eJournals

Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm JOHN BLAIR U NIVERSITY OF W EST G EORGIA Tom Tykwer ’ s prominence since the 1998 premiere of Lola rennt has been consolidated with international productions such as Heaven (2002), Perfume (2006), and The International (2009). Although Winterschläfer (1997) preceded Lola rennt in Germany and shares some of its stylistic features, its international reception was delayed. The American release of Winterschäfer in March 2000 probably occurred only because of the popularity of Lola rennt. Since that release, Winterschläfer has since garnered some popular acclaim and more recently an academic reception. 1 In the film, four young Germans working in a ski resort village «hang out,» seeking ineffectually for meaning in their lives, which are touched obliquely by the decline of a local farmer ’ s fortunes after the death of his young daughter in an automobile accident. Despite the kinetic energy Lutz Koepnik notes in Winterschläfer ’ s techno soundtrack and its frequent abrupt cuts and mobile camera work (8), it seems initially quite static in its emphasis on the personal and its exclusion of the political. On the one hand, one could argue that the quaint isolated village constitutes a crucible in which the film ’ s personal conflicts are compressed and intensified. On the other, if the words winter sleepers describe the main characters, then one must assume that the most important issues are outside the film, that the natural pendant to the film is the sum total of its apposite characteristics: awake, conscious, active, involved, political, discursive, and public. Tykwer suggests, if a bit defensively, that the film is political by depicting the apolitical: [. . .] akut politische Filme zu machen ist wirklich nicht leicht zur Zeit . . . [W]ir haben keine Streitkultur, überhaupt keine Diskurskultur mehr, nur intellektuelle Wüste - das ist ja alles ein Resultat aus der politischen Gegenwart, die da seit inzwischen bald 20 Jahren vor sich hindümpelt. Und um sich in dieser Realität zu befreien, ist erst mal wichtig, daß man sie wahrnimmt, daß man sie beschreibt, was wir auch mit der «Baustelle» 2 versucht haben, und auch in Winterschläfer. Das sind ja beides Filme, die in einem Jahr entstanden sind, die auf unterschiedliche Weise unterschiedliche Schichten zeigen, die aber beide sehr repräsentativ sind speziell für Deutschland, und das deutsche Lebensgefühl dieser Zeit. (1998) So Winterschäfer could mean to promote an awareness of a particularly negative and apolitical condition, to encourage an audience to reflect on its own stagnation, to offer a kind of Fürstenspiegel 3 reflecting Generation Golf to itself. 4 Florian Illies ’ s use of the film ’ s four young Germans - Rene, Laura, Marco, and Rebecca - as examples of the young adults of Generation Golf in his 2003 book of the same name is partially justified. All four characters come across as narcissistic and struggle mostly with very personal problems and malaise. The characters are color coded by their clothing and the film ’ s mise-en-scéne. Marco, who dresses almost exclusively in blue, is unhappy, but seems content enough to maintain multiple sexual relationships, eat, and watch bad movies and game shows on television. Rebecca, wearing red, is very sensually oriented and worries about maintaining a long-term relationship with Marco. Rene (black) and Laura (green) are alienated and unsatisfied, but have settled more permanently in the town and meet and develop what may be a lasting relationship. All of the figures suffer from weariness and some degree of indecision. In fact, all of them are shown repeatedly, either in bed, or stretched out on the couch or in the bathtub. Like Koepnick, Margaret McCarthy sees redemption from this narcissism and passivity in the «film ’ s kinetic visual register,» particularly the «energetic, circular tracking shots or lateral pans that pit mobility against inertia» (58). More importantly, in my opinion, she refers to the political implications of the film ’ s gestures to the Heimatfilm tradition, and notes that Winterschläfer was filmed in Berchtesgaden, Hitler ’ s «resort residence» (55 and 55, n. 6). Reading Winterschläfer as a Heimatfilm opens up productive contexts, and reintroduces strong political aspects to the film, despite Tykwer ’ s half apologetic disavowal of them. The Heimatfilm, as McCarthy notes, citing Alasdair King, is «always about the ideological meaning of space,» about «larger historical conflicts around German borders, and by extension, national identity» (56). Indeed, the Heimatfilm traditionally allows for the kind of illusory resolution of insoluble conflicts theorized by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious, partially by moving the action into a natural realm far removed from political conflicts and partially by displacing political and cultural conflicts onto the personal. Clearly, the Heimatfilm has played something other than an entirely progressive role in German culture, and it is no wonder that it was a dominant genre during the Third Reich and in the 1950s. These 50s Heimat films are, according to Anton Kaes, «deceitful movie kitsch,» and to Robert Morely, a «way to disavow the cultural rupture of 1933 - 45» (cited in Ludewig 27). Naturally there have been critical and progressive films in this tradition, since genres gradually constitute and transform themselves historically, 5 but when a genre is so clearly evoked, as it is in Winterschläfer, it is these traditional 2 John Blair celebratory films that are referenced and used to comment on changing German identity. In this paper, I argue that Winterschläfer references the Heimatfilm for more progressive political agendas. The largest hurdle such an interpretation faces is the verisimilitude with which Tykwer ’ s film corresponds to the Heimatfilm. It does belong to the genre, not only by virtue of the sweeping mountain cinematography and its depiction of a Bavarian family ’ s trials after an accident that takes the life of the daughter, but also because it clearly suggests providence or fate as a major player in its narratives. All of the characters are contemplating new beginnings at the end, and are contemplating these new beginnings despite or because of mistakes, misconceptions, and errors; if viewers see the end as somehow positive, as the fulfillment, for example, of a hidden justice, then there is a sense that everything works out in the end, despite our errors and misconceptions, a kind of vote of confidence in fate, a confirmation of the old adage that God works in mysterious ways. Such an interpretation would return us to the problematic ideological terrain often associated with the Heimatfilm - to a premodern, nostalgic «all ’ s right with the world,» in a small, claustrophobic, ethnically and racially monotone «heile Welt.» Winterschläfer is quite successful in providing a resolution that harmoniously ties up loose ends and smoothes all conflicts, providing symbolic solutions to the problems and discomfort associated with the individuals ’ experience of modernity. It is difficult to completely do away with this reading, since the film points to it at every turn and buttresses it with mystical music and montages. However, the exaggerated nature of the film ’ s nods to providence and Heimatfilm suggests parodic implications, and a number of politically critical themes are pointedly broached, suggesting that a careful and nuanced reading can provide sound and productive interpretations that sidestep some of the more atavistic implications of popular examples of the genre and its fateful tendencies. After extensive discussion of some of the film ’ s parallels to the traditional Heimatfilm, i. e., the way it satisfies genre requirements in ideologically conservative ways, I will argue that it subverts these same themes by foregrounding tropes of memory and stereotyping tied to historical notions of Germanness, and thus emphasizes an interpretive context that includes an awareness of the problems associated with the Heimatfilm. The Heimatfilm often focuses on individuals and communities dealing with the results of large-scale political events. Exiles flee from the east due to political turmoil; national boundaries must be redrawn; or totalitarian regimes must be consolidated after WWII. 6 Many films in the genre focus on how couples and communities negotiate these issues, dealing with the changing times and mores, shifting populations, and, particularly, a lost sense of 3 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm belonging, and find their way to a happy end, ratifying the value of love, friendship, family, community, and nation along the way, always within iconic German landscapes in the Alps or forests. In Winterschläfer, these narratives of displacement are reflected ironically. The four main characters are outsiders who have wandered into the village, but they are only fleeing less than harmonious family lives. Their malaise and alienation seems much more personal, if not narcissistic, hence the references to Generation Golf. They are reasonably secure in