Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures And The Long 1968 178744483X, 9781787444836

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968
Part I
1: Peter Zadek's Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing "1968" by Means of "1968 Thinking"
2: "Break the Power of the Manipulators": Film and the West German 1968
3: Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow's Berlin, 2. Juni
4: Helke Sander's dffb Films and West Germany's Feminist Movement
5: Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics 6: A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism7: West Germany's "Workers' Films": A Cinema in the Service of Television?
8: Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s
9: Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative
10: Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German Blockbuster Heißer Sommer
11: Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968 12: Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures13: "You Say You Want a Revolution": East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas
14: Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms's Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand
15: Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard's Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film
Part II. In Conversation: Interviews with Filmmakers
16: An Interview with Harun Farocki: "Holger Thought about Aesthetics and Politics Together." 17: An Interview with Birgit Hein: "Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system"18: An Interview with Klaus Lemke: "Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films"
Notes on the Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Celluloid Revolt

Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual Series Editors Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College) Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)

Also in this series Women in Weimar Fashion, by Mila Ganeva (2008) After the Digital Divide?, edited by Lutz Koepnick and Erin McGlothlin (2009) The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, edited by Christian Rogowski (2010) Screening War, edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman (2010) A New History of German Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (2012) The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, by Marco Abel (2013) Generic Histories of German Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher (2013) The Autobiographical Turn in Germanophone Documentary and Experimental Film, edited by Robin Curtis and Angelica Fenner (2014) DEFA after East Germany, edited by Brigitta B. Wagner (2014) Last Features, by Reinhild Steingröver (2014) The Nazi Past in Contemporary German Film, by Axel Bangert (2014) Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928–1936, edited by Barbara Hales, Mihaela Petrescu, and Valerie Weinstein (2016) Forgotten Dreams, by Laurie Ruth Johnson (2016) Montage as Perceptual Experience, by Mario Slugan (2017) Gender and Sexuality in East German Film, edited by Kyle Frackman and Faye Stewart (2018) Film and Fashion amidst the Ruins of Berlin, by Mila Ganeva (2018) Austria Made in Hollywood, by Jacqueline Vansant (2019)

Celluloid Revolt German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968

Edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel

Copyright © 2019 by the Editors and Contributors

All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2019 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-995-5 ISBN-10: 1-57113-995-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data CIP data is available from the Library of Congress. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel

1

Part I 1: Peter Zadek’s Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing “1968” by Means of “1968 Thinking” Michael Dobstadt

27

2: “Break the Power of the Manipulators”: Film and the West German 1968 Timothy Scott Brown

42

3: Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni Priscilla Layne

53

4: Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement Christina Gerhardt

69

5: Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics Madeleine Bernstorff

87

6: A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism Fabian Tietke

105

7: West Germany’s “Workers’ Films”: A Cinema in the Service of Television? Thomas Elsaesser

122

8: Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s Lisa Haegele

134

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CONTENTS

9: Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative Andrew Stefan Weiner

152

10: Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German Blockbuster Heißer Sommer Ian Fleishman

168

11: Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968 Sean Eedy

183

12: Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures Patricia Anne Simpson

201

13: “You Say You Want a Revolution”: East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas Evelyn Preuss

218

14: Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand Ervin Malakaj 15: Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film Kalani Michell

237

253

Part II In Conversation: Interviews with Filmmakers 16: An Interview with Harun Farocki: “Holger Thought about Aesthetics and Politics Together” Tilman Baumgärtel

271

17: An Interview with Birgit Hein: “Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system” Randall Halle

281

18: An Interview with Klaus Lemke: “Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films” Marco Abel

292

Notes on the Contributors

313

Index

319

Acknowledgments

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Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 lies in the 2008 German Film Institute, which was co-organized by Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and which focused on the German cinemas around 1968. We thank Tony and Rick for that summer’s iteration, in particular, and for the invaluable service they provide to the field of German film studies by offering the German Film Institute. We thank Jim Walker, our editor at Camden House, and Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke, series editors of German Screen Cultures, who understood the relevance of the book from the very outset. Their enthusiasm and support of the project as well as helpful suggestions along the way were much appreciated. We thank the two anonymous readers for their generous feedback, which helped to shape the volume. We are grateful to the following persons at the press for their excellent work: Julia Cook, managing editor; Jacqueline Heinzelmann, editorial assistant; Mark Baker, copyeditor; Jane Best, production editor; and Rosemary Shojaie, marketing executive. The book benefited from several conference panels devoted to the topic of 1968 and German cinemas at the 2014 Modern Languages Association convention and at the 2015 German Studies Association (GSA) conference, which Tina organized, as well as a 2013 GSA seminar, which Marco co-organized. The papers and audiences at these conferences confirmed our suspicion that there is much, much more to say about the long 1968 and German cinemas. We are grateful to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for supporting our project with an ENHANCE grant. Our deepest gratitude goes to our contributors, whose work has shaped the book into something far beyond what we initially imagined. As Celluloid Revolt developed, we were fortunate to have the involvement and encouragement of colleagues, friends, and partners, and to witness the formation of new intellectual communities, some of which have already produced new collaborations. We look forward to the future conversations and projects generated by this volume. HE GENESIS OF

Introduction: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel

1968 as a German Political and Cinematic Event

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1968, or rather the era of what Fredric Jameson influentially periodized as the long sixties,1 changed the world in countless ways, politically and socially. Anti-colonial and anti-imperial wars were being waged around the globe, in particular in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The protracted US-Vietnam War was emblematic of these selfliberation and self-determination struggles, and social movements sprung up internationally to protest it. In the United States, the civil rights movement challenged racism and demanded equal rights. The Black Panthers inspired countless other groups, including the American Indian Movement, a Native American advocacy group; the Brown Berets, a Chicano rights group; I Wor Kuen, an Asian-American rights group; the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group; and the Young Patriots, a poor and working-class white group. Many of these organizations came together to form the Rainbow Coalition, through the organizing efforts of Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, of José Cha-Cha Jiménez of the Young Lords, and of members of the Young Patriots Organization. The 1969 Stonewall Riots led to the first Christopher Street Day and gay pride protests in 1970. In European social movements, solidarity with third world politics played a key role.2 Additionally, feminists challenged patriarchal structures and sexism, also among the left, demanding changes in the workplace and at home, which led to the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s. Solidarity alliances across classes were crucial domestically as well, as student protests and labor struggles joined forces, most notably but not solely in France.3 In addition to these political changes, what we will call ’68 here but will construe throughout this introduction and volume as the “long 1968” was also decidedly a media event. Graphic, gruesome images from the Vietnam War were broadcast on television on the nightly news and printed as photographs in the daily newspapers.4 Most famous among them, Eddie HE YEAR

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Adams’ photograph, “Saigon Execution,” shows South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of the National Police, firing his pistol into the head of suspected Việt Cộng officer Nguyễn Văn Lém (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street, February 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive. The student and social movements criticized the often skewed coverage of demonstrations, highlighted by the consistent struggle against the Springer press in West Germany. In response to frustrations with the media’s coverage, social movements worked to create an alternative public sphere, in both print media and film.5 Against this well-known global background, this edited volume zooms in on Austria, East Germany, and West Germany in order to examine how German-language cinema engaged with the events of what we conceptualize, following recent scholarship, as the “long 1968.”6 Rather than an objection to Jameson’s periodizing argument, the notion of the “long 1968” constitutes a small but meaningful conceptual tweaking of the “long Sixties,” holding that the notion of the “long 1968” captures the events of ’68 better than either “the Sixties” or simply “1968.” Indeed, we think “the long 1968” has the advantage of clearly signaling that both the effects of “the Sixties” did not end with New Year’s eve of 1969 and the decade’s most famous year—1968—cannot and should not be delimited merely to what occurred during its twelve months, as Chris Marker’s landmark film, Le fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin without a Cat, 1979) subsequently compellingly demonstrated and as João Salles’ No Intenso Agora (In the Intense Now, 2017) more recently powerfully reiterated. In the context of German-language screen cultures, we note that while scholars have written extensively on the Young German Cinema (YGC) of the 1960s and the New German Cinema (NGC) of the 1970s (both in West Germany) or on the cinema of the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (the state-owned East German film studio, DEFA), in East Germany of those decades, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to how Austrian, East German, and West German cinema participated in—took place in, shaped, and reflected on—the revolutionary happenings of ’68 itself. This book aims to fill this gap. The volume’s fifteen essays and three interviews generate a variety of important new insights into what constituted German and Austrian cinemas around 1968 and, consequently, significantly impact the historiographies of German and Austrian film. Specifically, we think, the “long 1968” might emerge as a productive organizing principle for framing German-language film cultures, as well as its historiography, between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. This shift to the “long 1968” is more productive for readings of the era’s cinemas, allowing a greater range of international and domestic factors, such as the self-liberation and self-determination wars then being waged worldwide or the lack of denazification in West Germany and Austria, to become visible

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and set the political stage. They also allow the problems with the industries related to West German screen cultures, pinpointed by the Oberhausen Manifesto and discussed by Eric Rentschler, to form part of the discussion of what led to the particular film landscape in West Germany in the late 1960s.7 The contributions that follow engage a range of formats, including avant-garde and experimental cinema, feminist films, short films, student films, animated films, collectively produced cinemas, as well as a range of genres, including Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films), exploitation films, musical films, and the relationship of German-language cinema to cinemas of other countries, be it French cinéma vérité or US direct cinema. Our hope is that such a constellation of approaches and concerns, circling around the common focal point of the event of ’68, will generate new perspectives on German-language cinemas and the long 1960s. The volume’s contributions are mostly organized chronologically, that is, with regard to the year of the films’ releases, but should be viewed as a constellation in motion. Thus, as one moves through the analyses, one sees not only the shifts and developments in the aesthetics of different contexts but also the emerging conversations among these different contexts discussed in the individual contributions. In staging a dialogue among cinematic traditions, this book allows the conversations, formerly occluded from view by boundaries established by film genres or national cinemas (Austria, East Germany, and West Germany), to appear and come to the fore. Although the cinemas around 1968 of other countries have been wellstudied, German screen cultures of the long 1968 have received relatively short shrift. Well-known are the celebrated productions of the French New Wave affiliated with Cahiers du Cinéma,8 especially of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard,9 and the Left Bank cinema of Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, which pre-dated but influenced 1968;10 of Brazilian Cinema Novo11 and the work of Glauber Rocha;12 of the British New Wave13 and the early cinema of the “Angry Young Men”; or of the Czech New Wave14 and the work of Vera Chytilová, Jamil Jires, and Jirí Menzel. Scholars have discussed the influence of the earlier Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave on political cinema of the late sixties. Italian Neo-Realism—with, among other things, its emphasis on amateur rather than professional actors, actual locales rather than sets, natural rather than artificial lighting and sparse dialogue—palpably influenced these various subsequent waves. Additionally, Italian Neo-Realism’s proximity to documentary cinema and tendency towards verisimilitude manifested often in late sixties filmmaking. The French New Wave of Godard and Truffaut, as well as of Marker and Varda, also shaped later global new waves. The interplay between what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino called “Second Cinema”—or European cinema, with Hollywood as first

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cinema—and “Third” Cinema, that is, of the third world,15 is often taught in comparative analyses of cinemas of the late 1960s; it was, of course, famously staged by Godard and his Dziga Vertov Group collaborators in Le Vent d’Est (Wind from the East, 1970) in a scene where a female character asks Glauber Rocha, positioned at a crossroads, the way to political cinema.16 Yet countless other, lesser-known “New Waves” and political film movements participated in the broader culture of ’68, in both the Global North and the Global South.17 By examining German-language (political) cinema during the long 1968, this volume seeks to draw attention to one such under-studied broader filmmaking movement and thereby to contribute new insights into what specifically constituted German-language cinemas and politics during this era and, at least implicitly, into how global cinema was informed by and responded to the event of ’68. Debates about German-language screen cultures of the long sixties— that is, from the Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 to West Germany’s hot autumn of 197718—have, until fairly recently, tended to focus on YGC, which emerged in response to the Oberhausen Manifesto, and its more famous successor, NGC.19 Detailed discussions of films by YGC stalwarts, such as Alexander Kluge and Volker Schlöndorff, as well as NGC directors, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and Margarethe von Trotta, eclipsed the attention given to their numerous contemporaries whose films have fallen off the (scholarly) radar, even if at least some of them once were well known to their contemporary audiences (for example, May Spils and Werner Enkes’ films—blockbusters that today are rarely discussed and in some cases still almost impossible to see).20 Moreover, accounts of East German cinema rarely concern themselves with “1968,” and only few analyses exist comparing how the meaning of 1968 differed in West and East Germany. Last but not least, cinemas of Austria are often entirely left out of the account of German-language screen cultures of the long sixties. There are undoubtedly many reasons why the German-language film historiography of the long sixties has evolved in this fashion. But there is no question that the Oberhausen Manifesto (and what occurred in its aftermath) assumes a privileged, near-mythological position. Put forward on February 28, 1962, and signed by twenty-six directors, the Oberhausen Manifesto’s position has been kept alive over the decades not only by dutiful commemorations of the event, for example on its fiftieth anniversary in 2012, but also by the bitterly biting yet undeniably humorous public antics of someone like Klaus Lemke, who himself was a key director of West German cinema’s long 1968 with now largely forgotten films such as 48 Stunden bis Acapulco (48 Hours till Acapulco, 1967), Negresco****—Eine tödliche Affäre (Negresco, 1968), and Brandstifter (Arsonist, 1969).21 As a result of the Manifesto, the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film (Young German Film Subsidy Committee) was established in 1965, fund-

INTRODUCTION



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ing the work of some of the Oberhausen signatories, such as Kluge and Edgar Reitz, and directors who would become associated with the NGC, such as Herzog and Schlöndorff. YGC typically refers to the cinema produced during the latter half of the 1960s. New German Cinema is a term first coined in 1974. At times, it is used to refer to the more popular productions of the 1970s, in contrast to the YGC of the 1960s; at other times, NGC is used more broadly to encompass cinema from 1962 and the Oberhausen Manifesto, to Fassbinder’s death on June 10, 1982. NGC’s best-known directors include Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog, Kluge, Schlöndorff, von Trotta, and increasingly also Helke Sanders and Helma Sanders-Brahms.22 The Oberhausen Manifesto famously closed with the statement: “Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den Neuen” (The old film is dead. We believe in the new film.).23 The Manifesto touted the recent success at film festivals of short experimental and independent cinema, which achieved international recognition. Inversely, it criticized the industry’s conventions, the control of commercialization, and the dictates of stakeholders. The Oberhausen Manifesto demanded not explicitly but de facto, among other things, a radical revamping of the West German television and film industry, its funding mechanisms, as well as the establishment of schools.24 As Rentschler, writing about the Oberhausen Manifesto on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, pointed out, “despite substantial opposition, the initiative proved a valuable catalyst with significant and lasting results, including, but not limited to, the founding of film academies in Ulm, West Berlin, and Munich.”25 In 1962, Oberhausen signatories Kluge and Detten Schleiermacher together with Reitz co-founded West Germany’s first film school, the Institut für Filmgestaltung Ulm (Ulm Institute for Film Design) at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm, hfg).26 In 1966, as the social movements were approaching their peak, the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) was established in West Berlin at the frontlines of the uprisings.27 The Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film in Munich, hff), which was established on July 19, 1966, officially opened on November 6, 1967.28 These three schools and the short films produced by students at them, as well as other contemporaneous movements, such as the Neue Münchner Gruppe (New Munich Group, NMG), which included Lemke, Rudolf Thome, Max Zihlmann, as well as Spils and Enke, the Cologne XScreen, and the Hamburg Filmmacher Cooperative (Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative), are pivotal to the history of the West German cinemas of the long 1968. The Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative was established in October 1967. It included Theo Gallehr, Hellmut Herbst, Werner Nekes, Dore O., Walther Seidler, Thomas Struck, Klaus

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Wildenhahn, Ursula and Franz Winzentsen, Klaus Wyborny, and Hellmuth Costard, who in his film Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (The Little Godard: To the Production Board for Young German Cinema, 1978) eventually rethinks what constituted 1968 temporally, spatially, and materially, as Kalani Michell argues in her contribution herein, thereby prompting us to reconsider what language we use to talk about 1968. Another member of this collective, Theo Gallehr, would, in the 1970s, direct Arbeiterfilme, such as the well-known Rote Fahnen sieht man besser (Red Flags Are More Visible, 1971), made with Rolf Schübel.29 The NMG, which in addition to the already mentioned directors also included Roger Fritz, Martin Müller, and a few others, started its filmmaking activities in the mid-1960s, though they were never affiliated with any film academy. Like many of the directors discussed in our volume, the directors of the NMG have, up until very recently, suffered historiographical neglect.30 Beyond West Germany, German-language cinema of the era expands to include the Swiss AKS Gruppe of Super-8 filmmakers and the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, which famously, through the Austrian emigrant Peter Kubelka, had ties to New York City’s experimental cinema of the sixties, where he worked with Jonas Mekas to co-establish the Anthology Film Archive. While the films of these cinematic schools and movements were influenced by and in turn influenced global new waves, they also documented and responded to the era’s politics and grappled with the question of film aesthetics in relation to the political. Perhaps more than anything, however, these films, separately and collectively, were informed by the event of ’68 and struggled to find ways, each in their own fashion, to respond to what was widely sensed to be a watershed in post-1945 culture, including in but certainly not limited to Germany and Austria.

1968 as Event At this moment, however, one might wonder why it is even necessary, let alone desirable, to return to the revolts of 1968 in general and to German screen cultures around that time in particular. Why might one focus today, as we are well into a different millennium, on a moment in the history of German-language screen cultures that as a socio-political and cultural moment has received perhaps all the attention any event could ever hope to receive? Why—other than for reasons of historical felicity, with the fiftieth anniversary of ’68 just behind us—revisit once more this year or, for that matter, the interval enveloping it: the “long 1968” as scholars have come to recodify the snappy yet also misleading moniker of a single year, of ’68, which nevertheless discursively and symbolically anchors the broader period?

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There are certainly many good reasons for returning to this moment when it comes to the specific inflection of ’68 through the lens of Germanlanguage screen cultures. For starters, as mentioned, German film historiography has, perhaps surprisingly, largely neglected this pivotal moment in history and instead has primarily focused in West Germany on the earlier moment of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the resulting YGC of the mid1960s, and the famous West German directors of the 1970s; and in East Germany on the Rabbit-films, which were famously censored at the Eleventh Plenum of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1965 and, thus, in a way embodied a road not taken, a “what could have been” in that country’s film production history. As contributors to this volume argue, these pre- and post-1968 moments are definitely part of the “long 1968”—a period that “continues to shape our lives,” as the editors of The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives write in their introduction.31 What matters to us, however, is that those moments have to date not been coherently analyzed through this conceptual lens, that is: as part of the same sociopolitical, cultural, and historical moment. Yet, we decidedly do not seek to revisit the moment of ’68 out of any sense of nostalgia for it and what it has since then come to stand for in the (especially leftist) cultural and political imagination in Germany or Austria (or elsewhere). To our minds, rather, nostalgic glorification of that moment in general and its cinematic output in particular would be one of the worst reasons for returning to ’68; even worse than being nostalgic for ’68 would be embracing the widely held position—so widely, indeed, that it has clearly become common sense in the last couple of decades and likely at least since the fall of the inner-German wall and the country’s subsequent unification—that ’68 has failed and that there is therefore simply no point in once more revisiting this event in the first place. Such a position is time and again on display on late-evening political talk shows in Germany, as well as in the written opinions by a wide range of cultural commentators, not to mention in politicians’ remarks, whenever the topic arises. These pundits habitually present as a fait accompli that the event of ’68 has been thrown in the dustbin of history—garbage bag neatly tied up and lid closed—and posit that we are irrevocably (and happily) cut off from this event.32 When imagining this project, however, we came to it neither with a sense of nostalgic yearning for ’68, dreaming the impossible dream of returning to it, nor with a historian’s attitude of objectivity, simply hoping to shed additional light on an historical event’s social determinations or chains of causality. Instead—and we offer this to our readers as an invitation, even as a provocation, to produce their own work, with and even counter to ours—we were curious about German screen cultures around 1968 precisely because we submit that as an event, including as a cinematic event, ’68 has been “repressed, co-opted, betrayed” and yet is not “outdated,” to use Gilles Deleuze’s words from his minor essay, “May ’68 Did

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Not Take Place.”33 This essay is “minor” precisely in the sense that he, together with Félix Guattari, introduced the term in their Kafka book. “The three characteristics of minor literature,” they write (and we could easily substitute writing for “literature,” a writing that would include the cinema as well as the kind of theoretical texts they wrote), “are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”34 Crucially, the category of the “minor” is not one of identity or representation. Rather, as they propose, the “minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.”35 “Minor,” then, has to be understood as an act of modulation that operates from within the molding operations performed by established writing and thinking—and filming. Deleuze’s short essay on ’68 strikes us as useful, though admittedly somewhat unusual, for the purposes of framing the essays that follow, because it manages to put considerable conceptual pressure on the relationship between history and event, which underlies the above-mentioned claims about failure and nostalgia. Without suggesting either that our contributors are writing in response to his essay or that Deleuze’s essay offers the only, let alone only correct, way of thinking about the event, history, and thus ’68, we offer our reading of it as an attempt to unsettle the wellcodified narratives about ’68 and, consequently, also to suspend immediate recourse to them as the primary lens through which to read the essays that follow. If, as is often held, ’68 was also an attempt to free the imagination— “all power to the imagination,” as the famous slogan declares—then it stands to reason that this event itself demands an imaginative way of rethinking (or perhaps of reframing) how we think about it. Deleuze’s essay, we submit, provides one such imaginative effort—an effort that is deeply political and affirmative of the very possibilities that ’68 opened up. In his four-page essay, Deleuze was modulating from within the mold of the new common sense dominating French thinking about soixantehuite during the time of the nouveaux philosophes in the 1980s.36 We might say that he wrote his essay counter to the times (of the 1980s), expressing a sensibility that was no longer of the time, and thus performatively turning his theoretical purview towards the future. This time-to-come, however, is not a time that comes after 1968; rather, as Deleuze holds, it is of (meaning: immanent to) the very event that has been falsely cast as having failed. ’68 cannot possibly be said to have failed, so the philosopher argues, precisely because such a claim presupposes that ’68 actually took place. (Likewise, any nostalgia for ’68 also presupposes it occurred). Deleuze’s imaginative, provocative, and, indeed, counter-intuitive claim is, however, that ’68 did not (yet) take place. How could one possibly claim that ’68 did not take place given that volumes of scholarship filling library shelves have been written on ’68, not

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to mention the countless pieces the press published on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of ’68? Writing in 1984, Deleuze—no doubt informed by his intellectual interlocutor, Michel Foucault, whose thought he was about to creatively ventriloquize in Foucault37—suggests that, generally speaking, an event “is a bifurcation, a deviation with respect to laws, an unstable condition which opens up a new field of the possible.”38 Pace historians’ penchant for reducing an event to “social determinism, or to causal chains,” the famous philosopher of becoming holds that an event is about the future: “it is an opening onto the possible,” and as such it “passes as much into the interior of individuals as into the depths of society.”39 An event, that is, instills itself in the social body like a virus whose force may be momentarily dormant, even a long time, but is nevertheless real and waits for the actualization of its potential—the moment of actualization that requires environmental conditions that agree with its potentials. This new field of the possible, then, does “not pre-exist” but is instead “created by the event. It is a question of life. The event creates a new existence, it produces a new subjectivity (new relations with the body, with time, sexuality, the immediate surroundings, with culture, work . . .),” Deleuze writes.40 It does so because it “is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces,” as Foucault puts it in his key methodological essay, which is all about thinking the event (of ’68, no doubt): “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”41 For this and other reasons, an event cannot fail: an event, which “splits or breaks with [historical] causality” and is “a reintroduction of the possible,” as Frida Beckman glosses Deleuze’s argument, exists only in its effects, not in relation to any given (alleged) causalities.42 An event has no goal; it is “only” an irruption that opens up a vision, confronting society with “a visionary phenomenon, as if a society suddenly saw what was intolerable in it and also saw the possibility for something else,” Deleuze writes.43 ’68 was such a moment: when the intolerable was, however briefly, rendered sensible—in Jacques Rancière’s sense of le partage du sensible (most commonly rendered in English as “distribution of the sensible,” but it is important to keep in mind a sense of partition, division, as well as sharing, which are all present in the French original), namely of the possibility of seeing, sensing, and perceiving something that had not been possible to see, sense, and perceive prior to such an eventful redistribution of the sensible—another possibility for living emerged, became seeable, sensible, perceivable, as well as thinkable, shareable, and ultimately also representable (in the cinema, for example).44 We are interested in turning to German screen cultures around ’68 for this very reason: to see and of course to provoke more thinking about not only what the intolerable was that was suddenly seen, sensed, and perceived by German-language filmmakers around that moment but also what the possibilities for something else were—and, perhaps, still remain, today.

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For the present moment’s very real impasses, its crises and its never-ending “state of exception,”45 stem from, as we hold with Deleuze, the very inability of society—including German and Austrian society—“to assimilate May ’68,” that is, to “create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what ’68 demands.”46 Note, here, that Deleuze uses, in 1984, the present tense: ’68 demands, rather than “demanded.” ’68 demands precisely because it did not yet take place! It demands subjective redeployment, for it is only in such redeployment—an affirmative again (“re”) that Deleuze always thinks through the logic of differentiation— that ’68, as an event, can ever become actual, at another time, indeed: at other times that are not “of” the “original” historical moment (the year 1968).47 This means—and here Deleuze is obviously close to Spinoza, another great thinker of revolt—that when “a social mutation appears,”48 such as it did around ’68, when the intolerable amounted to a visionary phenomenon not only but also in German-language societies, it is necessary for that new subjectivity, which the event produces, not to have a “bad encounter.” In his Spinoza lecture, Deleuze explains that, for Spinoza, the “individuality of the body is defined by the following: it’s when a certain composite or complex of relation . . . of movement and rest is preserved through all the changes which affect the parts of the body. It’s the permanence of a relation of movement and rest through all the changes which affect all the parts, taken to infinity, of the body under consideration.” Moreover, Deleuze continues, “When I have a bad encounter, this means that the body which is mixed with mine destroys my constituent relation, or tends to destroy one of my subordinate relations.”49 As Deleuze is never just thinking of an individual body, what is inscribed in this explanation of a Spinozian body is a social theory—and, in fact, a theory of the event. For the event is an encounter between (social and therefore not merely human or even animated) bodies. Encounters can, however, be “bad”—which is to say that the encounter one body has with another can be disagreeable, with the result that one body’s affects, its potential or desire, are not enabled to actualize themselves. This is why Deleuze argues that when “a social mutation” such as ’68 “appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality,” precisely because “Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires the mutation.”50 An event irrupts and is not reducible to lines of causalities. In its irruption, new possibilities emerge, embodied by its production of a new subjectivity. But for such a new subjectivity—that is, the mutation of society into something else—to become actual, it must encounter a social body that ultimately desires such a mutation, that is, its own self-overcoming, its becomingother-to-itself. The question, then, is which social body has the capacity to forge creative collective agencies of enunciation in such a way that the

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birth of a new subjectivity is matched, that is, welcomed as the harbinger of its own self-overcoming? Which social body will be capable of serving the role of host to this new subjectivity, so that the latter can transform the former from within? Only the future will tell, to be sure—but what matters, we think, is that we examine the event (of ’68, including, as this volume does, in the context of German-language screen cultures) from that perspective, rather than from a perspective ultimately grounded in lack (nostalgia) or failure (and thus historicism).51 What, then, is required is, perhaps, the embrace of Foucault’s genealogical impetus, the key of which for him was that genealogical practice ultimately seeks to grasp the present—to understand or produce some sort of knowledge about the character of contemporary reality—and to transform that reality by opening up new possibilities for thought and action. These two goals, for Foucault, are meant to be understood together: genealogical inquiry aims to transform the present by grasping (more fully) what it is. But what is the present? For the genealogist, the present cannot be explained by going “back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things,” and the genealogist’s “duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate that present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes.”52 That is, an historical event is precisely not an active element in the present, if by that we imagine that such an event exists today, because it “imposed a predetermined form” on the present’s fluctuations. Instead, the work of genealogy—as defined by Foucault—is to “maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us.”53 In his contribution to a special issue of the left-wing Jacobin magazine on the global phenomenon of ’68, Jonah Birch concludes his essay on the events in France by insisting, “if nostalgia for the lost promise of a brief period of radical ascent half a century ago must be avoided, so too must the fatalism that says no other result was possible.”54 In other words, no to nostalgia but also no to a fatalistic sense of failure! In this spirit, then, our impetus for organizing this project on German-language screen cultures and the event of ’68 is neither driven by a nostalgic desire to return to it nor by a desire to add one more entry to the fatalistic narrative that considers ’68 a failure and, ultimately, a mistake that should never even have been committed; rather, our hope for our volume, in its collectivity, is to think this event, through German-language cinema, for the first time in a systematic fashion—and to do so not merely for purposes of historical edification but also, if not indeed primarily, with the hope to intervene in the present.

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Volume Overview This edited volume’s opening essay, Michael Dobstadt’s “Peter Zadek’s Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing ‘1968’ by Means of ‘1968 Thinking,’” sets the stage for reconsiderations of the event of ’68. This essay considers how Zadek’s film represents the era by showing at once the dogmatic and authoritarian streak and the principle of self-questioning and subversion that informed it. Arguing that the film presents “the 1968 protests as a radically ambiguous event,” Dobstadt raises many of the key questions that our volume as a whole seeks to pose. He does so by showing how Zadek’s by now largely forgotten film uses an aesthetic approach that nevertheless offers a historically convincing representation of 1968, which as representation, that is, through its form, renders sensible the transgressive, anarchic spirit of ’68. By foregrounding the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and how the film itself reflects on that relationship, Dobstadt’s essay ultimately asks whether the constant self-examining and self-transgression that characterized the event of ’68 can, today, be comprehended in a positive light in a country where its national holiday does not memorialize a deterritorializing but a reterritorializing event: the country’s unification rather than the fall of the Berlin wall. By asking how the possibilities that the event of ’68 opened up might still produce new subjectivities that respond to the event’s transformative potential, Dobstadt’s essay productively frames the conversations our volume seeks to stage. The following five essays consider the early films of the dffb between 1966 and 1968. The early dffb students penned a manifesto critical of directors associated with the Young German Cinema, in particular Kluge and Reitz, deriding them for being “a self-serving Establishment.” On June 23, 1968, at an event at the Technical University, which took place concurrent with the Berlin International Film Festival then still held in the summer, they read the manifesto and threw eggs.55 The dffb, like other German cinemas of the long 1968, is understudied. As Volker Pantenburg states, “the diversity that was created in the first two years of the dffb, the early short films of Wolf Gremm, Thomas Mitscherlich, Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Wolfgang Petersen, Günter Peter Straschek, Johannes Beringer, Helke Sander, among others, is pretty much invisible.”56 Similarly, on the thirtieth anniversary of the dffb’s founding, Tilman Baumgärtel argued, “The short documentary and agitation films, which the collective of politically active students produced during this time at the dffb, have now been almost completely forgotten witnesses of the student movements.”57 This gap in scholarship continues to exist to this day, especially in English-language scholarship, and our volume seeks to remedy this state of affairs by making analyses of early dffb films available in English for the first time.

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Historian Timothy Scott Brown’s “‘Break the Power of the Manipulators’: Film and the West German 1968” locates the early cinema of the dffb students within the era’s social movements and demonstrations in West Berlin. As his article shows, the uprisings and the student films were closely related to the latter, serving essentially as the media arm of the West Berlin Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist [West] German Students’ Union, SDS). In “Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni,” Priscilla Layne focuses on a film that captures the two demonstrations that took place on June 2, 1967, protesting the state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, Farah Diba, during which police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras fatally shot nonviolent student protestor Benno Ohnesorg. This fatal shooting is widely credited with kicking off West Germany’s “1968,” both galvanizing and increasing protests throughout West Germany. Dffb students were present at and filmed these demonstrations. That the dffb filmmaking students also included women is an important point foregrounded by Christina Gerhardt’s essay, as she considers how Helke Sander’s dffb cinema, produced between 1966 and 1969, at once expands narratives about early dffb cinema to include feminist filmmaking and also already develops the thematic and formal innovations that would become known as hallmarks of Sander’s filmmaking in the later 1970s. In her essay, “Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics,” Madeleine Bernstorff examines how feminist filmmaking that grew out of the dffb provided a public sphere for feminist politics that is inseparable from West Germany’s second wave feminist movement in the 1970s. Fabian Tietke, in turn, explores in “A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism” different modes of participatory filmmaking that the dffb tried out in its early years in order to shed light on the working and living conditions of workers and of women. Thomas Elsaesser, in “West Germany’s ‘Workers’ Films’: A Cinema in the Service of Television?,” continues the focus on workers’ films, examining how the decision to make workers’ films for television rather than cinema, to some extent as a result of funding decisions, revitalized the genre. After this extended look at the dffb, which is further enhanced by Tilman Baumgärtel’s interview with Harun Farocki (included in the volume’s interviews section), our volume then sheds light on developments in German-language screen cultures that occurred independent of and often in aesthetic opposition to the films made at the dffb. In so doing, our volume asks readers to consider how genre cinema as well as avant-garde and experimental cinema, frequently accused of being if not ideologically suspect then apolitical, complicate any understanding of what constituted

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German-language cinema during the long 1968 and its relation to the political. Starting off this exploration is Lisa Haegele’s essay, “Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s,” which examines how West German exploitation films of the 1960s have typically been overlooked in favor of West German art cinema. In her analysis of the St. Pauli cycle of crime films, Haegele reveals how the films exhibit postwar cultural anxieties, while also rebelling or pushing back against the films of YGC. Andrew Stefan Weiner, in “Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative,” rereads VALIE EXPORT’s Tastkino, contextualizing it in the late sixties work of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative (AFC) and of the Viennese Actionists. Weiner’s analysis of their work as experimental filmmakers and intermedia artists corrects the hitherto limited reception of the AFC in Anglophone scholarship and contributes their transversal work to discussions of late sixties screen cultures or what Weiner calls “expanded cinema.” It includes the artists’ use of mass mediation, publicity, and performance. Adding important texture to these essays’ explorations of experimental and genre cinema, respectively, are the interviews by Randall Halle with avant-garde filmmaking pioneer, Birgit Heim, and Marco Abel with the NMG enfant terrible, Klaus Lemke, which close the volume. Starting with Ian Fleishman’s “Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German Blockbuster Heißer Sommer,” this book shifts its focus to East German cinema. Resonating with Haegele’s interest in genre cinema in West Germany’s long 1968, Fleishman investigates genre cinema, albeit in East Germany. He explores Joachim Hasler’s musical, Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968), as a case study of how small everyday actions, such as going to the movies or on vacation, provided East German citizens opportunities to express their desire for greater (private) autonomy and for escape (from the paternalistic claws of the state, if not from the state altogether). Turning to another genre, in his essay, “Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968,” Sean Eedy examines how the East German stateowned film studio used fairy tales to generate enthusiasm among children for the socialist state and to raise children to be socialist citizens. While scholars have attended to East German children’s film and fairy tales, Eedy considers cartoons, hitherto a mere footnote in the historiography of East German screen cultures. Turning to yet another genre, that of the documentary, Patricia Anne Simpson, in “Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures,” considers how East and West German propaganda used Vietnam as a “political signifier,” reflecting the era’s Cold War politics. She explores how documentaries directed by Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann (H&S) about Vietnam sought to highlight commonalities between

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Vietnam and the GDR and closes with an analysis of the H&S film Amok (1985) and how it conveys postwar trauma. Last but not least, Evelyn Preuss, in “‘You Say You Want a Revolution’: East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas,” shows how East German cinema anticipated and answered emancipatory calls typically associated with 1968. Preuss insists that East German cinema needs to be wrestled away from the colonizing lens of West German narratives, arguing that it is at once more heterogeneous and more politically and aesthetically challenging than many scholars suggest. Framing this cinema as at the intersection of First, Second, and Third Cinema, Preuss argues that East German directors staged an aesthetic revolution with the goal of inviting the subjects of this revolution—the viewers—into the narrative. In so doing, Preuss’s essay, we think, not only caps in provocative fashion our section on the long 1968 in East Germany but also sets the stage for the closing moments of our volume, consisting of the remaining two essays and three interviews. First, our volume’s penultimate essay, Ervin Malakaj’s “Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand,” returns us to feminist filmmaking. Malakaj rereads Sanders-Brahms’s film by juxtaposing the female protagonist’s cruel optimism to her boyfriend’s nostalgia for an “old” or previous leftist political movement in order to reconsider the relationship between feminism and political activism. His essay, in other words, explicitly returns us to one of the core arguments we laid out above, namely by investigating a film that directly and critically dramatizes the growing sense of nostalgia for ’68 that is predicated on a (questionable) sense of its failure. Second, Kalani Michell’s essay, “Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film,” explores how this film, in form, format, and content, stages film funding challenges that Costard—like other members of the Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative and in contrast to New German Cinema—experienced in the 1970s. Like Malakaj’s, Michell’s essay could prompt readers to reflect back on a core argument we introduced as a framework for how to read this volume, to wit, the question of how to consider “1968”: as an historical epoch or an event. As Michell persuasively argues, a film about an application for film funding might seem out of place in narratives about the long sixties, but it actually encapsulates the era’s critiques of institutions and of the limited access to resources. Costard’s film subjects “1968” to a significant scrambling operation at the tail end of the long 1968 in German-language screen cultures, and, in kind, Michell’s reading subjects her readers to such an operation by virtue of how she engages the film on its own self-reflective terms, which in the end produces more questions than answers about the event of ’68. Three interviews with key directors associated with West German cinema of the sixties conclude this volume. The first interview, prefaced by a

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new introduction, is a translation of an interview Tilman Baumgärtel conducted in 1997 with Harun Farocki about dffb student filmmaker and future Red Army Faction (RAF) member Holger Meins. Although Meins is best known as a member of the RAF and for his tragic and brutal death in 1974 as a result of force-feeding during a hunger strike that he and the RAF carried out to protest prison conditions, he was also a remarkably talented filmmaker, as noted by directors ranging from Farocki to Gerd Conradt, who directed a documentary about him: Starbuck Holger Meins (2002). Meins and Farocki, together with Minow and Sander, were part of the dffb’s inaugural class in 1966. Randall Halle conducted the second interview with Xscreen cofounder Birgit Hein. Xscreen, an institution of underground, experimental, material, and independent cinema, was founded in 1968 in Cologne. In 1967 at the fourth exprmntl film festival in Knokke Belgium, a group of West German activist film students led by Farocki sought to disrupt screenings with politically engaged happenings. Rejecting these protests, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein returned to Cologne and joined with other inspired filmmakers to co-found Xscreen.58 Returning Xscreen to scholarly attention addresses the postwar divergence of what Peter Wollen famously identified as “the two avant-gardes”: that is, the split of New German Cinema from New German Avant-garde Film and a political narrative cinema from a material experimental film.59 As Halle argues elsewhere,60 an emphasis on New German Cinema in (German) film studies has exiled New German Avant-garde Film or experimental cinema from (German) film histories into the realm of art history and visual culture studies. Inversely, this foreclosure has erased the political potential of West German experimental or avant-garde cinema from narratives about its 1968. Marco Abel conducted the third interview with Klaus Lemke. Lemke, who went on to have a still ongoing, more than fifty-year-long career, is one of the key directors associated with the NMG of the mid- to late-1960s. This group, which to date has received scant scholarly attention, can be considered a counter-movement of sorts to both the mainstream cinema of post-World War II West Germany that the Oberhausen Manifesto attacked and to YGC and its various offshoots, emerging through the newly founded film schools in Ulm, West Berlin, and Munich.61 Lemke and company enthusiastically embraced Hollywood genre cinema as well as early French New Wave films and agitated (both with their early films and in their public statements) for a cinema that is more physical than intellectual, more about an attitude than about educating viewers about weighty topics, and more interested in creating moments of ecstasy than of political insight. At the time decried for their allegedly regressive, post-fascistic aesthetic, Lemke’s films and those of his NMG peers serve as a reminder that political cinema during the “long 1968” in West Germany consisted not only of a dominant “political left” but also of a more subterranean “aesthetic left,” to appropri-

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ate a term Enno Patalas used to differentiate between two tendencies of film criticism in West Germany at that time.62 Revisiting lesser-known German-language screen cultures of the long 1968 that have by and large been overlooked in favor of a focus on YGC or NGC proves worthwhile for a variety of reasons. This volume brings concurrently or synchronically existing Austrian, East German, and West German cinemas into conversation with one another. Taken as a constellation, the essays and films discussed lead to new narratives about what constitutes the event of ’68 in the context of Austrian and German screen cultures. Or, put differently, if ’68 is approached as an event in the sense delineated above, then one of the key questions to ask is precisely about the new subjectivities to which it gave rise (as well as about what happened to them subsequent to their emergence). German-language screen cultures of the “long 1968” might yet prove to be an important archive for future investigations that seek to discover which new relations among the body, sexuality, immediate surroundings, culture, work, economic and institutional arrangements, as well as temporality and history emerged with and through the event of ’68. The contributions herein can be read as an attempt both to address this question and to provoke further engagement with it.

Notes The first section of this introduction is revised from Christina Gerhardt, “Introduction: Cinema in West Germany around 1968,” 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, a special issue of The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10, no. 1 (2017): 1–9. 1 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” Social Text 9–10 (Spring–Summer 1984): 178–209. Jameson’s intervention into how scholars conceptualize the sixties has been highly influential. See, for example, Christopher Leigh Connery and Rob Wilson, eds., The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2007); and Jeremy Varon, Michael S. Foley, and John McMillan, “Time is an Ocean: The Past and Future of the Sixties,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 1, no. 1 (June 2008): 1–7. 2 See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 3 Ross, May ’68. 4 Todd Goehle, “Challenging Television’s Revolution: Media Representations of 1968 Protest in West German Television and Tabloids,” in Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present, eds. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Siverts, and Rolf Werenskjold (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 217–33. 5 John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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6 See Daniel J. Sherman, Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder, and A. Aneesh, eds., The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 7 Eric Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on Twenty Years since Oberhausen (Bedford Hills, NY: Redgrave Publishing, 1984). 8 Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2009); Richard Neupert, A History of French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007); Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School, trans. Richard Neupert (New York: Wiley, 2002). 9 Recent studies on Godard, to cite only a few, include Rick Warner, Godard and the Essay Film: A Form That Thinks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018); Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline, eds., A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2014); Douglas Morrey, Christina Stojanova, and Nicole Côté, eds., The Legacies of Jean-Luc Godard (Waterloo, ON, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014); and Michael Witt, Jean-Luc Godard, Cinema Historian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 10 Recent studies on Marker include Adrian Martin and Raymond Bellour, Chris Marker: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (Brisbane, Australia: Institute of Modern Art, 2008); Nora Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); and Laurent Roth and Raymond Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une Madeleine?: A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). 11 On Brazilian cinema novo, see Tatiana Signorelli Heise and Andrew Tudor, “Dangerous, Divine, and Marvelous? The Legacy of the 1960s in the Political Cinema of Europe and Brazil,” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 6, no. 1 (2013): 82–100; Lúcia Nagib, Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia (New York: Tauris, 2007); Ana del Sarto, “Cinema Novo and the New / Third Cinema Revisited: Aesthetics, Culture and Politics,” Chasqui 34, no. 1 (2005): 78–89; and Robert Stam and Randal Johnson, “Brazil Renaissance, Introduction: Beyond Cinema Novo,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 21 (November 1979): 13–18. 12 See also Glauber Rocha, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 59–61. 13 B. F. Taylor, The British New Wave: A Certain Tendency? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (London: BFI, 2008); and Peter Wollen, “The Last New Wave: Modernism in the British Films of the Thatcher Era,” in Fires Were Started: British Cinema and Thatcherism, ed. Lester Friedman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 70–91. 14 Jonathan L. Owen, Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties (New York: Berghahn, 2013); and Peter A. Hames, The Czechoslovak New Wave (New York: Wallflower Press, 2005).

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15 The third world in this era was associated with the then newly established NonAligned Movement and the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), established in Havana in 1966 after the Cuban Revolution. Its publication is the Tricontinental, in which Solanas and Getino’s manifesto, “Towards a Third Cinema,” was first published in 1969. 16 In this context, see also Glauber Rocher’s 1970 essay, “O Ultimo Escândalo de Godard,” available in English as “Godard’s Latest Scandal,” translated by Stoffel Debuysere with Mari Shields, December 21, 2013, http://www.diagonalthoughts. com/?p=2020. 17 On the global interplay among cinematic new waves in the sixties, see Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi, eds. 1968 and Global Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018). 18 The events of West Germany’s autumn took place between September 5, 1977, and October 18, 1977. They began when members of the second generation of the Red Army Faction (RAF) kidnapped industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer on September 5, 1977, and hijacked a plane on October 13, 1977, both in an attempt to free imprisoned members of the first generation. The West German Autumn ended when the hostages in the plane were freed on October 17, 1977, and four members of the RAF’s first generation were found dead or dying in Stammheim maximum security prison. For more about the RAF in cinema, see Christina Gerhardt, Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018); Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); and Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013). 19 On what constitutes the shift from Young German Cinema to New German Cinema, see Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 154. 20 Of their films, only Zur Sache, Schätzchen/Go For It, Baby (1968), one of German-language cinema’s most successful films of all times, has received some critical attention. Not coincidentally, it was their only film available on DVD, even though the sequels—Nicht fummeln, Liebling (No Pawing, Darling, 1970, now available on DVD), Hau drauf, Kleiner (Hang on, Kids, 1974), and Wehe, wenn Schwarzenbeck kommt (If Schwarzenbeck Arrives, 1979)—all delighted a sizeable audience at the West German box office as well. 21 The 2012 commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Oberhausen Manifesto yielded the publication, Provokation der Wirklichkeit—Das Oberhausener Manifest und die Folgen, eds. Ralph Eue and Lars Henrik Gass (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012). In a conversation with a number of fellow filmmakers, Lemke expresses his strong resentment of the Oberhausener. See “Wir haben die Strukturen, die wir verdienen: Ein Gespräch zwischen Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, Christoph Hochhäusler, Dietrich Leder und Klaus Lemke,” in Provokation der Wirklichkeit, 277–88. Lemke’s public antics are documented in videos available on YouTube. See also his interview with Marco Abel in this volume.

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22 In addition to Elsaesser’s New German Cinema, see Rentschler, West German Film in the Course of Time; Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992); John E. Davidson, Deterritorializing the New German Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History and a Matter of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Julia Knight, New German Cinema: Images of a Generation (New York: Wallflower, 2004). 23 “Oberhausen Manifesto,” in West German Filmmakers on Film, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 2. 24 On the working conditions of filmmakers, see the various documents by New German Cinema directors in Rentschler, “The Price of Survival: Institutional Challenges,” West German Filmmakers on Film, 9–38. On the history of these and other film schools in Germany, see Peter C. Slansky, Filmhochschulen in Deutschland. Geschichte - Typologie - Architektur (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2011). 25 Eric Rentschler, “Declaration of Independents,” Artforum (2012): 273–79. 26 Monika Maus and Peter Schubert, Rückblicke: Die Abteilung Film - Institut für Filmgestaltung an der hfg ulm 1960–1968 (Detmold: Verlag Rohn Dorothea, 2012). 27 Volker Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, 1966–1968,” in Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 199–206. See also Karl-Heinz Stenz, Kampfplatz Kamera: Die filmkulturelle Bedeutung der filmstudierenden ’68er Generation: Am Beispiel der Protestaktivitäten an der neu gegründeten Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) (Munich: GRIN Verlag, 2008). 28 That the establishment of these three schools did not resolve issues raised by the Oberhausen Manifesto is made explicit in the Mannheim Declaration (1967), which opens thusly: “Six years have passed since the Oberhausen Declaration. The renewal of [West] German film has not yet taken place.” The Mannheim Declaration criticized the film funding law (Filmförderungsgesetz, FFG), implemented in 1967, and viewed it as “a victory of the old guard” because it was “based solely on economic not artistic criteria.” Rentschler, West German Filmmakers on Film, 4. 29 On Arbeiterfilme of the 1970s and their relationship to the shift in political organizing, on the one hand, and to Fassbinder’s filmmaking, on the other hand, see also Thomas Elsaesser’s essay in this volume: “West Germany’s ‘Workers’ Films’: A Cinema in the Service of Television?”; and Christina Gerhardt, “Fassbinder’s Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven (1975) and the Arbeiterfilme (Workers’ Films),” Film Criticism 41, no. 2 (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ fc.13761232.0041.109. 30 In the last few years, new attention has been directed toward the NMG, especially in Germany, as was evidenced by various retrospectives of their films as well as a documentary on the group, Zeigen was man liebt/Showing What One Loves (Frank Göhre, Borwin Richter, and Torsten Stegmann, 2016).

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31 Jasmine Alinder, A. Aneesh, Daniel J. Sherman, and Ruud van Dijk, “Introduction,” in The Long 1968: Revisions and New Perspectives, 1–20. Here, 16. 32 For a comprehensive account of how ’68 has been, and continues to be, discursively constructed in Germany, see Ingo Cornils, Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany (Rochester: Camden House, 2016). 33 Gilles Deleuze, “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 233–36. Here, 233. To be clear about the intent of our provocation: we offer here one possible way of framing, or rather: re-framing, how to think about ’68 as an event. Here, we must also insist that it is a conceptual error to think that an event could not possibly encompass many years, as is the case when we think of the event of ’68 through the useful lens of the “long 1968.” 34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18. 35 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 18. 36 For Deleuze’s view of the nouveaux philosophes, see his scathing “On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem),” in which he identifies the new philosophers’ “hatred of May ’68.” Gilles Deleuze, “On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem),” Two Regimes of Madness, 139–47. Here, 144. 37 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Paul Bové (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The French original was published in 1986. 38 Deleuze, “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” 233. 39 Deleuze, 233. 40 Deleuze, 234. 41 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64. Here, 154. 42 Frida Beckman, Gilles Deleuze (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 64. 43 Deleuze, “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” 234. 44 For Rancière’s discussion of the sensible and its (re-)distribution, see, for example, Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004). 45 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 46 Deleuze, “May ’68 Did Not Take Place,” 234. 47 That Deleuze always thinks repetition through difference is programmatically elaborated in his 1968 book, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 48 Deleuze, “May ’68,” 234. 49 Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza 24/01/1978,” Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, accessed May 29, 2017, https://www.webdeleuze.com. 50 Deleuze, “May ’68,” 234, italics ours.

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51 We echo, here, Antonio Negri’s argument that his friend Giorgio Agamben, with his famous concept of “naked life,” tells the story of power from the perspective of power: “Isn’t this the story about Power [potere] that Power [potere] itself would like us to believe in and reiterate? Isn’t it far more politically useful to conceive of this limit from the standpoint of those who are not yet or not completely crushed by Power [potere], from the standpoint of those still struggling to overcome such a limit, from the standpoint of the process of constitution, from the standpoint of power [potenza]?” Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 156. In the same text, Negri clarifies the distinction between potere—“power intended as the institution of dominion over life”—and potenza, or power “intended as the potentiality of constituent Power” (148). 52 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146. 53 Foucault, 146. 54 Jonah Birch, “How Beautiful It Was,” Jacobin 29 (Spring 2018): 33–48. Here, 48. 55 On this event, see also Richard Langston, “23 June 1968: Alexander Kluge Egged in Berlin, Months Later Awarded Gold Lion in Venice,” in A New History of German Cinema, eds. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 417–22. See also Hans Helmut Prinzler, “Die DFFB und der junge deutsche Film: Lecture zum Jubiläum im Kino Arsenal,” (lecture, Kino Arsenal, Berlin, Germany, September 23, 2006); Hans Helmut Prinzler, 10 Jahre DFFB (Berlin: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, 1976), 57–120; and Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, ed., Hoffnung als Prinzip: Bericht zur Lage des Filmnachwuchses von Absolventen der Deutschen Filmund Fernsehakademie Berlin (Berlin: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, 1978). 56 Volker Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, 1966–1968,” in Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 199–206. Here, 204. Translation the authors. 57 Tilman Baumgärtel, “DFFB-Studenten bei der Revolte von 1967/68,” Jungle World, 27. September 1996. Translation our own. See also Tilman Baumgärtel, “1 February 1968: Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails Promotes Film as a Tool for Political Violence,” in A New History of German Cinema, 400–404; and Tilman Baumgärtel, Harun Farocki: Vom Guerrillakino zum Essayfilm (Berlin: b books, 1998). 58 See also Randall Halle, “XScreen 1968: Material Film Aesthetics and Radical Cinema Politics,” 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special issue of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10, no. 1 (2017): 10–25. 59 Peter Wollen, “The Two Avant-Gardes,” Studio International 190, no. 978 (November/December 1975): 171–75. 60 Halle, “XScreen 1968.”

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61 For scholarship on the NMG, see Johannes von Moltke, “Between the Young and the New: Pop Sensibilities and Laconic Style in Rudolf Thome’s Rote Sonne,” Screen 41, no. 3 (2000): 257–81; Brigitte Werneburg, ed., Inside Lemke: Ein Klaus Lemke Lesebuch (Cologne: Schnitt—der Filmverlag, 2006); and Tobias Haupts, Rudolf Thome (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2018). 62 Enno Patalas, “Ein Plädoyer für eine ästhetische Linke: Zum Selbstverständnis der Filmkritik II,” Filmkritik 10, no. 7 (1967): 403–7. Patalas juxtaposed the “aesthetic left” to a more sociologically-oriented “political left.”

Part I

1:

Peter Zadek’s Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing “1968” by Means of “1968 Thinking”

Michael Dobstadt I still consider Elefant my best film work: it’s subjective, committed, about human beings— artificial—and it represents a historical moment. And it is enjoyable. Entertaining. It’s Entertainment. —Zadek, Das wilde Ufer, 106

A

its anniversaries, “1968” is no longer an “event” but has become a “subject matter of history.”1 This change has increased the awareness of the complexity and intricacy of the student protests in the “old” Federal Republic of Germany as well as their entanglement with the complex, multi-layered, transnational, and globalizing modernization processes of societies in the postwar period2 and their “specifically West German features.”3 “1968” has become a “shibboleth” and an “icon”4— not only an event of real history but also a (disputed) event of public discourse.5 For this reason, “the historical place of ‘1968’ within the social history of the Federal Republic of Germany will remain suspended a while longer.”6 1968 has proved to be open to highly contradictory attributions ever since. Some consider it a battle for the “freedom of the oppressed,” for the “social participation of all citizens,” for “more democracy”;7 others see in it a “rage for change,” a “desire for creating a tabula rasa and . . . for violence.”8 Against this background, it proves worthwhile to consider interpretations that focus precisely on this “double nature”9 of 1968, such as those by literary scholars Karl Heinz Bohrer and Klaus Briegleb.10 Both trace the perceived contradiction back to 1968 itself, to the “subversiveaesthetic origin of the revolt,”11 to that kind of surrealism, more precisely, that had engendered the slogan of “bringing imagination to power”12 in France and that, in West Germany, was recognizable in the actions of the Kommune I.13 Bohrer pinpoints the inherent ambiguity of 1968 in the attempt of some of the protests’ exponents—referred to as “Phantasiefraktion,” (fantasy group)14—to bring to power the surrealistic S A RESULT OF

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imagination and its impetus to unhinge reality.15 Briegleb follows a similar line of argument, albeit in reverse.16 His reconstruction of 1968 centers on the conflict between, on the one hand, the emancipatory, anti-authoritarian, and literary discourse mainly represented by the Kommune I and, on the other hand, the repressive, schematic discourse of the so-called “rational leftists.”17 The latter, according to Briegleb, were not only incapable of or unwilling to understand the situationist-surrealist approach pursued by the anti-authoritarian Bohemia but also more than ready to marginalize this “fun guerrilla,”18 with whom the author clearly sympathizes.19 In line with the above interpretations, and yet markedly different in important details, Peter Zadek’s film Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame (I’m an Elephant, Madame, 1969) outlines the 1968 protests as a radically ambiguous event. Briegleb’s omission of Zadek and his film probably results from the narrow concept of literature on which his approach is based. This is particularly sad, because the film—all but forgotten until ten years ago20—would have been interesting to look at, as it stages 1968 in a way that anticipates Briegleb’s stance (albeit subverting its dichotomous structure): for while Briegleb’s partisanship for anti-authoritarianism, without admitting it, obeys a binary logic (simply put, by confronting the “good” anarchism inspired by surrealism with the “evil” organization fetishists),21 Zadek, in spite of undoubtedly similar sympathies, denies himself such partisanship.22 In so doing, he not only achieves a more critical—and, as it were, more complex—perspective on 1968. Paradoxically, his aesthetic approach also results in a historically convincing portrait of 1968, which as representation, that is, through its form, makes tangible the subversive, anarchic spirit of 1968.23 As becomes clear from the introductory motto, what Zadek had intended was aesthetic historiography: Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame stages 1968 in a manner spiritually akin to its topic: it is both a critical reflection on and a compelling representation of the events. In its first images, the film transports its viewers to the, at that moment, still contemplative atmosphere of a Bremen high school in the year of the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, the charismatic and controversial figure among the leadership of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist [West] German Students’ Union, SDS). With a nod to the real protests against public transport fare increases in January 1968,24 Zadek’s film zooms in on a number of high school students who have formed a group to protest it. Their objectives soon go beyond their initial reasons. The group tries to expose the repressive character of the school, state, and society; seeks to expand pupils’ and students’ rights; and, most generally, fights to democratize society. Before long, the students come into conflict with their teachers who, in their reactions to the youths’ forays, display a whole repertoire of defensive behaviors, ranging from authoritarianism (on the part of the math teacher) and repressive tolerance

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Figure 1.1. Rull celebrating his father’s birthday in class. Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame, dir. Peter Zadek, 1969, 100 min., Beta Film GmbH, Oberhaching (Germany), and Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin (Germany). Screenshot.

(German teacher) down to the flat-out refusal to communicate (history teacher). Zadek poignantly presents the conflict between the two parties in numerous scenes, both inside and outside of the classroom. The confrontation between the establishment and the protesters, which dominates the perception of 1968 to the present day, is not his theme, however, but only serves as a foil against which Zadek highlights a completely different conflict: that between the anarchic fun guerrilla and the anti-authoritarian orthodoxy that attempts to exploit the impetus of the anti-establishment “Great Refusal”25 for its own political purposes and to finally suffocate it.26 These extremes are typified by two students from the group of those about to take their final exams. On the one hand, Peter Satemin (Georg M. Fischer), the head of the left-wing intellectual opposition, uses the gestures and language typical of an SDS functionary to demand not only the radical transformation of social conditions, including schools, but also the revolutionary discipline of his fellow students. On the other hand, Jochen Rull (Wolfgang Schneider), without recourse to ideology, refuses to acknowledge these “conditions” and their constraints and rejects any kind of discipline, even that demanded by the Revolution. Rull is a kind of anarchist, a

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Figure 1.2. Rull’s war dance. Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame, dir. Peter Zadek, 1969, 100 min., Beta Film GmbH, Oberhaching (Germany), and Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin (Germany). Screenshot.

“clown,” who derides both the “conditions” and those aiming to subvert them by their organized actions. His eccentricity and uncivilized “wildness” become obvious in a scene in which police and students are gathered in Bremen’s town hall square, facing each other as two disciplined formations ready for battle, each the spitting image of the other. Even before the conflict fully erupts, Rull bounces around between the opposing parties, grotesquely dressed as an Indian chief, performing an absurd war dance that satirizes and ridicules the confusingly similar militaristic swagger of police and students. The police eventually arrest Rull, while his classmates who had been chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” are left entirely unmolested. Given Rull’s subversive incommensurability, this seems only natural, for the true revolutionary potential by which the authorities feel provoked, and the state system endangered, is not represented by Satemin’s followers but by people like Rull. By contrast, Satemin’s revolutionary patrol, in spite of its revolutionary rhetoric, looks pretty harmless. Another feature Satemin shares with his teachers is their “order” thinking, which, as Zadek maliciously insinuates, creates a kind of secret agreement between them. Discipline, the acceptance of hierarchical struc-

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tures and predetermined rules, as well as the belief in leader figures are behaviors that are not only not rejected by the revolutionary avant-garde but, on the contrary, also considered crucial for the success of its undertakings. Satemin is such a leader figure—his classmates unconditionally obey his command both in the classroom and in street demonstrations—while he himself bows to the directives of the West Berlin leadership. This leadership sends to Bremen a special envoy, who plans and supervises the extraparliamentary opposition’s actions with military precision, exposing his battle plans in staccato monologues to devoutly listening students. It does not come as a surprise, then, that at the end of the film all pupils except Rull take their Abitur (the graduating examination at West German high schools). Zadek’s message is that Rull is the only true anti-authoritarian; unlike his fellow students, he is the one who really questions the consensus and the basic rules; however, his questioning does not involve a detailed, revolutionary project. Rull’s decidedly non-ideological attitude is most apparent in a sequence in which the film takes up the theme of National Socialism as a focal point of the 1968 protests. Without warning, a swastika appears on the cinema screen. Only in retrospect does it become clear that it was Rull who painted the NS symbol onto the facade of the Bremen Parliament. In an attempt to render the action acceptable, Rull’s teachers and classmates assume a political motive, but it remains unclear what this motive could be. What manifests in the responses of passers-by, however, is a combination, just barely kept in check, of denial and guilt, and of fantasies of violence and revenge, which so profoundly shaped the “post-National Socialist People’s community” (Frei) of the 1950s and 1960s27—a combination that, as though it had only waited for an occasion to explode, is then passionately vented on Rull. In the eyes of excited passers-by, Rull’s deed acknowledges Germany’s collective guilt; it denigrates Germany in the eyes of foreign countries by calling to mind an evil that was “brought on us” and of which, consequently, no one wishes to be reminded any longer. The conviction revealed in these allegations—namely, that Germans, far from being perpetrators, were themselves victims of the Nazi regime—is exposed as dishonest by the spontaneity with which the cries for Rull’s extermination (“Should be hanged immediately!”) are voiced. These reactions clearly exhibit non-fictionality. Unlike all other scenes, they are not performed by actors but presented as authentic comments by Bremen citizens; shot in black and white and built into the film as (semi-) documentary sequences,28 they are distinct from the rest of the film. The boundaries between fiction and reality thus become permeable in both directions—most obviously so when at the end of the sequence a representative of the revolutionary politburo from Satemin’s group named Koch makes his appearance and Stalinistically stigmatizes Rull as a counter-revolutionary.

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The entanglement of fiction and reality, conspicuously exhibited and skillfully arranged, is key to understanding Zadek’s aesthetic concept. Zadek’s artistic representation of the protests in the above sequence is subjected to a reality test, which he passes by managing to seamlessly merge reality and fiction. People from the streets of Bremen enter into a discussion with Rull, a fictional character—and this merging works fine. Zadek’s personal appearance as director and rumors about a camera operator being slapped in the face by a passerby (a scene that viewers are subsequently shown) does not spell a break but serves to enhance the impression of a casual transition from fiction to reality. By contrast, the importance of the artistic context in which the events take place is emphatically stressed in this sequence, insofar as leading actor, director, and camera operator, by their respective functions, implicitly refer to the film as a work of art. These signals discreetly remind viewers that what they are watching is a movie—and not “reality.” But already the change from color to black and white at the beginning of the sequence provides a double index. On one level, it marks the transition from fiction to reality, but, on another level, it concurrently signals the creation of a genuinely aesthetic opposition, in which colorful dramatic action and the dismal reality of the documentary sequence are juxtaposed as positive and negative elements. What predominates, however, is aesthetic structuring, which, far from hindering the representation of reality, is made visible as the indispensable framework of this representation. What Zadek achieves here is a radical appreciation of art. Art is not the worthless, or even misleading and distorting, appearance, as the generally art-hostile ideology of the 1968ers’ militant wing would have it;29 rather, it is quite capable of visualizing reality. This, in essence, is the aesthetic message of Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame, which Zadek puts forward with provocative glee. On the level of dramatic action, it is mirrored in Rull’s portrait as an artist. In the title sequence, Rull makes his appearance as an action painter, so it is no coincidence that his provocative emblazoning of the wall with a swastika is the result of a painting action. Also, the swastika is strikingly “staged” out of context; its real existence on the wall is not shown, which means that it is treated as a kind of artistic token provoking similarly allergic responses as modern art. What Zadek’s art makes visible here is that there is no difference between the “healthy national attitude,” articulated by the Bremen citizens and the school authorities, on the one hand, and the allegedly anti-bourgeois revolt, on the other hand. When Rull, in the following sequence (which returns to the level of dramatic action), is expelled from school, it becomes clear that the so-called establishment and the protests about “the Rull problem” (thus, verbatim, from school director Dr. Hartmann) are in complete agreement with each other: either they ignore the enlightening element of the swastika action, which puts its finger on

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the insufficient accounting for the Nazi past and reveals the mentality of people in the streets, or they merely appreciate this element for its usefulness for their own political targets. When Satemin and his followers eventually show their solidarity with Rull, they do so solely because they can exploit Rull’s expulsion from school for their revolutionary objectives. This strategy is brilliantly thwarted in the film’s most dramatic scene, when Rull, during a discussion of his “case” organized by some of the senior pupils, abstains from pledging his commitment to anti-fascism and instead draws Rohwedder, the emissary from West Berlin, into a surreal and absurd conversation about soccer in front of the congregated pupils. One can easily see that Zadek’s film is a critical reaction to the organized student movement and its ideological narrowing—a narrowing that Zadek considered fatal. What he sensed in these slogans was the emergence of a new—leftist—fascism: “The path from ‘lacking societal orientation’ to ‘degenerate’ is shorter than we think,” he said at the time.30 At the height of the public impact of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (ExtraParliamentary Opposition, APO), such a stance was of course bound to irritate massively. Already Zadek’s 1968 West Berlin production of Edwards Bond’s scandal play Saved, which snubbed the APO by provocatively abstaining from any political partisanship, had annoyed spectators and actors alike.31 In an unprecedented move against their director, whom they accused of consciously concealing existing social conditions, the actors expressed their solidarity with the audience. Zadek, who did not allow himself to be swayed by this move, had the nerve to offer APO spokesperson and political scientist Ekkehart Krippendorff, the leader of the anti-Saved protesters, a role in Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame. Krippendorff, of course, declined.32 Nevertheless, it would be wrong to interpret Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame as an unequivocal condemnation of the APO as totalitarian. After all, Zadek expressly grants his opponents speaking rights in his film. In the documentary scene mentioned above, a young man accuses Zadek, who here makes a brief appearance, of political indifferentism, thus repeating the very criticism leveled at him and his West Berlin Bond production. But above all, Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame mercilessly criticizes the social phenomena to which the APO also objected, leaving no doubt that Zadek considers the protest, also in its organized from, basically justified. The unclear position of the older generation with respect to its own Nazi past, which survives in unreflected formulas and body images from National Socialism, of which the film presents impressive examples, is one of the central themes of Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame. In the scene entitled Turnunterricht (Physical Education), for instance, a sports teacher is shown whose meticulously timed movements are enclosed and framed by a circle painted on the ground as well as the classical gym equipment of horizontal and stretching bars that can be seen in the background.

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Something shockingly constrained informs the whole situation, including the teacher’s frozen smile. This constrained atmosphere continues in the teachers’ mechanical, almost robotic tea break on a balcony, which starkly contrasts with the playing and noise-making pupils shown in reverse shot. The film in its final sequence brilliantly stages the older generation’s refusal to deal with its history and its unreflected continuation into the present. Freddy Quinn’s unspeakable anti-APO hit single, Wir (We), which mobilized the resentment of large parts of the public against the criticism it faced from the younger generation, is sarcastically underpinned by pictures of the Vietnam War; of riots in US black ghettos often in response to police violence, grinding poverty, and racism; and of the Ku Klux Klan’s racist actions.33 In the end, German prisoners of war marching through Moscow are shown to the song lines, “We, too, sometimes went too far.” Zadek’s attack on the APO should therefore not be mistaken for a defense of the establishment. Where he criticizes the protest movement, he does so because, to his mind, it has betrayed its own ideals by enforcing its ostensible anti-authoritarianism with authoritarian means, even developing authoritarian structures and attitudes. All of the above notwithstanding, Zadek’s film does not fall into the trap of unhistorically isolating this sudden change. The film deserves credit, in particular, for making this change recognizable as the (natural, as it were) response to a kind of state and social order whose absolutism hindered it from any self-questioning—making counter-absolutism, the selfenclosure into hermetic jargon, and irrefutable (because circular) arguments look like effective strategies.34 The confrontation between the police and the opposition movement at the town hall square succinctly reveals that the protest movement, in a grotesque mimesis, is emulating the state system of violence, paradoxically turning into an imitation of what it rejects. By presenting it as the reflection of existing social conditions, Zadek dedemonizes this behavior without protecting it from criticism. On the contrary, it is precisely his way of presentation that uncovers the absurdity of this strategy, against which he juxtaposes the original anti-authoritarian impetus of the protest, pitting it against an increasingly authoritarian APO, whose elitist behavior and tendency to form hierarchical structures he humorously satirizes. The sequence, for instance, in which the revolutionary delegate from West Berlin enters Bremen in a white jeep with a flying red flag is underscored by music from the then-popular Winnetou35 films: the revolutionaries’ adolescent self-stylization as courageous heroes of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is treated with subtle irony and exposed as kitsch and childish. Apropos irony, the ironic gesture of unmasking is one of the film’s overall characteristics, and it clearly betrays Zadek’s affinity for the anti-authoritarian core of the 1968ers. Other than in the case of the West Berlin communards’ actions, however, this gesture is not only directed at the representatives of collective consensus or school

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authorities but also at the representatives of the Revolution itself, who are spared a completely negative presentation. While Briegleb—in true “modern” fashion, as it were—operates on the basis of such clear-cut dualistic schemes, Zadek is much closer to the postmodern impetus of permanent transgression and questioning (the distinctive mark of the 1968 movement’s anti-authoritarian wing36) and the early-romantic concept of permanent (self-)relativization, as developed in Friedrich Schlegel’s Atheneum Fragments;37 in the above-mentioned confrontation with one of his critics he even relativizes his own position as a filmmaker. In fact, the relationship between Kommune I and the SDS in some respects resembles that between Early Romanticism and Enlightenment.38 As is well known, the German romanticists—Novalis, the Schlegels, as well as the siblings Johann Ludwig Tieck and Sophie Tieck— did not simply negate the latter’s emancipatory project but, paradoxically, carried it through by self-reflexively transgressing and ironizing it. Zadek’s procedure is similar. Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame demonstrates to perfection what it means to take anti-authoritarianism seriously in every respect, i.e., both politically and aesthetically—that is, to take it ironically, namely, by permanent refractions on the levels of image and action,39 by actors suddenly talking into the camera (thus suspending the fictional character of the film), by the presence of the film team and director in the film, and by the use of blurred images from a hand-held camera. Above all, however, the radicalism inherent to Zadek’s principles of permanent criticism, questioning, and self-questioning manifests in the fact that these principles also apply to Jochen Rull, the film’s undisputed hero and figurehead. Here, the difference between Zadek and Briegleb is most clearly discernible. For Briegleb, surrealist anarchism is the unquestioned positive element in his presentation, its transcendental signified; Zadek, by contrast, notwithstanding his feelings of sympathy for Rull, avoids falling into the obvious trap of making him into an identification figure, a kind of authority of non-conformism. Rull ultimately remains an ambiguous and ambivalent figure who eludes conclusive interpretation, which exasperates not only his classmates but also his girl-friend Billa, who eventually leaves him. If we cast a look at the film’s literary model, Thomas Valentin’s novel Die Unberatenen (The Ill-Advised) from 1963,40 we see that Zadek explicitly intends this ambiguity and ambivalence. In the novel, Rull is presented, somewhat pathetically, as a thoroughly positive character, a seeker of truth and God, who remains a role model, even though he fails because of the existing conditions.41 In Zadek’s film, by contrast, Rull is portrayed as a notorious loner whose thinking and acting is ultimately incomprehensible both to those around him and to the audience. The only thing clearly identifiable in him is his gesture of great refusal. Of course, precisely this attitude was found to be objectionable and has repeatedly been criticized.42 Volker Canaris, for example, in his 1979 monograph on Zadek writes,

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What was impressive about Zadek’s own attitude had been stylized, in the fixed installation of this key film, into the only true attitude and suddenly turned into the very thing it had by all means avoided becoming: ideology—and an ideology, at that, whose subjective attitude was vainglorious and whose stance on the objective political situation was reactionary. Obviously, at the time when the film was made, it was the collectively organized pupils and students—and not characters isolating themselves, such as Rull—who changed society and, hence, the conditions of cultural production in a way from which, just a few years later, also Peter Zadek’s art would benefit.43

Only repeating the point that is made against Rull in the film itself, this criticism fails to achieve Zadek’s level of reflection. Yet, it raises the reasonable question whether Rull’s strategy, that is, his consistently hedonistic and provocatively apolitical subversion, can be considered a pioneering innovation. How are we to know that Rull, who ostentatiously refuses to live up to the political requirements of his day, thus working toward his own depoliticization, is not a reactionary himself? As this essay’s epigraph indicates, Zadek’s sympathies lie unmistakably and provocatively with the former position.44 Precisely the negative consequences of 1968—the sectarianism of the Kommunistische Gruppen (communist groups also often referred to as K-Gruppen), the Red Army Faction’s terrorism, and the June 2, Movement, as well as the ever-present political fanaticism of those days—argue for this position. Zadek, however, rejects any kind of “tendency-poetical” answer, questioning all parties involved, even the one dearest to him, which he admits in the documentary scene. It is the disturbing radicalism of Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame— disturbing, in spite of its funniness—that makes the film more profound and more significant than other more popular “1968” productions. Take, for example, the film version of the musical Hair (1977) by Miloš Forman, which, regardless of its pretensions to convey the spirit of the protest days, is a fairly conventional and easily digestible production, formally speaking. The provocative strength of Zadek’s film rather lies in the fact that it highlights an element of the protests that otherwise would probably have remained intangible: it visualizes why the anti-authoritarian protests in the late 1960s were capable of mobilizing the intellectual and moral resources from which the radically anti-totalitarian thinking of post-modernity has drawn from the 1970s until today. These impetuses, still relevant (because not realized until) today, lie at the center of Zadek’s film, its interest and sympathies, and they constitute the director’s representation principle of permanent questioning and subversion, which does not even stop at its own point of view. Precisely this fact accounts for the film’s quality, and it allows for a different assessment of the controversial nature of the 1968 protests. True, on the downside of the ambivalence discussed above, an aggressively dogmatic and opinionated

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element exists that in retrospect can be associated with both the organization fetishists who triumphed over the anti-authoritarian wing and the Red Army Faction. Zadek’s film suggests, however, that society’s fears and anxieties in dealing with 1968 are also, and perhaps predominantly, caused by its upside, the highly acclaimed emancipatory potential of 1968. Consequently, the reason it is so difficult for 1968 to become part of the West German success story may be sought not only, or not primarily, in the downside of its ambivalence. It is worth recalling that this success story was built around the economic miracle in the first place, which is why the West German society of those days had trouble dealing with the essentially consumer and system-critical 1968 movement. Moreover, the question arises whether the permanent self-questioning and self-transgression, that is, the early romantic and post-modern principle of permanent subversion, so brilliantly expressed in Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame, is capable of being canonized and perceived in a positive light. And while this is difficult for any society, it seems particularly difficult in Germany, where the national holiday, to give but one example, does not commemorate a deterritorializing but a reterritorializing event: not the fall of the Berlin wall but the unification of East and West. —Translated by Christoph Nöthlings

Notes 1 See for example the title of “Sonderheft 17” (special volume 17) of the quarterly Geschichte und Gesellschaft: 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998). All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 See Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011); and Norbert Frei, 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (Munich: dtv, 2008). 3 Frei, 1968, 219. 4 See Oliver Rathkolb, Friedrich Stadler, eds., Das Jahr 1968—Ereignis, Symbol, Chiffre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2010). 5 Frei, 1968, 211. 6 Frei, 225. 7 Frei, 216. 8 Götz Aly, Unser Kampf: 1968—ein irritierter Blick zurück (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2008), 8. 9 Wolfrum, “1968 in der gegenwärtigen deutschen Geschichtspolitik,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 22–23 (2001): 28–36. Here, 29. 10 Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die gefährdete Phantasie, oder Surrealismus und Terror (Munich: Hanser, 1970); and Klaus Briegleb, 1968: Literatur in der antiautoritären Bewegung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993).

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Briegleb, Literatur, 165. Bohrer, Gefährdete Phantasie, 38. 13 “At the time, [West] Berlin religious scholar Jacob Taubes with others . . . defended the Kommune I pamphlets against the state attorney’s incriminations before the [West] Berlin Regional Court, calling them surrealist provocations.” Karl Heinz Bohrer, “1968: Die Phantasie an die Macht? Studentenbewegung— Walter Benjamin—Surrealismus,” in 1968. Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft, 288–300. Here, 298. See also Helmuth Kiesel, “Literatur um 1968: Politischer Protest und postmoderner Impuls,” in Protest! Literatur um 1968. Eine Ausstellung des Deutschen Literaturarchivs in Verbindung mit dem Germanistischen Seminar der Universität Heidelberg und dem Deutschen Rundfunkarchiv im Schiller-Nationalmuseum Marbach am Neckar (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1998), 593–640. Here, 612. 14 Bohrer, “Phantasie an die Macht,” 296. 15 Bohrer, 299. “Hence, the politicization of surrealism is not an eccentric tick; it came as a natural consequence” (Bohrer, Gefährdete Phantasie, 47). 16 Bohrer, too, shows sympathy for this literary-revolutionary basis of the protests. Other than Briegleb, however, who principally considers the surrealist “fusion” of art and politics a feasible prospect (see Briegleb, Literatur, 23 and 101), Bohrer takes a skeptical stance toward this aspiration (see Bohrer, Gefährdete Phantasie, 54–55). 17 Briegleb, Literatur, 64. 18 Briegleb, 101. 19 See Briegleb, 130. 20 Although prepared by its 2007 re-release as an Arthaus DVD (no longer available), interest in the film, which in 1969 had received several awards, only flared up again around the fortieth anniversary of 1968. Until 2008, the film was not even mentioned in the relevant publications dealing with that moment of German film history (see That Magic Moment—1968 und das Kino. Eine Filmschau [Vienna: Viennale, 1998]); it is not mentioned either in Handbuch zur Kulturund Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007). An exception was the film’s TV broadcast on the ARTE channel in the context of a theme night hosted on May 19, 1996, to mark Peter Zadek’s seventieth birthday—and not, significantly, to commemorate 1968 (see die tageszeitung, May 14, 1996, 18). Since 2008, the film has been shown on a number of occasions: “Drehbuch Geschichte: 1968 im Film,” Linse e.V.: Cinema Münster, 2008, URL no longer accessible; “Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: SchülerInnenrechte heute und in den 60er Jahren in Deutschland,” Haus der Demokratie und Menschenrechte, Berlin, 2008, URL no longer accessible; “Filmclub—Filmtreihe I: Die wilden 1960er,” Förderverein Filmkultur Bonn, accessed December 7, 2018, http://www.foerderverein-filmkultur.de/ filmclub-filmreihe-i-die-wilden-1960er/ (2016); “Soziale Utopien—gestern und heute,” Deutsches Filminstitut Filmmuseum, accessed December 7, 2018, http:// deutsches-filminstitut.de/blog/soziale-utopien-gestern-und-heute/ (2016). To 12

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my knowledge, the first academic essay was published in 2009: Julia Zutavern, “‘Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame.’ Peter Zadeks Gesellschaftssatire als Prüfstein linksalternativer Bewegungen,” in Linksalternative Milieus und Neue Soziale Bewegungen in den 1970er Jahren, eds. Cordia Baumann, Sebastian Gehrig, and Nicolas Büchse (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009), 287–306; it was followed in 2016 by the essay by Walter Gödden, “Popkomödie und Politsatire. Peter Zadek: Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame. Spielfilm (1968) (nach Motiven aus Thomas Valentins Roman Die Unberatenen),” in Vom Heimatroman zum Agitprop: Die Literatur Westfalens 1945–1975. 118 Essays, eds. Moritz Baßler, Walter Gödden, Sylvia Kokot, Arnold Maxwill (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2016), 330–34. A remarkable undertaking in this context is the local-history school project “Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame”—Bremen und Worpswede 1968, which was created within the framework of “Literatur@tlas Niedersachsen,” website no longer accessible. The film was screened as part of the 2008 German Film Institute focused on 1968 and was mentioned in the introduction. 21 See, for instance, Briegleb, Literatur, 148. 22 Gödden, “Popkomödie,” 333. Gödden underestimates, however, the share of political and aesthetic calculation in Zadek. See 334. 23 Zutavern, on the basis of other reference texts and theories, comes to the same conclusion. See Zutavern, “Gesellschaftssatire,” 291. 24 Wolfgang Kraushaar, 1968: Das Jahr, das alles verändert hat (Munich: Piper, 1968), 22–23. 25 Jakob Tanner, “‘The Times They Are A-Changin’—Zur subkulturellen Dynamik der 68er Bewegungen,” in 1968: Vom Ereignis zum Gegenstand der Geschichtswissenschaft, 207–23. Here 209. 26 Zadek’s grasp on contemporary history found its cineastic parallel, almost twenty-five years later, in Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom (1995), which in a stunningly similar way deals with the Spanish Civil War. 27 In spite of denazification, democratization, and westernization, National Socialism had a lasting impact on West German society. See, for instance, Bohrer: “In those years especially, the subliminal presence of a National-Socialist mentality was brought to awareness through the conflict of the 1968 protesters with representatives of the state, the universities and the press.” Bohrer, “Phantasie an die Macht,” 289. 28 See, for this, die tageszeitung, October 31, 1995, 23, as well as the conversation between Peter Zadek and Geerd Dahms included on the DVD. 29 Briegleb, Literatur, 92, 147. 30 Quoted after Volker Canaris, Peter Zadek, der Theatermann und Filmemacher (Munich: Hanser, 1979), 108. 31 On the course of these events, see also Peter Zadek, My Way: Eine Autobiographie 1926–1969 (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch), 505–7; and Kraushaar, 1968, 195. 32 Zutavern, “Gesellschaftssatire,” 290–91, and Zadek, My Way, 526–27. 33 Due to Quinn’s refusal to sing in the film, an imitator performed. See Zadek, My Way, 470, and the conversation between Zadek and Geerd Dahms.

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34 “The West German radicals were radical not only because of historical damage and a neurotic consciousness (which undoubtedly left its mark on them) but also because of a contemporary opposition that was itself neurotically tainted and that confronted the young generation with absolute hostility, up to and including civil war—and it was this opposition that the young generation had to face” (Bohrer, “Phantasie an die Macht,” 290). 35 Between 1962 and 1968, eleven “Winnetou” films were produced. Based on the immensely popular stories by German writer Karl May (1842–1912), these films feature the fictional Native American hero “Winnetou” (played by French actor Pierre Briece). 36 Kiesel, “Literatur,” 614–16. See, for the thesis that Zadek in Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame holds the mirror up to the student movement from a position of radical anti-authoritarianism, Zutavern, “Gesellschaftssatire,” 291. 37 For Schlegel, irony is “the freest of all liberties, for it enables us to rise above our own self; and still the most legitimate [the liberty most governed by laws], for it is absolutely necessary. It is a good sign if the harmonious dullards fail to understand this constant self-parody, if over and over again they believe and disbelieve until they become giddy and consider jest to be seriousness, and seriousness to be jest.” Friedrich von Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, trans. and annotated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 131. The appreciation of irony in the context of 1968 has already been remarked by Bohrer: “The ‘seriousness discourse’ modeled by German Idealism was [as a consequence of 1968] overtaken by the discourse of irony” (Bohrer, “Phantasie an die Macht,” 300). 38 I am guided here by the interpretation of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank, “Aufklärung als analytische und synthetische Vernunft: Vom französischen Materialismus über Kant zur Frühromantik,” in Aufklärung und Gegenaufklärung in der europäischen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), 377–403. 39 See especially the sequence where Rull is shown crouching in the school cabinet. Through its panes he tells his incredulous class teacher, “Now, prove to me that I am not a kiwi.” And the wife of the German teacher Dr. Nemitz, whom Rull ironically calls “our top-ranking German scholar,” repeats this nonsensical phrase. 40 Thomas Valentin, Die Unberatenen (Berlin: Ullstein, 1979). 41 “The character of Rull portrayed in Die Unberatenen was an idealist, very German, as much as Valentin himself, truth-seeking and loving (sic!), straightforward, honest, and without a sense of humor.” Peter Zadek, Das wilde Ufer: Ein Theaterbuch (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1990), 104. Notwithstanding its caustic, devastating criticism of the restorative West German society of the post-war period, however, there is something almost embarrassingly affirmative about the novel, if one compares it to Zadek’s film. To cite but the most important example, Rull, in the novel, is called a “bull in a china shop” (“Elefant im Porzellanladen,” 284). His well-meaning teacher, who is the author of this sobriquet, takes some of

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the sting out of Rull’s criticism by denigrating it into something clumsy and awkward. The film ironically rejects this condescending gesture by having Rull, in a manner both nonsensical and provocatively self-confident, belt out the lines, “I am an elephant, Madame / Is this not rather blatant, Madame” (“Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame / das find’ ich eklatant, Madame”), to the melody of the famous 1920s song Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame. Ultimately, Rull, in Valentin’s novel, is a product of adult projections but not the “bad boy” he is alleged to be. His actions here are morally justified by their purported higher truth. In some sense, then, Rull is morally exploited and denied autonomy by Valentin. The film radically breaks with this integrationist perspective. The fact that Rull is allowed to flout all conventions—most drastically so, because here the author of the swastika painting is not some agent provocateur but him—makes it clear that he is unconditionally accepted as a person in his own right. And exactly this recognition is denied to him in the novel. 42 The film received a Silver Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1969 and, on the part of the student movement, “the Rostige Filmdose (Rusty Film Can) award as the most reactionary film of all times” (Zadek, My Way, 473). 43 Canaris, Zadek, 241. See also the 1969 criticism by Peter Hamm, reproduced in Zadek, My Way, 519–25. 44 “I’m still fond of ‘Elephant.’ I like watching it from time to time and still identify with the character of Rull. . . .” (Zadek, My Way, 474).

