Table Of ContentCinema and television studies Fisher
and The Collapse of the
“Fisher and Prager have assembled a significant group of essays by the
emerging generation of German cinema experts in the US. The anthol- Prager
ogy is the first serious attempt to retell the history of the New German
Cinema and the ‘consensus’ cinema of the 1900s through the lens
Conventional
of contemporary, post-2000 films in all their diversity. Film scholars,
students of the German cinema, and the general reading public will O T
n
“Ttdtcdihhooeiseennbc taaoteCotevmeos escltprl hao aohepnbretstaiorecereumy. t woA cptf hhu—o mtyelrtha Mu u‘lereDrsaye gter —C. Gca”ufoo cSStensriaier lcvmebbsehvie annoeernemtfsr i a yo NHacKotna nienintank,whe eleoc em ,o’hGi nUTfiaasfeteeni e rrxaori mrvsaoenne sfsadc ar ttn seCeh i si cdtCeha yo b agi Dinmonoiareef ui pnoGmpWnr faeei danGirrsh tmatctemeohnorna emednssn n tisl aiviittcmmin esnoin ,eupLf ie lnMlioiGagmtteltrahieetoraditra cd .mni”tassuueno acrowdnne-f Petzold’s Yella (2007). (Photo courtesy Christian Shu cover: Yella (Nina Hoss) suddenly awakens on the sh he Collaps
“Btohfr iisnth ghei—un cggPoe tanloyut gols eCuigtorohnsofei fikoMrce fm a,ot nphdateren oc rypfnoa eoo nlslLfeldis attci ohcnCtreiago u olumn litfan uooGg rftseefheet s erarim ms tap aantpohn dofsea rtc Cts-UauWcunnlitlnatutivu alsrle ratcceirlnsh isnsgio,tte yulUaam dnornsaidfie v t Tosisecef ur i xnsGlbaai ttentsylherd meao sa tfcaSc ALancceup ohfieseuolmdt.noi”nst,l lz) / Cover design by Maya Rhodesore following a car crash in Christian e of the German Film and
C
o
Jaimey Fisher is associate professor of German at the University of California–Davis.
He is the author of Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruc- n
Its Politics at the Turn of
tion after the Second World War (Wayne State University Press, 2007). He is also
v
co-editor (with Peter Uwe Hohendahl) of Critical Theory: Current State and Future
Prospects and (with Barbara Mennel) of Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in e
German Literary and Visual Culture. n
t the Twenty-First Century
Brad Prager is associate professor of German and film studies at the University of
i
Missouri. He is the author of Aesthetic Vision and German Romanticism: Writing o
Images and The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth. He is also
n
co-editor (with David Bathrick and Michael D. Richardson) of Visualizing the Holo-
caust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory. a
l
Contributors: Marco Abel, Roger F. Cook, John E. Davidson, Jaimey Fisher, Jennifer
M. Kapczynski, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Elisabeth Krimmer, Barbara Mennel,
Johannes von Moltke, Anna M. Parkinson, Brad Prager, Michael D. Richardson,
Wilfried Wilms
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series
Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager
Wayne State University Press / Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
The Collapse of the Conventional
00 Fisher_Prager FM.indd 1 7/7/10 7:53 AM
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series
A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu
General Editor
Barry Keith Grant
Brock University
Advisory Editors
Robert J. Burgoyne Tom Gunning
Wayne State University University of Chicago
Caren J. Deming Thomas Leitch
University of Arizona University of Delaware
Patricia B. Erens Anna McCarthy
School of the Art Institute of Chicago New York University
Peter X. Feng Walter Metz
University of Delaware Southern Illinois University
Lucy Fischer Lisa Parks
University of Pittsburgh University of California–Santa Barbara
Frances Gateward
Ursinus College
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The Collapse of the
Conventional
German Film and
Its Politics at the Turn of
the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager
wayne state university press detroit
00 Fisher_Prager FM.indd 3 7/7/10 7:53 AM
© 2010 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The collapse of the conventional : German film and its politics at the turn of the
twenty-first century / edited by Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager.