material terms. Marco suffers from being something of a kept man, living with his lawyer girlfriend in Berlin and driving her car to his resort job as a ski instructor. Laura has inherited a house from her aunt. Rene has a cushy job as a projectionist and probably a disability pension because of his accident in the military. And Rebecca is living with a friend and can count on some sort of inheritance, since her grandmother had extensive property. They may be suffering from alienation or spiritual Angst, but materially they are in great shape. Although it is difficult to see these characters as victims, they are outsiders and exiles of a kind, fleeing familial, if not political turmoil. The four color-coded exiles are clearly not local color, but transients in search of the same absences that motivate the Heimatfilm ’ s criticism of modernity: the loss of connection, community, meaning, happiness, family, and roots. They are in process, in hibernation, to echo the film ’ s title, and they are all fleeing the same negative potential of the very things that they are seeking, i. e., family conflicts and shallow or confining relationships. The film ’ s prologue shows Rene and Laura, in completely separate locations, listening to bickering during the Christmas festivities, and deciding to return early to the Ski-resort area where they work. Marco is running away from a relationship in Berlin in which he feels smothered and unfulfilled. And Rebecca doesn ’ t go home at all, but stays in the resort eating, drinking, and watching television. We know, however, from a later incident that her family fights over money and the grandmother ’ s inheritance, and that her presence in the mountain village represents an earlier flight. That these characters run away to the mountains and that this locus plays a role in their development further references the Heimatfilm tradition. The touristic nature of these areas is a feature of many Heimatfilme which often celebrate particularly picturesque remote areas and popularize them as vacation sites, hence domesticating them. Von Moltke discusses the «domesticated sublime» in the popular mountain films Franz Ostermayr made from Ludwig Ganghofer ’ s novels, but there remains a vestige of the darker, more natural and more dangerous «Alpine Sublime» in the Winterschläfer (44). 7 Mountains are, after all, both beautiful and dangerous, a characteristic Marco confirms in his slow motion plunge to his death at the end of the film. 4 John Blair In the center of this Heimatfilm lies a near collision between Theo, a true «premodernist father» (Schlipphacke 120), and Rene, one of the color-coded outsiders. The accident is, at least for the characters, shrouded in mystery. Neither Theo nor Rene can remember the details of the accident. Theo has been injured in the crash and Rene has no short-term memory at all because of an accident with a grenade during his military service. Rene ’ s vehicle vanishes into a snowdrift and is found only at the end of the film when the snow starts to thaw. When Theo reports his version of the accident, one policeman says to the other, «Was kannst machen? Der Mann ist am Ende. Der Hof ist pleite. Die Tochter ist in einem Koma.» When one of his sons asks about getting a horse to replace the one that died, he replies ambiguously, «Mir schaffen des net. Diesmal net.» And shortly thereafter, the family is forced to move from the farm, further up into the mountains, away from the village into a remote area. 8 The family ’ s fortunes and happiness have been destroyed and Theo is obsessed with a desire for retribution. This is eventually granted to him after he find ’ s Marco ’ s identification papers in the car and then encounters him in the mountains. Marco flees and plunges to his death, while Theo is satisfied that his daughter ’ s death has been avenged and seems content. At the level of the plot, Winterschläfer has provided a solution, but it is based on suppressing or forgetting the fact that Theo is responsible for the accident and that Marco wasn ’ t present at all, and is guilty only of serial infidelity. But Theo, as a local, can now feel once again at home in the mountains, after having avenged his daughter ’ s death and defended the community against an outsider. Although Marco is not guilty of the crime, he does pose problems for the community in this film and exhibits an existential homelessness. Certainly he attempts to take part in numerous transactions, all of which involve the body, and none of which are satisfactory. He doesn ’ t want what he needs, or he cannot stand what he wants. He seems to want space, so he leaves his girlfriend ’ s apartment in Berlin and drives her car to his new job in the mountains. Despite his desire to be on his own, he moves out of his own apartment into Rebecca ’ s room. He rehearses lines in front of a mirror about the increased intimacy living together will allow, but when he shows up with his suitcase, he is petulant and annoyed, and forgets his rehearsed argument. He house sits for his boss and claims to own the house while seducing another woman, but he can ’ t find the light switches and burns himself badly on an espresso machine that he is unable to use. Home seems to be a dangerous place for him. He seems to be at home on the ski slopes, but after an encounter with Theo and his dog, he skis off a cliff. He owns nothing and has no place of his own. He also fails to maintain stable relationships of any sort. All of the transactions that purport to emotional 5 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm involvement or relationships are reduced to physical pleasure or material and financial advantage. In addition to sex, he gets the car from one relationship and a rent-free apartment from another. He eats everything in the fridge and doesn ’ t clean up after himself. He uses another ’ s house, alcohol, and coffee, and claims them as part of his own identity. He is restless and discontent, and maintains that three happy years in a life are all that one can expect. He has a disturbed relationship to Heimat, and can get no satisfaction. His life - a peripatetic search without a recognized goal, a series of short and meaningless relationships - serves as a foil to the main narrative of the film, the story of Rene and Laura, who, despite their own issues with feeling at home, find one another and produce a child at the end of the movie. Marco ’ s metaphoric flight from relationships during most of the film and his literal flight to his death (or rebirth) at the end of it constitutes, for Schipphacke, an escape tableaux that «explicitly reject[s] the past, thereby discarding a potential nostalgia for Heimat.» My project is also a kind of recuperative interpretation, but I disagree. Although this scene does seem to fulfill the implication of the opening montages, it also suggests a more problematic aspect of the Heimat motif, namely the protection of the community space. Marco ’ s leap into freedom/ death removes a disturbed and disturbing character from the community. He is not only narcissistically hedonistic; he is unhappy, dissatisfied, dishonest, manipulative, and incapable of maintaining relationships. His presence causes difficulty for every other character in the film and obstructs the formation and maintenance of community and family. After his death, Laura and René live together and have a child, and Rebecca and Nina, the new girl in yellow, go out into the world to try again to find more stable and satisfying relationships. Theo seems to have come to terms with the death of his daughter and looks out optimistically at the mountain spring thaw while splitting wood. And the implication that Marco ’ s energy or spirit is somehow continuing on in the child strengthens the sense that all things work together to promote the continuance of mythic community, certainly a nostalgic idea. 9 Marco has been the problem in the community, particularly for women, and his death and rebirth suggest once again a mythic economy of energy, the efficient recycling of otherwise destructive male energies, or if you will, a kind of sublimation. And perhaps «leap into freedom» is a bit euphemistically phrased. He is, after all, fleeing from Theo, certainly representative of the autochthonous in this community. He is chased off the cliff by the community, which is then, to argue within the ideological framework of the normative melodramatic Heimatfilm, much better off. Within this tradition, Winterschläfer depicts solutions to problems. The largest source of conflict has been culled; the 6 John Blair dissatisfied and/ or disappointed go searching for happiness; and the central couple has found it, and reproduces. In the opening sequence, we see Rebecca cut her thumb. As McCarthy notes, this is a reference to «Sleeping Beauty,» which resonates especially well in a context where Germanness is being emphasized, and fits the title and topic of hibernation and character development. However, the mise-en-scène also sets up the concept of home central to a conservative notion of Heimat. Rebecca is filmed from below, gazing at her cut thumb with the