2:

“Break the Power of the Manipulators”: Film and the West German 1968

Timothy Scott Brown

T

HE REVOLT OF 1968 in the Federal Republic of Germany was very much a media revolt. As a vibrant and relatively new medium, film occupied an important position within it. Film could inspire rebellion or provoke protest, but it could also function as a powerful tool of propaganda in its own right. Film reflected the interpenetration of culture and politics around 1968 and the tendency of artists to become political. More importantly, filmmaking practices exemplified key tendencies of the sixties revolt, not least self-organization and a DIY (“Do it Yourself”) approach to culturalproduction. As a site of political engagement, furthermore, film became connected with a collectivist ethos (as opposed to an individualist one), with a corresponding re-inscription of artistic production into a collective enterprise and a rejection of capitalist methods of production and distribution. Most fundamentally, filmmaking contributed to one of the anti-authoritarian revolt’s most fundamental projects: the forging of an alternative public sphere to act as a counterweight to prevailing regimes of un-truth.1 Truth, indeed, was a key site of contention in the West German 1968—not truth as in the hands of postmodernists who later tried to redraw 68’s battle lines on the terrain of epistemology, but truth in the hands of sixties militants who insisted on its absolute nature as a weapon against the false claims of authority. Against official untruth—lies about the nature of state violence at home or abroad, or mis-characterization of the spiritual and political content of the various rebellions being enacted by the young—rebels sought to construct a Gegenöffentlichkeit (an alternative public sphere), rooted in alternative media and local small-scale ownership of the cultural means of production. Heavily indebted to the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass media and mass culture as potential sites of authoritarianism, this attempt to build an alternative repository of truth became a central feature of underground filmmaking at the height of the anti-authoritarian revolt. Long before 1968, film played a key role in radicalizing youth by transmitting nonconformist lifeways, fashions, and anti-authoritarian

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attitudes. Even the early theoreticians of the student revolt were not immune to film’s emotive, fantasy-invoking power. As early as 1965, leaders of the anti-authoritarian contingent in West Berlin were so taken with Louis Malle’s revolutionary sex romp Viva Maria! (1965) that they took its title as the name of their subversive group. For figures like Rudi Dutschke and Dieter Kunzelmann, the film helped crystalize the idea of a Third World-First World rebel alliance, one that, tellingly— given the latter’s emphasis on Situationist-inspired play and a Reichian politics of daily life aimed at sexual liberation—involved comic depictions of a fun revolution steeped in the sexuality of bombshell French actresses. More in line with the dominant attitude toward culture in and around the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Students’ Union, SDS) were the protests of the following year against Gualtier Jacopetti and Franco Prosperis’s Africa Addio (Africa Blood and Guts, 1966), in which Kunzelmann was also involved. An exploitation film masquerading as a documentary, Africa Addio employed a jumble of horrific footage shot two years earlier during the decolonization struggles in the Congo, with the transparent intention of depicting African backwardness and unreadiness for self-determination. The film’s depiction of West German mercenaries executing black prisoners called to mind a 1964 Stern series profiling the activities of Wehrmacht soldier-turned mercenary Siegfried “Kongo” Müller, suggesting a link between the persistence of colonial exploitation and the continuing presence of fascism.2 Protests against the film, prefiguring the massive unrest to come over the next two years, demonstrated the revolt’s intention of disputing media productions that gave a false view of reality in the service of neo-colonial ideology and the profit motive. Film became one important site at which the struggle over representation, central to the anti-authoritarian revolt in West Germany, was waged. With the founding of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) in September 1966, the ground was prepared for the politicization of filmmaking itself.3 The dffb became a hotbed of cinematic agitation, its student-directors both documenting and participating in the protests that enveloped West Berlin from 1967–68. The academy was characterized by conflict between students and professors from the beginning, first over students’ unhappiness with inadequate technical facilities, later over some professors’ concerns about the emerging political content of student films. In May 1968, in connection with protests against the Emergency Laws, students occupied the academy for three days, raising a red flag and renaming the academy after the Soviet director Dziga Vertov.4 The first class of the academy, which included Helke Sander, Wolf Gremm, Hartmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Christian Ziewer, Hans Rüdiger Minow, and Holger Meins,

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closely coincided with the traumatic events of June 2, 1967, when the student Benno Ohnesorg was killed by police during protests against the visit to West Berlin of the Shah of Iran. Those events subsequently became the topic of Thomas Giefer and Minow’s film Berlin, 2. Juni, one of a number of films in which students at the dffb directly tackled current political struggles.5 Student filmmakers became especially involved in the growing conflict between the student movement and the Springer press. The Springer question lay at the heart of a wide-ranging and heated debate about the status of mass media in West Germany. The near-monopoly enjoyed by the Axel Springer media empire, especially in West Berlin, was a target of widespread condemnation, encompassing not just student radicals but also trade unionists, liberal journalists, intellectuals, and clergy, united in the view that the concentration of so much power in the hands of one man posed a problem in a democracy dedicated to a plurality of opinion.6 For the student movement especially, the Springer press exemplified the problem of mass media manipulation put forward by Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. As early as 1962, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, editor of the influential journal Kursbuch, had borrowed Adorno and Horkheimer’s idea of a “culture industry” to elaborate his concept of a “consciousness industry,” a term suggestive of a more thoroughgoing conditioning of consciousness via, especially, the press and mass media. The problem of press concentration appeared regularly in Enzensberger’s journal Kursbuch from its founding in 1965.7 The term Gegenöffentlichkeit came into use some time in 1966–67, in the course of the escalation of the conflict in West Berlin between the SDS and the Springer press. Sensationalist reporting, red-baiting, false depictions of student activists as shaggy, club-yielding barbarians— “journalism as manhunt,” as the writer Reinhard Lettau put it—seemed to provide proof of the Frankfurt School’s warnings about the danger of mass media manipulation.8 The concept of Gegenöffentlichkeit was officially enshrined in the anti-Springer campaign launched at the annual SDS convention in Frankfurt in September 1967. “Enlightened Gegenöffentlichkeit,” argued student leaders like Rudi Dutschke and Jürgen Krahl, was the only antidote to the “dictatorship of the manipulators.”9 Echoing Marcuse, the authors argued that monopolistic mass media created “publicistic forms of psychological pressure” that reduced its objects to the status of slaves. According to this analysis, the role of mass media was not merely one among other aspects of capitalist domination; in its means as well as in its effects, it was absolutely central. The anti-Springer campaign was thus nothing less than an assault on the very foundations of capitalism: “Our struggle against Springer is . . . a struggle against the late-capitalist system of rule itself.”10

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The more radical of the film students at the dffb, operating near the heart of this escalating conflict, were quick to take up themes of media manipulation in their work. The conflict with the Springer press was thematized in several of the short films created by students at the academy. The most infamous was future Red Army Faction member Holger Mein’s Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (The Making of a Molotov Cocktail, 1968). Screened in February 1968 during the “Springer Tribunal” at the Technical University in Berlin, the three-minute silent film depicted a pair of female hands adding oil and benzene to an empty wine bottle, inserting a rag, and setting it alight. The device is thrown against a car, which burns. In a following montage, Molotov cocktails pass hand to hand from one furtive figure to the next. Next, a box of matches is shown sitting atop a copy of Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution. In the final scene appears an image of the Springer press headquarters in the Kochstraße. If the film was one of the most obvious calls for exemplary violence—which in the event was carried out by unknown persons who smashed the windows of Springer-owned buildings across West Berlin the night of the film’s showing—it was by no means the only one. It was part of an emergent tradition that included Ulrich Knaudt’s Unsere Steine (Our Stones, 1968), and Farocki’s Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman, 1967) and Ihre Zeitungen (Your Newspapers, 1967). In Ihre Zeitungen (“On Several Problems of the Anti-Authoritarian and Anti-Imperialist Struggle in the Metropolises Using the Example of West Berlin”) Farocki takes up the practice of argument by visual analogy, so characteristic of the visual praxis of the student movement and underground press. Bombs falling on Vietnam are intercut with newspapers raining onto the streets of West Berlin, juxtaposed in turn with the image of the Springer press headquarters in the Kochstraße, just as in Meins’s film. In Knaudt’s Unsere Steine, the Springer high-rise is again pictured, placed in the context of images of US bombing raids and the dead bodies of Vietnamese civilians, intercut with images suggestive of revolutionary civil war. The paving stone and breaking glass serve as recurrent visual metaphors, appearing in close conjunction with Springer headquarters as the suggested target. These anti-Springer messages—directed not just against Springer but against the entire apparatus of repression he was seen to represent—were predated by the first of the dffb student films to thematize political violence: Farocki’s Die Worte des Vorsitzenden. In an uncanny tableau, a narrator relates wisdom from Mao (“the world’s greatest living Marxist”) while a young black-clad woman fashions a needle-tipped paper airplane from a page torn from Mao’s red book. Making the intention clear, the narrator intones: “The words of the Chairman must become weapons in our hands, that can hit the enemy by surprise.” The airplane made of weaponized words flies across the room to explode in the faces of the Shah of

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Iran and his Queen Farah Diba—depicted by actors wearing masks like those used in the protests of June 2, 1967—wounding the Shah, presumably mortally. The deployment of Maoism in the film was in keeping with that elsewhere in the student movement. As dffb student Hellmuth Costard put it, Mao was interpreted almost as “a modern Buddha, an Enlightened one.”11 The image of Mao and above all the red book depicted in Die Worte des Vorsitzenden became staple props of the anti-authoritarian revolt, carrying a talismanic power far out of proportion to any actual ideological content. Maoism, at least in the early days of the revolt before cadre Communism began to assign literal importance to Mao’s words, was more a matter of performance than anything else.12 What was being performed was the possibility of an authentic anti-authoritarian position, one expressing the primacy of action over mere theory. In this way, Maoism served, in the West German as well as in other national student movements, as a trope alluding to the possibility of revolutionary action in a world of ossified Cold War bipolarity, one deriving its radical charge from its provenance in Third World anti-imperialism. By turning words into (symbolic) action, moreover—and telegraphing the possibility of real action in the films directed against Springer— Farocki’s film, and those of the other radical dffb filmmakers, in the words of Tilman Baumgärtel, “dreamed the secret dream of the German student movement.”13 That is, they sought to expand the horizons of the radical imagination, in a time of rapidly exploding protest, to include previously neglected possibilities. In this way, they performed a characteristic act of the artist in 1968: to serve as a vanguard for political action by challenging mainstream depictions of social reality and utopian possibility and supplying others in their place. In laying out alternative possibilities—in this case of violent resistance—the dffb student filmmakers signaled their own movement away from pure art towards political action, a move that embodied an unresolved tension in film practice before and after 1968. These young filmmakers also took part in the focus within the ExtraParliamentary Opposition on documentation. In both the “documentary turn” in literature and in the publicistic strategies of the student movement, primary documents became ultimate sites of recourse in the conflict with the authorities.14 A belief in the documentary power of images informed the new style of activist filmmaking that grew up in conjunction with the anti-authoritarian revolt, such as Giefer’s Terror auch im Westen (Terror also in the West, 1968), which dealt not just with the Vietnam Congress of February 1968, but also with the reaction of the West Berlin population. Similarly, Giefer and Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni employed footage shot on the day of the protest against the Shah, as well as footage of policemen (identified from photographs of the protest) being confronted about their role.15 Such films were seen by their makers as necessary inter-

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ventions to fight against the false view of reality propagated by the mass media. “A true documentary film,” argued Giefer in a flier, “has to agitate in order to result in what it is showing being changed. Provocation and destruction are legitimate means against the large-scale consolidation [Gleichschaltungs-] campaign of the counterrevolution.”16 In a way typical of the activism of the 1960s, this concern with the deforming power of mass media bled over into a focus on the politics of daily life. Helke Sander, whose 1967 film on the Springer press monopoly, Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators), dealt with the mainstream media’s manipulation of consciousness, was quick to draw the connections between the “alternative public sphere” sought by the SDS and the alternative perspective of women, the topic of her previous short film Subjektitüde (1966). Sander’s exploration of the content of the Springer press during the preparation of Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure led her to reflect on the messages directed at women and their connection to the subordination of women within the private sphere. Her growing recognition of the ways in which the role of women was circumscribed even by male comrades within the SDS—a realization that occurred, in her later retelling, directly in connection with her research for the film—was a direct precipitating factor in the formation of the first women’s groups in West Berlin and Frankfurt and the famous and oft-recounted “tomato incident” at the Twenty-Third Delegate Conference of the SDS in September 1968, marking the traditional start date of the Women’s Movement in West Germany.17 This event was only one of the many developments in which art and politics intersected over the terrain of film. Film students established relations with the SDS and the Republican Club, took part in demonstrations, and staged their own actions. In December 1967, a group of young filmmakers at the Experimental Film Festival in Knokke, Belgium—including a group of students from the recently-founded dffb (among them Meins and Farocki)—agreed to dedicate themselves to “the struggle against imperialism,” coming into severe conflict with the director of the festival over their openly expressed support for the FNL in Vietnam.18 “Create two, three, many Vietnams,” Meins is to have said, echoing the famous injunction of Che Guevara, concluding, “let’s start with Knokke.”19 The following month, Sander, Farocki, and Skip Norman crashed the annual West Berlin Press Ball, infiltrating the hall in evening dress only to reveal their identity at the table of Axel Springer with a placard bearing the words “Axel, this is your final ball.”20 In February, students of the dffb attended the International Vietnam Congress in West Berlin, distributing a flyer demanding that filmmaking become part of “a struggle for a revolutionary transformation of the existing social order and its replacement with a socialist one. . . .”21 Being a political artist was, however, not as simple as attending demos, staging actions, and distributing flyers. Radical filmmakers at the dffb con-

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fronted a conundrum facing the politicized artist in 1968: how could the process of producing art, itself, become political? The group active at the Vietnam Congress had recognized the problem early on. The creation of truly political film, they argued, “rules out simply modifying the existing production and reproduction apparatus, to refine existing aesthetic norms and decorate them with socialist quotations. To create an approach means to initiate a collective learning process in which the individuation of the filmmaker is abolished. . . . We must figure out on which economic basis, in what production and organization form this can be accomplished.”22 This impulse was part of a broader movement across the artistic spectrum to turn art into a collective enterprise, create the conditions for selforganization, and take control of the cultural means of production. These principles were in operation early on in the rise of film collectives, which, dissatisfied with the possibilities of experimental film in West Germany, sought to import the latest from abroad. Groups like X-Screen in Cologne and the Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative were front and center in this effort. X-Screen, founded in 1967, introduced Cologne to the world of international avant-garde film, including especially the films of the American avant-garde (Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Bruce Connor) and the experimental film of the Vienna Actionists, which they screened at an XScreen Festival in Cologne in 1968.23 The Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative, founded in spring 1968, was patterned after the Filmmakers’ Co-op in New York City, inspired by the visit of experimental film scholar and activist P. Adams Sitney to Germany in 1967. Later that year, a “filmin” presented a non-stop three-night screening of underground films from the US, Japan, and the UK alongside productions from Hamburg, jumpstarting a vibrant independent local film culture solidified by two subsequent “Hamburger Filmschau” festivals in 1968 and 1969.24 The intention of the Hamburg Co-op was explicitly political, aiming “to create a noncommercial, cooperatively-structured distribution network” that would overcome the “repression within the culture firms.”25 This focus on establishing access to the most important new experimental films as a democratic, self-organized, collective process proceeded in parallel with a collectivization of the filmmaking process itself. The founding of the so-called “Group 3” at the dffb by Sander, Farocki, and others saw (partly successful) efforts to take control over the budget and production process, establish methods of collective work, and develop ways of approaching and appealing to different political target groups. In Frankfurt, the “Projektgruppe Schülerfilm” was founded by Meins, Michael Lukasik, and Günter Peter Straschek, in association with the Aktionszentrum Unabhängiger und Sozialistischer Schüler (Action Center for Independent and Socialist School Pupils, AUSS), one of the key groups working to politicize the young. The goal was to allow school pupils to address their own social conditions through film.26 The founding of

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“Projektgruppe Schülerfilm” was lauded by the “Culture and Revolution” working group in the West Berlin SDS as an important attempt at developing a “collective praxis” aimed at establishing a truly revolutionary culture. Books and other cultural works of political agitation, the group argued, were limited in their impact as long as they were produced and distributed under the auspices of the culture industry. Films were to be produced by school pupils, working as independently as possible, and dealing with home conditions, sexuality, and “practical resistance against the police.”27 In 1969, eighteen students of the dffb, expelled in the wake of the occupation of May 1968, including some members of Group 3, founded the “Rosta Kino,” a film distribution collective aimed at expanding the influence of “progressive political films.”28 The following year saw the founding of a related but independent group, the Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter (West Berlin Film Workers’ Collective, KWF). Rejecting the role of “useful idiots of film,” the collective sought to establish film creation and production on an explicitly revolutionary basis. Crucially, the group identified the revolutionary potential not just in the content but also in the means of production. Rejecting any opposition between political and artistic tasks, they declared: “The relationships of production and distribution [“die Vertriebsform”] have a substantial impact on the relevance of the filmmaker’s work; they delineate their relationship to the public, [a] relationship . . . determined by market relationships and the distanced relationship they create. For that reason, we can take over relationships of production and distribution based on the traditional pattern.”29 Encoded in existing forms, they argued, was an authoritarian relationship that affected both the culture producers and their relationship with their audience. Existing practices produced an “uncritical consumer relationship” based on the status of “film as a commodity.” This commodity status had to be eliminated in order to transform film into a “real means of communication.”30 Defining cultural production as work carried out collectively, as opposed to art produced individually, resonated with trends in fields like literature, where groups like the “Authors’ Collective” and the “Literature Producers” sought to place cultural production in the service of collective struggle, while protecting the prerogatives of collective production.31 The focus on communication, meanwhile, articulated the concern, after the failures of the campaigns against the Emergency Laws and the Springer Press in late 1968, with finding new organizational forms and new revolutionary actors. This moment saw the formation of a plethora of MarxistLeninist-Maoist cadre parties—the so-called K-Gruppen—as well as a host of rank and file and city district groups (Basisgruppen and Stadtteilgruppen), dedicated to intervening in local struggles and connecting directly with the working class. Radical film work mirrored these concerns. “Rank and file work,” argued the KWF, “means for the filmmaker, above all, that he doesn’t wait for the public to come to him, but that he goes to the public

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and [there], in a collective work and learning process, articulates concrete political interests. . . .”32 This impulse to “go to the people” resulted in numerous initiatives in the realm of film, of which the above-mentioned “Projektgruppe Schülerfilm” was one of the earliest. In 1971, the Red Guard, the youth wing of the Maoist KPD/ML, in its effort to connect with young workers, sponsored the creation of a film created “by apprentices for apprentices.” The film depicted exploitation at work and oppression at home, decrying attempts to split apprentices into “specialists and helpers” and to induce them to military service that might one day place them in the position of having to shoot on their striking fellow workers.33 The West Berlin Film Workers’ Collective, meanwhile, sought to support the work of groups seeking to mobilize socalled marginal groups, especially youth living in group homes. This work was a focus of groups like the “Rank and File Group Home and Apprentice Work” in Berlin, “Action Southern Front” in Munich, and the group around Ulrike Meinhof, whose unaired teleplay Bambule (1970) depicted the struggles of young women in the Eichenhof group home in West Berlin.34 The KWF’s film on the campaign to radicalize institutionalized youth in a group home in Staffelberg—entitled, after a quotation by Chairman Mao, Die Hauptsache ist, dass man zu lernen versteht (The Key is to Know How to Learn, 1972)—was part of a search for the revolutionary subject so critical to the post-1968 moment in the Federal Republic. In the 1970s and 1980s, with the growth of the “alternative movement” and its network of left-oriented cultural production facilities, distribution networks, bookstores, publishers, and so on, film activism—especially around the cheaper video format and the democratic-productive possibilities it represented—continued not only to produce left wing content but also to insist that cultural production could and must be political. Groups like the Medienpädagogikzentrum (Centre for Media Pedagogy, MPZ), established in 1973 by students of the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg (Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, HfbK), and the Thede, an association of documentary filmmakers established in Hamburg in 1980, arose as part of a wave of foundings of video production collectives across Germany, as well as in Zurich and Vienna. Taking up key themes of the post-1968 period connected to the peace, anti-nuclear, and women’s movements, these collectives continued—and continue to the present day—to uphold the connection between self-organized grassroots production and alternative left politics. As a scholar of these initiatives has recently pointed out, a focus on collective filmmaking—and the engaged politics with which it has historically been connected—serves as a needed corrective to the traditional focus on individual auteurs.35 In this connection, for scholars of the “global 1968,” film must be situated as part of a broader explosion of critical alternative media that, in both its analytic concerns and in the methods of its creation, mirrored key concerns of—and contributed to—the revolt of 1968.

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Notes 1

Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The AntiAuthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 See Niels Seibert, “Proteste gegen den Film Africa Addio. Ein Beispiel fur Antirassismus in den 60er-Jahren,” in WiderstandsBewegungen: Antirassismus zwischen Alltag und Aktion, ed. Interface (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2005), 280–89. 3 On the dffb see Volker Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne. Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, 1966–1968,” in 1968: Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart, Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2007), 199–206. Here, 200. 4 Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne,” 200. 5 See Priscilla Layne’s essay in this volume for a sustained analysis of this film. 6 For figures on the extent of the monopoly see Nick Thomas, Protest Movements in 1960s West Germany: A Social History of Dissent and Democracy (New York: Berg, 2003), 165. 7 See also Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972). 8 Reinhard Lettau, “Journalismus als Menschenjagd,” Kursbuch 7 (1966): 116–29. 9 Altvater, Blanke, Dutschke, Krahl, Schauer, “Die demokratische Öffentlichkeit ist zerstört,” in Gefundene Fragmente, 1967–1980, vol. 1, ed. Bernd Kramer (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 2004), 63–66. 10 Altvater, Blanke, Dutschke, Krahl, Schauer, “Die demokratische Öffentlichkeit ist zerstört,” 63–66. 11 Hellmuth Costard, “Das ist die Angst des Tonmanns,” in Starbuck–Holger Meins: Ein Porträt als Zeitbild, ed. Gerd Conradt (Berlin: Espresso, 2001), 44–49. Here, 45. 12 A point made by Sebastian Gehrig, “(Re-)Configuring Mao: Trajectories of a Culturo-Political Trend in West Germany,” Transcultural Studies 2 (2011): 189– 231. 13 Tilman Baumgärtel, “Die Rolle der DFFB-Studenten bei der Revolte von 1967/68,” Junge Welt, September 27, September 30, and October 2, 1996, archived through Infopartisan.net, accessed December 7, 2018, http://www. infopartisan.net/archive/1967/266705.html. 14 See for example the document collection by the Verband Deutscher Studentenschaften on the events and aftermath of June 2, 1967, published the same year: Knut Nevermann and Verband Deutscher Studentschaften eds., Studenten zwischen Notstand und Demokratie: Dokumente zu den Ereignissen anläßlich des Schah-Besuchs (Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1967). 15 See Priscilla Layne’s essay in this volume on Giefer and Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni. 16 Quoted in Nevermann and VDS eds., Studenten zwischen Notstand und Demokratie, 203.

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17 “‘Break the Powers of the Manipulators!’ Q and A Helke Sander,” posted to YouTube by GlasgowFilmTheatre, May 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IDXxiCiSwIY; Peter Mosler, Was wir wollten, was wir wurden (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt-Verlag, 1977), 159. For a more sustained analysis of Sander’s films during this time, see Christina Gerhardt’s essay in this volume: “Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement.” 18 Conradt, Starbuck, 50. 19 Conradt, 51. 20 Conradt, 51. 21 Conradt, 51. 22 Dietmar Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter,’” March 2009, archived on Materialen zur Analyse von Opposition (MAO), http://www.maoprojekt.de/BRD/KUL/KWF.shtml. 23 See XScreen: Materialien über den Underground-Film (Cologne: Phaidon, 1971). 24 Dagmar Brunow, “Before YouTube and Indymedia: Cultural Memory and the Archive of Video Collectives in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s,” Studies in European Cinema 8, no. 3 (2012): 171–81. 25 Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter.’” 26 Karl-Heinz Stenz, “Kampfplatz Kamera—Die filmkulturelle Bedeutung der filmstudierenden ’68er Generation am Beispiel der Protestaktivitäten an der neu gegründeten Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb)” (Diplomarbeit, Norderstedt, 2007), 41–44. 27 “Kunst als Ware der Bewußtseinsindustrie,” Die Zeit, no. 48, November 29, 1968. 28 Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter.’” 29 Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter.’” 30 Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter.’” 31 Thomas Daum, Die 2. Kultur: Alternativliteratur in der Bundesrepublik (Mainz: NewLit Verlag, 1981), 62. 32 Quoted in Kesten, “Das ‘Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter.’” 33 Rote Garde - Jugendorganisation der KPD/ML, Unna o.J. (1971), archived on Materialen zur Analyse von Opposition (MAO), last updated November 21, 2017, http://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/NRW/ARN/Unna.shtml. 34 “Über die Aktion Südfront ist folgendes bekannt geworden,” Bayer. Staatsministerium des Innern, 8 München 22, den 14. November 1974, Protest in München seit 1945, accessed December 7, 2018, http://protest-muenchen.subbavaria.de/artikel/1809. 35 Brunow, “Before YouTube and Indymedia,” 171–81.

3:

Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of Hans-Rüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni1

Priscilla Layne

Introduction: Revolutionizing German Society and Film

T

the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) and the West German student movement was a contentious one. That might come as a surprise, considering that the dffb was founded on the heels of the infamous 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, when twenty-six West German filmmakers rebelliously declared “the old film is dead” and professed the necessity for West German films free of conventions and commercial influence. The institutional effects of the Oberhausen Manifesto were the creation of state funding for film and the creation of three film programs:2 the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm, hfg), led by Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Detten Schleiermacher in 1962, which would close due to financial problems in 1968, as well as the dffb in West Berlin and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich, hff), both founded in 1966.3 According to Hans-Rüdiger Minow, a member of the dffb’s first cohort, he and his fellow students did not identify with the Oberhausen signatories.4 Directors such as Kluge and Reitz were nearly twenty years older than Minow, who began his studies at age twenty-two and found that the topics and conventions of Young German Cinema were just not sufficiently political for his cohort. While Fabian Tietke acknowledges the ideological break between the generations on the dffb’s website, he does not focus as much on politics as Minow, who states, “there were points of contact to the political interests we had. But that wasn’t decisive. . . . Rather, it became evident that the coalition failed at the very moment when political interests were at the forefront of a situation instead of libertarian interests, like in the case of the Vietnam War” (Minow). Thus, HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN

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Minow’s statement points to a gap between philosophy and praxis, not in terms of filmmaking but of political action. The Oberhausen directors may have strived for social changes that reflected more liberal art and lifestyles, but they were not as committed to effecting concrete political change as Minow and his colleagues. By focusing on Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni (1967), this essay takes a closer look at the dffb students’ break with Young German Cinema and their ideological alliance with the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extraparliamentary Opposition, APO) as well as the resultant conflict with the dffb. Bearing the date when student Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot at a protest against the Iranian Shah—an event that kicked off the radicalization of the 1968 student movement—Minow’s film consists of footage and photographs from the protest and of interviews with eyewitnesses. In contrast to Young German Cinema, which Sabine Hake describes as not overtly political, Berlin, 2. Juni reflects the moment of rupture between Young German Cinema and the radical, documentary film of the late 1960s.5 In my analysis of the film, I specifically concentrate on its Vertovian style, which reflects both this rupture and the distinctions between Minow’s film and his French and American contemporaries. There are traces of French cinéma vérité and American direct cinema in Minow’s inclusion of testimonies from several eyewitnesses and the spontaneous interviews conducted on the street. Yet there are also clear traces of the older documentary style of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, after whom the students named the dffb in 1968, when they briefly occupied the building. While Vertov’s conception of showing “life as it is” was in fact the inspiration for cinéma vérité, in reality Vertov did not simply capture life before the camera; rather, he used editing, intertitles, and sound to manipulate the audience and to convey specific meanings.6 Likewise, in Berlin, 2. Juni Minow often links images together to create causalities that are absent from the recorded material. His manipulation of sound, focus, editing, and intertitles demonstrates not only a rejection of the apolitical nature of the Oberhausen authors but also a drastic difference between documentary filmmakers in West Germany and their contemporaries in France and the US.

Hans-Rüdiger Minow and His Tenure at the dffb Hans-Rüdiger Minow was not just any student at the dffb. His entire period at the academy was fraught with conflict, largely because of his involvement with activism and his uncompromising political positions. His political activity in West Berlin soon turned him into a “difficult fellow,” as his former instructor Jiří Weiss described him.7 A self-described “typical war child,” Minow was born in November 1944 in Bad Schwalbach (Hesse), to where his mother had fled from Berlin during the final months

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of the war. Minow returned to West Berlin at age three, attending school in Wedding, five minutes from the border to East Berlin, giving him complete access to East German films and television. Watching Soviet films on East German television, Minow was inadvertently introduced to a part of German history to which he previously did not have much access—namely films about the Second World War shot from a Soviet perspective in which Germans appeared as perpetrators and the Soviets as victims. Minow relates this experience as one of the foundational moments in his life that created mistrust not only toward German history and culture but also within his own family. His interest in the German fascist past followed him to university, when in 1964 he began taking classes in Tübingen and then Munich. It was in a film seminar in Munich where he first encountered opposition from film studies in West Germany because of his political opinions. Minow was taking a course on film and theater criticism with Professor Hanns Braun. He wrote a review of the Nazi propaganda film Kolberg (Veit Harlan, 1945), which Braun refused to let him present in class because of Minow’s alleged “hateful aversion that extended beyond the topic.”8 In the recommendation letter Braun sent to the dffb in 1966, he dissuaded the academy from accepting Minow because of the latter’s political views.9 Despite Braun’s critical letter, Minow was accepted into the first cohort of the dffb in 1966. According to Minow, the dffb’s director, Erwin Leiser, would have been enthralled rather than turned off by his anti-fascist position. Leiser, born in Berlin in 1923, was a German Jew who had fled Nazi Germany in 1938, finding exile in Sweden.10 Leiser was chosen to be the first director of the dffb after shooting his acclaimed documentary film Mein Kampf (1960). In his memoir, Gott hat kein Kleingeld (1993), he writes that he had taken the job as dffb director out of the desire to work with “a new, young generation of Germans, who didn’t simply say yes to everything.”11 Yet Leiser also expresses his discontent with the students’ political activities: “We prepared ourselves for students who wanted to make films. We were surprised when we realized what many of them actually wanted: revolution.”12 Leiser’s comments set up the central misunderstanding between himself and his students that would culminate in the first cohort’s expulsion. Leiser was understandably in a very difficult situation. Having been persecuted by the Nazis, he was reasonably suspicious of any form of German political extremism. And since he had been living abroad for over twenty years before returning to West Germany, he might not have been very aware of the day-to-day political climate and rising intergenerational conflict. As a result, his students interpreted his conservatism as fascist, while he interpreted their dogmatism as fascist. Clearly, finding common ground would not be easy. Minow’s problems began following his probationary first year at the dffb. As per the guidelines, all students were to be evaluated to assess their

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potential for continuing their studies. Minow claims the dffb sought his dismissal not because his work was poor but because of his political activity. In fact, his personal files at the dffb archive confirm this assessment. On May 8, 1967, Heinz Rathsack, who was Leiser’s co-director, wrote a letter to Alexander Kluge asking if he could accept Minow as a student in Ulm. In the letter Rathsack clearly shows support for Minow’s artistic skill, stating that Minow “has to the best of our beliefs shown evidence in his work that he is clearly capable of continuing on this path.”13 Nevertheless, Rathsack expresses concern with Minow’s personality: “Mr. Minow is the kind of loner who needs to be given the chance to work under conditions that are more flexible than is the case with us.”14 Thus, the main reasons for Minow’s dismissal were personal rather than professional, that is, expressing any concerns about his filmmaking skills. Minow, however, refused to leave West Berlin. He felt he had been treated unjustly, and thanks to his tenacity, as well as letters of support from Kluge and Weiss, Leiser and Rathsack reversed their decision on June 1, 1967, and Minow was allowed to stay on as a student. According to subsequent letters from Leiser and Rathsack, however, his behavior did not improve. Part of the source of tension between Minow and the directors was his role as Studentenvertreter (student representative). Minow would eventually be expelled in November 1968 for reasons I will address in the conclusion. Several months prior to his dismissal, in May 1968, students had already made a strong statement to the administration by occupying the dffb and renaming it the “Dziga-Vertov-Akademie.” In his memoir, Leiser suggests that such actions were the result of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist [West] German Students’ Union, SDS) having chosen the dffb “as the smallest and least established academy in [West] Berlin . . . to demonstrate that students can take power.”15 Leiser’s statement not only reflects a dismissal of the SDS but also suggests he did not take his students’ political convictions and activities seriously. Ralph Eue maintains that the students found the name Vertov Akademie fitting, “because they saw the famous Russian documentary and experimental filmmaker as their role model.”16 Vertov, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking in the early twentieth century, had already faded into obscurity in the Soviet Union by the time of his death in 1954.17 But in the 1960s, in Western Europe, his work experienced a renaissance. KarlHeinz Stenz claims that for West German filmmakers of the 1960s, the name Vertov stood for experimentalism and a critical view of realism, both of which were objectives laid out in the Oberhausen Manifesto.18 While Vertov’s political ambitions for film may have eventually appealed to West German filmmakers, it was in France that Kinopravda first inspired a group of filmmakers, including Jean-Luc Godard, to call themselves the Groupe Dziga Vertov in 1968.19 According to Ginette Vincendeau, however, the term cinéma vérité (cinema’s truth), a literal

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translation of Vertov’s Kinopravda, actually originated in the 1950s with “sociologist Edgar Morin, who, with Jean Rouch, directed the key cinéma vérité work: Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), in which Parisians respond to personal questions and the filmmakers appear in the film, reflecting on their own practice.”20 It is important to remember the sociological roots of cinéma vérité, because while contemporary definitions might specify cinéma vérité’s formalist techniques (use of handheld camera, spontaneity), filming outside of the studio, and its focus on interviews and events, the fact that a sociologist helped develop this “cinema of truth” suggests it had been considered not only an art form but also a scientific practice. Therefore, Morin and Rouch must have believed there was in fact a concrete truth that one could reach. According to Vincendeau, cinéma vérité sought to reveal rather than capture truth.21 Capturing truth suggests that the truth is readily available and out in the open, so that the filmmaker must only point his camera at reality and shoot it. Revealing truth, however, suggests that the filmmaker knows where the truth is located, but that it has been hidden from view. This concept will be of particular importance in my analysis of Minow’s film, which was made with the premise that the West German police intentionally tried to cover up what occurred on June 2, 1967. Compared to his non-West German contemporaries, Minow’s film does incorporate some aspects of observational cinema. For example, similar to cinéma vérité, Berlin, 2. Juni is self-reflective with regard to the act of filmmaking itself. Chronique d’un été begins with several people sitting around conversing about the difficulties of capturing a real conversation on film. While the subjects in Berlin, 2. Juni may not discuss filmmaking in such a direct manner, Minow does step in front of the camera occasionally and allows the audience to see other members of his camera crew. What makes Minow’s film drastically different from cinéma vérité and direct cinema is its clear intention to make an argument. Chronique d’un été has no such clear intention, and this is reflected both in the film’s long takes, typical of observational film, and the open-ended questions directed at its audience, questions that are intent on exploring filmmaking and Parisian life more generally. By contrast, Berlin, 2. Juni has a clear political argument, which is reflected both in its content, such as the confrontational questions Minow directs towards the police, and in its form, as in Minow’s primary use of three-quarter shots.22

Piecing Together the Truth If the premise of Chronique d’un été is the question “Are you happy?” then the premise of Berlin, 2. Juni is simply “What happened on June 2, 1967?”—a question that Minow poses to various bystanders, demonstra-

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tors, and policemen and that reflects the film’s inherently political nature. When asked about the film’s origins, Minow claimed that immediately following the demonstration, which he and fellow student Thomas Giefer had attended separately, students were appalled by how the protests were covered in the media. While the then Springer-controlled media had “laid blame on oppositional Iranian and [West] German students” for the violence, in truth the violent events of the day had largely been instigated both by West German policemen, who verbally and physically targeted students for their leftist beliefs, and by members of the Iranian secret police, who had been present under the guise of pro-Shah demonstrators.23 Of primary concern to Minow was documenting what really happened, in an effort to provide evidence to the courts regarding which policemen used violence against protesters. In order to gather enough photographic evidence and reconstruct the day’s events, Minow created a flyer that was distributed to thousands of students, asking them to bring their footage to the Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss (General Students’ Committee, AStA) of the Free University of Berlin, and several dozen students responded. The AStA provided Minow with a room where he could collect this evidence. According to Minow, only after they had gathered an impressive amount of evidence did he get the idea to make a film that could circulate to other universities in West Germany in order to inform students outside of West Berlin of what had happened. Before the film was even finished, Minow and Giefer traveled to different universities showing film clips and slides. In addition to the photographs provided by demonstrators, Minow also had footage from Giefer, who had attended the protest with a handheld camera. This footage primarily constitutes the documentary. However, in addition to Giefer’s footage, foreign correspondents, among them American and British journalists, who were also appalled by the violence, gave Minow footage to use. This range of contributions accounts for the varying quality of footage in the film. At the AStA headquarters, Minow and Giefer attempted to reconstruct the events of June 2, 1967, as they unfolded at the protest. Despite Minow’s goals of documenting the truth, his film techniques reveal how his editing, the mise-en-scène, and Skip Norman’s camerawork were meant to convey a specific message about the West Berlin police.24 The film starts with footage of several policemen walking towards the camera in Charlottenburg in the area around the Deutsche Oper, where the protests occurred, specifically in front of the building where Ohnesorg was shot. In the frame, one sees Minow wearing a striped, long-sleeved shirt with his back to the camera and another student standing to his left. Both students do not face the camera, but the policeman whom they question and another policeman looking on behind Minow do face the camera

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Figure 3.1. Two students, including Minow in the striped shirt, attempt to question two police officers on the street. One officer asks for their identification, including that of cameraman Skip Norman. Berlin, 2. Juni, dir. Hans-Rüdiger Minow and Thomas Giefer, 1967, 45 min., AStA of the Free University of Berlin. Screenshot.

directly, making it clear from the outset on whom the documentary focuses. After asking to see the students’ identification, the policemen proceed to argue over whether or not the students can film them without their permission. This interaction stands in stark contrast to the appearance of French policemen in Chronique d’un été. In the French film, when the policemen are asked by two young women to respond to the question “Are you happy?” they laugh playfully, and one admits that he could truthfully respond only when off-duty. This kind of open, trusting dialogue is completely absent from all the encounters with policemen in Minow’s film. Instead, by beginning with this tense encounter, the film makes the West Berlin police appear defensive, distrusting, as though they have something to hide. Perhaps sensing their vulnerability, both policemen turn away from the camera so that they are standing directly opposite Minow. Aware of their attempt to avoid the camera, Minow turns to cameraman Norman and tells

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him to come around so that the policemen’s faces are in view of the camera. Instead of circling in front of the policemen, however, Norman moves behind them. As a result, Minow switches back and forth between giving Norman directions and arguing with the police. What further suggests the police’s dishonesty is that though they insist to Minow that he cannot film them without their permission, they resort to petty arguments when they cannot assert their will: “If you can film us where you want, then we can stand where we want.” Before the film cuts to the title page, the viewer sees the shorter policeman collecting an identification card (ID) from the soundman and then walking towards the camera as he requests Norman’s ID as well. Because the viewer’s gaze is aligned with the camera, it effectively feels as though the policemen were demanding identification from us, which perpetuates a hostile dynamic between the viewer and the police.

Sound, Intertitles, Montage, and Testimony Reminiscent of Vertov’s techniques, the film uses sound, intertitles, and montage throughout in order to get its points across. Sound is sometimes absent, because the handheld camera that Giefer used at the protest did not have the capacity for it. Yet when there is no diegetic sound, the voiceover tells us what we are seeing. This type of narration potentially allows the filmmaker to be manipulative, because he is giving us a narrative, instead of allowing us to make up our own minds based on what we see. At times, it does not appear that the director is manipulative, because what we see is indeed confirmed by what we hear. For example, when Minow informs us that on the evening of June 2 policemen divided the crowd of protesters in two by charging into their midst, these events can clearly be seen in the footage. At other times, however, the off-screen narration intentionally contradicts what we see on-screen. For example, towards the end of the film we are presented with photos of a female demonstrator, Helga Haas, who appears fine in one image but is bleeding from a head wound in another shot.25 Minow’s voiceover suggests that the police physically assaulted her and that hospitals purposefully refused to help demonstrators such as Haas. Then, the film cuts to the newspaper coverage of this incident. In the unidentified newspaper, the photo of Haas is given the caption “[. . .] a young girl is brought to safety away from a storm of rocks.” While we see this image, the voiceover informs us, “The newspapers characterize the victims as offenders, the perpetrators as rescuers.” In this case, Minow purposefully contradicts what we are reading, because rather than suggesting the filmmaker is lying, here the conflict between the narration and the text conveys that this film presents a counter-narrative to oppose the skewed coverage by the press. In my conversation with Minow, he confirmed that he knew Haas personally and was

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Figure 3.2. A close-up of a newspaper photo of Astrid Haas, bleeding from a headwound and being accompanied by police. While the caption to the photo states that Haas is being saved by police after being attacked by demonstrators, Minow’s voiceover informs us that her injuries stem from the police. Berlin, 2. Juni, dir. HansRüdiger Minow and Thomas Giefer, 1967, 45 min., AStA of the Free University of Berlin. Screenshot.

aware that she had not been injured by demonstrators. Furthermore, he indicated that the misleading caption did not stem from the photographer but from the newspaper, thus exemplifying the power of the mainstream press at the time to skew the narrative. Nonetheless, there are also scenes in which it would not be possible for viewers to corroborate the accuracy of the narration. Near the beginning of the film, scenes of the Shah’s visit are narrated by Minow offscreen. In contrast to the previous, less professional footage of the protest that Giefer filmed, this footage appears to come from foreign journalists and to have been given to Minow. This fact is revealed, for instance, by the position of the camera. Unlike the footage of the protest, which was shot in close proximity to protesters, at eye level, this footage is shot from a position higher up, starting with a long shot of the Shah’s car arriving and then continuing with high angle shots of him walking past an adoring crowd. Giefer would not have had access to the equipment for such a shot.

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Figure 3.3. Wearing suits and holding sticks broken off from protest signs, the Shah’s secret police threateningly approach student demonstrators. Berlin, 2. Juni, dir. Hans-Rüdiger Minow and Thomas Giefer, 1967, 45 min., AStA of the Free University of Berlin. Screenshot.

Furthermore, there is no way that one of the film students would have been allowed into the town hall to film the meeting with the Shah, let alone in such close proximity. Since Minow was not actually present at these meetings, he would not be able to tell us what we are seeing. The narration added to this footage is framed by a simple sentence: “The Shah is greeted by the [West] Berlin State Government.” However, within this sentence, Minow follows the subject, “The Shah,” with a long modifying clause that informs us of the details of the Shah’s brutal regime. By ending his narration with “is greeted by the [West] Berlin State Government,” Minow’s text has a potentially manipulating effect. But since the framing statement appears to describe what happened objectively, viewers are led to believe that everything else in the narration is factual as well. In contrast to this, there are also scenes where no voiceover is added. For example, silence is foregrounded in the scenes of the Shah’s secret police beating demonstrators with sticks. These men, dressed in dark suits, had arrived at the protest by city bus and presented themselves simply as

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pro-Shah counterdemonstrators.26 By deciding not to add a voiceover, Minow allows the silence to emphasize the brutality of the violence. The silence can also be interpreted as the police’s failure to intervene or perhaps as a reference to those who have since turned a blind eye to what happened. Besides the question of whether the narration is factual, there are also moments when the scene is clearly being described, but the narrator infuses his commentary with judgment. One such instance occurs when footage shows student protestors sitting down. At that moment, the narrator comments, “naïvely believing in the democratic fundamental rights of passive resistance, while they are still spared, the second group sits down for a strike.” While it is clear from the footage that the students have sat down, as an audience we have no idea what motivated this action. However, Minow’s comments not only suggest the students’ intentions but also condemn the strategy of a sit-in as “naïve,” because, perhaps in hindsight, following the events of June 2, he no longer believes West Germany grants its citizens the “democratic fundamental rights of passive resistance.” In an interview in 1969, Jean Rouch remarked that cinéma vérité should actually be called cinema-sincerity, because the filmmaker is showing viewers what really happened. There is sincerity in the fact that Minow’s film is clearly composed of actual footage of the protest. Nevertheless, when he adds narrative to footage without sound and when his narrative is not merely descriptive but clearly contains an ideological argument, he is no longer being sincere. Thus, while Berlin, 2. Juni may employ formalist techniques shared with cinéma vérité, Minow’s goal to influence his viewers ideologically does not reflect the viewpoint of his French contemporaries. Some of the techniques Minow uses harken back to early cinema. For example, he occasionally uses intertitles, such as “Polizei” (police), which is used twice. The first time precedes the police intervention in the conflict between protestors and Iranian secret police. The second appearance is followed by several photographs that are close-ups of handguns and police holding batons with a close-up of their torsos and arms so that we cannot see their faces. When the camera zooms in on the weapons and obscures the policemen’s faces, they become anonymous agents of violence rather than individuals or people, a notion the voiceover intensifies by talking about police violence. In this sequence, there are also close-ups of the police turning away from the camera, further driving home the point made at the start of the film that the police have something to hide and cannot be trusted. Finally, eyewitness testimonies are also central to the film, because they lend it an air of objectivity. Ten eyewitnesses appear on camera, the final one being a young woman who witnessed Ohnesorg being shot. There is, however, no unified manner in which their testimonies are treated. Some

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are shot in extreme close ups, some from the front, another from the side, and one from behind. Some eyewitnesses are framed in a three-quarter or full shot, which allows us to follow their body language. And the very first witness, an unnamed Persian student whose identity needed to be protected, is shrouded in darkness until the end of his statement.27 The locations of their testimonies are just as varied, whether at their home, out on the street, or at some recognizable public place. According to Minow, each witness was allowed to decide where they would be filmed, though the camera team also made suggestions based on sound quality. The camera team proposed how witnesses would be filmed, such as the man in the wheelchair on whose disability Minow did not want to focus, so the wheelchair is left out of the frame.

The Legacy of ’68 for the dffb In Leiser’s memoir, he mentions Berlin, 2. Juni as an example of filmmaking he did not support: “I think that a film that was made in the academy about the encounter between police and students on June 2, 1967, (during which the student Benno Ohnesorg was killed) would have been even better if it had been made with a larger audience in mind than just students.”28 But it clearly was not Minow’s intention to make an objective film to convince the masses, and this disagreement over the role of ideology in film reflects one of the many rifts that led to his expulsion on November 26, 1968, nearly five months after he had shot Berlin, 2. Juni. As justification for Minow’s explusion, Leiser named an incident on November 25, 1968, when Minow forced himself into Rathsack’s office to track down a film, Ein Western für die SDS (1967), which Rathsack had allegedly seized. This film had been made by fellow student Peter Straschek. Straschek had come into difficulties, because during filming he distributed flyers demanding recognition of the GDR.29 Minow demanded the copy of Ein Western für die SDS be returned. When Minow refused to leave Rathsack’s office, he was expelled. Two days later, in response to his expulsion, the rest of the students occupied Rathsack’s office, and, consequently, seventeen more students were expelled. But even before Minow was dismissed from the program, he had already entertained the idea of leaving the dffb not long after shooting Berlin, 2. Juni. In a letter to Jiří Weiss on January 16, 1968, Minow writes: “As I tried to make clear to you in [West] Berlin after the screening of my film Demonstrations, I doubt whether a string of films can have any sense or purpose for a training at the academy or for my own personal development.”30 At the end of the letter Minow says he had a more fulfilling experience shooting Berlin, 2. Juni than he had during his film studies. He also writes that he decided not to film anything else for the dffb: “this

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decision was easy for me to make, since making the film Berlin, 2. Juni gave me the opportunity for a comparison that none of my other films for the academy can withstand, even though they were made under much more favorable conditions.”31 Thus, Minow rejects the ease of making films for the dffb, which would have included financial and technological support, and instead accepts the difficult conditions of making political films on the margins of commercial cinema and state institutions. It is significant that Minow did not give up on filmmaking per se; instead, he no longer wanted to make films under the umbrella of a state institution like the dffb. Minow would eventually form the Socialist Film Cooperative West Berlin along with Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky, and the fifteen other students from his year who were expelled. In March 1969, Minow, Farocki, and Bitomsky co-authored an article titled “Film in der Opposition,” outlining their philosophy of filmmaking. The essay conveys how making Berlin, 2. Juni affected both Minow as a filmmaker and the student movement. He writes, “After June 2, 1967, an investigative committee of students in West Berlin succeeded, with the help of film, photography, and sound recording, to catch the municipal system in its grave contradictions and reveal its attempts at justification as lies. We are now trying to further develop the practice that began there with various initiatives. Every potential demonstrator is asked to use a small camera and eight-millimeter cameras during protests in order to document the brutality of the police and to help identify individual perpetrators.”32 Thus, what Minow and his colleagues learned from Berlin, 2. Juni was that rather than giving up on film altogether as a bourgeois, escapist art form that perpetuates false consciousness, film could in fact be utilized to educate the masses and indict the state’s wrong-doings as part of a larger movement towards liberation. Berlin, 2. Juni was important not only for showing the student movement how film could be used to support its political efforts but also for forming the starting point for Minow’s life-long career of using film for political causes. After leaving the dffb, he not only travelled repeatedly to North Vietnam during the US-Vietnam War to bring film equipment to local filmmakers, so that they could document the injustices there, but also continued to make documentary films that addressed topics like Germany’s fascist past and US imperialism. So, if the dffb expelled Minow and his colleagues who were heavily involved in the student movement, and these filmmakers found it more fulfilling to continue their filmmaking outside of the institution, what does ’68 mean for the legacy of the dffb today? On the academy’s website, the June 2, 1967, protest, Ohnesorg’s death, and Minow’s film are summarized in a few brief paragraphs. The language is quite revealing. The institute acknowledges that Berlin, 2. Juni was not made for the dffb, but it still wishes to take ownership of the film by claiming it “derives from the milieu

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of the dffb.”33 Nonetheless, Tietke does not make a direct connection between the film and the first cohort’s expulsion. Instead, we are simply told that, “in addition, countless connections between the dffb and the [West] Berlin student movement existed.”34 On its website, the dffb briefly references the expulsion of Minow and his fellow students, but it never names all of the students who were expelled, just Straschek and Farocki; and Farocki is described as the most successful of the expellees.35 In hindsight, the expulsion is framed as something positive, not because troublemaking students were removed but because it resulted in the removal of Leiser from the position of director. Thus, perhaps we are to understand that by expelling these students, Leiser’s conservatism was revealed and that this position was not in line with the mission of the dffb. Leiser himself admits to warning students “against making films shot with state funding for political initiatives that were directed against this very state [. . .].”36 To be fair, rather than reflecting a very conservative viewpoint, Leiser’s statement seems like a reasonable recommendation from the head of a state institution. As the director of the dffb, he could not openly support student’s misuse of state funds and equipment, unless he shared their political stance and was also willing to put his position on the line. Minow does not hold Leiser responsible for the academy’s “failure” at the time to live up to its revolutionary origins. Rather, Minow argues that despite the ambitious claims of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the dffb leadership was primarily training directors to make entertaining television programs and films for the masses. And this mission conflicted with the interests of the students admitted in 1966, who quickly became involved in the extraparliamentary political movement and who sought to use dffb equipment, both legally and illegally, to make films to support the movement. By November 1968, when the eighteen students of the first cohort were expelled, they would have realized that reconciling their political interests and their film studies was not possible. That several of the expelled students eventually returned to the dffb as instructors indicates both that it was possible to integrate once radical students into the institution and that the institution was ultimately reliant on radical ideas in order to remain relevant.

Notes 1 This film is known under at least two different titles. Hans-Rüdiger Minow refers to it as Berlin, 2. Juni both on his website (accessed December 7, 2018, http:// www.minow-film.com/filme/) and in a personal letter written in 1968 included in the dffb archive (N21446_dffb, 1/4). However the Laika Verlag, which distributes a DVD of the film, refers to it as Der 2. Juni 1967. Laika Verlag also refers to Thomas Giefer as a co-director (“Der 2. Juni 1967,” Laika Verlag, accessed

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December 7, 2018, https://www.laika-verlag.de/bibliothek/2-juni-1967-film). In my conversations with Minow, he never described Giefer as a co-director but acknowledged that some of Giefer’s footage was included in the film. Therefore, in this essay, I have chosen to refer to Minow as the film’s sole director and use the title he prefers. I would like to thank Hans-Rüdiger Minow for his support of this project. He went out of his way to speak with me in Bremen in January 2017 for several hours. He also provided me access to unarchived texts and photographs. I would also like to thank the dffb for providing me access to archival material. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 Krischan Koch, Die Bedeutung des ‘Oberhausener Manifestes’ für die Filmentwicklung in der BRD (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985), 101. 3 See Peter C. Slansky, “Die Entwicklung der Filmausbildung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Deutschland 1966: Filmische Perspektiven in Ost und West, eds. Connie Betz, Julia Pattis, and Rainer Rother (Berlin: Fisher Verlag, 2016), 108– 23. Here, 108. See also Koch, Die Bedeutung, 106–7. On the film schools established in response to the Oberhausen Manifesto, see also Christina Gerhardt, “Introduction: 1968 and West German Cinema,” The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10 (2017): 1–9. On 1968 and the dffb, see also Christina Gerhardt, “1968 and the Early Cinema of the dffb,” The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10 (2017): 26–44. 4 Hans-Rüdiger Minow, interview by Priscilla Layne, tape recording, Bremen, Germany. January 8, 2017. 5 Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), 156. 6 Jeremy Hicks, “Dziga Vertov,” in Encyclopedia of Documentary Film. vol. 3: P-Z, ed. Ian Aitken (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1391–93. Here, 1391. 7 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 8 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 9 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 10 Wilifried Wiegland, “Film-Maker, Author, Witness: Erwin Leiser at Seventy,” Kultur Chronik 11, no. 5 (1993): 46. 11 Erwin Leiser, Gott hat kein Kleingeld (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993), 213. 12 Leiser, Gott hat kein Kleingeld, 213. 13 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 14 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 15 Leiser, Gott hat kein Kleingeld, 215. 16 Ralph Eue, “Vorgeschichte der dffb 1962–66,” Deutsche Kinematek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed August 30, 2016, https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/vorgeschichte-dffb-1962-66. 17 Annette Michelson, “Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Camera,” in Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of the Documentary, eds. Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), 50–55. Here, 52. 18 Karl-Heinz Stenz, Kampfplatz Kamera—Die filmkulturelle Bedeutung der filmstudierenden ’68er Generation am Beispiel der Protestaktivitäten an der neu gegrün-

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deten Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) (Norderstedt: GRIN Verlag, 2007), 31. 19 American Direct Cinema and British Observational Cinema were also part of this international call for “liberation of documentary from the old rules.” Jonathan Kahana, “Introduction to Section IV,” in The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism, ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 431–33. Here, 432. 20 Ginette Vincendeau, Encyclopedia of European Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 83. 21 Vincendeau, Encyclopedia of European Cinema, 83. 22 Another example of an earlier film classified as cinéma vérité is Chris Marker’s Le joli mai (The Lovely Month of May, 1963). In this documentary, shot in May following the end of the Algerian war, Marker and his co-director Pierre Lhomme ask Parisians their opinions about religion, politics, and life more generally. Le joli mai seemingly occupies a space somewhere between Chronique d’un été and Berlin, 2. Juni. While Le joli mai is largely observational, in the film’s voiceover the directors occasionally make larger arguments about themes such as loneliness and freedom. But these arguments are more abstract than Minow’s concrete political argument in Berlin, 2. Juni. 23 Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 117–18. 24 Dr. Wilbert Reuben Norman Jr, a.k.a. Skip Norman, was an African-American filmmaker. Born in Baltimore in 1933, he moved to West Berlin in the 1960s and was also part of the dffb’s first cohort. 25 Slobodian recounts Haas’s participation at the demonstration and the circumstances surrounding her injury in Foreign Front, 118–19. According to her testimony, she was beaten repeatedly by police, even after falling to the ground. 26 Slobodian, Foreign Front, 111. 27 Slobodian identifies this witness as Bahman Nirumand (Foreign Front, 133–34). However, Minow disputes this. 28 Leiser, Gott hat kein Kleingeld, 217. 29 Fabian Tietke, “Dies- und jenseits der Bilder - Film und Politik an der dffb 1966–1995: Teil I, 1966–1969,” Deutsche Kinematek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed July 25, 2018, https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/dies-jenseitsbilder-film-politik-dffb-1966-1995. 30 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 31 dffb archive. N21446_dffb, 1/4. 32 Hans-Rüdiger Minow, Harun Farocki, and Harmut Bitomsky, “Film in der Opposition,” film (March 1969): 40–46. Here, 42. 33 Tietke, “Dies- und jenseits der Bilder.” 34 Tietke, “Dies- und jenseits der Bilder.” 35 Tietke, “Dies- und jenseits der Bilder.” 36 Leiser, Gott hat kein Kleingeld, 222.

4:

Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement

Christina Gerhardt

T

of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), established on September 17, 1966, in West Berlin, is often read together with the then unfolding social movements.1 Films produced by dffb students between 1966 and 1970, when the movements splintered along various lines, document and engage with the late sixties’ uprisings and their main concerns. Given the dffb’s original location at the Theodor-Heuss Platz in Charlottenburg, West Berlin, its students were in close proximity to and witnessed key events of the sixties in West Germany, such as the June 2, 1967, demonstrations of the state visit by the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, Farah Diba. During this protest, police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras fatally shot nonviolent student protestor Benno Ohnesorg. This fatal shooting is widely credited with kicking off West Germany’s “1968,” both galvanizing and radicalizing social movements throughout West Germany. Dffb students were present at and filmed these and other demonstrations. For example, dffb students Thomas Giefer and Hans-Rüdiger Minow filmed the day’s demonstrations and produced the film Berlin, 2. Juni 1967 (1967).2 Many dffb students were involved with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Students’ Union, SDS) and the teachins, reading groups, and demonstrations it co-organized. Some dffb students carried out actions in solidarity with the SDS. For example, partially in response to the ratification of the Emergency Laws on May 30, 1968, which had been protested nation-wide, but also in response to demands internal to the dffb, eighteen students occupied the dffb from May 30 to June 10, 1968, renaming it the Dziga Vertov School. The early dffb’s filmmaking documented the political actions and also sought to put forward a counter-message, thereby supporting the social movements politically and acting, de facto, as their mass media arm. Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb, where she studied between 1966 and 1969.3 When scholars discuss her filmmaking of this era, they typically focus on Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators, 1968), which, crucially, engages the Springer HE EARLY CINEMA

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Press. Sander is mainly considered for three things: first, her role in establishing the Second Wave Feminist Movement in West Germany, which will be discussed below; second, her work to support feminist filmmaking; and third, her later cinematic work. To support feminist filmmaking, she coorganized with Claudia von Alemann the first international women’s film seminar in 1973 in West Berlin and founded the first feminist film journal in Europe, Frauen und Film (Women and Film), in 1974, which continues to the present day. Her best known and most written about films include her first feature film, Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit (The All Around Reduced Personality REDUPERS, 1977); her second feature Der subjektive Faktor (The Subjective Factor, 1980); and her documentary BeFreier und BeFreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Liberators Take Liberties: War, Rapes, Children, 1992). Yet Sander produced other cinema while at the dffb that ran parallel to her role in establishing the West German feminist movement. Returning this cinema to studies of the early dffb underscores the feminist filmwork that formed part of the cinema produced at the academy in the late sixties4 and that thematically and formally contained the seeds of her later better-known films. Sander’s dffb films of the late sixties form a key node of her oeuvre, of dffb cinema of the late sixties, of West German screen cultures of the late sixties, and of the growing feminist movement. Examining Sander’s dffb films allows her development of formal techniques and thematic issues, which would become hallmarks of her better-known aforementioned films of the late seventies and early eighties, to become visible. Formally, her focus on the subjective point of view in aligning the camera’s shot intensely with the main character and the unique use of voice-over narration already informed her first dffb short Subjektitüde (1967); this technique would reappear in her first feature Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit and her subsequent feature film Der subjektive Faktor. Scholars have noted its use in the latter films but have not noted its appearance in her first dffb film. Thematically, her dffb films already show a consistent focus on women’s “double burden”: that is, the juggling act of parenting and of housework, while also working, often in precarious labor. This double burden is compounded for women who are single and thus lacking a partner to support them in the parenting and housework. Engaging in political activism, be it a self-organized childcare cooperative or a women’s collective of photographers, places yet a further demand on stretched thin time and energy. Sander examines this topic in her dffb Abschlussfilm (thesis film), Kinder sind keine Rinder (Children Are Not Cattle, 1969), and in the first film she made after graduating: Eine Prämie für Irene (A Reward for Irene, 1971). While the political work in which Sander engaged during this time—to co-found childcare cooperatives and the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women—as well as her 1968 SDS talk, which is widely credited with establishing the Second Wave Feminist Movement in West

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Germany, have received considerable attention, the films she made concurrent to this political activism have hardly been discussed at all; and the few critics who attend to her early work do not usually consider it in tandem with her political actions. Sander clearly intended her dffb thesis film to intervene in the local struggles of West Berlin, yet she also conceived of it as part of a nation-wide struggle for the rights of women and of children. In what follows, my study of Sander’s early films attempts to develop a two-fold strategy. On the one hand, I examine the formal stylistics of her first dffb film and the specific thematics of her dffb thesis film vis-à-vis her political work in late sixties West Berlin. On the other hand, in the last section, I interlace the films’ formal stylistics and thematics with a comparative analysis of the feminist politics unfolding nation-wide in West Germany in the late sixties. In closing, I discuss briefly how Sander’s dffb films inform her better-known later films.

Sexism and Subjectivity In 1966 Sander was one of three women accepted into the dffb’s inaugural class. The other two women were Gerda Katharina Kramer and Irena Vrkljan.5 Additionally, Cristina Perincioli, Gisela Tuchtenhagen, Gardi Depe, Barbara Kasper, and Marianne Lüdcke were early attendees of the dffb and contributed feminist films.6 In 1970, for the first time, more women than men were accepted into the incoming class.7 Julia Knight emphasizes that the dffb offered an important opportunity not only to male but also to female aspiring directors to work together rather than in isolation within a still male-dominated profession.8 Previously, Sander had studied theater in Hamburg from 1957 to 1958. In 1959, she married Finnish author Markku Lahtela, and they had a son. Starting in 1962, Sander lived and worked in Finland, initially in theatre, producing about four to five plays annually. In 1964, she began directing programs and theater pieces performed on Finnish television, Suomen Mainos-Televisio. In 1965, she returned to West Berlin, now single and with her son. In 1966, she began her studies at the dffb.9 Sander’s first dffb film, the four-minute 16-mm short Subjektitüde, already focused on subjective experiences of sexism. She made the film as an assignment for a course taught by Jiří Weiss. The topic was “Boy Meets Girl,” to which Sander responded critically: “At the outset,” she said, “I had no relationship to the topic ‘boy meets girl.’ . . . So I had to find a problem in this topic that would be unavoidably of interest to me.”10 The film shows the interactions between a woman and two men at a bus stop in West Berlin, using innovative formal techniques to convey subjective experiences of sexism. Sound relays inner monologues and point of view shots closely align with each of the three main characters.

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Figure 4.1. Subjektitüde, dir. Helke Sander, 1966, 4 mins., deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin. dffb on-line archiv. Screenshot.

These techniques would become noted hallmarks of and developed in Sander’s films, such as Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit and Der subjektive Faktor. An economic framework begins and ends the film. The opening shot focuses on an advertisement for the magazine Money and then pans horizontally to show a woman walking down a sidewalk towards us. Then, the camera shifts for the remainder of the shot to what Sander called a “subjective” style, moving between the short film’s three main characters. The voice-over narration reveals the woman’s interior monologue as she wonders what would happen if the voting age were reduced from 18 to 10. During her interior monologue, she looks up at the sign for the bus stop and then at the bus schedule. Her point-of-view shot pans slowly to the nearby intersection, where a man is running across the street to catch the green light. Her point-of-view shot pans back again to the items on display in the shop window behind her: a sign that reads “Make Each One Happy” stands in the background, and a small cutout of a man with a beard and a mechanical sheep, nodding its head up and down, stand in the foreground. The man, who had crossed the street, slowly approaches the bus stop, checking his watch, reading a newspaper.

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Soon the crosscuts and dynamics intensify. The women’s voice-over narration says, “A decent man is approaching is what my mother would have said. Probably not, I think.” The camera cuts to his point of view, and the voice-over narration blends in his interior monologue; when he sees her, he thinks, “Damn! Oh my! Oh my!” She makes eye contact with him and, with her interior monologue blending in, immediately curses herself for doing so: “Damn it! How embarrassing. How embarrassing.” She looks away and then looks at him again. His interior monologue: “Hmmmm. . . . One has to be blond. One has to have tits.” Another man appears at the bus stop. He, too, observes the woman. The woman’s monologue continues, apparently seeking safety in numbers: “So few retirees here today.” The first man, walking away to examine his face in the shop window, apparently referring to the competition generated by the other man, thinks, “Shit. Wherever one goes, there is always someone else.” Cut to the second man, lingering directly behind the woman, who is now trying to avoid both men. The bus arrives. The first man kisses the woman’s neck briefly before boarding the bus. The second man boards the bus. She remains on the sidewalk. The second man disembarks. A sign that reads “CAUTION” flashes on the screen. The bus departs. The woman, agitated, wonders why the second man disembarked. His interior monologue: “where are you trying to go, little bird?” She runs to the street. His interior monologue—“Police? Police?”—wondering if she is looking for the assistance of the police. Her rapid-fire internal monologue: “In this damned city. On this damned street. Is there no taxi in this entire damned city?” She hails a cab and gets in. As the shot shows the second man’s point of view, looking at her, her interior monologue continues: “yes, you, now I am leaving in a taxi. Nice and expensive.” Thematically, the film shows the subjective experience of the woman, who initially thinks about the rights of children, is then pestered by two men at a bus stop, assaulted (kissed without her consent) by one, which leads her to avoid the bus, only to have one man still lingering, which leads her then to flee in a taxi. Formally, this very short dffb film already shows Sander’s use of innovative formal techniques to convey different subjective vantage-points.

Children Are Not Cattle Sander’s hitherto little written about dffb thesis film, Kinder sind keine Rinder, is a documentary about cooperative childcare centers, a topic for Sander at once personal and also the focal point of her political organizing. Despite being a single, financially challenged mother of a young toddler and juggling a demanding schedule that included parenting, studying, and working, Sander made the time to become involved with the SDS. In

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December 1967, Sander attended an SDS working group meeting. “Within the Springer campaign,” she noted, “there were 40 working groups on all sorts of topics, but not one on women. Reading the Springer newspapers, I had noticed that they also addressed women specifically. So I felt pretty shaky when I went to our working group [Cosimaplatz 2] at Peter Schneider’s, who wasn’t as intimidating as the other big lefties. After two hours I finally asked the group whether we might not start a working group on the topic of Springer and women. Everybody was just smirking away, but Peter Schneider said, ‘Go see Marianne Herzog in the kitchen, things like that interest her too.’”11 The irony and sexism of his relegation of “women’s work” to the kitchen resounds, yet this kitchen meeting was also politically productive. Sander revisits and depicts these events in the autobiographically based Der subjektive Faktor. Sander and Herzog came up with the idea for Kinderläden (selforganized, cooperative childcare centers).12 In January 1968, they cofounded the Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Committee for the Liberation of Women) at a meeting attended by roughly one hundred women and a few men. Attendees discussed the Kinderläden, and groups, divided up by neighborhoods, set about establishing the first five Läden in West Berlin. During the International Congress against the Vietnam War (February 16–17, 1968), the Action Committee established a temporary or first iteration of a Kinderladen, by setting aside a room for childcare so that women could take part in the political debates and actions related to the Congress.13 The Kinderläden had two main aims. On the one hand, the goal was to liberate women from the expectation to parent. To this end, women met and discussed “how the ruling class used the cliché of subservient women, in order to achieve its goals.”14 On the other hand, the goal was to offer children places to gather and to self-educate, that is, to follow their curiosities and interests, drawing on the pedagogical theories of Maria Montessori, Alexander Sutherland Neill, and Paulo Freire. The women sought to address the contradictions between the children’s needs and child-rearing institutions. Initially, the Kinderläden focused on developing both women’s and children’s autonomy. The Action Committee for the Liberation of Women recognized that women’s emancipation cannot be secondary to economic liberation. Instead, economic theory, they argued, needed to include a feminist point of view. That is, in capitalism’s division of labor, women carried “the double burden of family and housework, on the one hand, and [of] wage earning, on the other [hand].”15 They analyzed the gendered division of labor in a non-feminist, heterosexual family and the fact that housework was unpaid, while also recognizing the additional inequity in pay for men and women.16 Over the course of the 1970s, the Wages for Housework campaign was discussed both in feminist and in labor circles.

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The focus on the family was intended to liberate both (heterosexual) women and the children. As Sander put it: The Action Committee for the Liberation of Women . . . is trying to change, on a practical and on a theoretical level, the reactionary role that women have played so far in class struggles. As one very important element, we became aware that we have to fight against the bourgeois family, and to do so at any place that confirms and strengthens ideologically the structure of the contemporary family: kindergartens, schools, training centers. To fight against the bourgeois family means at the same time to develop new forms of education, which liberate children from the family.17

The first five Kinderläden in West Berlin were opened in January 1968 as a result of the initial meeting. By 1969, over thirty childcare cooperatives existed nation-wide.18 Sander’s Kinder sind keine Rinder, a thirty-five-minute, 16-mm short, presents these cooperative childcare centers.19 Sander interviews children between six and fourteen years old in the West Berlin neighborhoods of Charlottenburg, Neukölln, Kreuzberg, and Schöneberg. The film opens with a discussion of the need for more open spaces for children, such as playgrounds and soccer fields, as well as for congregating inside. The opening sequence shows that while the courtyard of an apartment building may be a safe spot for children to play, because it is removed from cars and allows parents to supervise through a glance from the apartment window above, the children’s playful noises and shouts echo in the enclosed space and disturb some residents. When the children move to the sidewalks, as the next sequence shows, they disturb pedestrians, and balls run the risk of rolling into the street, with children chasing after them, possibly into oncoming traffic. In most parks, children are not allowed to play ball, the voice-over narration states, while the shot shows numerous signs in parks stating playing ball is verboten (forbidden). In sum, the children clearly need more open spaces from which they are not chased away. Thus, women self-organize Kinderläden in order to give the children places to gather and learn. The voice-over narration presents the principle of selforganizing: “There [at the centers], students learn about the reasons for this situation and what they can do to change it.” At the time the film was made, four such centers existed in West Berlin. But four centers, the voiceover states, cannot accommodate the 142,800 children who live in West Berlin. The film also embeds its discussion within an analysis of economic structures and inequality: “At the centers, the students learn about why some have much money and some have little. Why some own the means of production and the others only their labor.” The film presents various approaches to address the need for gathering spaces for children. First, an adult and students act out how a school would

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Figure 4.2. Kinder sind keine Rinder (Children Are Not Cattle), dir. Helke Sander, 1969, 35 mins., deutsche film- und fernsehsakademie berlin. dffb on-line archiv. Screenshot.

typically address the issue. The teacher, seated behind a desk at the head of a classroom with all the desks neatly aligned in rows, reads a story that presents a noble police officer. He stops traffic as a ball rolls across the street, creating a safe scenario that allows two children to retrieve the ball. In the ensuing discussion, the teacher reminds children to play in playgrounds or to go on strolls with their parents through parks. This typical classroom scenario, the voice-over tells us, does not take as its premise the children’s needs, asking them what their needs are or addressing them. Instead, it presupposes that the status quo suffices and reifies it. By contrast, in the self-organized childcare center, when the children are inside, the students sit not in rows but around a table. An adult is present, but the children do most of the talking. Often the students and adults are, however, not in the classroom. In one sequence, a group of three students disperses throughout neighborhoods, armed with notebooks and pencils, documenting fenced off empty plots of land and abandoned fields, as well as school courtyards that sit empty and unused, beyond locked gates at the school day’s end. Back at the Kinderladen, filmed at the then newly established Kinderladen at Witzlebenstraße 37 in Charlottenburg,

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the students transfer their findings onto a map of West Berlin. At the top of the map, they write, “Children demand access to the labeled places, in order to play in them.” They hang the map at the local city hall’s entranceway. The students make signs that read “children demand access to this place, in order to play in it,” and post them at the abandoned sites. Then, to illustrate the abundance of available land, they sneak into and occupy an abandoned plot belonging to the West Berlin Senate. They write a song, make puppets, and write a theatre piece. The curtain closes on the puppets singing their protest song and celebrating the successful securing of more spaces. Lastly, the children publish a newspaper titled Radau (row or trouble). It tells of their organizing to secure places. The children write its articles and draw its art. They print copies manually and distribute them to schoolchildren in the other aforementioned neighborhoods. One group of students sits on a house stoop, as in the opening shot, illustrating the lack of gathering spaces. The paper also relays what the students in the other neighborhoods shared in interviews about their need for assembly spots. The adult guardians ask the students whether they are familiar with the concept of Kinderläden. Because the students are not familiar with the term, the adults explain what a Kinderladen is. The students of the Kinderläden thus not only share the news about their self-organizing efforts but also model what such efforts can produce, providing an example for others to build on and to emulate. While the paper exemplifies the results of students self-organizing through Kinderläden, it also dovetails with the late sixties’ proliferation of self-published leftist papers.20 Aside from postings to recruit for the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women or to seek spaces to establish new Kinderläden, however, the leftist publications in West Berlin in the late sixties, such as Agit 883, did not engage much with the feminist and Kinderläden movements.21 Kinder sind keine Rinder is not as experimental formally as Subjektitüde, but its solid shift to focus on the children, their needs and organizing, would inform Sander’s subsequent films. By the summer of 1968, men involved with the SDS had become increasingly involved with the Kinderläden. Initially, this development was lauded, as the men’s involvement could help to shift the gendered burden of childrearing. “The initiative’s emphasis,” however, “shifted increasingly to a discourse of anti-authoritarian childrearing and away from . . . women’s liberation.”22 By “August 1968 male movement activists formed the Zentralrat der Kinderläden, a ‘Central Committee’ responsible for the coordination of the Kinderläden”; and as Kristina Schulz points out, “as for the critique of the bourgeois family model, the central committee’s position was close to that of the Committee for Women’s Liberation. But with regard to gender relations it did not subscribe to the critique of women’s oppression that was, for the Committee for Women’s Liberation,

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Figure 4.3. Helke Sander addressing the twenty-third SDS Delegate Convention, September 13, 1968, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Mittem im Malestream, Helke Sander Filmproduktion, 2005. Screenshot.

inseparably linked with the problem of childcare.”23 Sander, however, kept her focus on the relationship between children’s and women’s liberation and on the mechanisms that kept pushing them from the spotlight.

The Personal Is Political In 1968, Sander participated in the twenty-third SDS Delegate Convention that took place on September 12–13, 1968, at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. On September 13, she gave a talk on behalf of the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women in which she denounced the sexism of male members of the SDS. “We note,” she stated, “that the SDS by dint of its organizational structure mirrors societal relationships.”24 The private sphere, she argued, has been excluded and issues related to it deemed taboo. This relegation impeded an acknowledgment, assessment, and redress of the mechanisms by which women are exploited. Thus, it was the order of the day to undo this separation of the political and the private spheres. Sander asked the SDS to support the women’s political agenda, declaring “the private is political” and demanding that the separation of the “political” and the “private” spheres cease. She argued that women were tasked with tending to housework and to childrearing, which prevented them from participating as equals in other forms of work or in political organizing. As she spoke, some audience members vocally expressed support, while others yelled at her in an attempt to shut her up and or down.

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At the end of her speech, she mentioned the Kinderläden and the shift away from the original focus of women’s and children’s liberation and demanded to discuss the issue. “Comrades,” she concluded, “if you are not ready for this discussion, which must be carried out and focus on the content, then we must unfortunately take note that the SDS is nothing more than a booming windbag.”25 Hans-Jürgen Krahl, the next SDS representative to speak, did not honor Sander’s request. When he attempted to move the discussion on to another point, Sigrid Rüger—a student at the Free University of Berlin and also among the leadership of the SDS—threw tomatoes at him, which went down in history as the Tomatenwurf (tomato toss).26 Historical accounts typically date the beginning of West Germany’s Second Wave Feminist Movement to this action. It brought the Action Committee for the Liberation of Women to nation-wide attention. In response to this event, women began self-organizing autonomous Weiberräte (women’s committees) across West Germany.27 When the extra-parliamentary opposition disintegrated along various fault-lines in 1970, different political strands came to the forefront, and one such swatch of the social movement to intensify was the feminist movement. In her next made-for-television feature film, Eine Prämie für Irene, Sander took up this issue of the double burden under which women suffered, that is, the exploitation both in the family and at work, or the relationship between the personal and the political.28 Produced for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), this forty-five-minute film marked Sander’s return to television and was her first post-dffb production. The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival, then still taking place in the summer, on July 4, 1971, and first screened on television on September 18, 1971. It was created to support the work of Frauenbetriebsgruppen (women’s groups in factories), which had been set up by social movements to organize workers in their workplaces. It was also made in response to the Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films) being produced by the dffb, many of which did not consider women workers.29 To this end, the film can be read as part of the early militant political cinema, produced in West Germany and elsewhere, both documenting the living and working conditions of workers and encouraging action.30 Formally building on Subjektitüde, Sander here, too, experiments with shifting points of view for the camera, but Eine Prämie für Irene draws, on the one hand, “on footage from a surveillance camera in the factory” and, on the other hand, on footage “featuring cinema’s male gaze, as it follows,” for example, “a female secretary.”31 Eventually, five women at the factory destroy the surveillance cameras and the loudspeakers that had bombarded them with pop hits and work announcements. Thematically, the film also continues the focus of Kinder sind keine Rinder, by examining the tensions a single mother experiences between

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her obligations to parent and to work. The protagonist, Irene, is a single mother with two children. Over the course of the film, as the children are taught to do in the Kinderläden in Kinder sind keine Rinder, Irene analyzes each situation to ascertain “for whom it is useful and for whom it is harmful.”32 As Sander had put it in her SDS speech, “the groups that have recognized the contradiction and that are politicized most easily are the . . . women with children and a failed marriage. Their aggressions are the strongest and their speechlessness the lowest.”33 Irene recognizes that although she is not exploited at home by a male partner, she is exploited because she is single and a single mother. Eine Prämie für Irene thus shifts an analysis of the workplace to include feminist politics and shifts workers’ films to include a feminist vantage-point.34 Lastly, the film shifts formally and thematically to a feminist point of view, which would feature prominently again in Sander’s best-known film from the 1970s: Die Allseitig Reduzierte Persönlichkeit.

Conclusion: Sander’s Feminist Filmmaking from around 1968 to the 1970s Sander’s engagement with political issues in the late sixties and seventies— spanning sexism, feminism, cooperative childcare, housework, women’s dual burden (family and work), birth control, and abortion rights—has been much written about. After Eine Prämie für Irene she focused on birth control in Macht die Pille frei? (Does the Pill Liberate? 1973). In 1971 Sander co-organized the feminist group Brot und Rosen (Bread and Roses), influenced by the eponymous Boston group, to work for childcare and equal pay and against §218, which banned abortions in West Germany and formed the focal point of feminist actions and of numerous films produced in West Germany in the 1970s. Sander also worked to support feminist filmmaking. The first international women’s film festival, which she co-founded in 1973 in West Berlin, screened forty-five films by women from seven countries. The journal Frauen und Film, which she launched in 1974 and of which she served as editor-in-chief until 1982, was the “only feminist film journal in Europe.” Both forums were intended to support not only women filmmakers but also feminist filmmakers. “The journal allowed her,” Renate Fischetti writes, “to fight back against the fact that she was given absolutely no film work, ‘because [she] was a socialist and a feminist.’”35 On this point, Knight argues that “the women’s movement can be seen to have done almost as much to hinder and restrict women’s filmmaking as to promote it.”36 Knight mentions that both Sander and Perincioli were pulled from projects due to concerns “that women who could be termed feminists could not be ‘objective’ about issues relating to the women’s movement”

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(94). Knight underscores that “prior to [Sander’s] involvement with the student Left and the women’s movement, however, Sander had had no difficulty working in television. In the mid-sixties she had been in permanent employment as a director in Finland, where she had been able to choose her own material” (96). As Sander wrote, presenting how and why she established Frauen und Film: Ten years before the women’s movement everything was easier. I was a well-regarded theater director in Helsinki and could do whatever I wanted. . . . I wanted to make films and . . . started over again, as part of the dffb’s inaugural class. Single, with a child, and without financial support and in this job was a demanding mélange, and it led me to co-found the women’s movement in 1967/1968. . . . I had no doubts that I, too, would have my song to sing and that that was my right. . . . but from that moment on, when it became clear to me and others, not only that various classes existed, poor and rich, . . . not only racism, . . . but also that a difference ran . . . through society, splitting the genders into hierarchies with different laws for each one, . . . then, the tolerance drew to a close. This observation could not be contributed to the general body of knowledge back then. With me, it expressed itself in that I did not receive work anymore. Indeed, I had established the women’s movement and the cooperative daycare centers but I was not to make films about it because as a woman, I could not be “objective” (NRD Editor).37

While Sander’s work in the social and feminist movements was thus pivotal to establishing the Second Wave Feminist Movement in West Germany, it also impeded funding for her own filmmaking. This situation changed by the late seventies when some film funding for feminist issues became available. Knight argues, “as the [seventies] progressed many women filmmakers started to find it easier to obtain funding for their projects and employment with television companies” (98). Knight mentions the “small workshop department at ZDF [that] played a particularly important role in enabling women filmmakers to develop their careers . . . Das kleine Fernsehspiel (The Little Television Play)” (98). It commissioned Sander’s two subsequent feature length films: Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit and Der subjektive Faktor. These two films, aside from the subsequent BeFreier und BeFreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder, are her best known and most written about works. Each one builds on her early dffb films discussed in this article, formally and thematically. In Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, the main character, Edda Chiemnyjewski, a freelance photographer, juggles the demands of being a mother, a worker, and a member of a feminist collective of female photographers. The film is concerned with both film form and narrative voice. Fischetti observed that it “speaks a new filmic language. It is the first

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feminist feature film in the BRD.”38 Judith Mayne pinpoints how it blends documentary and fiction modes and draws extensively on a third person voice-over narration.39 Mayne also discusses how the film combines the public and private sphere, History and history, again and again using “tracking shots of the city . . . removing us from the space of ‘fiction’ and returning us to the anonymous public sphere. And this public sphere is also heard throughout the film via the radios which are a constant element of the soundtrack” (160). Yet these “tracking shots,” Mayne argues, “are, most often, accompanied by the voice of a female narrator” (165). The female voice-over narration thereby connects the public sphere with the female sphere. Sander here also takes a strategy commonly associated with documentary cinema, Mayne points out, and unsettles it by having it appear in a fictional feature. Both the use of voice-over narration and the consideration of what role gender plays in how the public sphere is experienced had played key roles in her first dffb short, Subjektitüde. In Der subjektive Faktor, Sander also draws intensely on her earlier films produced between 1966 and 1969 while at the dffb or soon afterward. By the late seventies, Sander was concerned that the history of the feminist movement might get lost. She thus shot Der subjektive Faktor, by drawing on archival documentary (often newsreel) footage and creating dramatized or fictional footage. The film opens with a framing narrative from 1980 but is predominantly set in 1967. It features a woman, Anni, and her young son, Andres, who live in a commune with students active in the social movements. Der subjektive Faktor, too, was formally innovative. Kaja Silverman writes, “The organization of The Subjective Factor can best be described as communal—as capable of accommodating private as well as public events, everyday life as well as history, the poetic as well as the didactic, dissonance as well as melody.”40 Silverman examines the diverse strategies that Sander uses in order to collapse borders between genres, musical modes, and sound (voice-off, voice-over, overlap). In particular, she studies how Sander combines documentary and fictional footage, using techniques counter-intuitive to each genre, such as handheld camera and a voice-over narration to convey the protagonist’s subjective point of view for the fictional footage. By conveying, thematically, a history of the late sixties through a feminist lens and relaying a subjective viewpoint, formally, through innovations in a bricolage of sound, genres, and camera shot, both Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit and Der subjektive Faktor build on Sander’s first films, from Subjektitüde to Kinder sind keine Rinder to Eine Prämie für Irene. Each early film uses original formal techniques to share a feminist vantagepoint, be it the voice-over narration used to convey the interior monologue or the alternation between footage sources in Eine Prämie für Irene. While Subjektitüde focuses on the subjective experiences of sexism and Kinder sind keine Rinder argues for the liberatory effects of Kinderläden for both children and (implicitly) women, Eine Prämie für Irene evidences

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what had become Sander’s focus and what would appear in both Die allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit and Der subjektive Faktor: women’s unequal burden. In many ways, these early films, first, tell the pre-history, formally and thematically, of her better-known later works. Second, reading them together with her political work sutures together the political concerns with the aesthetic innovations. Third, returning Sander’s early works to discussions of the dffb cinema produced between 1966 and 1969 expands the narratives about cinema of the late sixties to include feminist filmmaking. In short, West Germany’s feminism, be it politically or cinematically regarded, did not start in the late seventies but rather in the late sixties.

