Table Of ContentThe CounTer-Cinema
of The Berlin SChool
marCo aBel
The Counter-Cin ema of the Berlin School
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Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual
Series Editors:
Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College)
Johannes von Moltke (University of Michigan)
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The Counter-Cinema
of the Berlin School
Marco Abel
Rochester, New York
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Copyright © 2013 Marco Abel
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 2013
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: 978-1-57113-438-7
ISBN-10: 1-57113-438-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Abel, Marco.
The counter-cinema of the Berlin School / Marco Abel.
pages cm. — (Screen cultures: German film and the visual)
Includes filmography.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-57113-438-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)—
ISBN 1-57113-438-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Germany—History—21st century. I. Title.
PN1993.5.G3A59 2013
791.430943090'05—dc23
2013019462
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
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It is not the cinema that turns away from politics, it becomes completely
political, but in another way.
—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
After unification we noticed how the country is changing and that we had to
deal with this. We began to ask ourselves, how does it look, who are we, what is
our identity. . . . This is why I feel that this new German cinema has less to do
with stasis and more with movement. That is, this new cinema, even though it
is frequently static and, if you will, not particularly playful, is a cinema that
deals in precise ways with the reality of life.
—Benjamin Heisenberg, “Unpublished Interview”
[At night] I watch old [soccer] games on Youtube. Gladbach against Cologne
in 1973, Ernst Huberty is broadcasting. 4 camera positions, few cuts. Berlin
School.
—Christian Petzold, “Auf einmal sah ich den Spielertunnel”
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Note on Translations xii
Introduction: So This Was Germany—A Preliminary
Account of the Berlin School 1
I: The First Wave
1: Thomas Arslan: Realism beyond Identity 31
2: Christian Petzold: Heimat-Building as Utopia 69
3: Angela Schanelec: Narrative, Understanding, Language 111
II: The Second Wave
4: Revolver Cinema and Électrons Libres:
Cinema Must Be Dangerous 151
5: Christoph Hochhäusler: Intensifying Life 162
6: Benjamin Heisenberg: Filming Simply as Resistance 201
7: Valeska Grisebach: A Sharpening of Our Regard 230
8: Maren Ade: Filming between Sincerity and Irony 249
9: Ulrich Köhler: The Politics of Refusal 274
Conclusion: A Counter-Cinema 297
Filmography 313
Bibliography 315
Index 331
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Acknowledgments
WHEN IN SEPTEMBER 2004 I opened a package my dear friend Marc
Donay had sent me from Germany for my birthday, neither he
nor I could have known how its contents would impact my life for the
next decade, though I like to think that he in fact had at least a hunch.
Upon opening what turned out to be a gift that changed my scholarly
career—for which I cannot thank Marc enough—I discovered a number
of German films that had recently been released in Germany on DVD,
including Christian Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit, Ulrich Köhler’s
Bungalow, and Christoph Hochhäusler’s Milchwald. I was instantly struck
by how different these films were—aesthetically, narratively, and in terms
of the attitude they took toward a postunified country that they depicted
in frequently cool, clinically precise, and intellectually compelling ways—
from the many awful German films I remembered seeing when growing
up in the West Germany of Helmut Kohl’s “geistig-moralische Wende”
and, subsequently, on my annual visits after I had moved to the United
States in 1992. Because the gift arrived just as I was looking for a new
research project, I decided to make the first of many annual pilgrimages to
the Berlin Film Festival to immerse myself in the cinematic context of the
“Berlin School,” as those filmmakers had recently become known among
German critics. My ability to travel to Berlin every February since 2005
would not have been possible without the unwavering support of the
chairs of the English Department at the University of Nebraska—Linda
Pratt, Joy Ritchie, and Susan Belasco—as well as from the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln’s Research Council, which has repeatedly enabled
me to travel to Germany with research grants (two Maude Hammond
Fling Faculty Research Fellowships in 2006 and 2009, and a Charles J.
Millard Trust Fund Research Fellowship in 2008) and which has sup-
ported the publication of this book with a grant funded by a generous gift
from the Jane Robertson Layman Fund. During my times in Berlin I was
always lucky to be able to count on Christian Weisz’s friendship and hos-
pitality, and I very much appreciated the ability to decompress on many
an evening (and late night) by having a beer or two with one of my oldest
friends—something I eventually also had the pleasure of regularly doing
with Chris Wahl, my main Germany-based film-studies compañero who
was the first to invite me to give a lecture on the Berlin School.
While the seeds for this book were thus serendipitously sown by a
generous birthday gift, and were allowed to germinate thanks to the
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