wall and ceiling joists of a traditional German timber frame house behind her and a cupboard with herbs and plates on display. It is not accidental that she is in pajamas and decidedly blond, since she functions here as a quintessential German image of woman, barefoot in her domain, mistress of the hearth even if the house doesn ’ t belong to her. Her blood is not just the index of a spindle poke, but also in this context of hearth, home, and Heimat, surely a marker of race and ethnicity. When she answers Laura ’ s query as to what she had been doing, she laconically replies that she had «slept, read, and waited.» Despite the absence of «Kinder, Kirche, Küche,» she still functions as an ideal of German femininity and she has clearly been waiting for her man. McCarthy notes that the Sleeping Beauty motif prompts «viewers to associate geographic isolation with amorous possibilities» (55), which ties Rebecca to both a heightened and generally subordinate gender construct - she is waiting, and «only sex counters her symbolic malaise» (McCarthy 64) - and to the natural sublime of the Heimat tradition. Indeed, the film crosscuts between her masturbatory climax and post-coital cigarette and Marco ’ s plunge to his death, suggesting a mythical context again, this time of female power, and/ or a melodramatic wish fulfillment. If one does grant her representative status as a German woman, her pairing with Marco is significant. As a well-built and confident blond male who is associated with the sun, he is mythically rendered. His depiction both at the outset and the end as a kind of Sonnenjunge plays into National Socialist mythology. And although he suggests that the local police are xenophobic, 10 he does so by making them into an Other - stupid, unsophisticated hicks - onto whom he can project some of his own failings. After all, he not only does not lock the car, he leaves the door wide open and the key in the ignition; he can ’ t find a light switch in a house he claims to own, nor manage an espresso machine without serious burns. He would seem to be the unsophisticated hick rather than the police. He also prefers blonds, and his death and the departure of Rebecca and Nina (the woman in yellow with whom Marco has an affair) banishes blonds from paradise, a symbolic exorcism of a number of characteristics that could be associated with traditional historical German role 7 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm models. These particular blonds seem to be a generally un-self-reflexive, overly gendered group, and their departure leaves behind dark-haired characters who seem more self-reflexive and have less strongly gendered characters. The final scenes, for example, suggest an alternative family organization. Rene is at home taking care of the baby and waving at Laura returning home, probably from work as the primary wage earner. Within the context of the Heimatfilm, a genre which often defines Heimat by expelling its various others» (von Moltke 5), it is striking that those characters who have been identified as especially German through Märchen and mythological references and by virtue of their stereotypical physical features are the ones who have been cast out of the community. This constitutes a kind of inversion of traditional roles in the genre. From this vantage point, additional themes in German historical discourses, such as memory, stereotyping, and collective guilt, become more prominent in the film. Rene ’ s ongoing struggle to piece together his past, Laura ’ s inability to remember her lines in the Tennessee Williams ’ play A Streetcar named Desire, and Theo ’ s inaccurate memory of the accident are all related, and all of these figures are causally connected to the daughter ’ s death. They, as well as Marco and Rebecca, participate in a network of events that cause the death of the child. It is a series of nebulous causal connections, all of which are tied to the final tragic event: If Marco had locked the car door, and if Rebecca had been less emphatically demanding, if Rene hadn ’ t seen the open car door as a fateful invitation, if the child hadn ’ t stowed aboard, if Theo hadn ’ t tried to get to the walky-talky on a snowy road, and if Laura hadn ’ t decided to open the drapes against the will of the father, the child would still be alive. These connections point to collective guilt, a collective community entanglement in actions that have repercussions. In every case, the film ’ s context makes the actions understandable, and we are not pushed to judge the characters harshly for their decisions. McCarthy describes some of these decisions as «infantile dispositions» and «childlike whims,» i. e., Marco ’ s desire for immediate sex, Rene ’ s spontaneous joyride, and the young girl ’ s disobedient act (58), but this seems to limit the context too much and to exaggerate Marco ’ s role in the precipitousness of the sexual encounter in question. He was, after all, pulled into the house while voicing some protest. I would argue that the depiction of so much causal context suggests quite strongly the concept of collective guilt supported by German postwar intellectuals, but without as much venom. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, viewers and readers have generally resisted this concept of collective guilt to a large degree, and Chancellor Helmut Kohl ’ s symbolic pardon to those who enjoy «die Gnade der späten Geburt» only emphasizes the need to understand and reflect on 8 John Blair collective guilt and responsibility. By avoiding direct historical references and by allowing a measure of sympathy and understanding, Tykwer ’ s depiction escapes psychological censure. In other words, his use of the Hollywood narrative tendencies allows him to explore the «insistent particulars of German history and identity» (McCarthy 60) without causing immediate defensiveness on the part of the viewer. Winterschläfer works with a concept of collective causality in which characters ’ acts are connected. It is similar to the oft-cited butterfly effect of chaos theory, but it is not neutral or accidental. All of the characters do share some responsibility and some guilt in the outcome, that is, all of them choose to act in ways that are problematic. The daughter chooses to disobey her father ’ s well-meaning instructions, and Theo chooses to irresponsibly look for the walky-talky in the back seat on an icy road. The only person who might arguably be innocent in the chain is Laura who opens the drapes and plays music for the child with only the best of intentions. She does, however, experiment a bit, trying out «treatments» on her own while the child is lying in a coma, and she ignores the father ’ s request that she not open the drapes and let in the sunlight. She overreaches and decides that she knows what is best. In these events, Tykwer has created a depiction of collective guilt that has been made palatable without too much loss of substance. In fact, the Heimatfilm, with its emphasis on community, would seem an ideal vehicle for this particular content. Although the film ’ s narrative clearly points to a shared guilt, it suggests that this guilt is part of the human condition, and allows us as viewers to pardon the characters by seeing them as seekers on life ’ s journey, attempting to find happiness, connection, or enlightenment. The mystical context suggested at the end of the movie by Marco ’ s rebirth in the child, i. e., reincarnation, also implies endless searching over multiple lives. The frenetic, breathless musical score at the outset of the film, accompanying the camera ’ s ceaseless and rapid movement over the snow and through the forest supports this sense of searching by pantomiming a hunt. Marco ’ s search seems limited to a series of meaningless sexual encounters, but even he recognizes that there is something more that he is not finding, hence his remark about being lucky if you experience three good happy years in a life. Thus he is reborn to search further. Rebecca is searching for more, as well, but is so strongly tied to sensual experience that it drowns out other interests. Her translations would suggest the possibility of self-reflection, but they bottom out in typical romance/ soft porn fashion by attempting to camouflage traditional gender characteristics with grandiose quasi-mythical natural parallels. The empty gesture toward monumental nature mimics depth while predicating commonplaces. Rebecca must journey on and search further. Nina, the yellow girl, is young, shy but 9 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm open to experience, and clearly not ready to reflect too much. She sees through Marco ’ s lies but accepts his invitation in the spirit of carpe diem. She, too, within the film ’ s universalizing narrative, must continue to search/ sleep. Rene and Laura are granted a «time out,» a locus amoenus, a little Heimat, if you will, and the film suggests that they earned it. Rene and Laura, the new, alternative, dark-haired family that remains after the «expulsion» of the blonds, are more self-reflexive than the other characters, but they too not only also