Notes Kindest thanks to Rick McCormick, Helke Sander, and Marc Silberman for comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1 See Christina Gerhardt, “1968 and the Early Cinema of the dffb,” 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special issue of The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10 (2017): 26–44, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/175 41328.2017.1326731. See also Timothy S. Brown’s essay, “‘Break the Power of the Manipulators’: Film and the West German 1968,” in this volume. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise. 2 See Priscilla Layne’s essay, “Ideological Rupture in the dffb: An Analysis of HansRüdiger Minow’s Berlin, 2. Juni,” in this volume. 3 The work of Helke Sander is mentioned in English language books about the era’s feminist filmmaking. See Julia Knight, Women and the New German Cinema (New York: Verso, 1992); Ruby B. Rich, Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). To date, however, no book-length study exists in English devoted solely to Sander’s oeuvre. 4 To that end, see also the following two essays, both in this volume: Madeleine Bernstorff’s essay, “Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics,” and Fabian Tietke’s essay, “A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism.” 5 Volker Pantenburg, “Die Rote Fahne: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, 1966–1968,” in Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007), 199–206. Here, 199. 6 Knight, “The Absent Directors,” Women and the New German Cinema, 9. 7 Madeleine Bernstorff, “Feminismen an der dffb 1966–1985,” Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed December 7, 2018, https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/feminismen-dffb-1966-85. 8 Knight, “The Absent Directors,” Women and the New German Cinema, 9. Bernstorff underscores that the Institut für Filmgestaltung Ulm (Ulm Institute for

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Film Design) accepted a higher percentage of female students, perhaps as a result of tapping into or building on the Bauhaus tradition. Directors Ula Stöckl, Marion Zeeman, Claudia von Alemann, Recha Jungmann, and Jeanine Meerapfel were associated with Ulm. Bernstorff, “Feminismen an der dffb.” 9 Information based on Helke Sander’s official website, “Biography,” accessed May 1, 2017, http://www.helke-sander.de/biography/. 10 “Biography,” http://www.helke-sander.de/biography/. 11 Cristina Perincioli, “Interview with Helke Sander,” Berlin wird feministisch: Das Beste, was von der 68er Bewegung blieb (Berlin: Querverlag, 2015). Also, see Perincioli, “1968 Helke Sanders Speech,” Berlin Goes Feminist, accessed December 7, 2018, http://feministberlin1968ff.de/leftist-debates/1968-helke-sandersspeech-2/. Peter Schneider is a German writer and was active in the social movements in West Berlin in the late 1960s. Marianne Herzog was subsequently briefly a member of the Red Army Faction from 1970 to 1971. 12 Ute Kätzel, Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2002), 165. As Patricia Melzer points out: Kinderläden, literally translated, means “children’s shops,” because many Kinderläden rented empty storefronts. Patricia Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 254, fn 22. Marianne Seifert had already established one in 1967 in Frankfurt am Main. 13 See also Berliner Kinderläden, ed. 1970: Antiautoritäre Erziehung und sozialistischer Kampf (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970). 14 Sander’s official website, “Kinder sind keine Rinder,” accessed December 7, 2018, http://www.helke-sander.de/filme/kinder-sind-keine-rinder/. On this issue, see also Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004). 15 Kristina Schulz, “Feminist Echoes of 1968,” in A Revolution of Perception? Consequences and Echoes of 1968, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 124–47. Here, 132. 16 Over the course of the 1970s, feminists demanded wages for housework or that men and women share housework. See Alice Schwarzer, Frauenarbeit Frauenbefreiung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973); Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975); Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, CounterPlanning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework: A Perspective on Capital and the Left (New York: Wages for Housework Committee, 1976); and Gisela Bock, “Wages for Housework as a Perspective of the Women’s Movement,” in German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature, eds. Edith Hoshino Altbach, Jeanette Clausen, Dagmar Schultz, and Naomi Stephan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 246–50. 17 Quoted by Schulz, “Feminist Echoes of 1968,” 130–31. Original source: Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen. 1968/1969. Die politische Ökonomie. Archive APO und soziale Bewegung, Free University of Berlin, Handapparat Tröger.

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18 Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 162. 19 The film, shot on 16 mm, was edited down to twenty-five minutes for its premiere, which took place October 9, 1979, at the Mannheim International Film Festival. 20 As Morris Dickstein put it vis-à-vis the US context, “The history of the sixties was written as much in the Berkeley Barb as in the New York Times.” Cited in John McMillian, Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv. C.f. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Erling Sivertsen, and Rolf Werenskjold, eds. Media and Revolt: Strategies and Performances from the 1960s to the Present (New York: Berghahn, 2014). 21 Massimo Perinelli, “Lust, Gewalt, Befreiung: Sexualitätsdiskurse,” in Agit 883: Bewegung, Revolte in West Berlin 1969–1972, ed. rotaprint 25 (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2006), 85–99. Here, 95, 96. 22 Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl, 59. 23 Schulz, “Feminist Echoes of 1968,” 135–36. 24 Helke Sander, “Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen, 13. September 1968,” in Die neue Frauenbewegung in Deutschland: Abschied vom kleinen Unterschied, ed. Ilse Lenz (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010), 57–61. Here, 57. 25 Helke Sander, “Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen, 13. September 1968,” 61. 26 Ulrike Meinhof, “Die Frauen im SDS oder in eigener Sache,” konkret, October 7, 1968. Reprinted in Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1981), 149–52. 27 Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl, 59. 28 Marion von Osten, “Irene ist Viele! Or What We Call ‘Productive’ Forces,” e-flux 8 (September 2009), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/08/61381/ireneist-viele-or-what-we-call-productive-forces/. 29 For more about the Arbeiterfilme produced at the dffb and their lack of feminism, see Tietke’s essay, “A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism,” and for more about the Arbeiterfilme genre, see Thomas Elsaesser’s essay, “West Germany’s ‘Workers’ Films’: A Cinema in the Service of Television?” both in this volume. 30 On the nexus of women’s living and working conditions and militant political cinema, see also Pablo La Parra-Pérez, “Workers Interrupting the Factory: Helena Lumbreras’s Militant Factory Films between Italy and Spain (1968–1978),” in 1968 and Global Cinema, eds. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 363–84, as well as writings on the better known French SLON. 31 Description based on Sander’s official website, “Eine Prämie für Irene,” accessed December 7, 2018, http://www.helke-sander.de/filme/eine-pramie-furirene/.

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32 See “Eine Prämie für Irene,” http://www.helke-sander.de/filme/eine-pramiefur-irene/. 33 Sander, “Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen, 13. September 1968,” 59. 34 See also Tietke’s essay in this volume for work by Perincioli and by Rentmeister that focused specifically on women workers. 35 Renate Fischetti, Das neue Kino: Acht Porträts von deutschen Regisseurinnen (Berlin: Tende, 1992), 50. Quoting Sander. 36 Knight, “The Women’s Movement,” Women and the New German Cinema, 73–101. Here, 94. See also Tietke on Perincioli’s firing. 37 Helke Sander, “Wie ‘Frauen und Film’ entstand: Ein Erlebnisbericht,” Frauen und Film 62 (June 2000): 146–49. 38 Fischetti, Das neue Kino, 30. 39 Judith Mayne, “Female Narration, Women’s Cinema: Helke Sander’s The AllRound Reduced Personality / Redupers,” New German Critique 24/25, Special Double Issue on New German Cinema (Autumn 1981 / Winter 1982): 155–71. Here, 157. 40 Kaja Silverman, “Helke Sander and the Will to Change,” Discourse 6 (Fall 1983): 10–30. Here, 13.

5:

Film Feminisms in West German Cinema: A Public Sphere for Feminist Politics

Madeleine Bernstorff

A

that we associate with 1968, the 1970s can be described as the decade of feminist filmmaking and film theory. A crucial aspect of this decade of feminist filmmaking was the development of a film feminist public sphere.1 In this essay, I examine how this public sphere emerged out of the broader radical changes that we associate with “1968.”2 I understand “public” as a social context wherein collective experiences can be reflected and compared and in which counter-publics articulate themselves and influence collective societal processes. Yet, “public” also refers to certain institutions and activities, as well as to conditions of social experience characterized by antagonisms. During the 1970s, a women’s film sphere gradually emerged as a result of the publication of new film magazines and books, as well as the screening of (mostly short) films directed by women at small film festivals, including some that would eventually become landmarks of women’s filmmaking. I am therefore also interested in the isolated moments when female filmmakers and their films were present in this public sphere, long before they constituted themselves as feminist. For audiences to encounter these international female filmmakers made a difference. In order for the public sphere’s gendered hierarchies to become less ossified and more flexible, many hegemonic interpretive frameworks had to be put into question and many persisting and small-scale powers had to work together. This analysis cannot be carried out without considering the sociopolitical situation of the early Federal Republic of Germany. After a brief punitive phase, when the population was confronted with the crimes that had been committed during the Nazi era, the ideological realignment of West Germans after the Second World War, especially the re-education advised in the western zones, also became linked to the demand for cinematic self-expression. In the summer of 1947 the British military administration announced that “the reconstruction of the German Film industry rests essentially on psychological grounds. For if Germany is to develop a new sense of responsibility and purpose, it must develop its own means of RISING FROM THE EVENTS

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self-expression. Its screens must be freely open to its own creative producers and directors. Without self-expression, and the power to articulate to itself the new ideals that are being so painfully learned, rehabilitation will be infinitely delayed. . . .”3 In the early fifties, the public success of Heimatfilme (homeland films) replaced the rather unpopular Trümmerfilme (rubble films), which were produced under the control of the occupying powers until September 1949. In subsequent years, West German film continued in the illusionist vein of the films from the forties: “In many cases the technicians of the old dream factory remained at their posts. They adapted themselves and delivered outrageous exculpations, in which they attributed the Nazi films to Minister Goebbels and the artistic films to their own genius.”4 The films of the Third Reich survived, however, not only in continuity of personnel but also “by leaving behind a collective identity of far-reaching emotions.”5 Take, for example, R. A. Stemmle’s Toxi (1952), in which a white bourgeois West German family takes in an Afro-German girl. This patriarchal family modernizes itself through the open discussion of racist stereotypes—very rare in West German cinema— but positions itself even more strongly as a white norm through its acts of expulsion. The white German father and grandfather have leading parts, and a third, African-American father, who arrives deus ex machina-like, takes the child “home to America”—to the relief of everyone else. The short film festival in Oberhausen was founded in 1954 as the Westdeutsche Kulturfilmtage and inspired by the spirit of French Reorientation,6 those Franco-West German film meetings organized by Joseph Rovan for teachers and public supporters at which films would be shown and discussed night after night with guests such as André Bazin, Robert Flaherty, Helmut Käutner, Wolfgang Staudte, Alain Resnais, as well as Yéva and Chris Marker. These meetings were inspired by the left-wing Catholic, Résistance-esque French popular education movement peuple et culture. Through them film know-how and democratic discussions, and thus film-political education, were (again) practiced. Other regular guests included Hilmar Hoffmann, who eventually became the long-time director of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival; the art historian and film club initiator, Eva M. J. Schmid, who was also formative for Oberhausen; Enno Patalas, at the time a student in Münster, who became a cinephile through the meetings, founded the journal Filmkritik in 1956, and later established the Munich Film Museum; and the film-club activist Fee Vaillant, who later became the director of the Mannheim Film Week. During the early years of the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, debates about films by female directors mostly took place on the level of subtext, though films by female directors appeared relatively frequently at Oberhausen when compared to the rest of the West German film landscape. The expertise to assess these films, however, was mostly entrusted to men accompanied by invisible female secretaries.7 In 1955 three films

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by female directors were shown: Charlotte Decker’s, Eine Stadt zwischen Gestern und Morgen (A Town between Yesterday and Tomorrow, 1955), a short film about a day in Bremen; Das Leben beginnt morgen (Life Begins Tomorrow, 1949), a feature-length film directed by the French essayist Nicole Védrès; and the lively short film Colette (1951) by Yannick Bellon, a “young female director with courage, energy, imagination, and artistic empathy,” as a 1955 festival bulletin stated. The word feminism first appears here in the context of this film—ex negativo: “Truly an enchanting film, based on an enchanting idea: to show one of the great women of our time in her everyday life, a woman who never spoke of the ‘era of feminism,’ let alone championed it, but who was always simply a humanist: in her warmth, in her own great humanity.”8 Internationally, too, the emergence of female directors was imminent.9 Additionally, the Oberhausen Short Film Festival served as a venue for experimentation with film forms, which, though observed with suspicion, also functioned as a meeting point for East and West, North and South, as well as a space for debating film politics. The crisis of the film industry, which had long been in the making, then reached its peak. In 1961, not a single West German film qualified for the Bundesfilmpreis (West German Film Award). Rental and production companies went bankrupt, and more and more movie theaters closed. The number of annual per capita visits to cinemas fell from 15.6 in 1957 to 9.1 in 1961.10 In 1962, while the number of televisions in West German households rose from 700,000 in 1956 to 7.2 million, film production decreased by half. As the Oberhausen Manifesto put it, “The collapse of the conventional [West] German film finally removes the economic incentive for a mentality that is rejected by us. The new film has a chance to come to life . . . a new language of film can speak . . . the old film is dead. We believe in the new one.”11 This shift to the new film did not come about without societal pressure. As Edgar Reitz put it, “We felt like the accused, even though we had been blowing our own horn. . . . I no longer remember the arguments, but I have memories of the shrill voices, of agitated, malicious, shrill remarks, of men and women who were older than us and who seemed so competent to us. We had no choice but to close ranks.”12 Yet, this move did not include women. Indeed, no female filmmakers signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in February 1962, although many of the participating directors worked with female editors whose experimental montages contributed decisively to the changing film forms.13 As a result of the Oberhausen Manifesto, Papas Kino (daddy’s cinema), the “exhausted post-war cinema,” the “yesterday,” gradually disappeared, but it did not disappear as quickly as the Manifesto demanded, because “as an intervention in aesthetic questions, the manifesto remains remarkably vague.”14 The Oberhausen group developed a program with three core points: first, the development of young talent; second, the pro-

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motion of debut films; and third, the clear and lasting promotion of short films as a permanent field of film experimentation. The first film school in West Germany was the Hochschule für Gestaltung (School for Design, hfg) in Ulm. As early as 1950, founder Inge Aicher-Scholl—sister of the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, both of whom had been hanged by the Nazis for co-founding the non-violent White Rose resistance group—mentioned the plan for a film school in a letter to artist Max Bill. In 1955, the school opened. Its program was based on the ideas of the Bauhaus school and on a Frankfurt Schoolinspired rejection of the culture industry. In 1956, industrial filmmaker and architect Detten Schleiermacher, film journalist Enno Patalas, and Martin Krampen, a student in the Department of Visual Communication, proposed a program design for training in film and television practices. The program was never realized because of insufficient funds, but starting in the academic year 1960–61 film-focused courses were offered. In 1962, the Institut für Filmgestaltung (Institute for Film Design) Ulm was founded under the direction of Reitz, Schleiermacher, and Alexander Kluge on behalf of the Oberhausen Manifesto Group. From 1963 on, it became an autonomous satellite of the hfg, funded by the state of BadenWürttemberg. This school’s counter-public approach influenced directors including Ula Stöckl, Claudia von Alemann, Marion Zeeman, Jeanine Meerapfel, Maximiliane Mainka, and Recha Jungmann, who all trained here before the emergence of the Women’s Movement. Their approach to filmmaking included a focus on their own subjectivity—that is, “to keep always in mind one’s own reality as part of cinematic statements.”15 One of the first students, Ula Stöckl, originally only wanted to learn scriptwriting: “I would not have dared to dream that I could learn more than to write. This was very typical of the time, where one could only think of very small goals, at least as a woman. . . . Cinema was for me the French and the Italian film. At that point, I had not heard of the Oberhausen Manifesto.”16 At the time, Stöckl was the first woman to study film. “I [had to] first acquire my own approach,” she wrote, “and, above all, the technical knowledge that sometimes existed solely in the realization that everything was arranged for the male gaze.”17 Stöckl’s dramaturgical exercises from this period are characterized by the narrative form of the “miniature” developed in Ulm. As Kluge put it, “The main approach simply means: radical brevity, inventions that allow greater length and levels of intensity. . . . Dramaturgy of brevity: How to make concentrated, selfcontained abbreviations that lend themselves to montage, a kind of shorthand of experience, so-called miniatures. You can tell whole films using this style of microstructural form of narration.”18 This miniature form proved to be particularly productive in treating historical and everyday experiences. In 1965, a special program in Oberhausen presented the miniatures Belästigung im Kino (Harassment in the Cinema), Kartenspieler

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(Card Players), and Stöckl’s Grossküche (Canteen Kitchen), about the preparation of potato salad in a canteen, as well as her first short film Antigone (1964), a parable of female resistance, and other works by the film department. In 1967, Oberhausen screened Stöckl’s short film Haben Sie Abitur? (Do You Have a Degree?), which highlights class and gender inequalities in education by interviewing a number of students attending evening school. The Oberhausen international competition occasionally screened films by female directors, such as Agnès Varda’s short films and Shirley Clarke’s early musical film experiments. In 1963 Věra Chytilová’s medium-length Filmová a televizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění v Praze (Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, FAMU) thesis film Strop (Ceiling, 1962) received the West German Film Critics Prize in Oberhausen. The film is about a young woman who ends her studies to work as a model. It is now considered an important contemporary document in the run-up to the Prague Spring. Shortly thereafter, Chytilová won the main prize of the festival in Mannheim with her feature O Necem Jiném (Something Different, 1963). The impact of Forough Farrokhzad’s short film Khaneh Siah Ast (The House is Black, 1962), which was shown in Oberhausen and won the grand prize of that festival in the same year, was also key but rarely recognized in the West until the late 1990s.19 Together with a small team, the iconic female Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad filmed a leper settlement in Tabriz, Azerbaijan, using direct sound. The film was judged by Jonathan Rosenbaum as a key film and the beginning of an Iranian New Wave, long before the works of Sohrab Shahid Saless and Abbas Kiarostami.20 Chris Marker called the film the Iranian Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1933) in his obituary of Farrokhzad, while reflecting on her early death.21 In Khaneh Siah Ast, the director manages to avoid a victimizing gaze when observing the lepers in their everyday life and at their festivities; they appear as simultaneously beautiful and ordinary, as persons of intense identification. Some of the scenes are quite staged. An unidentified male voice describes leprosy in an impassioned tone as a disease that has to do with poverty and is curable, while Farrokhzad recites her poems and passages from the Old Testament and the Koran with a deeply passionate voice. While these films and filmmakers may not have been recognized by cultural institutions at the time as female avant-garde directors, their importance as role models for future feminist filmmakers was crucial; they are, therefore, beginning to be recognized and should continue to be returned to narratives of the long sixties. Claudia von Alemann, who was also educated at hfg Ulm, started to look beyond the West German border early on: in the forty-five minute film, EXPRMNTL Knokke (1967), she and Reinhold E. Thiel documented the clashes over film politics and aesthetics at the Belgian experimental film

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festival in Knokke, and in cooperation with the États généraux du cinéma she also shot a medium-length documentary film about the very early days of video activism during the May ’68 events in Paris: Das ist nur der Anfang—der Kampf geht weiter (This Is Only the Beginning—The Struggle Continues, 1969). She filmed the short film Kathleen und Eldridge Cleaver in Algier (1970) with a Beaulieu sixteen-mm camera, as the Cleavers were living in exile in Algeria and trying to set up—with several drawbacks—an office and meeting point of the international branch of the Black Panther Party.22 In her short film Germaine Greer (1980) von Alemann portrayed the titular Australian feminist. In 1971, she made another short film, Anti-imperialistische Frauenkonferenz in Toronto (AntiImperialist Women’s Conference in Toronto, 1971), for the West German television channel WDR but was forced to cut out the South Vietnamese liberation anthem; and from various documentary materials she assembled the short film Aus eigener Kraft—Frauen in Vietnam (Through Their Own Efforts—Women in Vietnam) (1971), for which she also interviewed the anticolonial activist and foreign minister of the (underground) Viêt Cong government of South Vietnam, Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, who later prepared and led peace negotiations with the United States. Very few (women) filmmakers in West Germany pursued their interest in international political issues through such an engagement as von Alemann did. The deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), founded in 1966, took a while to consolidate itself but soon staggered into the arena of radical politicization after the protests of the state visit of the Shah of Iran in West Berlin on June 2, 1967, and the assassination of Benno Ohnesorg. Of the thirty-five students in the first class of the dffb, only three were women: Gerda Kramer, Irena Vrkljan, and Helke Sander, all of whom already enjoyed strong careers. As Sander put it in an interview, “The women who were the first to be accepted at the film academy were simply the ones with the most professional experience.”23 During her time at the dffb, the Yugoslavian author and television writer Irena Vrkljan produced the short film Faroqhi dreht (Faroqhi Shoots, 1967), which shows Harun Farocki working on a film (using the old spelling of his last name), and three idiosyncratic, historically-conscious portrayals of West Berlin.24 Gerda Kramer, who had previously worked as an actress, quickly returned to the theatre. Sander (dffb, 1966–69), who had been trained as an actress and had already worked successfully in student and community theatres, had worked for Finnish television. In its earliest days, everything at the dffb was oddly formal, because the school was still trying to figure out how to teach this new discipline of film, as countless policy drafts, interviews, and discussions show. “There were no formal courses, because nobody understood how to run a film academy. . . . I was already senior,”25 said Sander. “The need to work, the desire to study, and the fact that I had a child meant an

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unbelievably organized everyday life,” she continued.26 Additionally, she said, “I had to assert myself constantly because not everyone believed at the beginning that I was a student and not just a girlfriend.”27 Abundant documentation of vocal young men sitting next to mute young women reinforces that notion, though women were much more present in the social movements than subsequent historical narratives about the era lead one to believe. In a seminar directed by Jiří Weiss and given the guideline of a topic on “boy meets girl,” Sander produced her first short film, Subjektitüde (1966/67). “A woman and two men meet at the bus station, each with the point-of-view shot of who is speaking and who the others are observing,” Sander wrote, continuing, “To make [the topic] more interesting, I recorded everyone with a point-of-view shot and had the problem of why I—with my subjective perspective—should bother cutting from one person to another. The subjective perspective never stops. It is my decision to interrupt the three characters’ expressions from outside.”28 Sander stages the sexualizing, appraising peeks of the men and the exchanges of glances between them and the woman in form of a complex three-way situation using close-ups, pans, and wide shots, with inner monologues offering commentary. In this way, the film presents gender relations in a public space. Sander questioned the distinction between social and private violence in the films produced at the dffb in Undated Pamphlet No. 2, titled “Criticism and Self-Criticism” and written in 1968.29 As she put it, “I adopt the definition that all of the films that we have shown in the last two days deal with violence in some way.”30 She described the film of a fellow student and the internalized, unreflected violence present therein, before arriving at examples of films “that detect violence whose origins are metaphysically endemic.”31 A third category is characterized as giving name to the violence and showing it as rooted in a historically explainable process. There is for her, however, an “absurd struggle over the meaning or priority of the so-called private and [or] social violence.”32 In her opinion, the communication problems at the academy were grounded in the perpetual search for qualitative differences between the one, already defined, and the other—not yet defined, not yet socially investigated— type of violence: it may be that this division is concerned with the politics of the [West] Berlin Left, which speaks constantly of social conflicts [but] in so doing ignores or suppresses interpersonal ones. . . . The fact is that the cult with its emblems and flags and sheer immensity also has the function of concealing one’s own personal problems. It means that the violence between genders will not be discussed. . . . Women who wander through films with fabric [over] their chest and death on their lips are unbearable, because they only reproduce that which is already

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known. . . . Women are now ready; they no longer have to participate in all the outlandish activities of men.33

Is this the “Urszene” (primal scene) of feminist awareness experienced through gendered representations of violence, brought about as a result of analyzing fellow students’ films? It appears so.34 Subsequently, Sander proceeds from focusing on gendered representations of violence to posing questions about the relationship between form and content: “the last thing to discuss is why the films of the politicians, if we can lump them together in this way, are so technically terrible; and why the films of aesthetes, if we can also lump these films together in this way, are technically thoughtprovoking, stimulating, and novel even if their content is moronic.” The “politicians”—especially when they shoot documentaries—are often at the mercy of events. They must “quickly decide on the aperture and ensure that they are not hit over the head, etc. . . . There has not yet been enough discussion of these things. Further weaknesses result from the novelty of insights. A thought has to be worked out cinematically, [but it is] one that does not yet have a cinematic tradition. . . . The aesthetes may speak for themselves, but they should finally also do so.”35 In this pamphlet, in which Sander takes as her point of departure the films of her fellow dffb students, an early feminist (film) politicization emerges, in that Sander demonstrates the relationship between social or public and so-called “private” violence and their respective representations, while also addressing the simplified schism between “political” and “aesthetic”36 filmmakers. Within the framework of the legendary dffb Group 3, which was founded following the murder of Benno Ohnesorg, Sander filmed the forty-three-minute Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators, 1968). Addressing the Springer campaign in a speech, Sander said, “We also act: but with a different technical-chemical process.” Sander activated contacts with Finnish television37 and shot a film about the Springer campaign together with Ulrich Knaudt, Skip Norman, and Harun Farocki and with great formal transparency and self-reflection.38 Subsequent events, such as the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke, which resulted from the Springer newspapers’ articles against him, quickly moved reality beyond what the film depicted. As Sander stated speaking about the film, My goal at the time was to present a theoretically complex subject matter and to convey the argument of the APO [Ausserparlamentarische Opposition, Extra-Parliamentary Opposition] to those who were unfamiliar with it. The realization that what is written in the newspaper is not only “information” but can also be edited, commentated, distorted, and twisted, in order to serve certain interests hit me with immense force. This observation was mixed with a sense of shame about the fact that this idea of social interrelationships came to me

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relatively late and only through a happy combination of circumstances. I was indebted to the student movement for its insights, the teach-ins, and lectures in which I took part as a listener and learner and with which, through the tremendous outburst of curiosity and questions that seemed to me to be at the center of the movement, I identified. The film does not document the different activities of the APO with respect to the Springer campaign but rather attempts to reconstruct the main arguments of the campaign as I see them. It was most important for me, in a film about manipulation, not to manipulate them myself.39

Sander grasps here the core utopian energy of questioning, of representational critique. Off-screen Skip Norman, who also worked as cameraman for the film, quotes Frantz Fanon: “We must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man.” Many documentary films about the student movement were made at the hfg Ulm, including Günter Hörmann’s Delegiertenkonferenz. Filme 1 + 2 (Conference of SDS Delegates: Films 1 + 2, 1968), which documented the women’s council protest at the SDS Delegation Conference in November 1968. Railing from the lectern, Sander said, “We no longer accept that we must continue to acquiesce to the oppression with which they oppress us.” The disparaging reactions of the men who were present led to the legendary tomato throw.40 Later, Sander would cite this scene in the essayistic film Der subjektive Faktor (The Subjective Factor), a critical reflection on the student movement years that focused primarily on its fractures and dissonances. It hardly constitutes a heroine’s story. As Sander retrospectively argues, the second wave Women’s Movement “began to play a role for the female filmmakers as they got to know each other.”41 They were committed to bringing more women into the dffb. In 1970, the film academy accepted as many women as men for the first time. Three dffb films show the multiplicity of this new presence of feminism. In 1971, the twenty-one-minute collaborative film Women’s Camera was shot. Inspired by the friendly (but uncredited) lecturer Charles Völsen, the directors Gardi Deppe, Barbara Kasper, Brigitte Krause, Ingrid Oppermann, and Tamara Wyss produced this camera tutorial from a woman’s perspective. They planned the film at “a beautiful roundtable over many shared lunches.”42 The camera report for the Geyer film laboratory states, “Director: Women,” “Cameraman: Women.” Three two-person teams created montages of the clips as cutting exercises; the released version came from Oppermann and Deppe. The film was to be shown to subsequent first-year students at the dffb. It was the time of collective and of target group films, and not only students at the film academy were asking questions about teaching and learning. Women’s Camera begins with Oppermann at the camera, pivoting the Arri BL sixteen-mm camera on its tripod. The white capital letters of the title Women’s Camera shoot in

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individually, filling the entire frame of the lens hood to the rhythm of rattling rock riffs. A female voiceover narration introduces, describes, and explains the processes, falling silent when the footage is placed in the cassette in the changing bag, which the camera zooms in on until almost the whole picture is black. Wyss cannot help but laugh as she labels the cassette. On the subject of the “lens” the viewer sees directly on the matte screen the frontal image of a young woman—Deppe—as she is knitting. A shot of hands peeling vegetables and potatoes, with the sound of peeling audible in the background, demonstrates how different apertures affect the amount of light entering the film negative, as well as how different focal lengths crop the image differently. A Brecht quote rests on screen: “The meat that is missing from the kitchen / will not be decided in the kitchen!” The film in its entirety was shown to the new dffb classes. Under the heading “The Films, the Production of Wealth, and the Poor Consumers,” Hartmut Bitomsky wrote, “Women’s Camera is a film about the liberation of woman; but it does not deal with their emancipation, it is its attainment. . . . [It] is a film about the camera work that women have done.”43 Women’s Camera served as a practical response to the specific experiences of gendered social assumptions regarding the handling of technology. With a tremendous sense of ironic self-empowerment, the protagonists act out the reproductive sphere wearing high-heels and fur coats: they knit and cook and film. Situational learning and teaching with the technical material became intertwined. The fun in acquiring practical knowledge and the liberating feeling of passing it on is apparent. In the same year, the dffb student Cristina Perincioli shot Für Frauen 1. Kapitel (For Women: Chapter 1, 1971), an impetuous film about a strike against the inequity in the wages of men and women. Four women from the Märkisches Viertel comprised the cast, Gisela Tuchtenhagen operated the camera, and Norman served as lighting technician. The film was preceded by another tenant-activist film of a former dffb colleague: Perincioli had financed “his” film with her dffb budget and carried out all the work except for the camerawork but was not mentioned in the credits. As Perincioli put it, “This division of labour sensitized me to further genderrelated observations.”44 After this experience Perincioli met the tenant councilwomen at a go-In and developed with them the idea of a “Screenplay from the Apron” during Sunday meetings.45 This idea was then improvisationally staged: the female cashiers of a supermarket discover that they are paid less than their male co-workers and decide to strike. The fun and engagement of the protagonists, all amateur actresses, their “direct, blatant form of address and the openly displayed amateur performance,”46 and “the desire to think the unthinkable and to dare it”47 in this common cause make the short film a still-relevant realistic-utopian documentary. As Max Linz writes, “The film underscores the changeability of circumstances in an almost classical narrative mode and naturalises, in other words, not the

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circumstances but their changeability.”48 The film was extremely successful, winning the [West] German Film Critics Prize at the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, receiving an enthusiastic review by Farocki in the journal Filmkritik,49 and enjoying national and international sales. For women to develop their own voices was a laborious process. The female students at the dffb pursued this goal with very different strategies, often using their complicated experiences of politicization as the basis for their work as filmmakers. Elsa Rassbach arrived from the United States in 1965 to study and work at the Free University in Berlin. While there, she was active in many protest movements, supported American conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War, and can be seen briefly in Carlos Bustamante’s five-minute film De Oppresso Liber (1968).50 In her 1967 application to the dffb, she wrote that she wanted to produce political allegories. Her short film His-story (1972) satirically re-enacts a 1920 conversation between Lenin and the communist women’s rights leader Clara Zetkin on the “woman question.” At the time, the text by Zetkin gave Rassbach “the impression that she, a great theorist of women’s empowerment, let herself be treated like a little schoolgirl and hardly spoke at all.”51 The prologue to His-story ironizes the gender relations of the student movement: “Many of the women who have joined the student movement since 1966 do not do so completely of their own political will. Some of them are more or less voluntary appendages of friends or acquaintances.” A fanfare, reverse shots of women aiding in the production and distribution of leaflets, a female student complains about her boyfriend: “I have enabled him to do his intellectual work.” Then, Zetkin appears and describes similarities to the leftist movements of the early twentieth century: “Some comrades tried to conceal their theoretical weaknesses by discriminating against women.” The film reconstructs the encounter between Clara Zetkin and Lenin (in historical costumes) in a sparse room decorated with Maoist slogans. Their dialogue is scrupulously copied from Zetkin’s memoirs, as the camera moves around the two in sprawling circular motions. Lenin wants to integrate the women’s movement into the Third World Congress and polemicizes against sexual liberation efforts: “The revolution does not tolerate orgiastic states. The uncontrolled nature of sexual life is bourgeois, it is a symptom of decline.” Finally, Clara gives in and sadly descends the stairs, her silhouette lying over the pages of the script. “Do not whisper like brave aunts, speak loudly like fighters. Prove that you can fight! . . . It’s about the masses of women,” Lenin calls after her. Allegorically and ironically, the film warns against the capitulation of women to male leadership, the cries of contradiction, and the dogmatisms of the student movement of the early 1970s: it is a plea for a self-determined women’s liberation movement. These three dffb-films set the stage for further film-feminist struggles with their arguments for gender equality concerning learning technical

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skills (Women’s Camera), for equal wages (For Women: Chapter 1), and for the inclusion of women in leftist histories (His-Story). The “Nebenwiderspruch” (secondary contradiction) was countered.52 Another important step in the development of a visibility of women’s films and feminist film exhibition was initiated by Sander and von Alemann: the First International Women’s Film Seminar, which took place in 1973 at the Arsenal in Berlin, the cinema of Freunde der deutschen Kinemathek (Friends of [West] German cinematheque) founded by Erika and Ulrich Gregor in 1963. “The seminar was called that, although Claudia von Alemann and I did not really want to call it that,” Sander said. “I have always been interested in how the women’s movement was depicted by women who made films and who believed that they made something related to the women’s movement. And the women’s movement then, that was in 1973, had a great deal to do with these whole reproductive histories, that is to say, with abortion, contraception, and the like. . . . This seminar was actually intended to bring together women filmmakers who consciously dealt with the women’s movement.”53 At a large meeting, documented by the photographer Abisag Tüllmann, about forty films were presented and discussed by three hundred mainly female visitors, with cathartic, though also problematic, consequences: “but now critics could mindlessly also apply the term Frauenfilm (women’s film), which women had previously used as a sort of emergency solution for describing documentary films, to feature films, in order to marginalize the films and to avoid having to seriously engage with their aesthetics.”54 The women’s film seminar became a model for the feminist ladyfests of the 2000s. They were replicated in many locations in West Germany, contributing decisively to feminist film discussions and cinema initiatives. In 1968, Stöckl’s Ulm diploma film Neun Leben hat die Katze (The Cat Has Nine Lives, 1968) was a solitary film, that is, unique and far ahead of its time. A feature film shot in techniscope, it was funded by Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (Young [West] German Film Advisory Board), which was created as a result of the demands of the Oberhausen Manifesto. It is the first long feature film to anticipate the women’s movement. Its way of portraying sketches of female lives was so radical that even the most conscious male film journalists, realizing their inability to deal with the broken taboo or silence, initiated a torrent of ill-tempered discussions. Only Frieda Grafe, a former student of Roland Barthes and the only female author writing for Filmkritik until 1974, found nuanced words to describe the aesthetics of the film: With a decisive will to style that scorns all codes of common tastes, she throws herself at things and through vulgar artistic constructions makes clear how much we are lived by a life that is not our own. . . . How do you express yourself in a world in which the possibility of expressing yourself is marred by an ideology that you would like to

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contradict? How can women explain how they want their world to be, if their existence is defined by a basic speechlessness, because there was always someone there before the women and nothing remains for the women, except to always have to react? In the name of the father. In Ula Stöckl’s film, laughter is heard for the first time. The women laugh endlessly. Not a bad beginning to avoiding masculine language regulation.55

The film journalist Christa Maerker retrospectively recounts how the film opened something that did not yet exist: “When Ula Stöckl showed her first film . . . something happened to me that I could not pin down. There was not yet a feminist movement, but there was a feminist film. I only knew that something revolutionary had happened before my eyes, but I couldn’t explain it, because the vocabulary was not yet there.”56 Something was in the air, a poetic feature film anticipated the women’s movement.57 It was not an activist documentary for target groups. Since the emerging depiction of female subjectivity was fragile and contested, it required new structures. The Women’s Film Seminar spread the news, but a new language and sphere for writing about film was also sorely needed. In 1974, Sander stayed in a Franconian village and summarized her experiences of the women’s movement. Film production had not become easier; the film boy’s club continued to use outdated images of women; the left was insinuating the “secondary contradiction”; and feminists wanted to see heroines on the screen. Sander wrote, “If someone takes your sword, then grab a club. If you can no longer defend yourself elegantly, then start whacking away.” From this came the idea to start a journal, Frauen und Film, the name of which ironically distances itself from the 1950s journal Film und Frau. As Sander says, “with some one hundred free copies, we held our first press conference at the Berlinale during the summer of 1974. . . . In 1975, we the editors demanded gender parity in film committees. We posed—for the first time, and against the considerable protestations of almost all filmmakers—the question of quotas.”58 Clearly, a paradigm shift had taken place by the mid-1970s even if the problems to which feminist filmmakers called attention remained unsolved. The search for a language of feminist film aesthetics was still, however, in its infancy. In a completely different environment, the avant la lettre queer photo book Oh Muvie (1971) was developed by the photographer, camerawoman, and filmmaker Elfi Mikesch,59 the filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim, and the actress Carla Aulalu. Birgit Hein’s standard reference work Film im Untergrund: Von seinen Anfängen bis zum Unabhängigen Kino (Film in the Underground. From Its Beginnings to an Independent Cinema, 1971) was less interested in questions of feminism than in situating experimental films in twentieth century art history. In March 1968, the platform XSCREEN in Cologne—and the Independent Film Center in Munich—was created through the initiative of Birgit and Wilhelm Hein.60

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Since then, experimentation such as that of the New American Cinema was more present in West Germany. But even festivals like the ones in Mannheim and Oberhausen, and the journal Filmkritik, still had prolonged difficulties with experimental film.61 At the first European meeting of those independent filmmakers (as experimentalists called themselves in opposition to the “film establishment”) in Munich in November 1968, VALIE EXPORT’s street campaign Tapp- und Tastkino (Touch and Tap Cinema, 1968) could be seen or, rather, experienced. VALIE EXPORT calls it “the first directly female film”: The screening always takes place in the dark. But the cinema hall has become somewhat smaller. There is only room for two hands. To see the film, that is to say, to feel and sense it in this case, the viewer (user) must place his or her two hands through the entrance into the cinema hall. With this, the curtain, which had previously risen only for the eyes, raises also for both hands. The tactile perception works against the deception of voyeurism. For as long as the citizen is satisfied with a reproduced copy of sexual freedom, the state is saved from a sexual revolution. Tapp- und Tastkino is an example for the empowerment of the audience through reinterpretation.62

The viewer or perceiver is allowed a thirty-three-second breast-touching visit of the Körperleinwand (bodyscreen) in EXPORT’s cinema.63 The demand for a fundamental image-political criticism is found in a public space in front of a cinema in the red-light district, largely unnoticed by a feminist scene, which still was on its way to being developed. It took many years until the clashes between feminist activist cinema and art and experimental cinema, equally based on ideas of female subjectivity, dissolved. Short films tend to be less prominent in film histories, but the small form of a minor cinema embodies huge possibilities for developing radical aesthetics. The discussion of female and feminist aesthetics continued on different levels. The films assumed different perspectives in relation to the battle for gender equality and at times also looked beyond the West German sphere—and they continue to flourish. —Translated by Alex Claussen and Courtney Leikam

Notes 1

Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972). All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise. 2 This chapter builds on my essays “Feminismen an der dffb 1966–85,” Deutsche Kinematek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed December 11, 2018, https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/feminismen-dffb-1966-85, and “Transnationales

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Lernen,” Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed December 11, 2018, https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/transnationales-lernen, about foreign students at the Berlin film school dffb, published in March 2016 and based on indepth research in the dffb archives of Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. 3 Bettina Greffath, Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit: Deutsche Spielfilme 1945– 1949 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1995), 89. 4 Karsten Witte, “Film im Nationalsozialismus: Blendung und Überblendung,” in Geschichte des deutschen Films, eds. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1993), 119–70. Here, 168. Translators’ note: all translations from German sources are our own. 5 Karsten Witte, “Film im Nationalsozialismus,” 120. 6 Thomas Tode, “Starthilfe zur Filmkultur: Die deutsch-französischen Filmtreffen 1946–1953,” in Lernen Sie diskutieren! Re-education durch Film—Strategien der westlichen Alliierten nach 1945, ed. Heiner Roß (Berlin: CineGraph Babelsberg, 2014), 71–87. See also Madeleine Bernstorff, “Der Beitrag Frankreichs: Filmpolitik in der französischen Besatzungszone,” available on the author’s website, accessed July 25, 2018, http://www.madeleinebernstorff.de/seiten/reedu2_ tx.html. 7 Madeleine Bernstorff, “Für Frauen 1. Kapitel: Grenzen verlaufen nicht horizontal,” in kurz und klein: 50 Jahre Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, ed. Klaus Behnken (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004). 79–89. Here, 81. 8 Bernstorff, “Für Frauen,” 80. 9 See Borjana Gakovic and Sabine Schöbel, eds., Aufbruch: Regisseurinnen der 60er, special issue of Frauen und Film 68 (2016). 10 Daniela Sannwald, Von der Filmkrise zum Neuen Deutschen Film: Filmausbildung an der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm 1958–1968 (Berlin: Wissenschaftsverlag Volker Spiess, 1997), 60. 11 “The Oberhausen Manifesto,” in West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 2. 12 Edgar Reitz, quoted in Fernand Jung, “Kino der frühen Jahre: Herbert Vesely und die Filmavantgarde in der Bundesrepublik,” in Zwischen Gestern und Morgen: Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1962, eds. Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert (Frankfurt am Main: Schriftenreihe des Deutschen Filmmuseums Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 318–37. Here, 330. 13 Claudia Lenssen, “Gruppenbild ohne Dame: Wo waren die Frauen am 28.2.1962?” in Provokation der Wirklichkeit: Das Obenhausener Manifest und die Folgen, eds. Ralph Eue and Lars-Henrik Gass (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012), 239–45. Here, 239. 14 Klaus Kreimeier, “Erratisch, in leerer Landschaft: Ein Manifest aus Oberhausen,” in Provokation der Wirklichkeit, Das Obenhausener Manifest und die Folgen, eds. Ralph Eue and Lars-Henrik Gass (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2012), 178–82. Here, 180. 15 Sannwald, Von der Filmkrise zum Neuen Deutschen Film, 137. 16 Sannwald, 92.

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17 Quoted in Peter Schubert and Monika Maus, eds., Rückblicke: Die Abteilung Film-Institut für Filmgestaltung an der hfg Ulm 1960–1968 (Ulm: Verlag Dorothea Rohn, 2012), 110. 18 Alexander Kluge, “Der Hauptansatz des Ulmer Instituts,” in Ulmer Dramaturgien: Reibungsveluste, eds. Klaus Eder and Alexander Kluge (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 1980), 5–7. Here, 5. 19 On the film’s importance, see Sara Saljoughi, “A New Form for a New People: Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black,” Camera Obscura 32, no. 1 (May 2017): 1–31. 20 Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Forough Farrokhzad et La maison est noire,” cinéma 6 (2003): 46–52. 21 Chris Marker, “Délivrée des méprises,” cinéma 6 (2003): 45. 22 Kathleen Neale Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969–1972),” in The Black Panther Party [reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 211– 54. Here, 223, 224. 23 “Ich war ein Wirtschaftswunder: Helker Sander im Interview,” Der Freitag, January 31, 2017, https://www.freitag.de/autoren/der-freitag/ich-war-einwirtschaftswunder. 24 Bernstorff, “Transnationales Lernen,” https://dffb-archiv.de/editorial/transnationales-lernen. 25 Quoted in Renate Fischetti, Das neue Kino—Acht Porträts von deutschen Regisseurinnen (Dülmen: Tendeverlag, 1992), 43. 26 Quoted in Fischetti, Das neue Kino, 43. The founding of children’s daycare coooperatives was central for the organization of daily life. See Ute Kätzel, Die 68erinnen: Porträt einer rebellischen Frauengeneration (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2002), 160–79. Here, 162. See also Christina Gerhardt’s essay on Sander’s filmmaking in this volume. 27 Quoted in Fischetti, Das neue Kino, 43. 28 Helke Sander, “Subjektitüde,” accessed February 13, 2017, http://www.helkesander.de/filme/subjektitude. 29 Helke Sander, Flugschrift No. 2 (internal), “Kritik und Selbstkritik,” March 1968. From the private collection of Helke Sander. 30 Sander, Flugschrift No. 2. 31 Sander, Flugschrift No. 2. 32 Sander, Flugschrift No. 2. 33 Sander, Flugschrift No. 2. 34 “In hindsight, I would see it that way.” Helke Sander, email to the author, June 12, 2015. 35 Sander, Flugschrift No. 2. 36 These filmmakers were also called “Kuchenfilmer.” 37 “The 17,000 Deutschmarks, which the film cost then, was provided by the Finnish station Suomen Televisio along with an order for a Finnish version. The film was not broadcast in Finland, however, because the station was apparently

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heavily under pressure from the Springer Corporation, as I was told: if the station shows this film, Springer will no longer buy his paper from Finland. At the beginning of the nineties the corporation ordered a VHS cassette of the film in order to use it in training sessions on the history of the group.” Helke Sander, “Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure,” accessed February 13, 2017, http://www.helkesander.de/filme/brecht-die-macht-der-manipulateure/. 38 Max Linz, “Film-Politik, Studenten-Bewegung, Online-Archiv, Bericht von der Dziga-Wertow-Akademie,” montage AV Zeitschrift für Theorie und Geschichte Audiovisueller Kommunikation (2014): 105–21. Here, 113–14. 39 Helke Sander, “Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure.” 40 After the comrades called the women “petit bourgeois” and claimed they should first liberate oppressed working women, Sigrid Damm-Rüger started throwing tomatoes, a legendary act that founded the Women’s Movement across West Germany. 41 Helke Sander, “Das ‘Fräuleinwunder’ im deutschen Film,” in Wie haben Sie das gemacht? Aufzeichnungen zu Frauen und Filmen, eds. Claudia Lenssen and Bettina Schoeller-Boujou (Marburg: Schüren Verlag, 2014), 76–90. Here, 76, 77. 42 Barbara Kasper in a conversation with the author, December 2014. 43 Hartmut Bitomsky, Die Röte des Rots von Technicolor: Kino-Realität und Produktionswirklichkeit (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1972), 7. 44 Cristina Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch: Das Beste, was von der 68er Bewegung blieb (Berlin: Querverlag, 2015), 53. 45 Cristina Perincioli, “Drehbuch aus der Schürze,” Spandauer Volksblatt, September 12, 1971. 46 Linz, “Film-Politik,” 116. 47 Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch, 54. 48 Linz, “Film-Politik,” 116. 49 He wrote, “To see [is] to experience the fun of liberating knowledge.” Harun Farocki, Filmkritik 5 (1972), 172. 50 She is holding a banner that reads “RESIST.” 51 “Elsa Rassbach, “Aktivistin gegen den Vietnamkrieg,” in Die 68erinnen, ed. Ute Kätzel (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2002), 61–79. Here, 73. 52 In Marxist theory, the oppression of women is considered a “secondary contradiction”; the main contradiction is the relationship between wage labor and capital. 53 Fischetti, Das neue Kino, 48. 54 Sannwald, Von der Filmkrise zum Neuen Deutschen Film, 195. 55 Frieda Grafe, “Elektras Trauer: Ula Stöckls Film Neun Leben hat die Katze im Münchner Arri,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 7, 1971. 56 Christa Maerker in conversation with Ula Stöckl, “Frauenfilm ist eine Erfindung von Männern,” in Fischetti, Das neue Kino, 100. 57 On this film, see also Christina Gerhardt, “On Liberated Women in an Un-liberated Society: Ula Stöckl’s the Cat Has Nine Lives (1968),” in Women, Global Protest Movements and Political Agency: Rethinking the Legacy of 1968, eds. Sarah Colvin and Katharina Karcher (New York: Routledge, 2018), 69–83.

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58 Helke Sander, “Wie Frauen und Film enstand: Ein Erlebnisbericht,” Frauen und Film 62 (2000): 146–49. 59 Oh Muvie is the pseudonym of Elfi Mikesch. 60 See also Randall Halle’s interview with Birgit Hein in this volume. 61 Birgit Hein, “Film im Untergrund,” in Film als Idee: Birgit Heins Texte zu Film/ Kunst, eds. Nanna Heidenreich, Heike Klippel, and Florian Krautkrämer (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016), 235–70. Here, 241. 62 Valie Export, “Tapp- und Tastkino,” accessed February 14, 2017, http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/werke/tapp-und-tastkino. 63 See also Andrew Stefan Weiner’s essay, “Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative,” on VALIE EXPORT in this volume.

6:

A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism

Fabian Tietke

Introduction

O

N MAUNDY THURSDAY, April 11, 1968, Rudi Dutschke was shot and severely injured in the center of West Berlin. Dutschke was one of the most charismatic members of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union, SDS), an organization central to West Germany’s student movements. The attack triggered a wave of protests over the subsequent Easter holidays, with tens of thousands of people across the country taking part. That same evening, Harun Farocki, a student of the deutsche filmund fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), led a demonstration against the tabloid Springer press. Many people deemed the rabble-rousing against the student movements, fomented for months in Springer Press newspapers, to be the reason for the attack on Dutschke. Farocki, like many other dffb students, was also in the SDS. And like many other students in West Berlin at the time, they were politicized after Benno Ohnesorg, a student and protestor, was fatally shot by plainclothes police officer Karl-Heinz Kurras on June 2, 1967, at a demonstration against the state visit of the Shah of Persia and his wife. In the following years, many dffb students were involved in the West Berlin student movements. The films produced by these dffb students supported the campaigns of the movements and served as their mass media arm. Other filmmakers in West Germany did the same, but no production context was as large and important as the dffb, which was founded in 1966 as the first West German stand-alone film academy.1 The timing proved crucial as the film school’s formative years coincided with the period of its

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students’ politicization. The students took the liberty of making political films as part of their studies.2 The films of the dffb not only covered core issues of the West German New Left but also, through films by emigrés such as Carlos Bustamante and Skip Norman, raised awareness for international struggles like that of the Black Panther movement or against the war in Vietnam. Over the years, dffb students tried different approaches to political filmmaking. One question that stood at the core of this constant renegotiation was how the films relate to the people portrayed in it. Another question was whether these films should address a general public or a specific political group of spectators. The political films produced at the dffb gradually shifted from cinematic explorations of the era’s political issues towards a stronger interaction with the people these films engaged and intended as audiences. In retrospect, some concepts tried out over the decade ending in the late 1970s seemed like dead-ends. Yet they form an important part of the history and development of political film. This essay explores four positions of political filmmaking that tried out different forms of participatory filmmaking. These attempts to renegotiate the relationship between the filmmaker and the people filmed would influence German political documentaries for years to come.

How to Address an Audience? From Group 3 to Zielgruppen (Target Audience) Films In the fall of 1967, nine students of the dffb founded “Group 3” together with their lecturer Otto Gmelin. The group’s basic idea was to pool the internal production budgets and the equipment supplied to the students in order to allow them to respond to current events on short notice. The work program of Group 3 reads like guidelines for political documentary films: “Regarding the ‘Springer-Press Concentration,’” the group sought to test the possibilities of documentaries. They did not aim to provide continual coverage of events but rather to adhere to self-imposed goals, which could be examined through film: a. How does one conceptualize educational films? b. How can one film political slogans? c. How does one construct scenes that assert themselves as documentaries, i.e. how far can documentation be fictionalized? d. How does one address different groups?3 Three films by the Group 3 dealt directly with the Springer Press and joined the student movement’s Anti-Springer Campaign. Harun Farocki’s Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers, 1967) and Ulrich Knaudt’s Unsere Steine (Our Stones, 1968) were short slogan films. The longest film about

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Springer was Helke Sander’s approximately forty-minute long Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators, 1968). These three films examined how the publishing group influenced the public sphere and revealed its strategies through a combination of instructional scenes and documentary material. The production of these films was of enormous importance to and established the relationship among students in the dffb, the social movements, and the SDS. dffb students who were also members of the SDS thus established themselves as the student movement’s media arm. On an individual basis, working in the Group 3 granted the students the space to develop their ideas about political filmmaking. On a collective level, it created a platform for an exchange of concepts between the students in the social movements and the film school. The Group 3 addressed the student movement’s political issues and transformed them into films for this movement. At the end of 1968, several dffb students were expelled after conflicts with the academy’s directors, Heinz Rathsack and Erwin Leiser. One year later, Farocki—who was also expelled—looked back on the development of political filmmaking at the dffb in a conversation with West German television and film editor Georg Alexander: In these two and a half years, the entire politicization of the students transpired. One can divide the period into three phases. In the first phase, the filmmakers attempted to make films about a political theme, with all the reservations and standards and clichés like cautious objectivity, truthfulness, and not taking a position. In the second phase, they attempted to make films for the evolving political left. . . . And actually, only in the third phase did the work on films with political figures begin. The old separation between author and film subject was, for the first time, rescinded. Entire project groups made films within a single political concept.4

Within this typology, the Group 3 films corresponded to filmmaking “for the evolving political left.” At the time, the work “with political figures” in film was connected to the concept of Zielgruppen (target audience) films. dffb students had developed this concept throughout 1968 as a cinematic counterpart to the concept of Basisgruppen (action groups) through which the SDS wanted to disseminate its political work in West Berlin, particularly after the attack on Dutschke.5 The Zielgruppen films were meant to accompany and reflect the work of the target audience. Although the concept of Zielgruppen films was applied to many topics, the early films focused on the work environment. This focus on the working world, particularly factory work, was motivated by elements of political theory of the time. Succinctly put, just as students went to the factories as workers, so, too, did the filmmakers.6 While the first films about the work environment were predominantly documentaries, eventually more

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fictionalized elements asserted themselves. In 1971, Helke Sander’s first film after completing her studies at the dffb, Eine Prämie für Irene (A Reward for Irene), screened at the Berlinale. Eine Prämie für Irene shows how a young mother tries to juggle factory work, children, too little money, and modest living conditions. This group of Zielgruppen films predates the wave of films about work in factories, problems of piecework, strikes, etc. that emerged domestically and internationally in subsequent years.7 A second and extensive group of Zielgruppen films appeared when dffb students started working in the then new housing development Märkisches Viertel (Mark Quarter) in northern Berlin, along the border between West and East. Throughout the 1970s, dffb students worked in this area, concentrating on the workers’ living conditions. The films engaged not only the general living conditions but also, with a special regard for their impact on women workers, the patriarchal social division of labor, as well as gendered expectations within a heterosexual marriage and in childrearing. The choice of the Märkisches Viertel was not coincidental: unlike other housing projects, the history of the quarter was ridden with conflicts from the beginning. If the new housing project was still deemed to be a model of modern construction in 1962, with comparable coverage accorded by the relevant professional journals, it soon became clear that large parts of the infrastructure needed for living were not taken into account during the planning stages. For example, although more than 11,000 of the approximately 30,000 tenants (March 1970 figures) were under the age of twentytwo, initially no youth centers or playgrounds existed.8 Beginning in 1967, critical debates about these serious deficits took place, initially in the form of events organized by the student movement’s Gegenuniversität (counter-university) and one year later as a protest exhibition during the Senate-organized West Berlin Construction Week. In the following years, residents of the Märkisches Viertel self-organized a tenants’ rights organization. Between 1969 and 1973, a variety of social, political, and media practices were tested in the quarter: whether it was work in the neighborhoods, which was based partly on the organizing methods of the Black Panthers, or the founding of parent-child groups and the first Kinderläden (self-organized daycare centers), which called into question the social division of reproductive labor.9 For a few years, the Märkisches Viertel was a laboratory for political practices of the New Left in its years of transition to the New Social Movements. The dffb students added to this and made it a laboratory of political filmmaking.

Die Gruppe Basis-Film: The Basis-Film Group Thomas Hartwig, Jean-François Le Moign, Max Willutzki, and Christian Ziewer—four of the eighteen students who had been expelled from the

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dffb at the end of 1968 for having occupied it—were the first to film in the Märkisches Viertel. While a court had overturned their expulsion at the beginning of 1970, the dffb administration refused to take the students back. The dffb did, however, agree to pay the funds allocated for the second year and final thesis films: 15,000 DM for the students in their third year and 19,500 DM for students in their second year.10 The four former dffb students pooled their monies (about 60,000 DM altogether) and used it to acquire film equipment (camera, tape recorder, etc.). They were now able to produce their films predominantly independently. Willutzki moved to the Märkisches Viertel in the fall of 1969.11 Paying homage to the Basisgruppen, the group named itself Basis-Film.12 In accordance with the concept of the Zielgruppen cinema, the BasisFilm group filmed activities, discussions, and actions in the Märkisches Viertel. These materials served in part as the basis of discussion groups in the Märkisches Viertel, as they reflected on their own conduct and group processes. The footage also formed part of short, agitational documentaries—the so-called Kinogramme. The group aimed to abolish the dualism or split between producer and consumer.13 In practice, this goal meant that their footage would be viewed and selected together with inhabitants from the Märkisches Viertel and with people who participated in a project of the College of Education.14 The group split up fairly quickly: Hartwig and Le Moign tracked activities in the youth center and the development of the first “adventure playgrounds” cinematically. By focusing on a single project and maintaining a division of labor between filmmakers and those being filmed, they made quick progress. By the end of 1970, they finished their documentary Wir wollen Blumen und Märchen bauen (We want to build flowers and fairy tales). Ziewer and Willutzki, by contrast, had additional goals. They pursued “the development of several groups with the goal of processing the entirety of the Märkisches Viertel project into one coherent contemporary document.”15 In so doing, they made slower progress than Hartwig and Le Moign, and the footage they produced was deemed to be not substantial enough for television. Ziewer and Willutzki subsequently devoted themselves to the parent-child-group, the self-published newspaper of the neighborhood’s tenants, and also the “working group on renting and living.”16 They produced three types of films: 1) footage not intended for the public and focused on behaviors, language, etc.; 2) quickly produced, short agitational films, for example, the film about the May Day demonstration of 1970, which was in part shot as a reversal film, so that they could use the films immediately; and 3) the Kinogramme, a type of Zielgruppen-oriented thematic reflection, which, in contrast to the other type of films, was more developed in terms of its film aesthetics. While the first three of the Kinogramme films survived, the fourth appears to be lost.17 Kinogramm I: Die Besetzung (The Occupation) docu-

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Figure 6.1. Press still showing Christian Ziewer during rehearsals on the set of Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut. From the collection of the author, reproduced with kind permission of Christian Ziewer.

ments the symbolic occupation of a factory hall over the course of the May Day demonstration in 1970.18 The shortest film (three minutes), Kinogramm I is cinematically very sober and consists almost exclusively of shots of the occupation. Kinogramm II: Mietersolidarität (Tenant Solidarity) shows how residents in the Märkisches Viertel collectively prevented the eviction of the Puhle family. At thirteen minutes, Kinogramm II is already notably longer than its predecessor. It assembles footage from the campaign to prevent the eviction and ties shots of go-ins (the act of entering a space en masse to protest) at the housing office together with footage of interviews with the family and of protest actions. Kinogramm III: Nun kann ich endlich glücklich und zufrieden leben (Now I can finally live happily and satisfied) focuses on Hans Rickmann, who lived in the Märkisches Viertel and was active on the editorial board of the quarter’s newspaper. The film documents approximately one year of Rickmann’s life, his work, and his struggles; it includes conversations with Rickmann alone and some also together with his wife, Janine. A particularly interesting sequence shows how unedited footage from the film

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served as the basis for a debate about Rickmann’s conduct or behavior in the parent-child group.19 The Kinogramme films were first used in the Märkisches Viertel itself. In her study on the political practices in the Märkisches Viertel, Katja Reichard describes the way the films were presented in the quarter: “Every four weeks, counter news programs [programs that counter the mainstream media] are shown, consisting of the collected factual material in image, sound, and completed questionnaires, sometimes with more that 200 viewers in attendance. One of the Kinogramme films was projected for a week on a screen in the shopping center [at the heart of the Märkisches Viertel], another film was used to recruit members for the tenant’s rights association.”20 Since these films supported critical perspectives on the living conditions in the quarter, the government of West Berlin tried to prevent these screenings and began to organize screenings of less critical films.21 At forty-five minutes, the third Kinogramm was by far the longest and was widely distributed by the Institut für Film und Bild in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (Institute for Film and Picture in Science and Education, FWU). The protagonists of Ziewer and Willutzki’s films were recruited mainly from the editorial board of the Märkisches Viertel newspaper and the selforganized tenant council. Hans Rickmann, in particular, fascinated the filmmakers. The fascination with Rickmann as the prototypical “worker”— palpable in the work of Willutzki and Ziewer—continued to shape their later films. Rickmann appears in the feature-length documentary Der lange Jammer (The Long Lamentation), on which Willutzki, along with Horst Lange (another activist from the tenants movement) and Aribert Weis, began working during the Märkisches Viertel rental strike of summer and autumn 1972. The title of the documentary covering the actions of the tenants during the rental strike refers to one of the most prominent buildings of the area. Der lange Jammer comes closest to the group’s original intention to document the overall activities in the Märkisches Viertel. Rickmann also stars in Ziewer’s much-respected debut feature film Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut (Dear Mother, I’m Doing Well), which brought the so-called Berliner Arbeiterfilm (Berlin Worker’s Film) to international prominence. Activists from the Märkisches Viertel play most of the workers in the film. The film screened at the Berlinale in the summer of 1972 as part of the International Forum of Young Films and laid the foundation for the Basis-Film Rental Company.22 In retrospect, the importance of the films of Willutzki, Ziewer, Hartwig, and Le Moign lies, on the one hand, in the broad range of documented events and developments and, on the other hand, in the processes triggered by these films: they offered an important opportunity for reflection within the self-organized groups of the inhabitants of the Märkisches Viertel. Without the films of the Basis-Film group, there would have been

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Figure 6.2. Discussing the script for Für Frauen — 1. Kapitel: Cristina Perincioli (on the left), camerawoman Gisela Tuchtenhagen (background left), and (left to right) the protagonists of the film: Ulla Lange, Janina Rickmann, and Helga Freyer. Reproduced with kind permission of Cristina Perincioli.

no films of the quarter by dffb students. While Hartwig and Le Moign dropped the idea of working with the filmed people in order to finish their film, the relation to the workers differs in the films by Ziewer and Willutzki. While some material was actually produced with the workers and was used to reflect behavior and collective processes, most of the films focused on the workers rather than including them in the production process. In their later films, all four directors returned to the classic division of labor between professional filmmakers and those being filmed.

Für Frauen—1. Kapitel (For Women: The First Chapter) In 1968, Cristina Perincioli and Gisela Tuchtenhagen began their studies at the dffb. In the summer of 1970, Willutzki met these two women and convinced them to use the money and film stock the dffb provided in order to shoot in the Märkisches Viertel. This money went into the

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production of Kinogramm II (Tenant Solidarity), which is comprised of video footage filmed by Perincioli during a go-in.23 Perincioli painted the following picture of the renters’ council: “[There,] only men spoke—women were silent and knitted—and decided one day to have a go-in at the district office and the housing association. When it started, not a single man was there—women had to do it on their own. They stormed the offices and brought forth their catalog of demands with an eloquence and a verve that I never expected from these women, since I only knew them to be mute knitters. They were loud, strong, angry, and united. I was deeply impressed, I had never seen such an appearance by women previously, not even in film.”24 Under this impression, Perincioli began work on her dffb thesis film, Für Frauen—1. Kapitel (For Women: The First Chapter), holding on to the concept of the Zielgruppen films. Throughout the summer of 1971, she met with a group of women from the renters’ council in the Märkisches Viertel and began brainstorming themes on which a collectively developed film should concentrate.25 Ultimately, a plot emerged that would share the experiences of women engaged in a labor struggle, as they fought against unequal pay and the sexist nature of their boss at a small supermarket. As soon as the women in the film are in agreement, they stop doing their work and declare to the boss that they will only return once they receive the same salary as their male counterparts. They leave the supermarket and walk arm in arm through the streets, enjoying the feeling of their own power.26 Similar to Sander’s Eine Prämie für Irene, various scenes use the music of the West German squatter rock band Ton Steine Scherben to emphasize the feeling of empowerment the women experience. In retrospect, those involved described the process as a combination of work on the film and of a consciousness-raising group. While Ziewer and Willutzki devoted their films almost entirely to male activists from the tenants movement of the Märkisches Viertel, Perincioli chose another perspective and directed a film in which mainly women appeared. Für Frauen—1. Kapitel therefore functions as a counter-film to Ziewer and Willutzki’s. For example, in Nun kann ich endlich glücklich und zufrieden leben, Janine Rickmann sits silently on the couch next to her husband Hans, whereas in Perincioli’s film she plays a leading part. The collective concept of Für Frauen—1. Kapitel and the space given to the women from the renters’ council in the finished film, in order to express and reflect upon their experiences, was not accepted by Willutzki and some men from the renters’ council. According to Perincioli, in an attempt to discredit her, Willutzki visited every woman who worked on the film individually and told them that Perincioli was a lesbian. Horst Lange, ex-husband of one of the protagonists, wrote to the director of the dffb and insisted that the project must be stopped, since Perincioli was “technically not a real woman.”27

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As Perincioli remembers, the film did not go down particularly well at a screening at the dffb, again primarily with the male students. She was confronted with the accusation that the “primary contradiction” (capital and work) would only distract from the “secondary contradiction” (emancipation) and that films with so-called “women’s issues” (Frauenthemen) would only help “the reactionaries.”28 Despite this rocky start, the film gained recognition, winning the award of the Preis der deutschen Filmkritik (Prize of the [West] German Film Critics) then awarded by the Arbeitergemeinschaft der Filmjournalisten (Association of Film Journalists)29 at the International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen in 1972; and in a gesture of feminist solidarity by a man, Harun Farocki pushed back against the film’s hostile reception by some of the male dffb students and published an extremely positive review in Filmkritik, the most influential West German film journal of the time. The film subsequently aired on West German, Swiss, and Swedish television. According to Perincioli, “The film was screened mostly through women’s labor unions but also through church women’s groups and §218 Gruppen [groups campaigning against the West German law banning abortion] at women’s film series and women’s conferences. Because of its length and the momentum that the film created, it was often used as a warm-up for discussions.”30 The film had this function at the Women’s Film Seminar that Claudia von Alemann and Helke Sander organized in 1973 in West Berlin. True to the idea of the Zielgruppen films, Für Frauen—1. Kapitel was produced with the women featured in the film and primarily addressed female spectators. After production ended on Für Frauen—1. Kapitel, Perincioli and her partner Cillie Rentmeister turned to the subject of marriage and of sexual liberation. Another film project, with the working title Für Frauen—2. Kapitel, resulted from these deliberations. Similar to Perincioli’s graduation film, this film’s plot was to focus on experiences that were to be exemplary. During production, then ZDF producer Alexandra von Grote and film producer Regina Ziegler took the project away from Perincioli and Rentmeister and tasked TV director Gerrit Neuhaus with its realization. The film aired in 1975 under the title Anna und Edith (Anna and Edith) on the West German television station Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), becoming the first West German feature film that offered a positive portrayal of a lesbian couple.

Wandernde Kameras: Wandering Cameras While both the Basis-Film group and Perincioli held on to the concept of the Zielgruppen films, Helga Reidemeister moved away from the concept over the course of two films she created in the Märkisches Viertel. After

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studying art and participating in the exhibition of the group “Social Psychology and Politics,” which focused on the quarter, she worked there from 1968 to 1973 as a social worker. During this time, she began to work with one of the families living in the development area. Their last name was Bruder. The father of the Bruder family expressed to Reidemeister his frustrations with the media’s representation of the Märkisches Viertel. In response, Reidemeister began to experiment together with the family with the medium of film in order to portray the family’s living conditions.31 Reidemeister adopted an approached used by French filmmakers that equipped workers at the Renault factory with cameras during May ’68: she acquired a Super-8 camera for the family. She developed a concept whereby “several families take stock of the world around them, so that through a collective form of film work one could find anew a form of organizing, of a collective and more effective recognition and action, and of the support of the entire district.”32 While these goals resembled those of the BasisFilm group, the production principle was different: Reidemeister stated that she wanted “‘the direct participation of those involved as producers.’ That is, communal money, communal cameras, communal editing of the films.”33 “Wandering Cameras” should have enabled several families to determine how they would be represented in the film and to create that image on their own. Her project did not garner enough support, however, to allow it to realize this scope. Hence, Reidemeister limited herself to the Bruder family and left them first one and then later a total of three cameras. As Michael Drechsler puts it in his analysis of Reidemeister’s films: “By handing over the cameras, she left the themes and goals of the film project entirely up to the family members to determine independently. She did not intervene restrictively and instead saw her role solely as one of encouragement.”34 Initially, when only one camera was put at their disposal, the father in the family was the only one filming. Other family members only began to film when more cameras were made available to them. Because of newly appearing problems—a car accident, sudden loss of employment—the filming always receded into the background and was interrupted for long periods of time. “Upon inspection of the footage to be edited, both parents ascertained that they had excluded the painful or sore parts of the family history.”35 Between 1968 and 1973, only four hours of footage were collected. Reidemeister’s initial concept had met a dead-end. In 1973, Reidemeister began to study at the dffb. She brought the project with the Bruder family into her studies, with a fellow student, Sofoklis Adamidis, intermittently joining in. Together they reoriented the project. As Michael Drechsler writes, “Over the course of the new orientation of the media work, both filmmakers moved into the forefront of filming. While cinematic coverage of the environment had previously rested entirely in the hands of the parents, the transition to a product with high

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standards demanded a takeover of production by media professionals.”36 Still during her studies, Reidemeister edited the new material she and Adamidis shot on sixteen-mm together with the earlier footage to create the seventy-minute long documentary Der gekaufte Traum (The Purchased Dream, 1977). While Reidemeister’s initial concept bears affinity with the concepts of the Zielgruppen films (using film to reflect behavior), the reorganized project shifted away from the shared terrain. Redemeister had produced Der gekaufte Traum with the Bruder family, but the film no longer targeted a specific group. Reidemeister continued this transition with her second film from the Märkisches Viertel. Her thesis film, Von wegen “Schicksal” (Is This Fate? 1979), focuses on another family living in the quarter, showing the divorce of two parents and the subsequent conflicts between the mother and her children, who blame her for the separation. Der gekaufte Traum and Von wegen “Schicksal” both emerged out of a process of close coordination between filmmakers and the persons filmed, a method that contrasted starkly with the films directed by Ziewer and Willutzki. Reidemeister went so far as to grant Irene Rakowitz, the mother, the right to prohibit the film if it did not accord with her expectations. As a result, Reidemeister had to balance her obligations towards Irene Rakowitz with the limits the dffb set for her. After all, the film school provided the money and film equipment for the project. Reidemeister retrospectively confessed, But I really could not carry that out, because it was my thesis film, and my degree depended on it. And since the college could not file a claim to prohibit Irene from stopping the film, I told her she would have a say in the film’s content. Before the shoot, we drove out to a family in the country, and we slept in an enormous double bed, with my tape recorder between us, and talked the whole night through. I brought up absolutely everything that came to mind and transcribed our conversations and then filled enormous file folders with all of it and gave them to her. From the very beginning, she had absolute control. That was a very unusual style of production.37

With the decision to focus primarily on one protagonist, Reidemeister sharply deviated from the Zielgruppen film’s core idea of producing film with a target group. Reidemeister’s decision to involve the family in the first film and Irene Rakowitz in the second film in all decisions can be explained by the Rakowitz family’s rejection of the approach used by Ziewer and Willutzki. As Reidemeister reported in an interview with Marc Silberman, “I got to know a working-class family who hated filmmakers like Willutzki and Ziewer. The family said, ‘They are always making films about us, but never with us. They never show us the way we really want to be shown.’”38 The decision to forgo labor divisions between the filmmaker and the people

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being filmed also had advantages for Reidemeister: “I wanted this codetermination because I also wanted to protect myself from the impression that I exploited Irene, because, at the time, it was said: you go somewhere, hold up the camera, and then exploit the people, use them to fit your conceit. I wanted to protect myself against that.”39 Yet the feared accusation would nonetheless later be leveled against the film. Its screening at the Duisburger Filmwoche in 1979 triggered a debate over the position of filmmakers in documentaries.40

Instructive Dead Ends The documentary approach of Reidemeister’s Der gekaufte Traum and Von wegen “Schicksal” differed markedly from that of Ziewer, Willutzki, and even Perincioli. While Reidemeister’s films document the convergence on reality, the films by Ziewer, Willutzki, and Perincioli grapple with the result of this convergence. After their documentary work, Ziewer and Willutzki, as well as Perincioli, switched to feature filmmaking. Looking back at their documentary work, one notices that these films, too, have more to do with procedures, structures, and modeling processes than with individuality. By contrast, both of Reidemeister’s films from the Märkisches Viertel shed light on social conditions via the portrayal of individual situations, without generalizing. In the ten short years between the first Kinogramm and the completion of Reidemeister’s Von wegen “Schicksal” a fundamental transition had taken place. Rather than the Zielgruppen film, it was now the participatory work between women filmmakers and individual subjects that were central to the production efforts. The mode of the collaboration, this shift suggested, must always be renegotiated; mutual trust and the necessity of finishing the film must be balanced out. The Zielgruppen films, which emerged as an idea of political agitation, were transformed by tangible experiences into a medium of reflection that made individual experiences accessible to collective discussions. The questions formulated by Group 3 back in 1967—“How does one film political slogans?”; “In which ways does one address specific groups?”—gave way, after the first attempts to respond quickly solidified into dogmas, to cinematic forms that brought the process of consciousness-raising into film. One could outline the similarities between Perincioli’s and Reidemeister’s films along these lines. The decision by Perincioli and Reidemeister to support women as protagonists marks a dividing line: giving women in films the courage to use their own voice (sometimes literally, as with Janine Rickmann in Für Frauen)—and to encourage them toward a liberating reflection on their situation—turns out to have been a challenge for male directors. For far too long, to make political films had meant that men

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would make political films about men. Women were challenging this sexist and narrow premise. Both protagonists in Reidemeister’s films were well aware of the films’ political function. Irene Rakowitz, protagonist in Von wegen “Schicksal,” explains in the program information for the film’s broadcast on TV, “Family is taboo, and I think that is not right. It is also a success of my political thought process, which began at some point, that I learned that family actually does not have to be taboo! . . . Family is the breeding ground of all social behavior, and I think that it must be revealed exactly where this behavior comes from.”41 Irene Bruder, protagonist in Der gekaufte Traum, is cited in the film’s accompanying booklet saying, “For us, it was important not only to portray ourselves but also to make others recognize their situation through this portrayal and not to allow oneself to be discouraged.”42 By the end of the 1970s, countless films had been produced that asked the question: what is a political film, and how do political films relate to political movements of the time? Concepts like the slogan films from Group 3 or the Zielgruppen films may appear to be dead ends, but within the quest for political filmmaking they proved to be instructive ones. –Translated by Courtney Leikam and Alex Claussen

Notes Parts of this paper have been published in German as Fabian Tietke, “Die Politisierung der Filmproduktion: Die Filmarbeit von Christian Ziewer, Max Willutzki, Cristina Perincioli und Helga Reidemeister im Märkischen Viertel in den 1970er Jahren,” Filmblatt 19, no. 55/6 (2014): 92–113 and Fabian Tietke, “Dies- und jenseits der Bilder—Film und Politik an der dffb 1966–1995, Teil 1: 1966–1969,” https://dffbarchiv.de/editorial/dies-jenseits-bilder-film-politik-dffb-1966-1995. 1 Two institutions predated the founding of the dffb in 1966: the Deutsche Institut für Film und Fernsehen (German Institute for Film and Television) in Munich and the Department of Film at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm founded in 1961. See Ralph Eue, “Vorgeschichte der dffb 1962–1966,” Deutsche Kinematek Museum für Film und Fernsehen, accessed July 21, 2018, https://dffbarchiv.de/editorial/vorgeschichte-dffb-1962-66. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise. 2 For more on the early years of the dffb, see Tilman Baumgärtel, Vom Guerrillakino zum Essayfilm: Harun Farocki—Werkmonografie eines Autorenfilmers (Berlin: b_books, 2002), 25–82; and Christina Gerhardt, “1968 and the Early Cinema of the dffb,” 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special Issue of The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10 (2017): 26–44. 3 Arbeitsprogramm Gruppe 3, five pages of typescript. Deutsche Kinemathek Schriftgutarchiv, Produktionsakte Gruppe 3, N24344_dffb.

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4 “Minimale Variation: Harun Farocki im Gespräch mit Georg Alexander,” Kunst der Vermittlung, accessed March 24, 2017, http://www.kunst-der-vermittlung. de/dossiers/bildforschung-farocki/farocki-und-georg-alexander/. 5 Cf. Karl-Heinz Schubert, “Die Basisgruppen als Stadtteilgruppen,” archived through Infopartisan.net, accessed March 24, 2017, http://www.infopartisan. net/archive/1967/266722.html. 6 For a history of this approach, see Jan Ole Arps, Frühschicht: Linke Fabrikintervention in den 70er Jahren (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2011). Outside the context of Germany, see also Pablo La Parra-Pérez, “Workers Interrupting the Factory: Helena Lumbreras’s Militant Factory Films between and Italy and Spain (1968–1978),” in 1968 and Global Cinema, eds. Christina Gerhardt and Sara Saljoughi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018), 363–84. 7 A list of further titles can be found at Dietmar Kesten, “K-Gruppen und Filmwesen, mao-projekt,” archived on Materialen zur Analyse von Opposition (MAO), March 23, 2010, http://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/KUL/Filmwesen. shtml. See also Thomas Elsaesser’s essay in this volume about Arbeiterfilme that grew out of the dffb. 8 For population and housing numbers, as well as the age distribution, see Autorengruppe “märkisches viertel zeitung,” stadtteilzeitung: dokumente und analysen zur stadtteilarbeit (Reinbek bei Hamburg: rororo, 1974), 62–112, here 84 and 13–23, here 20. For information about the Märkisches Viertel see also Christiane Reinecke, “Am Rande der Gesellschaft? Das Märkische Viertel—eine West-Berliner Großsiedlung und ihre Darstellung als urbane Problemzone,” Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 11, no. 2 (2014): 212–34, http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/2-2014/id=5095. 9 On the issue of lacking spaces for children to gather and the establishment of Kinderläden, see also Christina Gerhardt’s essay in this volume on “Helke Sander’s dffb Films and West Germany’s Feminist Movement.” 10 See Volker Baer, “Vergleich in Aussicht? Die Filmakademie und die einst relegierten Studenten,” Der Tagesspiegel, March 25, 1970, reproduced in Volker Baer, in Worte—Widerworte: Texte zum Film 1958–2007, ed. Ralf Schenk (Marburg: Schüren, 2009), 134–35. Here, 134. See also in literary form Ulrike Edschmid, Das Verschwinden des Philip S. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2013), 79. 11 See Michael Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit in basisdemokratischen Initiativen: Die Filmprojekte im Märkischen Viertel (West-Berlin: Verlag Klaus Guhl 1980), 59. 12 Conversation between the author and Christian Ziewer (2008). According to Michael Drechsler, the group additionally received about 33,000 DM from the project of the Pädagogische Hochschule. See Michael Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit, 59. 13 Thomas Hartwig, Jean-François Le Moign, Max Willutzki, and Christian Ziewer, Projekt Märkisches Viertel (unpublished Filmexposé, Berlin 1969), cited by Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit, 60. 14 Drechsler, 60.

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Drechsler, 60. On the newspaper, see Autorengruppe, “märkisches viertel zeitung.” 17 The fourth and final Kinogramm, Sanierung für wen? (Redevelopment for whom?), was seemingly created by Willutzki solely for the Wuppertaler Kulturevent urbs 71. See Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit, 69. Katja Reichard also discusses a fifth Kinogramm, Mieterproteste im MV (Renter’s Protest in the Märkisches Viertel), though no other conversational partner remembers this. Katja Reichard, “Wandernde Kameras: Operative Medienpraxis, Projektarbeit und kollektive Organisierung im Berliner Märkischen Viertel der 1970er Jahre,” in Das Erziehungsbild: Zur visuellen Kultur des Pädagogischen, eds. Tom Holert and Marion von Osten (Wien: Schlebrügge, 2010), 315–36. Here 328. The publication on the tenth anniversary of the dffb’s founding lists seven Kinogramms in Willutzki’s filmography. See dffb, dffb: 10 Jahre Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (Berlin: dffb, 1976), 155. 18 On the events, see Horst Lange, “Die Stadtteilzelle MV 1970: Die Besetzung der Halle und ihre Folgen,” in “jetzt reden wir”: Wohnste sozial, haste die Qual, 80–84. Here, 80. See also Reichard, Wandernde Kameras, 321. 19 On Hans Rickmann’s assessment of the parent-child group and its role, see Hans Rickmann “Zur Situation der Eltern-Kind-Gruppen im MV und zur Märkischen Viertel Zeitung 1970/71,” in “jetzt reden wir”: Wohnste sozial, haste die Qual, 104–9. The film and its excerpts were also displayed by the SPD faction of the BVV Reinickendorf. See Autorengruppe “märkisches viertel zeitung,” 102. 20 Reichard, Wandernde Kameras, 327. 21 Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit, 45. 22 For a history of the foundations of the Basis-Film renting agency, see “Wir über uns,” Basis-Film Verleih Berlin, accessed March 24, 2017, http://www.basisfilm. de/basis_neu/seite2.php?titel=wir. 23 A request from Cristina Perincioli for 3,800 DM is found in the meeting notes of the dffb Academic Council from Thursday, September 10, 1970. Deutsche Kinemathek Schriftgutarchiv, Protokolle Akademischer Rat 1970, N4476_Akarat_ dffb. The video equipment came from another dffb student, Philip Werner Sauber. Like the Basis-Film group, Sauber had invested his money in film equipment and had the first portable twenty-kilogram camera in West Berlin. See Cristina Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch: Das Beste, was von der 68er Bewegung blieb (Berlin: Querverlag 2015), 53 and Edschmid, Das Verschwinden des Philip S., 79. 24 Cristina Perincioli, “Anarchismus—Lesbianismus—Frauenzentrum: Warum mußte die Tomate so weit fliegen?,” in Wie weit flog die Tomate? Eine 68erinnenGala der Reflexion, eds. Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and Feministisches Institut (Berlin: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung 1999), 98–117. Here, 107. 25 Conversation with Perincioli during the screening of Für Frauen—1. Kapitel at the Berliner Kino Arsenal on December 13, 2010. 26 On the decision to make Für Frauen—1. Kapitel a feature film, see Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch, 55. 16

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27 Perincioli, “Anarchismus—Lesbianismus—Frauenzentrum,” 108. In Berlin wird feministisch, Perincioli quotes at length a letter written by Horst Lange to Christa Maerker. 28 Perincioli, “Anarchismus—Lesbianismus—Frauenzentrum,” 101. 29 It is called the Verband der deutschen Filmkritik ([West] German Film Critics Association). 30 Perincioli, Berlin wird feministisch, 59. 31 Helga Reidemeister was involved with many publications during her work in the Märkisches Viertel, among them “jetzt reden wir”: Wohnste sozial, haste die Qual and articles in the journal Kursbuch. 32 Interview by Michael Drechsler with Helga Reidemeister and Sofoklis Adamidis on October 2, 1975. Reidemeister interviewed by Drechsler, Selbstorganisierte Medienarbeit, 94. 33 Drechsler, 94. 34 Drechsler, 94. 35 Drechsler, 95. 36 Drechsler, 95. 37 Helga Reidemeister, “Mein Herz sieht die Welt schwarz,” in Wie haben Sie das gemacht? Aufzeichnungen zu Frauen und Filmen, eds. Bettina Schoeller-Bouju, Claudia Lenssen (Marburg: Schüren 2014), 108–13. Here, 110. 38 Marc Silberman, “The Working Class Family: Interview with Helga Reidemeister,” Jump Cut 27 (July 1982), accessed March 24, 2017, http://www. ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC27folder/ReidmsterInt.html. Even in the collaboration between Ziewer and Willutzki and protagonists Horst Lange and Hans Rickmann conflicts frequently occurred, as a dispute from 1974 shows: “Warum ist Solidarität so schwierig?,” in “jetzt reden wir”: Wohnste sozial, haste die Qual, 157, 166–71, 176–93. 39 Reidemeister, “Mein Herz sieht die Welt Schwarz,” 111; also Uli Opitz, “Protokoll der Diskussion über den Film “Von wegen ‘Schicksal’” from Helga Reidemeister on November 8th,” Duisburger Protokolle 1979, accessed March 24, 2017, http://www.protokult.de/prot/VON%20WEGEN%20SCHICKSAL%20 -%20Helga%20Reidemeister%20-%201979.pdf. 40 The debate was named the “Kreimeier-Wildenhahn-debate” after its protagonists Klaus Wildenhahn und Klaus Kreimeier, both former lecturers at the dffb. 41 Das Fernsehspiel im ZDF, Programminformation Nr. 23, Dez. 1978–Febr 1979, cited in Britta Hartmann und Gerlinde Waz, eds., Die Dokumentarfilme von Helga Reidemeister (Berlin: Deutsche Kinemathek, 2015), 15. 42 Accompanying booklet to Der gekaufte Traum, cited in Hartmann and Waz, Die Dokumentarfilme von Helga Reidemeister, 15.

7:

West Germany’s “Workers’ Films”: A Cinema in the Service of Television?