p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8143-3377-8
EISBN 978-0-8143-3688-5
1. Motion pictures—Germany—History—21st century. 2. Politics in motion pictures.
3. Motion pictures—Political aspects—Germany. I. Fisher, Jaimey. II. Prager, Brad, 1971–
PN1993.5.G3C645 2010
792.0943’09051
2010005704
Typeset by Maya Rhodes
Composed in Minion Pro and Myriad Pro
00 Fisher_Prager FM.indd 4 7/7/10 7:53 AM
Contents
Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager
Introduction 1
Jennifer M. Kapczynski
Imitation of Life: The Aesthetics of Agfacolor
in Recent Historical Cinema 39
Lutz Koepnick
Public Viewing: Soccer Patriotism and Post-Cinema 63
Elisabeth Krimmer
More War Stories: Stalingrad and Downfall 81
Anna M. Parkinson
Neo-feminist Mütterfilm? The Emotional Politics
of Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse 109
Wilfried Wilms
Dresden: The Return of History as Soap 136
Johannes von Moltke
Terrains Vagues: Landscapes of Unification
in Oskar Roehler’s No Place to Go 157
Jaimey Fisher
German Historical Film as Production Trend: European Heritage
Cinema and Melodrama in The Lives of Others 186
Michael D. Richardson
A World of Objects: Consumer Culture in Filmic
Reconstructions of the GDR 216
v
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CONTENTS
John E. Davidson
Playing Hide-and-Seek with Tradition: Games,
Aesthetic Form, and Social Critique in German Cinema
following the Wende 238
Marco Abel
Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema
of Christian Petzold 258
Kristin Kopp
Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment: The Berlin School
and the Politics of Spatial Aesthetics in the
German-Polish Borderlands 285
Roger F. Cook
Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei:
Edukating the Post-Left Generation 309
Barbara Mennel
The Global Elsewhere: Ursula Biemann’s
Multimedia Countergeography 333
Brad Prager
Glimpses of Freedom: The Reemergence of
Utopian Longing in German Cinema 360
Works Cited 387
Filmography 411
Contributors 419
Index 423
vi
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Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager
Introduction
Since the turn of the millennium German cinema has been hailed as
having “returned”—it has again captured the world’s attention and
is again vital, dynamic, and engaged. Many see in it an aesthetic and
substantive quality that had apparently diminished in the two decades
before 2000. In light of renewed attention, filmmakers and critics find
themselves embroiled in debates about the priorities and goals of that
cinema, especially as concerns its politics. One striking example is Ul-
rich Köhler’s essay “Why I Don’t Make Political Films.” The director of
Bungalow (2002) and Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday,
2006) positions himself against the demand that his films have a more
political emphasis. He argues that politically motivated screenplays—
ones guided by agendas—tend toward monocausal lines of argument
that fail to capture the world’s complexity. Without ever referring to him,
Köhler’s argument rehearses aspects of Theodor W. Adorno’s position
on aesthetic autonomy: Art, insofar as film can be understood as art,
is not an appropriate tool through which to express a political aim. Its
strength, Köhler argues, lies in its autonomy (ihre Stärke liegt in ihrer
Autonomie).1
That Köhler poses the question of political and artistic film at all
is, at this particular historical moment, symptomatic of a tectonic shift
in German cinema since the late 1990s. Over the past decade German
cinema has aroused interest based on its international acclaim and on a
widespread acknowledgment of its artistic merits. However, Köhler’s in-
vective also reverberates like an echo. It speaks to old issues, ones raised
decades ago by Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fass-
1
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jAIMey FISHeR AnD bRAD PRAGeR
binder, and others, who addressed the question of whether cinema that
concerns itself with “vision”—with the artistic project of scrutinizing the
veil through which we see the world—can be politically engaged and
the extent to which films about Hitler and nazis force a truly critical
processing of the past.2
Köhler’s position and others like it are taken as provocations to
which the essays in this volume respond. German film is in rare form—
it is engaged—and much in today’s German cinema recalls the old days,
either directly or indirectly. but because the times have changed, any as-
sessment must be critical and account for new contexts. There is surely a
link that connects the aesthetics and politics of key contemporary film-
makers such as Oskar Roehler, Fatih Akın, and Christian Petzold with
Fassbinder, Kluge, and others, but those last two filmmakers would have
been among the first to hold their own cinema up for critical scrutiny.