participate in the collective guilt of the community, but rather exhibit additional problematic attitudes and behaviors. Like Marco, they project their own difficulties onto outsiders, a classical projection, very human, but exaggerated and legitimized in fascist cultures. McCarthy reads Marco ’ s remarks about the local police in the context of Tykwer ’ s reference to Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Spielberg ’ s suburbia, as the seat of bland, claustrophobic materialism, shifts slightly to the collective mentality of the Dorf (village), which eschews alien elements. (At one point Marco imitates the local Bavarian-accented gendarme, claiming that a stolen car to them is as odd as a UFO landing.) Tykwer ’ s nod to Spielberg signals more than precociousness because trumped-up fear of aliens resounds forcefully in a German context. Here I mean not only the anti-Semitism that laid the foundation for the Holocaust but also the victim mentality that emerged in the postwar era and was directed at Allied forces. (70) Without detracting from McCarthy ’ s insights about the «collective mentality of the Dorf,» I would like to shift more of the onus of the criticism to Marco. After all, he is denigrating Bavarians, rural policeman, etc., the very group that is trying to clean up his mess. Such projection is a dominant characteristic of Marco ’ s in the film. He sees both Rene and Rebecca as dishonest, cheating behind his back, while they are innocent, and he programmatically cheats on Rebecca. He also projects his own bad moods onto other characters on a number of occasions. And his relationship to women in general makes them into exotic others to be preyed on and used for personal profit. He drives their cars, eats their groceries, and moves in with them to save on rent. Finally, he explicitly and repeatedly sees himself as a victim. In the context of xenophobia and Otherness, the Dorf has its issues, but Marco is guilty of every sin and psychological tendency that might be associated with Germany ’ s historical skeletons in the collective closet. Despite Rene and Laura ’ s more favorable depiction, they too are tied to group norms that create intimacy through exclusion, that is, they have the same issues with guilt and personal responsibility as both Marco and the locals. They meet after a film and play a game, each describing the other with a list of negative characteristics. Laura labels Rene «nervös, arrogant, eitel, 10 John Blair ungepflegt, ungesund, selbstgefällig, sehnsüchtig, verbraten, fremd,» and he, for his part, defines her as «verschlossen, frustriert, verklemmt, verzögert, zugeknöpft, zusammengerissen, egozentrisch, appetitlos.» On the one hand, such jousting with personal characteristics enables self-reflection and redefinition, and cutely defines the relationship through word games that create a dialogue of recognition, qualification, real and mock hurt, and acceptance. On the other hand, the opinions expressed are harsh and personal enough that one might think they would exclude the possibility of a relationship. However, it becomes clear that they are going to be a couple when they are able to agree on criticizing a third party. When the waitress brings coffee instead of tea, Laura describes her as «blöd, hässlich, dämlich, blind, taub, stumm, bescheuert.» The film depicts the all too human tradition of forging a bond based on creating and criticizing an outsider, a mechanism active in more general marginalization, exclusions, biases, prejudices, etc., and in doing so, allows for further criticism of the characters. The most positive and self-reflexive characters in the film become a case study in a trait that is central to the cultural discourse on the Third Reich. Becoming aware of such tendencies is part of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, but here the gesture becomes part of a courtship ritual that we can identify with, making us part of the problem. The behaviors of projection and exclusion become a commonality that ties all of the young exiles together and relates them to Theo, to the community, and to the Heimatfilm. Winterschläfer reminds us of such cultural fictions and generalizes them, makes them our problem as well. The young blow-ins have the same problems with memory and with fictions and falsehoods as Theo. They also belong thematically in the Heimatfilm. Johannes von Moltke argues that the Heimatfilm generally defines Heimat against its binary oppositions, i. e., «exile, [. . .] rootlessness, displacement,» and uses «such oppositions in order to stabilize a hierarchy of values and a moral universe that defines Heimat by expelling its various others» (5). This supports Theo ’ s satisfaction after his encounter with Marco who flees only to plummet from a cliff. In Theo ’ s narrative, he has expelled the stranger who caused his daughter ’ s death, and we know that this is a convenient fiction. Not only was Rene rather than Marco the driver of the car Theo remembers, but Theo himself was directly responsible for the accident. Despite these errors and fictions, the film invites us to participate in the same ritual expelling. All of the characters who are «not ready for community» are shown leaving at the end of the film, and the viewer witnesses and affirms. The tradition of the Heimatfilm genre helps make such critical themes more visible, since such contexts are the ideological bread and butter of the genre. 11 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm Instead of a genre that helps the viewer forget the gaping chasm represented by the Third Reich, the film thematizes forgetfulness as a human problem. Although we may sympathize with Theo, we know that he has forgotten his own complicity in the problem and is looking for a scapegoat. When he wrinkles his forehead and tries to trace the half-remembered scar in his potatoes, we understand, but he won ’ t find any truth that might set him free. Ironically, as he moves further up the mountains into clearer and clearer air, a trope von Moltke sees in the Heimatfilm, we learn that it is a new narrative, a standard human lie that will allow him to begin moving on again after his daughter ’ s death. This is his personal narrative, but it parallels the more global cultural narrative portrayed in films such as Michael Verhoeven ’ s Das schreckliche Mädchen (1990), where an entire village creates alternative pasts and buries both historical and personal truths. All of the young transients or exiles share Theo ’ s problem with memory and self-supporting narratives. Particularly in Rene ’ s case, these issues are tied to the film ’ s self-reflexive and self-critical meditation on art. Rene ’ s accident with a grenade during his compulsory military service has left him with little or no short-term memory, and he attempts to keep track of his life with snapshots and recordings. With these elements he creates a kind of protofilmic narrative, a suggestion that is strengthened by the fact that he works as a projectionist and criticizes the films he shows. His very real handicap doesn ’ t completely exonerate him. It is clear that the images he shoots and the recordings he makes are chosen for narcissistic and self-serving reasons. They are strongly oriented towards brief sensory impressions; not a car, but a fragment of a car, not a house or a landscape, but a voyeuristic shot of a couple having sex with a sound track. And although he may have been confused, it is still striking that he walks away from the accident, does not try to help Theo, and does not take a picture. This is something that he, at some level, knows that he wants to forget. His accident and his problematic memory become a welcome crutch, despite the fact that this particular gap troubles him. People construct lives just as films construct narratives, based on personal memory and social responsibility, but also with exclusions, suppressions, and, to borrow from A Streetcar named Desire, the play Laura performs in, with mendacities. And these characters and much of contemporary cinema must be faulted for playing too much with the present and losing a sense of the past, for emphasizing momentary experience and response and relegating the concomitant depiction of context to the background. In fact, both the characters and the films of the 90s, the contemporaries to Winterschläfer, do show «a marked disinclination towards any serious political reflections or sustained historical 12 John Blair retrospection» (Rentschler 263). Most of the films of the Heimatfilm genre would also fit Rentschler ’ s «cinema of consensus.» Tykwer has constructed a film that conforms, at least at the level of the plot, to the conventions of a melodramatic Heimatfilm, but he also criticizes films, and perhaps art in general, as media that may encourage reflection and remembering, but may also be complicit in the suppression of memory. The Heimatfilm, so my earlier quotation, is «deceitful movie kitsch.» It takes its place in this film alongside other forms of art. Marco practices lines in front of a mirror and attempts to live life to the fullest, a kind of Lebenskünstler, but