Thomas Elsaesser

A

of diverse and prolific production, post-1968 West German filmmaking is still mostly associated with the star directors of the New German Cinema, especially Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, and several women directors such as Margarethe von Trotta, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Doris Dörrie. Even in the communitarian 1960s and 70s, when the “death of the author” was the politically correct motto, the precariousness of film exhibition in West Germany and the system of municipally funded art house venues (the “Communal Cinemas”) required independent distributors to market virtually all their productions under a director/author label, with filmmakers often travelling with their films, like musicians.1 These programming exigencies obscure the fact that most Western European filmmaking has, for the better part of four decades, been dependent on the large national television networks: for finance, production facilities, and even exhibition, in the form of scheduled broadcasts.2 This was particularly true of West Germany, where the various state subsidy systems for filmmaking were tied to, and synchronized with, the television networks to such an extent that one had to ask: was television putting its resources into supporting a national cinema, or had the nation’s filmmakers put themselves in the service of television?3 A particularly illuminating case not only of the West German filmmaking community’s interpenetration with television but also proof of its vulnerability when it came to targeting domestic television viewers (while still envisaging a national or even international cinema audience) was a relatively short-lived but historically important experiment conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the so-called Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films).4 It was the first time since the birth of the New German Cinema (or “Young German Cinema,” as it was known between 1962 and 1970) that a group of films made by independent directors was launched specifically as a genre, rather than under the then so powerful and almost magic banner of the Autorenfilm (authors’ films). In what follows, I will sketch some of the thinking behind the decision to revitalize and at the same time radicalize the concept of genre, by making it productive not in its traditional FTER SOME FIFTY YEARS

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context of the cinema but for television, where it represented a useful halfway house between the information-and-issue orientation of the docudrama and the entertainment-and-spectacle orientation of classical genre-cinema. The films grouped under Arbeiterfilme constitute a limited corpus that includes Theo Gallehr and Rolf Schübel’s Rote Fahnen sieht man besser (Red Flags Are More Visible, 1971), a documentary, divided into selfcontained scenes and episodes, about a factory closure; a series of feature films by Christian Ziewer and Klaus Wiese (Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut [Dear Mother, I’m Doing Fine, 1971], Schneeglöckchen blühen im September [Snowdrops Bloom in September, 1973], and Der aufrechte Gang [Walking Tall, 1975]) focusing on the internal conflicts between differently politicized workers on the shop floor and how these affect their confrontations with management; a five-part television soap opera Acht Stunden sind kein Tag (Eight Hours Are Not a Day, 1972), directed by Fassbinder and depicting the life and work situation of several families; three films made by Marianne Lüdcke and Ingo Kratisch (Die Wollands [The Wolland Family, 1972], Lohn und Liebe [Pay Packet and Love, 1974], and Familienglück [A Happy Family, 1975]) dealing with family life as much as with the work place; and finally Helma Sanders’s Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding, 1975), the story of a Turkish girl coming to the Federal Republic to escape an arranged marriage and find her lover, a Gastarbeiter (foreign “guest” worker) in Cologne, whom she eventually meets while working as a prostitute. Since Ziewer’s films were considered to be Autorenfilme, it was above all the narrative strategies and stylistic choices of Ziewer that came under scrutiny and sometimes received criticism. Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut, Schneeglöckchen blühen im September, and Der aufrechte Gang form a kind of trilogy in which the conflicts, contradictions, and potential for solidarity facing a particular segment of the working class are explored. In order to make these factory workers representative, Ziewer and his co-writer Wiese paid special attention to two aspects: they did extensive research on the objective factors shaping the conflicts, and second, they analyzed for each stage the escalating confrontations between the parties, by detailing the respective interests involved and by giving insight into the protagonists’ motives. For instance, in order to create context, they contrasted the workers’ own subjective perception and awareness of these interests with those of management. But they examined the conflicts also in light of the more orthodox Marxist theories about “labour” and “capital,” because they were prevalent at the time, notably among student activists and left-wing intellectuals. The problem for the scripts, then, was to create characters with whom the audience could identify, that is, sufficiently individualized to convey “some of the naturalism and obsession with detail of other television plays” but also sufficiently typical and representative to carry the

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more abstract play of contending forces.5 The results reflected these tensions, without ever being able to resolve them satisfactorily: [P]rotagonists are lost from view and incidental characters take over the main action. The film is a network of collective relationships. . . . Plots composed of collective actions are not likely to produce figures with whom the viewer can identify throughout the whole film. He can no longer put himself in the place of individual heroes when his attention is being claimed by the relationships among a number of characters. The old character dramaturgy that tried to draw generalized conclusions from typical people in typical situations is made obsolete by the laws of reality themselves.6

Ziewer justified his conventional mise-en-scène and the staged recreation of conflicts partly by objectivist criteria (the drama of false consciousness in the protagonists’ heads) and partly by referring to the consciousness of his ideal addressees, the workers whose notion of reality is formed by the identification strategies of Hollywood fiction film. Yet with the dramatic arc already fixed in advance, the realist claims are in some sense compromised, even if the precise form and content of the conflict is the result of specific research. Inadvertently no doubt, the director becomes a sort of administrator of the workers’ own experiences and arbiter of their (false) consciousness. Such dramaturgy relies, as in all fiction films, on the premise that the spectator is given access to the characters’ inner life, that he sees the world from their point of view. This manipulation of the audiences’ position of knowledge, which in a conventional film produces suspense or pathos, was, in Ziewer’s films, a necessary precondition for understanding how the conflict of interests are lived in the specific terms by those affected: the resulting melodrama tries to disguise itself as authenticity. For how can the filmmaker with his fictional construction attempt to mediate between the real worker on the shop floor and the real worker in front of the television screen, while presuming to have access to his subjects’ subjectivity? As Johannes Beringer, speaking as one such left-wing intellectuals, put it in a sharp attack on the workers’ films in general: To commit oneself to serving the cause of the working class would have required first of all the realization that as a director one cannot have a free pass to the reality of the proletariat as easily as to a leftwing film festival. The interests of the working class are by no means automatically identical with those of the filmmaker. . . . Placed between the emancipatory needs of the workers and the capitalist media’s needs to package and sell issues, the filmmaker is in a difficult and dubious position. His role of mediator and go-between cannot arbitrarily change its master: the subjectivity of his creative effort is the very object of the media. . . . The form in which, therefore, those affected pass on their material, their experiences, their ‘life’ is crucial. Precisely the fact that they have to sell their labour might dispose

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them towards keeping their inner life to themselves, at least until it is clear in whose interest it is finally administered.7

The constant references to verifiable facts and painstaking research risk becoming a mere fetish, and the decision to direct attention to “the world of work” becomes little more than a laudable exercise in delivering a hitherto unknown slice of life to a bourgeois public. Once one moves away from an auteurist perspective as well as the questions of realism and takes a more institutional approach, however, another perspective opens up on these Arbeiterfilme. I am supporting this counter-argument by another look at a monograph by Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm (British Film Institute, London, 1981), which still stands out from other literature on the subject. It not only puts a great deal of the historical background to West German television in perspective but also analyzes this specific instance of co-production through both the institutional framework and the ideological questions that such a collaboration raises, rather than focusing merely on the filmmakers as authors or on the films as texts—even though the book’s subtitle reads Fassbinder, Ziewer, and others. Collins and Porter, for instance, have chapters on the political context and on the growth of state-owned television before they discuss the genesis of the Arbeiterfilm; fifty pages of appendices contain translations of material whose usefulness goes beyond merely documenting the case at hand. For even though the history of the “workers’ films” may have been brief, and the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR, the broadcasting company involved) tended subsequently to downplay its part in this success story, the films have to this day retained exemplary status: they contain, at least embryonically, a theory of the media under the political conditions of state-ownership and representational democracy. The case is exemplary in that, on the one hand, the political stance—arguing at least implicitly for a radical change of the economic system and the mode of production—was such that no commercial company or private source of financing would have taken on these films; and on the other hand, only politically independent filmmakers not under contract to and not employed by television could have taken the risks or brought so much commitment to the task, while television program directors could justify the series internally by pointing to the freelance or “author” status of the filmmakers. What is to be understood as the institutional underpinnings of the Arbeiterfilm as a series of films on working class subjects is the fact that they were commissioned by the WDR one of West German television’s most prestigious networks, in which the workplace is the primary site and the working life the primary setting for dramatic conflicts. These conflicts are only marginally concerned with psychological or emotional tensions between characters, and they do not depict the struggle of the forces of order against

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disruptions or threats to the community, as is the case in the majority of genre films made in West Germany under commercial conditions. Instead, the central conflicts are those arising out of the fundamental contradictions between different sets of interests, mainly those of organized and nonunionized labor (e.g., West Germany’s foreign workers) and between labor and management or employer, especially in the manufacturing industries of the West German Ruhrgebiet (Ruhr region), the country’s industrial heartland. Since the making of the films coincided with West Germany’s first major recession for more than thirty years, beginning in 1973, the films’ target audiences were an increasingly politicized working class and, second, a general public only ill-informed about world political events (such as the Middle-East oil crisis) and the consequences of these events for working-class people. The films, for instance, focused on the fatal logic of job insecurity and stress at the workplace, leading to domestic traumas or psychic illness. Precisely because direct (whether fictional or documentary) depictions of industrial relations, of strikes, lay-offs, and lock-outs, shop-floor militancy, trade union organizations, and of working conditions and their effects on family life are as rare and politically controversial in West Germany as they would be elsewhere in the industrialized world, the Arbeiterfilm demonstrates in much more concrete terms than the analysis of a quiz show or even a critique of a thriller series the decision-making process and the command structure of a large, publicly-funded corporation. Comprising the genre are a grand total of eleven films, either commissioned or co-produced by the WDR between 1968 and 1976—films that, taken as a whole, are unparalleled, since they are still the exceptions to a certain programming policy. By dealing explicitly with places of work from the point of view of those affected (“vom Standpunkt der Betroffenen”), as the key film, Gallehr and Schübel’s Rote Fahnen sieht man besser (Red Flags Are More Visible, 1971) puts it, not without deliberate provocation, the films are well-suited to revealing the assumptions and pressures that shape work in television at all times but that would normally remain internalized, unvoiced, and implicit. Those involved in making the decisions—from the Director-General, and the Heads of Department, down to the producers and (freelance) directors—realized the chorus of disapproval the concept would generate. In an article in Die Zeit from 1966, WDR’s Intendant (Director-General), Klaus von Bismarck, had announced his intention of breaking with the cautious and conservative approach of West German television: Experience has shown that programs tend to ossify when the demands of society have reached a state of perfect balance; program patterns become inflexible, planning is carried out on a sweeping, long-term basis, and productions are safely mediocre, without risks, gambles, or experiments. In this situation what is needed, again and again, is the initiative of a few individuals. . . . The Intendant of a broadcasting

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company that is free of both government and commercial influences must take on the difficult task of protecting many different interests both from within and without. But when in doubt he should opt for taking the risk.8

Martin Weibel, chief producer at WDR, was even more specific: Rote Fahnen sieht man besser constitutes teaching and learning material in so far as it exposes large economic and small private situations of conflict. . . . Concepts like exploitation, alienation and social injustice seem to have become slogans. . . . It was necessary to make abstract concepts concrete and specific by means of an example from real-life experience, in order to ensure that other potential victims would have no difficulty in understanding. So the film attempts to take the dramatization of social reality seriously.9

Those involved in developing this form of dramatized social issue film knew they were exploring not only the working reality of millions of people but also, as it were, the “outer envelope” of television’s role as an agency of mediation and socialization. In effect, the Arbeiterfilm brought to a crisis point two sets of working hypotheses that have hardened into dogma in television practice: the notion of a clear demarcation line between news, current affairs, and documentary, on the one hand, and drama, that is fiction, on the other hand. Peter Märtesheimer, for instance, the then Head of Department at WDR responsible for Fassbinder’s miniseries Acht Stunden sind kein Tag,10 reflecting on the difference between the issue-oriented television feature and the kind of spectator involvement he wanted for the film series, defended the idea of a positive hero: Many television plays, good and bad, have come about because a drama producer or scriptwriter said at some time or other “someone ought to make a film about. . . .” Then a so-called “theme” usually follows, or a “problem,” which the person (who considers it to be a serious issue) considers relevant. This approach, which surely has something to do with the proximity of the television editorial staff in the drama department to those in current affairs, features and the political journal (“I have a program going out on Monday—do you know about any more grievances?”) has in recent years made a definite impact on the television play, and has set it apart from the cinema film. . . . Now, there would be nothing wrong with this approach, if this fixation with bringing the facts to light were also extended to consider how these facts should be presented. . . . The use of drama, which attempts to deal with reality by means of utopia, is not unproblematic, as is evident when one thinks maybe of Fassbinder’s Acht Stunden sind kein Tag, a working-class series whose hero certainly does not act as workers generally do. Nevertheless, reality was intended, but this reality was not to appear as natural or unchangeable but as part of a process, which might be influenced by human beings.11

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If the idea of the “positive hero” inserted into the realistic and even documentary depiction of a situation harks back to the films from the late 1920s and early 1930s, such as Piehl Jutzi’s Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krause’s Journey into Happiness, 1929), a fiction film about a working-class family in Berlin, or Hunger in Waldenburg (The Shadow of a Mine, 1929), a documentary about unemployment in a Silesian village, in order to challenge the strict separation between drama and documentary, then the other television dogmas that the Arbeiterfilm transgressed were the assumptions that “balance” and “objectivity” were inherent attributes of television broadcasting and that, in any program purporting to be about real life, justice must be seen to be done. This is achieved by having somebody on the program act as a moderator, who can raise real or hypothetical counter-arguments. Rote Fahnen sieht man besser, in particular, ran foul of even liberal commentators, because its evident partisanship for the victims of a factory closure dispensed with balancing its portrayal with a statement from the management. The critics were swift to pounce: Television writers do not take on an easy task when they tackle economic matters. Economics is particularly difficult to translate into the visual medium. For this reason one should be tolerant towards less successful attempts. However, there is a particular form of economic and socio-political film production, which is not made by experts, which does not actually clarify relations and does not criticize the basis of expertise. Its aim is pure defamation. Rote Fahnen sieht man besser is an obvious example of this.12

In West Germany, the division between information (property held, as it were, in the public domain) and personal opinion (the prerogative, above all, of the film-auteur and artist) is reinforced by analogous administrativedepartmental divisions (drama/current affairs), and it is this division of labor that the Arbeiterfilm upset by giving a positive definition to the ambiguous term “representation,” both in its political and its aesthetic sense: what can be shown, for whom, and from whose point of view? The reasons why such a test-case as the Arbeiterfilm could be mounted at all—almost in the spirit of Brecht’s “model-books” or his earlier Dreigroschenprozess (which he called “a sociological experiment”)13—are to be sought in the conjuncture of a particular historical moment and a particular institutional structure. By the early 1970s, the student movement in West Germany had reached its peak and, at least temporarily, had managed to politicize many of those active in education and in the independent, freelance sector, at the margins of the public service media or official culture. Thus, for instance, more than two-thirds of the filmmakers involved in the Arbeiterfilm belonged to a single class [of 1968/69] of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), whose students were expelled after a bitter and

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passionate struggle over the future direction of the school.14 Equally important was the fact that the Social Democrats—in power for the first time since 1932—still enjoyed the good will and support of the broad Left, while the Right took a low-key profile and adopted a wait-and-see approach. Finally, the West German economy was experiencing its first recession, and with it came industrial conflict—again something that Germany had not experienced on a large scale since the 1930s. Thus, considerable pressure existed for the media to reflect these events and to portray, if not the causes, then at least the effects of what were indeed radical changes in West Germany’s postwar society. In this constellation, the WDR proved to be the “weakest link,” so to speak, in the chain of institutional conservatism among the nine regional television networks, which together supply the ARD, the more middlebrow of West Germany’s two national channels. At the WDR, a combination of personal and political factors made for unique conditions: the non-conformist outlook of Klaus von Bismarck and the specific demographic factors of the Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia, which the WDR serviced. Von Bismarck was able to exploit to the fullest the television charter’s definition of balanced reporting—a charter that the WDR ironically owed to the legacy of the British Allied Authorities, who in response to the Nazi abuse of broadcasting gave the service in their zone a particular definition of public responsibility and representativeness, modeled on the BBC. Basing his argument on the demographic reality, namely that North Rhine-Westphalia had a very high number of working-class people as WDR’s core audience, von Bismarck could legitimately claim that proportionally the views of the working class were under-represented in the overall spread of programs, if one considered that WDR material was received by the industrial population of the Ruhrgebiet as well as the Catholic bourgeoisie around Bonn, Cologne, and the Rhine valley. But given the explicitly party-political constitution of the various administrative and consultative councils to whom the Director-General reported, it required a very delicate balance of regional political forces to allow von Bismarck to implement a programming policy whereby his broadcasting service could make an impact on the national networks, for which the WDR supplied twenty-five percent of all programs. It is one of the central theses of Collins and Porter that the rise and demise of the Arbeiterfilm directly parallels the prevailing political tendencies of the North Rhine-Westphalia Landtag (regional government), as represented in and filtered through the administrative and decision-making bodies of the WDR itself: Thus the constitution of the WDR has ensured an almost direct line of political accountability between the Intendant and the Landtag, but, because of the particular politics of North Rhine-Westphalia, it has given the Intendant substantial independence, provided that he

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operated within the liberal public service traditions envisaged by the British authorities when they set up NWDR [sic] at the end of the war. When, however, programming policy upsets two of the three interests on the administrative council, then the Intendant becomes politically accountable in a very real sense. This limitation on broadcasting independence was to play a key role in the history of the Arbeiterfilme.15

The end of the experiment had little to do with lack of audience response or with the fact that the filmmakers became tired of the format and did not want to be typecast (contributing factors, to be sure) but much more with the change in political climate, the formation of right-wing pressure groups, press campaigns against individual programs, and personnel changes at the head of the WDR. The story of the WDR and the Arbeiterfilm risks at this point becoming a “genre” in itself: that of the Left learning precious lessons from its defeats. For a brief historical moment, the low clouds seemed to be parting, a ray of revolutionary hope became visible before it was again extinguished by the grey mass of disinformation, prejudice, and vested interests. If this was all there was to it, the history of the Arbeiterfilm could hardly serve as a model. The coming together of the WDR and the worker’s films was not fortuitous; but neither was it inevitable: herein lies the subject’s theoretical and exemplary interest. For what was ultimately at stake was a particular self-definition of public service broadcasting and its notion of public accountability. The episode of the Arbeiterfilm points quite naturally to a more enlightened and democratic possibility for broadcasting than that practiced at the time, proving that the claim towards Olympian impartiality above politics and factions not only was manifestly untrue but also had become socially unsatisfactory and even politically dangerous. For it is clear that beyond the historical interest in an aspect of West German film and television co-operation that the Arbeiterfilm holds for the specialist, the issues raised contribute to a debate about both the role of independent filmmaking generally and the function of a filmic genre or a body of work, in a situation where the producer, distributor, and exhibitor of the product is television. The Arbeiterfilm was catering, from a national perspective, to a minority audience and often presented minority views even within this viewer group. As such, it made a strong case against over-valuing audience-numbers, that is, the ratings game as an end in itself, and offered a valid rationale for particular programming policies. In a country and at a time when the different public service networks were not in an economically competitive situation with commercial television but nonetheless pretended to be, there was the danger that politicians took for granted the availability of television for delivering audiences to the government of the day (which through the national evening news in any case already addresses “the people”). The priority given by the WDR during the early 1970s (and thus

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indicating a potential inherent in the West German system generally) to questions of public access and public accountability (open government, proportional representation) contrasts favorably with other countries’ media lobbies’ obsession with balance and objectivity, in which so often the dominant ideas turn out, no doubt not by coincidence, to be the ideas of the dominant. The final paragraph of the study by Collins and Porter makes this point with forceful clarity: It remains our view that although disappointing for those who perceive considerable aesthetic interest and artistic success in the Arbeiterfilm and greet it as a small step towards unskewing the representation of the public sphere offered by mass-communication and therefore towards ushering the spectators in their own real world with attentive faculties, this ending (of the “worker’s film” as a genre) is paradoxically a testimony to one of the most positive features of the post-war West German broadcasting order. Its representation of politics and political control is much more explicit. . . . In Germany, by and large, you know who is talking to you, why and what they are saying.16

Most observers, having watched West German television news coverage over a certain period, would probably say that, in this generalized form, the statement is too optimistic. The case in this respect rests on a structural potential, which the Arbeiterfilm began to explore, not on an actual, widely followed practice, even in West Germany. Both the success and demise of the Arbeiterfilm indicate that this structural potential has to be defined in a wider social context. What the West German experience shows is that independent filmmaking can have a crucial role to play in the general landscape of media-culture of which public service broadcasting is perhaps the strongest but not the only constituent. What happened in West Germany over the subsequent decades was that non-commercial filmmaking won for itself the status of something very close to a public service. The extensive state subsidy as well as other funding schemes for filmmaking created a situation that exempted filmmakers from either defining themselves solely in terms of a radical aesthetic opposition or from becoming wholly dependent on audience- and profit- maximization.17 Almost all of the Arbeiterfilme were based on the development of ideas and storylines brought to the WDR (and subsequently one or two other networks) by writers and directors from outside the television establishment. Likewise, many films were, in fact, co-productions between television and independent producers. It points to a different role for television, as co-financier and distributor, by making it represent views, interests, and ideas not originating from within its own organization but formulated elsewhere in society and in the public sphere. Such a practice established uniquely different circuits of access and representation, usually occupied by documentaries: but the Arbeiterfilme were fiction films.

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The picture of the Arbeiterfilm would be incomplete, however, if one did not mention that these films were also shown outside of and in different viewing contexts from television programming. They were exhibited by the filmmakers’ own distribution companies (e.g., Basis Verlag in West Berlin), which often acted as production companies as well. The films also reached smaller, more specialized audiences, including trade union organizations and even personnel departments of industrial corporations that were known to hire the Arbeiterfilme for management training courses! The potential of the West German system was therefore not merely in the constitution of its public broadcasting service. It lay in the diversification and interpenetration that public funding and public accountability created for the various sectors and organizations of film production, to the point where the independent circuit was able in some small measure—with the help of television itself—to displace the monolithic structure of both television and the exclusive sphere of theatrical distribution, initiating a more flexible play of political and cultural forces. In this light, the Arbeiterfilme may not have been such a unique or isolated historical moment after all. They point to the fact that the politics of broadcasting in general determined the aesthetics of both television and independent filmmaking in (West) Germany and largely continue to inflect today’s practice, where commercial channels are obliged by charter to co-finance cultural (i.e., documentary, minority) programs. The achievement of the Arbeiterfilme, thus, consists not so much in the aesthetic strategies they employed, when measured against theories of “realism” or “political avant-garde,” but in highlighting how a sizeable section of the independent filmmaking community in West Germany (thanks to organizing itself in professional bodies) managed to gain— legally guaranteed—access to the television networks as, in some sense, equal partners, thanks to the Film Subsidy Laws and the various Framework Agreements passed during the 1970s.18 The question the Arbeiterfilme did not resolve was whether filmmakers were willing to regard their work as a public service or whether, ironically, the very success of gaining access to this new national market did not foster a new star director mentality: auteurism is still the only viable currency at film festivals and, thus, the only path to accumulate the kind of cultural capital needed for a film to find a conduit to an international audience.

Notes 1

For a brief history of the Kommunale Kinos in Germany, see the Kommunale Kinos website, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.kommunale-kinos. de/?page_id=264. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise.

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2 See Thomas Neumann, Das Recht der Filmförderung in Deutschland (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2016). 3 For a useful overview, see Roswitha Müller, “From Public to Private: Television in the Federal Republic of Germany,” New German Critique 50 (Spring–Summer, 1990): 41–55. 4 See Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, “Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the Arbeiterfilm (1967–1977),” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 5, no. 2 (1980): 233–51. 5 Christian Ziewer, quoted in Richard Collins and Vincent Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm: Fassbinder, Ziewer, and others (London: BFI Publishing, 1981), 155. 6 Collins and Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm, 157. 7 Johannes Beringer, “Ranklotzen—Arbeitsweltfilme und Verwandtes,” Filmkritik (March 1975), 125–27. 8 Collins and Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm, 126. 9 Collins and Porter, 130. 10 Denigrated, boycotted, and nearly cancelled at the time, Fassbinder’s multi-part Arbeiterfilm has been restored and digitally remastered. Its five episodes were shown on the big screen at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2017. It is now celebrated as a “cult classic.” Jochen Kürten, “Kultserie von Fassbinder: ‘Acht Stunden sind kein Tag,’” Deutsche Welle, March 3, 2017, https://www.dw.com/ de/kultserie-von-fassbinder-acht-stunden-sind-kein-tag/a-37794029. 11 Collins and Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm, 143–44. 12 Collins and Porter, 130–31. 13 For a concise summary of Brecht’s lawsuit against the Nero Film Company in connection with the filming of his Threepenny Opera, and why he regarded it as social experiment, see Monika Dommann, “Mehr Brecht als Recht,” Literaturkritik. de, July 3, 2015, http://literaturkritik.de/id/20810. 14 See Tilman Baumgärtel, “Die Rolle der DFFB-Studenten bei der Revolte von 1967/68,” September 27, September 30, and October 2, 1996, archived through Infopartisan.net, accessed December 7, 2018, http://www.infopartisan.net/ archive/1967/266705.html. See also the articles in this volume on the dffb by Timothy Scott Brown, Christina Gerhardt, and Priscilla Layne. 15 Collins and Porter, WDR and the Arbeiterfilm, 19. 16 Collins and Porter, 115, 116. 17 See Knut Hickethier, “Television and Social Transformation in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, eds. Karl Christian Führer and Corey Ross (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 129–45. 18 For a more extended discussion of the Filmförderungsgesetze and their consequences for both style and subject matter of the films produced with public funds, see Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 36–72.

8:

Guns, Girls, and Gynecologists: West German Exploitation Cinema and the St. Pauli Film Wave in the Late 1960s

Lisa Haegele

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its national art cinemas, European cinema in the 1960s and 1970s also yielded a plethora of exploitation films, from the Italian giallo and “nunsploitation” films to the Spanish erotic vampire thrillers, from the British occult horror hybrids to the French and West German softcore porn serials. While scholars have recently begun to examine the exploitation cinemas of the United States, Great Britain, France, Spain, and Italy, West German B-films have received little critical attention outside of a few notable studies on the popular sex education documentaries in the late 1960s and schoolgirl sexploitation films in the early 1970s.1 Scholarship on 1960s West German cinema has tended to focus instead on the Young German Cinema, the new art cinema that developed into the internationally acclaimed New German Cinema in the 1970s. Unlike the more intellectual films of the Young German Cinema, internationally co-produced genre films and domestic B-films attracted millions of cinemagoers. Produced by, among others, Wolf C. Hartwig and Heinz Willeg—two especially prolific B-film producers—a series of crime films exploiting the sensationalist attractions of St. Pauli, Hamburg’s notorious red light district, were enormous box-office successes in the late 1960s and are slowly gaining “Euro-cult” status today.2 Reading the series within the context of late 1960s exploitation cinema, this article argues that the St. Pauli films rebel against establishments of taste as represented by the culturally acceptable films of the Young German Cinema. At the same time, however, they reveal specific cultural anxieties in postwar West Germany. I suggest that the films therefore represent the internal tensions and paradoxes of the “long 1968,” as well as the various, sometimes contradictory, forms of the “political” in late 1960s West German culture. IDELY RECOGNIZED FOR

Exploitation and the Politics of Excess Although loosely defined, “exploitation” in film criticism generally refers to a cinema that is cheaply produced, that exploits cultural taboos as a

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means of provocation, and that directly opposes the canon of highbrow art or “quality” cinema. Exploitation films address a range of controversial topics such as prostitution, venereal disease, sexuality, and violence against women, gays, and racial minorities. With their quick turnaround rate, they are able to exploit highly topical news events from political protests to bank robberies and homicides. While they claim to warn about the vices and dangers they represent, the films tend to be more invested in sensationalizing contemporary social problems.3 Typical for this low-budget cinema is a deliberately amateurish, “ragged and rickety” style that complements the marginal topics and abject, often destitute spaces that the films portray.4 Divided roughly into a “classical” and “modern” period, exploitation since the 1960s has become increasingly aware of its status as “trash,” consciously pushing against the limits of cultural acceptability through thematic and stylistic provocations in a variety of subgenres.5 Drawing from Pam Cook’s analysis of American B-films, Tim Bergfelder suggests that exploitation often affords more possibilities for aesthetic experimentation than mainstream cinema because of its marginalized position in film culture.6 In his pivotal 1995 study on lowbrow film art, Jeffrey Sconce coined the term “paracinema” to refer to “every historical manifestation of exploitation cinema . . . devoted to all manner of cultural detritus.”7 Sconce argues that paracinema is a political cinema to the extent that it “attack[s] the established canon of ‘quality’ cinema and question[s] the legitimacy of reigning aesthete discourses on movie art” in an “aesthetic of vocal confrontation.”8 In its “calculated negation and refusal of ‘elite’ culture,” paracinema embraces an aesthetic of excess and lack of restraint in both style and thematic material, representing an “explicitly political challenge” to canons of film art and their attendant styles and discourses.9 Either “rejected or ignored by legitimate film culture,” paracinema, Sconce elaborates, “demonstrates the limitations and interests of dominant cinematic style by providing a striking counter-example of deviation.”10 The films become so messy, “histrionic, anachronistic and excessive” in the process that “even the most casual viewer” is compelled to “engage [them] ironically.”11 Already in 1969, Pauline Kael had put forward an assessment of exploitation cinema similar to Sconce’s, describing it as a “subversive gesture” against the “academic, respectable films” of “official high culture.”12 Unlike European art films, which “make us too anxious for pleasure, too bored for response,” “bad” movies allow viewers to develop their “own aesthetic responses” by offering them “liberation from duty and restraint.”13 Through stylistic excess, unsanctioned material, and celebration of anything within the realm of “poor” taste, exploitation represents a political intervention by virtue of its oppositional stance toward the established regimes of “official” film culture, whose legitimacy it both challenges and offends.

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Yet another characteristic of postwar exploitation is its international scope. As generic amalgamations of adventure, crime, horror, and pornography, B-films produced in France, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and West Germany fit within a variety of European subgenres in the 1960s, finding distribution where even the more culturally acceptable art films did not.14 Many of the films were international co-productions featuring actors and crews from across Europe, thus catering to a wide range of audiences and assuring broad distribution. While they easily traveled across national borders, the films tend to address regionally specific sensitivities and controversies.15 Breaking box-office records across Europe, the West German sex education B-films of the late 1960s, for example, were part of a larger movement toward the greater visibility of sex and sexuality in German culture, which led to the expansion of sex shops and increasingly illicit images in tabloid papers and magazines.16 With their unusual combination of pornographic explicitness and sober documentary styles, these so-called Aufklärungsfilme (“enlightenment films”) exploited the tension in West Germany between the sexual libertarianism advocated by the 68ers and the morally conservative majority of the West German middle classes in the Adenauer era, condemned by the 68ers for perpetuating, so they argued, the repressive social values and behaviors that had existed in Nazi Germany.17 The St. Pauli film wave in West Germany coincided with the sex film phenomenon in the late 1960s. Yet with their titillating images of sex and violence, bombastic styles, and action-based narratives, the St. Pauli films appear to have more in common with other European exploitation films— the Italian giallos and French and Spanish horror films, for example—than with their West German B-film peers. The films exploit in particular local anxieties surrounding the growth of criminal violence, prostitution and sex trafficking, illegal drug use, and the influx of immigrants in the global West German city in the postwar period. Since Jürgen Roland’s St. Pauli-based Polizeirevier Davidswache (Police District Davidwache; in English as Hamburg: City of Vice) attracted three million viewers within a year of its release in 1964,18 small B-film production companies such as TerraFilmkunst, Heinz Willeg’s Allianz, and Wolf C. Hartwig’s Rapid-Film piggybacked on the box-office success of Polizeirevier by churning out several cheaply produced St. Pauli films between 1965 and 1971. Among the most lucrative of the films was Der Arzt von St. Pauli (The Doctor of St. Pauli, 1968; in English as Bedroom Stewardesses), directed by Rolf Olsen, who achieved cult fame for his “sleazy” German-Italian political thriller Blutiger Freitag (Bloody Friday) in 1972.19 In 1969, Der Arzt von St. Pauli was awarded the Goldene Leinwand for reaching three million viewers,20 and by the end of the year, Olsen’s B-film remake of the 1954 film Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins (On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight; in English as Shock Treatment, 1969) and Jürgen Roland’s

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Die Engel von St. Pauli (The Angels of St. Pauli, 1969; in English as Angels of the Street) topped the charts. Olsen’s and Roland’s films outperformed not only the sex films of the year but also Peter Hunt’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969),21 the sixth motion picture in the James Bond series, one of the most profitable cinematic imports in 1960s West Germany.22 The St. Pauli films capitalized also on the success of contemporary crime shows, engaging directors and actors working primarily in television— Jürgen Roland, Wolfgang Staudte, Günther Neutze, and Horst Frank, among others—and adapting their styles and subjects. The St. Pauli-based B-films form part of a greater international film movement that deliberately positioned itself against the established regimes of “good” taste as exemplified by the art cinema’s esoteric aesthetics and serious interrogations of national history and politics. Indeed, the West German films exploit the very issues that the Young German Cinema critically addressed, including abortion, xenophobia, and classism. In this respect, the films are not, as some critics have argued, simply “bad” films or mere aberrations in the period of West German film history in which the more respectable national art cinema began to emerge. Rather, although they hardly align with the politics of the left, they represent a form of the political by virtue of their oppositional politics, actively participating in a global film culture united in its attack on the art cinema through its aesthetics of “bad” taste. While scholarship on West German cinema—and the nation’s history in the late 1960s in general—has tended to focus on the politics of the left, the B-films stage an alternative form of protest and rebellion that reflects the wider ambit of the global antiauthoritarian revolt in West Germany in the “long 1968.”23 Like the majority of cinematic exploitation, the St. Pauli films reveal conflicted ideological agendas that veer between libertarianism and reactionarism. While refusing to temper their representations of sex and violence in protest against the elites of taste and bourgeois social values, they ultimately belie a more reactionary political stance by sensationalizing the taboos and moral transgressions they represent. The films thus “affirm West Germany’s democratic legitimacy” while “preserving the status quo,” as Bergfelder argues in relation to the sex education B-films of the same period.24 The confused and clashing ideologies in West German exploitation cinema seem to suggest that audiences were, as Bergfelder writes, “trying to negotiate deeply ingrained moral and social conventions . . . [in order] to conform to new models of sexual and consumerist behavior” in the new postwar liberal democracy.25 Hamburg serves as an especially suitable setting for films that promote different models of sexual and consumerist behavior in the new nation. In her analysis of Hamburg travel guidebooks in the 1950s and 1960s, Julia Sneeringer notes that Hamburg—and the St. Pauli Reeperbahn in particular—witnessed a dramatic boost in domestic and international tourism in

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the 1960s.26 Known as a “zone of pleasure,” the Reeperbahn attracted tourists looking to consume sexual experiences and witness the district’s liberal attitudes towards sexual commodification, homosexuality, and racial and ethnic difference.27 In this respect, St. Pauli offered its visitors “lessons in plurality” in a nation whose democratization suddenly demanded a rapid recalibration of social values and behaviors.28 The red light district gave West Germans an opportunity to practice liberal values and new methods of consumption at a time when, Sneeringer argues, they were “grappling with the changes in their material environment” and the very “nature of subjectivity” underwent radical shifts.29 The St. Pauli films offer their audiences similar “lessons in plurality” by exploiting images of the Reeperbahn in the West German imagination as a site of sexual liberty and exoticism. In the remainder of this article, I will demonstrate how three films—Rolf Olsen’s Der Arzt von St. Pauli (The Doctor of St. Pauli, 1968), Jürgen Roland’s St. Pauli Report (1971), and the latter’s Die Engel von St. Pauli (The Angels of St. Pauli, 1969)— exploit the issues of abortion, prostitution, xenophobia, and gang violence not only to protest against film culture elites but also to represent and come to terms with the new experiences and subjectivities in the postwar liberal democracy. The films thus bring into relief the ideological tensions in West Germany at the time, offering a more comprehensive view of West German cinema in 1968 beyond the scope of the political left.

Der Arzt von St. Pauli: Lessons in Liberalism with Blood for Effect Among the St. Pauli films, Rolf Olsen’s Der Arzt von St. Pauli, produced by Heinz Willeg, follows most closely the classical narrative format of contemporary mainstream productions. The film stars famous GermanAustrian actor Curd Jürgens as Dr. Jan Diffring, a well-respected and wellliked medical doctor.30 His brother Dr. Klaus Diffring (Horst Naumann), by contrast, is a notorious gynecologist who specializes in (illegal) abortions. Before agreeing to perform the abortions, Klaus blackmails his patients by forcing them—often by sedating them without their knowledge—to engage in sexual acts at his lavish villa parties. At one of his parties, Margot (Christiane Rücker), a woman indebted to and now enslaved by Klaus as a sex worker, takes incriminating photographs of Elisabeth, Klaus’s most recent victim, in order to blackmail her for a large sum of money. When Klaus finds out about Margot’s intentions, he forcefully enters her apartment and gags and binds her before proceeding to search for the negatives. Returning to the living room, he and his accomplice discover that Margot has suffocated. Soon thereafter, another woman falls victim to Klaus because of a botched abortion procedure, at which point

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Jan begins to suspect his estranged brother’s guilt. At the end of the film, Klaus kills himself despite his brother’s pleas to turn himself in to the police. Der Arzt von St. Pauli fits within a longer trajectory of Arztfilme (doctor films), a popular genre in the postwar period from the 1950s through the 1960s.31 Dr. Jan Diffring is particularly reminiscent of Dr. Fritz Böhler, the hero in Géza von Radványi’s popular 1958 war film Der Arzt von Stalingrad (The Doctor of Stalingrad). Both Olsen’s and Von Radványi’s films appropriate metaphors of health and healing in addressing issues related to West German national identity after fascism. In Der Arzt von Stalingrad, Böhler, a German prisoner in a Soviet war camp after the Second World War, does not discriminate among his patients, treating both his fellow Germans and the “enemy” Russians at the onset of the Cold War. Similarly, Jan—nicknamed the “Nuttendoktor” (“whore doctor”)—is known in St. Pauli for his charitable and nondiscriminatory treatment of the poor, sick, and socially ostracized members of the local community. While on his way to work in the opening credit sequence, he shakes hands and chats casually with a street sweeper, a group of beggars, and a security guard, demonstrating his familiarity with and lack of prejudice toward the working and lower classes. By helping patients regardless of their morally objectionable behaviors—which include female prostitution and male promiscuity—Jan represents a new liberal moral authority in the postwar democracy. Through the benevolent actions of its hero Böhler—a doctor and former soldier—Der Arzt von Stalingrad seeks to activate processes of national healing as West Germans began dealing with the guilt of their nation’s war crimes under Nazism.32 In a similar vein, Jan functions as a “healer” of a nation being forced to undergo the dramatic transformations of liberalization. Both doctors embody processes of reconciliation and recuperation in West Germany’s transition from its past into a “healthier,” more democratic future. While Jan does not discriminate against his patients, he also does not condone their alleged vices. In the first scene in his office, he washes his hands while gently urging a patient to refrain from prostituting in the next two weeks. When she says that she must continue to work, he calmly replies, “See you next time,” implying his willingness to treat her yet again for, we assume, venereal disease, even though she cannot heed his advice. Hein, a young sailor suspected of killing Margot, also seeks Jan’s treatment after injuring himself while running from the police. When Jan’s pastor friend reproaches him for treating suspected criminals, Jan insists that he would never force a patient who has been stabbed in the stomach to fill out forms of identification, emphasizing that it is his duty and ethical obligation to ensure the health of those who seek his treatment. By subtly reprimanding his patients for their vices, however, and by curing them of sexually transmitted illnesses, Jan tempers the liberalism of

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the milieu. Embodying the ideological shifts in late 1960s West Germany, he mitigates the new liberal values within the predominantly morally conservative society of the postwar era. In this capacity, Jan acts as a sort of “healer” between two opposing sets of values. While tolerating sexual licentiousness and transgressive behaviors, he takes on the role of a patriarchal figure who looks after and rehabilitates his female patients. Elisabeth, for example, depends on him for her physical and moral “health.” After she initially seeks to have an abortion performed by Klaus, Jan effectively deters her, saving her, the film suggests, from her descent into moral decrepitude. At the end of the film, Jan looks downward toward Elisabeth in a low-angle close-up and reassures her—in his characteristically rugged, self-assured voice—that her husband loves her. In a countershot, Elisabeth looks up at him with wide eyes and a bright smile, thanking him for giving her “courage.” The film warns about the consequences of abortions in other ways as well: Klaus is the greedy and sexually perverse “bad guy” who must die in the end, and the young patient on whom he operates bleeds to death as a result of the failed procedure. Jan takes on a fatherly role toward young men in the film as well. While treating Hein for the injuries he incurred during his escape from the police, Jan gently scolds him for not coming to him sooner. When Hein insists that he did not kill anyone, Jan reassures him that he believes him, but the police may not. Jan therefore advises him to “go underground” and offers him a place to stay until “we can prove the truth,” adding that he is willing to help because he, too, was helped by someone when he was in trouble with the law some time ago. An older, wiser German man who nurtures, understands, and sympathizes with the rebellious male youth, Jan represents a new kind of father figure for the fatherless generation of the 68ers. To be sure, he belongs to the “generation of fathers” that the 68ers rejected for having been complicit in the Nazi regime; he even insinuates that he was a soldier when he mentions his ten-year imprisonment “damals” (“back then”) until “they”—he does not say who—realized “I was just doing my duty.” In offering his compassion and resources to the young rebel, however, Jan serves as a mediator between the antiauthoritarian youth and the values of the old. While he helps Hein hide from the police to prevent his false arrest, he tells Elisabeth in a close-up at the end of the film that the police is “more humane than we think.” Jan’s actions and statements speak both in support of and against the campaigns made by the 68ers against police brutality and structural violence. His character thus reflects not only the ideological contradictions that lie at the heart of the film but also the film’s attempts to smooth over—or to “heal,” in keeping with the metaphor—the deep political fissures that rocked West Germany in 1968. Typical for exploitation in the late 1960s, Der Arzt von St. Pauli forgoes stylistic restraint in its depictions of sex and violence, a further indica-

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tion of its ideological ambiguity. As one critic wrote, “Rolf Olsen did not skimp on anything in this portrait of bad habits: neither on sex, nor crime, nor on crass dialogue, nor brutality. It’s just lacking in taste.”33 On a narrative level, the film condemns Klaus’s decadent sex parties; on a formal level, however, it relishes in the naked bodies and sexual lasciviousness of the partygoers. The camera lingers on two young bikini-clad women kissing; a man and a woman performing a nude artistic dance; a Frenchspeaking black woman and a rich white man smooching, their “exoticism” heightened by their interracial coupling; and several other half-naked pairs kissing and embracing, including Klaus and the sedated Elisabeth. The handheld camera imparts a degree of realism to the scenes, evoking the sensation of being there first-hand. The on-stage sex show involving Klaus and Elisabeth, whom he rapes, is intended to entertain the film’s viewers as much as it is its diegetic audience. The film similarly does not refrain from exploiting violence. In the final sequence, two gangsters hang Jan upside-down from his ankles and torture him with a blowtorch, a scene that critics found particularly offensive.34 In the next cut, another gangster proceeds to rape Karin, Hein’s girlfriend, in a room decorated with pornographic posters. Bound to a pole in the same room, Hein is forced to listen to his girlfriend’s cries as she is raped in the background behind him. The camera cuts to another gangster observing them with pleasure while we continue to hear Karin’s screams from off-screen. After a lengthy shoot-out, the sequence climaxes when Klaus looks directly into the handheld camera and kills himself with a gunshot to the head. In the meantime, some St. Pauli residents hurl trash toward the gangsters where Jan, Hein, and Karin are detained. Debris and various metal objects soar past the camera, enhancing the “trashy” feel to the sequence. The overlap of pornographic sex and brutality for effect is common throughout the film: in another example, a cut takes us from Margot’s dead body to a close-up of a woman’s bare breasts. The camera gradually zooms out, revealing three topless women dancing and playing guitar at a bar. In contrast to Der Arzt von St. Pauli, the Young and early New German Cinema take women’s reproductive rights seriously. Though not yet in full swing, the Women’s Movement was gaining momentum in West Germany in the late 1960s and launched its campaign against the antiabortion law by the early 1970s.35 Both Ulrich Schamoni’s Es (It, 1965) and Alexander Kluge’s Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin (Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave, 1973), address the issue of abortion using experimental and alienating forms such as intertitles, jump cuts, and fast-motion effects. Kluge’s film in particular provoked a scandal with its documentary-style depiction of an abortion procedure, a contested issue that the women’s movement brought into public discussion.36 With the camera placed directly in front of the patient’s vagina as though in a medical training

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video, the doctor, Roswitha (Alexandra Kluge), inserts the speculum and removes the fetus with forceps, pulling it out toward the camera. Barring the sounds of the metal instruments, latex gloves, and rolling chair, the scene is silent, contributing to its realism. The scene is provocative because of its clinical, seemingly objective representation, forcing viewers to confront the everyday reality of a controversial—and at the time illegal—medical procedure.37 Commenting on its realist style, many critics praised the film for establishing the “critical distance” necessary for engaging viewers in reflection about the social problems represented.38 Unlike Kluge’s objective realism, the abortion scene in Der Arzt von St. Pauli is marked by sex, violence, and stylistic flamboyance. Shortly after beginning the procedure, Klaus is interrupted by Helmut, Margo’s boyfriend, who comes to the office to threaten him. Now agitated, Klaus returns to his patient and clumsily inserts a tool into her vagina. Suddenly, the woman gasps and Klaus swears as discordant horns and strings enter the soundtrack. In a close-up shot of his sweaty face, Klaus tells his assistant that he must have perforated his patient and is unable to stop the bleeding. He wipes the sweat from his lip, reaches his bloodied gloved hand back to his assistant for forceps and continues to probe the woman forcefully while the soundtrack becomes more frenzied. Far from offering a still and objective point-of-view, the sequence, consisting of blurry handheld shots at medium distance, is staged from the patient’s perspective. To add to the scene’s schlock, the patient’s cleavage is visible at the bottom of the frame while Klaus pokes and prods her with his tools, a provocatively distasteful combination of sexual innuendo, violence and gore. As Klaus and his assistant unstrap her from the table, the shaky camera tracks backward and pans left, enhancing the dizzying sensation of the scene; the bright-red pool of blood on the examination table further contributes to the scene’s visual excess. Uninterested in social criticism, Olsen’s B-film is more invested in exploiting contemporary taboos of high topicality for their ability to arouse and disgust all at once, even if the film otherwise claims to promote liberal, non-prejudicial social values.

Jürgen Roland’s St. Pauli Films: Titillating Taboos in Excess Produced by Wolf C. Hartwig’s Rapid-Film, the most productive B-film company in West Germany in the 1960s, Jürgen Roland’s St. Pauli Report (1971) surpasses Olsen’s earlier film in its aesthetic and topical provocations, especially in terms of sex. While Der Arzt von St. Pauli follows a linear narrative, however convoluted, that ends in a problem solved, St. Pauli Report shares with the sex report films of the era—also produced by Hartwig—an episodic narrative structure and a documentary style that

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ostensibly aims to “instruct.” Typical for exploitation, St. Pauli Report claims to provide an “authentic” and unbiased portrayal of St. Pauli based on “facts,” a claim also made in contemporary television crime shows. Indeed, Roland was already well-known at the time for his work on Der Polizeibericht meldet . . . (The Police Report Makes Known . . .), Stahlnetz (Steel Net), and Dem Täter auf der Spur (On the Trail of the Culprit), three extremely popular crime series on television in the 1950s and 1960s.39 To a greater degree than Olsen’s film, St. Pauli Report functions as a tourist guidebook on film, offering its West German audiences “lessons in plurality” through the example of the ways and customs of the notorious harbor district. In particular, the film warns viewers about the seductions of sexual consumerism, while simultaneously highlighting the pleasures and thrills that it affords. St. Pauli Report foregrounds its unabashedly low-budget style and stylistic excesses from its opening sequence, demonstrating a self-awareness that was becoming increasingly typical for exploitation. The sequence bombards viewers with a barrage of disjointed and sensually stimulating images accompanied by several different jazzy tunes and strange sound effects. Beginning with aerial footage of St. Pauli, the subsequent shots— many of which are dizzying zoom-ins—display sadomasochistic sex acts, bar fights, a man propositioning a sex worker, speeding police cars, a brutal stabbing of a woman, and copious nude erotic dancers. Aside from its clumsy editing, the sequence exhibits a conspicuously cheap and amateurish style in its incorporation of shots from previous St. Pauli films, including the same aerial footage and shot of a sailor tossed out of a bar featured in Der Arzt von St. Pauli. The next scene further emphasizes the film’s deliberately “trashy” aesthetic. At the Große Freiheit cross street, Roland appears before the camera to introduce the film, situating it within the longer history of St. Pauli B-films. Sitting on top of and between film reels—which are slightly reminiscent of garbage in the grey, filthy street—Roland looks directly into the camera and reminds viewers, “Große Freiheit No. 7, on the Reeperbahn at half past midnight. You know St. Pauli from thousands of film meters.” After listing other St. Pauli films—Der Arzt von St. Pauli, Der Pfarrer von St. Pauli, and Die Engel von St. Pauli—Roland stresses that his film will do what the others have not, namely to capture the goings-on of the district in broad daylight, when it is most “raw,” “unembellished,” “naked,” and “vulgar.” The director suggests with a bit of sarcasm that St. Pauli slang is perhaps “too vulgar” and the “girls” are “too naked” for audiences. He immediately follows his statement by emphasizing that his film nevertheless holds to the “truth”: “Forgive me, but the language is too vulgar, the girls are too naked!” Roland later takes a jab at the Aktion Saubere Leinwand (Action for a Clean Screen), a committee that formed in 1964 in an effort to enforce stricter regulations on the representations of sex and

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violence in the cinema.40 This committee, he implies, merely seeks to hide the dirty truths about urban West German life. Staging an intentional provocation against modesty, “respectability” and “good” taste in the cinema, Roland—who allegedly begrudges the word “art” in relation to his work41—promises to up the ante of St. Pauli schlock. By laying claims to factual truth, the film seeks to amplify the shocking qualities of the vices it portrays. Having worked as an actual police reporter in Hamburg, Roland enhances the ostensible authenticity of his film by appearing before the camera to introduce each episode in on-location shots or through voiceover. Moving from an episode on gang violence, to prostitution, to homicide, and so on, Roland provides the time of day and other pertinent information about the “case” or custom. Many of the scenes are reenactments of recent crimes. In the last murder episode, Roland speaks with “real” police officers at the Davidwache station about the murder of an officer. Just as the opening credits boast the participation of “many (real) people of St. Pauli” in the film, Roland stresses that the officers who reenact the apprehension of the murderer are “not actors.” The episode based on “Uncle Troll,” an older man who housed twenty-four young female runaways in his tiny apartment in exchange for sexual favors, also lays claims to historical truth. Roland notes that the only discrepancy between the staged scene and the “truth” is that Uncle Troll lived with twenty-four women as opposed to just two. Drawing attention to the film’s low budget with a hint of irony, he mentions that twenty-four women were “twentytwo too many” for “us,” the crew. The apartment, however, is allegedly “the original.” In typical exploitation fashion, while Roland criticizes Uncle Troll’s behaviors as “bizarre” in voiceover, the camera focuses on the man’s perversions, lingering on the women’s legs, breasts, and bare buttocks as Uncle Troll grabs and fondles them. All of the episodes in St. Pauli Report generate an awkward tension between instruction and sensationalism. Explaining the implicit rules and attractions of St. Pauli, Roland acts as a virtual tourist guide. In this respect, the film aligns closely with the “lessons in plurality”—particularly regarding sexual commodification—that Sneeringer identifies in the St. Pauli tourist brochures in the 1960s. In an aerial pan of the city, Roland tells viewers in voiceover that “they will have to break down their stereotypes” when visiting the red light district. Setting up the next episode, he proceeds to explain that young women from the provinces make up the majority of illegally employed sex workers in St. Pauli. The sequence shows a young woman with pigtails—emphasizing her youth and naiveté—hitchhiking her way into the city. Shortly after her arrival, she has sex with her new panderer until they reach orgasm after two full minutes of screen time. Later, Roland demonstrates to audiences how to use a vending machine of women’s underwear, whereby he exaggerates its exoticism: “You most

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Figure 8.1. The director demonstrates to audiences how to use panty vending machines. St. Pauli Report, dir. Jürgen Roland, 1971, 86 min., Studio Hamburg and Rapid-Film Munich. Screenshot.

certainly don’t have this mounted on the side of your building . . . in St. Pauli, everything is different than anywhere else!”42 One of the last episodes in the film warns viewers about the aggressive selling tactics of brothel owners through the example of “Oskar,” an unassuming tourist who is lured into a sex club. After spending all of his money, Oskar reports immediately to the police that he was “robbed.” When the owners and employees of the sex club maintain that they have never seen him before, Oskar tries to prove the contrary to them by mentioning that one of the women carries a picture of her daughter. To Oskar’s embarrassment and frustration, the officer explains to Oskar that many women working in sex clubs have “such photos” to seduce the more trusting and gullible types. Like Der Arzt von St. Pauli, St. Pauli Report offers lessons in liberalism through exploitation, a style that proves to be particularly suitable for films seeking to mediate between conservative bourgeois values of mainstream society and new, opposing liberal values that were still deemed taboo. Exploitation not only serves as a suitable vehicle for the films’ conflicting ideologies but it also articulates the intensity of the new sensations and

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Figure 8.2. A panderer evaluates the “skills” of his newest seventeen-year-old victim in an erotic display of sex trafficking. St. Pauli Report, dir. Jürgen Roland, 1971, 86 min., Studio Hamburg and Rapid-Film Munich. Screenshot.

experiences in West Germany’s new social and economic order. The St. Pauli B-films reflect the efforts of West Germans to adapt, as Bergfelder and Sneeringer argue, to the changes in their material environment, often resulting in the confusing and incongruous images, sounds, and affects. Among the films in the series, Roland’s Die Engel von St. Pauli (1969) conveys the growing pains of the transition to a capitalist democracy most pointedly. Featuring, like all the other St. Pauli films, an abundance of sex, nudity, and violence, Die Engel von St. Pauli centers on the rivalry between two gangs, one from St. Pauli and the other from Vienna. Starring three well-known B-film actors—Horst Frank, Herbert Fux, and Werner Pochath—the film focuses on Jule Nickels (Horst Frank), a panderer and leader of the St. Pauli gang. Protecting his “territory,” Jule tries to scare away the Viennese gang whose sex workers are stealing his business. In the meantime, Herbert, a young and well-to-do tourist, solicits Lisa, a mute prostitute working for Jule. When Lisa teases Herbert for his impotence after a failed attempt at sex, he strangles her to death in a bout of rage. Jule sets out to find Lisa’s murderer and discovers him hiding in an empty

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warehouse. Following a brief shoot-out, Herbert topples to his death from the top floor. Like Roland’s later film St. Pauli Report, Die Engel von St. Pauli warns potential tourists about the dangers of sexual consumerism, as Herbert finds himself unwittingly wrapped up in a world of violent crime with lethal consequences. At the same time, the film boasts a long list of exploited taboos. While films such as Werner Herzog’s Behinderte Zukunft (Handicapped Future, 1971) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969) bring stereotypes toward physically disabled persons and nonnationals under critical inspection, Roland’s film manipulates those very issues and more for their shock appeal. It exploits, for example, Lisa’s disability, particularly when her muteness prevents her from being able to yell for help to the people just outside her door in the scene of her murder; xenophobia, as conveyed, however displaced, in the St. Pauli-Viennese conflict, whereby the St. Pauli gang tries to expel the foreigners they believe to be taking away the business that belongs rightfully to them as nationals; and homosexuality, represented by a gay man nicknamed “Schwuli”43 who meets the most grisly death in the film when he is run over by a subway train in full display. In addition to its extensive list of controversial topics, Die Engel von St. Pauli exhibits an excess in style that trumps many of its peers. The camera is conspicuously more mobile, and individual shots in the film are full of movement as bar clientele and pedestrians move about or engage in activity—most often sexual—in the background or in blurry proximity to the camera. This film packs in sex and violence with few moments of relief in-between: after “Schwuli” is killed, a cut immediately brings us to a nude dancer on stage in a medium shot, the camera gradually tilting up from her waist to her breasts. Herbert orders a beer at the bar before the camera cuts again to the dancer in a shot that is visually complex and whimsical: with a light projection of an American one-hundred-dollar bill covering her torso, the dancer rotates her hips slightly left and right while sitting on her knees. Positioned at the level of Benjamin Franklin’s eyes, her moving breasts give the odd impression of Franklin looking left and right at the crowd. While functioning as a visual allegory for the sexual commodification of women’s bodies in the postwar economy, the image also denotes the dominance of the immaterial currency of US capitalism— as represented by the projected image of the bill—over material reality. But the very strangeness, indeed uncanniness, of the moving image seems to point to the uneasy balance between the new (US) capitalist economy and the (national) body on which it has been superimposed. Sex, money, and Americanization literally overlap in an image that at first glance is almost illegible, suggesting an incomplete if not essentially disharmonious union between the new economic system and the realities of postwar society.

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A later scene similarly expresses a surplus of sensations and distractions that represent the changing nature of subjectivity in 1960s West Germany. Accompanied by a sultry soundtrack, the sequence begins with a nude woman dancing in front of the camera as Jule talks on the phone behind her. The owner of the brothel stands next to Jule, while a gang member watches the dancer from behind the bar. Dancing between us and Jule, who is facing the camera, the woman captures our attention at the same time that we try to focus on Jule’s phone conversation as it relates to the progression of the plot. But even Jule is inconveniently distracted by the stimuli around him. Annoyed, he turns away from the woman when she saunters up to him and proceeds to ask the man at the bar to turn the music down so that he can hear his interlocutor. The music softens, but the scene is still acoustically overloaded for its non-diegetic audience. As Jule’s conversation sounds increasingly urgent, the brothel owner sits down with the dancer directly in front of the camera and begins to instruct her on how to improve her dancing. With several different visual cues vying for our attention—all of which are in focus—the sequence packs in an overabundance of stimuli that overwhelm our sensory palates. Representative of the film’s broader aesthetic, the scene not only offers viewers “lessons in plurality” through its visual and aural excesses, but it also irritates the senses—mirrored by Jule’s own agitated response—in ways that reflect the demands placed on the perceptive faculties in adapting to the new economic and material realities of the postAdenauer era. *

*

*

With their bombastic styles and images, the St. Pauli B-films of the late 1960s and early 1970s exploit contemporary cultural anxieties and taboos often ignored by mainstream popular culture. Although the films favor sensationalism over serious social criticism, they nevertheless fulfill an important cultural function by representing head-on social issues and identities that would be central to the formation of West Germany’s new democratic legitimacy. Through the excesses of exploitation, the films seek to articulate the radically new and challenging experiences and perceptions in postwar global capitalism. Indeed, despite all of their stylistic differences, both the St. Pauli films and the Young German films engage with the material and social changes brought about by the new liberalism. Even though they rebel against the more “tasteful” films of the canonical art cinema, the exploitation films are nevertheless part of the same history of defiance and anti-conservatism that has come to define West German politics and culture in the late 1960s. Advocating an aesthetics of “bad” taste, the films set out to challenge the traditional moral and social values of their parents’ generation through an oppositional politics, a stance that

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paradoxically links them to—rather than separates them from—their more culturally acceptable contemporaries. Although their “trashy” styles and offensive images have barred them from serious scholarly inquiry, these B-films represent a significant contribution to the countercultural film movements of the late 1960s, rendering a more complete and nuanced view of transgressive film art beyond the scope of the canon.

Notes 1 See Tim Bergfelder, International Adventures: German Popular Cinema and European Co-Productions in the 1960s (New York: Berghahn, 2005), and Jennifer Fay, “The Schoolgirl Reports and the Guilty Pleasure of History,” in Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 39–52. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise. 2 Since 2015 and 2012, respectively, limited DVD editions of Jürgen Roland’s Die Engel von St. Pauli (The Angels of St. Pauli, 1969; in English as Angels of the Street) and Wolfgang Staudte’s Fluchtweg St. Pauli: Großalarm für die Davidswache (Escape Route St. Pauli: Alarm for the Davidwache, 1971; in English as Jailbreak in Hamburg) are available through Subkultur Entertainment, a German company that distributes mostly B-films. 3 Ernest Mathijs, “Exploitation Film,” Oxford Bibliographies Online, last accessed May 1, 2015, doi: 10.1093/OBO/9780199791286-0096. 4 Ernest Mathijs, “Exploitation Film.” 5 Ernest Mathijs, “Exploitation Film.” 6 Bergfelder, International Adventures, 211. 7 Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 371–93. Here, 372. 8 Sconce, 374. 9 Sconce, 380. 10 Sconce, 392. 11 Sconce, 392. 12 Pauline Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” in The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, ed. Sanford Schwartz (New York: Library of America, 2011), 201–34. 13 Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 214. 14 Bergfelder, International Adventures, 224. 15 Mathijs, “Exploitation Film.” 16 Bergfelder, International Adventures, 230. 17 Bergfelder, 230. 18 “Polizeirevier Davidswache: Ein Film von Jürgen Roland,” Filmpalast: Kinohits von Gestern, e-m-s GmbH.

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19 Karsten Thurau and Michael Cholewa, Der Terror führt Regie: Der italienische Gangster- und Polizeifilm, 1968–1982 (Hille: Medien Publikations- und Werbegesellschaft, 2008), 30. 20 “Der Arzt von St. Pauli,” Goldene Leinwand, accessed February 17, 2017, https://www.goldene-leinwand.de/filme/der-arzt-von-st-pauli/?articles%5Bsearc hvalue%5D=Der+Arzt+von+St.+Pauli. 21 “Film-Hits im IV. Quartal 1969 (Okt.-Dez.),” spiopress (1969): 3. 22 Bergfelder, International Adventures, 213. 23 See Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 24 Bergfelder, International Adventures, 231. 25 Bergfelder, 232. 26 Julia Sneeringer, “‘Assembly Line of Joys’: Touring Hamburg’s Red Light District, 1949–1966,” Central European History 42, no. 1 (March 2009): 65–96. Here, 65. 27 Sneeringer, 66. 28 Sneeringer, 67. 29 Sneeringer, 67. 30 Curd Jürgens was probably chosen for the role at least partially because of his physical resemblance to the popular German actor Hans Albers, who starred in several Hamburg-based films in the 1940s and 1950s, including Helmut Käutner’s Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom No. 7, 1944; in English as Port of Freedom) and Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins (On the Reeperbahn at Half Past Midnight, 1954). Jürgens later starred in Rolf Olsen’s successful remake of Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins (1969), Der Pfarrer von St. Pauli (The Priest of St. Pauli, 1970), and Käpt’n Rauhbein aus St. Pauli (Captain Ruffian of St. Pauli, 1971; in English as Nurses for Sale), all produced by Heinz Willeg. 31 Jennifer Kapczynski, The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 211. 32 For a more thorough discussion of Der Arzt von Stalingrad, see Jennifer Kapczynski, “The Treatment of the Past: Geza Radvanyi’s Der Arzt von Stalingrad and the West German War Film,” in Framing the Fifties: Cinema in a Divided Germany, eds. John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 137–50. 33 “Neuer Film in Frankfurt: Der Arzt von St. Pauli,” Frankfurter Rundschau, October 2, 1968. 34 Volker Holt, “Der Arzt von St. Pauli,” film-dienst 41 (1968): MunzingerArchiv GmbH. 35 Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 300. 36 “Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin,” film-dienst 12 (1973), accessed February 23, 2017, http://www.filmdienst.de/nc/kinokritiken/einzelansicht/gelegenheitsarbeit-einer-sklavin,42159.html.

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37 Thomas Großbölting, Der verlorene Himmel: Glaube in Deutschland seit 1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2013), 131. 38 “Film: ‘Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin’: Alexander Kluges Neubeginn,” Die Zeit, January 4, 1974. 39 Hans Berndt, “Streng sind im Kietz die Sitten: Jürgen Roland bringt ‘Die Engel von St. Pauli’ farbig ins Kino,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, September 26, 1969. 40 “Saubere Leinwand,” Filmreport 6 (1965): 7. 41 Berndt, “Streng sind im Kietz die Sitten.” 42 In German, “Nur in St. Pauli ist überhaupt alles anders als anderswo!” 43 “Schwuli” is a nickname derived from “schwul,” the word for “gay” in German.

9:

Mediation, Expansion, Event: Reframing the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative

Andrew Stefan Weiner

O

NE OF THE MOST iconic images of Austrian oppositional culture in the moment of 1968 is a photograph of the artist VALIE EXPORT performing a public action entitled Tapp- und Tastkino (“Tap- and TouchCinema”). EXPORT wears a cardboard box over her upper body; a man reaches through the front of the box, apparently touching her breasts. It is a difficult image to read in that the viewer is confronted with a number of details that do not lend themselves to straightforward interpretation. Instead, she finds herself asking questions that are not so easily answered: What sorts of pleasure, power, and intimacy are activated by this deeply strange encounter? Who is the bystander watching this event, and how should we understand her or his expression, her or his role, or her or his relationship to the viewer? And what relation do any of these ambiguous questions have to the concrete, historically contingent particularities of film, art, politics, or the public sphere? It speaks to the complexity of EXPORT’s piece that none of these questions can be readily resolved, even when one is familiar with its concept (the box was meant to represent a kind of tactile cinema in which the artist’s body served as the “film”; by reaching through a set of curtains on the front of the box, interested members of the public could “view” the film by handling her exposed breasts).1 In the decades since the Tastkino was performed, it has come to be celebrated as a foundational work of feminist art, a status that lends credence to EXPORT’s subsequent assertion that the work was intended to be “the first women’s film.”2 This acclaim derives in part from the impact that EXPORT’s actions from that period have exerted on subsequent generations of artists. Re-performances of Tastkino and the related project Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969) have been staged in numerous cities, as well as at the Guggenheim Museum and in the virtual community Second Life. “Invisible Adversaries,” a recent exhibition at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art inspired by EXPORT’s eponymous 1976 film, featured work by numerous widely acclaimed, critical, contemporary artists, including Hito Steyerl, Emily Jacir, Nikki S. Lee,

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and Lorna Simpson.3 Historians of postmodern and contemporary art have been virtually unanimous in celebrating the Tastkino as a prescient anticipation of important developments in such fields as body art, performance, and media art.4 This reception has depended in part on specific formal innovations of the piece but largely on a particular interpretation: namely that the structure of EXPORT’s “cinema” publicly reversed the gendered power relations typical of mainstream cinema, such that the omnipotent, presumably male, viewer became instead the subject of multiple gazes. Yet while such a reading is perfectly consistent with the artist’s account of the piece, it is not altogether clear that it can account for questions like the ones raised above. Moreover, it treats EXPORT’s action as an isolated, quasi-autonomous entity, with little if any relation to the historical moment in which it was executed. Most art-historical accounts of the Tastkino tend to overlook the participation of EXPORT’s collaborator Peter Weibel; they similarly fail to account for EXPORT’s status as a member of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative (AFC), which she helped to found in 1968. The members of this group, acting both individually and in concert, played a pivotal role in helping to define the contested cultural meanings of “1968” in Austria. They did so not only as experimental filmmakers but also as intermedia artists, as theorists, and as public figures who sought to decisively influence the cultural politics of postwar Austrian society. Unfortunately, a partial, limited understanding of the history of the AFC is arguably the norm outside of German-speaking Europe. Although the group’s work is familiar to certain sectors of the experimental film community in the US and Western Europe, it is largely unknown to Anglophone critics, arts journalists, and art historians, as well as to the curators of major arts institutions. In the typical narrative of postwar European art history, if 1960s Austria is represented at all, it is solely by the notorious excesses of the Viennese Actionists, which are more often the subject of rumor than analysis. The Actionists—a group typically thought to consist of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler—tend to be portrayed as transgressive antiheroes in tales of animal sacrifice, serial lawbreaking, and countless varieties of perversion.5 Although many of these stories are based in fact, they have come to function as myths, thanks in part to the lurid, sensationalistic, and occasionally censored photographs by which Actions came to be known to a broader audience: images of bizarre ritualistic performances carried out in the claustrophobic confines of an unfinished basement, which typically climaxed in chaotic messes of paint, meat, and bodily fluids. For various reasons the reputation of the Actionists, which was once highly controversial, has been quite thoroughly rehabilitated in recent decades. Artists like Brus and Mühl—who were demonized, prosecuted,

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forced into exile, and in Mühl’s case imprisoned for years—now appear in state-funded travelling exhibitions. Nitsch, whose work successfully courted charges of blasphemy, has even been hailed as a modern religious artist by the Catholic Church.6 It is not just that Actionism has been celebrated by numerous institutions; rather, Actionism has become an institution in itself, and a powerful and profitable one at that. As this essay seeks to show, even though the complex, overdetermined legacy of the Actionists has in many ways overshadowed the activities of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, the latter group developed a prescient, sophisticated, and politically trenchant aesthetic that deserves to be considered on its own merits, especially insofar as it resonates much more strongly with contemporary critical art practice. While the two groups overlap to a certain extent—figures like Kurt Kren and Peter Weibel executed various collaborations with Mühl and Brus in the mid-60s—the AFC’s approach represented a pronounced, self-conscious break from specific problems with the Actionists’ aesthetic and political orientation. Members of the cooperative, which included Ernst Schmidt Jr. and Hans Scheugl, in addition to EXPORT, Weibel, and Kren, undertook a rigorous examination of the various elements of the cinematic dispositif, rethinking the conceptual and technical bases of photographic reproduction, montage, and public display.7 Some measure of their inventiveness can be ascertained by considering the range of experimental approaches that were taken to the activity of projection: these included projecting images onto human bodies and commercial products; projecting one-word texts; introducing foreign materials into the film projector; making projection dependent on a noise-dependent audience-enabled switch; cutting holes in screens so as to shoot fireworks into the audience; using the cinema curtain in conjunction with the screening; and, in the case of the Tastkino, making the female body into the site of corporeal “projection,” with all the psychoanalytic resonance of that term.8 When such experiments are considered collectively, it becomes clear that the various activities of the cooperative amounted to a rigorous and sustained critique of the aesthetics and politics of cinema, both on its own and in conjunction with other forms of technical mediation. While this engagement had substantial affinities with contemporaneous discourses of intermedia art, most notably those concerning Expanded Cinema, it nevertheless diverged from them in important ways, many of which were informed by the specific contingencies of Austrian society circa 1968. It is only by evaluating the output of the AFC as inextricably embedded within that conjuncture that we might begin to gain some sense of how its highly nuanced approach to mediation might resonate in more contemporary conditions. By advocating and trying to model such an approach, this essay seeks to correct for the limited and distorted reception that the AFC has received

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to date within Anglophone critical and art historical scholarship, where it is mentioned, if at all, only in passing or in relatively decontextualized monographic studies. Though the reasons for this oversight are complex, they derive at least in part from the aesthetic orientation of the first generation of postmodernist art historians (most notably those associated with the New York-based journal October), who broadly identified the various Austrian neo-avant-gardes with Actionism, which they wrote off for its misogyny, its crypto-theology, and its sensationalism.9 Within an oppositional hermeneutic paradigm that tended to categorize artistic practices as either “critical” or “symptomatic,” the dense, messy contradictions of Austrian performance modes were not easily assimilated. Something similar is true of their status as artworks, which aggregated or fused the visual arts (painting and sculpture) with technical media (film and photography), with new musical and theatrical modes of performance, with poetics, and with activities bordering on direct political action. Such practices do not fit neatly into the familiar interpretative models of many postmodernist art historians, whose work still remains residually modernist in its implicit presumption of aesthetic autonomy, its discomfort with technical mass media, and its separation of the visual and performing arts. The limitations of such approaches can arguably only be transcended by modes of analysis that account for the marked transversality of the majority of work produced by the cooperative—its propensity to breach the boundaries between not only distinct cultural formats but also the aesthetic sphere and its ostensible antitheses.10 In this sense, the cooperative’s work exemplifies a contradiction that is deeply connected to a certain cultural politics of 1968, one which has become increasingly familiar since then within the field of contemporary art: namely, that what appears most distinctive about art is often its refusal to distinguish itself from other cultural forms. Or, to draw on a theoretical framework developed by Jacques Rancière: such art paradoxically bases its claim to autonomy on the assertion of its own heteronomy.11 In order to register the complex, shifting, and often contradictory significance of such forms, it becomes necessary to develop critical and analytical concepts that can operate in multiple registers, thus enabling us to account for work that can function simultaneously as some combination of art, non-art, quasi-art, and anti-art. Toward that end, I will examine selected AFC works in relation to three specific elements, each of which possesses the sort of duality or equivocality just described. The first element is mediation: a term that denotes both artists’ use of technical media, including but not limited to film, and their engagement with historically contingent regimes of mass mediation and publicity. The second aspect is expansion, which clearly recalls the contemporary discourses of “expanded cinema,” even as it gestures toward some of the ways that members of the cooperative sought to

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extend their experimentation from film not just into other media but also into other social spheres, reckoning more systematically with the larger political economy within which cinema is embedded. The third concept is the event: a term that literally denotes the modes of performance with which film was increasingly hybridized, but which also opens up a complex web of meanings that are at once philosophical, aesthetic, and political, and which derive in various ways from the “events of 1968” and the manner in which they have been subsequently theorized. In thinking through some of the interpretative possibilities afforded by these categories, this essay means to raise questions concerning the critical capacities of various AFC interventions and about what this might tell us regarding “criticality” more generally, whether then or today. In the process, it also seeks to advance several claims about what it might mean to speak of a specifically Austrian 1968. To telegraph my argument, even though there is clearly a certain utility in speaking of an Austrian ’68, such a trope threatens to obscure our sense of the ways in which this moment or “event” was dispersed and in some ways disjunctive, both temporally and geographically. If this indicates the need to further develop the sort of historiographical models we use to analyze cultural production, it also suggests that the events of 1968 might signify something quite different today than they did at the time, and that ultimately we might need a more nuanced concept of the event if we are to understand their contemporary relevance.

“Lesser Crimes”: Between 1945 and 1968 For the artists of the Austrian neo-avant-gardes, the central defining feature of their practice was an opposition to the perceived illegitimacy of the hegemonic social order, whether in the form of state power or national culture. Perhaps even more so than in West Germany, the postwar period in Austria was marked by profound, pervasive tensions in the social and political order. As in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), independence was not declared from within but was the result of a military occupation. The very idea of an autonomous Austrian nation was complicated from the start, however, given the relatively recent dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the subsequent merger with National Socialist Germany. As is well known today, Austria had been a willing and enthusiastic collaborator with Nazi Germany, with strong public support in both countries for the so-called Anschluss (Annexation) of Austrian territory in 1938. Not surprisingly, these sympathies did not just evaporate with the end of the war. A 1948 poll showed that more than one-third of Viennese still endorsed National Socialism, with even greater support in more conservative regions of Austria.12

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These deep continuities between Austria and West Germany notwithstanding, the transition to post-fascism took markedly different forms in the two countries. This difference in many ways resulted from Allied wartime military policy, when it was decided for strategic reasons that Austria would be treated as a victim of Nazi aggression rather than as an accomplice. The end of the war was thus framed by the Allies as a liberation rather than as a defeat and occupation. As a result, Allied policies of denazification were not pursued as aggressively in Austria as in the FRG, and the number of actions taken to ensure denazification began to decline markedly soon after the war, in 1947. An initial amnesty law in 1948 covered infractions that were viewed euphemistically as “lesser crimes”; some ninety percent of former Nazi party members were covered under these provisions, and Austria’s two major parties began competing for their votes. When Austria was granted sovereignty in 1955, its occupiers were successfully convinced to drop a clause stipulating continued national responsibility for war crimes. By the time of a second amnesty covering major crimes in 1957, denazification was effectively finished. As a result of this shift, the Austrian state was able to resist the re-emigration of Jewish former citizens, to secure acceptance of the material gains inherited from the Nazi occupation, and to deflect claims for compensation, including reparations suits brought from Yugoslavia, Poland, and Greece. In keeping with this general climate of evasion, the sort of strident (if limited) discourse of dissident memory, symbolized by such figures as Karl Jaspers or Theodor W. Adorno in West Germany, was nonexistent.13 Not only was the debate on such matters relatively absent, in its place something like a collective fantasy of victimization also emerged. Within this scenario, everyday Austrians were not seen as having been perpetrators, accomplices, or bystanders in the Nazi genocides but rather as victims in a double sense: first of Hitler and then of the Allied occupation. Given the rather tenuous legitimacy of the political and social order, it is no surprise that postwar Austrian politics inclined strongly toward stability and prosperity. This tendency was consolidated by the national unity government that ruled the country until 1966, based on a so-called “Grand Coalition” between the conservative Österreichische Volkspartei (Austrian People’s Party, ÖVP) and the left-liberal Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (Austrian Social-Democratic Party, SPÖ). (While there was a legally recognized Communist Party [Kommunistische Partei Österreichs, KPÖ], a power-sharing agreement between the ÖVP and SPÖ had foreclosed any chance of its success.) With external competition sidelined, the two ruling parties enacted a policy of what was called Proporz, or proportionality, with each party effectively being guaranteed a certain amount of representation for its constituents.14 Such a practice was consistent with the interests of a corporatist political order, under which

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the interests of labor unions, industrial cartels, and political parties were coordinated to a large extent. For artists or activists on the left, these conditions would very likely have been grounds for discouragement, if not desperation. Surveying this situation, they would have perceived official institutions that were complicit in covering up war guilt, a very real threat of police repression, and a lack of viable political alternatives. This must have been especially galling in Vienna, a city that was known internationally before the war for its platform of socialist policies, which included ambitious experiments in fostering forms of working-class culture. This history was foreclosed by the ascendance of Austro-fascism and Nazism, and its legacies were rendered largely unavailable during occupation and reconstruction. Much the same was true of the many strains of thought that emerged from the intensely productive cultural and intellectual climate that had existed before Hitler. Given such conditions, radical cultural producers essentially regarded the Austrian state and the capitalist politico-economic order it represented as no better than, or in fact the direct descendant of, the fascist regimes it succeeded. This oppositional stance structured the practices of the first generation of Austrian neo-avant-gardes, which included the 1950s “literary cabarets” of the Vienna Group, the various activities of the Actionists, and the efforts of experimental filmmakers like Peter Kubelka and Ferry Radax.15 The founding of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative marked a decisive pivot from this orientation, a comprehensive transformation in which various elements of these precedents were both altered and synthesized so as to respond to the new demands of a changing cultural and political conjuncture. The fact that the AFC was founded in 1968 is in some sense not surprising; this much is clear in the approach of figures like Weibel and EXPORT, which was largely consistent with the style of Western countercultures and the politics of New Left movements like the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (Extra-Parliamentary Opposition, APO) in West Germany. Both generationally and attitudinally, the members of the AFC tended to have little in common with predecessors like the Vienna Group, who performed in matching suits on a proscenium stage. That said, there are reasons to be hesitant about ascribing undue importance to 1968, whether as a historical moment or something more like a cultural logic. The issue is not just that the collective memory of ’68 has for decades now been subject to nostalgia, ideologization, and various kinds of political manipulation, as scholars such as Kristin Ross have shown.16 Rather, it includes the fact that 1968 in Austria took a very different shape than it did in other parts of Western Europe. The reasons for this were in part political. Unlike the nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bloc, Austria remained non-aligned. Unlike West Germany, where the APO became large, influential, and increasingly mili-

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tant, the Austrian New Left failed to gain much of a foothold until the early 1970s. Despite (and in certain ways because of) this belatedness, the Austrian neo-avant-gardes began to embrace ever more radical strategies beginning in the late 1950s. With such complications in mind, it makes sense to think in terms of something like a “long 1968” in Austria, one that extended discontinuously over the course of more than a decade. In much the same way, it is necessary to consider the ways in which groups like the AFC, while based in the relatively insular confines of Vienna, became enmeshed in regional and even global networks of collaboration, exchange, and circulation. Paradoxically, but perhaps not surprisingly, the forms that gave such a distinctive character to Austrian experimental art circa 1968 depended in many ways on contact with groups operating elsewhere. A watershed moment in this respect was the Destruction in Art Symposium, which was organized by the German-born Gustav Metzger and held in London in 1966. In attendance were Kren and Weibel, who travelled together with the Actionists Mühl, Brus, and Nitsch. Over 100 other invitees came to London, not only from the US and Western Europe but also from Argentina, Mexico, New Zealand, and Japan.17 The roster of invitees comprised many of the more prominent exponents of Fluxus, Happenings, and Nouveau Réalisme, including Wolf Vostell, Jean-Jacques Lebel, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, and Al Hansen; it also included lesser-known but still influential figures like John Latham and Enrico Baj. The planning committee had associations with radical groups operating at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including the Amsterdam-based PROVOs, the London-based Sigma, and the Situationist International. In interacting with this range of artists, none of whom had performed in Austria, the Viennese attendees would have been exposed to a much broader spectrum of event-forms than had been available to them previously. Another important encounter between the AFC and international avant-gardes took place in Belgium at the Knokke Experimental Film Festival in late 1967, where Hans Scheugl screened the short film Hernals, which intercuts simultaneously recorded footage of Weibel and EXPORT to undermine the indexicality of the photographic image. Also present at Knokke were Yoko Ono, Michael Snow, and Paul Sharits, together with a group of radical West German students who protested the festival’s apolitical tendencies.18 Apart from exposing the visiting AFC members to any number of other models of experimental practice, the festival brought them into contact with people pursuing related projects elsewhere, including the London Filmmakers Co-op. Notable in this regard were Wilhelm and Birgit Hein, who helped organize the “XScreen” festival of underground film in Cologne, where EXPORT and Weibel would go on to show their work.19 Although this exposure quickly brought them a degree

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of countercultural fame, it ultimately intensified the sort of contradictions that frustrated the more radical aspirations of the AFC. As the subsequent discussion means to demonstrate, such a history strongly suggests that we remain skeptical of any attempt to herald the “events of 1968” as some sort of singular historical threshold.

Expansion and Cutting: The Emergence of “Mediated Actions” Although cinema was clearly the primary object of analysis for the cooperative, certain members viewed it in the context of a more comprehensive media ecology whose function was to strengthen the hegemony of the Austrian state and its corporatist economy. In their view, whatever sort of specific properties film might have, these had to be considered socially and politically and, furthermore, in relation to other modes of technical mediation. This approach is most clear in EXPORT and Weibel’s practices from the period 1966–69, which were distinct but often pursued collaboratively and which instructively demonstrate the considerable potential of this systematic, radical approach. Between 1966 and 1969, EXPORT and Weibel analyzed and experimented with the capacities of specific formats by elaborating a practice centered on what Weibel called “Media Actionism.”20 As this term suggests, one critical reference point for this approach was the work of the Actionists, with whom both Weibel and Kren collaborated on numerous occasions. The precedent of Actionism, particularly the work of Brus and Mühl, was evident on multiple levels, including the primacy of ephemeral event forms, the negation of mass culture, and the attention paid to the body as an instrument of repressive power. Media actions broke with this precedent, however, in that their basic structures directly incorporated a range of technical artifacts and devices, including audio recordings, public address equipment, mass-produced commodities (particularly plastics), newspapers, and the various components of the cinematic apparatus (film, screens, projectors). This pronounced formal difference reflected an even more profound reorientation with regard to the political, processual, and even ontological elements of art production. While the mechanisms of this turn are too complex to be described here in detail, their essential features might be sketched as follows. First, through their very form media actions addressed one of the most problematic aspects of Actionism, namely its blindness to the intense contradictions between Actions and their representation through photographs and film. Although the Actionists tended to view these images as neutral documentation—and many subsequent critics have gone on to venerate them as artworks themselves, even as relics of a

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quasi-transcendent event—they were in fact the product of detailed planning, lighting, staging, and photographic processing. Even as the Actionists were positioning their performances as spontaneous transgressions that challenged the mores of mainstream consumer culture, they were working closely with the photographer Ludwig Hoffenreich, who had built his career working for Stern, a glossy magazine based in West Germany. With one or two exceptions, Actions were not staged for an audience but for the camera, and this proximity suggests that the relation between the event and its documentation was in fact much more complicated than has usually been assumed. By addressing the constitutive role that representation played in Actions—and thus by extension in mediated event forms as such, whether within art or beyond—media actions decisively underlined the need for more self-reflexive and analytical modes of performance. This reorientation enabled a crucial break with other contradictory aspects of the early 1960s neo-avant-garde, particularly their crypto-theological and misogynistic tendencies, which go a long way toward explaining their disfavor among art historians outside Austria. If the first of these criticisms is typically leveled at Nitsch, who developed elaborate performances with an intensely ambivalent relationship to Christian ritual, the second is often leveled at Mühl, who staged numerous “Material Actions” in which female models were reduced to a purely passive, quasi-abject role as their nude bodies were coated in pigment, feathers, and various base or often unidentifiable substances. In contrast to these highly problematic tendencies, which have only become starker with historical distance from the events, media actions were constructed around a model that expressly sought to break technologies down into their component parts and to reassemble and repurpose them in ways that countered their complicity with various modes of repression, particularly the objectification of women. In developing the process of decomposition and recombination, EXPORT and Weibel relied on the precedent of the Vienna Group, whose members had produced a kind of concrete poetry by interchanging the different letters in a given word or phrase; they also drew on the contemporaneous work of Kren, who edited his films in-camera according to precisely given mathematically generated formulas. They referred to these productions as “medial anagrams,” seeking to locate and exploit “the fractures between media.”21 The results of this approach are clear in the Tapp- und Tastkino, which transformed the function of mainstream cinema by reversing the direction of gazes, making the viewer into both participant and object, recoding the female body as active, materializing the visual image, replacing distanced sight with proximate touch, and relocating projection to the street. It was on the basis of this attempt to uproot the gendered power relations that were immanent to cinema that EXPORT could convincingly claim that the

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action constituted “the first women’s film.” Other media actions were similarly ambitious, seeking to interrogate basic structures of democratic participation or to alter the basic rhetoric of cinema by effectively making mediation itself the object of mediation. It is this kind of recursive, highly self-reflexive engagement with media that arguably distinguishes the work of the AFC from the other contemporaneous activities that were often grouped together under the heading of Expanded Cinema. Although the members of the AFC were familiar with this discourse and had various connections to the filmmakers and artists working in that field, their milieu was nevertheless sufficiently insular as to engender a distinctive, idiosyncratic model of erweitertes Kino (expanded cinema). One important difference concerned attitudes toward technology. Whereas many practitioners and proponents of Expanded Cinema operated under the more or less utopian notion, largely derived from Marshall McLuhan, that technical media functioned as prostheses enabling the “extension” of human capabilities, AFC members tended to focus on the ways in which media divided, distorted, or somehow instrumentalized the activity of perception. They neither embraced cinema as a liberatory extension of human perception, nor denounced it as a malign instrument of ideology. Instead, they engaged media from an immanent position, understanding themselves to be acting within a force field of shifting power relations that could reflexively inform the very execution of their own actions. This more circumspect, skeptical orientation is evident in EXPORT and Weibel’s first collaboration Cutting (1967–68), which was an effort to analyze and transform one of the most fundamental aspects of cinema: montage. The action consisted of five parts, each of which parodically resembled a different genre: documentary, sound film, comedy, silent film, and pornographic film. In one part, a quotation from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) was projected, only to be literally cut out of the screen with scissors. In another, EXPORT shaved Weibel’s chest, with his torso made to represent a flatbed editing station, or “body cutter”; in the finale, she performed fellatio on him in an ambiguous gesture that was ostensibly meant to be an example of uninhibited communication but arguably reinscribed the artists within the same system of gendered power relations they meant to scrutinize. Another way in which the Austrian take on Expanded Cinema differed from others elsewhere was in its radical revaluation of the time and space within which films are typically thought to be produced and screened. Cinema was expanded not just to new sites of reception, including the university, the street, the counter-cultural happening, and the political demonstration; it was also effectively re-temporalized, whether via innovative approaches to editing or through the integration of different event-

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structures. Speaking of this expansion, EXPORT has recalled, “There was a shift in production to a new sense of time.”22 This temporal re-inflection was perhaps most evident in the work of Kren. Whereas his early films bore a significant debt to Kubelka’s model of metrical film, Kren went on to develop his own mathematically determined editing schemes, which situated abstraction not in the image but at the level of the individual cut. This approach memorably collided with Actionism when Mühl asked Kren to document his Material Actions. The few films that Kren shot before Mühl ended their collaboration radically decoupled the temporality of the Action from that of its mediation and reception. Such a break was most pronounced in films like 6/64: Mama und Papa (6/64: Mom and Dad, 1964), based on an Action for which Mühl’s score stipulated some 50 individual actions, to be completed over the course of an hour or so. In contrast, Kren built a four-minute film from 81 separate takes, some as short as one frame, recombined in 38 sequences with some takes repeated dozens of times in varying lengths. The net effect of this interpolation is overwhelmingly disjunctive, diffracting chronological sequence into a palpably juddering pulsation that almost seems to interfere with the body’s most basic biological rhythms. The expansion of cinema outside the movie theater took many forms, but its most visible and notorious incident occurred in June 1968 with the event Kunst und Revolution (Art and Revolution), which was staged at the University of Vienna by a group including Weibel, Mühl, Brus, and the theorist Oswald Wiener. Even though the event was intended to designate and activate the university as a site of potential dissensus, it ultimately crystallized many of the contradictions in Austrian cultural politics at that moment. Unlike France or West Germany, Austria had no viable independent left; it also lacked any structures of support for its neo-avant-garde, which was increasingly divided. As Gerald Raunig has argued, instead of sublating art within some sort of transcendent, emancipatory Event, Kunst und Revolution in fact demonstrated the irreconcilability of these terms at that moment, functioning as a “negative concatenation.”23 The artists who performed were split between the first and second generations of Actionists: Mühl led a band of naked imps in a pissing contest as Brus masturbated to the Austrian national anthem; while Weibel and Wiener stood at a blackboard in lab coats, giving oblique lectures on Leninism and cybernetics. The audience of students was unimpressed, then later infuriated after a public uproar led to the dissolution of the main leftist student organization, as well as criminal charges and exile for Mühl and Brus. Whatever critical impulse the event may have had was thus largely overshadowed by its recuperation as a juridical spectacle of deviance and punishment. Later that year, in this moment of crisis within the already weak Austrian New Left, Weibel and EXPORT produced Tastkino. That same

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month, Weibel premiered a different media action entitled Exit as part of an independent film festival. The audience sat before a “prepared screen,” which was covered in aluminum foil and punctured in several places. Weibel spoke from a script while a film was projected onto the screen. Then, without warning, fireworks began shooting from the screen directly into the audience. A small crew of collaborators continued this assault by igniting smoke bombs and lobbing firecrackers over the screen. From what little is known about the event, it seems audience members sought cover under their seats before fleeing the smoke-filled cinema. This flagrant display of barely sublimated aggression clearly speaks to the frustration felt by radical artists who lacked any obvious popular support. Such a sense of impasse was deepened by the general crisis of New Left movements elsewhere, which had foundered in part because of their difficulty negotiating their own mass-mediation. At the same time, Weibel and EXPORT had begun to enjoy success throughout central and northern Europe, appearing in independent cinemas, at universities, and at multimedia rock shows. As a young, attractive couple prone to advertising their own sexual liberation onstage, Weibel and EXPORT projected the personae of countercultural antiheroes, like Bonnie and Clyde, or Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. The two increasingly flirted with militancy— as in the 1969 Kriegskunstfeldzug (Art War Campaign), in which Weibel tried to build incendiary traffic blockades and which ended after EXPORT was attacked by an audience member. Soon thereafter the pair were charged with indecency violations in Austria after publishing the first collection of Actionist documentation. While they each continued to produce critical media art, they largely retreated from their action-oriented practice of the late 60s and from its potent yet problematic articulation of art, violence, technics, and spectacle. This change of course is evident in comments about the Tastkino that EXPORT made in 1980, when she noted that even though the event “succeeded in checking the power of patriarchy through acts of self-chosen demonstration,” such gestures of resistance occurred “at the expense of the woman actionist.”24 Presumably, she meant that the event achieved criticality only by risking the perpetuation of the conditions it contested, whether through EXPORT’s potential objectification or through inciting censure and harassment, as in fact occasionally happened. Furthermore, EXPORT acted in the absence of any sort of viable broad-based feminist movement in Austria and at a time when the apparent liberation of female sexuality was in many cases serving as an alibi for the expansion of the Western European pornography industry into an economy of scale.25 Such ambivalence suggests that the ultimate outcome of the “cultural revolution” sought by the members of the AFC and their fellow travelers was in many cases quite different than what was intended: a view that tracks closely with the more recent critiques of Fredric Jameson or Luc

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Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, which analyze the various ways in which the new social and political movements of the 1960s were recruited into the service of advanced capitalist hegemony.26 This quasi-dialectical inversion might help explain how the oft-revered events of ’68 have increasingly become inseparable from their entanglement with the regime of spectacular publicity that we now call “event culture.” It would thus seem that any contemporary assessment of this highly conflicted history would have to account for its central contradictions and for the pressure these invariably exerted on even the most careful or impassioned attempts to contest them. If the activities of the AFC make clear that cultural producers cannot expect (or be expected) to somehow transcend this radical immanence, they also suggest that such a position can serve as the basis for a different model of criticality—one that is premised on exposure to various orders of risk, contingency, and unforeseeability, and one that treats this heightened sensitivity not as a liability but as a potential opportunity.