Moreover, the success of big-budgeted German films such as Der Un-
tergang (Downfall, 2004), Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl:
The Final Days, 2005), and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others,
2006) likewise calls for critical assessment. When films are so heartily af-
firmed, they must themselves be affirmative. In these and other respects,
German cinema’s old questions are new again. This volume examines
the past and explores the links where they arise. To do that, however, one
has to look back and take stock of a narrative that generally begins with
the Oberhausen Manifesto (signed on February 28, 1962), frequently
referred to as the inaugural document of young German Cinema, the
movement that then paved the way for new German Cinema.
Though the status of the Oberhausen Manifesto as an “origin” has
been rethought and contested, it can still be constructively regarded as
a watershed on the way to the politically engaged German filmmaking
generally associated with the 1970s.3 The Manifesto is similar to other
manifestos insofar as it begins with the proclamation that all that pre-
ceded it has definitively come to an end: its authors write of “the collapse
of the conventional German film” (Der Zusammenbruch des konven-
tionellen deutschen Films), and it subsequently concludes with a state-
ment reaffirming this demise and asserting that something new has been
born (“The old film is dead. We believe in the new one” [Der alte Film
ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen]). Many have suggested that the Mani-
festo helped usher in two decades of German film production rivaled
only by the Weimar era as a cinematic heyday. What was most distinctive
about this “new” movement, however, lay not in its effacement of the old
2
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Introduction
(although the old was constantly denigrated in the form of an assault
on that which had been oedipally termed “Papa’s Cinema”) but rather
in its pronounced turn toward explicit political engagement, a turn that
grew in intensity over the course of the years that followed. Although
the Oberhausen Manifesto calls for a new language and for taking eco-
nomic risks—precisely that which bound many of its authors’ films to
one another—what garnered for them their international audience was
a struggle for political relevance.
The era that followed the one defined by that movement and its po-
litical engagements has been described as a period in which a “cinema
of consensus” prevailed. Politically incisive filmmaking was generally
restrained during those years. In his examination of German cinema of
the late 1980s and 1990s, eric Rentschler, who coined that now much
cited phrase, notes, “The most prominent directors of the post-Wall era
aim to please, which is to say that they consciously solicit a new German
consensus. In this sense the cinema they champion is one with a decid-
edly affirmative calling.”4 This consensus, in which German cinema of
that era participated and which it helped to produce, can be understood
both as an abreaction to new German Cinema and as a symptom of a
period in which the Cold War had drawn to a close and a politics of Ger-
man national unity—over and above the apparently polarizing Leftist
projects of the past—seemed desirable. Although there were certainly
some “auteurist” films produced over the course of those years—films by
Andreas Dresen, Andreas Kleinert, Christoph Schlingensief, and Monika
Treut, are examples—the most widely distributed and most successful
films from that period, such as Doris Dörrie’s Männer (Men, 1985) and
Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, 1994), in-
deed tended toward the kind of affirmative, consensus-oriented themes
Rentschler describes.5 because the berlin Wall had only recently fallen,
there were, for example, relatively few mainstream cinematic depictions
of nostalgia for east Germany produced in 1990, when the wounds were
still fresh and Germany was still waiting to see whether the recent past
would be worked through or simply set aside and forgotten.
The Collapse of the “Consensual”
The present volume explores how many of the films made in Germany
since the turn of the millennium represent another transformation in
cinematic conventions. To be sure, this period has seen the collapse of
3
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