doesn ’ t really manage very well. Laura is acting in a good play, A Streetcar named Desire, but she butchers it. Even Theo ’ s repeated modeling of Rene ’ s scar - in potatoes, mud, snow, and on paper - can be seen as an artistic impulse. Perhaps the best parallel in Winterschläfer to the Heimatfilm is Rebecca ’ s translations of romance/ soft porn. Nature, in her translation - tears, sun, salt, condensation, the implicit beach in the idyll - is explicitly tied to the mountainous snowscape Tykwer pans through during this narration. Both the romance genre and the Heimatfilm foreground the search for happiness and depict it in terms of clearly defined gender roles and family relationships that culminate in legitimatized heteronormative families. Both are popular genres that function as substitutes for real fulfillment and help obfuscate actual inadequacies and deficiencies. Rebecca ’ s romance narrative is echoed, if nonerotically, in her response to her grandmother ’ s death, peeing and crying with snow-capped mountains in the background, again bringing multiple fluids and the two genres together. The pantheistic move - paralleling the little in the big, the body and the world, inside and outside - opens up multiple ideological possibilities. If tears are like the ocean, and human desire and coupling are like the beach, then all of these fluids (tears, urine, sperm, snow, seawater, etc.) form one big mythic whole. The romance novel is realized ideologically in Rebecca ’ s character and in the film ’ s mise-en-scène, and in the end with the masturbation, conception, death, and reincarnation sequence. In this sequence, the two genres are again brought together. Mountainscapes, Marco ’ s fall, and Rebecca ’ s masturbation are connected through parallel editing. By making the viewer see the film as a melodrama and as a Heimatfilm, genre characteristics like these mythic plot resolutions which might otherwise support nostalgia or complacency (since our actions do not seem to matter) instead make both more visible to an active spectator, i. e., themes and ideas to be considered in context. And although the filmic devices that compose Tykwer ’ s style are interesting, entertaining, and effective, they are also devices that call attention to themselves, that remind the viewer that he or she is 13 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm watching a film. Tykwer has struck that balance that Fassbinder sought and Brecht would have affirmed. He foregrounds filmic detail - technical devices, framing, references to other films - and causes the viewer to reflect, for example, on genre characteristics and history, but his films remain thoroughly enjoyable. Tykwer seems to have come out ahead in his Faustian contract with Hollywood. As he put it in «Analytisch Träumen,» a favorite film «muss meine diffusen Gefühle ebenso spiegeln wie meine konkreten Interessen, er muss den bizarren Spagat aushalten, dass ich mich einerseits in ihm verlieren, abschweifen, träumen möchte, zugleich aber durch ihn nachdenklich, wachgerüttelt, und zum Widerspruch herausgefordert werden will.» Germany ’ s historical experience as perpetrator has, at least in Tykwer ’ s films, allowed its variant of postmodernism to maintain some of the subversive power of modernism, or «in the almost sixty years since the fall of Nazism, the country has experienced an abrupt reentry into modernity that occurred synchronically with German postmodern ruptures» (Schlipphacke 113). Consequently, Tykwer brings his own distinctly German sensibility to the Heimatfilm. He is inundated in international film and aware of the power of Hollywood, but also immersed in the tradition of New German Cinema, referencing Wenders, Fassbinder, and Ballhaus. 11 And he is concerned with history, memory, and critical self-reflection, even if he has a lighter and more forgiving touch than the auteurs of New German Cinema. As McCarthy puts it, he «seems to have intuited that Hollywood codes are effective for communication with politically and historically impervious audiences» (60). Through the evocation of the Heimatfilm and the melodrama, then, Tykwer emphasizes the ideological and political themes of exclusion and expulsion, projection, collective guilt and responsibility, forgetfulness, and the creation of self-serving narratives. He does so in an entertaining, lighthanded fashion, effortlessly harnessing Hollywood codes for his own purposes. It could be easy enough, however, for a viewer to watch the film and miss the call for critical reflection. Creating an entertaining Heimatfilm with traditional resolutions that calls for active viewing and criticism could be seen as playing a dangerous double game. To my mind, however, the exaggerated nature of the mystical layer and its role in the film ’ s resolution function as the ultimate demystifying move. If neither the location, nor the original, autochthonous community, nor the simple life of the Hochland, nor the lifestyle of a farmer, nor clarity, nor the truth itself are what bring about healing and peace, but the passage of time, blind human striving, fate, error, and suppression, then the Heimatfilm is demystified in the process of being referenced. The mystical element that still ghosts through the film remains ideologically problematic, but by effectively illuminating the Heimatfilm, 14 John Blair Winterschläfer repudiates archaic nationalisms and localisms tied to the Alpine landscape as solutions for the discomforts of Modernism. The «solutions» offered by the Heimatfilm are revealed to be the equivalent of the soft porn that Rebecca translates. The love relationship she idealizes - a oneness of salty fluids in nature - parallels the Heimatfilm ’ s image of the individual ’ s embeddedness in a variety of ideological geographies, i. e., blood, home, community, Vaterland, Hochland. The themes of the Heimatfilm are present, but because they are foregrounded as thematic elements, they lose credibility, despite the fact that they can be very real and dangerous fantasies. Finally, because Winterschläfer encourages us to understand and sympathize with the characters in the film, the viewer can potentially see and reflect on his or her own complicity in such ideas and allegiances rather than project them onto other groups. Notes 1 See Koepnik, McCarthy, Osborne, and Schlipphacke, for example. 2 Das Leben ist eine Baustelle is a 1997 X-Filme Creative Pool production directed by Wolfgang Becker and cowritten by Becker and Tykwer. 3 Fürstenspiegel (principum specula, or mirrors for princes) refers to a genre that aimed at influencing rulers, often indirectly through literary texts, by showing them examples of good or bad absolutist princes. 4 Generation Golf is a term coined by Florian Ilies in his eponymous 2003 work. In it he criticizes Germans born between 1965 and 1975 and actually uses the four main characters in Winterschläfer as examples. Among other things, Margaret McCarthy defends the film from his criticism. 5 See Rick Altmann ’ s seminal work, summarized in von Moltke, 26 - 27. 6 See von Moltke ’ s chapter «Expellees, Emigrants, Exiles: Spectacles of Displacement,» 135 - 69. 7 Ludwig Ganghofer (1855 - 1920) became famous for literally dozens of Heimatromane. Franz Ostermayr (a. k. a. Franz Osten; 1876 - 1956) secured the film rights to Ganghofer ’ s works after World War I and made many of Ganghofer ’ s novels into films. See von Moltke 36 - 72. 8 In Johannes von Moltke ’ s readings of the Hochland/ Heimat films in his influental monograph, No Place like Home, moving up the mountain promotes clarity and healing, but is also a flight to «an ahistorical place that provides refuge from the spaces of history below» (39). 9 The film suggests that Marco ’ s death and the birth of Rene and Laura ’ s child are supernaturally related. Marco plunges into a snowy crevice shaped like a navel (Osborne 37) or a vaginal opening. The film cuts back and forth between Rene with the pregnant Laura during Marco ’ s fall and after he disappears into the glacier, cuts to Rene with the baby, dressed in light blue, related to Marco ’ s theme color and his connection to the sky. Rene speaks to the baby about its confusion and inability to be 15 Tom Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer and the Heimatfilm satisfied, reemphasizing its connection to Marco by reference to his dominant characteristics. 10 See McCarthy 70. 11 Both McCarthy and Schlipphacke argue convincingly that Tykwer references Fassbinder, both in the tight framing of characters in the mise en scéne (see footnote 6) and in the use of Michael Ballhouse ’ s signature 360-degree tracking shot, first used in Fassbinder ’ s 1974 film Martha (McCarthy 72, fn. 41). McCarthy also argues that the film references Wim Wenders road movies of the 70s: «Tykwer amplifies the Golfers ’ apathy and apoliticism by invoking the extreme self-absorption of Wenders ’ s damaged and paranoid wanderers circa 1975» (54). Works Cited Asmussen, Torben. Die Rolle des Filmkameramanns bei der Produktion von Spielfilmen - Exemplarisch dargestellt anhand der Arbeit des Kameramanns Frank Griebe. Magisterarbeit. Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2010. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989. Kapcynski, Jennifer M. «Newer German Cinema: From Nostalgia to Nowhere.» The Germanic Review 82 (2007): 3 - 6. Koepnick, Lutz. «Free Fallin ’ : Tom Tykwer and the Aesthetics of Deceleration and Dislocation.» The Germanic Review 82 (2007): 7 - 30. Ludewig, Alexandra. «Screening the East, Probing the Past: The Baltic Sea in Contemporary German Cinema.» German Politics and Society 22 (2004): 27 - 48. McCarthy, Margaret. «Somnolent Selfhood: Winterschläfer and Generation Golf.» New German Critique 37 (2010): 53 - 74. von Moltke, Johannes. No Place like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. Berkeley: U California P, 2005. Osborne, Dora. «The Sleeping Wound: Abjection and Dormancy in Tykwer ’ s Winterschläfer.» GFL. German as a Foreign Language 3 (2006). 22 - 39. Schlipphacke, Heidi. «Melodrama ’ s Other: Entrapment and Escape in the Films of Tom Tykwer.» Camera Obscura 21 (2006): 108 - 43. Rentschler, Eric. «From New German Cinema to the Post-wall Cinema of Consensus.» Cinema and Nation. Ed. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie. Routledge: London, 2000. 260 - 77. Tykwer, Tom. «Analytisch träumen. Ein Vortrag von Tom Tykwer anlässlich des Nederlands Film Festivals in Utrecht, September 2001. 15 May 2012. <http: / / www. x-filme.de/ html/ statements.html>. Tykwer, Tom. «Tykwer spricht: ein Gespräch mit dem Regisseur von Lola Rennt.» 20 August 1998. 15 May 2012. <http: / / www.artechock.de/ film/ text/ interview/ t/ tykwer_1998.htm>. Tykwer, Tom, Dir. Winterschläfer. 1997. Prokino. Verhoeven, Michael, Dir. Das schreckliche Mädchen. 1990. Arte. 16 John Blair Genre, Gender, and Gaze: Postmodern Parody in Roth ’ s Baader MURIEL CORMICAN U NIVERSITY OF W EST G EORGIA In this essay I examine how genre, gender, and the gaze function in ways that suggest criticisms of both the main character of Christopher Roth ’ s 2002 film Baader and a general film-viewing public. A close reading of the elements of the film foregrounding the complexity and depth of Roth ’ s interactions with the characters and events of German domestic terrorism (including their media representation) will serve, I hope, to recuperate the film from a negative reception that has sometimes reduced it to little more than a pop-cultural embrace of revolutionary energy and cool, brash, antiauthoritarian masculinity. The recuperative project is an important one because this film is formally quite complex and thus has the potential to open up questions and issues that are sometimes too easily subsumed by a hegemonic national narrative that rejects avenues of exploration suggesting any recuperation of members of the RAF and of a radical leftist political agenda. It is also important because it forces us to examine memory-making films in general, the role they play in contemporary German national identity narration, and the problematic limits of seeing such films in terms of how much they adhere to an «approved» ideological approach to aspects of the German past. In her reading of Schlöndorff ’ s Die Stille nach dem Schuss, Stefanie Hofer argues that Schlöndorff ’ s film is, at least in part, an exploration of the identity crisis that the 1998 elections ushered in for the 68ers. They now had more representatives in the Bundestag than ever before but only at the cost of compromised ideals. «Pragmatismus, Mäßigung und Realismus,» Hofer argues, «haben den heroischen Gestus der Radikalität, des Diskonsensus und vor allem des Idealismus abgelöst» (126). Indeed, whatever fringe, radical, politically active culture Germany had in the sixties, seventies, and even eighties seems to have been swallowed up by precisely the forces Hofer mentions: pragmatism, moderation, and realism. And Germans in general, perhaps because of the fall of the wall and/ or Germany ’ s leading role in the European Union and/ or the events of September 11, 2001, are less sympathetic toward idealist antigovernment ideologies than they were in the past. This is reflected, I would argue, in the kinds of films that have been made about German domestic terrorism in the past ten years and in the often negative reception of those films in the popular press, based, in many cases to be sure, on poor and inaccurate readings but nonetheless published and circulated. Baader can serve as a case in point. Although 1970s terrorism arose at a particular moment and in relation to specific historical forces - the Third Reich, the Vietnam war - Baader (among other films such as Was tun wenn ’ s brennt and even Die Stille nach dem Schuss) foregrounds specific human characters and types, self-stylization, and specifically gendered behaviors as the impetus behind people ’ s involvement in the domestic terrorism of the seventies and deflects attention away from the legitimate and considered ideological justifications the individuals involved might have had. Yet despite the fact that Baader is guilty of offering a reductive and trivialized view of the RAF, Roth has been criticized for paying homage to Andreas Baader and his cohort and has been accused of focusing on Baader ’ s coolness in order to elevate him to a kind of hero status. In Andrea Dittgen ’ s words: «Hardly anyone much liked Baader (2002). . . , in which director Christopher Roth combined terrorism with pop aesthetics, showing Baader as an urban guerrilla and macho lover, venerating him as if he were Jesse James in a Western. Roth even gave him a fictitious death in a violent shoot-out with the police» (25). Others who criticized the film for its use of pop aesthetics to make terrorism chic, its positive mythologizing of Andreas Baader and the RAF, its overly sympathetic portrayal of Baader and/ or its lack of historical authenticity include Ekkehard Knörer, Stefan Aust, author of the seminal Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex, and Isabelle Reicher. 1 The reviews and interpretations of the film that condemn it for turning Baader into a hero and for sympathizing with the RAF should cause resistance for two main reasons. First, what if the film did actually render Baader a hero or depict him sympathetically? Does a critique of a film based solely on its alleged lionizing of Baader not imply a censorship of certain political positions and a refusal to allow for political positions beyond a set of politically correct and acceptable ones? Readings that reject the film for demonstrating the «wrong» sympathies imply that the only appropriate approach to the RAF and its representation is a critical one that labels the players mindless and dangerous terrorists and wipes its hands of them. Such readings betray what I see as a problematically hegemonic view, one that denies the kinds of complexity we need in any discussion of terrorism past or present. In fact, I would argue, this particular kind of negative reception makes the same mistake that Roth suggests, by means of his formal choices, the press, the government, and the peace-keeping authorities made in dealing with the APO in the late sixties: condemning without listening, excluding and marginalizing as dangerous what contains legitimate critiques, and grasping at and enjoying 18 Muriel Cormican with one hand what we cast off and denounce with the other. I hope to elucidate those formal choices and how they function here. Secondly, it is very difficult to see how any medium-appropriate analysis of Baader could arrive at the conclusion that Baader is depicted in heroic terms in the first place. Surely such interpretations are based on a failure to account for the formal complexities that make the film immensely interesting in its representational strategies and its ideological and historical insinuations. In my discussion of gender and gaze, I hope to demonstrate that if Baader comes off as cool, sexy, and heroic, it is only in scenes that Roth uses to suggest that this was how Baader saw himself. In the end, what the viewer gets is a parody. We laugh at Baader ’ s self-stylization because we see in it things that he was unable to see such as his recreation of gender inequity to enhance his own authority. In much of the reception of German cinematic renderings of the German past - be it of the Holocaust, the former East German state, or the RAF - memory making - how to do it appropriately, sensitively, accurately, respectfully - has played a large role, and understandably so. Representing relatively recent historical events and figures inevitably touches the lives of real people affected by those events and intrudes on the interests and careers of actors on the national stage who deal in the currency of national identity and ideology. Not infrequently, therefore, one comes up against receptions and readings of a variety of what I will call memory-making films that treat the films almost exclusively as ideology delivery systems - much like a cigarette is a nicotine delivery system - readings that reduce the films to calculated interventions in the service of a particular political agenda and that accuse the films and/ or filmmakers of presenting viewers