Notes 1 My reconstruction of this action is based on VALIE EXPORT, “Tapp und Tastfilm,” unpublished text in the archives of the Generali Foundation, Vienna. All translations are the author’s unless noted otherwise. 2 EXPORT, “Tapp und Tastfilm.” 3 Further information about this exhibition is available in the accompanying catalog, Invisible Adversaries, eds. Lauren Cornell and Tom Eccles (Annandale-onHudson, NY: CCS Bard College, 2016). 4 See for example Pamela M. Lee, “Bare Lives,” in X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. Mathias Michalka (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), 70–89. 5 Usage of this term is thought to have become common only after the publication of the collection Wien: Bildkompendium Wiener Aktionismus und Film, ed. Peter Weibel with VALIE EXPORT (Frankfurt a.M.: Kohlkunstverlag, 1970). 6 See Günter Berghaus, Avant-Garde Performance: Live Events and Electronic Technologies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 158, n. 65. 7 For overviews of this field, see Hans Scheugl, Erweitertes Kino: Die Wiener Filme der 60er Jahre (Vienna: Triton Verlag, 2002), and Peter Tscherkassky, Film Unframed: A History of Austrian Avant-Garde Cinema (Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 2012). 8 For a critical account of this question, see Andrew Stefan Weiner, “Möglichkeitsformen: Expectation and Experiment in the Work of the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, 1968–69,” in Sarai Reader 09: Projections, eds. Shveta Sarda and Raqs Media Collective (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2013), 25–30.

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9 See for example Rosalind E. Krauss’s dismissal of Nitsch’s work as “a redemptive version of sacrificial self-mutilation.” Krauss, “No to . . . Joseph Beuys,” in Formless: A User’s Guide, eds. Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 143–46. Here, 146. 10 For a detailed theorization of this concept see Gerald Raunig, Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, trans. Aileen Derieg (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). 11 See Jacques Rancière, “Aesthetics as Politics,” in Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Malden: Polity Press, 2009), 19–44. 12 Steven Beller, A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 257–58. I rely primarily on Beller’s account in the following paragraphs. 13 See Karl Jaspers, Wohin treibt die Bundesrepublik? (München: Piper, 1966); and Theodor W. Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” (1959), in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, bk. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 555–72. 14 The historian Tony Judt has referred to this arrangement as a system that allowed the Grand Coalition to “purchase the consensus on which the country’s equilibrium rested.” Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 262. 15 For an overview of the Vienna Group’s activities, see die wiener gruppe: a moment of modernity 1954–60, ed. Peter Weibel (Vienna: SpringerWienNewYork, 1997). 16 See Kristin Ross, May ’68 and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 17 Kristine Stiles, “The Story of the Destruction in Art Symposium and the ‘DIAS Effect,’” in Gustav Metzger: History History, ed. Sabine Breitweiser (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005), 41–65. 18 On the importance of Knokke and also Xscreen, see Randall Halle, “Xscreen 1968: Material Film Aesthetics and Radical Cinema Politics,” 1968 and West German Cinema, ed. Christina Gerhardt, special issue of The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture 10 (2017): 10–25. 19 See Randall Halle’s interview with Birgit Hein in this volume: “Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system.” 20 Peter Weibel, “Der Mythos des 21. Jahrhunderts, Exkurse zu Marshall McLuhan, Ereignisfeld aus endlichen Regeln” (1967), in Buffalo Heads: Media Study, Media Practice, Media Pioneers, 1973–1990, eds. Woody Vasulka and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM and MIT Press, 2008). While the text seems to have been intended to be recorded for use in a mediated action in late 1967, it is unclear whether or not it was ever performed. 21 EXPORT, “Medial Anagrams,” trans. Camilla R. Nielsen, in White Cube/Black Box, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1996), 99–128. Here, 125. 22 VALIE EXPORT, “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality,” JAM 1, no. 4 (July 1991): 9.

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Raunig, Art and Revolution, 54. VALIE EXPORT, “Feministicher Aktionismus: Aspekte” (“Aspects of Feminist Actionism”), in Frauen in der Kunst, eds. Gisland Nabakowski, Helke Sander and Peter Gorsen (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 139–76. Here, 165. 25 For the relative weakness of the Austrian feminist movement at that moment, see EXPORT’s interview with Danièle Roussel in Roussel, Die Wiener Aktionismus und die Österreicher: Gespräche (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1995); on the relationship between EXPORT’s work and the growth of the pornography industry, see Robert Bilek, “Der Wiener Undergroundfilm der 60er Jahre: Realitätsbezuge und kritische Funktion,” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1983), 65. 26 Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the 60s,” in The 60s Without Apology, special issue of Social Text 9/10 (Spring-Summer 1984): 178–209; Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2007). 24

10:

Prague Displaced: Political Tourism in the East German Blockbuster Heißer Sommer

Ian Fleishman

W

HEN JOACHIM HASLER’S campy East German musical turned cult classic Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer) was released in June of 1968, it was intended (in somewhat of a self-contradiction) both as a pleasant distraction from the contemporary political climate and as a celebration of socialist ideology. As Andrea Rinke summarizes what seems to be the general scholarly perception of the film, which follows two groups of carefree young adults (ten boys, eleven girls) on a summer trip to a Baltic beach, “during the highly politicized period [of] the 1968 Prague Spring the apparently ideology-free depiction of youngsters having a good time must have come as a welcome moment of escapism to contemporary viewers. . . . it invited East German viewers to feel pride in the beauty of their Heimat, the homeland GDR [German Democratic Republic], and in the achievements of their young state.”1 In other words, the very escapism of the movie, examined more closely, may be revealed to have an ideology all its own. An overt attempt to attract larger audiences through an imitation of the West German Schlagerfilm (fluffy romantic comedies organized around catchy, inoffensive pop songs), Heißer Sommer delicately negotiates the need to entice young moviegoers while simultaneously taming and appeasing an increasingly rebellious youth culture, to toe a strict party line espousing socialist values without completely sacrificing sex appeal. Attuned to these tensions, criticism of this atypically cheerful East German blockbuster has therefore tended to situate the film somewhere on a spectrum between uncomplicated diversion and rather straightforward socialist propaganda—as a shrewd if not always subtle effort at ideological indoctrination in the guise of a lighthearted entertainment film. But perhaps this perspective too readily dismisses the unruly emancipatory potential of a youth film like Heißer Sommer—a potential that the film must first tap into and then struggle to contain. Shifting the discussion of Heißer Sommer from one generic category to another, from the musical to the travel narrative, here I would like to home in on the hidden traces of a youth rebellion both repressed and ultimately even coopted by the

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surface socialist ideology. After all, in a state with rigidly enforced borders, any travel is a fundamentally political act; as Christopher Görlich contends in his study of East German tourism: “Vacation in the GDR was never free of politics or nonpolitical.”2 Recent historical scholarship has been keen to point out that East German citizens under “actually existing socialism” were, in fact, nevertheless avid tourists.3 And, as Stefan Wolle relates in his book on 1968 in East Germany (in the opening lines of a chapter playfully but significantly titled “Heißer Sommer”), at the moment in question Prague—an epicenter of the era’s political disquiet—was a particularly “beloved destination for the travel-obsessed citizens of the GDR. The Golden City was the film onto which the most varied desires and mental images were projected.”4 Here I would like to examine the complicity between this variety of touristic fantasy projection, described by Wolle in explicitly filmic terms, and the cinematic projections of a film like Heißer Sommer, reinterpreting the box office hit and its celebration of tourist escapism in light of a repressed East German complicity with a culture of political protest in Prague and across Europe. The East German state’s attempt to mobilize the political capacity of popular cinema, I intend to demonstrate, is structurally analogous to its interventions into the tourist industry: just as the Deutsche FilmAktiengesellschaft (the state-owned East German film studio, DEFA) deployed cinematic distraction for the purposes of political edification, so, too, did the GDR’s Feriendienst (vacation bureau) work to domesticate the escapist impulse and wanderlust of its citizens, politicizing travel and ultimately transforming tourism into what Görlich has insightfully identified as a Herrschaftsinstrument (instrument of control).5 As an idealized cinematic fantasy of travel at a moment of heightened political tension and restricted freedom of movement, Heißer Sommer brings the workings of such mechanisms of state control into sharp relief. I do not necessarily mean to imply subversive intent on the part of the filmmakers;6 rather, I want to explore the depiction of travel in Heißer Sommer as a case study of how the authoritarian state cum culture industry first politicized daily life to the extent that ordinary autonomous acts on the part of its citizens (moviegoing, vacation) took on the appearance of political dissidence, then reincorporated this purportedly dissident activity back into the cultural-political body. There is a utopian longing latent in both cinematic and touristic escapism: it is this utopian aspect that the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED) sought to harness.

Popular Cinema / Socialist Cinema The problem with popular entertainment film, from the perspective of the ideological allegiances of the GDR, was that it was precisely socialist film—

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politically didactic, dramatic realism affirming party values—that was meant to be attractive to mass audiences: meaning that DEFA was forced to adopt the language of the capitalist enemy for its own films in order for them to attain the public appeal that the received wisdom insisted capitalist cinema should not, by its very nature, possess. Regarding the popularity of West German films in East Germany, Rinke concludes that “the situation was untenable for DEFA, not only from a financial but also from an ideological point of view, as the film imports were expensive, and it was socialist, not Western art, that was supposed to be massenwirksam (to address millions of people). Therefore, the DEFA management advised filmmakers to create their own specific brand of entertainment that would win back audiences while still conveying socialist values.”7 Heißer Sommer is inarguably one of the most successful products of this unique brand of entertainment—both commercially and in terms of the place it continues to occupy in the cultural imaginary. The blockbuster is thus a prime example of what Sebastian Heiduschke identifies as a precarious compromise between mass entertainment and socialist education in the East German genre film: “Filmmaking, according to the official political doctrine, was to adhere more to the principles of socialist realism by depicting the role of the working class. As a result, . . . DEFA’s audience sizes continued to decrease, and it was vital to coax audiences to the movie theaters. One response was an increased focus on the production of genre films—sci-fi, Western, and musical.”8 Previous scholarship on Heißer Sommer too often seems to accept at face value the socialist opposition between political realism and escapist entertainment: East Germans, Heiduschke insists, “eagerly relied on the cinema as means of coping with political reality. They sought out productions that were either critical of the political developments and of everyday life in East Germany or those that attempted to escape the present altogether by heading to a growing number of DEFA genre films.”9 But the trouble with this critical perspective is that it unwittingly adheres to the ideological associations it purports to critique. If DEFA’s hesitancy regarding genre films like the musical follows from the conviction that only bleak realism can fittingly portray socialist mores and appropriately espouse the state’s political values, scholarship on Heißer Sommer seems to participate in the converse fallacy: namely, that only dreary, serious endeavors could convey a critique of the state apparatus and that a genre film, by dint of its glossy entertainment value, cannot. Instead, the genre film in general and Heißer Sommer in particular are seen either as unadulterated escapism or neatly aligned with an insidious propaganda machine that seduces East German citizens into taking their socialist medicine with just the necessary dose of pop cultural sugar. For Henning Wrage, for example, Heißer Sommer is an intentionally inane response to the politically subversive “Kaninchenfilme” (“Rabbit Films”), banned in 1965: “The popular music film’s definitive lack of any political

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dimension anticipates the exhaustion of a profoundly integrative, even utopian social approach that had driven the coming-of-age films in the 1950s and early 1960s.”10 A sharp distinction is drawn, then, between those youth films “notable for their entertainment value” and those “for the authenticity in the representation of young people’s struggles in everyday life.”11 While seemingly agreeing with this sharp division between critique and entertainment, Heiduschke—who situates Heißer Sommer as an inheritor to the tradition of the Nazi musical and beside the West German Heimatfilm—sees the film’s politics as somewhat more menacing and manipulative: “the musical film for DEFA offered a convenient way to promote socialist ideals in disguise to young East Germans. . . . Heißer Sommer . . . carries an abundance of subliminal messages designed to sway the minds of East Germany’s teenagers. . . . Unlike the banned films of 1965 that depicted East Germany as a gray, drab country with unhappy people leading depressing lives, Heißer Sommer presents the opposite—a country of idyllic locations, overflowing with buoyant spirit and happiness, presenting young people with an abundance of opportunities.”12 In short, Heißer Sommer is denied any critical capacity and understood purely as a projection of how the GDR would like to see itself. But what if, remaining sensitive to the gap between generic ideation and social reality, we chose instead to read the film as a negative image of what East Germany has failed to become? What if we posit political escapism and utopian thinking not as polar opposites but rather as two sides of the same coin?13 As Richard Dyer insists, for instance, in a chapter on the genre of the film musical, “Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfillment,’ point to its central thrust, namely, utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes—these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realized.”14 By imagining and even staging this on-screen utopia, then, Heißer Sommer makes a spectacle of utopian aspirations not yet fully realized. This is particularly apparent when considered within the context of an East German youth culture drawn to Western music. As Mark Fenemore reminds us, “Bebop, rock ’n’ roll and beat fans were all perceived as threats to order and conformity. The perpetual rejuvenation of the youth subcultural scene made it a recurring thorn in the SED’s side.”15 In 1965, hundreds of beat fans in Leipzig had been sentenced to labor in a coalmine for protesting a ban on local pop bands.16 In 1969, hundreds more were arrested when they flocked to the Berlin Wall for a concert the Rolling Stones were rumored to be planning from a rooftop in West Berlin. When the band did not appear, cries of “We want the Stones” (Wir wollen

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Stones”) were intermingled with “We want freedom” (Wir wollen Freiheit”) and even “Dubček, Dubček.” As Wolle notes in his account of the event, “The name of the Czechoslovakian reformer had remained for many a symbol of freedom.”17 But if, in the youth-cultural imaginary, popular music and the Prague Spring clearly remained firmly linked, this was only because the state itself had insisted on it. As Wolle argues, “The beat fans by no means posed a real threat to the state. Their protest was nonpolitical and spontaneous. It was only artificially politicized by external pressure.”18 In their attempt at an East German Schlagerfilm, then, Hasler and his team were forced to capitalize on precisely those alluring aspects of Western youth culture that were seen as a threat to the ruling ideology of the socialist state. Doubtless for this reason, the music of Heißer Sommer oscillates unsteadily between defiant-sounding but really rather tame rock inflections and more innocently frolicsome, sometimes marcato rhythms reminiscent—particularly in the case of the hit number “Was erleben” (which could be roughly translated as “Have an Adventure”) to be discussed below—of the Fahrtenlieder (travel songs) of the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, FDJ) or other Pfadfinder (boy scout) groups. But what if, rather than reading the echoes of Wanderlieder (hiking songs) in Heißer Sommer as a purely domesticating element, we instead choose to take this as our cue to regard the film not merely as a musical or beach party movie but rather as a travel narrative at moments resonant of a road movie? In Heißer Sommer, the teenagers hitchhike to the coast, acquire and jury-rig a broken-down van whose unreliability becomes a running gag, sing and dance on a steam train and, at one of the film’s most climactic moments, take a fishing boat out for a joy ride. (In 1974, Maurycy Janowski, the screenwriter of Heißer Sommer, will even script a film featuring popular Eastern Bloc rock bands and billed explicitly as a road movie, Wie füttert man einen Esel (How Do You Feed a Donkey), which takes place largely in and around Prague. In this same context, the immense popularity of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road [1957] among East German youth deserves mention.) While the upbeat, chipper tone of Heißer Sommer could hardly be more different from the darker American icons of the genre such as Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and Easy Rider (Denis Hopper, 1969) or Wim Wenders’ West German road movie trilogy of the 1970s,19 it does, like earlier audience-pleasing East German teen flics—Die Halbstarken (Teenage Wolf Pack, 1956) or Berlin—Ecke Schönhauser (Berlin, Schoenhauser Corner, 1967)—borrow liberally, if sometimes in a quasi-parodic mode, from the motifs, costuming, and mannerisms (particularly in some of the dance sequences) of films like Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and especially the Marlon Brando biker film The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953). Perhaps, then, Heißer Sommer, is also comprised of what David Laderman calls “an intricate matrix of cultural predilections [through which] the genre of the road

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Figure 10.1. Marlon Brando’s iconic look in The Wild One. The Wild One, dir. Laslo Benedek, 1953, 76 min, Columbia Pictures. Screenshot.

Figure 10.2. One of the supporting characters from Heißer Sommer doing his best Brando. Heißer Sommer, dir. Joachim Hasler, 1968, 91 min, DEFA. Screenshot.

movie explores the ‘borders’ (the status quo conventions) of . . . society.”20 Put differently, as the East German, socialist antidote to Western, capitalist teenage rebel films, Heißer Sommer must first explore the borders of the ruling ideology before attempting to re-establish them.

Escapist Vacation / Political Vacation Travel to Czechoslovakia was forbidden to citizens of the GDR during the more violent events of the Prague Spring,21 but when Soviet tanks rolled into the Czech capital on August 21, 1968, Heißer Sommer—which, by coincidence, had premiered two months prior to the day—was still projecting its on-screen fantasies of freedom of movement not only in theaters but

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also in campgrounds, festivals, and open-air cinemas along the Baltic coast.22 Although there was, of course, no way for the filmmakers of Heißer Sommer to anticipate the outcome of the Prague Spring, it might make sense to read its popular reception (it attracted more than two million spectators23) as an ersatz of sorts during this travel ban. In the years and months preceding the release of Heißer Sommer, the Stasi had grown increasingly concerned about young East Germans vacationing in Prague, especially, where these tourists reveled in a relatively freer exposure to Western culture, jazz, Hollywood cinema, and the German-language Prager Volkszeitung. In fact, in the month of the film’s debut alone, nearly a quarter of a million East German tourists visited the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.24 Moreover, political tensions surrounding travel both within and beyond the borders of the GDR were compounded in the years leading up to these events by an increase in independently organized, individual vacations instead of travel arranged officially through the Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftbund’s Feriendienst (Free German Trade Union Federation’s vacation bureau)—a troubling development for a régime that sought to permeate every aspect of daily life. Görlich estimates that by 1966, independent travel accounted for nearly half of the GDR tourist industry, noting that “already in the 1960s independent tourism had grown to a size that could no longer be ignored. . . . these independent trips betray a desire for freedom of movement and self-determined travel planning with which citizens responded to the ideological guidelines of the state.”25 If this independent-mindedness is symptomatic of an underlying psychological emancipation from state control, Görlich nevertheless insists, “only rarely, however, did independently-organized travel constitute oppositional behavior or much less a form of resistance. Only in a few exceptional cases can independent trips truly be classified as oppositional behavior, such as holiday travel to the Prague Spring in the summer of 1968, undertaken especially by young people and intellectuals before the repeal of visa-free travel.”26 But if such trips to Prague were among the few instances that could legitimately be considered acts of political protest, any autonomously undertaken travel whatsoever, regardless of intention, was perceived by the state as potentially politically suspect. If tourism took on a decidedly political tenor, then, it was at least in part because the state insisted on it. This was particularly true for younger travelers. As Wolle recalls, “GDR authorities reacted almost hysterically to uncontrolled encounters between young people.”27 Recounting his frequent arrests while backpacking alone (especially whenever in the vicinity of the border to West Germany), Michael Möller concludes, “as a young man in his early twenties you were assumed to be attempting to flee the country as soon as you moved about freely outdoors.”28 Taking into account this culture of political paranoia, it is perhaps worth reconsidering how the projection of frolicsome twentysomethings on an improvised trip

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to the beach in Heißer Sommer may have registered with East German viewers of the time. The central contention of Görlich’s Urlaub vom Staat (and the double meaning of that title, Vacation of/from the State) is that while East German vacationers tended to see their time away from home as an escape from the perpetual politicization of daily life in the GDR, the state apparatus sought from very early on to politicize tourism as a guarantor of governmental legitimacy, as proof of the healthful joys of life under socialism and the material comfort provided and permitted by this political-economic system. Vacation, in short, was envisioned by the state as nothing less than a preview of coming attractions, as a brief teaser for socialism’s future utopian promise. What Görlich dubs the “Erlebnisorientierung [focus on adventure] of vacationers in the GDR” thus led “to a contradiction between the ideologization and politicization of the vacation bureau” and a constant conflict “between the ideologization of vacation through the party, state, and union, on the one hand, and citizens’ desires and expectations, on the other hand.”29 Precisely such an Erlebnisorientierung as the motivation for travel is given apt (and nearly verbatim) expression in the musical number alluded to above, “Was erleben”: I can be well-behaved whenever, there’s always time for that. But right now that’s out of the question, I’m in the mood, And today, today, today I want to Have an adventure, have an adventure, Have the kind of adventure that doesn’t happen every day.

The peculiar conditions of East German tourism lent an important political undertone to what otherwise might seem an utterly innocuous assertion of youthful defiance and pleasure-seeking.30 The insistence on the urgency of an undeferred experience (“heut’, heut’, heut’ [today, today, today]”) exceeding the dross of daily life in the German Democratic Republic also hints at an experience beyond what that state, with its utopian aspirations, was at present able to provide. As Görlich continues, “The adventure that citizens were looking for had to be discovered in the present, it could not take place in some future-oriented promise made by the socialist state. Thus, a specific form of vacation came into being between the future promise of socialism and GDR citizens’ focus on the present.”31 It is this particular form of vacation—a precarious compromise between apolitical instant gratification and politicized utopian patience—that is on display in Heißer Sommer. Tellingly, the Erlebnis of “Was erleben” is itself postponed. As the girls dance and march around the farmhouse attic they inhabit during this vacation, jumping on their beds and beginning a pillow fight, they are

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interrupted by a matronly figure who brings them buttermilk and imposes a bit of gentle discipline. While this wholesome intrusion is not entirely at odds with the admittedly chaste song, verses of which are dedicated to the punishments the boys will suffer (erleben) if they get too frisky, the implementation of a curfew is met with back talk that is largely comedic but nonetheless charged with subtle political significance. Declaring generational differences, one of the girls proclaims, “We’re not kids anymore! Everything develops so much faster these days. It’s acceleration.” (The statement is particularly ironic considering that the leads are actors in their mid-twenties playing teenagers prone to harmless but juvenile pranks.) Much more provocative, in a country with increasingly closed borders, is the melodramatic assertion, “I refuse to be locked up!” (In fact, deliberating whether to break out of locked sleeping quarters is a repeated motif, with both the boys and the girls staging group escapes at key moments.) While the rest of the dialogue is played off as a cute joke, this line is delivered with uncharacteristic fervor, immediately provoking a rallying cry of “Jawohl!” and another rousing chorus of “. . . today I want to have an adventure!” The situation is ambivalent: it is uncertain whether the comic relief is meant to be provided by the rotund and lovably hardened representative of adult, socialist values or rather by the naïve histrionics of the teenage girls. In any event, the interruption of the song incites a youthful discontent that cannot fully be laughed off: the same gesture demands and represses unrestricted freedom of movement. While recognizing the film’s decidedly “camp aesthetic,”32 previous scholarship on Heißer Sommer is surprisingly reluctant to read any real irony into its mode of presentation, instead interpreting it as an unambiguous celebration of socialist values. As Heiduschke insists in what is the most expansive reading of the film to date, “the teenagers complete their daily chores on the farm and at the harbor and do not start a sexual revolution like their 1968 counterparts in West Germany. . . . And their choice of modest fashion likely did not cause concern among their parents. Heißer Sommer shows an ideal East Germany—a country in which even a beach movie now could easily take place.”33 But it is never certain whether these implausibly innocent and well-behaved teenagers are intended as a socialist ideal—they quote Brecht to each other, read poetry aloud in lieu of sexual activity, and indeed don an only slightly skimpy but otherwise fairly drab wardrobe—or as a tongue-in-cheek parody of that ideal. What the text and staging of “Was erleben” do make evident is that this PG beach movie (the DVD re-release from 2003 is “freigegeben ab 0 Jahren” [appropriate for all ages]”) is not quite the adventurous vacation its characters had in mind. These diverging views of the ideal travel experience are evident even from the setting of the sequence, a makeshift dorm room in the local farmers’ cooperative, which is itself the locus of an underlying conflict between spontaneous, autonomous travel and officially organized state-sanctioned

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tourism. While not entirely anomalous, these makeshift accommodations are nevertheless noteworthy. “The essential motivations for independent travel on the part of older youths,” writes Görlich, “were an attempt at self-determination, spontaneity and adventure as well as the desire to escape the omnipresent politicization of everyday life and of one’s free time. Rather than relying on the travel office of the FDJ, young people sought accommodations in youth hostels, on campgrounds, in the wilderness or . . . with private renters.”34 The boys’ campground is an even more pronounced example of the latently subversive Erlebnisorientierung of young East German vacationers, which ran counter to the desire of the Feriendienst to bring all aspects of all travel under state control. Heike Wolter, for instance, has connected camping, within the specific context of East German vacationing, not only to political escapism but even to a variety of utopian fantasy projection: For one thing, the formation of one’s own spheres of adventure [Erlebnisbereiche] can be symptomatic of an inclination to flee. . . . In this sense, camping trips, for instance, become an occasion to seal oneself off as much as possible from the demands of the system. A niche comes into being that in many respects represents a fictional space, since a sense of freedom is perceived here that does not correspond at all to the objective conditions of the location. Furthermore, here acts of compensation are possible. Since certain locations are not accessible to citizens of the GDR, imaginary geographies of traditional holiday destinations were sometimes displaced as compensation.35

Specifically, Wolter wonders to what degree travel to the Baltic can be understood as a surrogate for the cliché of Mediterranean vacation, unavailable to East Germans; by August 1968, one might expand this geographical imaginary to include the non-coastal but similarly beloved (and similarly forbidden) destination of the Czech capital. Throughout the film, as the teenagers hitchhike, camp, and generally ad-lib their trip to the coast, they participate in the kind of “independent travel and camping trips that became immensely more common in the 1960s,”36 according to Görlich, and exhibit an independence and an impulsiveness in keeping with the broader pop cultural spirit of youthful rebellion of that decade: “Some older youths began . . . to forgo governmental mediation and support and to travel on their own. Hitchhiking, camping in the wilderness and . . . sleeping outdoors . . . thus became important components, often permeated by pop culture, of an independent youth tourism that attempted to elude state influence, to escape what was perceived as the dreary daily life of the GDR and to seek out adventure [Abenteuer].”37 This spontaneity is particularly apparent during the movie’s earliest sequences, depicting the first encounter between the two gender cliques as they compete for rides in Leipzig. The girls gain the

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advantage, slyly taking recourse to the same sex appeal that attracted viewers to the movie. “You’re appealing to the basest instincts,” one of the girls admonishes another, in what is one of the film’s more obvious moments of winking self-awareness. (A similar moment occurs just before “Was erleben,” as one of the girls, with a glance almost directly at the camera, coyly claims not to understand the appeal of her skin-tight jeans.) “Not to worry, boys, there are female drivers, too!” replies one of the young men. Heiduschke reads the opening musical sequence—the movie’s title track—as a happy tour through the East German Heimat, from Karl-MarxStadt (where the boys begin) to Leipzig (where they meet the girls) and onward to the Baltic. But while the sequence undeniably paints a rosy picture of the country’s land- and cityscapes, it is also edited into a somewhat bewildering montage replete with geographically flexible graphic matches from one landmark to another (twice a match-on-action causes a choreographed turn beginning before the backdrop of a fountain to conclude in front of the opera house) and even one city to another (the boys, for instance, are instantly transported from Karl-Marx-Stadt to Leipzig between the song’s chorus and its subsequent verse). A later dream sequence projects two of the characters onto the rooftop of a club in East Berlin and a bridge over the Spree then back before a windmill presumably somewhere in Pomerania. In fact, the movie was filmed not only in the places just mentioned but also in the Hanseatic City of Greifswald and on the islands of Rügen and Usedom, with little regard for geographic consistency, editing continuity, or coherence. Road movies, Laderman notes, “tend to integrate significant montage sequences so as to emphasize ‘traveling for traveling’s sake.’”38 But the construction of the opening montage of Heißer Sommer exemplifies traveling for its own sake in a rather more peculiar sense than one of reckless abandon: instead of providing images of elsewhere, of foreign experiences to be had, the sequence homogenizes East German territories as if all places were interchangeable. Youthful wanderlust has again been fulfilled and repressed by the same gesture. Ultimately, though, the impression that this montage makes on the viewer is one of a dissolution of geographical limitations in unmistakable contrast to the political realities of the time, and it is perhaps worth mentioning in this context that both Leipzig and especially Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) are significantly closer to the Czech border than they are to the Baltic Sea: Heißer Sommer delivers a fantasy of uninhibited transportation—but not in all directions.

Travel, Cinema, Utopia Scholarship on post-World War II German cinema has, for more than a decade now, been reorienting itself to take into account not only the

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national but also the transnational, working to establish how the local and the global in fact inform and constitute one another. When interpreted through the lens of travel, Heißer Sommer proves to be an especially apt specimen for an autopsy of how East German cinema, specifically, in the words of Lutz Koepnick and Stephan Schindler, “sought to unleash or to contain the very logic of deterritorialization [and] displacement . . . that distinguishes the filmic medium.”39 Considering this constitutive deterritorialization and displacement, one could reasonably consider film as a medium to be aligned with tourism on a fundamental level. And if this alliance clearly has a lot to do with fantasy production and (political) escapism, it might by the same token also be said to have an inherently utopian quality—an imaginary projection of places and states that are not present or that do not yet exist. Orvar Löfgren, for instance, in his history of vacationing, has identified it as a kind of cultural laboratory: “here people have been able to experiment with new aspects of their identities, their social relations or their interaction with nature and also to use the important cultural skills of daydreaming and mindtraveling. Here is an arena in which fantasy has become an important social practice.”40 Heike Wolter, while noting that early theorists of travel describe it “as a quasi-concrete utopia and thus make clear that touristic perception does not produce an image of travel destinations true to reality but rather that new spaces are constituted through projections, fantasies and medial preconceptions,” describes such daydreaming and mindtraveling in even more explicitly filmic terms: “It was equally true for citizens of the GDR that individual—but also medially conveyed and thus in a way collective—perceptions and images were to be found again in the reality of vacation. Visited territories that deviate from the imagined world of vacation are ultimately constructed anew through fantasies and projections. This formation of individual experiences [Erlebnisse] through montage and selection is typical of all travelers, but for GDR citizens it nevertheless has a certain special significance.”41 Heißer Sommer is one such particular moment of touristic image projection: a mental montage of individual Erlebnisse into a collectively imagined utopia. Perhaps, then, the film’s political significance in the summer and fall of 1968 has less to do with the utopian images it presents than with how these images differ from the reality of life under actually existing socialism—making the movie less of an escapist fantasy than a dream deferred. Stefan Wolle, an eighteen-year-old student at the time, has described the events of that August as the end of a vacation for East Germany: “The summer vacation of the year 1968 was the beginning of the end. After a cool and rainy season, the final days of vacation were meant to be summery and lovely.”42 But in recounting the many acts of youth protest in the country following the Prague Spring (more than sixty percent of those

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arrested in East Germany for such activity in the late summer and fall of 1968 were under the age of twenty-five;43 the same age bracket accounts for a full sixty-six percent of those who illegally visited Prague during the travel ban44), Wolle speaks of an impatience that would have been all too familiar to the teenagers of Heißer Sommer: “Everything these kids were asking for, freedom, democracy, truth, humanity, justice, all of that was just fine and dandy but not yet possible. And then came the day that not yet became no longer. This day was August 21, 1968. . . . The collision of utopia and reality had become a generational conflict.”45 It is, undoubtedly, this generational conflict that Heißer Sommer seeks to sublimate. But perhaps by giving filmic form to the gulf between reality and utopia, the movie draws on and in turn inspires a youthful impatience it could never fully contain.

Notes 1 Andrea Rinke, “Eastside Stories: Singing and Dancing for Socialism,” Film History 18, no. 1 (2006): 73–87. Here, 85. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 Christopher Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat: Tourismus in der DDR (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 266. 3 Görlich in particular, but also Heike Wolter “Ich harre aus im Land und geh, ihm fremd”: Die Geschichte des Tourismus in der DDR (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2009). 4 Stefan Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte: Die DDR 1968 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2008), 146. 5 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 14. 6 Sebastian Heiduschke notes that the director seems to have been chosen to ensure strict adherence to the ruling ideology: “Having Joachim direct the musical film . . . indicates that Heißer Sommer was to promote a socialist message. He had originally worked as cinematographer for Kurt Maetzig, one of DEFA’s eminent socialist directors. As director, Hasler had also delivered politically conforming films . . . that made him viewed as a ‘specialist for anti-West German films’ in West Germany.” Sebastian Heiduschke, East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 90. 7 Rinke, “Eastside Stories,” 75. 8 Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 86. 9 Heiduschke, 86. 10 Henning Wrage, “DEFA Films for the Youth: National Paradigms, International Influences,” eds. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage, DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), 263–80. Here, 278. 11 Wrage, “DEFA Films for the Youth,” 278.

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Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 88. On this point, I am closest to Stefan Soldovieri, who notes how Hasler’s belated 1972 Heißer Sommer sequel, Nicht schummeln, Liebling, “opens up a utopian space in which popular music can erupt onto the streets at any moment.” Stefan Soldovieri, “Not Only Entertainment: Sights and Sounds of the DEFA Music Film,” in DEFA at the Crossroads, 133–55. Here, 140. 14 Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 2012), 20. 15 Mark Fenemore, Sex, Thugs and Rock ’n’ Roll: Teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 239. 16 Also alluded to by Rinke, “Eastside Stories,” 84. 17 Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 230. 18 Wolle, 231. 19 Exploding genre definitions is, after all, part of what the “genre” of the road film does. The road movie emerges, as David Laderman tells us, at just this historical moment, in “the late 1960s, as an ‘independent’ film genre, vehicle of antigenre sensibilities and countercultural rebellion.” David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 3. And, as Timothy Corrigan reminds us at the outset of an influential book chapter on the road movie, “genre may always have been on the edge of a hysterical history, a shifting marker of history’s troubled relation with the way it represents itself. While genre has always struggled valiantly to accommodate within its formulas the social and cultural contradictions of history as if they were a single story—a western, a musical, a sci-fi film, in that action genre has often appeared strained or uncomfortably aware that any ‘true,’ ‘real,’ or ‘natural’ cultural history persistently remains outside its excessively codified borders.” Timothy Corrigan, “Genre, Gender, and Hysteria: The Road Movie in Outer Space,” A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 137–60. Here, 137. 20 Laderman, Driving Visions, 2. 21 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 136. 22 Ralf Schenk, Eine kleine Geschichte der DEFA: Daten, Dokumente, Erinnerungen (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2006), 163. See also Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 89. 23 Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 87. 24 Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 150. 25 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 134. 26 Görlich, 134. 27 Stefan Wolle, Aufbruch nach Utopia: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1961– 1971 (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2011), 340. 28 Unerkannt durch Freundesland: Verbotene Reisen in das Sowjetreich, directed by Cornelia Klauß (Germany: CinePlus / Radiofunk Berlin-Brandenburg, 2006). 29 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 22–23. 30 Rinke, “Eastside Stories,” 84. 31 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 23. 13

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Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 36. Heiduschke, 90–91. 34 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 201. 35 Wolter, Geschichte des Tourismus in der DDR, 420. 36 Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 195. 37 Görlich, 189. 38 Laderman, Driving Visions, 16. 39 Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick, “Against the Wall? The Global Imaginary of German Cinema,” in The Cosmopolitan Screen: German Cinema and the Global Imaginary, eds. Stephan K. Schindler and Lutz Koepnick (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1–21. Here, 14. 40 Orvar Löfgren, On Holiday: A History of Vacationing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 7. Also quoted in Görlich, Urlaub vom Staat, 13. 41 Wolter, Geschichte des Tourismus in der DDR, 420. 42 Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 7. 43 Wolle, 160. 44 Wolle, 167. 45 Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 173. 33

11:

Animating the Socialist Personality: DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme in the Shadow of 1968

Sean Eedy

I

1968, A WAVE OF PROTESTS and reform movements swept across Europe. While the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was not a focal point of these protests as it was in 1953 and would be again in 1989, the East German state was not immune to their influence as student uprisings changed society in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) to the West and the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) to the East. Coinciding with the student demonstrations against the communist regime in Poland, reform movements in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (ČSSR) proved to be particularly disconcerting for East Germany’s General Secretary Walter Ulbricht and his Socialist Unity Party (SED). Initiated by Alexander Dubček, Chairman of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ), “socialism with a human face” was meant to jumpstart the ČSSR’s economic activity through the relaxation of Stalinist repressions and the alleged democratization and decentralization of society and politics. Of concern to East German leaders was the possibility that these reform movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia would spill into the GDR and influence grass-roots movements in the GDR, the stability of which was always tenuous given the Federal Republic’s immediate proximity as a viable alternative to socialism. As Polish protests were quelled by internal security forces and the ČSSR’s reforms fell to the military invasion of the Warsaw Pact, the SED strengthened its own influence at home. If reform was to appear in the GDR, as happened in limited fashion with subsequent General Secretary Erich Honecker’s “unity of economic and social politics” in 1971, communist hardliners hoped these reforms would be managed by the SED and not pose a threat to the stability of the party or of the socialist state as was the case in both Poland and the ČSSR. In the aftermath of events and potential reforms in 1968 in Eastern Europe, children’s education and entertainment were reassessed in terms of their ability to generate adequately children’s enthusiasm toward the socialist state and to produce the required socialist personality among those children. Angela Brock suggests this socialist personality was N

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dedicated to the construction of socialism and society, able to act appropriately within the collective, and possessed of the highest socialist morality and scientific worldview. The development of this personality then became a core objective of East German education at the Fifth SED Party Congress in 1958.1 As education and the educational objectives of the SED regime were often embedded in children’s entertainment in the GDR, this chapter examines three Trickfilme (animated cartoon films) developed in the aftermath of the events of 1968 and Honecker’s subsequent “unity of economic and social politics.” Although children’s films and fairy tales in the GDR have become the subjects of much recent discussion and analysis by scholars such as Benita Blessing, Qinna Shen, and Marc Silberman, the subject of cartoons has been a curious footnote within the emerging historiography of East German films for children. This is not to suggest that the subject is entirely absent from the literature. But despite the importance of children’s films within the Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (the state-owned East German film studio, DEFA) studios and the pride of place afforded fairy tale films, the relative infrequency with which the subject of animated films is broached is curious, to say the least.2 Likewise, modernity in the GDR not only framed the socialist project since the 1960s but also marked technological, social, and political progress in the state, often simultaneously. Because of the technicality of film production as a mechanical and reproducible art form and its subsequent relation to socialist modernity, film came to the fore of East German youth policy as the attitudes of young people turned away from the SED in the latter half of the decade.3 The films under discussion here are all adaptations of Grimm fairy tales as one of the most common sources of established material in the genre. Tischlein deck dich (The Wishing Table, 1970), Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen (The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Kitten, 1970), and Die Geschichte vom Fischer und seiner Frau (The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife, 1975) were all produced by the DEFA Studio für Trickfilme Dresden. None are long enough to be considered features, common for animated films emerging from the GDR, which may begin to explain how and why this style of children’s filmmaking has largely gone understudied.4 Of equal importance, with the arguable exception of Der arme Müllerbursch, each film began its pre-production cycle following the upheavals of 1968 and as such reveals the values with which children’s films were imbued both from an entertainment and pedagogical standpoint. At the same time, these films speak across the artificial divide in East German historiography created by Honecker’s ascendency to the party leadership in May 1971, the supposed reforms initiated following his announcement at the Eighth Party Congress of “no taboos” among the arts, and the 1972 Basic Treaty with West Germany. This perceived divide thus allows a greater consideration of how the regime’s changing position to the West undermined strict

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adherence to socialist realism and permitted the inward turn of the critical lens in GDR fairy tale films. The pre-production of Die Geschichte vom Fischer, discussed below, began after the implementation of these changes in approach to both the arts and the West. That said, this chapter argues that animated films for children in early 1970s East Germany drew their pedagogical impetus from developments in SED politics coming well before the Prague Spring and the upheavals of 1968. As with other aspects of children’s entertainment, including but not limited to children’s literature and comic books, animated films were influenced by the adherence to the principles of socialist realism dictated by the Bitterfelder Weg in 1959, the liberalization of youth policy directed by Ulbricht’s Jugendkommunique (Youth Communiqué) in 1963 (which was, ironically, inspired by the perceived stabilization of society and youth culture following the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961), and the subsequent roll-back on these reforms in 1966. This new period of hardline repressiveness was itself a confluence of Honecker drawing attention from the SED’s Neues Ökonomisches System (Neues Ökonomisches System, NÖS), the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, and Ulbricht’s weakened position within the party as a result.5 While this affected other areas of children’s and youth culture well in advance of 1968, the film industry, including those films produced for children by DEFA Studio Babelsberg, was most directly affected by criticisms at the Eleventh Plenum of the Central Committee in December 1965 with the wide-ranging ban on films beginning with Kurt Maetzig’s Das Kanninchen bin ich (The Rabbit Is Me, 1965) and Frank Vogel’s Denk bloß nicht, ich heule (Just Don’t Think I’ll Cry, 1965). Although Sebastian Heiduschke suggests that by 1968 the SED demonstrated a somewhat more relaxed approach to DEFA films, particularly with the release of Joachim Hasler’s Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer, 1968), the groundwork was already laid for the continuation of children’s films, both animated and live action, as pedagogical tools in service of the SED state.6 As such, and although these animated film releases reflected the new social realities after 1968, they emerged equally from earlier policies surrounding children’s entertainment and culture. Of the three films, Tischlein deck dich adheres closest to the original Grimm fairy tale. A tailor casts out his three sons after their pet, a talking goat, lies about the sons not having fed him.7 Only when the tailor himself takes the goat to graze and the goat subsequently lies about it, does he realize his error. The tailor’s eldest son, Hans, apprentices with a carpenter. At the completion of his apprenticeship, Hans is given a magic table that, when the words “Tischlein deck dich” (table, bedeck yourself) are spoken, furnishes itself with a tremendous and perpetual feast. On his journey home, Hans stops at an inn where he demonstrates the table’s power to the patrons. The innkeeper then steals the table, replacing it with a replica

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Figure 11.1. Walter unleashes his magic cudgel after the innkeeper refuses to return his brothers’ stolen table and ass. Tischlein deck dich, dir. Rudolph Schraps, 1970, 33 min., DEFA Studio für Trickfilme Dresden. Screenshot.

while Hans sleeps. Likewise, the middle son, Klaus, apprenticed with a miller and is given an ass that spews gold coins from its mouth when the word “bricklebrit” is spoken. He arrives at the same inn where Hans was earlier deceived and is similarly tricked out of his magic ass. When Walter, the youngest son, completes his apprenticeship with a woodworker, his master gives him a cudgel in a sack. Saying “Keule aus dem Sack” (cudgel out of the sack) causes the magic cudgel to leap from the bag and, of its own accord, beat those who would do Walter harm. As Hans and Klaus both realize the innkeeper’s deception and together return to the inn to confront him, Walter arrives separately and watches this exchange unseen. After his brothers leave bereft, Walter enters the inn and talks of his magic cudgel just as his brothers before him. Once more, the innkeeper attempts to switch the cudgel with an imposter after the boy goes to bed. But Walter feigns sleep and, once the innkeeper has the cudgel in hand thus proving his guilt, says “Keule aus dem Sack.” The cudgel then beats the innkeeper until he returns both the table and the ass. As Walter returns home, magical gifts in hand, the townspeople are gathered, his family included. With the table and ass, the three sons provide the townspeople with food and

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gold. The goat, previously driven from the home by the tailor, returns and is also beaten by the cudgel for the falsehoods that initially set the story in motion.8 Released in 1970, Tischlein deck dich perhaps is informed by the immediate reverberations of 1968 more fully than the other films discussed in this essay, having started preproduction within a year of the antiauthoritarian revolts in Eastern Europe. The film includes themes such as the importance of vigilance against the imperialist enemy, providing for the collective, of which the familial unit is but the smallest microcosm, and of truth in the face of bourgeois, capitalist greed. Not traditional animation, the film is a Puppenfilm (puppet film), evoking the sixteenth century Punch and Judy puppet shows. The puppets are crude compared to the stop motion figures appearing regularly in Unser Sandmännchen (Our Little Sandman, 1959– present), the popular children’s program of the Deutscher Fernsehfunk (East German Television, DFF). The characters have large, asymmetrical eyes, tiny painted smiles, coils of yarn hair pasted to wooden scalps, and useless paws with fused fingers. Background sets are detailed though generic, and adult and child audiences would be forgiven for mistaking the boys’ childhood home for the inn or being unable to differentiate among the homes of the master-tradesmen or the master-tradesmen themselves. Though some of the camera tricks are effective if unconvincing (a superimposed fade creates the magic table illusion), the film required the magic cudgel to float across the screen, suspended above the set on a visible wire. Writing on DEFA fairy tale films, Shen suggests that Brothers Grimm stories were problematic for the SED, because, after numerous translations and interpretations, they were tainted by the bourgeois society that produced and consumed them.9 Thomas DiNapoli, a scholar of GDR children’s literature, concurs, claiming that the traditional fairy tale typically contradicted the precepts of socialist realism as adopted with the 1959 Bitterfelder Weg.10 Socialist realism avoided abstraction or expressionism in order to convey clearly its subject matter with little room for interpretation. It was possessed of a moralistic optimism that plotted history in an ever upward trajectory that glorified not only the present but also the promise of the future. In addition, socialist realism was imbued with classbased content that supported the Party’s ideological course. That said and as is the case with all the films under discussion here, Tischlein deck dich avoids the typical beats of fairy tale stories in that the heroes are skilled laborers and are thus defenders of the SED state’s projected value system, more so than either princesses or kings. Moreover, the villain in Tischlein deck dich is the bourgeois innkeeper, greedy to acquire and keep the magical items for his own benefit. While not indicative of the anti-fascist narratives dominating children’s films and largely defining the East German state before 1970, Tischlein deck dich is possessed of a class-conscious narrative that not only followed patterns established in DEFA children’s films,

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whereby children learn of honesty through an idealized morality. but also constructs Walter as a socialist realist hero.11 Blessing argues that, despite the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, the SED remained unshaken in its belief that children were the realization of an ideal socialist society. As such, children’s films, both live-action and animated, largely provided their audiences with positive role models and clear messages regarding social and political behavior.12 This focus followed trends established in other facets of children’s entertainment and education toward the development of the socialist personality among youth. At the beginning of the 1960s as socialist realism was introduced as the approved style across the arts in the GDR and the supposed unification of the arts and the factory floor was underway, the notion of the socialist personality emerged as the dominant trope of East German education and youth policy. While that policy largely focused on the organization of children’s free time, it was never separate from the socialist educational system. By the middle of the decade, this confluence of policy, organized free time, and education turned toward issues of child-citizenship and the child’s role in the socialist state as a member of East German society.13 This shift was reflected in children’s entertainment as comics, for example, fell under the scrutiny of educators and were criticized for their perceived inability to properly establish the socialist personality among its audiences. Children’s publications such as Mosaik von Hannes Hegen, conceived in 1955 as a socialist counterpoint to the popular Disney comics available in West Germany, were attacked for their lack of socialist content after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.14 The Wall was important here as its construction allowed the SED regime the ability to assert relative control over the now fixed population.15 Largely the result of its own popularity and the obligation to reader interests, Mosaik escaped radical alterations by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, FDJ) and its publisher, Verlag Junge Welt.16 But by 1966 and in the wake of renewed measures implemented after the Eleventh Plenum and the ban of the so-called Rabbit Films, Mosaik’s sister publication, Atze, received similar complaints regarding its ability to educate children sufficiently and to instill in them a sense of responsibility and enthusiasm toward the socialist state. The alterations to these comics necessitated clarity of both image and language to transmit effectively socialist educational content. The heroes they provided were thus drawn from working class people whose motives were simple and relatable to the young readership, in keeping with the fundamentals of the socialist realist model.17 This is equally true of Tischlein deck dich. Unlike Grimm adaptations produced by DEFA Studio Babelsberg, such as Rainer Simon’s more popular Wie heiratet man einen König (How to Marry a King, 1969) and Egon Schlegel‘s Wer reißt den gleich vor’m Teufel aus (The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs, 1977), Tischlein deck dich

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does not consider the potential transformation of the nobility, or bourgeoisie, toward a more acceptable proletarian state of consciousness or demonstrate life under monarchy as a kind of hell. Rather, the film is one of the few Grimm tales that does not involve upper class nobility at all and thus speaks directly to the exploitation of workers, in this case of the elder brothers by the bourgeois innkeeper. As a result, the tale required less modification to fit Tischlein deck dich into the SED’s existing socialist, pedagogical aesthetic. Demonstration of these social relations in the film, then, provided what Shen suggests is justification for East Germany’s existence at a time when children’s films retreated from such a position. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, adaptations of fairy tales typically criticized the oppressiveness of the East German state in the aftermath of the Prague Spring. The invasion of the ČSSR and the West German student protests found filmmakers approaching contemporary society critically as they had prior to the Eleventh Plenum.18 Tischlein deck dich, however, as is the case with all the films under discussion here, approaches social relations from a decidedly more conservative, hardline stance, demanding the supposed need for vigilance and sustained class conflict. Arguably, this need is attributed to the audience for whom the film was intended. Blessing asserts that children’s films produced by DEFA Studio Babelsberg were consumed by both children and adults despite the creation of a Kinderfilm (children’s film) culture that embedded socialist ideology easily digested by children.19 Trickfilme and, in the case of Tischlein deck dich and Die Geschichte vom Fischer, Puppenfilme explicitly targeted the child audience—the same audience for whom the socialist educational content was directed. As with the development of children’s literature throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the FDJ forged a Kinderkultur (children’s culture) that could not only stand alongside international competition but also legitimize the GDR as a Kulturstaat (nation of culture). It was imperative to turn toward the German literary canon in order to craft new stories in the classic tradition for the generation coming of age under socialism, to develop the socialist personality among those children for the perpetuation of the socialist state, and to lay claim to East Germany’s right as inheritor of the German-language arts. More than anything, the GDR’s claims to Germany’s cultural inheritance was the result of immediate competition and of comparison with the neighboring Federal Republic of Germany.20 With children’s literature, the FDJ hired established and celebrated writers to craft a new children’s canon accessible to both children and adults, promoted socialist values and, often, possessed themes and imagery too advanced for the intended audience.21 The regime likewise encouraged East German filmmakers to foster a new Kinderfilm, equal or superior to the one emerging from the West.22 However, like the perceived relationship between children’s literature and comic books in the GDR, this applied only to liveaction films, as animation was meant only for children and was less likely to

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be seriously considered and appreciated by adult audiences. As such, the crudity with which Tischlein deck dich was rendered—the puppets and presentation roughly hewn compared to the popular Unser Sandmännchen, the Punch and Judy-style humor, and the overbearing, conspicuous socialist message—was not intended for adults nor was it meant to contribute to the emerging (East) German filmic canon. The animated adaptation of the Grimm tale Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen, in development since 1966, was released to audiences shortly after Tischlein deck dich and was thus beholden to the same forces appearing in the fallout of 1968, addressing some of the same themes as that earlier film.23 Unlike Tischlein deck dich, Der arme Müllerbursch is traditional hand-drawn animation. The characters are realized with amateurish, jagged and incomplete lines, colored in flat hues belying the film’s tone and depth. They appear misplaced, almost child-like drawings themselves, against the painted and textured backgrounds. Der arme Müllerbursch’s relatively inferior animation, especially when compared to contemporary work emerging from western studios like Hanna Barbera (Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! 1969–70) and Rankin Bass (The Hobbit, 1977), may be attributed to the regime’s dismissiveness of the genre. Animation supposedly appealed only to children, despite drawing on the Brothers Grimm as (East) Germany’s cultural legacy. Since the uprising in Hungary in 1956 and the SED Fifth Party Congress in 1958, reiterated in 1965 by the FDJ’s Central Committee Secretary Helmut Müller, it remained imperative that Kinderkultur impress socialist ideology and pedagogy.24 But animation, like comics, was considered disposable. Ironically, this was not unlike the way German folk and fairy tales originally garnered little support from the SED.25 As a result, little early attention was paid to a film style that was thought forgotten as children grew into contributing citizens under socialism. Like the previously discussed film, Der arme Müllerbursch sees three boys sent into the world at the behest of their patron, an aging miller, to find him a horse and thereby earn the inheritance of the mill. Hans, the youngest of the three and the film’s protagonist, is depicted as smaller and more ragged than the other boys, busying himself with work and chores while they are drunk and boorish, and suffering abuse from the miller to whom he is pledged. But this never breaks Hans’s good mood because he draws pleasure from his work. When abandoned in the woods by the other boys who think him silly and strange, Hans encounters a small black kitten with yellow spots. She offers him a beautiful horse, one that will satisfy the miller and guarantee Hans will inherit the mill, in exchange for Hans’s completion of three tasks. Hans agrees and is led to an underground house where the kitten lives with several other cats. But they are followed by a larger, mangy, green and black cat, twisting design elements of both Warner Brothers’ Sylvester (and Tweety) and Hanna-Barbera’s Tom (and

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Figure 11.2. The mangy green cat appears, tempting Hans to choose the effortless way out of his first task for the kitten. Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen, dir. Lothar Barke and Helmut Barkowsky, 1970, 53 min., DEFA Studio für Trickfilme Dresden. Screenshot.

Jerry), and possessing an eerie voice that echoes unnaturally. The character is new to this film version of the Grimm tale and, as suggested by the DEFA Film Library, affects the moral. With each task Hans attempts, the evil cat appears, offering Hans a quick, magical solution. Each time, however, Hans replies to the cat’s temptations: “a promise is a promise” (“Versprochen ist versprochen”). Whereas the Grimm tale demonstrates the boy’s ability to overcome despite his perceived silliness and stupidity, this DEFA film foregrounds the concept of obligation as Hans makes no effort to find an easy way out of the promises made to the kitten.26 Hans returns to the mill after the completion of his tasks and is soon after followed by the kitten, now transformed into a beautiful woman wearing a black and yellow spotted dress, who arrives by coach. The horse she presents to the miller easily outclasses the pitiful examples produced by the other boys. Hans turns down inheriting the mill, choosing instead to leave with the kitten-turned-woman to marry and presumably live happily ever after. The miller is thus forced to continue with the oafish behavior of his remaining, lazy apprentices.27

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Set against the East German socialist landscape, Hans’s value of hard work both endears him to the kitten and allows him to fend off the advances of the evil, green cat. Moreover, it is this same outlook that positions Hans as the kittens’ defender. Each night, the cat attempts to break into the kittens’ underground house. With the help of a firefly befriended while alone in the woods, Hans stands watch over the kittens, easily outsmarting the cat whenever he appears. In this respect, Hans is not unlike Walter from Tischlein deck dich. Although Walter observes the innkeeper only once, the theme of vigilance is prominent throughout Der arme Müllerbursch as Hans drives the cat away each night he spends in the kittens’ home. But in each film, the protagonist thwarts the foreign influence of the innkeeper and of the green cat and is indicative of socialism’s defense against the perceived hostilities of encroaching capitalist forces. This alteration to the original fairy tale helped avoid criticisms regarding the genre’s typical lack of socialist content as Daniela Berghahn suggests was the case with the release of Francesco Stefani’s Das singende, klingende Bäumchen (The Singing, Ringing Tree, 1957).28 At the same time, the film’s inclusion of the green cat and the vigilance required to protect the kittens from it impressed socialist convictions necessary to the development of the socialist personality, traits that later became the principle task of the party’s educational program following Honecker’s speech at the Eighth SED Party Congress in 1971.29 Similarly, in a report on the development of Atze published at the end of 1964, Verlag Junge Welt proposed stories that not only connected the SED’s educational regime but also served to generate genuine love for and participation in the socialist Fatherland and the development of appropriate socialist behavior traits that included a “hatred of West German imperialists.”30 It was thus the responsibility of East German children’s popular media to entertain in a way that was educational and met children’s obligations to the state.31 In the wake of the social and political upheavals of 1968, children’s films, and particularly animated fairy tale films, continued to reel from the repressive measures implemented across youth policy with the weakened position of party leader, Ulbricht. DEFA productions and their representation of the socialist state were subject to intense self-censorship already in place prior to the emergence of democratic reforms in the ČSSR and student protests in West Germany.32 While this was the case for adult feature films, Blessing suggests it was equally true of DEFA’s productions for children.33 This was by no means a recent development, however, as the Politburo, as early as 1952, criticized DEFA’s productions, children’s films included, for not sufficiently providing for the socialist education of the German working class.34 More important in terms of children’s films and fairy tales, the SED employed public space to allow for an engagement with this socialist education and the perceived construction of the socialist personality.35 This shift echoed pedagogical developments elsewhere in

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children’s entertainment as the Party leveled criticisms against comics and children’s books, attempting to develop a unique East German Kinderkultur (children’s culture) through anti-fascist children’s literature, in place since the mid-1960s, though arguably as early as the announcement of the Bitterfelder Weg as official course in the late 1950s.36 As a result, both Tischlein deck dich and Der arme Müllerbursch demonstrated relatively conservative notions of socialism, of the films’ child-audience, and of perceptions of children’s role within socialist society. On the other side of the divide rendered by the changing SED leadership, Die Geschichte vom Fischer und seiner Frau is the most fully realized and technically proficient film under discussion. Die Geschichte vom Fischer, like Tischlein deck dich a Puppenfilm, is stop motion animation evocative of the long-running Unser Sandmännchen. Arguably, the mechanical reproduction and repetitiveness of the animation style reflected socialism and socialist modernity as a technological and political undertaking.37 The figures are more refined, though no less stylized, than those in Tischlein deck dich, and while not having articulated mouths, their eyes are expressive and their movements more realistic than possible with the puppets of that earlier film. A rich color palate, leaning toward deep blues and purples at sea, warmer oranges and yellows at the fisherman’s home, and heavy shadow contrasting what would normally prove to be the film’s happier moments, reflected the changing themes and moods of the film and of Kinderfilm more broadly. The short was released in 1975, well after Honecker’s announcement at the Eighth Party Congress (1971), the Basic Treaty with West Germany (1972), and East Germany’s membership in the United Nations (1973). This changed relationship between East and West Germany and mutual recognition launched a new era of East German national pride and legitimacy, buoyed by cultural exports, particularly DEFA fairy tale films and Grimm adaptations, proving themselves more than pale reflections of West German culture.38 The FDJ exported Mosaik von Hannes Hegen to the West beginning with the Amerika-Serie in 1969. Unser Sandmännchen followed suit, appearing in Finland in 1973 and in Norway and Sweden (as John Blund) later in the 1970s. As a result, the smoothly sculpted and nuanced puppets in Die Geschichte vom Fischer are attributable to the GDR’s changing image of self within the international cultural community, initiated by DEFA’s filmic output and Unser Sandmännchen’s rising stardom. DEFA’s Kinderfilme, based on Grimm fairy tales, were “national treasures,” exported and shared globally. Moreover, DEFA was proof of East German international legitimacy with live-action children’s films providing a limited outlet for criticism.39 Still, Die Geschichte vom Fischer was subject to ideological imperatives that were spread throughout East German Kinderkultur since 1968, because education dominated FDJ youth policy. Children’s literature and film demonstrated the GDR’s perceived status as a Kulturstaat following the Basic

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Figure 11.3. Having become the epitome of bourgeois greed, the fisherman’s wife reclines in her lavish sitting room. Die Geschichte vom Fischer und seiner Frau, dir. Werner Krauße, 1975, 13 min., DEFA Studio für Trickfilme Dresden. Screenshot.

Treaty, but narratives retained their exploration of humanism and antifascism in development of the realized socialist personality among the child audience and the child’s role under socialism.40 In Die Geschichte vom Fischer, a fisherman catches a golden flounder that then begs for its life to be spared. Of course, the fisherman cannot kill a magical fish and releases it back into the sea. In gratitude, the flounder offers the fisherman one wish. After a moment’s indecision, not sure that he wants or needs anything more than he already has, the fisherman wishes for a boat to ease his work and make him more productive, a wish the flounder happily grants. Upon his return home, the fisherman tells his wife of the flounder and his wish. She immediately complains that he wished only for a boat, demanding that he return to the flounder to wish for a house better than the hovel in which they live. The fisherman does so reluctantly, but the sea has grown dark and purple and the flounder appears cross, bearing large, pointed teeth. Nonetheless, the fisherman asks on his wife’s behalf. Granting the fisherman’s wish, the flounder sends him back to his wife. The wife is unimpressed and returns her

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husband to the flounder, this time to wish for a castle. Now the sea is grey and roiling. No less animated than the characters that occupy the space, the sea and sky swirl with dark colors like an ideologically problematic impressionist painting. The flounder bids the fisherman return home as the wish is already granted. The fisherman does as he is told only to find his wife sitting on a lavish couch, sipping tea. The mirrors lining the walls of the circular sitting room reflect the conversing figures and would prove a technical challenge to the hand puppets of Tischlein deck dich. After a moment and sounding rather uninspired by the splendor in which she now resides, the fisherman’s wife insists her husband bring the flounder to her, so she may make additional wishes without the husband’s delay as messenger. The fisherman initially refuses but is browbeat by his wife until he relents. As he tells the golden fish of his wife’s latest desire, the sea grows stormy and tumultuous. In an echoing, malevolent voice, the flounder shouts, “I will come! I will come! (“Ich komm! Ich komm!”). And with a great flood, the flounder washes away the castle. With everything bestowed upon them gone, the fisherman and his wife are left in the hovel in which they first lived.41 While Die Geschichte vom Fischer shares the opposition to capitalist greed and laziness made apparent in both Tischlein deck dich and Der arme Müllerbursch, the story is also demonstrative of the critical atmosphere seeping into the post-1968 narrative landscape of DEFA animated films. In contrast to the original Grimm fairy tale, Die Geschichte vom Fischer was simplified in that the wife no longer asks to become queen, or empress, finally wishing for control of the sun and moon, effectively granting her the powers of divinity. This shift foregrounds the wife’s greed in terms digestible for children in the socialist context with the removal of monarchies and deities given the structure and atheistic nature of GDR socialism. At the same time, the story is driven by class conflict as the wife’s greed compels her toward a bourgeois lifestyle. This appears in stark contrast to the fisherman’s own wish for a boat to facilitate his labor, turning attention back toward the pleasure derived from work and noted with Der arme Müllerbursch. In Die Geschichte vom Fischer, however, the fisherman does very little to prevent his wife’s greed. When the flounder freely offers the fisherman a wish, he does not believe himself truly in need of anything, despite living in squalor. But as his wife’s wishes become more extravagant and outrageous, the fisherman does little more than voice concerns to his wife or himself. When, finally, he puts his foot down, his wife, having just demanded he bring the flounder to her, shouts and complains until the fisherman submits to her will. As much as this turn of events is critical of the wife’s bourgeois greed, the film criticizes the fisherman’s inability to protect her from herself and to provide the necessary bulwark against her want of material things.42 By no means is the fisherman a positive role model in the same way as either Walter in Tischlein deck dich or Hans in Der arme Müllerbursch.

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Nor is he indicative of the socialist hero upheld elsewhere in children’s television programming, literature, or comics. Indeed, such a figure is not to be found anywhere in the film. Though the fisherman believes in the value of work and wishes only to continue in that, he proves incapable of pushing back against the encroaching influence of bourgeois capitalism and greed. As such, Die Geschichte vom Fischer indicates a departure not only from the prior policy requirements lording over children’s entertainment and pedagogy but also from socialist realism following the Bitterfelder Weg. In the wake of 1968 and particularly after Honecker’s announcements at the Eighth Party Congress, however, this departure reads as one sanctioned by the Party. Blessing suggests that the presence of magic provided the fairy tale genre limited space for discussions of modernity’s problems and their impact on children, which proved impossible in more realistic works, particularly in the context of the 1970s.43 Here again, Qinna Shen concurs, as DEFA’s critical lens turned from the west toward the GDR itself.44 But in the build-up to the Soviet invasion of the ČSSR a few years prior, Ulbricht’s regime feared the potential overflow of western imperialist sentiment into the GDR from Czechoslovakia, had the Warsaw Pact allies done nothing to prevent its spread.45 Moreover, the relaxation of tensions with West Germany since the ascendency of Honecker in 1971 required greater vigilance within East Germany to keep imperialism at bay as the nature of western representations necessarily changed.46 As a result, and despite the perceived liberalization of DEFA films during the production cycle of Die Geschichte vom Fischer and as was the case in other areas of children’s entertainment, animated films required a pedagogical message that addressed this new socialist reality now that western imperialism did not present the same threat it had only a few years earlier.47 Rather than provide continued simplifications of the socialist personality that pervaded children’s films in the 1950s and 1960s, Die Geschichte vom Fischer sought to criticize socialism’s inability or refusal to defend itself from capitalism in a political landscape that could no longer criticize western powers as freely. None of this is to suggest that DEFA Trickfilme went unaffected by the changing political courses at home and abroad. But in terms of the upheavals of 1968, DEFA films were already engaged with clearer lines of political authority and self-censorship emerging from the Eleventh Plenum and affecting all levels of production.48 Though the release of Heißer Sommer provided necessary respite from the reality of life in the Soviet Bloc after the Prague Spring, conservative policies over DEFA productions were only alleviated following Honecker’s ascension in the Party ranks and the toleration and acceptance of the Alltagfilme (films of everyday life) after 1971.49 Children’s films, however, were only tangentially related to these political currents and, given their audience, more resistant to change from lackadaisical trends in film culture. While the events of 1968 caused

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ripples throughout East German society, Trickfilme, like many other aspects of children’s entertainment, were bound by perceived connections to the SED’s education regime. Fairy tale films, particularly these animated adaptations, since their audience was almost exclusively comprised of young children, played a significant role in the education and socialization of their viewers. As a result, animation closely adhered to long-standing youth policy, even when those ideological currents were largely abandoned by other aspects of DEFA film production. By the time of the Polish March, the Prague Spring, and the West German students’ movement, then, DEFA Kinderfilme were well into a conservative period of filmmaking fostered by the need to strengthen ties to the Soviet Union following Brezhnev’s ascendency and the political backlash of the Eleventh Plenum in 1965.50 From changes wrought to youth policy and children’s films by both the Plenum and the Bitterfelder Weg, Trickfilme found it difficult to escape narratives glorifying anti-fascism, vigilance, and the model socialist heroes that served to construct the socialist personality in the minds of their audience, educating them in modes of behavior appropriate to citizens in the SED state. Moreover, the aesthetic of these animated Grimm adaptations, visually and politically, was entwined with the regime’s perception of audience no less than it was the state’s perception of self. Though this tendency changed after 1971, made obvious in Die Geschichte vom Fischer and criticisms leveled against socialism’s inability to rebuke imperialist advances, this shift had more to do with Party leadership and the normalization of western relations than with the political instabilities of the late 1960s.

Notes The author is grateful to Mathias Weiser, without whom this essay would quite literally not have been possible. Not only did Mathias acquire the DVDs discussed in this essay and get them into the author’s hands, he ensured the screenshots within met the publisher guidelines. For all his assistance, the author is in his debt. 1 Angela Brock, “Producing the ‘Socialist Personality’? Socialisation, Education, and the Emergence of New Patterns of Behaviour,” in Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’? ed. Mary Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 220–52. Here, 223. 2 Benita Blessing, “Defining Socialist Children’s Films, Defining Socialist Childhoods,” in Re-Imagining DEFA, eds. Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 248; and Daniela Berghahn, Hollywood Behind the Wall: The Cinema of East Germany (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 248–67. Here, 44. 3 Dorothee Wierling, “Youth as Internal Enemy: Conflicts in the Education Dictatorship of the 1960s,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture

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and Politics, eds. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 157–82. Here, 157 and 164. 4 Marc Silberman, “The First DEFA Fairy Tales: Cold War Fantasies of the 1950s,” in Take Two: Fifties Cinema in Divided Germany, eds. John E. Davidson and Sabine Hake (New York: Berghahn, 2007), 106–19. Here, 110. 5 Sebastian Heiduschke, East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 80. 6 Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 86. 7 The logistics of a talking goat are never broached in the film. The notion of a talking animal, as is also the case with comic books, can be explained as a trope of the fairy tale genre in which the film itself operates. 8 Tischlein deck dich, dir. Rudolf Schraps, Alles Trick 5 (1970; Dresden, DE: Studio für Trickfilme Dresden/Icestorm, 2013), DVD. All references are from the Icestorm DVD release. 9 Qinna Shen, “Barometers of GDR Cultural Politics: Contextualizing the DEFA Grimm Adaptations,” Marvels & Tales 25, no. 1 (2011): 70–95. Here, 71. 10 Thomas DiNapoli, “Thirty Years of Children’s Literature in the German Democratic Republic,” German Studies Review 7, no. 2 (May 1984): 281–300. Here, 297. 11 Berghahn, Hollywood, 43–44; and Benita Blessing, “Happily Socialist Ever After? East German Children’s Films and the Education of a Fairy Tale Land,” Oxford Review of Education 36, no. 2 (April 2010): 233–48. Here, 239. 12 Benita Blessing, “DEFA Children’s Films: Not Just for Children,” in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, eds. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 243–62. Here, 261. 13 Anna Saunders, Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979–2002 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 11–15. 14 Gerd Lettkemann and Michael F. Scholz, “Schuldig ist schließlich jeder . . . der Comics besitzt, verbreitet oder nicht einziehen läßt” Comics in der DDR—Die Geschichte eines ungeliebten Mediums (1945/49–1990) (Berlin: MOSAIK Steinchen für Steinchen Verlag, 1994), 49. 15 Wierling, “Youth as Internal Enemy,” 162. 16 Sean Eedy, “Comic Books and Culture in the German Democratic Republic, 1955–1990: Between Constructions of Power and Childhood” (PhD diss., Carleton University, 2016), 210–11. 17 BArch DY 24/1581, “Konzeption für das neue Profil der Bilderzeitschriften ‘Atze,’” 2–6. 18 Shen, “Barometers,” 80–82. 19 Blessing, “Defining,” 250–51. 20 Sean Eedy, “Reimagining GDR Comics: Kultur, Children’s Literature and the Socialist Personality,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5, no. 3 (2014): 245–56. Here, 248. 21 J. D. Stahl, “Children’s Literature and the Politics of the Nation State,” Children’s Literature 20 (1992): 193–203. Here, 198; and Gaby Thompson-

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Wohlgemuth, “About Official and Unofficial Addressing in East German Children’s Literature,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2005): 32–52. Here 35–39. 22 Blessing, “Defining,” 248–51. 23 There is some debate surrounding the date of this film. The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts dates Der arme Müllerbursch to 1970. Icestorm, the German production company distributing DEFA Trickfilme in Europe, claims the film was produced in 1971. This discrepancy does not affect my argument, but for simplicity’s sake this chapter follows the DEFA Film Library dating. “The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Kitten,” DEFA Film Library, accessed December 16, 2016, http://ecommerce.umass.edu/defa/film/5086; and “Alles Trick 1,” Spondo, accessed December 16, 2016, https://www.spondo.de/dvd-alles-trick-1-jetztguenstig-kaufen.html. 24 Shen, “Barometers,” 75. 25 DiNapoli, “Thirty Years,” 297. 26 “The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Kitten,” DEFA Film Library. 27 Der arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen, dirs. Lothar Barke and Helmut Barkowsky, Alles Trick 1 (1970, Dresden, DE: Studio für Trickfilme Dresden/ Icestorm, 2012), DVD. All references are from the Icestorm DVD release. 28 Berghahn, Hollywood, 44. 29 Brock, “Producing the Socialist Personality,” 244. 30 BArch DY 26/118, 15. 31 BArch DY 24/1581, 4; and Blessing, “Defining,” 248. 32 Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 83. 33 Blessing, “Defining,” 251. 34 Manuel Köppen, “Emplotting Anti-Fascism: Heroes, Scoundrels, Traitors,” in DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture, eds. Marc Silberman and Henning Wrage (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 45–66. Here, 50. 35 Blessing, “Happily Socialist,” 236. 36 Eedy, “Reimagining,” 247–48. 37 Wierling, “Youth as Internal Enemy,” 157. 38 Blessing, “DEFA Children’s Films,” 249. 39 Blessing, “Defining,” 257. 40 Saunders, Honecker’s Children, 12. 41 Die Geschichte vom Fischer und seiner Frau, dir. Werner Krauße, Alles Trick 5 (1975, Dresden, DE: Studio für Trickfilme Dresden/Icestorm, 2013), DVD. All references are from the Icestorm DVD release. 42 East German society constructed women as consumers. More importantly, men, women, and the SED itself understood consumption in terms of the domestic space and the women occupying that space. As a result, the perception of women aligned itself with notions of bourgeois, and thus Western, patterns and practices of consumption. Women’s supposed desires toward the material thus threatened instability as the state was incapable of providing for this want, necessitating Honecker’s “Unity of Economic and Social Policy” in 1971. Although the greed

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of the Fisherman’s wife is perceived in terms of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, these consumptive patterns allowed women a “lever of control” in a society largely gendered male in its construction of social and political interactions. See Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 5–10. 43 Blessing, “Happily Socialist,” 239 and Blessing, “Defining,” 256. 44 Shen, “Barometers,” 71. 45 Manfred Wilke, “Ulbricht, East Germany, and the Prague Spring,” in The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, eds. Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Peter Ruggenthaler (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 341–70. Here, 354. 46 Gerd Horton, “The Impact of Hollywood Film Exports and the Cultural Surrender of the GDR Film Control in the 1970s and 1980s,” German History 34, no. 1 (March 2016): 70–87. Here, 84. 47 Eedy, “Comic Books and Culture,” 59–62. 48 Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 197. 49 Heiduschke, East German Cinema, 86 and 93; and Feinstein, Triumph, 217 and 222. 50 Berghahn, Hollywood, 143.

12:

Allegories of Resistance: The Legacy of 1968 in GDR Visual Cultures

Patricia Anne Simpson . . . Reiß den neben dir Aus dem tödlichen Schlaf: Es ist nicht Vietnam Hörst du Es ist nicht Vietnam! [. . . Wrest the one beside you from deadly sleep: It is not Vietnam Do you hear It is not Vietnam!1] —Inge Müller (1925–66), “(VIETNAM)”

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the public sphere in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) endorsed a hegemonic interpretation of history that excised World War II trauma from collective consciousness and subsumed both real and allegorical resistance against National Socialism into its national and internationalist socialist imaginary. Yet personal trauma persisted. During allied air strikes, poet Inge Müller spent three days buried under rubble, along with the corpses of her parents and a surviving dog. During her lifetime, only a few of her poems were published; the career of her second husband, Heiner Müller, dominated the relationship. Her suicide in 1966, inconsistent with the image of artists and intellectuals that the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party) projected, diverged from the GDR narrative of personal and political optimism and commitment to the utopian rhetoric of the Aufbau or building of a socialist state on German soil. During the 1960s, any recognition of personal stories of war-time victimhood or postwar trauma remained repressed or languished in an unpublished poetic indictment of socialist reason’s sleep, articulated, yet signified only as bracketed. The political and social turbulence of the 1960s, while exerting a profound impact on both sides of the Cold War divide, resonated differently in the two Germanys. While radicalism in some Western democracies fomented violence and sometimes spurred social change, geo-political events that galvanized transnational protest movements, such as the

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Vietnam War, elicited responses on both sides of the Berlin Wall, albeit selectively. In the Eastern European states, interdependent political and aesthetic practices largely suppressed sympathy with the agents of protest and reform in Prague, for example, while instrumentalizing dissent against Western powers, particularly the United States and its First World allies. In the GDR, during the aftermath of the Prague Spring and of the regime change within the SED, any potential for reformist impulse was subjugated to aesthetic orthodoxy: by decree, GDR art should create a “socialist human community” by portraying everyday life with optimism. At the time of Inge Müller’s death, GDR discourse on the everyday focused on the construction of an upwardly mobile socialist state. Documentaries produced by Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (the state-owned East German film studio, DEFA) about Vietnam recapitulated not only a dutiful aesthetic of socialism’s victory but also the less sanguine elements of collective repression about the public inability to mourn, subsumed into allegories of socialist resistance and belated anti-fascist fantasies. In local terms, East and West German propaganda deployed Vietnam as a political signifier; after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the West’s rhetoric of moral victory over Communism needed radical recoding. Meanwhile, the GDR occupied the moral, political, and historical high ground. That ground, too, was contested. Both sides redefined historical German fascism in exculpatory narratives, yet the issue of totalitarian continuities persisted in the political discourses of West and East and their respective Cold War allegiances. As Nora Alter observes, Vietnam, subjected to colonial occupation and victimized by the forces of neo-imperial conquest, came to occupy multiple and often mutually exclusive spaces in the Western political imaginary. She writes, “Though far removed geographically and culturally from the Western world, Vietnam was at the time of the war thrust into the center of global attention, becoming a sign with multiple meanings in virtually all political and cultural discourses.”2 On a grassroots level, protest against the Vietnam War united those voices in a chorus of anti-imperialist resistance. This battle cry became a chorus, the soundtrack of 1968 in both Germanys. As Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth write, “One of the outstanding historical characteristics of ‘1968’ was that it transgressed the ideological fronts of the Cold War.”3 In some ways, the Vietnam War, in the context of Cold War confrontations, configured the transnational, transgressive codes of protest that instantiate the temporal signifier “1968.” The representation of the Vietnam War in the GDR was refracted through the lenses of a history that aligned the socialist state with the internationalism of revolutionary resistance to fascism, colonialism, and imperialism. The camera was a weapon. In this spirit, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, journalists and DEFA filmmakers who founded the autonomous Studio H&S (1969–82), produced films that have been

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described as “documents of the Cold War.”4 Their collaborations underscored the brutality of imperialism, the advances of internationalism, and the existence of global socialism. Yet the documented scenes of war could also trigger “more or less involuntary allusions to the East German present,”5 with its selective invocation of war, trauma, and also transnational protest movements. H&S’s oeuvre, with few exceptions, asserts a relationship to an historical trajectory that urges a closer examination of the long 1960s, revolution, and the struggle for Cold War hegemony. Their documentary project, which directed the gaze to Third World battlefields, participated in the international movements to protest the violence of capitalism, US imperialism, and neo-colonialism. In this way, H&S’s films met East German needs to laud Soviet military action and foregrounded the return to everyday life in postwar Vietnam, thereby extending the revolutionary spirit of 1968 into the 1970s.6 With new national actors and socialist heroes as agents of history, H&S’s Vietnam films mine and mobilize a desire for anti-fascist resistance in the GDR at the time. In particular, Vietnam 2—Der erste Reis danach (Vietnam 2: And Then the First Rice, 1977) and a post-Vietnam cycle film, Amok (Amok, 1984), establish and reiterate a narrative of solidarity between the GDR and Vietnam; they articulate a grammar of socialist cinéma vérité that not only functions within a larger political syntax of 1968 movements, in transnational solidarity with Western protests, but also documents revolutionary movements in the present of the long 1960s. Finally, Amok, a film about a mass murder in California, engages, both intentionally and unintentionally, with the scars of postwar trauma and the banalities that ensue from historical amnesia in the US. In this chapter, the focus first falls on the representation of war and protest in West and East Germany and on the revolutionary spirit of 1968. Briefly, I characterize the common cultures of resistance across the Berlin Wall to contextualize the reading of specific films in an effort to calibrate the real and imaginary solidarity between the people of the GDR and of Vietnam. The next section contextualizes H&S documentaries on Vietnam, victory, and recovery, concentrating on the historical parallels they highlight between Vietnam and the GDR and demonstrating the intertextual, dialogical relationships between the Second and Third World. A reading of Amok concludes this chapter to make explicit the capacity of trauma to trigger crisis, despite the rhetoric of revisionist history.

Protest Cultures across the Divide While significant transnational affiliations could and did transcend borders, the reaction to statements of common purpose across the “Iron Curtain” may elicit some surprise. In the introduction to Between Prague

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Spring and French May, the editors open with the complex events at the 9th World Youth Festival, which took place in Sofia, Bulgaria in the summer of 1968. The West German delegation chanted the name of Alexander Dubček in ostensible support of his reform efforts—the Youth Festival preceded the Soviets’ invasion of Czechoslovakia later in August, ending the brief period known as the Prague Spring. At the center of conflict and controversy was Karl-Dietrich Wolff, president of the West German Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist German Student Union, SDS). Since K. D. Wolff had been brutalized at one point for his activism by Bulgarian officials, several Western nations’ delegations left in protest, joined by those of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The authors interpret this bold gesture as emblematic of political cross-pollination despite the Cold War odds: “Opponents of established political dogmas and power structures on both sides of the Iron Curtain occasionally even overcame the limitations imposed by their national contexts and joined forces with their peers in other countries against perceived oppression and injustice at home and abroad.”7 The transnational approach to social protest movements during the Cold War enables a more expansive understanding of the global forces that forged common ground between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. The representation of and political engagement with the Vietnam War represent the effort of both sides to negotiate their own identities, histories, and rights vis-à-vis the nonaligned nations of the “Third World.” The cinematic enterprise of H&S exemplifies the transnational approach, filtered through a socialist lens. Expressed through partisan and judgmental voiceovers, montage, and blunt and brutal editing practices, their Vietnam films recode documentary into socialist cinéma vérité. The protest movement in West Germany reacted allergically to the collusive alliance between the West German government and the United States, the continuity of fascistic politics and practices, and the geopolitics of imperialism and neocolonialism. The rise of left-wing terrorism, most famously the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF), gained understanding and supporters from many prominent leftist intellectuals, known as Sympathisanten or sympathizers. The film adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, 1973), directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta and released a year after the 1974 novel, while dealing obliquely with terrorism, excoriates the sensationalist press and the failures of West German democracy and elicits sympathy for the main character (played by Angela Winckler). Three decades before Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (Baader Meinhof Complex, 2008), Margarethe von Trotta’s Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages (The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, 1978) portrayed an act of justifiable crime, with the protagonist, played by Tina Engel, robbing a bank to save her children’s day-care center. Eventually caught, Klages is

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brought before the bank teller, played by an inscrutable Katharina Thalbach, who must identify the culprit. In an act of defiance to patriarchy, banking, and bourgeois morality, Thalbach’s character refuses. Other films more directly confront the everyday violence of West German society and demonstrate sympathy with revolutionary movements, such as the political film Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn, 1979), with its eleven directors and a mix of documentary and fiction. The film depicts the political turmoil and social upheaval of the Federal Republic in the late 1970s. In 1977, several imprisoned members of the RAF, including Gudrun Ensslin, were found dead or dying in Stammheim prison under disputed circumstances. Von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1981) is a fictionalized version of the Ensslin sisters’ lives, with a focus on their different trajectories.8 These narrative films share a strategy: the visualization of epiphanies, moments of decision when the citizen of an ostensibly democratic society chooses violence as a legitimate and ethical response.9 The documentaries of H&S depart from that moment of decision; their political and aesthetic strategies are performative, structured to reinforce socialist identity in a receptive audience or to confront the perpetrators with the enormity of their crimes to precipitate conversion. The cinematic afterimages of terrorism in West Germany are shaped by social protest against, among other targets, the Vietnam War. To the consternation of many in the West German government, Chancellor Ludwig Erhard (Christlich Demokratische Union, Christian Democratic Union, CDU, 1963–66) repeatedly compared the division of Germany and that of Vietnam. Hubert Zimmermann writes, “The careless equaling of Berlin and Saigon set the pretext of most unwelcome demands as soon as they felt placed nationally and internationally in an increasingly defensive position.”10 Student movements were galvanized around opposition to the war and to US imperialism.11 Additionally, by 1968, the majority of the West German public opposed a continuation of the war. In 1967, Ulrike Meinhof accounts for the lack of total opposition to the war with the claim that only intellectuals and the educated could access information; she lambasts the government for supporting US aggression with money, bomber pilots, helicopters, and more. Meinhof concludes that “anyone who has understood what is going on in Vietnam slowly begins to run around with clenched teeth and a bad conscience; begins to understand that their own powerlessness to stop the war leads to complicity with those who are waging it. . . .”12 She describes a process of education involving a realization that ideally ushers a thinking person from inaction to the recognition of complicity. In a later iteration, Meinhof characterizes the transformation as a nearly teleological activism, “from protest to resistance.”13 The radicalized principled stance Meinhof articulates makes common cause with the activist filmmaking H&S endorse. The imperative to foment resistance through knowledge becomes legible in the Vietnam series.

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The most sustained and analyzed film about the Vietnam War to be produced in the H&S studio is indisputably Piloten im Pyjama (Pilots in Pajamas, 1968), a four-part, five-hour documentary that first appeared on GDR television as a mini-series. Comprised of interviews with ten US pilots, held as prisoners of war in the North Vietnamese Hỏa Lò prison (“Hanoi Hilton”), the filmmakers foreground, perhaps predictably, the humility of defeat and probe the degree of guilt and complicity among the agents of US war and destruction. To a consistent degree, parallels emerge between the confined pilots, whose prison uniforms bear a resemblance to the striped cloth worn by concentration camp prisoners, and Nazi soldiers, officers, and collaborators, all of whom justified their actions as part of war. While the film ethos is by no means exculpatory, the pilots are viewed as instruments of US imperialism. The “Milde” or mercy bestowed by socialism on its former enemies functions as a leitmotif through the Vietnam series, and the moments of conversion demonstrate the strength of solidarity and the depth of self-repudiation after living in false consciousness. In contrast to the downed US pilots, several South Vietnamese officers, after a period of self-repudiation, confess their errors and atone for their former allegiances. Vietnam 3—Ich bereue aufrichtig (I sincerely repent, 1977) narrates journeys and epiphanies into the H&S lens. The personal and political trajectory emphasizes revolutionary patience, the mercy of the victors, the essential humanity of communist compatriots, learning new ways of thinking and behaving, and ultimately becoming “neue Menschen” or new human beings. Lê Minh Ðảo, a former major general, describes his motivation for choosing to stay in Vietnam, stating the primary reason is US racism, manifest in the deplorable treatment of Vietnamese in refugee camps: “But I stayed here . . . they look down on us because of the color of our skin.” For those who choose to pledge allegiance to socialism, there is a postwar community. H&S focus on the steep learning curve of the postwar Vietnamese. In documenting the conversion, H&S foreground the flaws in US claims to social equality and justice. Just as they make legible the parallels between the United States and the presumptive heir of fascism, West Germany, they posit an allegorical relationship between the GDR and united Vietnam. The rhetoric of rebuilding, the collective enterprise of confronting trauma and the crimes of the past all contribute to the allegory of resistance, retribution, and reconciliation. The stubborn consciousness of imperialist counterparts demonstrates the persistence of false consciousness in Piloten im Pyjama. While Alter’s reading lends insight into the film’s dialogical aspects—to bring the pilots as human beings and agents of the capitalist nation-state into a greater awareness and historical consciousness—different scholarly approaches highlight the politics and processes of traumatic memory.14 Ultimately, however, the documentary interview process, a kind of political and historical therapy, fails to achieve its learning outcome. Alter writes, “This

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recognition entails admitting that they are fighting for the political economy of capitalism as much as for the United States as a nation or for ‘freedom’ as universal principle. Nevertheless, in most cases, the downed pilots seem to retain their ideological conviction that both capitalism and Americanism are preferable to communism, at least as they have been brought up to understand it.”15 H&S go to great lengths to dismantle that mindset in the Vietnam films that extended into the long 1960s.

Documenting War The GDR’s social and cultural investment in Vietnam, in addition to the political and military support, can also be seen in television documentaries, news, and the visual arts. Both the spirit and acts of rebellion and uprising in the West are legitimate and newsworthy topics for the GDR series Augenzeuge in the 1960s (Eye Witness, 1960–69). In the 1968 installment, the news segment covers the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Vietnam War, and the student protests in West Germany. The names Rudi Dutschke and Benno Ohnesorg echo in the GDR. One section focuses on the welcoming of 300 young North Vietnamese interns in 1966 to highlight the solidarity and friendship between Hanoi and East Berlin. Augenzeuge’s omniscient voiceover refers to North Vietnam as the “sorely tested homeland” (“schwer geprüfte Heimat”).16 The episode unfolds within a contact zone between Wests and Easts, with the GDR Hootenanny Club performing a song critical of the West for their North Vietnamese guests, who represent difference within socialist solidarity. The television news and documentaries instantiate a shared commitment to the historical resonance between wars. In a 1973 edition of Film und Fernsehen, Friedrich Wolf (1888–1953) writes about the model of political film. Returned from exile to the GDR and a co-founder of DEFA, Wolf had a career as a writer with twenty film credits in IMDb. The essay was republished in the film and television journal to commemorate his eighty-fifth birthday. He asks, “Where should we start today with the new German film? Where can we build on the past? For us an old world has collapsed, and the new world only begins to emerge gradually from the rubble field and the slowly dissipating fog of decay and the decades of deceit and of the wasteful falsification of terms.”17 The persistence of his political and aesthetic convictions about the function of film infuses the public culture of GDR cinema. Without explicit reference to this historical and aesthetic imperative, Heynowski and Scheumann mobilize the genre of socialist documentary to create those connections to the past, to transmute them allegorically into the politics of their Cold War, and of the global present, and to turn up the volume of critical protest voices from

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the late 1960s in the First and Second Worlds, each claiming stakes in the violently contested battlefields of the Third World. The bonds forged across national and ideological borders, walls, and craters inscribed the East German film discourse with the codes of resistance allegories. Film und Fernsehen (1974) features one example of this politically transcendent alliance. The magazine published a “Vietnam Diary” by American actress and activist Jane Fonda, giving voice to the critic of a common enemy. Fonda had spent two weeks traveling from Hanoi to the south when the bombs had only recently stopped falling. Her prose describes a people rebuilding. In a moment of realization, she pivots from false to social consciousness, conforming to the narrative of socialist ascendancy. Her words—the diary does not credit a translator—articulate the tenets of socialist realism. The team encounters workers, women who fill craters efficiently and effectively, recalcitrantly optimistic people who do not hold a grudge on discovering that she is not Russian but American. This prompts her to write the following: “For a long time, I lived only for superficial things, and my thoughts were directed toward an alienated culture. In effect, as an actress with no social consciousness, I contributed to the dissemination of that culture. Now, I not only have to work on separating myself from their influences but also think about what it means that this culture is exported to other countries.”18 Fonda concludes the diary entries with a plea for the United States to engage with its history in Vietnam as a way to move forward. Fonda admires the sense of purpose in life she detects among the Vietnamese and writes, “If we Americans could summon the courage to deal with Vietnam again and to learn from the people what we can, and through this process to recognize who we really are, then perhaps even we might comprehend that there is something worth living for.”19 The self-examination on a national scale instantiates the response that Heynowski and Scheumann try to elicit with the final section, which considers the Vietnam trilogy and one later film. The films Vietnam I, II, and III comprise, in my view, the major achievements of the H&S documentary production about Cold War conflicts carried out in Southeast Asia. Vietnam I: Die Teufelsinsel (Devil’s Island, 1976) is a brutal account of the prison reserved for the incarceration, torture, and execution of political prisoners. In interviews with a surviving (and celebrated) prisoner who became a national hero, the audience learns the depth of dedication to the cause from those who declared themselves prepared to die for the revolution. Lê Quang Vinh, a student leader who aspired to become a math teacher, lends structure to the film with his story; he was arrested, then sentenced to death, but received a suspended sentence as a result of outside pressure. His execution commuted, he received a life sentence with forced labor. On camera, he relates the beatings during which his captors insisted he salute the flag and repeat the patriotic slogans. “They didn’t want to kill us,” he claims, “they

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wanted to kill our political life.” Throughout his fourteen-year incarceration, he refused to capitulate. He, too, encountered the enemy, but treated the “Ami” as an individual and a human being and decided to speak with him. Amidst the footage, interviews, and voiceovers that bear witness to the torture, Lê Quang Vinh finds a moment of humanity. In his address to the US soldier, he secures a pack of Salem menthol cigarettes and the admission, “I am a worker” (“Ich bin ein Arbeiter”). Even in the cinematography of torture and the ghostly presence of the dead and defiled, the narrative accommodates a moment of contact, in the spirit of socialism, across the firmest enemy lines: the victorious Vietnamese partisans and the instruments of US neocolonialism. The omnipresence of a socialist aesthetic coincides with an allegorical narrative that exposes parallels between the US and the West German fascist past, as well as between the Soviet Union and its East German and Vietnamese socialist allies. Just as H&S make explicit the resemblance between this prison, displaying the iron bar shackles, and the Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, they create further analogies between the histories of resistance. To make this comparison legible and indelible, H&S include an image of a newly appointed Vietnamese official who spent eight years incarcerated; to the right of the still, a police photo appears of the SED Party Secretary Erich Honecker, who was imprisoned for resistance to fascism and imperialism. The next sequence shows a contemporary state visit with the two men meeting in person to acknowledge the supportive relationship between the GDR and North Vietnam, thus forging the allegorical connections between the Vietnamese and the legacy of a GDR history of resistance. Finally, in this brief recap of the first film in the trilogy, Vinh declares that they committed no crimes and insists that they were fighting for a free and independent homeland and for the Aufbau or construction of socialism. The historical, rhetorical, and material similarities emphasized by the cinematography and soundtrack of the film celebrate not only North Vietnam’s victory over imperialist tyranny but also the legacy of East German socialism in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam II: Der erste Reis danach (And Then Their First Rice, 1977), the contrast between the military preparation of the people’s army and its ability to surprise the military powerhouse of the United States forms the focus of the Cold War comparison. H&S feature two pilots: one trained in the US and a second trained in the Soviet Union. The voiceover comments that the North Vietnamese fighter had no problem adjusting to the captured US equipment, his skill attributed to the superiority of his preparation. With sarcasm, H&S comment on the US retreat from Saigon. H&S insert a commentary from the perspective of MarxistLeninist economics, making connections between the GDR and postwar Vietnam. With selective historical references to shared internationalist history, an extension of fascism to the Cold War present, incarnated by the

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US and by West Germany, and a mining of socialist common ground, H&S showcase Soviet superiority through film. Again, they elaborate on the surprising strength of the people’s army, with a cameo of a young female partisan. Next, they shift attention to the international capitalist reach of the chemical company Hoechst and its cynical exploitation of cheap labor and voracious appetite for new markets. In Vietnam, the film explores the everyday, noting that six days weekly are market days and stressing that no consumer goods are produced in Vietnam; all hail from the US or Japan. The narrator wonders, “Is, then, dependency synonymous with a surplus of goods, and independence synonymous with scarcity?” The structural transformation needed to jump-start the Vietnamese economic and national production intersects with GDR history: “We are reminded of the lengthy stage of our own economic development.” Capitalism and exploitation translate into images of an emerging proletariat through the creation of a workforce, the development of class consciousness, and the progression toward socialism, the sum of which “is applied dialectics.” The film’s final moments tie into the agricultural economy and a wide-angle shot of harvesters in a rice paddy. Here, the aesthetic of the quotidian, after the upheaval and turmoil of war, not only corroborates the dominant DEFA and socialist realist visual practices but also represents a cause for celebration: “But especially everyday life is festive and joyful, for there is a reunion.” The female partisan heroine, it is revealed, has returned to the work of harvesting rice after heroic deeds during the war. H&S cut in footage of her leading a contingent of emissaries into the East Berlin Stadium in 1973. In the closing moments of the film, H&S document the bond between East Berlin and the North Vietnamese Mekong Delta.

Amok Amok (1984), while considered within the parameters of Heynowski and Scheumann’s Vietnam films, in many ways transitions from the history of socialist internationalist victory to their construction of the convulsive, violently disruptive consequences of the US’s lost war. On July 18, 1984, James Huberty, who was forty-one at the time, massacred twenty-one people and wounded nineteen more. The seeming banality of the venue, a McDonalds in the San Diego suburb of San Ysidro, adjacent to the US-Mexico border, along with the ostensibly quotidian event of consuming fast-food, constructed an unlikely stage for the eruption of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder-related violence and the largest mass shooting at that time in the United States. The shooter, whom Heynowski and Scheumann portrayed as a US army veteran as some newspapers reported, forms the subject of cinematic

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Figure 12.1. This documentary intercuts news footage from a 1984 mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Diego with images from the Vietnam War, creating parallels between two American crimes—of different magnitude. Amok, dir. Walter Heynowski, 1984, 14 min., DEFA. Screenshot.

speculation, which probingly and almost therapeutically visualizes psychic connective tissue among catastrophes on so grand a scale that they occupy and shape the national imaginary. The footage from live television news coverage, intercut with trivializing commercials and features, leads the viewer to diagnose the cause: Huberty’s traumatic experiences as a soldier during the US-Vietnam War. This conclusion proves to be both erroneous and accurate. During the attack—Huberty was ultimately shot by a Special Weapons and Technology (SWAT) team sniper—the shooter purportedly shouted that he had killed thousands in North Vietnam. A survivalist who amassed weapons, Huberty suspected himself of mental illness; he sought assistance from a clinic the day before the massacre, but clerical confusion led to a delayed response. According to sources,20 however, Huberty never served in any branch of the armed forces and was not, as the Heynowski and Scheumann film reveals, a traumatized Vietnam veteran suffering from the debilitating burden of his crimes. This contingent fact, however, does not alter the condemnation of American society and the collective inability to reckon with the war.

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Figure 12.2. A law enforcement officer gazes into the distance, crouching beside a victim and his bicycle. Amok, dir. Walter Heynowski, 1984, 14 min., DEFA. Screenshot.

The film launches with a News Eight Special Report. The juxtapositions between the scope of the tragedy—we hear of an injured woman pleading to save her baby; we see the body of a child inert beside a bicycle; we also see the anguished faces of relatives searching for family members— elicit emotional swings and cognitive dissonance in the viewing audience. The ethical vertigo experienced while watching the documentary should lead toward a political and moral epiphany. The filmmakers, however, didactically draw that conclusion for the viewers. Huberty did not serve in Vietnam; he was not a veteran,21 though others compare the massacre to the carnage of war and H&S feature German newspaper clips that insist Huberty shouted, before opening fire, “‘I was in Vietnam’” (“‘Ich war in Vietnam’”). The contrast between trauma and consumerism indicts the society that produced Huberty. Abruptly, the first commercial break features “Merci gellé,” a product that promises shiny hair and emphasizes its point of origin: Made in America. The critique of US consumer culture and socio-political life, along with news-as-entertainment, dominates the structural aesthetic of the film, an unsubtle commentary on and condemnation of the unthinking,

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mind-numbing aspects of American culture. The vapid and vacant collective, the film implies, bears the blame for the failure of social protest movements associated with the spirit and activism of 1968. These commercials are rare exceptions to the H&S voiceover practice of translating over the original. The audience can experience directly the packaged speech of the consumer idiom. The second commercial advertises Ortho. The lady of the house adopts a tough stance on vermin: “I’ve been too easy on you roaches, spiders, fleas.” The Ortho commercial promises that these invaders will be killed on the spot. The command is issued: “Get tough on pests” and claims, “It’s easy with Ortho.” Throughout the film, the commercial idiom and possibly the motives of the shooter echo the animal epithets demanded from the military of US soldiers to eradicate any trace of humanity from their thinking about the enemy. H&S devoted an early film, 100 (100 Pushups, 1971), to this topic. The consequence of referring to the enemy as anything but DOG, PIG, or MONKEY consisted of the corporal punishment of 100 pushups. In a way, H&S engage in an act of self-citation via American commercial products for exterminating pests. The intertextual relationship between a military code of behavior and locution corresponds, so it is implied, to the preparatory language of Ortho. Most of Huberty’s victims were Mexican or Mexican-American,22 and prior to the killing spree he called the McDonalds’ patrons “dirty swine.” According to reports, he had taken his family to lunch at a different McDonalds earlier that day. From here, the documentary cuts to a news interview with psychologist Jim Kleckner who comments on the public trauma. He lends insight into the reaction to an airplane tragedy, describing the shock generally felt at the crash of Air India flight 182, when suspicions fell on Sikh terrorists. The doctor, however, does draw general parallels between the trauma of the crash with “Vietnam or other catastrophes.” The film shifts again to an inventory of new objects. H&S intercut a consumer safety commercial, underscoring the superficial commitment to security at the level of Americans’ relationship to their material possessions. The judgment from Vietnam 2: Der erste Reis danach ricochets through the editing: political dependence is predicated on an embarrassment of consumer riches and product choices that effectively lobotomize and disenfranchise the citizen of capitalist economies. With this intertextual reference, the idea that federal regulation can provide blanket protection, again, juxtaposed with the massacre in so banal a location as a fast-food restaurant, becomes ridiculous. Survivors and witnesses comment on the tragic events. Even if the shooter, Huberty, had not served in Vietnam, his behaviors, along with the observations of victims, witnesses, and experts, drew a contextual connection. According to one headline, “he just shot at everything.” The voiceover

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observes with ostensible neutrality that no one paid any attention to the man in the black t-shirt. The innocuousness of Huberty’s appearance contrasts sharply with the volatility of the shooter. The conclusion from an eyewitness: “it was like in Vietnam.” The evocation of trauma in the streets of San Diego guides the editing hands to insert the images of the Vietnam dead. H&S repeat commentaries on the US tragedy over footage cited from their Vietnam films, effectively foregrounding the moral failure of ignoring the tragedy in Southeast Asia and further developing the intertextual associations. Again, the editorial intercutting suggests an intersection of parallel lives: a boy dead in San Ysidro, cut to a zoom-in on the orphaned boy, Do Boa, who survived the 1968 massacre at Sơn Mỹ and whose suffering haunts Am Wassergraben (At the Ditch, 1978).23 This editing makes prominent the conclusion that the greatest Amok laufen (running amok) of the US on a national scale was North Vietnam. Finally, the verdict condemns not the perpetrator but the system, because the US military “trained him to kill and prepared him for this violent killing spree.”

Conclusion When Inge Müller wrote a series of short poems about being buried for three days under the rubble and ruins of a bombed house, she was criticized for an inability to move forward with the Aufbau-Generation (the rebuilding generation), the cohort of idealists who staked everything to construct the first socialist state on East German soil, in part to atone for and absolve the original sin of fascism. The committed and triumphal rhetoric of international socialism, structured according to the grammar of DEFA documentary, worked to recode the GDR past exclusively as an allegory of anti-fascist resistance, on which the victory of the North Vietnamese resistance to US imperialism was predicated. In particular, H&S direct the gaze away from home-grown East German socialism and embrace instead the global Second World to fulfill anti-fascist fantasies. The victory of North Vietnamese partisans and resistance fighters over the military machine of the US superpower reiterates the history of the Soviet and by extension the East German victory over fascism. For this reason, the self-reflexive references to German-German history, the voluntary and intentional historic and cinematic citations within their Vietnam films, and their cinematic diagnosis of the US’s moral and political failures, contribute to a greater understanding of 1968 through a socialist lens. H&S’s commentary on the collective repression of US society’s war trauma in Amok averts the gaze from the involuntary reference to the GDR’s present. The Vietnam series, accounts of brutal battles, torture, massacres, along with the seemingly scripted self-repudiations and

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confessions of perpetrators, close-up portraits of resistance heroes and heroines, and occasionally didactic commentary along the lines of dialectical materialism, disarticulate in a close reading of the film about an ostensible war veteran whose psychic wounds went untreated. The embeddedness of postwar trauma, excavated by a mass shooting that recapitulated for Americans the inability to mourn their collective crimes in Vietnam, opens an aperture into the GDR’s own failure to acknowledge postwar trauma in a way that Mueller’s poem underscores. Woven into the texture of her stanza, trauma persists. Her lines indict the erasure that privileges a narrative of victory and triumphant resistance and inscribes a private, repressed history into the socialist public sphere and its instruments of representation.

Notes I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Executive Director, and the dedicated staff of the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for their generous and expert assistance during a research visit in October 2016. 1 Inge Müller, Irgendwo; noch einmal möcht ich sehn. Lyrik, Prosa, Tagebücher, ed. Ines Geipel (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1996), 108. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 Nora M. Alter, “Excessive Pre/Requisites: Vietnam through the East German Lens,” Cultural Critique 35 (Winter 1996–97): 39–79. Here, 46. 3 Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, “1968 in Europe: An Introduction,” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956–1977, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1–9. Here, 3. 4 Rüdiger Steinmetz, “Heynowski & Scheumann: the GDR’s leading documentary film team,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 24, no. 3 (2004): 366–78. Here, 365. See also Steinmetz and Tilo Prase, Dokumentarfilm zwischen Beweis und Pamphlet: Heynowski & Scheumann und Gruppe Katins (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002), 15. Steinmetz and Prase recount the history of the H&S studio’s founding and the reasons for its demise, as well as the respective roles Heynowski and Scheumann occupied within the practice. Scheumann worked on the verbal (“das Sprachliche”); he also served as an “Inoffizieller Mitrarbeiter” or unofficial informant (IM) for the Stasi, as the state secret police were commonly known. Heynowksi was responsible for the visual (“das Bildliche”) (45–46). Scheumann’s speech, critical of the Pol Pot regime and delivered at a time of shifting GDR relationships to China, ended the studio’s autonomy. Together they made seventy-one films (15). 5 Alter, “Excessive Pre/Requisites,” 59. 6 This argument does not, however, imply that local discontent or protest in the GDR extended to the general population, which was selectively influenced by the

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hippie movement and often expressed itself in popular music. See Michael Rauhut, Beat in der Grauzone 1964–1972 (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1993). 7 Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth, “Introduction,” in Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960– 1980, eds. Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1–11. Here 1–2. 8 See Christina Gerhardt, Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 153–200. 9 On German cinema, the Holocaust, and trauma theory, see Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema: Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2013); on the cultural history and the legacy of terrorism, see Gerhardt, Screening the Red Army Faction and Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 10 Hubert Zimmermann, “The Quiet German: The Vietnam War and the Federal Republic of Germany,” in La Guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe 1963–1973, eds. Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (Brussels: Bruylant, 2003), 49–64. Here 52. 11 See Jost Dülffer, “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in West Germany,” in La Guerre de Vietnam et l’Europe, 287–305. 12 Ulrike Meinhof, “Vietnam und die Deutschen,” in konkret 11 (1967): 2–3. Here, 3. 13 See Meinhof’s essay Die Würde des menschen ist antastbar,” translated as “Human Dignity Is Violable (1962),” in the volume Everybody Talks About the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, ed. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 144–49. On Meinhof’s treatment of “protest to resistance,” quoted from a Black Panther activist’s speech at the 1968 Vietnam Congress in Berlin, see Patricia Melzer, Death in the Shape of a Young Girl: Women’s Political Violence in the Red Army Faction (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 44–49. 14 See Christina Schwenkel, “Imagining Humanity: Socialist Film and Transnational Memories of the War in Vietnam,” in Transnational Memories: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, eds. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 219–44. 15 Alter, “Excessive Pre/Requisites,” 59–60. For her sustained analysis of this series, see 53–67. 16 Der Augenzeuge. Die DEFA Wochenschau: Die 60er Jahre [1960–1969] (Berlin: PROGRESS Film-Verleih, ICESTORM, 2004). 17 Friedrich Wolf, “Die Wahrheit des Lebens gestalten,” Film und Fernsehen 4 (1973): 17. 18 Jane Fonda, “Vietnam-Tagebuch,” in Film und Fernsehen 11 (1974), 11–16, 43. Here 16. 19 Fonda, “Vietnam-Tagebuch,” 43. 20 Time-Life Books, Mass Murderers (True Crime) (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Education, 1993), 127.

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21 “San Ysidro massacre,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 19, 1984, http://www. sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-san-ysidro-massacre-1984jul19-story.html. 22 Dana Littlefield, “New Documentary Explores 1984 McDonald’s Massacre in San Ysidro,” San Diego Union-Tribune, September 24, 2016, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sd-me-mcdonalds-documentary-20160920-story.html. 23 Heynowski and Scheumann, Dialog: Heynowski & Scheumann Filmen in Vietnam: Tagebuch (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1976), 131. My Lai is a hamlet in the village of Son My.

13:

“You Say You Want a Revolution”: East German Film at the Crossroads between the Cinemas

Evelyn Preuss “

T

GDR [GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC] was always in the 1970s,” the East German theater-director-turned-filmmaker Leander Haußmann stated, challenging the prevailing post-1990 historiography, which had dwarfed the East German experiment into “a footnote,” or aberration, of history.1 Explaining his collapsed country’s politics and culture in terms of preeminent Western movements, Haußmann argued that, indeed, they corresponded with many of the paradigm-changing trends in Western discourses with the focal date of 1968. I would like to test Haußmann’s assertion by probing East German cinema, whose economics and communicative practice, more than that of any other mass medium, entails the larger socio-political sphere. While scholarly approaches subsume East German cinema under its monopolistic studio system or tacitly treat it as an auteurist art, I argue that it is in fact both, namely a hybrid in which auteurs and the studio, and a third entity, the state, find a common denominator in the revolutionary stance and educational impetus of Third Cinema. HE

You Say You Want a Revolution: East Germany in Its Own Write2 East Germany’s core project was a revolution. From 1946 onwards, the GDR translated its postwar anti-capitalist bias into socio-economic structures that anticipated—and institutionalized—the greater equality and the rigorously understood democratization defining the goals of the global 1968 movements.3 But whereas this impetus opposed the established order in the West, it was literally the raison d’état in the East. According to its ideology, the GDR was a special purpose vehicle for a complete economic, social, and cultural overhaul aimed at equalizing access to power and emancipating the political subject.4 As an intermediate stage to a truly

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classless society, it had to change toward that aspiration in order to fulfill its promise.5 The term for this intermediary, “socialism,” was confusing. On the one hand, it referenced the theoretical construct; on the other hand, it designated the status quo as “real existierender Sozialismus” (really existing socialism). While many, if not most, East Germans could subscribe to the theory, really existing socialism—a highly politicized construct rendering the supposedly real—raised questions regarding the ruling party’s strategy and the project’s legitimacy, turning the term into a highly contested topography. Both need to be differentiated from yet a third, that is, the socialism—or the socialisms—Easterners actually experienced.6 What defined East Germany was the tension between these three concepts, with one premising the other, one conditioning the other, and one mistaken for the other. Yet, none was sufficient without the others to explain the discursive space that constituted East Germany. The negotiation among all three generated the highly productive force field of East German intellectual and artistic discourse that questioned the success— and the sheer possibility of—making a historical difference, a revolution. If there was a distinctly East German identity, it was here, as a vacillating, vexing contention among utopia, projections, and life lived, all inflected by the grammar of major change. By contrast, attempting to cast East German discourse into a monolithic national identity, scholarship not only focuses on an aspect secondary to East German problematics but also eclipses its emphatic heterogeneity: the “view of the nation as unitary muffles the ‘polyphony,’” which the particular East German “interplay of exit and voice” produced.7 In keeping with the terms of East German discourse, the national question figured as “a mere ideological epiphenomenon of the economic” and was of limited relevance.8 As in film, so in most other respects, the East German cynosure lay elsewhere.9 Given this differentiation, diversity, and negotiability, contentions such as “the most controversial filmmakers were also the ones most fiercely committed to communism” beg the question of how the latter was understood and what sparked controversy.10 After all, plurality, rather than a singular, authoritarian dogma, is what made communism compelling to a prominent scriptwriter such as Wolfgang Kohlhaase.11 Likewise East Germany’s foremost director and cultural official, Konrad Wolf, held that, “Socialism . . . is there for many, and many have to, always anew, partake in it.”12 This pluralist and participatory approach resembles more closely the credo of Western 1968ers than scholarship’s assumption of a monolithic East German doctrine. While the binary concepts that pit artists against the state would put Wolf on both sides of the supposed antagonism, his legacy, in the words of Homi Bhabha, “properly alienates our political expectations, and changes

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. . . the very forms of our recognition of the ‘moment’ of politics.”13 In the categories, as they are conceived, Wolf can be “neither the one nor the Other,” which, in turn, raises questions regarding the validity of the binarism in the first place.14 Wolf exemplifies not only that “the ‘state’ or the ‘regime’ was not a unitary actor”15 but also that artists and the regime had a common denominator from which all difference and disagreement followed. The GDR consisted of and was a projection of various populations with various agendas and strategies, each demanding drastic transformation.16 Again, the resulting heterogeneity and openness represents a remarkable parallel to the social forces that burst onto the scene internationally throughout “the long 1960s,”17 and place the GDR at the forefront of such global developments rather than into an easily neglected footnote to history. With a hold on institutional power and social means, however mitigated, the East German project changed GDR society more radically than the 1968ers did the West. Most notably, it rendered demographic demarcations extraordinarily penetrable and fluid. Collectivized means of production and massive subsidies for basic needs—including food, housing, public transportation, culture, and education—redistributed wealth and brought hitherto unknown access and freedoms, empowering broad sections of the population and indeed serving, at least in some respects, as an inspiration for 1968ers globally.18 While this empowerment did not translate into a public voice, as it did for some in the West,19 it brought a sense of self and agency: “workers who in others’ eyes occupied the same high rank as they accorded themselves. . . . That was new to history.”20 Materializing in informal, but dependable networks, it undercut formal, autocratic hierarchies. While the ideologized post-1990 historiographies sidelined the emancipatory achievement of Eastern European societies, it was so far-reaching that it even transformed the most intimate of social interactions: “both on their own terms, and set against the West, the changes . . . in East German sexuality deserve the label revolutionary.”21 Less loudly, but in some ways more consequently than its Western counterparts, East German society not only anticipated but also answered many of the 1968 calls for democracy and liberation.

At the Crossroads: Taking Both Ways and Neither The comparison between what cannot be but an abbreviation—the GDR—and the 1968 movements transcends the binaries that polarized both Eastern and Western ideologies during the Cold War and that continue to inform criticism.22 Complicating our comprehension of Western and Eastern trajectories, it recuperates East Germany’s alterity of vision,

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specifically in what has been deemed the most revolutionary of arts: cinema. Claims such as, “[t]he building of the Wall completed the bifurcation of postwar cinema into two national cinemas, with the one driven by competitive market principles, the other a state-owned company involved in the building of a socialist society,”23 on the one hand, equate incongruent cinematic practices and, on the other hand, ignore commonalities between the Eastern and Western film industries, with the latter comprising Hollywood’s highly commercial, globally dominating First Cinema as well as Western Europe’s auteur-centered Second Cinema. Contrary to the Cold War myth of Western European artistic freedom, Second Cinema’s directors depended as much on state sponsorship as GDR filmmakers and gauged their messages to protect their funding sources more timidly than many Eastern European directors.24 While Western auteurs needed to cultivate a corporate identity to use their individual signatures as marketing devices, their Eastern colleagues required no branding to finance their films. Arguably, guaranteed income gave Eastern directors greater artistic autonomy than Western auteurs, and their affiliation with a highly sophisticated studio put more resources at their disposal to vet their projects. Implicitly equating New German Cinema’s scope and appeal with that of East Germany’s film industry, the above binary also overlooks that the former remained, for the most part, an arthouse venture, catering to an elitist audience. West Germans primarily consumed film from further west. Here, nationally relevant issues are upstaged by universal formulas designed to maximize returns, rendering the term “national cinema” inapplicable. Likewise First Cinema’s domination of West German screens is not compatible with the idea of the market as a democratically informed institution. Instead of producing films that address the needs of a representatively structured marketplace, First Cinema’s hegemonic studio system spends a substantial part of its budget on marketing, that is, on creating markets to suit its products. Various strategies of market-control, including massive promotional campaigns and outright discrimination against other cinemas, manipulate audiences to create sales platforms for franchising its images. Horizontal and vertical integration as well as sheer financial clout—co-sponsored by other industries as well as by government agencies—guarantee it in many countries a much larger market share than East German film had in the GDR.25 As Alexander Kluge, an eminent director of New German Cinema, puts it, “Since 1944, we have become the colony of major foreign film companies that play their films here.”26 In contrast to both First and East German Cinema, New German Cinema had no distribution system. As “the [West German] exhibition market is entirely dominated by major companies from abroad,” New German Cinema had to resort to venues of more elitist culture and to television, both of which were owned and managed at the time by governments at the local, state, or the federal level.27 Accordingly, they operated based on

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what Kluge himself calls “a planned economy.”28 Neither when subsidized nor when commercialized does the Western film industry—i.e., First and Second Cinema—compete in a free market;29 and to characterize either of the Western cinemas as “national cinema” demands qualification with regard to which producers, audience demographics or subjects would warrant such definition. Furthermore, the premise of exchangeability and the commodification that underlie Western labor markets may produce a more pernicious censorship than Eastern bureaucracy. Having directed numerous films in both East and West, Egon Günther refuses to condemn the East German system but instead emphasizes his appreciation for his opportunities there.30 In the same vein, Rainer Simon—who also had several projects blocked in the East—considers financial censorship as deleterious as its ideological version.31 “Weighing up the pros and cons of filmmaking in the socialist and the capitalist systems,” including censorship, “most opted to stay in the GDR,” Daniela Berghahn concludes.32 Finally, not Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (the state-owned East German film studio, DEFA) but Hollywood is known for its “homogenization of content and style.”33 Avoiding experimentation, it limits itself to the predictable in order to minimize risk on investment returns. If heterogeneity suggests artistic freedom, East German cinema’s lack of uniform aesthetic or narrative structure should unravel any dichotomous categorization of market vs. planned economy, freedom vs. censorship, and veritable art vs. propaganda.34 Like First Cinema, East German film productions relied on a thoroughly professionalized, monopolistic studio with a relatively fixed market share; like Second Cinema, it granted filmmakers considerable autonomy through sustained government support. It did not, however, yield the same products. Concepts such as Hollywood behind the Wall or comparisons to West Germany’s New German Cinema miss East Germany’s Third Cinema dimension: its revolutionary impetus.

Triangulation: East German as Third Cinema Engaging similarly binary projections of self and Other as Western ideology, Eastern Cold War propaganda abridged Marxist dialectics to a crossroads of socialism vs. capitalism, mutual benefit vs. exploitation, friend vs. foe, etc. Identifying the socialist project with the East German state’s party rule, these binaries served to disenfranchise dissent with the latter as an immediate threat to the former. Paradoxically, however, this propagandistic ploy also facilitated dissidence, as it provided the arguments to redress the regime with its own rhetoric and, thus, with relative impunity. In this way, the revolutionary urgency, with which the regime sought to curb

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criticism, faced a backlash. Rainer Simon’s film Till Eulenspiegel (1975), for instance, used Marxist historiography for “a subtle parable regarding the conditions in the GDR.”35 As the film rendered feudal social structures with Brechtian deictics, audiences could draw parallels with their own experiences. The implied failure of the socialist revolution also enjoined one, as the regime itself had educated its audiences on the dangers that the outmoded ruling classes presented to society. If elites behave out-of-sync with the rest of the social body, so the lesson went, they need to be removed, if necessary, with revolutionary action. In other words, East German bureaucracy not only failed to suppress but also invited a pervasive discourse that paradoxically delegitimized the regime by affirming its most basic tenets. In the same way that the three socialisms unhinged any static designation of East German identity, GDR discourse triangulated political meaning and did so with the same charge: a call for change.36 Playing its part in colonializing East Germany, post-1990 scholarship discounts this form of political discourse as “slave language.”37 It abrogates the value of artistically and aesthetically formulated analyses and arguments precisely because of their artistic and aesthetic articulation. Reprehending equivocality as an aberration from a supposedly “nonslave” norm, scholars assert, implicitly and without fact-checking, a western norm of press freedom and political process. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the Other here projects the self: by dissimulation, it allows for a self-conception that only carries the semblance of validity because it is not made explicit and interrogated, but seen as the negative of the projected Other.38 Moreover, the term “slave language” proposes that, in transporting political content, art performs a surrogate function for political discourse impossible elsewhere when in fact no definition of art is devoid of political meaning; and it blames art for using artistic means to communicate politically, when art could not possibly be defined as abstaining from artistic expression. Contrary to conceptualizing art as a slave tool, Friedrich Schiller had conceived it as a medium granting the highest degree of freedom to self-determination and therefore especially suitable for education.39 This late eighteenth-century idea of art as emancipatory reverberates in Marxist thinking and informed both East German society and the 1968 movement in using art to political ends, not despite but because of its particular properties. Indeed, the dismissive characterization of “slave language” inverts the express politicization of art in East Germany. After all, the GDR’s subsidy for culture in general and the arts in particular aimed at empowering the underprivileged politically and sought to remedy the legacy of capitalism, where, according to Marxist analysis, cultural barriers keep the majority of people “in an uneducated and controllable state” irreconcilable with genuine democracy.40 In other words, art and culture were meant to intervene

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in the political process, as they had been assigned the decidedly political function of sophisticating and emancipating constituents. Conceived to enable spectators to chart, navigate, and change their historical coordinates, East German film prefigured Third Cinema, which, as first proclaimed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in their 1969 manifesto, broadcast the revolutionary “spirit of 1968.”41 Like East German Cinema, Third Cinema aimed to empower its audience through cinematic language and reception practice and advocated a “shift in power from the elites to the masses.”42 Both cinemas redefined the mass medium film from controlling masses to putting masses in control. Showing that the GDR’s understanding of the arts was not merely rhetorical, East German cinema’s revolutionary impetus evinces in its recalcitrant stance vis-à-vis the regime’s display of power. While scholarship assumes that East German censorship produced political and aesthetic docility,43 the exact opposite emerges from a survey of DEFA’s history. The years 1968 and 1969—the climax and anti-climax of everything the GDR stood for—came to define East Germany’s cinema with a number of films that not only depict (attempts at) revolution but also attempted revolution in a filmic sense. Frank Beyer’s 1963 film Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves), for instance, (re)appropriated the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, the self-liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by a German-led communist resistance group. While the party leadership had used that history to legitimize its rule as the only way to ward off fascism, the film’s party functionaries plan to surrender a child to a likely death by the SS in order to protect their organization. In trying to save the child, ordinary comrades resist not only the Nazis but also the rationale and rule of their own party. By saving the child, they save the promise of a compassionate and inclusive future. As the child’s rescue crucially motivates the inmates to resist and persist, disobedience disproves party leaders. Contrary to serving as “slave language,” the historical metaphor invites spectators to think through the conflict and deduce how to confront similar pressures in their own political situation. The lack of an unencumbered happy end reinforces the film’s call on the audience’s own political responsibility. As the child is carried forward in the final rush towards victory, the former inmate, who had adapted the story and, in a cameo appearance, features as the child’s protector, is left behind, dead. The silent death of the author—rendered solely through images—undercuts the optimism of the revolutionary moment and second-guesses the revolution. In hindsight, the film emerges as prescient. Exhorting the communist leadership to vouch for the humanity of the new social order, it anticipates the Prague Spring’s “socialism with a human face.” By the same token, its parable of politics perverting their own purpose also presages the legitimacy crisis and denouement of the Eastern regimes.

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Similarly, Konrad Wolf’s film Ich War Neunzehn (I Was Nineteen) and Egon Günther’s film Abschied (Farewell), both released in 1968, render past events with a temporal ambiguity that problematizes the historical difference East Germany supposedly made. Privileging visual over verbal significations, they open up the films’ coordinates for inquiry and selfreflection. Wolf depicts the encounters of a Russian propaganda unit advancing into Germany during the final days of the Second World War. Based on autobiographical notes, the film not only claims veracity but also personal proximity to the questions faced by the protagonists. As the film retraces what East Germany celebrated as liberation from Nazi rule, its images query that phraseology and the ideological caesura it stipulates. The camera captures the landscape’s stasis and the human topography’s inertia, following the protagonists’ foray into the no man’s land that the audience calls home. Indeterminate, harboring a past that, for the protagonists, is still present, it leads the spectators to question facile notions of socio-political change.44 Günther’s film Abschied likewise hinges on the biographical, irreverently adopting Johannes R. Becher’s eponymous autobiography. Tracing the adolescence of East Germany’s first Minister for Culture and author of its national anthem, the film shows an icon of the regime to be deeply flawed in judgement and ethics. However, while Becher’s novel remained on the GDR school curriculum until 1989, its filmic adaptation was, after initial commendations, withdrawn. The latter’s modern visuals ambiguate the temporal: costumes, hair-styles, make-up, Brechtian acting, and graphic montage render the beginning of the 1900s with a decidedly 1960s feel, projecting the contemporary GDR into circumstances before Germany’s first socialist revolution. The megalomania of the German Empire echoes the over-confidence with which GDR rhetoric professed socialism’s victory over history; the trepidations leading to World War I reverberate Cold War posturing; and the Empire’s self-satisfied paralysis echoes perceptions of East German stagnation passed off for grand achievement. As the protagonists, each in accordance with their own political outlook, bet their lives on social change, the audience recognizes the catastrophe into which they cheeringly march. Like the other films, Abschied, too, undermines a happy end and thus questions East Germany’s self-affirmation of presiding over an accomplished revolution and thus the end to history. With that, the film calls on the spectators’ agency and political acumen to assess the prospect of a revolution that is squandered in war and Othering. In Heiner Carow’s film Die Legende von Paul und Paula (The Legend of Paul and Paula, 1973) past and present also form a palimpsest. Visual metaphors such as the merry-go-round, the televised Ferris wheel, and the old coffee mill Paul’s wife churns between her legs invoke revolution as revolving: the return of the ever-same. The past extends into the

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present as a continuity of economies that the socialist revolution should have rendered obsolete. Irrepressible and reinventing itself in modern forms, it however also harbors the potential for renewal. The spaces untouched by East Germany’s modernity—Paul’s vintage garage, Paula’s old tenement and her matriarchal family history—enable the protagonists’ erotically charged transformation, as her elderly neighbors cheer on. Rejecting a marriage of convenience, Paula starts to pursue her happiness. Uncompromisingly, she stages her own revolution, changing herself, her work place, and morality. Yet, as in the films analyzed above, the happily-ever-after is forestalled. Her death breaks a taboo with respect to the proscribed unflinching optimism. It leaves no closure. Again only rendered through images, the implosion of old housing stock, including Paula’s home, comments visually on her demise and asks what has become of the revolution. From the dust clouds emerge the high-rise apartments synonymous with East Germany’s modernity. Contrary to the conviviality of the tenement, they invoke no sense of community and belonging but instead disenfranchisement and homelessness.45 Their bland uniformity connotes the perfunctory, anonymous, exchangeable life Paul had tried to leave behind, confronting spectators with questions regarding his—and their—influence vis-à-vis a past dissimulated and a future petrified in concrete. What is perhaps most striking about these and other films is their timing: with the exception of Nackt unter Wölfen, all of the above films were made after—and arguably, in response to—the gravest act of censorship in the history of East German cinema: the Eleventh Plenum of 1965. Instead of prompting conformity, banning an entire year’s production of feature films backfired. Right after prostrating himself, Wolf defiantly professed, “the worst thing we could do now would be to do nothing,” adding, he would love to make a movie exactly like those censored by the Plenum, that is, “a splendid film about present problems.”46 That movie turned into Ich War Neunzehn, which, despite the plot’s historicity, was conceived by Kohlhaase in decidedly contemporary terms: 1968 echoed 1945, the inception of supposedly revolutionary change in East Germany, inquiring whether it was time for a new beginning.47 Opening discursive spaces for the audience to engage, the films discussed above refuse to prescribe meaning or program audience reaction. Instead, they share with Third Cinema what Dudley Andrew has termed an “aesthetic of discovery.”48 Stimulating spectators’ hermeneutic agency, both cinemas oppose “a cinema of manipulation,” which controls the audience through the sensations its images arouse and a lack/suture mechanism that takes spectators on a filmic rollercoaster. Both react against First Cinema, which designs its films, in the words of one of its outstanding filmmakers, “to direct the viewers’ attention, to cue their train of thought, to keep them locked into a desired mood or emotion, to lead

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them through the ‘maze of multiple meanings.’”49 First Cinema derives profit from ascendancy, not a democratic process or an aware political subject. It disempowers spectators, turning them into passive consumers instead of active (co)producers, a malleable mass instead of a democratic body, to be acted upon instead of intervening. By contrast, East German—like Third—Cinema sought to utilize and expand the democratic potential of the medium. Requiring spectators to (co)produce meaning actively, it necessitated the viewers’ input and participation. The audience’s reaction became a communal experience in the movie theater: shared laughter, banter, intense silence, or crackling consternation could promote genuine political consensus.50 As an avid East German moviegoer put it, “At some point, I notice the people beside me. The same is happening to them, I think, I hope. I notice the silence that only transpires when many people create it. I am a part of it. Thankful for something that one can experience only and still in the cinema.”51 Here, as in Third Cinema, spectators figure as actors in an exchange for which the film is merely catalyst. In the words of Getino and Solanas, that spectator was “seeking other committed people like himself, while he, in turn, became committed to them.”52 The fact that this avid movie goer, Horst Pehnert, served as East Germany’s Deputy Minister for Culture, who oversaw all matters related to film production including censorship, evinces that the bureaucracy appreciated the democratizing politics of a cinema so deployed and identified not solely with the state apparatus, but also with the audience. Again, Bhabha’s exhortation to conceive of a politicality beyond the binarisms may lead to a more adequate understanding of how East German Cinema negotiated power and meaning.53 Dichotomous concepts of “power” and “opposition” cannot account for the revolutionary dimension of this negotiation. With filmic means that “looked for the most part politically and aesthetically orthodox” to Western observers,54 East German cinema catalyzed audience reactions that rattled the establishment. Officials perceived the communication in the auditorium as not only as unequivocally political but also subversive: “Nothing made them as nervous as a spontaneous success like The Legend of Paul and Paula.”55 Such subversion was inscribed into the political and economic organization of East Germany, which, having turned customers into stakeholders, differed decidedly from the profit-oriented system in which First Cinema functions. East German directors were fully aware that their filmmaking was incompatible with Western modes of production and sought to preserve its special quality in 1990: “Our concern is the coming commercialization of film production, the loss of values and traditions that brought also our films international recognition.”56 To Eastern observers, this difference has a political effect. First Cinema, in their perception, fosters “prodigiously acquiescent” audiences, who unquestioningly ingest a

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cinema that does not cause “anxiety in the upper echelons over spontaneous blockbusters,” because it reconciles audiences with the status quo instead of prompting a self-reflexivity that would query it.57 A politically engaging cinema, as East German filmmakers and functionaries agreed with Getino and Solanas, has to turn the movie hall into a (semi-)public forum; it has to be a communicative practice that allows the audience to participate in the construction of meaning and consensus. Both East German and Third Cinema create this political space by privileging the visual. According to Detlef Kannapin, East German Cinema found “a new film language, which, interestingly, . . . brought the heart of film, namely the images, to the center of the film’s message, redeeming more fully the point of film to show more than to speak, . . . symbolically coded and thereby . . . more poignant.”58 Likewise Getino and Solanas stress the importance of the image, claiming that, “[t]he image of reality is more important than reality itself” in political struggle.59 In contrast to Hollywood cinema, these visuals do not corral emotion or thought along a particular path. Instead, they correspond to Dudley Andrew’s concept of “‘ame’ or soul,” according to which cinematic images lack a core or substance of their own. Unlike in Hollywood cinema, the spectators fill the images with their own reality and meaning. His stipulation that “cinema should use the constituting absence at the heart of the image to probe the novel and the real” closely corresponds to East German and Third Cinema’s use of imagistic discourse.60 Conceiving images as discursive spaces of appropriation and re-appropriation, East German and Third Cinema narrate in a way that gives spectators agency to determine their meaning themselves. Redressing lack/suture structures through an overdetermination or polyvalency, they proffer associations and meanings based on what Susan Sontag discerned as “substantiating archives of . . . representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.”61 As these ideas, thoughts and feelings are crucial to the maintenance of existing power structures, images can also be used to subvert or counter them. While Sontag’s notion of “archives” suggests that images have stable significations within a given framework, Justin Jampol shows their interpretation to be a highly dynamic process: they can be taken from the archive, read against the ideological grain, and returned with a transformed meaning. More effectively than other media, cinema allows for such redefinition, both because film, as material, is fixed, unalterable, and therefore of a certain binding quality (as opposed to a live performance, for instance, which may vary from evening to evening) and because the movie hall provides for an exchange among the audience participants that can affirm the social currency of reconfigured meanings. This negotiation of power is inflected by the cultural and ideological specificity of visual meaning. Belonging to specialized lexica, or registers,

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for communicating beyond the verbal, images are arguably less susceptible to censoring intervention than words, as the subversive (verbal) reading of an image may betray more of the respective officials’ ideological references than is conducive to their job security. Who does not make the image say what it “should be saying”?62 In arguing that a visual has a subversive charge, the burden of proof is on the censor; if the film follows the aboveoutlined stratagem of mirroring the powers that be in their projected Other, such proof may put the censor into an untenable position, whereas the artist has an alibi in the visual’s equivocality. Finally, the visual did not enter the pre-production censorship process in the East German studio; as the filmic image first has to be shot—which is also to say, financed—before it can be perused, the political investment of the image gives East German cinema a particular potency. As cinema negotiates the meaning of images, its archive is liquid, in flux. Charged with the reality the audience lives—with a past it may not have yet escaped and with the future it was promised—such images fuse on the screen into what Jacques Derrida calls “specter”: an immaterial yet spectral convergence of future and past in the present moment.63 Since photography lends reality to what it depicts,64 cinema can also lend reality to this specter. Rather than simply using the GDR’s library of political signification and shelving images back in an orderly fashion, East German cinema lets its audience redraw them, prompting and recuperating its agency in a process of triangulation. In locating the aesthetic and political efficacy of East German filmmaking, scholarship needs to explore the culturally productive space within the triangle of the three socialisms, that is, of constantly renegotiated lexica and their application to the real. This unstable, dynamic field of political and cultural tension generates an alterity of social and media designs. By employing theories that sustain the 1968 impetus to forgo, challenge, and break down structures that reproduce schemes of exclusion and domination, scholarship would avoid translating Cold War binarisms into neocolonial ones. Moreover, scholarship needs to address “the (traumatic) disconnect between storage and functional memories,”65 which its own implication in the ideologized contexts of the Cold War and its neo-liberal and neo-colonial aftermath has created. Film presents a unique chance in this regard. As a material record in the double sense—being material and showing material—film allows the audience an alternate access to reality without asserting hegemonic validity or, by itself, colonializing meaning. Spectators can associate their own references with that materiality, negotiating the tension between their cultural practice and the archival record of images (and texts). They shape the film’s import, exploring its world according to their problems and perspectives. In the words of Solanas and Getino, such a use of images “becomes something which the System finds indigestible.”66

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“The End of the Story” At a unique juncture among First, Second, and Third Cinema, East German directors staged a two-fold revolution, taking the state to task for its revolutionary program through an aesthetic revolution that harkened back to the constitutive unit of cinema—the moving image—in order to invite the very subjects of the revolution—the audience—into the narrative. While East Germany’s cinema may not have become the “new common language” that Guy Debord called for in 1967,67 it certainly aspired to it. If the years 1968 and 1969 only proved the temporal mid-point on which the East German regime (un)hinged in hindsight, they had equipped its cinema with a new perspective.68 East Germany’s films problematize (the possibility of) revolution, bending the beginning and end of the political trajectory into one. “We have reached the end of the story, and if it looks familiar, don’t be surprised. It is. It’s where we started,” Dmytryk snaps, rolling up Hollywood’s narrative template into the return of the same.69 But where First Cinema found a home, East German filmmakers felt discomfort: in their cinema, the return of the ever-same was a ubiquitous, nightmarish trope. Instead of closure, their films try to pry open an aperture for the audience to insert itself with its own story, history, and expectation. The first post-1990 film by an East German director to be screened in German mainstream cinemas, Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (Sun Alley, 1999), tries to recuperate this openness. Far from attesting to a “failure of DEFA,”70 Haußmann poignantly shows the relevance of Eastern filmmaking. In contrast to the later Goodbye, Lenin! (2004) by the West German Wolfgang Becker or Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) by the West German Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which both emulate First Cinema’s aesthetics and deliver an ideologized closure, Haußmann’s highly theatrical, over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek film about East Germany reflects the filmmaking of Eastern directors such as Rainer Simon, Jiři Menzel, or Emir Kusturica. Laughter and banter in the auditorium redefined what East Germany stood for at the end of the 1990s, when the colonialist ambitions of the preceding decade had devalued and denigrated the former East. Moreover, the film’s contradictoriness and Romantic irony invoke a Schwebe (“floating”) of meaning that impels the spectators’ own positioning, letting them come to their own terms with the meaning of the past presented, the present implied, and the future put into question. Finally, Sonnenallee’s surreal, contrived, and undercut happy ending, like the East German films discussed above, interrogate the revolution that was supposed to have taken place. The film’s receding final shot, turning into black and white, recalls the emblematic camera movements of Wolf’s Ich War Neunzehn. Here, Haußmann pays homage to film as a homecoming that avoids closure and comfort, extending the 1970s— and by implication the impetus of 1968—into the 1990s and beyond.

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Notes 1 “Sonnenallee—eine Mauerkomödie: Interview mit Leander Haußmann und Thomas Brussig, geführt von Sandra Maischberger,” in Sonnenallee: Das Buch zum Farbfilm, ed. Leander Haußmann (Berlin: Quadriga, 1999), 8–24. Here, 11. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. Klaus-Peter Wild, an official with the Treuhandanstalt, sums up this approach in speaking about the “ineffably misdirected and failed state of the GDR.” “Geleitwort,” in Auf der Suche nach dem verlorenen Staat: Die Kunst der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR, ed. Monika Flacke (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 1994), 7–9. Here, 7. See also Daniela Dahn, Wehe dem Sieger: Ohne Osten Kein Westen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2009), 67–198. 2 Reference to John Lennon’s In His Own Write (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964). 3 See for instance Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 806. 4 In the language of post-1990 German scholarship, this revolutionary impetus is rendered as “a permeating totalitarian will to form, which touched all social relations and all areas of life.” Thomas Lindenberger, “Die Diktatur der Grenzen: Zur Einleitung,” in Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR, ed. Thomas Lindenberger (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 13–44. Here, 13. 5 As the 1960 Journalistisches Handbuch put it, “We are undertaking the greatest revolution in German history.” Quoted in Dominic Boyer, Spirit and System: Media, Intellectuals, and the Dialectic in Modern German Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 139. Klaus Erdmann modelled his “Nation des Übergangs” (“nation of transition”) on the notion of Übergangsgesellschaft. See Klaus Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat: Die Interpendenz von Nations- und Geschichtsverständnis im politischen Bedingungsgefüge der DDR (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 152. Taken from Marxist-Leninist theory, this phrase figured prominently in East German discourse; Volker Braun’s theater play of the same title opened in East Berlin on the eve of the 1989 revolution. Christoph Funke, “Habt keine Angst! Fliegt ab! Wieder im Gorki: Brauns Übergangsgesellschaft,” Tagesspiegel, December 8, 2013, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/habt-keine-angst-fliegt-ab-wiederim-gorki-brauns-uebergangsgesellschaft/9186116.html; Moray McGowan, “‘Machen wir uns auf in das Land hinein.’ Volker Braun’s Übergangsgesellschaft: ‘Übergangstheater,’ ‘übergangenes Theater,’ ‘Metatheater’?,” in Volker Braun in Perspective, ed. Rolf Jucker (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 209–26. 6 For a discussion of the “gulf between media representation and the ‘everyday reality’ of life in the GDR,” see Boyer, Spirit, 148. While the term real existierender Sozialismus stakes a claim in the real, it is nothing but that: a claim. Ultimately, “all ideology . . . including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of the oppositional or oppressed classes . . . is in its very nature Utopian.” Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a

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Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 289. For a discussion of the term, see also Stefan Wolle, Heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1999), 236–37. 7 Ella Shohat, “Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender, Nation and the Cinema,” in Rethinking Third Cinema, eds. Anthony R. Guneratne and Wimal Dissanayake (New York: Routledge, 2003), 51–78. Here, 57; Albert Hirschman, “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic,” in A Propensity to SelfSubversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 9–44. Here, 12. 8 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 298; Erdmann, Der gescheiterte Nationalstaat, 34. 9 Detlef Kannapin, “Gibt es eine spezifische DEFA-Ästhetik?,” in Apropos: Film 2000, eds. Ralf Schenk and Erika Richter (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2000), 142–64. Here, 163. 10 Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2002), 121. 11 Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Um die Ecke in die Welt: Über Filme und Freunde, ed. Günter Agde (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2014), 237. 12 Kohlhaase, Um die Ecke in die Welt, 242. 13 Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Questions of Third Cinema, eds. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 111–32. Here, 117. 14 Homi Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” 117. Emphasis in the original. 15 Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 12. On the intermediary role of cultural officials and the implications for the characterization of the East German state, see Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 2009) and “Communication and Compromise: The Prerequisites for Cultural Participation,” in Power and Society in the GDR 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’?, ed. Mary Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 130–50. 16 “Egon Günther Interview,” posted to YouTube by wendemuseumvideos, November 29, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8DBrWYRks&t= 111s. Interview by Justin Jampol and Julia Werner. 17 Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, “1968 in Europe: An Introduction,” in 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1957–1977, eds. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 1–9. Here, 3. See also Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World (New York: Ballantine, 2004), 378. 18 This inspiration took many forms; a most concrete one was the adoption of East German law. See Dahn, Wehe dem Sieger, 188. 19 Kurlansky, 1968, 380. 20 Wolfgang Engler, Die Ostdeutschen als Avantgarde (Berlin: Aufbau, 2002), 76–77. 21 Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 21.

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22 For an analysis of Cold War projection of self and Other that used the Iron Curtain to stabilize the domestic power structures of both East and West, see my article “The Wall You Will Never Know,” Perspecta 036: The Yale Architectural Journal, eds. Jennifer Silbert and Sidney McCleary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 19–31. 23 Hake, German National Cinema, 119. 24 Notably, New German Cinema did not survive the cut of government subsidies. C.f. Hans Joachim Meurer, Cinema and National Identity in a Divided Germany, 1979–1989 (New York: Mellen, 2000); Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (London: BFI, 1989), 44, 117; Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, The German Cinema (New York: Praeger, 1971), 125. For an overview of East German film financing, see Rosemary Stott, “The State-Owned Cinema Industry and Its Audience,” in Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts, eds. by Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 19–40. 25 Douglas Gomery, “The Hollywood Film Industry: Theatrical Exhibition, Pay TV, and Home Video,” in Who Owns the Media? Competition and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry, eds. by Benjamin Compaine and Douglas Gomery (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000), 359–435. Here, 361, 378–80. In 1986, film imports accounted for seven percent of the US domestic market, shrinking to 0.75 percent by 2005, Toby Miller, “Hollywood, Cultural Policy Citadel,” in Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, ed. Mike Wayne (London: Pluto, 2005), 182–93. Here, 190. 26 Stuart Liebman and Alexander Kluge, “On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview with Alexander Kluge,” October 46, no. 3 (1988), 23–59. Here, 25. 27 Liebman and Kluge, “On New German Cinema,” 25. 28 Liebman and Kluge, 30–31. 29 With respect to Hollywood, see Miller, “Hollywood,” 182–93. 30 Relativizing his experiences in the East with those made in the West, Günther emphasizes that censorship and repression are inherent in all filmmaking projects (Günther, Interview). 31 Ralf Schenk, “Der Filmregisseur Rainer Simon bereiste die USA und Kanada,” Berliner Zeitung, December 31, 2008, https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/derfilmregisseur-rainer-simon-bereiste-die-usa-und-kanada---ein-gespraech-die-studenten-sind-so-widerspruchslos-15771554. 32 Berghahn, Hollywood, 49. 33 Douglas Gomery, “The Economics of Hollywood: Money and Media,” in Media Economics: Theory and Practice, eds. Alison Alexander, James Owers, Rod Carveth, C. Ann Hollifield, and Albert N. Greco (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2004), 193–206. Here, 205. 34 Kannapin, “DEFA-Ästhetik?,” 164. 35 Winfried Glatzeder, Paul und ich: Autobiographie (Berlin: Aufbau, 2008), 111–16.

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36 Paul Betts, for instance, highlights such reverse censure in the widely used and legally formalized complaint procedure of petition letters, noting their “black humor and irony” and the adeptness with which the petitioners hold the regime accountable for its own rhetoric. Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 173–92. Justinian Jampol outlines the same strategies at work with respect to political symbols and sees the appropriation of the state’s symbols as a power struggle between the opposition and party leaders, which the latter lost. Justinian Jampol, “Swords, Doves and Flags: Political Symbols and their Appropriation in the GDR” (PhD diss., University of Oxford, 2011). Finally, I show how East German cinema employed this stratagem to delegitimize the state. Evelyn Preuss, “The Bakhtinian Headstands of East German Cinema,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, eds. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower, 2006), 101–17. Ultimately, reverse censure effected, to use Jameson’s summary of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogic, “the carnivalesque dispersal of the hegemonic order” in very concrete political terms. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 285. The chorus “We are the people” of the fall of 1989 is a condensed example of reverse censure; it became the regime’s funeral song. 37 For the term’s provenance and current applications, see Qinna Shen, The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 175–77. 38 Preuss, “The Wall You Will Never Know,” 22–28. 39 Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965), 35, 86, 121. 40 Von Richthofen, Bringing Culture, 3. 41 This argument applies also to production and exhibition strategies; however, a comparison of the two issues is beyond the scope of this chapter. Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Toward a Third Cinema,” Tricontinental 14 (1969): 107–32. 42 Paul Berman, A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (New York: Norton, 1996), 12. 43 Citing the special role East Germany played as a frontline state, scholars assume that greater exposure to the West resulted in heightened censorship concerns and consequently a more subdued aesthetic and political program. Hirschman, Exit, 21. This assumption informs Katie Trumpener’s comparison of East German to Czech and to Polish Cinema. Katie Trumpener, “DEFA: Moving Germany into Eastern Europe,” in Moving Images of East Germany: Past and Future of DEFA Film, eds. Barton Byg and Betheny Moore (Washington DC: AICGS, 2002), 85–111. Here, 95, 99. 44 With respect to Ich War Neunzehn, see Evelyn Preuss, “To See or Not to See? Topographies of Repression in Konrad Wolf’s I Was Nineteen and The Naked Man on the Sportsground,” in Revisiting Space: Space and Place in European Cinema, eds. Wendy Everett and Axel Goodbody (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 209–40.

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45 For a discussion of the concept of home in East German film, see Gebhard Moldenhauer, “Filme der DEFA als ‘Heimatfilme’?” DEFA-Film als nationales Kulturerbe (Berlin: Vistas, 2001), 43–48. 46 Wolfgang Jacobsen and Rolf Aurich, Der Sonnensucher: Konrad Wolf (Berlin: Aufbau, 2005), 311. Wolf had originally supported Frank Beyer’s film Spur der Steine (Trace of Stones, 1966) but bent to pressure. Beyer attributes his dismissal from DEFA to the studio leadership’s fear of an alliance between him and Wolf, Ralf Schenk, ed., Regie: Frank Beyer (Berlin: Hentrich, 1995), 61. 47 Kohlhaase, Um die Ecke, 30. 48 Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 10, 42. 49 Emphasis in the original; Edward Dmytryk, Cinema: Concept and Practice (Boston: Focal, 1988), 38. 50 Dmytryk, Cinema, 312. 51 Horst Pehnert, Kino, Künstler und Konflikte: Filmproduktion und Filmpolitik in der DDR (Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2009), 91. 52 Getino and Solanas, “Third Cinema,” 130. 53 See my discussion of Konrad Wolf in an earlier section of this chapter. 54 Trumpener, “DEFA: Moving Germany into Eastern Europe,” 95. 55 Trumpener, 213. 56 Reisch, . . . will Regisseur werden: Eine DEFA-Filmkarriere (Berlin: Neues Leben, 2015), 154. 57 Schenk, “Filmregisseur Rainer Simon.” Similarly, Winfried Glatzeder, lead actor of Paul and Paula and Till Eulenspiegel, notes that his West German colleagues—actors and filmmakers—were not used to voicing their opinion openly. Glatzeder, Paul und ich, 166. Klaus Wischnewski, “Träumer und gewöhnliche Leute: 1966 bis 1979,” in Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt Babelsberg: DEFASpielfilme 1946–1992, ed. Ralf Schenk (Berlin: Henschel, 1994), 212–63. Here, 223. 58 Kannapin, “DEFA-Ästhetik?” 156. 59 Getino and Solanas, “Third Cinema,” 123. 60 Andrew, What Cinema Is! 18. 61 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2003), 86. 62 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 29. 63 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994). 64 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 20–21. 65 Larson Powell, “The Spectral Politics of DEFA,” in The Place of Politics in German Film, ed. Martin Blumenthal-Barby (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014), 185–203. Here, 186. 66 Getino and Solanas, “Third Cinema,” 124. 67 Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 133.

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68 This unhinging was quite literally felt by East Germans, who commonly date the beginning of East Germany’s general crisis to the late sixties and early seventies. Wolfgang Engler, Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von einem verlorenen Land (Berlin: Aufbau, 1999), 147. 69 Edward Dmytryk, On Filmmaking (Boston: Focal, 1986), 161. 70 Powell, “Spectral Politics,” 188.

14:

Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand

Ervin Malakaj

T

of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand (Under the Pavement Lies the Strand, 1974/75) already categorized the film as a “a delayed debate about the political positions of the student movement and feminism” early on.1 Such criticism responds primarily to the film’s depiction of the theater performer couple Grischa (Grischa Huber) and Heinrich (Heinrich Giskes) in their struggle to reconcile the two competing impulses informing their daily life. Heinrich’s disenchantment with the failed promises of the broader antiauthoritarian movement, which activates his depression, clashes with an ardent desire to connect to the personal and political work of other women in West Berlin developed by Grischa over the course of the film. While portraying Heinrich as an emblem of the failed masculinist political energies of the 1968 movement, Grischa is shown ardently trying to achieve a livable future by learning from the women around her. The film is not, however, fully celebratory of Grischa. She gives in to the social and personal pressures to have a child in the midst of a self-actualizing mission partly inspired by the Women’s Movement. In this regard, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand advances a criticism against the changing landscape of activist work, as it connects to personal lives structured by pervasive unequal hetero-patriarchal power dynamics in the immediate aftermath of 1968. Building on Renate Möhrmann’s assessment of Sanders-Brahms’s treatment of post-1968 sentiment in the film as a delayed response to the movement in comparison to her contemporaries, this chapter focuses on the presentness of 1968 energies in the film. Even though it was written and directed in the years 1974/75, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand firmly relates to the intellectual, political, and social histories of the 1968 antiauthoritarian movement. 1968 is captured as a point of reference in the film, whereby the political climate of 1968 continually informs the subject position of those inculcated by the movement’s global reach.2 In this light, the HE CRITICAL RECEPTION

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contested 1968 presentness, as characterized by the private and public political fragmentation regularly cited by Heinrich and critiqued by Grischa, solidifies two impulses in the film: on the one hand, a utopian backwardness fueled by nostalgia and, on the other hand, a “cruel optimism” registered in the potentials of self-liberation at the cost of personal relations.3 For Lauren Berlant, cruel optimism describes “conditions under which certain attachments to what counts as life come to make sense or no longer make sense, yet remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings.”4 Cruel optimism registers when that which we want is the source of our suffering. In this light, Grischa’s optimism registers as cruel, particularly because she insists on reconciling her sustained efforts to learn how to navigate her changing daily life in the context of the Women’s Movement with Heinrich’s growing interest in domesticating her. This chapter examines how both Grischa’s cruel optimism and Heinrich’s nostalgia are deployed in the service of the film’s broader attempt to complicate political-activist work by considering the central role that daily life plays in tempering the perceived purely political experiences of publicly oriented figures.

Political Filmmaking and Sander-Brahms’s Early Career Media played a principal role in the formation and dissemination of the antiauthoritarian ideals promulgated by the global 1968 movement.5 Timothy Scott Brown writes of a “media explosion,” which is “inseparable from the other trends that produced the 1960s cultural revolution.”6 The democratization of filmmaking ushered in by the introduction of Kodak’s Super-8 camera in 1965 is central in this regard, a phenomenon that, along with the founding of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) in 1966, nurtured a group of filmmakers with decidedly political aesthetic aims.7 Consider, for example, Helke Sander’s Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure (Break the Power of the Manipulators! 1967), her documentary about the publishing giant Springer. The didactic political filmmaking of one of the first female dffb students found an audience among contributors to the movement. These contributors were receptive to cultural products programmatically against ideological apparatuses favoring capitalist consumerism over revolutionary ideals. On the extreme end of the political spectrum and facilitated by the link between the dffb and the antiauthoritarian movement, films such as Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (How to Make a Molotov Cocktail, 1968), a film presumed to have been directed by Holger Meins, emblematically captured a violently charged antiauthoritarian culture. The film was shown on February 1, 1968, during a protest that accused the

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Springer Publishing House of controlling the press and of contributing to the “maintenance of a false consciousness that prevented any challenge to regimes of domination in West German society.”8 The film enflamed an existing political resentment of the Springer publishing monopoly by calling for “exemplary violence,” a call responded to in the form of vandalized property throughout the company’s West Berlin offices.9 Such cinema, fueled by highly politicized messages in films by other dffb students such as Harun Farocki, effectively transformed, as Herbert Marcuse states in his work on the era, “subjective sensibility” as mediated through political works of art “into objective form” as realized in politically driven violence.10 Extreme ideological filmmaking in the context of a broader media culture associated with the antiauthoritarian movement came to define a political film aesthetic in the late 1960s and early 1970s against which the political dimension of Sanders-Brahms’s cinema was measured by some contemporary critics. The editors of Frauen and Film, for example, characterize much of Sanders-Brahms’s earlier filmmaking as accommodating a status quo instead of transgressing ideological boundaries: “the films were not very innovative and ideologically all too social-democratic.”11 According to the editors, the execution of her films lessened their potential. The editors speak here of films like Angelika Urban, Verkäuferin (Angelika Urban, Saleswoman, 1970), which traces the daily work of an ordinary woman, or Der Angestellte (The Employee, 1972), which captures the struggles of an autodidact in his chase after the middle-class dream. Measured against the overtly didactic, even politically inciting filmmaking characteristic of the period, Sanders-Brahms’s storylines, which often feature ordinary people, seemed less ideologically charged to the editors of the leading feminist film periodical. Even though some contemporaries celebrated its “kompliziertere erzählform” (“complicated narrative forms”) of blending narrative and documentary style, particularly reminiscent of the period’s political filmmaking, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand received harsh criticism.12 Gesine Strempel’s review of the film, for example, accuses Sanders-Brahms of participating in mass-media culture, neglectful of the nuances accounting for the broader Women’s Movement.13 That is, if Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand is overly concerned with showing its lead female character connecting to and learning from the Women’s Movement as it grows out of the global antiauthoritarian movement, then Strempel refutes that the film accomplishes what it outwardly claims.14 According to Strempel, SandersBrahms indeed places the concerns of women front and center but “robs” them of their political identity.15 Strempel blames Sanders-Brahms for misleading viewers about the political activities surrounding the Women’s Movement in Berlin in 1974, citing the experiences of Finkenstaedt, a woman interviewed in the film. Finkenstaedt had expressed deep resentment about how the film portrayed her and other women who talk about their

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personal experiences, which included destructive sexual relationships with men. It did so by de-emphasizing the political dimension of the women’s bravery to speak up in public about violent experiences. Finkenstaedt sees in the lack of nuance about how she came to be involved in the Women’s Movement an aesthetic choice that constitutes a blow against the tenets of the Women’s Movement itself.16 Strempel’s assessment of the extent to which the film fails to provide a nuanced account of the political bravery of women speaking up about their personal relationships in the film is correct. Although this is a valid criticism, it obstructs the film’s merit, which it achieves by focusing on the personal impact that the Women’s Movement has on Grischa. The political dimension of the movement leaves traces in Grischa’s daily chores, her cruelly optimistic relationship with Heinrich, her relationship to theater, and beyond. In other words, the film focuses not on the documentary realities of the movement’s political dimension but ponders how the political movement impacts daily life—and it does so through part-fictional actor-characters, who are, on the one hand, connecting to real life people in part-documentary fashion and who act, on the other hand, in the fictional romance between Grischa and Heinrich.

The Situationist International and Quotidian Political Aesthetics Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand imagines the quotidian in relation to the political through its aesthetic allegiance with the Situationist International (1957–72), an artistic-political collective based in Paris that sought “freedom from the banality and tyranny of bourgeois order and bureaucratic rule.”17 The Situationists’ goal was to foster revolutionary moments of radical self-awareness and self-actualization through activist art in order to create disruptions among broader capitalist systems of power. At the center of the movement were aesthetic-personal-political actions in the form of what the Situationists called dérives, which were city strolls conducted throughout the 1950s in Paris; the Situationists would drift “through the city for days, weeks, even months at a time, looking for what they called the city’s psychogeography.”18 At the core of this movement was an aim to discover a city’s “images of play, eccentricity, secret rebellion, creativity, and negation.”19 The Situationists “looked for images of refusal, or for images society had itself refused, hidden, suppressed or recuperated— images of refusal, nihilism, or freedom that society had taken back into itself, coopted or rehabilitated, isolated or discredited.”20 During dérives, the Situationists hoped to discover glimpses into a “new vision of daily life” devoid of consumerist tendencies by reverting to the truth beneath the pavement, as it were, by rendering legible that which lies inscribed into

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the very fabric of the city.21 Their graffiti slogans, such as “Never work!” and “Under the Pavement Lies the Beach!,” sought to dismantle what the Situationists saw as thick veils of ideology firmly positioned between the potentials of a self-actualized life and the co-dependency linked to consumerist realities. These and other slogans were likewise imprinted on their clothes, making those wearing them walking instantiations of détournement, “the diversion of an element of culture or everyday life to a new and displacing purpose.”22 Together, dérives and détournement permitted the Situationists to unleash the radical potential inscribed in quotidian life and became integral ideas behind the 1968 antiauthoritarian movement. Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand mobilizes the energies of the Situationists in an attempt to capture the movement’s interest in the daily lives of people as they connect to broader political realities seemingly devoid of the personal. In this light, Grischa’s stage work originally satisfies her, inasmuch as it offers a state of flexibility in which the performative easily helps her leap from the emotional-personal realities of the figures she plays to the political message of the play—in the film she notably performs in a leading role in Euripides’ The Bacchae.23 But the work on stage appears inadequate in effectively helping her connect the political, as she encounters it in art, to the “real world” off stage. Grischa sets out to find ways to relate to the real world, hoping to appease her political impulse. At the forefront of her quest rests her inability to articulate clearly her discontent with regard to the disjuncture between private and public life. After connecting with other women through the screening of a documentary on abortion rights and on the politicization of the pill, she reaches a high point in her inability to articulate this explicitly unnamable phenomenon, which she describes as a “Bedürfnis” (a need or urge). Alice Schwarzer speaks of the difficulty the majority of women had in articulating their needs while living in a male-dominated world, which, among other things, systematically excluded women from educational institutions and other sites through which they could learn to express their concerns. She notes that this problem led to the formation of Weiberräte, or “women’s groups, to which men were not admitted. Here only women spoke, at long last, without being run down by eloquent male comrades.”24 Just like the Situationists, Grischa yearns for moments of critical exploration of the cityscape in search of answers that would help her to find a remedy for this hermeneutic impasse rooted in hetero-patriarchy. Like the Situationists, she yearns for a radical disruption of the status quo and finds a semi-programmatic approach for her personal discovery in the energies of the burgeoning Women’s Movement.25 She seeks out a radical female subjectivity capable of asserting itself in a male-centric world—radical, because womanist assertiveness is a radical notion in the way the film presents it. The film screening serves as a starting point and becomes a catalyst for Grischa’s impulse toward social change. The discovery and connection in which she

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Figure 14.1. Grischa in a discussion following a film screening. Under the Pavement Lies the Strand, dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1974, 106 min., Helma SandersBrahms Filmproduktion GmbH & Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Screenshot.

partakes with other women living in West Berlin in the early 1970s draws from this initial scene in the film, which ultimately helps her come to a deeper understanding of the urge. The screening leaves an important trace in Grischa’s mind, which triggers her personal variety of dérive and détournement with an intentional desire to facilitate the “production of new situations as an end in themselves,” as McKenzie Wark puts it in their account of the Situationists.26 New situations here mean moments of discovery of the self outside of ideological power structures such as the wider 1968 movement, which, as the film underscores, inhibited instead of fostered women’s self-actualization.27 Grischa’s unnameable urge slowly acquires a name through her forging of personal-political bonds with women. Initially, her search for connections with women begins as a random stroll to the Siemens factory at the end of a workday. Grischa waits for women to leave the building, so that she can ask them a series of personal questions relating to how they balance expectations at work and at home. Honest answers follow her inquiries: the women are often caught between the routines of work and home life. For Grischa, this insight

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Figure 14.2. Grischa during one of her interviews. Under the Pavement Lies the Strand, dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1974, 106 min., Helma Sanders-Brahms Filmproduktion GmbH & Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Screenshot.

provides the basis for a more in-depth study of broader ideological systems concentrically organized under a hetero-patriarchy, which nurture such restrictions on women. The interviews she conducts in the film function as conduits for the discovery of the nature of womanhood as it is inscribed in the personal histories of women in West Berlin—in Situationist terms, she conducts a search for the psychogeography of the city. Likewise, the interviews are ideal instantiations of the situation-as-end-in-itself put forward by the Situationists, because they are the tools through which Grischa reaches toward self-actualization. The interview format appeals to Grischa due to its conversational nature. In the spirit of dérives, Grischa proceeds unintentionally in her questioning; that is, she is interested less in making sure to ask each woman the same set of questions in a uniform, empirically driven, ethnographic style than in asking the questions as the situation prompts. She records the interviews and listens to them at her home, transcribing them and thereby documenting the quotidian life of regular women whose official story otherwise would not have been part of the

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political discussions of the student movements. Each interview becomes a new situation, which maintains its status as an activity of radical potential. The technology of the recorder then functions less as an extension of a would-be ethnographic study and instead becomes an extension of the seeking out of situations of contact among women for the sake of revealing the psychogeography the situationists pursued.28 When Grischa plays back, transcribes, and analyzes the recorded interviews, she does so not with a pointed goal in mind but rather with a hope to move toward a point of rupture, itself hopefully laden in the form of insights about daily life as women. Although Grischa is shown in an existential episode in the opening of the film, this introspective moment is not limiting for her; her Situationist impulse grows out of it and feeds a particularly powerful personal-political subjectivity, which is in the process of being recharged throughout her dérives. Grischa’s political consciousness exists prior to the dérives in her work on stage and in her discussions with Heinrich about his fragile relationship to the post-’68 era. But through the dérives her political consciousness sharpens in focus as Grischa recurrently ignites the urge to seek out more information about the status of women. The interviews intensely preoccupy her: in one scene, she sits at her kitchen table, playing them back on the recorder, rewinding the tape, and frantically readjusting it to the moment at which Heinrich last interrupted her. Heinrich pouts as he feels neglected by her focus on work, but only at the end of the scene does she give in to his attention-seeking emotional manipulation. In their potential to captivate her, while patriarchy would rather have her focus elsewhere, the interviews reveal a great deal of political prowess in keeping her tied to her investigations.

Left Melancholy Heinrich’s depression is rooted in the failed 1968 antiauthoritarian movement. Initially, it functions as a foil to Grischa’s dérives, which means that in politically didactic terms it warns against a masculinist impulse, toxic to women’s self-discovery and actualization through the Women’s Movement. The film complicates a didactic warning by foregrounding Heinrich’s destructive egocentrism, rooted in hetero-patriarchal power tensions, which persists throughout the film. An early scene shows Grischa and Heinrich on a stroll following a performance and serves as a starting point for an analysis of their relationship in relation to the political dimension of their public lives. The couple appears to have no concrete destination initially. The stroll activates a politically-charged discussion by presenting the couple first interacting at a distance: a long shot shows the two slowly moving closer toward the

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camera, before they enter the staged space of the film, as it were, at which point their conversation becomes legible for viewers. The full conversation takes place in a tracking medium shot, which traces Heinrich’s display of a spectrum of emotional reactions to the retrospective story he tells about his involvement in the antiauthoritarian movement. From fondly referring to the spokesperson of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist [West] German Student Union, SDS), Rudi Dutschke, by his first name, and to the potentials arising from one successful demonstration, which led him and his friends to believe the Revolution was happening the next day, Heinrich wallows in retrospective excitement. Then, he turns notably and drastically from a fond nostalgia to critique: the time of glorious potential for a radically transformed world ended, because the broader student movement he thought was united ruptured politically along various lines. Heinrich even accuses his former comrades of having become apathetic to the movement’s ideals since 1968: despite all potential for revolution, he remarks casually, “nothing happened” (“nix ist passiert”) and, from his perspective, all former activists appear to have retreated into their apartments. They no longer appear united in a collective effort. Heinrich, in fact, reproaches those who once exhibited a strong political agency in 1968 for having become domestic, an allegation he indirectly makes against himself (the next sequence shows him on his own with his dogs in his apartment). The tracking camera stops as Grischa interrupts Heinrich in their stroll. She rejects his claim that people are not gathering in search of a better life, noting that Heinrich is simply too preoccupied with himself to notice. Their disagreement centrally shapes the film’s broader critique of 1968 sentiments. While Grischa urges Heinrich to reconsider his existential introspection as an obstacle toward a livable future after 1968, Heinrich does not fully take her recommendations seriously. Not only does he appear caught in a minor pout, as he expresses his loneliness among the fragmented political friendship circles, but he also rejects Grischa’s critique. She believes his insistence upon utopian collectives is destructive and a root cause of his existential malaise. As she elaborates, Heinrich interrupts briefly and finally kisses her on the cheek in an effort to lighten the mood and to stop her criticism altogether. Whereas the kiss effectively lights up Grischa’s face and the two playfully depart, it also affirms Heinrich’s distance from the solutions Grischa offers to his ways of approaching the political past. The scene offers a particular sort of politically limiting leftist nostalgia that Wendy Brown terms “left melancholy.”29 Brown draws on what Stuart Hall calls “the crisis of the Left” following the 1968 antiauthoritarian movement, namely an ideological impasse engendered by the Left’s political fragmentations and distance from quotidian realities.30 Left melancholy, in this context,

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is an epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. . . . Left melancholy represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress.” It signifies, as well, a certain narcissism with regard to one’s past political attachments and identity that exceeds any contemporary investment in political mobilization, alliance, or transformation.31

Heinrich suffers from left melancholy. Recurrently, he yearns for the critical energies of 1968 as a time of great potential that is no longer available in the present moment. The left melancholic impulse that dominates the scene irritates their relationship. As Heinrich insists on his frail connections to the antiauthoritarian movement, he concurrently rejects Grischa’s remarks, thereby prioritizing his subjective experience of the past over Grischa’s present rationalization of the causes for the malaise. Whereas Grischa insists on the promises of what Brown terms “the possibilities of political transformation in the present,” an antithesis to those “more beholden to certain long-held sentiments and objects,” Heinrich is left unable or unwilling to move forward, trapped in a state of arrested development.32 The conversation between Grischa and Heinrich thus becomes part of what Berlant calls a “situation”: “a genre of social time and practice in which a relation of persons and worlds is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.”33 The situation that constitutes the film is the aftermath of the heydays of the antiauthoritarian movement. In this regard, the scene is merely an extension of the political reality, in which one conversation partner looks into the past and the other one looks forward into the future. It is no accident that this sequence shows the world to be in transition: an extensive construction site forms the background during their conversation. Immediately following Grischa and Heinrich’s departure, a slow panning extreme shot fixates on the construction site, a location being cleared for new buildings as a train enters the image from the left and exits on the right in a symbolic gesture capturing the world moving forward. As the transformation of the cityscape hopes to “cover up” the critical energies of 1968, the film’s protagonists are caught in a conversation about the effect of this situational change in Berlant’s sense and the Situationist potential (in the way Grischa encounters it). Berlant gives critical language to the effects of the Situationist dérives, describing the momentary aimlessness and the critical insight to which it gives rise for the couple in the film as situational. Importantly, for Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand, the situation fosters political potential for Grischa, while fueling Heinrich’s existential malaise, his left melancholy. Grischa struggles to help

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Heinrich capture his disappointment about the West German student movement. Instead she notes his inability to let go of the utopian sense of belonging he harnessed in his collaboration with others—primarily men— during and in the immediate aftermath of 1968. Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand unveils Grischa’s political sensitivity and historic realism in the stroll with Heinrich. Heinrich’s rejection of her as a conversation partner during the stroll reveals his unwillingness to relinquish the very power dynamic against which her personal-political mission comes to be positioned in the film. Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand renders him as a culprit in the broader toxic hetero-patriarchal system, which would paint Grischa as a perpetrator in tempering their relation to one another through her political self-actualization instead of a figure with solutions for a better life together. In this light, Heinrich metonymically captures the hetero-patriarchal system, which strengthens his fond relationship to the past instead of helping him to imagine a livable future as equals in the relationship with Grischa. By showing Heinrich as in denial about his inability to let go of the romanticized 1968 past and as unwilling to acknowledge Grischa’s effective critique of his left melancholy, the film further complicates the productive Situationist ideal of fostering moments of rupture in the cityscape and daily lives of those traversing it. For Grischa, those Situationist moments are only possible in her discussions with women and not with men.