with a skewed and problematic prepackaged perspective. There is a sense in which collective memory is treated, at least in public discourse, as what Michael Rothberg, in his book Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, calls «competitive» memory. Introducing and elaborating on a concept that he calls multidirectional memory, Rothberg offers an alternative way of understanding collective memory and memory-making in various contexts: «Against the framework that understands collective memory as competitive memory - as a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources - I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive not privative» (3). A shift in perspective of the sort suggested by Rothberg ’ s concept allows us to see that the generation of memories about or, in the case of Roth ’ s Baader, the playing with memories of one aspect of the past does not necessarily block or falsify memory of other aspects but might, in fact, enhance or comment critically on the same. Seeing memory as multidirectional in this way can help 19 Genre, Gender, and Gaze move us beyond questions of a film ’ s adherence to or deviation from historic detail or of its apparent sympathies and open up spaces in which more accurate close readings of the film might occur. I want to emphasize that I am not undermining how understandable and necessary the former questions are, only positing that they are not enough. Whereas viewers close to victims of the RAF (or any terrorist) attacks are likely to be outraged by any positive depiction of the RAF (even if that positive depiction is, in fact, parodic), it is objectively the case that the members of the group were still human beings who lived, thought, suffered, loved, and died as we all do. And it is also the case that, as much as memory theory and memory studies, memory-making films such as Baader present - often in more accessible form - complex propositions and questions rather than easily digestible, nationalist nuggets. Many of the memory-making films I am thinking of here (Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Der Untergang, Die Stille nach dem Schuß, Aimée und Jaguar, Das Leben der anderen, and so on) deal in realist aesthetics and endeavor to present accurate approaches to historical contexts and events even when the story itself is fictional. As texts, these films invoke historical, political, and ideological «truths» in a manner that respects them as incontestable and promises to enhance the viewer ’ s understanding of them through a series of «what ifs» about the lives of a set of fictional or historical figures who moved in these «real» contexts. The editing choices Roth makes and the fact that Baader quickly becomes a parody means that it differs in an important way from many other German memory-making films, however. It refers not to an incontestable, external, historical truth about Baader but only to another set of texts and narratives about Baader, including Baader ’ s own. Thus in the same moment that Roth hints at a sexy, cool, admirable hero called Baader, he retracts that representation and offers another. In my reading of Roth ’ s formal choices (his editing, comedic invocation of the genre of the Western and his subtle comedy in general), his depiction of gender relations within the RAF, his nods to Godard ’ s Breathless, Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde, and Klaus Lemke ’ s 48 Stunden bis Acapulco, and his treatment of the gaze, of looking, I advance the argument that this is a self-reflexive, postmodern parody that forces attentive viewers to question their reception of the images presented. Roth ’ s character Andreas Baader is over-the-top in every sense of the word and thus little more than a caricature, let alone a hero. From the beginning of Baader, Roth ’ s self-reflexive, postmodern approach to the material is evident in how he works to undermine suture and to fragment the viewer ’ s perception. By means of disjunctive editing, a dissonant soundtrack, the character Gudrun Ensslin ’ s direct address to the camera, and rapid cuts among black and white as well as color pop-culture images, 20 Muriel Cormican historically authentic film footage, and his own fictional reincarnations of the members of the Baader-Meinhof group, Roth interrupts viewer identification and draws attention to the process of representation, both his own and the media ’ s in general. In the introductory sequence, two formal elements in particular stand out for their implied commentary on the content. First, a listlike compilation of faces and events and the media representation of those faces and events from the sixties and seventies offer only a convoluted narrative that allows no easy access unless one is already fairly familiar with the history of the period. The montage of authentic images of the Vietnam war, Joan Baez, protests in Berlin, the Shah, and Mick Jagger creates primarily atmosphere. We get a sense of a punk, exciting, aggressive, antiestablishment youthful movement but have to work to piece things together into a coherent statement. 2 Second, the staid, fictionalized images of intellectually engaged RAF members in a pastoral setting, shot on hand-held camera and with ambient sound, are juxtaposed to the fast-paced, authentic images and events, shot more elaborately and commercially and set here to the sounds of MC5 ’ s punky, abrasive, and somewhat misogynist «Kick Out the Jams.» Coherence is again undermined, and distancing techniques of this sort continue to crop up throughout the film: overlapping editing, ruptures in narrative time, and jump cuts that lend a jagged rhythm. The sense of uncertainty that these techniques create replicate the position of the historically contemporaneous viewer for whom the bombardment by the media must have seemed overwhelming and confusing. It also forces the viewer to interact more with the material, to put the jigsaw pieces together to form a recognizable picture. The stark contrast between the media images of the faces and events of the time and Roth ’ s depiction of the RAF depicting itself on hand-held camera in the opening black and white images in the countryside suggests a variety of representational choices and the possible complicity of the media in adapting what was relatively boring, unexciting protest and conflict into sexy, exciting, action-film-like sequences. Already in the opening three minutes then, Roth introduces the idea of a multiplicity of texts, of the media ’ s role in shaping events and figures, and of the complicity of those recording and consuming the images in the production of a satisfyingly interesting text and set of identities for the main players. Baader and his cohort may have been a problem, Roth suggests, but so too was the media that embraced the potential for exciting news stories about vigilantes whom they simultaneously condemned. If, as Seymour Chatman posits in his article «Parody and Style,» parody is defined as a text that copies and makes fun of another text, then Roth ’ s film certainly conforms to the definition (28). It includes visual quotes 21 Genre, Gender, and Gaze from the texts he copies and makes fun of as montage. Pointing beyond the film itself to other texts in which Baader is a character, he refuses to elevate the other texts (the historically accepted and established narratives and the newsreel representations) to the level of truth and thus underscores the viewer ’ s lack of access to anything beyond representations that reflect certain attitudes, ideologies, and assumptions on the part of those who represent, including himself. Roth advances the argument that Baader is always already a character in a text, first in his own, and then in that of others. He is a mediated construction. One might expect that such a diversion of viewers away from the notion of an original Baader would avert readings that engage in endless discussion of whether the Baader represented is authentic or historically accurate, but that has not been the case. In an interview with Ulrich Kriest, Roth speaks very clearly about the limits of his own filmic mediation of Baader, «Grundsätzlich sage ich dazu, dass das Ende alles offen lassen soll und dass das Ende die ganze erzählte Geschichte in Frage stellt. Ich sage ja nie: So war das. Sondern die Baader-Figur, die ich zeige, ist eine Kinofigur, die ist vereinfacht und trivialisiert.» He concedes his own simplification and trivialization of the RAF and the characters who populated it but also goes on to argue that all representation is, in any case, a simplification and trivialization of immensely complex lives and individuals. While other films might attempt to seriously and accurately depict Baader, offer insight, tell us something meaningful, Roth submits to the limits of a 90-minute feature film from the beginning and creates something that does, to be sure, reflect on and offer insight into Baader and the RAF but that also reflects on the limits of sound-bite media representations that promise to offer us the truth about historically complex, real people and events. Such moments of self-reflexivity, probing, and