Reproductive Fantasies and Cruel Optimism The emphasis in Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand on Grischa’s yearning for moments of self-actualization and of space from the hetero-patriarchal status quo stands in a reverse symbiotic relationship to Heinrich’s insistence on biological reproduction as a solution for the existential malaise. Ironically, whereas Grischa produces and “reproduces” situations to establish moments of radical repose capable of disrupting quotidian powerrelations and thereby revealing moments of self-actualization through communion with other women, Heinrich refutes any hope for a livable future unless they have a child. That is, he rationalizes his left melancholy produced by what he sees as a domesticated student movement through a reproductive fantasy intended to satisfy his deepest domestic desires. A notion that is contradictory to his political yearning, his reproductive impulse confuses Grischa, who questions Heinrich’s motives. Repeatedly, she mobilizes situational conversations to help Heinrich express what motivates his wish for a child. Heinrich simply cites an impulse or urge to fill a void in his life by creating life. This masculinist and sexist impulse behind Heinrich’s reproductive fantasies forms a grotesque counter-balance to the film’s political emphasis

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on Grischa’s discovery-driven self-actualization. Heinrich’s ideals burden Grischa in that they insist on harnessing their initial bohemian relationship, which Heinrich wants to be remade into a hetero-patriarchal model of power relations actively oppressive to and thus exclusive of the Women’s Movement.34 Though initially skeptical of his proposal because she insists that her investigative and creative work is too consuming to have a child, Grischa attends to a competing impulse: she hopes to have a child in the future. To this end, she stops taking the pill out of fear that she will never be able to have a child. Though the film never explicitly presents Grischa as abandoning her ideals of self-actualization, it does integrate Grischa’s reproductive urges into the womanist discourses during the interviews. As such, the question of reproductive rights figures prominently as it is described in the documentary footage during which Grischa attends a rally as part of the campaign against Paragraph 218, which criminalized abortion, but it also figures as focalized through Heinrich and his demands for domesticity. Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand thus portrays a complex network of personal urges pitted against political ideals, leveraged into the best of all possible political lives for the protagonists. The film does not merely position Heinrich as the cause of Grischa’s own reproductive thoughts; such a narrative would deny her agency in discussing openly her options about having a child and, as such, would counter a key tenet of the Women’s Movement and the campaign against Paragraph 218, which called for “the right of the individual woman to self-determination with regard to her body.”35 But the film positions Heinrich and their relationship as a quintessential consideration in Grischa’s evaluation of how to proceed, when she finds out she is pregnant. Deeply committed to her personal-political work in her dérives, in which she yearns for a better future, Grischa falls into another existential breakdown at the end of the film. The heteropatriarchal status quo is depicted as a threat in the lives of all the women she interviews, and it threatens her well-being as well: Heinrich and Grischa argue in the film; he actively interrupts work that is important to her; he emotionally manipulates her; and he finally breaks up with her. But she is hopeful for a livable future, if they work on it together. In this light, her drive is best characterized as cruelly optimistic in that Grischa maintains “an attachment to a significantly problematic object,” that of a future relationship with Heinrich solidified by a child.36 Berlant describes cruel optimism in terms of attachments to objects of desire that impede happiness: “the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.”37 In this sense, cruel optimism proliferates the false

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security in believing that the destructive forces of capitalistic modernity— which fostered the authoritarianism that the 1968 student movement protested—will eventually lead to a “good life.”38 The film predicts a glum future for Grischa and Heinrich at the end, when Grischa is shown as emotionally fragile and dependent on Heinrich, despite having spent the majority of the film finding ways to disassociate herself from the social structures supportive of unequal emotional relationships challenged by patriarchal expectations. And yet, the film is not just dismissive of Grischa: it does not paint her life story as a lesson for other women but presents her in all her complexity as a politically-conscious subject and deeply complicated human being, who attempts to face Heinrich’s patriarchal urges as a self-actualized feminist subject.

Limits of Political Activism Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand probes whether the competing ideals Grischa sets out to bring into harmony at the opening can indeed be brought together productively, if her partner is not willing to shift as well. The film is not clear about this at the end. Grischa is not crushed but is instead being spread thin between the political impulse and the personal urge without any added support but instead a challenge from her partner. The film tempers the purely political activism in her discovery missions through West Berlin by exposing Grischa’s deeply personal reproductive urges and the way she may, albeit for different reasons, share the reproductive impulse with Heinrich. Beyond simply painting her Situationism as hopelessly interrupted by the domesticated urge, the film indeed allots agency to Grischa in making the decision not to have an abortion and to give in to the relationship she fears may interfere with her personal discovery. Sanders-Brahms herself characterizes much of her early period as politically didactic, albeit not in the same vein as the work of her contemporaries Sander or Meins (cited above). In a 1977 interview with Frauen und Film, she states that her earlier films often feature ordinary “concept characters” (“Thesenleute”) informed by the mission to educate viewers.39 Beyond insisting on a politically-didactic aesthetic, Sanders-Brahms goes so far as to criticize a condescending quality that didactic filmmaking can have in relation to its viewers; instead of showing viewers tragedies, which are about individuals, these tragedies are weaponized in the service of a persuasion often unpalatable for broader audiences.40 While Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand premiered before this interview, the film stands positioned at the cross-roads of the politicized filmmaking she mentions in her assessment and of a more complex narrative form that, through storytelling, hopes to present viewers with situations without a clear resolution to the problems they present.

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To this extent, Sanders-Brahms speaks in one of her interviews of her interest in capturing “creaturely urges” (“kreatürliche bedürfnisse” [sic]) as the most common denominator and key factor for interpersonal relationships.41 As an example, she discusses her work on her feature film Shirins Hochzeit (Shirin’s Wedding, 1976) in which the title character feels an inexplicable urge to fight for her relationship despite severe obstacles. Shirin fights her way from a small village in Turkey to Germany, where her fiancé works as a guest worker. When she arrives, she struggles to find him and her way, finally resorting to prostitution. It is in the capacity as prostitute that she finally finds Mahmut. Regarding the relationship, “it is the only thing that is left behind, because that is the only thing that is left in history—even if this means that one has to pay upfront. In the end, this is the engine, which keeps Shirin going and which helped her maintain her dignity all this time.”42 The impulse driving Shirin is cruel optimism; that is, a misguided belief that the very structures can lead to a good life when what they ultimately cause her is harm. Grischa deals with her very own variety of cruel optimism, which positions her to know more about her world, but her final decisions in the film ultimately bring great uncertainty. In this sense, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand stands firmly alongside Sanders-Brahms’s works, all of which “insist relentlessly on the political and historical dimension of all emotional relationships.”43 That is, her films focus on the political not as it pertains to public activism alone but as it relates to the quotidian experiences of individuals. The emphasis on Grischa’s personal experience captures a political commentary, but one that reaches beyond the confines of the public Women’s Movement in the streets and its ties to the 1968 cultural revolution. It examines the extent to which the movement’s ideals can coalesce with the demands of heterosexual relationships.

Notes 1

Renate Möhrmann, Die Frau mit der Kamera: Filmemacherinnen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland—Situation, Perspektiven (München: Hanser, 1980), 145. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 4 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 13. 5 Ingo Cornils has shown not only that the broader media landscape has been responsible for the dissemination of the ideals of the antiauthoritarian movement and a conservative resistance to media culture against it in the 60s and 70s but also that a global multi-media industry continually kept the cypher 1968 alive until

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today. Ingo Cornils, Writing the Revolution: The Construction of “1968” in Germany (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2016), 151. See also Christina Gerhardt, Screening the Red Army Faction: Historical and Cultural Memory (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 65–100. 6 Brown, West Germany, 195. 7 Brown, 196–97. 8 Brown, 193–94. 9 Brown, 193. 10 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (New York: Beacon Press, 1969), 25. 11 Regine Halter, Eva Hiller, and Renate Holy, “Die Filmemacherin Helma Sanders-Brahms,” Frauen und Film 13 (1977): 21–31. Here, 22. The typesetting for the journal maintained a lower-case spelling throughout. 12 Halter, Hiller, and Holy, “Sanders-Brahms,” 29. 13 Gesine Strempel, “Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand: einige Bemerkungen zur dokumentarischen Methode,” Frauen und Film 13 (1977): 36–37. 14 For the rise of the Women’s Movement out of the student movement, see Eva Maleck-Lewy and Bernhard Maleck, “The Women’s Movement in East and West Germany,” 1968: The World Transformed, eds. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 373–97. 15 Strempel, “Unter dem Pflaster,” 37. 16 Strempel, 36. 17 Greil Marcus, “The Long Walk of the Situationist International,” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 1–21. Here, 4. 18 Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 4. 19 Marcus, 4. 20 Marcus, 4–5. 21 Marcus, 5. See also Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 22 Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 6. 23 The Bacchae notoriously mediate between the extremes of daily life in the form of Dionysian bodily impulses and the political responsibility to the collective. 24 Alice Schwarzer, 10 Jahre Frauenbewegung: So fing es an (Cologne: EmmaFrauenverlag, 1981), 13. Quoted in Brown, West Germany and the Global Sixties, 294. 25 Möhrmann, Die Frau mit der Kamera, 146. 26 McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (New York: Verso, 2011), 58. 27 Maleck-Lewy and Maleck, “The Women’s Movement,” 376. 28 Marcus, “The Long Walk,” 4–5. 29 Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (1999): 19–26. Here, 19. 30 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). Quoted in Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” 19.

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Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” 19. Brown, 20. 33 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 6. 34 Brown, West Germany, 286–304. 35 Maleck-Lewy and Maleck, “The Women’s Movement,” 383. 36 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24. 37 Berlant, 24. Emphasis in the original. 38 Berlant, 164. Emphasis in the original. 39 Halter, Hiller, and Holy, “Sanders-Brahms,” 27. 40 Halter, Hiller, and Holy, 27. See also Möhrmann, Die Frau mit der Kamera, 152. 41 Halter, Hiller, and Holy, “Sanders-Brahms,” 24. 42 Halter, Hiller, and Holy, 24. 43 Peter Brunette, “Helma Sanders-Brahms: A Conversation,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1990–91): 34–42. Here, 35. 32

15:

Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film

Kalani Michell

I

when the right moment to shoot has come. In the opening of Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (The Little Godard: To the Production Board for Young German Cinema, 1978), two girls at the lake exit the frame just when the music reaches its climax. The sound of French television, Les actualités Gaumont—Reflets d’automne, plays over the scene: “Holiday atmosphere on Super-8. Maybe also a home movie from the Alster.”1 They are playing apportieren, master and dog. One girl throws the stick and the other, the loyal servant, brings it back. Exaggerated movements, throwing the bounty farther out. Der kleine Godard is interested in rehearsals of retrieval. When the girls suddenly walk off the scene, the film fetches a quote from the past about the importance of timing.2 White typed text is superimposed over the lake, but ephemeral, appearing and fading away in four parts. “Bruno (off): ‘Each time the coast was clear, no witness . . . / . . . I hesitated a few seconds . . . / . . . and once again it was too late.’ / ‘LE PETIT SOLDAT’ Jean-Luc Godard 1960.” It is attributed to 1960, the year when production on the film was finished, and not 1963, when the ban on it was lifted and it was released, a result of the Algerian War having come to an end. The title of the film is also left in French, not translated as “The Little Soldier,” which would correspond with Bruno’s voice-off that is quoted in English. The film cuts to typed text on screen, not hovering over a lake this time, but more permanent, imprinted on paper. It is read out loud by Costard. “1974. Our Hamburg filmmakers’ cooperative has finally collapsed.” The film co-op was founded in 1968 amid appeals for “a different cinema,” but by the mid-seventies, while New German Cinema was critically and financially flourishing, Costard and others had to explore new methods of production and alternative institutions for support and distribution.3 This included Jean-Luc Godard, whose negotiations with the Cultural Committee of Hamburg about a potential artist-in-residence stipend are documented in detail in Der kleine Godard, setting up a parallel with Costard, as indicated in the film’s subtitle that T IS HARD TO KNOW

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mimics the address in the letter he is drafting to a funding committee. While Costard reads the typed text out loud for viewers, telling them about his fantasy “to shoot feature films completely without fantasy, to use the undisturbed course of events as the perfect mise-en-scène,” the paper from which he reads gradually goes up in flames. Although Costard initially tried to develop his own camera system with the help of a small television contract, he now must view his attempt as having failed. He missed the moment. Thus, in Der kleine Godard, he sits down “to draft a film funding application for the Production Board for Young German Cinema.” In the film’s first five minutes, France and Germany, the Algerian War and Oberhausen, pre- and post-1968, the big Godard and the little Costard,4 critically-acclaimed 35-mm films and failed Super-8 projects, broad institutional support and small television grants all come together to force a reconsideration of the dichotomous model of success and failure— of revolutions, of “1968,” of experiments. The film departs from an object that, while essential to film production, is supposed to remain off-screen, so as to not distract from the diegesis, and that is rarely thematized in film analysis: the Antrag, the funding application. It is usually considered to be mere paperwork, bureaucratic minutiae detailing costs, plans, and negotiations, which is neither entertaining, nor aesthetically or politically interesting. More than simply making viewers aware of the existence of the Antrag, this film is itself an Antrag: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film. While a film about Antragslogik might seem out of place in the wake of the sociopolitical turbulence of the long sixties, it is this object that brings together questions of historiography, institutional critique, and access to resources, issues that were central to this time period.5 The quote at the beginning, from a Godard film about timing, not only describes, in retrospect, the particular case of Le Petit Soldat, since “by early 1963, the film’s moment had passed,” but also, when it is translated and paired with anonymous amateur footage, asks what we do with all these dates—1960, 1963, 1968, 1974, 1978: when did we miss the moment and in what language do we talk about this?6 It unsettles standard couplings, such as “Costard” with “1968,” the year that his banned film, Besonders wertvoll (Of Special Merit), featuring a close-up of a penis mimicking lips “reading” the immoral content clause (Sittenklausel) in the latest Film Funding Act, brought the “Oberhausen Film Festival to the brink of collapse,” inciting half of the directors at the festival to withdraw their works in protest.7 Der kleine Godard rethinks “1968” in terms of temporal, national, and material reach. “[W]e need to break with a well-worn chronology which unfolds like a classical French drama, respecting unities of place (Paris) and time (the month of May).”8 The pre-1968 events, like the Algerian War, “which became the key event in the political socialization of many activists of student groups that supported the May 1968 movement,”9 and the post1968 era, with its failed co-ops and problematic funding models, become

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as important as the standard, celebrated list of 1968 events arbitrarily demarcated, reinforced by disciplinary canons and preoccupied with the Western world. If one consequence of the so-called 1968 movement was the realization that we need “to think more creatively about what institutionalization means (the balkanization of resources; impediments to producing points of comparison and alliance) [and that] the real challenges facing us institutionally are to challenge the world of established disciplines,” then Der kleine Godard turns first to the film institutions and their conventions and values that determine which projects get made, reviewed, and written into history, and which projects remain dilettantish, outside of history.10 This is not to say that Costard’s staged composition, re-working, and reading of the letter to the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film is valuable merely because it is a representation of a particular historical document or because it provides special insight into the history of West German cultural politics. As an Antragsfilm, it denaturalizes the objects and practices that originate from bureaucratic frameworks and, given the current crisis of funding in the arts and, particularly in Germany, the institutional pressure to acquire Drittmittelgelder, funds that academics raise from third-party sources in order to address insufficient increases in state funding and in order to avoid an increase in tuition fees, projects that examine and scrutinize this logic are still especially relevant, if rare, at present.11 Thus, Der kleine Godard is also valuable as an (institutional) appeal to the future. “Where most reception theory fetishizes the ‘death of the author,’ relegating intention to the past,” Costard’s reenactment of institutional critique “defers its site in multiple directions—not only into the past but across complicated fields of citation that undo any linearity that would give us, securely, forward and backward.”12 Studying the paperwork corresponding to institutional conventions and containing hopes for the future of film production can help us better understand, and maybe even appeals for us to reflect on, the relationship between experiments with technology and institutions today, in the supposed “post-cinema”13 era, when the German federal film funding logic still problematically calls for “art and profits at once” (“Kunst und Kasse zugleich”).14 Within the context of the Antrag, the role of technology is no longer an irrelevant, nerdy preoccupation of those in the industry. Formats are political, central to the historical trajectory of dichotomous models of success/failure, professionalization/amateurism, and theatrical exhibition/ hobbyist production. Costard had been interested in the problems and potential of format technology long before Der kleine Godard. “Since 1967, Costard has worked exclusively on 16-mm and Super-8 (modifying the mass-produced systems with some inventions of his own).”15 Yet this last observation, in parentheses, is highly reductive. When Costard “modifies” something, it does more than insert “some” new things, a little

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innovation, into a component of a dominant, mainstream production system because his interventions primarily point to the inadequacy of the dichotomies underlying such a statement. This is evident in the film’s opening scene, when he modifies the big Godard for a little home movie. In Le Petit Soldat, Bruno first begins his reflection on timing by talking about his friend, “Raoul Coutard [who] called it ‘the pain in the backside law.’ Every time I was ready to fire, something happened to stop me. Every time the coast was clear, I hesitated. And once again, it was too late.”16 “By attributing this quotation to his own camera operator [Coutard], the man who literally ‘shoots’ the action for him, Godard links the instinctive requirements of assassination with his own concept of a spontaneous approach to film-making.”17 In Der kleine Godard, however, Costard edits this quote, eliding the cinematographer, therein making it less about auteur cinema and more applicable to his own project of experimenting with different formats to capture the ‘right’ moment—whatever that is. A Godard quote can help understand the home movie of kids at the lake, the repeated “emphasis on ‘the moment of composition’”18 throughout this film, and the attempt, through technological formats, to seize the moment, kairos, crucial for both rhetoric and revolution.19 If “format” not only characterizes material support, such as a particular film stock, but also, as a verb, indicates an act of erasure and/or rearrangement, then to focus on formatting means to consider not only the conditions of possibility within film materialities, such as the documentary mode that Costard wanted his Super-8 construction to reference (“feature films that create themselves” [Der kleine Godard], but which he hoped to then “implicate . . . in a montage structure using editing patterns—such as shot, counter shot—conventionally associated with narrative film.”20 It also means that one must take into account the consequences of formatting beyond the visible, material differences between film stocks apparent at the surface level. “Most crucial dimensions of format are codified in some way—sometimes through policy, sometimes through the technology’s constructions, and sometimes through sedimented habit.”21 It means, if not striving to erase the dichotomies that, as this film shows, are implicitly reinforcing so many political, artistic, and institutional concepts at this time, then at least investigating the discourse—the policy, technology, and sedimented habits—that sustains them. From this perspective, Der kleine Godard is not solely, or even primarily, about problematic West German funding conditions that served as the impetus for Costard’s “failed” Super-8 experiment. Nor is it endorsing some form of technological determinism, a belief that the invention of this system can, in and of itself, give rise to films “completely lacking fantasy” (Der kleine Godard). The film’s representation of experimentation with format technology, including the self-proclaimed failures with it, turns attention to the discourse on experimental systems and historiographies. From the opening scene, we see that

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what is said is not what is shown; what is said is more complicated than it seems. Just as there is no one technological development that determines societal or artistic change, there is no big Costard, no inventor-artistgenius behind a successful invention that can be nicely and neatly situated in a lineage of big names, a narrative we still have to listen to at present: “Alexander Graham Bell displayed his telephone for the first time. Remington unveiled the first typewriter. An early attempt was made at electric light. Thomas Edison showed an automatic telegraph and an electric pen.”22 Imagine if we realized that, historically, “an innovative idea is not really to be traced back to the ingenious moment of a single inventor, but to the innovation process of a team.”23 Think of the marvels we can achieve if we simply let go of the fiction that the “[individual and frequently idiosyncratic inventor] is the beginning of a circuit, sprung whole, like Athena from the head of Zeus.”24 Once we recognize in this supposed linear clarity the confusion that underlies its dubious dichotomies that isolate times, people, and inventions that were successful and professional from those that were failures and amateurish, then we must accept that “these great divides do not provide any explanation, but on the contrary are the things to be explained.”25 The history of technology in this film is written with a view to this necessary “negative work” that must happen first.26 The ready-made synthesis we might expect from a film about an experimental format technology is one between the director and his baby, in this case his Super-8 invention, nicely aligned in the long history of talking about media inventions in terms of genealogy and accumulation. It is a prevalent trope found in various historiographies, from contemporary inventor biopics to modern media histories, and it consists of a problematic mix of technological determinism, the myth of the artist-genius, the Western glorification of the lone individual and the progressiveness of the history of science.27 While the scenes of “invention” in Der kleine Godard, which are implicated in scenes of writing, do not waste time with such attempts at simplification through linearity, accumulation, and dichotomies, they acknowledge that this is often what is expected in tales of technology. Before the Super-8 invention appears in the film, Costard is shown at his table composing a letter about it, ending with a line he reads out loud: “Express [your idea] as simply as possible.” It is a typical requirement of certain templates we all know too well—for funding applications, for debates, for scholarly essays. He smirks, and sighs. What comes after this scene of writing is not so simple. No shots of an artist alone in his studio experimenting with his tools and materials to express his divine idea. Instead, Costard is sitting at a metal press machine with other people in the fore- and background, punk music playing over the scene in a small factory. It is connected to a communal working room, full of graffiti, cigarette trays, paper drafts, and cameras. Close-ups of a woman hand-rolling

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a cigarette. Pans over a guy lying on the floor with his hands folded behind his head. It is the ideal working environment of the sixties, but not without some self-irony. When Costard finishes the metal plate he has been working on, he holds it up, measures it, and shrugs—it apparently did not turn out right—throwing his hands up in the air and then laying it aside. Understanding the discourse on technology in Der kleine Godard as statements made by Costard, in a celebratory or technological determinist fashion, would be paying attention to the mere surface of things—to what is “said,” which is never really just said.28 Not only because he does not always make the statements himself in the film, but also because he pairs them, without explanation, with subtitles, or insists on a disjunction between the words on the soundtrack and the movement of his lips in the image, or combines them with images whose content does not immediately correspond to the statement being verbalized, or interrupts the statements with self-reflexive gestures, such as a request to change the cassette tape in the camera. While Costard often explained his interest in Super-8 in terms of economic and technological imperatives, this remains in tension with his representations of these statements. At the beginning of the film, when Costard presents his typed-out dream “to make feature films completely without fantasy” and thereby creating, through his system, a “perfect staging,” he sets it ablaze while he reads it out loud (figure 15.1). It is a gesture that, on the one hand, evokes the revolutionary spirit of the sixties, since the spread of fire has historically “served as a model for understanding the force of ideas and their transmission through language [and thus controlling] the force of fire also became a model for controlling the force of social protest.”29 It insists, on the other hand, that this rhetoric be effaced—reformatted—and potentially reconfigured out of the ashes. It is a revolutionary and evolutionary gesture that, in 1978, embodies a pathos that nobody believes in anymore. But it is a gesture that West German audiences might have been used to seeing. In Bonanza, the television show that broke all ratings records in West Germany in the 1960s, the beginning of the story is also set ablaze (figure 15.2).30 The fire that breaks out between Reno and Carson moves the audience from the original map, from history and cartography, into live action and the diegesis, as it does in Der kleine Godard when it carries us from the Antrag, from paper and sketches and plans, to celluloid, to the live action. While the existing literature mentions that this “statement” is set on fire during Costard’s reading, this rhetorical gesture is rarely ever critically read.31 The question is not “What does it mean ‘to make feature films completely without fantasy’?”32 But rather: What does it mean to lay out these technological dreams on screen just to let them go up in flames? And what about the hyperbolic language in this “statement”? Completely without fantasy. A perfect staging. “Each camera and each sound recorder

Figure 15.1. “Feature films completely without fantasy.” Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film, dir. Hellmuth Costard, 1978, 81 min., Toulouse-Lautrec-Institut in collaboration with Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF). Screenshot.

Figure 15.2. Title sequence. Bonanza, created by David Dortort and Fred Hamilton, 1959–1973, 60 min., 430 episodes, NBC. Screenshot.

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is combined with a super accurate clock. . . . That means the absolute intertwining of the mechanical process of film production with the unique process of time.”33 Not an accurate clock. A super accurate clock. Not an intertwining of mechanics and temporality. An absolute intertwining. There is an emphatic and utopian remainder in these statements, in this belief in technology to bring about the perfection of reality, and there is also, simultaneously, an ironic tone to this remainder, evident when he overindulges in superlatives, mocking this as a basic requirement in Antragssprache, in the language of funding applications. A tension arises between focusing solely on the content of a statement and taking its discursive function into account, and thus when the film directly addresses the material basis of format technology, it simultaneously insists on the codification of format, on more than an “internalist” history of this format, which would entail “a sort of formalism, attending more narrowly to how things work.”34 After more than eight minutes of postponing an explanation of “why use super-8 anyway,” Jelena Kristl, cited in the credits as “the foreigner,” both asks the question and provides the answer to it. Most of us are, like Kristl, foreigners in this situation, but while she is able to communicate in this other language, we are not. What she presents are the specifics of a complex technological system that only experts in the industry can understand, and it is likely even too difficult for them to follow. It is through the foreigner, somebody outside our own cultural system, that we, the viewers, see that we do not belong to that world, resulting in an “ethnographic reversal of the authorization,” showing us our own primitiveness.35 In fact, there is almost a hyperbolic absurdity to the level of detail with which the foreigner describes this Super-8 setup, sounding more like a parody of the explanatory paragraphs regularly required in funding applications, in which one is instructed to avoid jargon and explain, in this case, a highly advanced experimental technology to non-experts in a way that is straightforward and goal-oriented. While the foreigner presents this working environment for us in all its confusion and complexity, relaying the language of the experts, the Antragssprache, noise punctuates her explanations. She repeats, verbatim, Costard’s dream of making “feature films completely lacking fantasy,” creating, through this system, a “perfect staging” (Der kleine Godard). In this motif one finds a combination of dreams and anxieties: the promise of automation through technological advancements, the fear of missing that right moment—kairos—of an unscripted reality, and a growing apprehension about institutional support and bureaucracy, as one could not plan in advance in this setup using standard filmmaking methods, such as a script. This results in a serious funding problem for Costard. His application to the Kuratorium in May 1977 was rejected because it did not include the required script. “The Kuratorium had resolutely ignored that Costard’s project renounced the idea of writing a script to dictate the direction of his

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film.”36 Since standard institutional practices excluded projects such as Costard’s, the foreigner tells us they needed to figure out how to make the film in a less expensive way. There is a brief cut to the December 1970 issue of Filmkritik, titled “Alles über Super-8” (Everything [to Know] about Super-8), the cover of which was drawn by Costard.37 In this issue, “[Edgar] Reitz identified synchronized sound recording as the most serious problem. Since no Super 8 sound blimps existed on the commercial market, many filmmakers had attempted to hand-produce their own.”38 Now, however, several years after this publication detailing the problems of the Super-8 format, the foreigner tells us that they are equipped with a timecoding system and a multiple-camera setup, and Costard updates his thoughts on the format technology in Filmkritik. He explains what can be won with this technological experiment in terms of what is lost without it: “When I begin a synchronized recording and then want to cut and don’t have a second camera—as long as I can only work with one camera, a jump in time occurs with each cut or at least every second shot is asynchronous. That’s why I say that montage loses its power through sound.”39 Or in Der kleine Godard: “‘Each time the coast was clear, no witness . . . I hesitated a few seconds . . . and once again it was too late.’” But he also implies that, while this might have been an objective with which to initiate his project, an experimental system is not simply meant to “generate answers; experimental systems are vehicles for materializing questions. . . .”40 Setting up such a strict technological system is not something that is meant to be either a success or a failure for Costard but merely a point of departure for possibilities that are, at present, unknown. “But I had decided on this construction, that the film is destroyed the moment it is put down on paper. That is a thought that one can take seriously, but which is of course also just as ridiculous. But I absolutely took it seriously, as a game.”41 However paradoxical it might seem to his experimental setup at first, noise becomes integral to this game. When the foreigner explains that the numerous cameras and the “documentary” approach required a high volume of film material, we are no longer looking at a series of diagrams, instruments, and sample Super-8 clips. A different stream of images appears, an unintended signal, as if the channel has changed. We are shown footage from the set of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Despair, shot in 1977 just outside of Hamburg in Mölln. Props are transported to the shooting location and the massive production team assembles. A 35-mm camera system is pushed by several crewmembers along a rail in preparation for a tracking shot. These images are not what the foreigner is talking about. And yet they are. I think the isolation of [West] German film-makers, one from another, may change. . . . If you look at the way television is produced, it’s already so like mass-production. It’s so progressive, as far as the principles of montage and fast production go—like the live telephone conversation, transmitted by satellite, between [Muhammad

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Anwar el-] Sadat and [Menachem] Begin. . . . When Hussein [bin Talal, King of Jordan,] visited [West] Berlin, there was a police car with a tiny, tripod-supported camera and a very tall hydraulic aerialmast transmitting directly to police headquarters. Equipment worth half-a-million, operated by five policemen! A team of film-makers, familiar with that equipment, and who no longer form and create, but simply transmit. Not even TV people can afford equipment like that. If you see things in that perspective, then Fassbinder and [Wim] Wenders and I are all sitting in the same . . . cinema boat. The difference is that Wenders, for example, hasn’t understood this yet. He thinks he’s in a different boat.42

This is a time of media change in the filmmaking landscape, a time when television, telephone, and cinema are situations that can now be described using the language—e.g., “montage”—that used to belong to one discipline alone. They are situations to be thought of together. Production materials have become more portable and are no longer exclusively tailored to industry professionals, meaning that different kinds of “filmmaking,” while long having existed, are more noticeable now. The big names, like Fassbinder and Wenders, and the littler names, like Costard, might stand for different kinds of filmmakers, but they are alike insofar as they are all figuring out their place in this reconfiguration of the media landscape. Fassbinder is holding on to the massive crew, the expensive equipment, and the theatrical release but is only able to do so through television co-production.43 The foreigner continues: “Our only option was radical cost savings. That’s why we used Super-8.” This last statement is paired with an image of a Rolls Royce being delivered to Fassbinder’s set. The dream of a precise audiovisual synchronization, of sounds and images that are “naturally” combined in the recording process, is not what takes place in the film. Rather, a different kind of synthesis, a visual-visual synchronization over time, becomes noticeable between what we thought were two distinct sets of images and circumstances.44 Costard is not only interested in the making of Despair because it is a big-budget Fassbinder production, the archetype of a critically successful filmmaking practice at this time. While seeking to examine the very broad themes of technology, institutions, and cultural politics, he understands that this must be done specifically, that it is a question of not only what kind of intervention one makes but also how precise this intervention is. Der kleine Godard is not interested in a blanket criticism of changes in capitalist production or the onset of neoliberal film funding politics.45 Instead, Costard looks at what is happening in and around a slice of West Germany, Hamburg, during a specific time, 1976–78, and presents us with detailed depictions of the materials of preproduction and pre-release. Scenes of Godard meeting with the city of Hamburg to discuss his artistin-residence invitation follow. He proposes a project on whether “it [is] possible to make films in Germany today,” but the cultural committee

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seems more interested in showcasing him as a famous director and cannot understand why he will not provide a screenplay with his proposal. He delves deeper into his video phase shortly thereafter.46 Scenes of a child actor in Moritz, lieber Moritz (Moritz, Dear Moritz, 1978) firing off a machine gun. Viewers observe Hark Bohm relying on a clapperboard to keep image and sound synchronized, and the re-miking of the children on set. Bohm wanders over briefly to Costard’s crew and asks about their experimental setup before returning, dismissively in mid-discussion, to the director’s chair behind the camera to film what “would become a leading German money making [sic] film in West Germany the next year.”47 Scenes of Fassbinder: he is driven to the set of Despair and then strides over to the 35-mm camera in a leather vest and biker hat with chains and, cigarette still in his mouth, peers through the lens. The actors are already in full dress for the costume drama and, along with the horses, carriages, old cars, expensive equipment, and film crew, were all waiting on him. The shot, lasting a few seconds, can only begin with the director’s presence and ends with his validation: “Dan-ke!” (thank you!). Costard’s film is still rolling though, capturing close-ups of a crewmember recording the continuity information in a thick binder with bound pages, charts, and smaller clipboards inside. Fassbinder begins to arrange co-productions with major West German television broadcasting companies.48 All these people are, importantly, types for Costard, as seen in the credits: “the applicant: Hellmuth Costard . . . first director: Hark Bohm . . . second director: R. W. Fassbinder. . . . As guest: Jean-Luc Godard.” The organizing principle behind this collection of names is not the similar content, style, or politics of their films, and thus this is not an attempt at an additive revision to New Wave or New German Cinema. Der kleine Godard links these projects together by recognizing that West European cinema is intricately involved in thinking about formats at this time and why they matter, and this is the organizing principle behind these seemingly disparate models of filmmaking. Auteur biographies or filmic plot descriptions offer little or no help in addressing this question, and thus they are not provided in the film. More important is the function of these names as types in a series, because of the “recursive character of serial progression. Recursivity here means the continual readjustment of possible continuations to already-established information.”49 One applicant, one director, two directors, one guest. These are categories that will still be needed in the future and can be filled in time and again, and they can also be reshuffled to accommodate and re-prioritize a growing number of experiments with emergent film format technologies and institutional funding models in the years to come. Maybe it is this potentiality for replacement and proliferation of types in the series that makes it hard to know when the right moment to stop is. In Der kleine Godard, the final moments of dialogue take place at the airport. The big Godard is leaving

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Hamburg, and he exchanges a few remarks with the little Godard and his translator about his potential artist-in-residence project, about which they all seem positive, although we now know that the answer to his question— Is It Possible to Make a Film Today in Germany?—is, at least in this case, no.50 He takes his leave by telling his hosts: “Peut-être on se revoit en . . . octobre, si . . . ça marche.” In subtitles: “Und vielleicht sehen wir uns im Oktober wieder” (And maybe we’ll see each other again in October). Appropriate final words for a reformatting of thoughts on revolution.

Notes 1

Hans Helmut Prinzler, “Der kleine Godard an das Kuratorium junger deutscher Film,” in Neuer Deutscher Film, eds. Norbert Grob, Hans Helmut Prinzler, and Eric Rentschler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012), 255–60. Here, 255. On the source of this footage, see Jan Dawson, “Introduction,” in The Films of Hellmuth Costard, ed. Jan Dawson (London: Riverside Studios, 1979), 5–8, here 8; as well as Ann Harris, “Taking Time Seriously: Technology, Politics and Filmmaking Practice in the Films of Hellmuth Costard” (PhD diss., New York University, 1993), 146–47. By focusing on the rehearsal of retrieval by two girls, this opening scene could also be referencing Harun Farocki’s thirteen contributions to children’s television: Einschlafgeschichten (Bedtime Stories, 1976–77) and Katzengeschichten (Cat Stories, 1978), which featured two girls visualizing operations of transport and transmission. Cf. Hans J. Wulff, “Ein poetisches Spiel: Einschlafgeschichten,” in Der Ärger mit den Bildern. Die Filme von Harun Farocki, eds. Rolf Aurich and Ulrich Kriest (Konstanz: UVK Medien, 1998), 207–13. Here, 207–8. All translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2 See Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, s.v. “apportō” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153. 3 Michael Töteberg, Filmstadt Hamburg. Von Emil Jannings bis Wim Wenders: Kinogeschichte(n) einer Großstadt (Hamburg: VSA, 1990), 186. 4 Costard was nicknamed “the little Godard” by film critics at the time. See Thomas Petz, “Frühe Filme—später Ruhm: Zur Werkschau von Hellmuth Costard im Stadtmuseum,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Oct. 7, 1976. 5 On the preference for the term “long sixties,” see Christoph Kalter, The Discovery of the Third World: Decolonization and the Rise of the New Left in France, c. 1950– 1976, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7–9; Arthur Marwick, “The Cultural Revolution of the Long Sixties: Voices of Reaction, Protest, and Permeation,” The International History Review 27, no. 4 (Dec. 2005): 780–806, here 780–81; and Niall Ferguson, “Crisis, What Crisis? The 1970s and the Shock of the Global,” in The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, eds. Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–24. Here, 3. For a critical perspective on the arbitrariness of decadological periodization, see Rüdiger

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Graf, review of The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, eds. Ferguson, Maier, Manela, and Sargent, H-Soz-u-Kult, July 2011, H-Net Reviews, http:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33759. 6 Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Henry Holt, 2008), 105. 7 Hans Blumenberg, “Portrait of an Outsider: Cinema of the Third Kind,” in The Films of Hellmuth Costard, 15–18. Here, 16. 8 Julian Jackson, “Rethinking the Events,” in May 68: Rethinking France’s Last Revolution, eds. Julian Jackson, Anna-Louise Milne, ‎and James S. Williams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–16. Here, 3. 9 Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, Die 68er Bewegung: Deutschland, Westeuropa, USA (Munich: Beck, 2005), 57. 10 Lauren Berlant, “‘68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 124–55. Here, 131. 11 On other projects relying on this kind of Antragslogik, which are themselves Anträge, see Kalani Michell, “All in the Same Box: Unhinging Audiovisual Media in the 1960s and 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018). On the importance of thinking about bureaucratic infrastructure within a larger framework of medial cooperation, see Erhard Schüttpelz and Sebastian Gießmann, “Medien der Kooperation: Überlegungen zum Forschungsstand,” Navigationen 15, no. 1 (2015): 7–55. 12 Rebecca Schneider, “A Small History (of) Still Passing,” in Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination: The Image Between the Visible and the Invisible, eds. by Bernd Hüppauf and Christoph Wulf (New York: Routledge, 2009), 254–69. Here, 264 and 263. 13 Scholarship on this topic has been prolific over the last several years and more books, edited volumes, and calls for papers are still being churned out at present. Thus, a selection: Steven Shaviro, Post Cinematic Affect (New York: Zero Books, 2010); Film in the Post-Media Age, ed. Ágnes Pethő (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, eds. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (Falmer: REFRAME Books, 2016); and The State of Post-Cinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the Age of Digital Dissemination, eds. Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 14 Rüdiger Suchsland, “Die Misere der Filmförderung,” Deutschlandfunk, March 16, 2017. See also Christiane Peitz, “Über Risiken und Nebenwirkungen der Filmförderung,” Tagesspiegel, Nov. 21, 2014. 15 Dawson, “Introduction,” 5. 16 Nicholas Garnham (translation and description of action), Le petit Soldat, a film by Jean-Luc Godard (Modern Film Script Series) (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 56. 17 Richard Martin, “‘So What Am I Supposed To Do?’ Thoughts of Action and Actions of Thought in Godard’s Contempt,” Critical Quarterly 53, no. 1 (July 2011): 157–67. Here, 163. 18 Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 165.

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19 On the significance of kairos to rhetoric, see Phillip Sipiora, “Introduction,” in Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, eds. Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 1–22. Here, 9. On the importance of kairos to the Marxist concept of seizing the revolutionary moment, see James Kinneavy “Kairos in Classical and Modern Rhetorical Theory,” in Rhetoric and Kairos, 58–76. Here, 64. 20 Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 111. 21 Jonathan Sterne, MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 8. See also Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 46. 22 Donald Trump, “Address by the President Delivered to a Joint Session of Congress,” Congressional Record 163, no. 35, 115th Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 28, 2017, speaking on H. 1390, https://www.congress.gov/crec/2017/02/28/ CREC-2017-02-28.pdf. 23 Nadine Taha, “Patent in Action: Das US-amerikanische Patent aus der Perspektive der Science and Technology Studies,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 6 (2012): 36–47. Here, 43. 24 Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 5. 25 Bruno Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986): 1–40. Here, 2. 26 See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 2010), 21–22. 27 See, for example, Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition,” 2; Erhard Schüttpelz, “Die medienanthropologische Kehre der Kulturtechniken,” Archiv für Mediengeschichte 6 (2006): 87–110, here 101–5; Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–59; as well as Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 3–8. 28 See Jean-Luc Godard on Le Petit Soldat: “One always does the opposite of what one says, yet it turns out the same way. I am for classical montage and I’ve done the most unorthodox montage.” Brody, Everything Is Cinema, 86. 29 Jonathan Charteris-Black, Fire Metaphors: Discourses of Awe and Authority (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 24. 30 See Siegfried J. Schmitt and Brigitte Spieß, “Geschichte der Fernsehwerbung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Eine Skizze,” in Unterhaltung, Werbung und Zielgruppenprogramme, eds. Hans-Dieter Erlanger and Hans Friedrich Florin (Munich: Fink, 1994), 187–242. Here, 205. 31 See Dawson, “Introduction,” 7; Jürgen Ebert, “Das geschichtliche Interesse am Film: Zum Verhältnis von Filmgeschichte und Filmdokumentation, dargestellt am Beispiel von Hellmuth Costards Film Der kleine Godard,” Filmkritik 264 (Dec. 1978): 620–53, here 640–41; and Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 133–34. 32 Prinzler, “Der kleine Godard,” 255–56.

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Costard in Jürgen Ebert, “Das geschichtliche Interesse am Film,” 646. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 8. 35 Erhard Schüttpelz, Die Moderne im Spiegel des Primitiven: Weltliteratur und Ethnologie 1870–1960 (Munich: Fink, 2005), 355. 36 Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 130. 37 Hellmuth Costard, “Titelzeichnung,” Filmkritik 12 (Dec. 1970): Cover Image. 38 Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 101. 39 Hellmuth Costard, interview by Jürgen Ebert, “Der Film hat sich auf die Seite des Tatsächlichen geschlagen. Arbeiten zu Hellmuth Costards Film ‘Der Kleine Godard an das Kuratorium junger deutscher Film,’” Filmkritik 264 (Dec. 1978): 655–66. Here, 665. 40 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28. 41 Hellmuth Costard, interview by Jürgen Ebert and Harun Farocki, “Der Film hat sich auf die Seite des Tatsächlichen geschlagen. Gespräch mit Hellmuth Costard,” Filmkritik 263 (Nov. 1978): 607–16. Here, 610–11. 42 Hellmuth Costard, “Fragments from Costard interviews, October—November, 1978,” in The Films of Hellmuth Costard, ed. Jan Dawson (London: Riverside Studios, 1979), 22. Final ellipses in original. 43 See Jane Shattuc, Television, Tabloids, and Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995), 51, and Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 212–18. 44 “[T]here are various possibilities for synchronization and its conceptualization, which in turn correspond with different concepts of time: is there such a thing as absolute time, a center with which local times are synchronized? Or the other way around: are there actually heterogeneous, distinct times that, when they meet, generate something like an in-between or overlapping time where they join?” (Jan Philip Müller, “Synchronization as a Sound-Image Relationship,” in See This Sound. Audiovisuology Compendium: An Interdisciplinary Survey of Audiovisual Culture, eds. Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann, and Jan Thoben (Cologne: Walther König, 2010), 401–13. Here, 401. 45 On the problem of blanket claims, see Latour, “Visualisation and Cognition,” 6. 46 See Michael Witt, “Shapeshifter: Godard as Multimedia Installation Artist,” in New Left Review 29 (Sept./Oct. 2004): 73–89, here 77; as well as Volker Pantenburg, “Moi / Je / JLG,” in: Automedialität. Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, eds. Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser (Munich: Fink, 2008), 261–82. Here, 268–69. 47 Harris, “Taking Time Seriously,” 129. 48 Shattuc, Television, Tabloids, and Tears, 52–53. 49 Frank Kelleter, “From Recursive Progression to Systemic Self-Observation: Elements of a Theory of Seriality,” Velvet Light Trap 79 (Spring 2017): 99–104. Here, 101. 50 See Brody, Everything Is Cinema, 399. 34

Part II In Conversation: Interviews with Filmmakers

16:

An Interview with Harun Farocki: “Holger Thought about Aesthetics and Politics Together”

Tilman Baumgärtel

W

of conditions in which the aesthetic could become a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft [socially productive force] and as such could lead to the ‘end’ of art through its realization,” writes Herbert Marcuse in his Essay on Liberation from 1969.1 Today, the essay reads as a theory after the fact of the student movement of the 1960s. That Marcuse stresses the relevance of art and aesthetics for political change is very much in line with the politics of that period, as is the underlying assumption of this sentence—that art per se is emancipating and progressive and that its utopian potential can be unleashed for the purpose of political change. The idea of leaving art behind or at least turning it into an agent of social change was a popular concept in the late 1960s, when even Jean-Luc Godard famously declared that there was only one way to become a revolutionary intellectual—by ceasing to be an intellectual. In the late 1960s, for the film students of the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), this statement could be rephrased as follows: There is only one way to be a revolutionary filmmaker—by ceasing to be a filmmaker. Only three years after the dffb had opened in 1966 in the isolated half-city of West Berlin, the first class of students had internalized the hasty radicalization of the West German student movement to such an extent that many of them were considering giving up their film careers in favor of political activism. Holger Meins and Philip Sauber, students from the first and second year’s classes of the dffb respectively, joined two of the left-wing terror groups that emerged in West Germany in early 1970s and that tried to bring about social change with the help of political violence: Meins became a member of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF); Sauber joined the Bewegung 2. Juni (June 2nd Movement). Both were dead less than half a decade later.2 As Harun Farocki—a friend of Meins and an admirer of Der einsame Wanderer (The Lonely Wanderer, 1968), Sauber’s Murnau-inspired student short film—points out in the following interview, he had no intention

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of following their path, even though some of his dffb films seem to flirt with political violence. For example, his short film, Die Worte des Vorsitzenden (The Words of the Chairman, 1967), suggests that political slogans can turn into weapons. His next short film, Ihre Zeitungen (Their Newspapers, 1968), extends this idea, showing a city-guerilla group preparing for vaguely defined political actions and including a relatively straightforward incitement to throw stones into the office windows of the Springer publishing house, which the West German student movement considered to be reactionary and dangerous. Other films with titles such as Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzureißen (Instructions, How to Pull Helmets off Police, 1969) also count among numerous dffb films that increasingly seemed to advocate political violence, including an anonymous work, probably by Meins, that consisted solely of a visual demonstration of how to build a Molotov Cocktail. Farocki turned his revolutionary wrath into a formalist agitprop film by making Unlöschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1969), a Brechtian exposé about the production and effects of Napalm and the Vietnam War. Farocki made the film after he and eighteen of his fellow-students were dismissed from the dffb because of their political actions, which included occupying their academy and breaking into the director’s office. What followed was one of the most unique filmmaking careers in (West) German cinema, one that saw Farocki turn from political propagandist into a director of cinéma vérité-style documentaries and highbrow essay films and eventually into an internationally acclaimed video artist. When he died on July 30, 2014, he was seventy years old and had made over one hundred films. No other postwar director in West Germany, apart from Werner Herzog, has created such a multi-faceted and eventually internationally recognized oeuvre over such a long span of time. While it is impossible to define a common theme in his work, the production of technological images and their power over us is a recurring issue. In fact, this preoccupation can also be traced back to his first student films. In Jeder ein Berliner Kindl (Everybody a Berliner Kindl, 1966), he analyzes the advertising posters of a West Berlin brewery in a way that feels like an early anticipation of films such as Godard’s Letter to Jane (1972). And Farocki’s very first film, Zwei Wege (Two Paths, 1966) provides a visual analysis of a religious painting. So the investigation of images and of our consumption of those images emerges from the beginning of Farocki’s career as a filmmaker. In the 1970s and 1980s, Farocki made political and historical films such as Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between Two Wars, 1978) and essay films such as Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988). Beginning in the late 1970s, he started to make documentaries in the style of cinéma vérité, such as Leben BRD (How to Live in the FRG, 1990), and found footage films, such as

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Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution, 1992) and Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik (Workers Leaving the Factory, 1995). In 2009, a DVD box set of his works from 1967 to 2005 was issued by absolut Medien. Between 2011 and 2014 he carried out the long-term documentary project Labour in a Single Shot together with his wife Antje Ehmann. He started to create video installations, such as Deep Play, which was first shown at the international art exhibition documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, in 2007. Farocki also began to take part in a growing number of contemporary art and video art exhibitions, and many of his later works were created to be shown on numerous monitors or as projections in art shows. He had solo shows and retrospectives in museums such as Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Akademie of Arts, Berlin; and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. He also curated a number of exhibitions of films and video art, such as the exhibit Kino wie noch nie (Cinema as Never Before) for Kunst-Werke Berlin from 2006 to 2007. Farocki was also a prolific writer: first, as an editor of the journal Filmkritik, beginning in the 1970s and until 1984, when the magazine folded; and later, for the Berlin daily die tageszeitung and other publications. He published Von Godard sprechen (Speaking about Godard, 1998) with the US film scholar Kaja Silverman. He taught classes at the dffb from 1978 to 1980 and from 1986 to 1993. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley from 1993 to 1999 and, in 2005, at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he held a full professorship from 2006 to 2011. The interview that follows was conducted in 1997, as part of the research for my dissertation about Farocki. It was the twentieth anniversary of the German Autumn, and after two decades over which this episode in West Germany’s postwar history was somewhat of a political taboo, it had become possible to talk more openly about the West German terrorism of the 1970s. While Farocki was often hesitant to discuss his involvement in the student movement and his leftist convictions of that time, he seemed eager to talk about that period at great length—less because of his political biography, I sensed, than because of his friendship with Holger Meins. TB: There are these terrible television images of Holger Meins’s arrest [in 1972]: he is almost naked except for his briefs, and two policemen drag him into a police van. He screams and screams and screams. No words, just sounds, almost like an animal. Back then, did you see this on TV? HF: Yes, it was terrifying, especially the nakedness. I assume the police undressed him. These images found their continuation in those of his death in prison [in 1976] after his hunger strike. This skeleton, almost not human anymore. It looked like the discovery of the bodies at Pompeii or

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like a horror image from the Thirty Years’ War. I had expected that they [the RAF] would barricade themselves in a house like the Japanese Zengakuren and let themselves be gunned down by the police.3 TB: At that time, the RAF people were hyped in the public as fiends. You knew one of them personally. What was it like suddenly to see him on TV as “Public Enemy Number One”? HF: Beginning in spring 1968, we lived in the Grunewaldstrasse in West Berlin-Schöneberg. I remember that Holger helped us move. Later on, our house in the Grunewaldstrasse became this leftist center. There was a commune in the apartment below us. There was a Kinderladen [a self-organized cooperative childcare center], a political video studio, a printing press where pirated editions were made. Holger Meins once briefly lived there as well; perhaps, he was just registered there.4 In any case, for a long time the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on which the postman had written “Meins,” kept being delivered. That I did not keep any! Once, when an article about him appeared on page one, they spelled his name incorrectly. The article spelled it “Mons,” I believe. And on the newspaper in the mailbox “Meins” was written in pencil next to it. Those were really strange times. If you did not wear a suit or if you had long hair, you were considered a hippie, a heroin addict, or an East German agent. Then, we had children, and suddenly our relationship with our neighbors changed. We had a lawyer who discovered that most people in our house paid too much rent, especially foreigners. In 1970, we organized a meeting of the tenants, and suddenly a Turkish family received a refund of 700 DM. This reflected back on us as well. It was just like this with Baader-Meinhof [the RAF]: they were also able to gain a Robin-Hood-like reputation. They had not yet given the poor anything, but at least they took something away from the banks. Moreover, due to their intelligence, they were a step ahead of the police. TB: Seriously? I would have thought the RAF had such a nimbus only in the leftist scene . . . HF: Not only there. I also heard such sentiments in banks, where people made jokes about this. This kind of sympathy does not cost a whole lot, of course. One takes their side a bit because they raise hell so well. And some of this sympathy also reflected on us. Whenever there was news that someone was arrested, neighbors expressed their sympathies: “But he was so nice” and “That’s a disgrace.” There was also much police presence in the Grunewaldstrasse. Whenever an occasion arose, hundreds of police arrived, completely senselessly, surrounded the courtyard, and searched the apartments even though it was totally obvious that no one would hide out there anymore.

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TB: When was this? During the German Autumn [in 1977]? HF: No, that was when this stopped. They came after the abduction of Peter Lorenz in 1975;5 and in 1977 I expected the same. But by then the whole process had been professionalized. That is when they knew where they had to go and where not. It had gotten serious. TB: Let us return to the time when you studied together with Holger Meins at the dffb. What is your memory of this time? HF: Holger already had more film experience than most of us. He was a real cineaste. He had a keen sense that what you learned in film school, what is right and what is not, was a rather uncertain terrain. His aesthetic was influenced by the underground. He had already worked with Hellmuth Costard in Hamburg on Klammer auf, Klammer zu (Open Parenthesis, Close Parenthesis, 1966).6 The university in Hamburg had a film workshop, which is where he gained experience, including in cinematography. I am sure he would have become a bona fide independent filmmaker like Costard. He had the talent to make films with his own style. Back then, at the film academy, everything was rather school-like. Three times per week we watched films and discussed them. Ulrich Gregor screened the history of film as if it were an anthology.7 That was when I noticed that Holger had smart standards, a good eye, and a deep aesthetic education. When he saw a film, he was quite capable of recognizing and communicating to others its aesthetic innovations. He fought hard against the influence of television on film. If you are political, it can easily happen that you do everything with words and use images only as background. At the time, I also observed him as he edited and added sound to Oskar Langenfeld 12x (1966). TB: Film aesthetically, Oskar Langenfeld 12x is incredibly austere. Do you think there was a connection between this artistic rigidness and his subsequent political radicalness? HF: I recall him arguing that artists tend to turn their aggression against themselves when what matters is turning it against the real enemies. I am sure he thought about aesthetics and politics together. I believe he was quite torn about whether he should make films or do politics. But he was always loyal. For example, he completely invested himself in Hartmut Bitomsky’s Johnson & Co und der Feldzug gegen Armut (Johnson and Company and the March against Poverty, 1968), even though he might have had his doubts about whether one should even make such films. I myself had an interesting conflict with him: in 1967, we were at the film festival in Knokke, and I had written a flier with a lot of Marxist rhetoric.8

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Before we printed it, Holger changed three sentences. I told him that his changes destroyed the whole rhythm of the text. I dared to tell him such things, for I expected that he would understand something like this. But at this moment he no longer understood it. He thought it was more important that the right sentences were on the flier rather than for the text to have its form as text. But I also know that at that festival he and I watched Michael Snow’s experimental film Wavelength (1967), which truly impressed him. At the festival, we polemicized against a certain kind of cheap avant-garde. But with Wavelength Holger immediately sensed the film’s aesthetic radicalness and was really impressed. So unlike with many other films, we did not disrupt its screening. TB: In 1968, a film appeared titled Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails (How to Make a Molotov Cocktail), which demonstrated how to make a homemade firebomb. Apparently, the film was by Holger Meins. One could consider this as announcing his change from filmic to political radicalness. . . . HF: Was the film by Holger? I don’t know. Chances are. In Godard’s Le Gai Savoir (Joy of Learning, 1969), the man also describes the woman metaphorically as a Molotov cocktail. There was something sign-like about it: the Molotov cocktail and the Kalashnikov, these are the weapons of the weak and the subordinated. That was the significance of the Molotov cocktail. I saw the film at the Technische Universität Berlin [Technical University Berlin, TU Berlin]. Back then, when we showed our films to a student audience, there was always such a sense of disappointment. Perhaps, this was due to our means of production: that the films were black and white and with a shrill sound, rather than Italian Westerns with lots of noise. Somehow the audience expected from our films that we would do something incredibly new, something explosive. When they got to see one of our dffb documentaries, they wondered: what kind of ridiculously small water cannon is that? Weapons had gotten much larger in their experience. But when How to Make a Molotov Cocktail screened, there was pious silence (laughs). The story regarding the weapons had, of course, a lot to do with the fact that everything was petrified, frozen, because of the world-political stalemate since 1945. The idea that emerged with the Vietnam War and the Cuban Revolution was that the guerilla movements of the Third World would be able to change something by undermining the super powers’ high technological threshold. Initially, most people who were involved with the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Socialist [West] German Student Union, SDS) opposed any use of violence, even skirmishes with the police.9 People argued that this would amount to little more than mindless action that would end up hurting the organization. In this context, however, I did have the impulse to think, “No, we have to go

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a step further.” Of course, thinking this also served as a means to convince myself, to dare to overcome my inhibition to fight. TB: Your film Their Newspapers also flirts with political violence. A “fighting collective” makes use of cobblestones; at the end, we hear the sound of a window breaking. This whole group seems a bit like a city guerilla group. Why do you think that such ideas simultaneously appear in both your and Holger Meins’ films but that only the latter chose the path of political violence? HF: With hindsight, I know I would never have gone underground, because I had focused way too much on making films or engaging myself on the intellectual-cultural level. I do not know whether this was really different for Holger or whether it was not just some constellation that prevented him from choosing my path. Who knows: perhaps he would have made films again if he had been released from prison after five years? I really do not know what constitutes the small reason for making such a big decision. TB: In a sense he resumed working artistically in prison. The RAF had requested to see the annual reports of Germany’s largest banks in order to study the methods of international capitalism. Holger Meins used the back covers of the report’s brochures, which were usually made of colorful cardboard, to create Mondrian-like collages. Another dffb-student who went underground in the 70s and who was later shot during a car raid was the Swiss-born Philip Sauber. Do you remember him? HF: Yes, he also lived below us, with a woman and her child. Because of my daughters I had relatively frequent contact with him. At the dffb, before we were expelled, he had made a film called The Lonely Wanderer, which I admired a lot. It is one of the most beautiful films that came out of that time. Back then he was twenty-two years old, and this was a coup: the aesthetic self-assurance with which he paraphrases this Murnauinfluenced genre and also immediately discovers in Berlin the equivalent in terms of architecture and lighting! A remarkable film. It was so clearly torn between aesthetic determination and political expectation. After he was expelled from the dffb, he planned on having a studio in the Grunewaldstrasse with the goal of making political videos. TB: Do you know whether any videos were made there? HF: Hardly any. I recall that they made a film about blacks in the US, with music by MC5. It was modeled a bit on Godard’s workshops. Chris Marker also created something similar, a collective that made films

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together. When we were expelled from the dffb, we discussed a lot. We had received some financial compensation, and we considered whether we should pool our money and create films together. I remember that Holger Meins said, “A union of filmmakers is utterly wrong. Filmmakers need to associate with other fields of experience.” I agreed with this idea and do so to this day. One ought to go where others do something rather than found a filmmaker guild. TB: Did the harshness with which the West German state reacted to the RAF contribute to one’s own distancing from this form of radical politics? HF: Whenever the police came to the Grunewaldstrasse, they told me: we know very well that you reject violence as a political means, even though I had never commented on this matter. I wanted to avoid at all costs such isolation, which would enable the police to know that these are the good ones and those are the bad ones. In the 70s, my telephone book was full of names of people who either committed suicide or were victims of terrorist actions. That was really terrifying. To this day I have a dream about someone who laughs hysterically because I still walk on earth. When someone whom you know starves himself to death in prison, then you question what you are doing. Where exactly is your commitment? What kind of lazy bastard are you? This exerted a tremendous amount of moral pressure on me. In some cases, it was quite clear that the cops embraced the opportunity to kill someone, such as Georg von Rauch.10 But others were intent on turning themselves into heroes. This was something I strongly rejected. The RAF, too, always exerted a certain amount of moral pressure on others. With everything they did, they always said: you are just too cowardly; we do what we do and no one is helping us. TB: Were you an RAF “sympathizer,” as it was called at the time? HF: I thought the guerilla-idea was wrong. I did not see any grounds for how this could work. Among the West German population, I did not see a majority that was willing to support such action. As part of my daily life, I took my kids to the playground, and that was where I got to know all these mothers. That was where I realized how quickly everything changes culturally-speaking, from this prewar ethic to today’s consumerism. It was no longer possible to convince these people of the need to engage in an anti-imperialistic fight in the metropoles. TB: How do you assess the importance of the RAF today? HF: The RAF helped the State to understand that it was no longer a repressive apparatus in this sense and that it is anachronistic to suppress

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people in such crude fashion. Because the State liked to participate in these war games, with a law enforcement apparatus and special response teams. But Foucault tells us more about how people are subjugated than do ideas of feudalism and anti-feudalism. TB: Such as Marxism? HF: Yes, for example. In an interview, Foucault says that the Marxists were mad at the Structuralists because the latter offered a new way of being left without having to have any truck with Marxism. In the 50s there was this practice village in West Berlin where the police staged a communist uprising as roleplay. Unfortunately, I never filmed that. There were those who acted as agents of the SED11 and who walked through the streets and incited people. These were the ideas based on which the police approached the conflicts with the students in 1967/68. They thought all of them were agents from East Germany. They could not imagine that their neighbor’s nice son might be participating in the protests as well. In the next five years, however, they learned that they were not fighting against an army of East German agents. But the RAF continued to work with these anachronistic terms: that they are an army and operated based on military tactics. This idea of opposition and repression has become historically obsolete. This is what the opposition has learned from the RAF tragedy, but so did the State. Today, it seems to me that 1968 was more than anything the end of Humanism—in the sense that what was at stake one last time was the end of alienation, the demand to be in tune with the present and to consciously intervene in the unfolding of history. The important books appearing at that time, Foucault’s and Derrida’s, are about the fact that it is too late for autonomy and that reification has become a fact of civilization. You can no longer get there, just as you can no longer live without electricity and heating systems—other than in survival courses. —Translated by Marco Abel

Notes The interview originally appeared as “‘Holger dachte Ästhetik und Politik zuzammen’: Gespräch mit Harun Farocki über den Filmstudenten Holger Meins und seinen Weg in die RAF,” Jungle World 42, October 9, 1997. https://jungle. world/artikel/1997/41/holger-dachte-aesthetik-und-politik-zusammen. Tilman Baumgärtel wrote, in English, the introductory remarks for this translation. 1 Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 45. 2 For an account of the radicalization of the dffb students, see Tilman Baumgärtel, “1 February 1968: Herstellung eines Molotov-Cocktails Promotes Film as a Tool for

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Political Violence,” in New History of German Cinema, eds. Jennifer Kapczynski and Michael Richardson (Rochester: Camden House Press, 2012), 400–404. For a more detailed account of these events, see Tilman Baumgärtel, Vom Guerillakino zum Essayfilm: Harun Farocki—Werkmonographie eines Autorenfilmers (Berlin: b_books, 1998), 25–95. 3 Zengakuren, founded in 1948, was an anarchist and communist group of students in Japan. 4 By law, in Germany both citizens and non-citizens are required to register with the Einwohnermeldeamt (local residents’ registry office) to let the (local) government know of one’s residence. 5 In 1975, Peter Lorenz (December, 22, 1922–December 6, 1987) was a candidate to be mayor of West Berlin, as a member of the Christian Democratic Union, West Germany’s leading conservative party. 6 For more on Hellmuth Costard’s later work, see the chapter by Kalani Michell, “Revolting Formats: Hellmuth Costard’s Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger deutscher Film,” in this volume. 7 Ulrich Gregor is a German film historian, co-founder of the Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek in Berlin, and director from 1980 to 2000 of the Internationale Forum des Jungen Films, which, since 1971, has been part of the Berlin International Film Festival under the title Forum. 8 The small Belgian city of Knokke-le-Zoute was host to the Knokke Experimental Film Festival starting in 1947. For another take on the trip to this film festival, see the interview Randall Halle conducted with Birgit Hein, in this volume. 9 Despite using the same abbreviation, the German and US SDS are not affiliated: the German SDS had socialism in its name, whereas the US SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) did not. 10 Rauch was a member of the left-radical group named the Berlin Blues, which existed in the late 1960s in West Berlin. He died in a shoot-out with a plainclothes police officer. After his death, the remaining members of the Tupamaros West Berlin, of which he was also a member (the memberships of the groups sometimes overlapped), co-founded the June 2 Movement (1971–80). The June 2 Movement was a group that occasionally worked together with the RAF. 11 The Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED) was the governing political party of East Germany between 1949 and 1989.

17:

An Interview with Birgit Hein: “Art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system”

Randall Halle

T

YPICALLY, CONSIDERATIONS OF

1968 and West German cinema focus on New German Cinema (NGC) as the radical aesthetic project of the period. NGC is even described as avant-garde film. This analysis, however, overlooks the significance of non-narrative experimental cinema. The following interview with Birgit Hein, one of (West) Germany’s most important experimental filmmakers, offers a vision of cinema culture focused on the experimental work of the 1960s. Hein, born in 1942 in Berlin, belonged to the first generation of postwar filmmakers who revitalized the experimental tradition destroyed by the catastrophe of 1933 or German fascism. Unlike commercial narrative cinema, this form of filmmaking did not return to West Germany easily. It took almost two decades and then largely through the exposition at venues like the film festival EXPRMNTL in Knokke, Belgium. In the interview, Hein notes importantly that experimental filmmakers came to the project not from the questions of narration but from the considerations of the fine arts. Birgit Hein, along with her then husband Wilhelm Hein, was part of a growing set of moving image artists who in their work turned, as she states here, “from the depiction of reality to the reality of depiction.” Hein provides here a compelling reflection on the often difficult to assess work of the avant-garde film of the period. In its aesthetic and political aspirations, art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system and that cannot even exist outside its own immanent language. She also helps us understand how, like NGC, a New German Avant-garde Film also had to build its community, train itself, establish an audience, find screening spaces, and, in effect, create its own institutions. The interview also helps us to understand how Hein’s work as a professor at the Braunschweig University of Art created the preconditions for the accomplishments of the most successful current generation of experimental filmmakers in Germany. The publication of Film als Idee (Film as Idea), which collects her writings

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Figure 17.1. Image of a screening at XSCREEN organized by Underground Explosion, Cologne, 15-19 October 1968. Reproduced with permission from Birgit Hein.

and contains translations into English, allows interested English speakers further access to Birgit Hein’s important body of work.1 RH: Typically, European film historians think of this as the period of the birth of New German Cinema. Could we say it was also the rebirth of German Avant-garde cinema, a New German Avant-garde Film (NGAF)? Could you understand your work of the 60s as having been at the center of the NGAF? BH: When I started to reinvent experimental film together with Wilhelm Hein in the middle of the sixties, we didn’t do this as filmmakers but as painters. Our aim was to discover film as a potential medium of fine art. We didn’t have any knowledge about classical filmmaking at that time. We knew that there was a New German Film. But in no way would we have connected it with the term avant-garde, which for us was exclusively connected with the fine art movements of the beginning of the twentieth century like futurism, cubism, constructivism, as well as dada and the abstract and surrealist films by German and French painters.

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We had internalized the idea of modernism that one must derive the rules of an art from the characteristics of its material. We approached film according to the definition of László Moholy-Nagy, who in 1925 taught that the basic materials of film are light and time.2 We wanted to define the fundamental elements of film in order to find our way from the depiction of reality to the reality of depiction. We wanted to explore the medium of film as a visual system and thereby analyze and examine the process of reproduction including the film material itself as well as the chemical and perceptual processes. The single-image structure of film also enables a montage based on visual principles that are independent of narrative continuity. We believed that only through this fundamental detachment from the context of traditional narrative cinema could film become available as a visual arts medium. RH: If the death of the German avant-garde tradition took place in 1933, was it reborn in 1963, when Ferdinand Khittl’s Die Parallelstraße (The Parallel Street, 1961) won the grand prize at EXPRMNTL 3 in Knokke, Belgium?3 BH: Oh no, don’t come with Die Parallelstraße! Let me quote what I wrote about the film in 1971 when I was writing about the Knokke Festival of 1964: “The distribution of prizes is certainly grotesque. The grand prize went to the German film Parallelstraße by Ferdinand Khittl, an addled pseudo-philosophical film.”4 RH: So when do you think experimental filmmaking returned to West Germany? BH: I can answer that only with a general observation: it happened at the start of the 1960s with the first short films of the Young German Film movement [Junges Deutsches Kino]. They were not really experimental films, but they established a new form of personal narration through filmic means. These films were screened in Oberhausen at the Westdeutsche Kurzfilmtage [West German Short Film Festival],5 and in the student filmclubs of the universities. RH: You went to Cologne in 1961 to study Art History. Did you select these subjects because of an interest in contemporary art? Cologne was developing one of the more lively gallery scenes at the time. What was your relationship to them? BH: Contemporary art had been my life ever since I was a teenager. I studied art history because my parents didn’t want me to study painting, even though I had already been accepted at the then famous Kunstakademie (Art Academy) in Düsseldorf.

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But of course back then, Art History was not about contemporary art, so the gallery scene was extremely important. Wilhelm and I would go to every one of the many openings. In 1967, Rudolf Zwirner opened his first gallery in Cologne with Andy Warhol’s Most Wanted Men. And I will never forget how deeply I was touched by his sense of an autonomous, massmedia aesthetic. RH: As a student and developing artist, how much attention did you pay to the oft-cited political markers of the 1960s in West Germany: the Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt (1963–65), the founding of Kommune 1 (January 12, 1967), the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg (June 2, 1967)?6 BH: We didn’t need the trial in Frankfurt in 1963 to open our eyes. My generation had already been confronted with the Holocaust as very young teenagers in the middle of the fifties. And many of us, like myself, were traumatized. We were deeply unhappy to be Germans. In 1963, even to think about the trial filled me with anxiety. The shooting of Benno Ohnesorg: at that time the student revolt was already in full swing. Anything was possible, since policemen had started riding their horses directly into the demonstrating students. The founding of Kommune 1 confirmed our Zeitgefühl [sense of the times]. It summarized some of the sensibilities we had in our era. By the way, the famous photo of them was shot by a friend of ours, an XSCREEN member.7 RH: Would you describe 1967 as a breakthrough year for you personally? You and your then husband Wilhelm began to move in broader circles: you were in Rome at Filmstudio 70, in Munich at LOFT, and in November you went to Paris and participated in the Cinémathèque’s retrospective of New American Cinema. And also in November the first public screenings of your own work—S & W and Olé (both 1967)—took place,8 and you received the news that your work would be screened in Knokke at EXPRMNTL 4. BH: It all happened at the end of 1967. I see it more as a preparation for the real breakthrough, which took place in 1968, first with the founding of XSCREEN and, most importantly, with the success of Rohfilm (Raw Film, 1968) at the filmmakers meeting in November in Munich.9 RH: That meeting brought you together with both other West German experimental artists and the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative.10 What was it about that gathering that had such resonance for you?

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BH: That’s not exactly how it happened. We had already met the Austrian filmmakers in February 1968 at the Hamburger Filmschau. We viewed their films with great enthusiasm, because they came from the same arts background that we did. We opened our first XSCREEN event in March 1968 with works from the Viennese Actionists. At that time, our own films were a bit more modest in their goals. The breakthrough came with Rohfilm. Peter Kubelka praised the film in Munich as the best film of the gathering. That was our official recognition. RH: So, beyond the experimental moving image art, what was your relationship to the experiments in narrative and documentary cinema taking place at the time? You paid attention to the New American Cinema but not to the DOC 59 in Munich. You went to Knokke but not to the Westdeutsche Filmtage in Oberhausen. You took up contact with Gregory Markopoulos but not with Haro Senft or Alexander Kluge.11 Why? How did you develop your understanding of an independent, experimental, underground cinema? BH: Cinema had not played the slightest role in our socialization, until we started to study at the University of Cologne in 1962. Today, this is hard to believe: We did not watch television and would not go to the movies, as we did not consider them to be high culture. An important event was the retrospective of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films, organized by the student film club at the University of Cologne in 1962, which opened our eyes to film and as a result shifted our attention to the Nouvelle Vague films and to New German Cinema, which was just taking shape at the time. We had gotten our hands on the American magazine Film Culture and were avid readers.12 The New American Cinema movement provided us with the vital impetus for making our own films as individual artists, even amateurs, who produce their films without any budget and who do everything by themselves: shooting, editing, and even acting. The writings of Stan Brakhage played an important role in this process. His notion of film—that mistakes, for instance, such as blurriness, could be an aesthetic device, or that one could directly manipulate the filmstrip’s emulsion, and that it didn’t come down to the narrative but rather to personal ways of visualizing images—had a crucial impact on our first film work. The co-founders of XSCREEN were film journalists who wrote for the daily Cologne newspaper Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, whose regular Saturday filmpage was read by producers and distributors all over Germany. They admired especially Jean-Marie Straub and Jean-Luc Godard. Of course, Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz became prominent. Wilhelm and I didn’t like Kluge very much, because his films were infused with a literary symbolism. I don’t remember any film by Haro Senft. Among the NGC only Werner Herzog impressed us with his aggressiveness.

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Why Gregory Markopoulos? I saw his film Bliss (1967) in October 1967 in Rome as the very first example of the New American Cinema, about which until then I only had been able to read. I was overwhelmed by the pure visual expression of the film and immediately promised Markopoulos to screen his work in West Germany. And it happened before Knokke! At the beginning of December 1967, I arranged a screening of his film Eros, O Basileus (1967) at the Film Club of the University of Cologne. RH: You literally began the year 1968 at EXPRMNTL 4 in Knokke, where your work was screened and where leftist film students from West Germany staged a protest against the apolitical underground film. You then spent the spring with people you met at the EXPRMNTL, founding XSCREEN in Cologne as an independent non-commercial screening space. Then, in October the police raided your screening of Otto Muehl’s works.13 And suddenly, you were at the center of a major protest in Cologne against state censorship. The leftists who had denounced your projects as apolitical came out onto the streets to demonstrate on your behalf. How did you understand the relationship then between aesthetic experimentation and political action? Looking back on the events, how do you now evaluate the positions you took then? BH: In our opinion the protest of the leftist students at Knokke, against US imperialism in experimental film, was completely ridiculous. Even today, whenever I see the TV footage of the event, I can only shake my head over Harun Farocki’s ego trip.14 Of course, we were political with our XSCREEN activities. But we didn’t follow any leftist ideology. We were subversively opposing political and sexual censorship, which caused many serious problems for us with the authorities, including a lawsuit. Nevertheless, as filmmakers with our own formal films, we were attacked by the left as reactionary and apolitical. Later, as a still ostracized avant-garde artist, I tried to mount a defense of my work in 1977 in a publication I’d like to quote: The problem lies in the paradox of artistic work and the function it is supposed to fulfill: it is meant to embody ideals—such as true freedom, or pure truth—that can’t be realized in society, but which society needs in order to vindicate itself. . . . Essentially, attacks on the avant-garde come from a conviction that art can have a direct effect. . . . But all attempts by the classical and contemporary avant-garde to connect art to life have failed. Because either anti-art turns into art again, or else the production of art is given up in favor of direct social activities. . . . The progressiveness of political art depends on the progressiveness of its content. That means that any debate necessarily becomes a debate about the right content. In that case, we have to

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ask ourselves whether content alone can be art. Either way, what is clear is that you don’t need art to convey the right content.15

In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists believed that the only possible approach to solving the problem of the conflict between “art and revolution” was to take on form. The constructivist painter El Lissitzky wrote in 1920: “many revolutions were needed in order to free the artist from his obligations as a moralist as a storyteller or as the court jester, so that he could follow unhindered his creative bent and tread the road that leads to construction.”16 The formalists understood art as work in an aesthetic, formal field that is only slightly different from other specialist fields, such as science. In this way, art communicates knowledge that cannot be expressed in any other information system and that cannot even exist outside its own immanent language. RH: Those are provocative and compelling critical insights. Would you still maintain this position today? BH: Today, we still confront the problem of people trying to mediate visual work with verbal work. Visual formative expression or the visual quality is difficult to replace with another medium—that is the basis of the uniqueness of the works. Simply in order to assess the visual arts, one needs a lengthy set of visual experiences. RH: With XSCREEN you created a space to support non-commercial independent film. What motivated you to become engaged on behalf of films that would never screen in mainstream cinemas? BH: In the first place, it was our own personal interest, as museums and exhibition spaces had no technical equipment and would not show films. Therefore, we needed to rent a cinema. At that time, documentary films were also not shown in mainstream cinemas. But in the sixties a new movement of political and personal documentaries started, and they really spoke to us, they were part of us. As I said before, we didn’t even question that we had to oppose censorship of information. For example, in October 1968 we screened La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), the four-hour-long film by Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino, a documentary on neo-colonialism in Latin America. RH: To what extent was XSCREEN part of a larger movement, along with the independent film center in Munich, the COOP in Hamburg, Germany? BH: We were connected in a kind of network with a continuous exchange of information. We would cooperate in organizing screenings for travelling

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filmmakers. The “movement” was international. We worked with the London Filmmakers Co-op, The Electric Cinema in Amsterdam, the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative, the Italian Co-op, and even the New York Filmmakers Cooperative. Together with the undependent film center we organized the “First European Meeting of Independent Filmmakers” in Munich in November 1968. In October 1970, The International Underground Film Festival was organized by the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (LFMC). As filmmakers and friends, we would share our homes and family life, including talks and drinking that lasted through the night and into the morning. RH: To what extent can we describe the period after 1968 as an institutionalization of the experimental/underground (West) German Cinema? BH: Since the beginning of the seventies, so-called community cinemas were established in many West German cities, as non-profit organizations, that were supported by the departments of culture. Their program would comprise all the film genres of the time from historical to independent to experimental/underground films. In 1974, XSCREEN also started a regular cinema with daily screenings. In the same year, the exhibition in Cologne, now legendary, “Kunst bleibt Kunst, Projekt, 74” (Art Remains Art, Project, 74) included film, video, and photography as new art forms for the first time. Then, in 1977 at the Documenta 6 in Kassel, West Germany, we had the chance to present a permanent daily film program again. Looking back, I find it remarkable that, with Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976) by Paul Sharits, it took so long for a film installation to be included in an art exhibition in West Germany. Also in 1977, shortly after the Documenta, the Kölnischer Kunstverein [an Art Museum in Cologne] opened the exhibition Film als Film—1910 bis heute (Film as Film: 1910–Today) with historical artworks, new film installations, and a permanent film program of around fifty short films, spanning from the abstract films of the 1920s to the Structural Films of the 1960s and 1970s, which dominated the international experimental film movement at that time. Ironically, this breakthrough of film in the art context marked at the same time the end of film’s reception in the art scene until the end of the 80s. But by that time, the avant-garde concept of linear progress had become intolerable. The purism of structural “film as film” had led to stagnation in formalism. It signified the end of conceptual art. At the end of the seventies, West German Experimental Film showed a tendency to narration. Also, a new young generation began to work with

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Super 8 with a commitment to content and personal themes. Especially in West Berlin, a new Super-8 subculture developed in the 80s outside of the art scene in connection with the squatter scene and the music scene in clubs and bars. Undergound was followed by Punk, also in Cologne. Our cinema had a stage. We would therefore also host live performances, including punk concerts with their wild audiences. Consider also that up to the beginning of the 1970s, film could only be studied at film schools like the deutsche film- und fersehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) or the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film in Munich, hff). Then, Film and Video Studies were also established at art universities like Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Braunschweig University of Art, HBK), where I taught for years and where the Filmklasse (Film Class) actually forms part of the Department of Fine Arts. There, with the collective plenary discussion of student work and the weekly film forum, where classics of the experimental cinema as well as the new media art were shown, film was established as a fully fledged artistic medium inside and outside the HBK. Of course, the technical equipment of the school with the professional 16-mm equipment and a 35-mm animation stand, even a small printer, and later the video and computer technique, supported by a graduate tutorial with two technicians, were important resources for an advanced training. I am proud that filmmakers who are internationally known these days, such as Matthias Müller, Bjørn Melhus, and Caspar Stracke, as well as the curators Florian Wüst and Peter Zorn, to name only a few, have studied in the creative atmosphere of the Filmklasse, while I was teaching there from 1990 to 2007.

Notes 1

Hanna Heidenreich, Heike Knippel, and Florian Krautkrämer, eds., Film Als Idee: Birgit Heins Texte Zum Film/Kunst (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2016). 2 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925); Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1967). 3 The seaside resort town of Knokke in Belgium hosted exprmntl (full official title: Le festival international du cinéma expérimental de Knokke-le-Zoute) intermittently in 1949, ’58, ’63, ‘67, and ’74. Especially exprmntl 3 and 4 were defining gatherings for a renewed post-war avant-garde moving image arts. exprmntl 3 welcomed many of the most significant US underground filmmakers, and they dominated the festival screenings. Exprmntl 4 presented a lively European film scene on equal footing with the work of the American artists. The awarding of the

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prize to Die Parallelstraße was not without controversy as the film’s narrative essayistic style was perceived as retrograde to the more material formal experiments of the New American Cinema. 4 Birgit Hein, Film im Underground: Von seinen Anfängen bis zum Unabhängigen Kino (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1971), 153. 5 The film festival was renamed the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 1991. 6 See also the essays by Timothy Brown, Priscilla Layne, Christina Gerhardt, and Madeleine Bernstorff in this volume about the latter two events in West Berlin. 7 XSCREEN, or the Cologne Studio for Independent Film, was founded by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Rolf Wiest, Dietrich Schubart Rosenthal, Wilfried Reichart, and Hans-Peter Kochenrath upon their return from exprmntl 4. XSCREEN became one of the central screening spaces for independent, underground, experimental film in West Germany and in western Europe generally, as will be discussed further on in this interview. 8 These two early films formed part of the explorations of the material of film that would characterize much of the collaboration of Birgit and Wilhelm Hein. The films could be described as in line with the structural material films of the New American Cinema or the London Co-op movement. 9 The film screened at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival. 10 See the essay in this volume by Andrew Wiener for more about the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative. 11 Haro Senft and Ferdinand Khittl organized in Munich a group of young critical filmmakers in a reform movement experimenting with documentary film under the title DOC 59. They undertook training and public activity to support the renewal of West German film. The members of the group joined up with Alexander Kluge and others at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival to announce the now famous Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962. These events can be understood as the birth of Young German Cinema. 12 Similar to Young German Cinema, New American Cinema was a designation coined to identify an independent non-Hollywood group of artists undertaking formal experiments to redefine filmmaking in the late 1950s and 60s; New American Cinema was coined by Jonas Mekas. The movement included Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, John Casavettes, Shirley Clarke, Maya Deren, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Gregory Markopoulos, and Ron Rice along with Jonas and Adolfas Mekas. 13 Otto Muehl, one of the Viennese Actionists, had been arrested in Vienna in 1968 as a result of his participation in Kunst und Revolution/Art and Revolution. Muehl along with Kurt Kren had been filming these actions, and at a screening of those films in Cologne organized by XSCREEN, the police arrived and confiscated the materials as pornographic. The censorship led to mass protests in the city along with an occupation of the mayor’s office. 14 Farocki, a student at the dffb, was one of the central organizers. See Tilman Baumgärtel’s interview with him in the volume. Other students of the dffb who

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attended included Hartmut Bitomsky, Gerd Conradt, and Holger Meins. Students Oimel Ma and Jeanine Meerapfel of the Institut für Filmgestaltung Ulm (Ulm Institute for Film Design) attended as well. 15 Birgit Hein, “Can Art Change Reality?” in Schwindel der Wirklichkeit: ClosedCircuit Videoinstallationen und Partizipation: ein Reader / Vertigo of Reality: Closed-Circuits and Participation: a Reader, eds. Anke Hervol, Wulf Herzogenrath, Johannes Odenthal, Andrew Boreham, and Paul Brown (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 2015), 214–16. Here, 214. 16 El Lissitzky, “Suprematism in World Reconstruction,” in Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking, 1976), 151–58. Here, 153.

18:

An Interview with Klaus Lemke: “Being Smart Does Not Make Good Films”

Marco Abel

F

in German film history have enjoyed as long and prolific a career as Klaus Lemke. With almost fifty films to his name, Lemke, born in 1940, is still going strong. His most recent feature, Bad Girl Avenue (2018), premiered at the Munich Film Festival, fifty years after his debut feature, 48 Stunden bis Acapulco (48 Hours to Acapulco, 1967), screened in Munich’s Filmcasino on November 30, 1967. Over the course of his long career, Lemke has increasingly established himself as one of German cinema’s great Einzelkämpfer—a lone warrior who acts as a veritable gadfly to the German film industry, which he never tires of attacking with public stunts (such as baring his behind on the red carpet at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival to show what he thought of the festival after it once more rejected one of his films) and polemic salvos that target industry functionaries as well as his peers with gleeful irreverence. One does not have to agree with each of Lemke’s positions vis-à-vis the history of German cinema to appreciate the relentlessness with which he has been trying simultaneously to realize his singular vision of cinema and life—where one is inextricable from the other and both are deeply embedded in a (fever) dream of America and its cinema of physis—and to fight what in his view is a well-codified left-liberal attitude that has dominated (West) German film at least since Alexander Kluge and others penned the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962). Both his films and his polemics seek to clear the path for a different cinema, for a different life—a cinema and a life dominated not by a politically correct consensus but by dissensus, especially with regard to the state as a regulator of an aesthetic regime that ends up delimiting what can and cannot be seen and sensed.1 Instead of making films of representative value—films whose value derives from the fact that they are about a more or less weighty topic about which they seek to edify their viewers—Lemke, from his earliest short films on, preferred to make films about nothing else but an attitude towards life, towards how to live life. This self-described anti-intellectualism (inspired by his encounter with none other than Martin Heidegger) never gave him a real chance EW DIRECTORS

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of fitting in with the protagonists of the Young German Cinema of the 1960s; and yet, his short films and early features hint at the possibility of a different West German cinema culture that could have developed around ’68, one contra to both Papas Kino that Oberhausen prematurely declared dead and the films that ended up codifying what (left) political cinema is (supposed to be) and whose effects we can still observe fifty years after ’68. Could it be possible that for a fleeting moment—one embodied in Lemke’s films that have situated him within film history as a member of the Neue Münchner Gruppe (New Munich Group)2—West German cinema around ’68 gave rise to a politics of absolute refusal (rather than dialectical resistance) embodied not by a film aesthetic seeking to transgress but by an affect of joyful nonchalance? Furthermore, might it be possible that the debate about political filmmaking that took place around ’68 resulted not merely in the denigration of the New Munich Group films at the time but also, through film historiographical processes, in the (until fairly recently) continued absence of the New Munich Group from the historiography of (West) German cinema in general and of political filmmaking in (West) Germany in particular? That is, I wonder whether the act of critically excluding the New Munich Group from the realm of the political around ’68—an act undoubtedly based on a specific understanding of left politics—finds its continuity today in the inability to imagine political filmmaking in Germany outside of the well-codified terms of the political (film) that emerged around ’68. This is merely speculation on my part and might very well even be counter to Lemke’s own views. It remains to be seen whether more sustained engagement with the New Munich Group films, including but not exclusively Lemke’s, would lend support to my hypotheses. That the “aesthetic left”—a term Enno Patalas coined to characterize a tendency of film criticism in West Germany (as opposed to a more sociologically oriented “political left” criticism) but that I think can also productively be used to conceptualize the films of the New Munich Group3—was received around ’68 with considerable irritation, however, marks something; and perhaps this something, in all its complex forms of articulation, was the desire of those who had a part in the existing distribution of the sensible to prevent those who had no part in it from issuing their dissensus, precisely by linking the latter’s aesthetics, as the antithesis to left politics, to the realm of the ideological enemy: the US (capitalism) and Hollywood (post-fascistic escapism). Against this assessment, I would like to suggest that the films of the New Munich Group mark the ongoing virtual existence of a more or less subterranean tradition of an other politics—perhaps even a left politics against the left, a politics of the left without leftism, as it were—that connects the New Munich Group in surprising and thus far relatively unexplored ways to a politics of desire that is more associated with “après mai” than with ’68 itself, as contemporary French filmmaker Olivier Assayas repeatedly emphasized when promoting his film Après

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Figure 18.1. Heinz Klopp and Werner Enke exiting a film screening of Hatari! in Klaus Lemke, Kleine Front (1965), screenshot.

Mai (Something in the Air, 2012) about the aftermath of mille neuf cent soixante-huit. This might also be an other (left) politics that connects Lemke and company with a post-’68 (West) German tradition that includes filmmakers such as Roland Klick and Dominik Graf as well as groups such as the Kölner Gruppe (Cologne Group) and the directors associated with the Berlin School—a lineage that, no doubt, seems counter-intuitive and yet is in its counter-intuitiveness expressive of the fact that, as this volume tries to demonstrate, the German ’68 remains a necessarily ongoing event that continues to await its renewed actualizations. I met with Klaus Lemke on July 10, 2014, in Munich.4 The interview took place in German; this translation is mine. MA: How did you perceive the West German film scene in the early to mid-1960s, when you started making your first short films? KL: When we [the New Munich Group filmmakers] began, films from Eastern Europe—from Poland, the Czech Republic, etc.—were in vogue:

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dissident films, politically correct, left. Some of them were indeed quite nice. We were considered politically right-leaning because we were obsessed with American films. They were our life. We were the only ones who knew John Ford, who at the time was received as a post-fascist, or Howard Hawks, whom people did not know at all, or Budd Boetticher and Raoul Walsh. Their films saved us from the dire reality of 1960s West Germany: if we had not seen them, we would have ended up as Studienräte [government-employed, tenured teachers]. But here is the key: although we knew that films are made, we treated these fantastic gangster films as if they were reality. For us, a Hawks film was completely real. Today all of this is history, but back then it was a revolution for us, even though we were labeled right-wing not only for being interested in American films but also for insisting that they were the best. We treated them as documentaries. This attitude, and our exposure to the Nouvelle Vague, prevented us from making films about concentration camps or other topics favored by the political left. We instead made films with our girlfriends, because we thought this would be the only way to approach Hollywood. Take, for example, Kleine Front (Small Front, Klaus Lemke, 1965). This short film starts with three jerk-offs [played by Enke, Horst Söhnlein, and Heinz Klopp] leaving the cinema, having just seen Hawks’ Hatari! (1962). And what do they do? They embark on a safari [they drive into the woods to steal some trout from a small pond], but they are completely incompetent. But the attitude with which they go about their business, even though they do not catch any fish, was an exact replication of what we saw in American films. We were not concerned with the rest of the world, including the West German reality; we just filmed what was closest for us to American films: our private universe. MA: You were in your mid-twenties then. What was the reason for your alienation from West Germany? KL: Although today there is also a significant difference between the US and Germany, back then the difference was infinite. The US was utterly unreachable. A plane ticket to the US was beyond imaginable for us. The cheapest ticket was with Icelandair, which cost 1,800 DM. We could shoot two or three films for this money. This is why we had only the cinema left as a means to escape West Germany’s petit bourgeois atmosphere. Another thing is that for us World War Two was never really present. We were always on the side of the US in the war films we saw. If it had not been for the Americans, I would not even live. The chocolate the soldiers brought with them fed us, and their AFN [American Forces Network] exposed us to an American attitude: AFN was the bomb! To us, it was more important to get into American clubs than to be accepted by the Cannes Film Festival. To be allowed just once into the PX, or at least to

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stand outside and watch who came from the club: this was heaven, a relief from the surroundings in which we lived. The Red Army Faction also originated in this environment. Suddenly, films about concentration camps came to us from France, and we saw who our fathers were. Other people, like our friends, such as Andreas Baader, could not understand that their parents—many of them Protestant ministers—had been on the side of the Nazis. We were less affected by this problem, because we had always loved the Americans. This difference ultimately divided us. We used to live together with Baader and those guys when we were young. But we always had a safe haven: we would go to the cinema and watch a Hawks film, the impact of which lasted for a couple of days. We felt we were the greatest, because we liked such films. Everyone else, especially the Filmkritik, considered such films post-fascist nonsense with which the Americans tried to corrupt us. Our attitude was exactly the opposite. MA: What about the Nouvelle Vague? KL: We only noticed these films in the mid-60s. They gave us hope. For what, in West Germany, had been completely lost after the end of the war was virility, manliness, and weapons. None of this was there any more—for good reasons! I fully understand the people who did not want to have anything to do with this. My father was a POW for many years, so he really had had it with weapons and virility and all that. But we did not want to go along with this attitude. We did not want to be part of this post-Nazi thing. We wanted to travel across the Atlantic, even though we did not even know that Los Angeles was on the Pacific. When I shot 48 Stunden nach Acapulco, we thought Acapulco was on the Caribbean side. We even had bets going on about this. We drew on a map where we thought Acapulco was; we were quite surprised to realize that it was somewhere else entirely. MA: You guys were a bit like Christopher Columbus. KL: Yes! Our second influence was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and the fact that they merely sped through the States and only knew gas stations. MA: A critic once wrote that Kerouac never saw anything of the real America.5 KL: He merely crosses back and forth through America. That was what we liked, as did Wim Wenders and those people. We liked that he does not describe how the main streets look or what museums exist. Not even cinemas exist for him. There are gas stations, bars where they meet someone, and then they move on. He described an attitude towards the world.

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MA: This has something to do with movement and physicality. KL: With Kerouac we have the start of this action-thing: to simply drive the car through the country from point A to point B. Looking back, I realize that there were other things, but we did not see them. We looked at Kerouac’s characters as free people, whereas we felt stuck in West Germany’s postwar reality. If we had not had AFN, we would never have amounted to anything. We loved the way people spoke on AFN. Today DJs across the world speak like that, but we had never heard such a way of talking. We were still stuck in Nazi Germany in this regard. Even today the language used for dubbing is a Befehlssprache [command language]: each sentence sounds like it is from a dissertation.6 For us it was redemption to hear mistakes in a show that the AFN produced, because it was impossible that someone on a West German show would speak such nonsense. There was the [literary] Gruppe 47 [Group 47], which we considered nonsense.7 At times, however, we sublet from some of these well-known authors, because we had no money at all. They thought we were interesting, which is why we experienced what the West German cultural scene was like. Horrible! So our refuge was the cinema, especially the Türkendolch in the Türkenstraße.8 We had no money, and the little we had we spent on beer and movies. We kept going to the movies until gradually our DNA began to change and we had the courage to make films about our friends and their nonsense. The desire to make such films was incomprehensible to the established West German cultural scene. Oberhausen always rejected us, but it does not matter: I would not be where I am today if it had not been that way.9 MA: The signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto rebelled against what they perceived as a stale West German film culture; the directors associated with the New Munich Group rejected those films, too—but in a fundamentally different manner. Why did the Oberhausen group not like the New Munich Group? KL: Frankly, they did not even perceive us; in turn, we looked at them as old petit bourgeois people who, thanks to Alexander Kluge, had managed to get their hands on some money and who wanted to buy houses in Tuscany just like their parents did. The only exception was Rob Houwer: he drove a fat British car, which we liked. The rest was so SPD-like [SPD-mäßig].10 MA: The Oberhausen filmmakers were a tad older than those of the New Munich Group. Was there a generational conflict? KL: They were about ten years older, but they simply did not perceive us. It does not matter. Nothing remains of Oberhausen, except Kluge’s

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Abschied von Gestern (Yesterday’s Girl, 1966). They just wanted to prove to their educated parents that film, too, could have a claim on high art. But what we did was not in opposition to these filmmakers, for we really had nothing to do with them. MA: So, this opposition was only established later through the debate in the Filmkritik? KL: Gradually, yes. Frieda Grafe was key in this regard. She was for us the Pauline Kael of [West] German film criticism, which is why Drei (Three, Klaus Lemke, 1966) is dedicated to her. We did not understand her texts, though today I do. They contain the spirit of cinema. She was such a brilliant woman. She also was pretty, slim like a French woman, and she had a certain je ne sais quoi: we treated her like a goddess. In turn, to thank us and also because we made the kind of films we did, she essentially made us. Her husband, Enno Patalas, eventually helped as well.11 MA: It seems to me that the Filmkritik positioned the New Munich Group as an “aesthetic left” in opposition to a “political left.”12 This is interesting given that others considered you part of a post-fascist camp. KL: Yes, but unlike us, the guys who attacked us had no clue about film. Without realizing it, we actually were quite educated in film. We knew all these gangster films by heart. The only one of our group who had some contact with the external world was Jean-Marie Straub. He sometimes called Jean-Luc Godard. And then À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) appeared. What is truly incredible about this film is that some guy from southern France tries to impress this American girl with his American philosophy. For years no one really understood this: an American woman, who, fortunately, refused to be coopted by him, though not because he is French. As if this guy could tell her anything about America! But that is just it: he could, because he knew about America from films. For him, she is reality, she is America. We were in tune with what these American filmmakers, who could not care less about their films’ political implications, did. But they got off on seeing gangsters doing their thing, trying to realize their dreams. Gangsters, pimps, rockers: we embraced them because they are the only ones who are capable of doing something. In contrast, the others, those Studienräte, believed that the smarter you are the better your films are. Against this, we enjoyed pretending to be dumb; we were even proud that the others thought we were stupid. Of course, we never believed that we would have a career as filmmakers. We simply got drunk on cheap beer, snuck into the Türkendolch, and hid under the seats till the next screening started. We could have done this many days in a row. Baader was always

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there when they screened an American film featuring girls and cabriolets. His obsession with driving cabriolets and fast cars derives from his love for these films. Then the Rolling Stones came to Munich. Suddenly, there was a band playing in a club that imitated American music—but with a completely different attitude. All but thirty people in Munich knew the Rolling Stones at the time. They, too, just copied America. When you are young there is nothing better, or do you want to copy the Soviet Union or China? We could have copied the Italians, as we liked them, or the French. But they were too intellectual for us. We were not dumb. For a while I studied with Martin Heidegger. Thome could have become a professor, and Zihlmann was super intelligent. But we wanted to get away from this intellectual thing and thought that America and its films would liberate us from it. For us, America was these fantastic Americans who came to Munich. But the most important aspect was their language, how they spoke, which is why dubbing is such a crime! For our whole life we felt inferior compared to that which said: American. We lived an entire life as if in a military barrack, which is true to this day, whereas the others had an Arbeitssprache.13 Rockers and pimps on the street: listening to them, one knew, just like in American films, that everything they say carries a double meaning. In their language, subtext mattered: only the subtext and not what was literally said. Whereas in the German spoken by these Studienräte what counts is only what is said word by word. This was the insanity of our youth, and if American film had not existed, none of us would have made a film. MA: When did you study with Heidegger? KL: Early ’60s. No, ’59: Heidegger, “What is Philosophy?” introductory seminar. It was packed. I quickly realized that I did not understand a word of what he was saying and noticed that my fellow students had no clue either. They were all drunk. Eventually, I started to sense that Heidegger was not giving a lecture but, rather, was letting language speak itself—that he always waited for his language to continue to speak on its own. Over the years I realized that this was the key experience of my life. I took classes with other professors, but Heidegger was the only one who fit with what we were interested in: that language speaks itself, that when we communicate with each other, it is language that speaks with itself, even though our intellect is inevitably involved. Only words speak with each other, and we are nothing but Pappkameraden [cardboard characters] behind them. That was what I experienced in a concrete way when attending his lectures. Years later I learned that this was apparently his real theme and that he tried to make the German language transport something other than news from the frontline. The Germans were completely militarized since World

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War One: they all acted as if they were in the gym of a military barrack. Less so today, but in reality little has changed. German films are still like that. The key is that from its inception German cinema tried to explain something to us, and the desire to explain something to the viewer is the end of film. German film is opposed to the bundled irrationality of life in which we find ourselves and that America exemplifies so wonderfully. America is currently facing a confrontation that we will be facing here in ten years as well, and yet we think we live in a clean world that we can understand and govern. America is not being governed the way we imagine but more like in House of Cards (2013–). But we Germans do not get this. This was what America gave us with its films. We already saw something in them that still nourishes Quentin Tarantino today. It is incredible how in Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) the guys, while under siege, suddenly sit down and sing together. This was the strongest rupture of the century that occurred: that one even dares to put those entirely different things together. To go against the grain [aus der Sache rausfallen]: this is the decisive thing. Of course, for such a belief you often get punched in the mouth, but this is the only belief that keeps me alive. MA: In your Munich time you first made six short films: the previously mentioned Kleine Front and Drei as well as Henker Tom (Hangman Tom, 1966), Duell (Duel, 1966), Ein Haus am Meer (A House by the Sea, 1966), and Flipper (1966). Then came your early features: 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, Negresco****—eine tödlich Affäre (Negresco****, 1968), and . . . KL: An RAF film. MA: Brandstifter (Arsonist, 1969). KL: The film was subjected to a lot of criticism. Now it is the only authentic RAF film we have. These guys were clowns, just like we were. In the photo of them as they are in the dock, they imitate the Marx Brothers. I know this, because I shot with them. Horst Söhnlein is a friend of mine who acted in Kleine Front.14 I knew they really thought that imitating the Marx Brothers would somehow accomplish something. Such things became criminal very quickly, and being criminal is fun. But at some point it is over: like in À bout de souffle, first, one cop is dead; Michel Poiccard [Jean-Paul Belmondo] shoots him in passing, as if he were in a film. Then there is the western shot, then Paris set to music, and then the end. This gives me goose bumps each and every time. MA: Why do you think the kind of films you and the others of the New Munich Group made in the mid- to late 60s came from Munich’s Schwabing district?

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Figure 18.2. Thorwald Proll, Horst Söhnlein, Andreas Baader, and Gudrun Ensslin, at announcement of their sentence at Frankfurt department store arsonist trial, 1968 © AP.

KL: We did not have anything else but Schwabing and ourselves. We knew our films would never succeed, so we made them only for ourselves. Back then, there was only one person who got what we did: Volker Schlöndorff. He had already been an assistant to Louis Malle, which for us was an entirely different world, and Schlöndorff’s own career path is quite different from ours.15 One day he visited our set and experienced something new, something he would have liked to do as well. But he was already too educated for doing what we did. We were shooting a scene for Die Versöhnung (Reconciliation, Rudolf Thome, 1964), and as always we had no clue. We did not even know what a shot/reverse shot was. Thome, Zihlmann, and I were standing around—we just had an argument—as Schlöndorff suggested that we could shoot the scene in a much simpler way. As he was about to tell us his idea, it suddenly dawned on him that sharing it with us would destroy everything. Once again: Heidegger. If we had known how to shoot the scene in a more professional manner, we would have destroyed everything he had just seen and recognized as genuinely new. To this day this is how I work with people: the only thing that matters to me is that I am somewhat touched. To achieve this, I now try to create situations in such a fashion that the people who already worked with me the previous day and thus know a bit about what their role is are compelled to do the right thing. It is not I who compels them but the situation itself. In this regard I think I am quite close to Hawks and also Spielberg. When I was working with the rockers, this was quite easy to do. They did not care about what I said anyway; they just did what they did. I was always half

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drunk and also stoned, but I was always able to sneak into their world some element from my film, from what I had in mind. But the rockers could not do anything wrong, for they had nothing else. They were the real Americans. We are all incredibly similar to one another. We are always on the verge of a breakdown. Modernity is nothing other than a path into total catastrophe. This catastrophe looms ahead of us. But to scream against it a bit before you sink: that is like the ancient Greeks. Greek drama is not about Oedipus perishing but about him always objecting, always screaming at the gods. The Greeks were the old Americans. It is always the same, and it is also always the same film. John Wayne stands there and says, look, first the Indians arrive and then things go downhill; and then we have ICE and things get really bad. Our entire life is like this, it is always Heidegger: always the same fucking day [English in original]. We do not learn anything new, but hopefully we unlearn enough. In America they realize there is still another world, whereas in Germany there is never another world. Here it is always the same homogenous nonsense, the same crossword puzzle that is solvable. In America things are no longer solvable [lösen sich die Sachen nicht mehr auf]. This is the whole secret. This is Heidegger, in contrast to the Frankfurt School. Or Husserl, with his brilliant idea, which influenced us a lot, that the gaze literally changes the object. This is true. If I look just right at the girl, then the girl is pretty, and then she will also be pretty on the screen. But today Germans play excellent soccer, build the best cars, have some of the prettiest women, yet our films are like gravestones because they are state cinema. We always opposed this kind of cinema. An American cannot even imagine that the government pays for films. This is absolutely crazy, as is the belief that this would not impact the films. The government itself does not even interfere. Filmmakers adjust their ideas on their own based on what they think the funding board wants. Nothing will ever happen in Germany as long as the state pays their bills and consequently takes all the fun out of making films. When you meet other filmmakers—successful ones who rely on state funding—you realize they are all suicide candidates, suicide clowns. MA: To return once more to the question of how the New Munich Group was perceived or situated, politically, in the ’60s. Kluge was an Adorno student, you studied with Heidegger, and as Thome told me, he, too, was interested in him.16 As you know, Adorno sharply criticized Heidegger and had just published Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (The Jargon of Authenticity, 1964): a Frankfurt School ideological critique of Heideggerian language philosophy. It is interesting to see how this philosophical debate manifested itself in the West German film scene in the 1960s. KL: Yes, it did, but without us knowing about this. We, too, chased a dogma, one that differed from what the Oberhausen group chased; but

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the dogma we chased has remained more alive over the years than that of the Oberhausen group. For the last ten years, newspapers have been discovering that things have gone horribly wrong with German cinema and that the possibility exists to create a different kind of film than the one that stands in the tradition of Oberhausen. But your observation is excellent. I often criticize Kluge, but I respect him. In fact, it was he who demanded that my film Ein Haus am Meer would be shown at the Oberhausen Film Festival. They would never have taken this film, which does not even have a story, quite purposefully so. As a student of Adorno’s, Kluge understood this. He immediately saw where the rupture is [wo dieser Bruch ist].17 MA: In Negresco****—eine tödlich Affäre, the name of the protagonist, the male photographer, is Roger. Is there a connection to Roger Fritz?18 KL: I lived with Roger. Michelangelo Antonioni had just made Blow-up (1966). Photographers were real stars. In Sylvie (Klaus Lemke, 1973) the protagonist is also a photographer. Roger was the big wide world in West Germany at the time, as well as Munich’s drug center [laughs]. Thome also dealt for years. That was Schwabing as well. Dealers were heroes back then. At the time, I had already started making films, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder had made his first shorts. My friend Martin Müller was my assistant, though we had no idea what a proper assistant director is.19 He also helped Fassbinder here and there. Fassbinder was not really gay. But the people at the festivals were—Felltrinelli and that whole world that at the time determined what counted as culture were homosexual, so Fassbinder joined them.20 Nothing at all wrong with this. To participate in this world is to engage in a beautiful protest and far preferable to remaining stuck in a petit bourgeois world in which we had grown up. Fassbinder, however, was not quite on the same America trip as we were. MA: Most of the New Munich Group films, other than some of the features such as Negresco****—eine tödlich Affäre as well as Thome’s Detektive (Detectives, 1968) and Rote Sonne (Red Sun, 1969), do not exist on DVD and can only be viewed in film archives. KL: Yes, and the prints are deteriorating. I do not think they can even be digitized at this stage. I am ok with this. MA: This is a shame, though, for one can see in the New Munich Group films that the possibility existed for a different kind of West German film.

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KL: Yes, but it disappeared. Helmut Färber is the only one who saw this. He was the first one, even before Frieda Grafe. He reviewed our films in the Süddeutschen Zeitung and fully recognized what we are discussing here.21 It is all in his first review. Grafe then wrote her truly great sentence about 48 Stunden bis Acapulco: “This film is the rebirth of American cinema from the imagination of a twenty-seven-year-old German.”22 I had not understood this when she wrote it, but today I know what she meant. It is what America did to us. I always say: film is a classic sport for boys. That is how we looked at Hollywood. We always heard that Hawks would walk really slowly, even when he was in a hurry. This was the first time we heard of “coolness” and really thought that we would have to walk a bit more slowly whenever it got dicey. It is in these small details that American DNA is inside us. MA: Yet, these films have been largely written out of German film history. KL: Yes, but suddenly they are coming back. This is partly due to me. Because I do not take any money from the state, I can speak out as I see fit. No one has ever said anything against my polemics, against all of the offending things I say about people here in Germany. This is because these people are all bought—they live off of filmmaking and the state subsidies they require to make their films. They have to feed their family—which is not something I can afford doing. The fact is that the Germans have never tried to really deal with themselves. Not even these antiwar films after the war did this. Really, Bernhard Wicki’s Die Brücke (The Bridge, 1959) is little more than a few actors reading their lines: there is never any life in what they are doing. MA: Quite unlike American actors you admired? KL: Yes. Our hero was Robert Mitchum, and then Brando arrived. Brando was absolutely revolutionary for us. When we got to see his films in English, we could not believe that someone could mumble in such a way that one simultaneously does not understand a thing yet understands everything, namely the subtext: it is all about the subtext. This subtext is what is missing in German films, and it is also somewhat lacking in the German language itself. What we are talking about here can barely be expressed in words. You can only render this sensible. And this is what our films were about. I do not think anything will really change. We would need people to be like we used to be in the mid-’60s: new kinds of Fassbinders, Thomes, and Lemkes, those who would transform the whole operation, who suddenly are the youth, the new Germany. But when you give a young guy 700,000 Euro you can hardly expect to get anything that differs from the

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usual shit. For he will hire assistants, and then he will lose control over the film. At twenty-seven years of age, one is bound to be a victim of all these professionals, which is why nothing better is being made in Germany than some stupid comedies that no one watches. MA: Of course, there are lone warriors such as Dominik Graf.23 KL: He is an evil genius whom I love. He does exactly the opposite of what we do, but he works in the same spirit. MA: As is the case in New Munich Group films, language plays an important role in his films. He, too, frequently complains about the homogeneous quality of dialogues in German film. KL: And he is right. Moreover, keep in mind that it is always the same people who handle the dubbing of foreign-language films. For sixty or seventy years we have been listening to the same 100 speakers. There is no difference between Brando’s mumbling and five other languages. It is always the same mush. This has ruined us. This is the price for the lost war. I know—this is a stupid thing to say. But it is true. It is Hitler. The whole thing developed when UFA, which had contracts with Hollywood, had to import American films, because it did not yet produce enough films on its own. These American films initially screened in the original. But then Adolf and his guys got the fabulous idea that films would be more German if the characters spoke German. This was the deadliest idea in our history, our art history, our film history. We will never be able to overcome this original sin. MA: Dubbing is a particularly strange phenomenon today, given that most Germans understand English fairly well. KL: It is completely superfluous. We have fortunately become more American thanks to our crazy enthusiasm for America. Of course, people would have acquired English without this. But it was American film that facilitated this, because in them even Angie Dickinson, wearing a dessous, was able to make big John Wayne’s knees weak in Rio Bravo, and yet he remains a cool guy. This is what we saw right away in these films: the anarchic element in women. We were the first who said that women are likely the better boys. MA: In the catalogue for the 2003 Oberhausen Film Festival retrospective of the New Munich Group films, your comment on Duell is simply: “Musste nicht sein” (“Wasn’t a must”).24 Yet, even in this film the point is simply that the woman plays with the man.

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KL: That was our experience. But we made this experience through all these American film noirs with their femme fatales; and we were convinced that Angie Dickinson was stronger than John Wayne. This affected us. Or Jean Seberg, who is moderately interested in this French guy, who says silly things and pretends to be intelligent even though he is not. She finds him amusing, but of course she is friends with a French author. For her, Belmondo’s character is a clown. This was a coup for Europe, a break-through: Seberg’s attitude in À bout de souffle and the fact that as a guy you have no choice but to perish gloriously. This was the real effect that this film had on us. MA: This effect is also dramatized in Henker Tom. KL: Yes. The film is called Henker Tom because Thome was the worst driver ever. Back then we did everything together, and he always drove like a “Henker Tom.” Flipper, too, is about this effect. This was always all we ever cared about. In my opinion, ninety-nine percent of filmmakers across the world do what they do merely to impress the girls—I mean, this is ultimately their primary motif. But then you experience your defeat— inevitably. I am telling you this as if I were once again twenty-two. And indeed, American films ensured that we are forever young: Film became our lifestyle. MA: During the time of the New Munich Group there was somewhat of a feeling of belonging to a group. But Zihlmann said to me: “I was not a go-getter [Macher], but Lemke was.”25 Such go-getters are always somewhat lone warriors: if you want to do something and others do not, then you have to do it on your own. KL: This attitude is directly taken from American cinema. Just do it and risk that you get punched in the mouth more often than being kissed in the dark. To not succumb to this European depression and instead to figure out how to escape it: this is what American film offered to us. These films are always just about this one thing: how can I face the abyss in which I find myself? By doing and doing, even when I get punched in the mouth. This is still better than merely to think about the abyss. This was Heidegger, where I realized that he does not read from a manuscript and instead simply lets language speak. It did not matter that everyone was drunk. The air must have been terrible in the lecture hall. But I had the feeling that Heidegger preferred talking into the alcohol-soaked air to having those people sitting there taking notes. I only sat in three lectures, after which I knew what I needed to know and stopped attending. I once got an award at the Venice Film Festival for Liebe ist so schön wie Liebe (Love Is as Beautiful as Love, 1971), a small, wonderful Hippie-film. Fritz Lang was supposed to present the award, but he refused, as he did not

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want to present an award for such nonsense. Robert Siodmak stood in for Lang. Of course, we would have preferred Lang, given how much we admired him. John Ford was at the festival as well, but he was already very ill. A few people were allowed to see him in his hotel room in the Excelsior, including Bernardo Bertolucci. I was invited as well, because another director liked my girlfriend at the time, Sylvie Winter. Just a few boys were allowed to visit him, together with a handful of famous people. I was the opposite of famous. Fassbinder was not part of it, even though he was at the festival with Warnung für eine heilige Nutte (Beware of a Holy Whore, 1971). MA: You admired the Lang of the German or of the American period? KL: The American Lang. But he was the first who established German cinema. M (1931): suddenly they all talk in Kölsch (Cologne dialect)! It is incredible that suddenly, among all those Goethe-German films, there is one who allows his actors to speak Kölsch. People loved this. His American films were a bit dark, but we liked them. They kept us alive. And time and again Hawks: the idea that you can escape into professionalism when faced with the superiority of girls. This was the last safety net. This is what we learned from Hawks. Child’s play, to be sure, but this keeps you alive. Take Werner Enke, for example. No one would have ever considered casting him. The Bavaria did not even hire him as an extra, but we had to make our first film, Kleine Front, together. Subsequently, I was supposed to make Zur Sache, Schätzchen (Go For It, Baby, May Spils, 1968), but then I had to leave for America to make 48 Stunden bis Acapulco. So, I did not make this film. Luckily. I have messed up enough with bad comedies. I have made so many bad films—it is unbelievable. But Brandstifter and also Mein schönes kurzes Leben (My Beautiful Short Life, 1970): these are two true films, even before my Hamburg films, where we finally had real people, real guys: rockers.26 For we were not real guys; we were already the dream of a dream of American cinema. But suddenly we got to know Germans who broke our hearts. MA: Were you afraid of the rockers? KL: Yes. We were spoiled. This was the first reality in our lives. The other was merely that we did not have any money, that we were always drunk, that we wanted drugs we could not get, and that we went to the movies. And suddenly we meet real people who have their own lives and do not allow us to partake in it. I was lucky to get in with them: it was the gift Hamburg gave to a guy from Munich who had no clue. This is a totally irrational thing. At times I tried to become a bit more mainstream and to develop my own stars, which worked quite nicely. But I was never satisfied with this. It

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was never what I really wanted. I did not want anything else but what Martin Scorsese always did: to create moments of sudden ecstasy. This indescribable feeling is occasionally in 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, which was new for the time but also incomprehensible. The whole film is incomprehensible, but we soaked up everything from American films and had to translate it. MA: It is this incomprehensible element that fascinates you—that things are at times beyond comprehension, because there are gaps that cannot be sutured. I imagine this was not easy to handle for West German viewers in the late 1960s. KL: They had to reject this, and we had no success with our early films. No one was able to understand them. But we could not help ourselves but to render our world in this manner. We knew that everyone else was making slick, pretty films, and it is not the case that we did not try. Thome got Uschi Obermaier, who has such a great Bavarian voice. But he destroyed it by dubbing her. MA: In Rote Sonne. KL: A beautiful film. The women were all our personal friends, except for Uschi who already hung out with different friends. MA: Because of her involvement in the Kommune 1.27 KL: Yes, that was the beginning. But we merely applied what the Americans taught us: that life is not a crossword puzzle where everything fits together in the end. This corresponded to our experience, so we made films like this. We believed doing it this way is more important than being understood by an audience. MA: Would you say that even though your films all emerge from how you received American cinema (and your dreams thereof), they are nevertheless somehow German films? KL: Yes: the rebirth of American film in the imagination of a twentyseven-year-old drunk (West) German who did not yet have any drugs. I think that in ten years German film history will tell a different story. It has already started. For years now, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung have been discovering that there is something else. MA: Such discoveries are always symptomatic of their times.

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KL: Exactly. It is quite telling about the age in which we live that these major newspapers discover this now. Everything has to do with this damned German state cinema. Since Adolf [Hitler] German cinema has been state cinema. After World War II there were fifteen years of West German comedies. They were good, skillful films. The people who made them learned their craft during the Nazi years. But in reality there was never the slightest chance that German film would affect people the way the German national soccer team affects them with their coolness. MA: The New Munich Group had a certain kind of cool Schrägheit (obliqueness) that someone like Thomas Müller has.28 What was the dynamic among the New Munich Group people? KL: This is nicely said, and a big compliment! We always met at the cinema. Thome had a press pass, as he was reviewing films for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He would go first, and then he found someone who came back with his pass to get one of us inside. This is also how we were able to go into the more expensive cinemas downtown. But mostly we spent our time in the Türkendolch and in the Bungalow bar, where everything started. It had the famous jukebox that played Elvis and the early Rolling Stones, and it had the cheapest beer, which was crucial. There were also some smalltime criminals, hustlers. This was the real world for us. This was a piece of America: sixteen square meters of America. MA: And a pinball machine? KL: Yes! Everybody always played pinball. It was so senseless, but this was America: the pinball machines were American. MA: Did you also talk about the films you saw? Or was there an unspoken sense of agreement that what one saw was cool? KL: We had a competition among ourselves where the winner was the one who could imitate Robert Mitchum the best, including speaking a few of his lines in English. That is how we always spoke with one another: we always quoted films, which is also what the French had done. MA: And today? KL: I only go to the movies alone in the afternoon. I have to go by myself and do not want to talk about them. For the point is this: the better you like the film the better you like yourself. You still live a while longer in Mitchum: you walk for another thirty minutes in his shoes before you return to yourself. This is the adventure of film. Of course, those who

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studied hard at the university rejected this as an anti-intellectual attitude. Such an anti-intellectual attitude was really new in the ’60s, and the word “anti-intellectual” did not even exist. We knew what the Frankfurt School was and were able to quote some Heidegger by heart without understanding what exactly he tried to say. But although we were intellectuals, we always wanted to get rid of this intellectual thing. I only managed to do so with Rocker—but then for real and for good. MA: If Adorno were here he would likely point out that such an antiintellectual position is, in the end, also an intellectual position in its own right. KL: Exactly! This is why I never participate in talk shows, for everything I say can easily be ridiculed. This is not a bad thing, but that is why I do not go there, because I have no interest to be intellectual and quote Baudrillard, whom one can always quote. I do not want to do this: I do not want to stand there as someone who is smart. MA: Why? KL: Because being smart does not make good films. You have a better chance to make a good film with stupidity, but smartness does not make good films.

Notes 1 I am drawing here in compressed form on Jacques Rancière’s work. See, for example, his Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010). 2 The core of the New Munich Group also included Rudolf Thome and Max Zihlmann and to varying degrees also Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Roger Fritz, Eckhart Schmidt, Martin Müller, Marran Gosov, May Spils and Werner Enke, and a few others. For a nuanced account of the New Munich Group’s composition, see Olaf Möller, “Utopia Suicide Speed Lane: Rien ne va plus,” Festivalkatalog 49. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 1.-6. Mai 2003: 167–69. 3 See Enno Patalas, “Ein Plädoyer für eine ästhetische Linke: Zum Selbstverständnis der Filmkritik II,” Filmkritik 10, no. 7 (1967): 403–7. 4 I want to thank the University of Nebraska’s Research Council for awarding me a Grant-in-Aid that enabled me to travel to Germany to do a series of interviews with the protagonists of the New Munich Group, including Lemke. 5 Fred Setterberg asserts that “poor old Dean Moriarty, his buddy Sal Paradise— and, let’s face it, Jack Kerouac—didn’t actually see very much of the country along

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the way.” The Roads Taken: Travels Through America’s Literary Landscapes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 13. 6 Lemke is referring to the longstanding practice in Germany to dub non-Germanlanguage films rather than subtitling them. West German viewers thus grow up watching films from abroad without ever getting to listen to the voices of, say, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, or Jean-Paul Belmondo. 7 Founded in 1947, the Gruppe 47 became an influential cultural institution in West Germany. Among its members were writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Peter Handke, and Alexander Kluge. 8 The Türkendolch, which existed from 1962–2001, was a small repertory cinema in Munich. 9 Lemke is referring to the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto and its impact on West German film in the mid-1960s. Together with Thome, Zihlmann, Straub, and a few others, Lemke presented a counter-manifesto of sorts at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1965. See “Untitled,” in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 153–54. 10 Houwer would produce Thome’s short film, Galaxis (1967), Volker Schlöndorff’s Mord und Todschlag (Degree of Murder, 1967), Johannes Schaaf’s Tätowierung (Tattoo, 1967), Marran Gosov’s sex comedies Engelchen oder die Jungfrau von Bamberg (Angel Baby, 1968), Zuckerbrot und Peitsche (Sugar Bread and Whip, 1968), and Bengelchen liebt kreuz und quer (The Sex Adventures of a Single Man, 1968), as well as Roland Klick’s Bübchen (Little Vampire, 1969), among others. 11 Like Grafe, Patalas wrote for what was in the 1960s and 1970s West Germany’s most influential film magazine, Filmkritik. 12 See Patalas, “Ein Plädoyer für eine ästhetische Linke.” 13 The word’s sense means a language spoken at and about work—a language that is informal and comes from within the lived reality of working together. 14 Söhnlein was a founder of Munich’s Action Theatre. On April 2, 1968, he, Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Thorward Proll set fire to two department stores in Frankfurt to protest the war in Vietnam. Unlike his comrades, he accepted his prison sentence and subsequently did not return to illegality. 15 Schlöndorff, best known for his literary adaptations, first drew attention to himself with Der junge Törless (Young Törless, 1966), one of Young German Cinema’s biggest successes. He assisted Malle on Vie privée (A Very Private Affair, 1962), Le feu follet (The Fire Within, 1963), and Viva Maria! (1965), and he also worked for Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais. 16 I spoke with Thome at his home on June 23, 2014. 17 The film screened at the festival’s thirteenth iteration in 1967. Kluge wrote a brief introduction to the film for the festival catalogue. 18 In addition to being a well-known photographer, Fritz also made a number of films, including Mädchen, Mädchen (Girls, Girls, 1967) and Mädchen mit Gewalt

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(The Brutes, 1969), and also acted as a fashion photographer in Eckhart Schmidt’s Jet-Generation: Wie Mädchen heute Männer lieben (How Girls Love Men of Today, 1968). 19 Martin Müller directed among other films Die Kapitulation (The Capitulation, 1967), Zinnsoldat (Tin Soldier, 1968), Anatahan, Anatahan (1968), Unser Doktor (Our Doctor, 1970), as well as co-directed with Veith von Fürstenberg the feature film Furchtlose Flieger (Fearless Pilots, 1971). 20 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was an influential Italian publisher sympathetic to the political left. 21 Helmut Färber, “Rasante Jagd nach Geld,” Süddeutsche Zeitung December 4, 1967. 22 Frieda Grafe, Review of 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, Filmkritik 12 (1967): 8. 23 Graf is arguably Germany’s most important genre filmmaker. For scholarship in English on him, see Marco Abel, “Yearning for Genre: The Cinema of Dominik Graf,” in Generic Histories of German Cinema: Film Genre and Its Deviations, ed. Jaimey Fisher (Rochester: Camden House, 2013): 261–84. For an in-depth interview with Graf, see Marco Abel, “‘I Build a Jigsaw Puzzle of a Dream-Germany’: An Interview with German Filmmaker Dominik Graf,” Senses of Cinema 55 (JulySeptember 2010), http://sensesofcinema.com/2010/feature-articles/%E2%80% 9C%E2%80%98i-build-a-jigsaw-puzzle-of-a-dream-germany%E2%80%99-aninterview-with-german-filmmaker-dominik-graf%E2%80%9D-2/. 24 Festivalkatalog 49: Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 1.–6. Mai 2003, 181. 25 Personal conversation at Zihlmann’s home in Munich on July 8, 2014. 26 Lemke’s Hamburg films include Rocker (1972), Sylvie, and Paul (1974). 27 West Germany’s first politically motivated commune, it lasted from January 1967 to November 1969. Obermaier and Rainer Langhans, two of the most famous communards, were a couple. 28 A football player for Bayern Munich, Müller has nearly 100 appearances for the German national team. He is known for his unorthodox playing style and famously identified his ability as a Raumdeuter (interpreter of space) as one of his key strengths.

Contributors MARCO ABEL is professor of English and film studies at the University of Nebraska. His books include The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School (Camden House, 2013) and Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation. Series co-editor of Provocations, he is also co-editor of The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts: A Transnational Art Cinema; of Im Angesicht des Fernsehens: Der Filmmacher Dominik Graf; of “Christian Petzold: A Dossier,” a special section of Senses of Cinema, and of “What Was Left Politics in 1968?,” a special issue of The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. Together with Christina Gerhardt, he co-edited a special section on the Dreileben project for German Studies Review. He has published essays on German cinema and interviews with German filmmakers in journals such as Cineaste, New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Senses of Cinema, as well as in edited volumes such as The German Cinema Book and A New History of German Cinema (Camden House, 2012). TILMAN BAUMGÄRTEL is professor of media theory at the University of Applied Sciences Mainz. Previously he taught at the Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia (2009–12) and at the University of the Philippines in Manila (2005–9). His publications include the edited volume Southeast Asian Independent Cinema and his book From Guerrilla Cinema to Film Essay: Harun Farocki. His writing has also been published in die tageszeitung, Die Zeit, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Telepolis, and the Berliner Zeitung. MADELEINE BERNSTORFF is a film programmer, writer, and lecturer. Her essay “Für Frauen 1. Kapitel” tells a her-story of Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Her two recent essays “Feminismen an der dffb” and “Transnationales Lernen” (https://www.dffb-archiv.de) examine the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie and are based on new archival research. TIMOTHY SCOTT BROWN is professor of history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the late 1960s and social movements in Germany and beyond. He is the author of West Germany in the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978. He is co-editor with Andrew Lison of The Global Sixties in Sound and Vision: Media, Counterculture,

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Revolt and with Lorena Anton of Between the Avantgarde and the Everyday: Subversive Politics in Europe, 1957 to the Present. MICHAEL DOBSTADT has been Visiting Professor of German at the Technical University of Dresden since 2017. Previously, he was Research Associate at the Herder Institute at Leipzig University. He is author of Existenzmangel und schwankendes Ich. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg und Karl Philipp Moritz im Kontext einer Krisengeschichte neuzeitlicher Subjektivität (2009) and editor of Linguistik und Kulturwissenschaft. Zu ihrem Verhältnis aus der Perspektive des Faches Deutsch als Fremd- und Zweitsprache und anderer Disziplinen (2015); and of Literatur in Deutsch als Fremdsprache und internationaler Germanistik. Konzepte—Themen— Forschungsperspektiven (2014). His writing has been published in the journals Jahrbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Fremdsprache Deutsch, Zielsprache Deutsch and Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht. SEAN EEDY received his PhD at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His dissertation, “Comic Books and Culture in the German Democratic Republic, 1955–1990: Between Constructions of Power and Childhood,” focuses on the SED regime’s changing perceptions of childhood in the socialist state. He has been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and The German Historical Novel since the Eighteenth Century: More than a Bestseller. THOMAS ELSAESSER has been visiting professor at Columbia University since 2013. He is professor emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam and taught at Yale University from 2006 to 2012. Besides publishing over 200 essays in journals and collections, he has authored, edited, and co-edited some twenty volumes on film history, film theory, German and European cinema, Hollywood, Media archaeology, New Media, and Installation Art. His recently authored books include European Cinema and Continental Thought, Film History as Media Archaeology, (with Malte Hagener) Film Theory—An Introduction through the Senses, and German Cinema—Terror and Trauma: Cultural Memory Since 1945. IAN FLEISHMAN is assistant professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, where he regularly teaches courses on German-language film. He has work published or forthcoming in German Quarterly, The Germanic Review, The Journal of Austrian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, French Studies, Essays in Romanticism, Mosaic, and The Journal of Austrian Studies on subjects ranging from the Baroque to contemporary cinema. His first book, An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino, was the 2015 winner of the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award.

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CHRISTINA GERHARDT is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. She has been awarded grants by the DAAD, Fulbright Commission, and NEH; and held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Columbia University, the Free University in Berlin, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught previously. She is author of Screening the Red Army Faction: Cultural and Historical Memory, co-editor of 1968 and Global Cinema, and guest editor of 1968 and West German Cinema, a special issue of The Sixties: Journal of History, Politics and Culture, and of Adorno and Ethics, a special issue of New German Critique. Together with Marco Abel, she co-edited a special section on the Dreileben project for German Studies Review. Her writing has been published in Cineaste, Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, German Studies Review, Humanities, Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Criticla Journal, New German Critique, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and The Sixties. LISA HAEGELE is assistant professor of German at Texas State University. Her research focuses on postwar through contemporary German cinema, especially on West German cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Her research has been funded by the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. She is currently working on a book on popular West German films of the “long 1968.” Her writing has been published in the edited volumes Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema, A Transnational Art-Cinema: The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts, and Cold War Spy Stories from Eastern Europe, and in the peerreviewed journal The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. RANDALL HALLE is Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German film and cultural studies and the director of the film studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. His books include The Europeanization of Cinema: Interzones and Imaginative Communities and German Film after Germany. He is coeditor with Reinhild Steingröver of After the Avant-Garde: Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film (Camden House, 2008) and with Margaret McCarthy of Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective and Marginality and Alterity in New European Cinemas, two volumes of Camera Obscura. His essays have been published in the journals Camera Obscura, Film-Philosophy, German Quarterly, New German Critique, and Screen. PRISCILLA LAYNE is associate professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature, film and music, multiculturalism, Black German history and culture, and gender studies. She has held a residency at the American Academy in Berlin and been awarded grants by the Fulbright Commission and the Mellon Foundation. She is author of

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White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture. She has published essays on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Whity, Lothar Lambert’s 1-Berlin-Harlem, and Doris Dörrie’s Die Friseuse and in Palimpsest, the Journal for Popular Music, and the Companion to German Cinema. ERVIN MALAKAJ is assistant professor of Germanic studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on German media history, feminist and queer film historiography, and cognitive culture studies. He is completing a book project, “Anxious Telling: Fragile Literary Culture in Early Wilhelmine Germany,” and is co-editing a volume on professional literary networks throughout the long nineteenth century. His articles have been published in the journals Studies in European Cinema and Neophilologus as well as in Women Screenwriters: An International Guide and the Directory of World Cinema: Germany. KALANI MICHELL is a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Her essays on art, film, and media topics have been published in the edited volumes Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936 (Camden House, 2016) and East, West and Centre: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema and in the journal CineAction. Her recent publications include an article on the role of the comics storyboard in Christian Petzold’s shot composition in Storyboarding: Bild—Text—Bewegung and on the emergence of academic podcasts that reposition the boundaries of film and media studies in Format Matters: Theories, Histories, Practices. EVELYN PREUSS is a doctoral student in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Her dissertation focuses on the cinema of the GDR. She holds MAs in German Studies from both Yale University and the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in the peer-reviewed journals The Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Focus on Literature, and Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal and in the edited volume Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Politics and Culture. PATRICIA ANNE SIMPSON is professor of German at the University of Nebraska. Her research spans a range of topics from German classicism and romanticism to contemporary popular culture and European immigration in transatlantic modernity. She has published three books, four co-edited volumes, and over forty-five articles and book chapters in venues such as the Brecht Yearbook, German Politics and Society, Journal of International Music Education, and Seminar. FABIAN TIETKE is a film critic and curator, based in Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on film and social movements, the politics of film produc-

NOTES

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317

tion, German film history, as well as Italian, Chinese and North African cinemas. His latest publication is “Lifting the Nightcap. The West German Animation Film from 1945 to 1963” in Beloved and Rejected: Cinema in the Young Federal Republic of Germany from 1949 to 1963. His writing has been published in a range of German print and online media, including Perlentaucher, taz, Cargo, and Filmdienst. ANDREW STEFAN WEINER is assistant professor of art theory and criticism at New York University. He is currently writing a book examining the relation between experimental art and radical politics in 1960s West Germany and Austria. He has written on contemporary art for publications including Grey Room, Afterall, ARTMargins, Journal of Visual Culture, and Texte zur Kunst.

Index 16-mm, 71, 75, 85n19, 255 35-mm, 254, 261, 289 48 Stunden bis Acapulco / 48 Hours to Acapulco (1967), 4, 296, 300, 304, 307, 308, 312n22. See also Lemke, Klaus À bout de souffle / Breathless (1960), 298, 300, 306. See also Godard, Jean-Luc abortion ban and rights, 80, 98, 114, 137–42, 241, 248, 249. See also Paragraph 218 Abschied / Farewell (1968), 225. See also Günther, Egon Abschied von Gestern / Yesterday’s Girl (1966), 298. See also Kluge, Alexander Acht Stunden sind kein Tag / Eight Hours Are Not a Day (1972), 123, 127, 133n10. See also Fassbinder, Rainer Werner Adorno, Theodor W., 44, 157, 166n13, 302, 303, 310 aesthetic left, 16, 23n62, 293, 298 affect, 265n13, 293 Africa Addio / Africa Blood and Guts (1966), 43, 51n2 agency, 220, 226, 228, 229, 245, 248, 249 AKS Gruppe (AKS Group), 6 Aktionsrat zur Befreiung der Frauen (Action Council for the Liberation of Women), 74, 84n17, 85n24, 85n25, 86n33 alienation, 197, 279, 295 allegory, 147, 206, 214 allseitig reduzierte Persönlichkeit, Die / The All Around Reduced Personality

REDUPERS, 70, 72, 80–83. See also Sander, Helke alterity, 220, 229 American Forces Network (AFN), 295, 297 Amok / Amok (1984), 15, 203, 210– 14. See also H&S; Heynowski, Walter; Scheumann, Gerhard Angelika Urban, Verkäuferin / Angelika Urban, Saleswoman (1970), 239. See also SandersBrahms, Helma Angestellte, Der / The Employee (1972), 239. See also SandersBrahms, Helma animation, 187, 189, 190, 193, 197, 289 Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzureißen / Instructions, How to Pull Helmets off Police (1969), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Anthology Film Archive, 6 anti-authoritarianism, 28, 34, 35, 40n36 anti-colonialism, 1, 92, 202–4, 209, 287 antifascism, antifascist, 33, 55, 187, 193, 194, 197, 199n34, 202, 203, 214, 224 anti-imperialism, 1, 45, 46, 65, 187, 192, 202–5, 209, 214, 278, 286 anti-intellectualism, 292, 310 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 303. See also Blow-up aperture, 94, 96 Après Mai / Something in the Air (2012), 293–94. See also Assayas, Olivier

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INDEX

Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik / Workers Leaving the Factory (1995), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Arbeiterfilme (workers’ films), 3, 6, 13, 20n29, 79, 80, 85n29, 119n7, 122–33 archive, 17, 52n24, 56, 228, 229, 303 arme Müllerbursch und das Kätzchen, Der / The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Kitten (1970), 184, 190–93, 195, 199n23, 199n27 art, 14, 16, 32, 46, 88, 90, 100, 160 art cinema, 14, 134, 137, 148, 266n21 Arzt von St. Pauli, Der / The Doctor of St. Pauli (1968), 136, 138–43, 145, 150n20, 150n33, 150n34. See also Olsen, Rolf Assayas, Olivier, 293. See also Après Mai Aufbau (construction of socialist society), 201, 209, 214 aufrechte Gang, Der / Walking Tall (1975), 123. See also Ziewer, Christian Außerparlamentarische Opposition (APO, Extraparliamentary Opposition), 33, 34, 54, 84n17, 94–95, 158 Austria, 2, 6, 7, 10, 138, 152–67 Austrian cinema, 2, 3, 4, 14, 17, 104n63, 152–67 Austrian Filmmakers’ Cooperative, 6, 14, 104n63, 152–67, 284, 288, 290n10 auteur (Second Cinema), 3, 50, 125, 128, 132, 218, 221, 222, 256, 263 autonomy, 14, 41n41, 74, 155, 215n4, 221, 222, 279 avant-garde cinema, 3, 13, 14, 16, 18n14, 22n59, 31, 48, 91, 101n12, 132, 155, 159, 165n6, 165n7, 232n20, 276, 281, 282, 283, 286, 288, 289, 291n16 Baader, Andreas, 164, 296, 298, 301, 311n14 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 241, 251n23

Bad Girl Avenue (2018), 292. See also Lemke, Klaus Basis Verlag, 132 Basisgruppen (action groups), 49, 107, 109 Baudrillard, Jean, 310 Becher, Johannes R., 225 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 300, 306, 311n7 Berlin, 2. Juni / Berlin, June 2, 13, 44, 46, 51n15, 53, 54, 57, 59, 61–65, 66n1, 68n22, 69, 83n2. See also Minow, Hans-Rüdiger Berlin International Film Festival, 12, 41n42, 79, 133n10, 280, 290n9, 292 Berlin School, 294 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 307 Beyer, Frank, 224, 235n46. See also Nackt unter Wölfen Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges / Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1988), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Bitomsky, Hartmut, 12, 43, 65, 68n32, 96, 103n43, 275, 291n14 Bitterfelder Weg, 185, 187, 193, 196, 197 Black Panthers, 1, 108 Blow-up (1966), 303. See also Antonioni, Michelangelo Boetticher, Budd, 295 Bohm, Hark, 263 Böll, Heinrich, 120n24, 204, 311n7 Brakhage, Stan, 285, 290 Brando, Marlon, 172, 173, 304, 305, 311n6 Brandstifter / Arsonist (1969), 300, 307. See also Lemke, Klaus Brecht, Bertolt, Brechtian, 96, 128, 133n13, 176, 223, 225, 272 Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure / Break the Power of the Manipulators (1967), 47, 69, 94, 103n37, 107, 238. See also Sander, Helke Brücke, Die / The Bridge (1959), 304 Buñuel, Luis, 285 Buchenwald, 209, 224

INDEX bureaucracy, 222, 223, 227, 260 Cannes Film Festival, 295 capitalism, capitalist, 42, 44, 74, 124, 146–48, 158, 165, 167n26, 170, 173, 187, 192, 195, 196, 203, 206, 207, 210, 213, 218, 222, 223, 238, 240, 249, 262, 277, 293 cartoons, 183–200 censorship, 192, 196, 222, 224, 226, 227, 229, 233n30, 234n43, 286, 287, 290 Chronique d’un été / Chronicle of a Summer (1961), 57, 59, 68n22 childcare, 70, 73–76, 78, 80, 274 Chytilová, Věra, 3, 91 cinema. See East German Cinema; New German Cinema; Hollywood (First Cinema); Second Cinema; Third Cinema cinéma vérité, 3, 54, 56, 57, 63, 68n22, 203, 204, 272 Cinémathèque, Paris, 284 Clarke, Shirley, 91, 290n12 class, 1, 18n13, 49, 74, 75, 91, 116, 121n38, 122–33, 136, 137, 139, 158, 170, 187, 188, 189, 192, 195, 210, 219, 223, 231n6, 239 close-ups, 63, 93, 140, 141, 142, 215, 254, 257, 263 Cold War, 14, 46, 139, 201–4, 207–9, 220–22, 225, 229, 233n22 collective filmmaking, 3, 42, 48–50, 113, 115, 277 Collins, Richard, 125 commercialization, commercialized, 5, 222, 227 commodification, 138, 144, 147, 222 communism, communist, 36, 46, 97, 157, 183, 202, 206, 207, 219, 224, 279, 280n3 Conradt, Gerd, 16, 51n11, 291n14. See also Starbuck Holger Meins consciousness industry, 44 Costard, Helmuth, 6, 15, 46, 253–67, 275, 280n6. See also Der kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film



321

crime films, 14, 134–51 cruel optimism, 15, 237, 238, 248, 250 Debord, Guy, 230, 251n17, 251n21 decolonization, 43, 264 Deep Play (2007), 273. See also Farocki, Harun DEFA, 2, 169, 170, 171, 173, 180n6, 183–200, 202, 207, 210– 12, 214, 222, 224, 230, 233n24, 234n37, 234n43, 235n45, 235n46, 235n57 DEFA Fairy Tale Trickfilme, 14, 183– 200, 234n37 Deleuze, Gilles, 7–10, 21n33, 21n36, 21n47 democracy, democratic, 27, 44, 48, 50, 51n6, 63, 88, 125, 130, 137– 39, 146, 148, 162, 180, 192, 204, 205, 220, 221, 223, 227, 239, 280n9 denazification, 2, 39n27, 157 derives, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 248 Derrida, Jacques, 229, 279 Detektive / Detectives (1968), 303. See also Thome, Rudolf détournement, 241, 242 deutsche film und fernsehakademie berlin (dffb, German Film and Television Academy Berlin), 5, 12, 13, 16, 20n27, 22n55, 22n57, 42–52, 53–68, 69–86, 92–97, 100n2, 105–9, 112–16, 118n2, 119n7, 119n9, 120n17, 120n23, 128, 238, 239, 271–80, 289 dialectics, 165, 210, 215, 222, 231n5, 293 Dickinson, Angie, 305, 306 didactic filmmaking, 170, 212, 238, 239, 244, 249 direct cinema, 3, 54, 57, 68n19 dissensus, 163, 292, 293, 310n1 distribution of the sensible, 9, 21n44, 293 Dmytryk, Edward, 230 documenta, 273, 288

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documentary, 3, 12, 14, 16, 31, 32, 33, 36, 43, 46, 47, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 65, 67n6, 67n17, 68n19, 69n22, 70, 73, 82, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 111, 116, 117, 123, 126, 127, 128, 132, 136, 141, 142, 162, 201–17, 238–41, 248, 256, 261, 273, 285, 287, 290 Drei / Three (1966), 298, 300. See also Lemke, Klaus Duell / Duel (1966), 300, 305. See also Lemke, Klaus Dutschke, Rudi, 28, 43, 44, 94, 105, 107, 207, 245 early Romanticism, 35, 40n38 East German cinema, 4, 14, 15, 168– 82, 183–200, 201–17, 218–36 East Germany, East German, 2–4, 7, 14, 15, 17, 55, 168–80, 183–85, 187–90, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199n42, 203, 208, 209, 214, 218, 219–30, 231n5, 232n15, 232n18, 233n24, 234n36, 234n43, 235n45, 236n68, 274, 279, 280n11. See also GDR Ehmann, Antje, 273. See also Labour in a Single Shot Der einsame Wanderer / The Lonely Wanderer (1968), 271. See also Sauber, Phillip Electric Cinema, The, 288 Eleventh Plenum, 7, 185, 188, 189, 196, 197, 226 emancipation, emancipatory, 15, 28, 35, 37, 74, 96, 114, 124, 163, 168, 220, 223 emergency laws, 43, 49, 69 empowerment, empowering, 96, 97, 100, 113, 220, 223 Engel von St. Pauli, Die / Angels of the Street (1969), 137, 138, 143, 146, 147, 149n2. See also Roland, Jürgen Enke, Werner, 4, 5, 294, 295, 307, 310n2 Ensslin, Gudrun, 164, 205, 301, 311n14

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 44, 311n7 Epileptic Seizure Comparison (1976), 288. See also Sharits, Paul Eros, O Basileus (1967), 286. See also Markopoulos, Gregory Exit (1968), 164. See also Weibel, Peter expanded cinema, 14, 154, 155, 162 experimental cinema, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 47, 48, 56, 77, 89, 91, 99, 100, 141, 153, 154, 158, 159, 256, 257, 260, 263, 276, 280n8, 281–91 exploitation films, 3, 14, 43, 134–51 Export, Valie, 14, 100, 104n62, 152– 67 exprmntl film festival Knokke, 16, 47, 91, 159, 275, 280n8, 281, 283, 284, 286, 298n3, 290n7 Familienglück / A Happy Family (1975), 123. See also Kratisch, Ingo; Lüdcke, Marianne Färber, Helmut, 304 Farocki, Harun, 12, 13, 16, 43, 45–48, 65, 66, 92, 94, 97, 103n49, 105, 107, 114, 239, 264n1, 271– 73, 286, 290n14. See also Anleitung, Polizisten den Helm abzureißen; Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik; Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges; Deep Play; Ihre Zeitungen; Leben BRD; Unlöschbares Feuer; Videogramme einer Revolution; Die Worte des Vorsitzenden; Zwei Wege; Zwischen zwei Kriegen Farrokhzad, Forough, 91, 102n19. See also Khaneh Siah Ast Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 4, 5, 20n29, 122, 262, 263, 267n43, 303, 307. See also Acht Stunden sind kein Tag; Warnung für eine heilige Nutte Federal Republic of Germany, 27, 42, 50, 87, 123, 133n3, 133n17, 156, 183, 189, 205, 216n10 feminism, 1, 13, 15, 20n22, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81–83, 84n11, 84n16,

INDEX 85n29, 89, 92, 95, 99, 105, 119n9, 152, 164, 165n25, 237 feminist filmmaking, 3, 13, 15, 52n17, 69, 70, 71, 80, 82, 83, 83n3, 83n4, 83–84n8, 87, 91, 94, 97–100, 100n2, 152, 237–52 Feriendienst (vacation bureau), 169, 174, 177 Film als Idee (Film as Idea), 104n61, 281, 289n1 Film Culture, 285 film distribution, 42, 48, 49, 50, 132, 136, 221, 253 film festivals, 5, 12, 16, 41n42, 47, 79, 80, 85n19, 87, 88, 89, 114, 124, 132, 133n10, 159, 164, 254, 275, 280n8, 281, 283, 288, 290n5, 290n11, 295, 303, 305, 306, 311n9 film funding, 253–67 film journals, 70, 80, 81, 88, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101n9, 103n49, 114, 121n29, 249, 261, 266n31, 273, 296, 298, 310n3, 311n11. See also Filmkritik; Frauen und Film film schools. See specific film schools Filmkritik, 88, 97, 98, 100, 103n49, 114, 121n29, 261, 266n31, 273, 296, 298, 310n3, 311n11 Filmstudio 70, 284 Flipper (1966), 300, 306. See also Lemke, Klaus Fluxus, 159 fond de l’air est rouge, Le / A Grin without a Cat (1979), 2. See also Marker, Chris Ford, John, 295, 307 Foucault, Michel, 9, 11, 266n26, 279 found footage, 272 Frankfurt School, 42, 44, 90, 302, 310 Frauen und Film (Women and Film), 70, 80, 81, 99, 101n9, 249 Frauenbetriebsgruppen (women’s groups in factories), 79 French New Wave, 3, 16; Nouvelle Vague, 285, 295, 296 Fritz, Roger, 6, 303, 310n2, 311n18



323

Für Frauen 1. Kapitel / For Women: Chapter 1 (1971), 96, 112–14, 120n26. See also Perincioli, Cristina Gai Savoir, Le / Joy of Learning (1969), 276. See also Godard, JeanLuc Gallehr, Theo, 5, 6. See also Rote Fahnen sieht man besser gay, 1, 135, 138, 147, 151n43, 303 gaze, male, 79, 91, 153, 161, 302 GDR, 14, 15, 64, 168, 169, 171, 173–75, 177, 179, 183–85, 187– 89, 193, 195, 196, 201–3, 206, 207, 209, 210, 214, 215, 215n4, 215n6, 218, 220–25, 229, 231n1, 231n6, 232n15, 234n36. See also East Germany Gegenöffentlichkeit (oppositional public sphere), 42, 44 genre, 3, 13, 14, 16, 82, 122, 123, 126, 130, 131, 134–36, 139, 162, 170–72, 181n19, 184, 190, 192, 196, 198n7, 207, 246, 277, 288, 312n23 German Autumn, 19n18, 273, 275 Geschichte vom Fischer und seiner Frau, Die / The Story of the Fisherman and His Wife (1975), 184, 193, 194 Getino, Octavio, 3, 19n15, 224, 227– 29, 234n41, 287. See also La hora de los hornos Giefer, Thomas, 47, 58–62, 66–67n1, 69 Gmelin, Otto, 106–8 Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 4, 18n9, 19n16, 56, 253, 254, 256, 262, 263, 266n28, 267n46, 271, 277, 285, 298. See also À bout de souffle; Le Gai Savoir; Letter to Jane Good Bye, Lenin! (2004), 230 Graf, Dominik, 294, 305, 312n23 Grafe, Frieda, 98, 298, 304, 311n11 Gregor, Ulrich, 98, 275, 280n7 Grimm fairy tale(s), 184, 185, 187– 91, 193, 195, 197 Gruppe Basis-Film, die (The BasisFilm Group), 108–12, 114–15

324



INDEX

Gruppe 3 (Group 3), 48, 49, 94, 106– 8, 117, 118, 118n3 Gruppe 47 (Group 47), 297, 311n7 Guattari, Félix, 8 Günther, Egon, 222, 233n30. See also Abschied H&S, 14, 202–14, 215n4. See also Amok Hair (Musical) (1977), 36 Hamburg Filmmacher Cooperative (Hamburg Filmmakers’ Cooperative), 5 Happenings, 2, 16, 159, 162 Hartwig, Wolf C., 134, 136, 142 Hatari! (1962), 294, 295. See also Hawks, Howard Haus am Meer, Ein / A House by the Sea (1966), 300, 303. See also Lemke, Klaus Haußmann, Leander, 218, 230. See also Sonnenallee Hawks, Howard, 295, 296, 301, 304, 307. See also Hatari!; Rio Bravo hegemony, hegemonic, 87, 156, 160, 165, 201, 203, 221, 229, 234n36 Heidegger, Martin, 292, 299, 301, 302, 306, 310 Heimatfilm, 88, 171, 235n45 Hein, Birgit, 16, 99, 104n60, 159, 281–89. See also Rohfilm Hein, Wilhelm, 16, 99, 281, 282, 290n7, 290n8. See also Rohfilm Heißer Sommer / Hot Summer (1968), 14, 168–82 Henker Tom / Hangman Tom (1966), 300, 306. See also Lemke, Klaus Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktail / How to Make a Molotov Cocktail (1968), 45, 238, 276. See also Meins, Holger Herzog, Werner, 4, 5, 122, 272, 285. See also Behinderte Zukunft; Jeder ein Berliner Kindl Heynowski, Walter, 14, 201–17 His-story (1972), 97, 98 history of science, 257

Hochschule für Bildende Künste (HBK, Braunschweig University of Art), 50, 289 Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (hff, University of Television and Film in Munich), 5, 16, 53, 289 Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (hfg, School for Design Ulm), 5, 16, 20n26, 53, 56, 83–84, n8, 90, 91, 95, 98, 101n10, 102n17, 102n18, 118n1, 291 Hollywood (First Cinema), 3, 16, 124, 174, 221, 222, 226, 228, 230, 233n25, 233n29, 267n43, 290n12, 293, 295, 304, 305 Holocaust, 216n9, 284 hora de los hornos, La / The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), 287. See also Getino, Octavio; Solanas, Fernando E. Houwer, Rob, 297, 311n10 Huberty, James, 210–14 Huillet, Danièle, 310 Hunger in Waldenburg / The Shadow of a Mine (1929), 128 Husserl, Edmund, 302 Ich bin eine Elefant, Madame / I’m an Elephant, Madame (1969), 27–41. See also Zadek, Peter Ich War Neunzehn / I Was Nineteen (1968), 225, 226, 230, 234n44. See also Wolf, Konrad identity, 8, 88, 139, 205, 219, 221, 223, 233n24, 234n36, 239, 246 Ihre Zeitungen / Their Newspapers (1967), 45, 106, 272. See also Farocki, Harun Institut für Filmgestaltung Ulm (Ulm Institute for Film Design), 5, 90, 290–91n14 International Underground Film Festival, 288 irony, 34, 40n37, 176, 230, 234n36 Italian Co-op, 288 Italian Neo-Realism, 3

INDEX Jeder ein Berliner Kindl / Everybody a Berliner Kindl (1966), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Jet-Generation: Wie Mädchen heute Männer lieben / How Girls Love Men of Today (1968), 311–12n18. See also Schmidt, Eckhart Johnson & Co und der Feldzug gegen Armut / Johnson and Company and the March against Poverty (1968), 275. See also Bitomsky, Hartmut Kaninchenfilme (Rabbit Films), 170 Kerouac, Jack, 172, 296, 297, 310n5 Khittl, Ferdinand, 283, 289–90n3 Kinder sind keine Rinder / Children Are Not Cattle (1969), 70, 73, 75–77, 79, 80, 82. See also Sander, Helke Kinderfilm(e) (children’s films), 189, 193, 197 Kinderkultur (children’s culture), 189, 190, 193 Kinderläden (self-organized, cooperative childcare centers), 74–77, 79, 80, 82, 84n12, 84n13, 108, 119n9, 274 Kinogramme, 109–11. See also Willutzki, Max; Ziewer, Christian Klammer auf, Klammer zu / Open Parenthesis, Close Parenthesis (1966), 275. See also Meins, Holger Kleine Front / Small Front (1965), 294, 295, 300, 307. See also Lemke, Klaus kleine Godard: An das Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film, Der / The Little Godard: To the Production Board for Young German Cinema (1978), 6, 15, 253–67, 280n6. See also Costard, Hellmuth Klick, Roland, 294 Klopp, Heinz, 294, 295 Kluge, Alexander, 4, 5, 12, 22n55, 51n7, 53, 56, 90, 142, 221, 222, 285, 290n11, 292, 297, 302, 303, 311n7, 311n17. See also Abschied



325

von Gestern; Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin Knaudt, Ulrich, 45, 94, 106 Kohlhaase, Wolfgang, 219. See also Ich War Neunzehn Kollektiv Westberliner Filmarbeiter (KWF, West Berlin Film Workers’ Collective), 49, 50 Kölner Gruppe (Cologne Group), 294 Kommune 1, 27, 28, 35, 38n13 Kratisch, Ingo, 123. See also Familienglück; Lohn und Liebe; Die Wollands Kren, Kurt, 154, 159–61, 163, 290n13. See also Tapp- und Tastkino Kubelka, Peter, 6, 158, 163, 285 Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film, 4, 98, 253–67 Kursbuch, 44, 121n31 Kusturica, Emir, 230 Labour in a Single Shot, 273. See also Ehmann, Antje; Farocki, Harun lack/suture, 226, 228 Lang, Fritz, 306, 307 Leben BRD / How to Live in the FRG (1990), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Leben der Anderen, Das / The Lives of Others (2006), 230 left melancholy, 244–47 Legende von Paul und Paula, Die / The Legend of Paul and Paula (1973), 225 Leiser, Erwin, 55, 56, 64, 66, 107 Lemke, Klaus, 4, 5, 14, 16, 19, 23n61, 292–310, 311n6, 311n9, 312n26. See also 48 Stunden bis Acapulco; Bad Girl Avenue; Brandstifter; Drei; Duell; Flipper; Ein Haus am Meer; Henker Tom; Kleine Front; Liebe ist so schön wie Liebe; Mein schönes kurzes Leben; Negresco****—Eine tödliche Affäre; Rocker; Sylvie lesbian, 113, 114, 120n24, 138 Letter to Jane (1972), 272. See also Godard, Jean-Luc

326



INDEX

Liebe ist so schön wie Liebe / Love Is as Beautiful as Love (1971), 306. See also Lemke, Klaus Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut / Dear Mother, I’m Doing Well (1971), 110, 111, 123. See also Ziewer, Christian Lissitzky, El, 287 LOFT, 284 Lohn und Liebe / Pay Packet and Love (1974), 123. See also Kratisch, Ingo London Filmmakers’ Co-op, 159, 288 Lorenz, Peter, 275, 280n5 Lüdcke, Marianne, 71, 123. See also Familienglück; Lohn und Liebe; Die Wollands M (1931), 307. See also Lang, Fritz Malle, Louis, 301, 311n15. See also Viva Maria! Mannheim Declaration, 20n28 Marcuse, Herbert, 44, 239, 271 Marker, Chris, 3, 18n10, 68n22, 88, 91, 277. See also Le fond de l’air est rouge market, marketplace, 49, 122, 132, 210, 221, 222, 233n25, 261 Markopoulos, Gregory, 285, 286, 290n12. See also Eros, O Basileus Marx Brothers, 300 Marxist, 45, 49, 103n52, 123, 209, 222, 223, 231n5, 233n25, 266n19, 275, 279 Meerapfel, Jeanine, 84n8, 90, 291n14 Mein schönes kurzes Leben / My Beautiful Short Life (1970), 307. See also Lemke, Klaus Meins, Holger, 16, 43, 45, 47, 48, 249, 271–78, 290–91n14. See also Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktail; Klammer auf, Klammer zu; Oskar Langenfeld 12x Mekas, Jonas, 6, 290n12 melodrama, 124 Menzel, Jiři, 3, 230 Mikesch, Elfi, 99, 104n59 Minow, Hans-Rüdiger, 16, 43, 53–66, 66–67n1, 68n22, 68n27, 69. See also Berlin, 2. Juni

Mitchum, Robert, 304, 309, 311n6 modernity, 36, 166n15, 184, 193, 196, 226, 249, 302 Moholy-Nagy, László, 283 montage, 45, 60, 89, 90, 95, 154, 162, 178, 179, 204, 225, 256, 261, 262, 266n28, 283 movie hall, movie theater, 89, 163, 170, 227, 228 Muehl, Otto, 286, 290n13 Müller, Inge, 201, 202, 214 Müller, Martin, 6, 303, 310n2, 312n19, 312n28 Müller, Thomas, 309 music, 34, 113, 148, 170, 171, 172, 181n13, 216n6, 253, 257, 277, 289, 299, 300 musical, 3, 14, 36, 82, 91, 155, 168– 82 Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück / Mother Krause’s Journey into Happiness (1929), 128 Nackt unter Wölfen / Naked among Wolves (1963), 224, 226. See also Beyer, Frank National Socialism (Nazi), 31, 33, 39n27, 55, 87, 88, 90, 129, 136, 139, 140, 156–58, 171, 201, 206, 224, 225, 296, 297, 309 Negresco****—eine tödlich Affäre / Negresco**** (1968), 4, 300, 303. See also Lemke, Klaus Negri, Antonio, 22n51 Neue Münchner Gruppe (New Munich Group, NMG), 5, 6, 14, 16, 20n30, 23n61, 293, 294, 297, 298, 300, 302, 303, 305, 306, 309, 310n2, 310n4 Neun Leben hat die Katze / The Cat Has Nine Lives (1968), 98. See also Stöckl, Ula New American Cinema, 100, 284–86, 289–90n3, 290n8, 290n12 New German Avant-garde Film, 16, 281, 282 New German Cinema, 2, 5, 15, 16, 19n19, 20n22, 20n24, 122, 134,

INDEX 141, 221, 222, 233n24, 253, 263, 281, 282, 285 New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative, 288 No Intenso Agora / In the Intense Now (2017), 2 Oberhausen Manifesto, 3–5, 7, 16, 19n21, 20n23, 20n28, 53, 56, 66, 67n23, 89, 90, 98, 290n11, 292, 297, 311n9 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, 88, 89, 114, 254, 283, 290n5, 290n11, 303, 305, 311n9 Obermaier, Uschi, 308, 312n27 Oedipus, 302 Ohnesorg, Benno, 13, 44, 54, 58, 63–65, 69, 92, 94, 105, 207, 284 Olsen, Rolf, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142. See also Der Arzt von St. Pauli On the Road, 172, 296 Oskar Langenfeld 12x (1966), 275. See also Meins, Holger Papas Kino, 89, 293 paracinema, 135 Paragraph 218, 248. See also abortion ban and rights Parallelstraße, Die / The Parallel Street (1961), 283, 289–90n3. See also Khittl, Ferdinand participatory filmmaking, 13, 83n4, 85n29, 105–21 Patalas, Enno, 17, 23n62, 88, 90, 293, 298, 310n3, 311n11, 311n12 patriarchy, 164, 205, 244 Pehnert, Horst, 227 performance, 14, 152–67 Perincioli, Cristina, 71, 80, 84n11, 86n34, 86n36, 96, 103n44, 103n45, 105–21 photography, 65, 155, 160, 229, 288, 289n2 political cinema, 3, 4, 16, 79, 85n30, 106–8, 118, 135, 238, 239, 293 political left, 16, 23n62, 107, 138, 293, 295, 298, 312n20



327

polyphony, 219 polyvalency, 228 popular cinema, 149n1, 169 Porter, Vincent, 125, 129, 131, 133n4 postwar, 14–16, 27, 40, 89, 129, 131 134, 136–40, 147, 148, 153, 156, 157, 166n14, 201, 203, 206, 209, 215, 218, 221, 266n27, 272, 273, 281, 289n3, 297 Prague Spring, 91, 168, 172–74, 179, 185, 189, 196, 197, 202, 204, 224 Prämie für Irene, Eine / A Reward for Irene (1971), 70, 79, 80, 82, 86n32, 108, 113. See also Sander, Helke Proll, Thorward, 301, 311n14 Provos, 159 psychogeography, 240, 243, 244 public sphere, 2, 13, 42, 47, 82, 83n4, 87–104, 107, 131, 152, 201, 215, 233n26 Quinn, Freddy, 34 racism, 1, 34, 81, 206 Rancière, Jacques, 9, 21n44, 155, 166n11, 310n1 Rathsack, Heinz, 56, 64, 107 realism, 56, 125, 132, 141, 142, 170, 247 Red Army Faction (RAF), 16, 19, 36, 37, 45, 84n11, 84n12, 204, 205, 216n9, 216n13, 250–51n5, 271, 274, 277–79, 280n10, 296, 300 Reidemeister, Helga, 114–21 Reitz, Edgar, 5, 12, 53, 89, 90, 261, 285 Resnais, Alain, 88, 311n15 revolution, revolutionary, 2, 8, 15, 19n15, 21n32, 29–31, 33–35, 38n16, 43, 45–47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 66, 97, 99, 100, 130, 163, 164, 166n10, 176, 199–200n42, 202, 203, 205, 206, 208, 218–27, 230, 231n4, 231n5, 238, 240, 245, 246, 250, 250–51n5, 254, 256, 258, 264, 266n19, 271–73, 276, 287, 290n13, 295, 304

328



INDEX

Rio Bravo (1959), 300, 305. See also Hawks, Howard road movies, 178 Rocha, Glauber, 3, 4, 18n12 Rocker (1972), 310, 312n26. See also Lemke, Klaus Rohfilm (Raw Film) (1968), 284, 285. See also Hein, Birgit; Hein, Wilhelm Roland, Jürgen, 137, 143, 144–47, 149n2. See also Die Engel von St. Pauli; St. Pauli Report Rolling Stones, 171, 299, 309 Rote Fahnen sieht man besser / Red Flags Are More Visible (1971), 6, 123, 126–28. See also Gallehr, Theo; Schübel, Rolf Rote Sonne / Red Sun (1969), 23n61, 303, 308. See also Thome, Rudolf Sander, Helke, 5, 12, 13, 16, 43, 47, 48, 52n17, 69–86, 92–95, 98, 99, 102n26, 102–3n37, 114, 119n9, 249. See also Brecht die Macht der Manipulateure; Kinder sind keine Rinder; Eine Prämie für Irene; Subjektitüde; Der subjektive Faktor Sanders-Brahms, Helma, 5, 122, 237– 52. See also Angelika Urban, Verkäuferin; Der Angestellte; Shirins Hochzeit Sauber, Philip, 120n23, 271, 277 Scheumann, Gerhard, 14, 201–17. See also Amok Schlagerfilm (blockbuster), 168, 172 Schleiermacher, Detten, 5, 53, 90 Schlöndorff, Volker, 4, 5, 122, 301, 311n15 Schmidt, Eckhart, 154, 310n2. See also Jet-Generation: Wie Mädchen heute Männer lieben Schneeglöckchen blühen im September / Snowdrops Bloom in September (1973), 123. See also Ziewer, Christian Schübel, Rolf, 6. See also Rote Fahnen sieht man besser Schwabing, 300, 301, 303 Schwarzer, Alice, 84n16, 241

Scorsese, Martin, 308 Second Cinema, 3, 50, 125, 128, 132, 218, 221, 222, 256, 263 Seberg, Jean, 306 self-reflexivity, 15, 35, 161, 162, 214, 228, 258 sexuality, 9, 17, 43, 49, 135, 136, 164, 220, 232n21 Sharits, Paul, 159. See also Epileptic Seizure Comparison Shirins Hochzeit / Shirin’s Wedding (1975), 123, 250. See also SandersBrahms, Helma short films, 3, 5, 12, 45, 47, 72, 87–104, 159, 272, 272, 283, 288, 292–95, 300 Simon, Rainer, 222, 230 Siodmak, Robert, 307 Situationist International (situationists), 28, 42, 159, 240, 241–44, 246, 246, 247 slave language, 223, 224 Snow, Michael, 159. See also Wavelength socialism, socialist, 14, 47, 48, 65, 80, 158, 168–76, 179, 180n6, 183–85, 187–90, 192–97, 201–10, 214, 215, 216n14, 219, 221–26, 229 socialist realism, 185, 187, 188, 196, 208 Söhnlein, Horst, 295, 300, 301, 311n14 Solanas, Fernando, 3, 19n15, 224, 227–29, 234n4. See also La hora de los hornos Sonnenallee / Sun Alley (1999), 230, 231n1. See also Haußmann, Leander sound, 54, 60, 63, 64, 65, 71, 82, 91, 96, 111, 142, 143, 146, 148, 162, 181n13, 202, 209, 253, 258, 261, 262, 263, 267n44, 273, 275, 276, 277 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party of Germany), 7, 169, 171, 183–85, 187–90, 192, 193, 197, 199n42, 201, 202, 209, 279, 280n11

INDEX Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS, Socialist German Students’ Union) 13, 28, 29, 35, 43, 44, 47, 49, 56, 64, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77–80, 95, 105, 107, 204, 245, 276, 280n9 SPD, 120n19, 297 Spils, May, 4, 5, 310n2. See also Zur Sache, Schätzchen Springer press, 2, 44–47, 49, 58, 69–70, 74, 94, 95, 102–3n37, 105– 7, 238, 239, 272 Springer Tribunal, 45 St. Pauli Report (1971), 138, 142–47. See also Roland, Jürgen Starbuck Holger Meins (2002), 16. See also Conradt, Gerd Stöckl, Ula, 83–84n8, 90, 99, 103n57. See also Neun Leben hat die Katze Stonewall Riots, 1 Straub, Jean-Marie, 285, 298, 310n2, 311n9 strikes, 63, 96, 108, 111, 126 student movement, 12, 33, 40n36, 41n42, 44–46, 53, 54, 65, 66, 95, 97, 105–8, 128, 205, 237, 244, 245, 247, 249, 251n14, 271–73 Subjektitüde (1966), 47, 70–72, 77, 79, 82, 93. See also Sander, Helke subjektive Faktor, Der / The Subjective Factor (1980), 70, 72, 74, 81–83, 95. See also Sander, Helke subsidy, subsidized, 122, 131, 220, 222, 223, 233n24, 304 subversion, 12, 36, 37, 227 Super 8 mm, 6, 115, 238, 253–58, 260–62, 289 surrealism, 27, 28, 37n13 Swiss cinema, 6. See also Perincioli, Cristina Sylvie (1973), 303, 312n26. See also Lemke, Klaus Tapp- und Tastkino / Touch and Tap Cinema (1968), 14, 100, 104n62, 152–67 television, 1, 5, 13, 17n4, 20n29, 55, 66, 71, 79, 81, 89, 90, 92, 94, 107,



329

109, 114, 122–33, 137, 143, 187, 196, 206, 207, 211, 221, 253, 254, 258, 261, 262, 263, 264n1, 267n43, 273, 275, 285 tenants’ movement, 111, 113 terrorism, 36, 204, 205, 216n9, 273 Third Cinema, 4, 15, 19n15, 218, 222, 224, 226–28, 230, 232n7, 232n13, 234n41, 235n52 Thome, Rudolf, 23n61, 5, 299, 301– 4, 306, 308, 309, 310n2, 311n9. See also Detektive; Rote Sonne; Die Versöhnung Tischlein deck dich / The Wishing Table (1970), 184–90, 192, 193, 195 tourism, 14, 137, 168, 169, 174, 175, 177, 179 Toxi (1952), 88 travel, 58, 65, 122, 136, 137, 154, 159, 164, 168, 169, 172–80, 208, 287, 296 triangulation, triangle, 222, 229 Tuchtenhagen, Gisela, 71, 105–21 UFA, 305 Unlöschbares Feuer / Inextinguishable Fire (1969), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand / Under the Pavement Lies the Strand (1974/75), 15, 237–52. See also Sanders-Brahms, Helma US film, 295, 298, 299, 305–8 utopia, 46, 95, 96, 127, 162, 169, 171, 175, 177, 178–80, 181n13, 201, 219, 231n6, 238, 245, 247, 260, 271 vacation, 14, 169, 173–77, 179 Valie Export, 14, 100, 104n63, 152, 165n1, 165n5 Varda, Agnès, 3, 91 Venice Film Festival, 306 Versöhnung, Die / Reconciliation (1964), 301. See also Thome, Rudolf Vertov, Dziga, 4, 43, 54, 56, 57, 60, 69

330



INDEX

video, 19, 50, 52, 92, 113, 120, 142, 233, 263, 272, 273, 274, 277, 288, 289 Videogramme einer Revolution / Videograms of a Revolution (1992), 273. See also Farocki, Harun Viennese Actionists, 14, 153–55, 160, 163, 285, 290n13 Vietnam, 1, 2, 14, 34, 47, 48, 53, 74, 92, 97, 106, 181n19, 201–5, 207, 216n11, 216n13, 276, 311n14; documentaries about, 14, 15, 45, 46, 65, 92, 202–4, 206–15, 216n14, 272 visual arts, 16, 155, 160, 283, 287 Viva Maria! (1965), 43, 311n15. See also Malle, Louis von Alemann, Claudia, 70, 83–84n8, 90–92, 98, 114 von Bismarck, Klaus, 126, 129 von Praunheim, Rosa, 99 von Rauch, Georg, 278 von Trotta, Margarethe, 4, 5, 122, 204 Vrkljan, Irena, 71, 92

Wolf, Konrad, 219, 220, 225, 226, 234n44, 235n46, 235n53. See also Ich War Neunzehn Wollands, Die / The Wolland Family (1972), 123. See also Kratisch, Ingo; Lüdcke, Marianne Wollen, Peter, 16 Women’s Camera (1971), 95, 96, 98 Women’s Film Seminar, First International, 1973, 70, 80, 98 Women’s Movement, 47, 50, 80, 81, 84, 90, 95, 97–99, 103n40, 141, 237–41, 244, 248, 250, 251n14 Worte des Vorsitzenden, Die / The Words of the Chairman (1967), 45, 46, 272. See also Farocki, Harun

Wages for Housework, 1, 70, 74, 78, 80, 84n16 wall, 7, 12, 32, 37, 171, 185, 188, 202, 203, 208, 221, 222, 233n22, 234n36 Walsh, Raoul, 295 Warnung für eine heilige Nutte / Beware of a Holy Whore (1971), 307. See also Fassbinder, Rainer Werner Wavelength (1967), 276. See also Snow, Michael Wayne, John, 302, 305, 306, 311n6 Weibel, Peter, 153, 154, 158–64 Weiberräte (women’s councils), 79, 241 Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), 79, 92, 125–27, 129–31, 133n4 Wiese, Klaus, 123 Willeg, Heinz, 134, 136, 150n30 Willutzki, Max, 108–21 Winter, Sylvie, 307

Zadek, Peter, 27–41. See also Ich bin eine Elefant, Madame Zielgruppen (target audience) films, 106–8 Ziewer, Christian, 43, 108–13, 116, 117, 121n38, 123, 124. See also Der aufrechte Gang; Liebe Mutter, mir geht es gut; Schneeglöckchen blühen im September Zihlmann, Max, 5, 299, 301, 306, 310n2, 311n9 Zur Sache, Schätzchen / Go For It, Baby (1968), 19n20, 307. See also Spils, May Zwei Wege / Two Paths (1966), 272. See also Farocki, Harun Zwirner, Rudolf, 284 Zwischen zwei Kriegen / Between Two Wars (1978), 272. See also Farocki, Harun

XScreen, 5, 16, 22n58, 48, 52n23, 99, 159, 166n18, 282, 284–88, 290n7, 290n13 Young German Cinema, 2, 12, 19n19, 53, 54, 122, 134, 137, 290n11, 290n12, 293, 311n15 youth culture, 168, 171, 172, 185

The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as ’68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond. “These thoughtful, incisive essays reconstruct the German film cultures wrought by 1968; they are especially illuminating about West German activist, feminist, and experimental film.” —Katie Trumpener, Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies, Yale University “The impeccably choreographed contributions to Celluloid Revolt offer a stunning act of aperture. German films from 1968 and in its wake no longer appear solely bound to the obligatory analytical frameworks, be it the triumphant narrative of the Oberhausen Manifesto and a nascent New German Cinema or revisionist retrospection on the putative failure of the Student Movement. The articles in this volume consider a diverse array of fronts, projects, and formats, traversing a heady expressive gamut from agitprop, arthouse, and avant-garde endeavors to feminist interventions, progressive TV productions, and self-reflexive film essays along with commercial features of various stripes, spanning work from both West and East Germany as well as Austria. The collection at once excavates and evokes, placing the films and events from what the editors call “the long ’68” within the realm of possibility, which is to say within the context of an effective history that is still in the state of becoming.” —Eric Rentschler, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Contributors: Marco Abel, Tilman Baumgärtel, Madeleine Bernstorff, Timothy Scott Brown, Michael Dobstadt, Sean Eedy, Thomas Elsaesser, Ian Fleishman, Christina Gerhardt, Lisa Haegele, Randall Halle, Priscilla Layne, Ervin Malakaj, Kalani Michell, Evelyn Preuss, Patricia Anne Simpson, Fabian Tietke, Andrew Stefan Weiner.

Cover image: Gerd Conradt, Farbtest. Die Rote Fahne (1968) Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

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Edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel

Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968 Edited by Christina Gerhardt and Marco Abel