criticism make this film not just a representation (admittedly fictionalized) of the past but a reflection too on the mechanisms of that representation and on the audiences that partake of the representations. Given the number of distancing effects being employed in the opening sequence of the film and the film ’ s focus on an antiauthoritarian, rebel collective, it is unsurprising that the first lines spoken by Gudrun Ensslin are from a poem by Bertolt Brecht, the father of the Verfremdungseffekt: «Wenn das so bleibt was ist, seid ihr verloren. Euer Freund ist der Wandel, euer Kampfgefährte ist der Zwiespalt. Aus dem Nichts müsst ihr etwas machen, aber das Großmächtige soll zu nichts werden. Was ihr habt, das gebt auf und nehmt euch, was euch verweigert wird.» The heady, intellectual overtones of these lines delivered fairly dryly to the hand-held camera of a fellow rebel provide a radical contrast in tone to the similar sentiment expressed almost immediately in MC5 ’ s lyrics: «Kick out the jams, motherfucker.» Both Brecht 22 Muriel Cormican and MC5 argue for resistance and revolt, Brecht in a reasoned and tamed fashion, MC5 in an emotional, crude, and gritty fashion. Roth constructs a soundtrack that echoes what the juxtaposition of images implies. He recognizes and points out the different modes used to represent the members of the RAF and their theories and ideologies and promises that the film to come will offer a similar variety. This dichotomy is repeated in the contrast between Baader ’ s voice-overs in the film (generally calm, considered, and theoretical in thrust) and his diegetic contributions (generally angered, emotional, and prejudicial). If the extra-diegetic Baader of the voice-overs can be equated with Brecht, then the diegetic Baader is essentially MC5. The black and white images of people milling about somewhat ghostlike in a rural area make for an unexpected beginning to a film about Andreas Baader and introduce spaces and activities that we do not often associate with the RAF. Here, in the middle of the countryside, a group of young reactionaries are pitted against a group of old, traditional farmers in a standoff in which the weapons of choice are a film camera and an empty bucket. The young rebels stand and sit around reading and wielding cameras and flags, and the farmers hide behind old farm equipment and look at them skeptically. In humorous style, Roth invokes the American Western: this is an oddly domesticated standoff on the wild frontier with the patriarchs (the cowboys) attempting to protect their authority and position against the untamed other (the Indians). Roth then carries traits of the western through the film. After the series of introductory cross-cuts discussed above in which predominantly peaceful rural scenes are already juxtaposed to noisy and chaotic city protests and activities, Roth translates the rebellious standoff (camera versus bucket) to an urban space in which Baader shoots a policeman and zooms off to search for another BMW to replace the one he is currently driving. Baader is essentially a lawless cowboy in a BMW, and his badguy, tough image is enhanced by his insistence in a voice-over that he will not surrender: «Ich denke nicht daran mich zu stellen . . .Erfolgsmeldungen über uns können nur heißen verhaftet oder tot. Der Kampf hat erst begonnen.» The film closes with a similar quote from Baader, again emphasizing his bravado: «Wenn jemand behauptet, ich sei auf der Flucht erschossen worden, oder irgendeiner von uns, sei auf der Flucht erschossen worden, dann glaubt ihm nicht.» Baader represents himself as too cool and tough to surrender, as someone who will go down fighting and remain true to his refusal to participate in the structures that exist. The fictionalized closing draws particular attention to Roth ’ s deliberate rewriting of the main character. In this filmic incarnation, Baader not only talks the talk but walks the walk. In the closing moments of the film, which similarly invoke the Western, he strides out of the garage where he ’ s been hiding, throws down 23 Genre, Gender, and Gaze one gun in mock surrender after being hit in the leg, and, after a pause of several seconds, pulls out two more from behind his back and fires repeatedly. He chooses to go out in a high noon shoot-out reminiscent of the shoot-out that closes Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde. The authorities shoot without restraint and well beyond the moment when Baader is dead, riddling him and everything around him with bullets, while the one good cop tries to prevent his death, acknowledging that despite his violent tendencies and misguided actions, there is a kernel of truth to Baader ’ s social critique. The «Zwiespalt» of the Brecht poem quoted by Ensslin at the beginning of the film and referred to from start to finish in a variety of ways rears its head again in this scene. As Baader goes down in a violent shoot-out, an unperturbed housewife in her bathrobe and curlers and a man chewing on a piece of bread take in the spectacle from their apartment windows. The comic contrast between a shoot out and curlers and bread recalls the frontier/ domesticity dichotomy of the opening and reminds the cinemagoer of her own safe and comfortable consumption of the spectacle that is violent cinema. In the beginning, the countryside, the frontier that once needed to be tamed and domesticated, remains a place of wide open spaces, open skies, and unconstrained movement but is dominated by a conservative and patriarchal culture - all of those with whom the RAF does battle are older, entrenched male farmers who fight back with the technologies of their time and profession. The city, on the other hand, the already conquered wilderness, is narrow, mapped, policed, and enclosed but equally dominated by a conservative and patriarchal culture - the SPD meeting is a men ’ s meeting, and there is one woman at the table when Kurt Krone addresses his forces about containing the RAF. What was wild and untamed land has been domesticated and civilized, and this domesticated and civilized space now represents the new frontier, one that is no longer geographical but cultural and intellectual, involving questions of political clout, ideology, gender, engagement, and ownership of the media and technologies of observation and control. Roth ’ s manipulation of the genre of the Western introduces a context in which the actions of the RAF and those who sought them out to bring them to justice can be seen with new eyes. Whereas the framework or constraints of genre often limit the possibilities of interpretation in advance, by populating that framework with new elements that «don ’ t belong» Roth can open up new avenues of understanding and seeing. His play with the genre of the Western, with its tradition of good guys and bad guys, domestication and wilderness, sheriffs and outlaws introduces questions and doubts about the media ’ s limited and limiting representation of the players in the RAF, the time, and the issues. 24 Muriel Cormican Shortly after the biographical narrative of Andreas Baader begins with his shooting of the policeman in 1972, the film flashes back to 1967. Roth employs a standard filmic device to offer us information from the past that grants insight into the character ’ s current motivations. What we find in the 1967 Baader is an immature joy rider who steals a car just for the thrill and drives it in circles in the middle of a field. After his arrest, and in a discussion with his girlfriend and mother of his daughter, we discover that although we might expect him to be knowledgeable about politics and world affairs, he in fact has no idea who Humphrey, the vice president of the United States, is. His narcissism is evident in his frustration with his baby daughter when she won ’ t say «Papa,» and he speaks in slogans, trying to teach a child who clearly doesn ’ t yet speak to say «Haut die Bullen platt wie Stullen.» This scene is followed immediately by one of an SPD meeting in which Kurt Krone gives a short, articulate speech explaining the position of the Außerparlementische Opposition. Krone rationalizes their antiauthoritarian position, defends it in part, and argues that people in authority ought to listen to the critique of these young people so that the country doesn ’ t continue to embrace problematically authoritarian structures. Krone ’ s sympathy for the RAF throughout the film reminds the viewer that it was not the left-leaning ideas of the student movement and eventual RAF in and of themselves that are objectionable but their violent expression in forms that were not acceptable within the system and that could not be controlled and limited. His perspective also raises the question of whether that violent expression might have been forestalled. Krone ’ s description of the APO fits our historical assumptions about the early days of the APO but seems to bear no relationship to the Andreas Baader to whom we have just been introduced, a boor who in the diegetic representation is largely inarticulate and who, when he does make some sense, speaks in slogans. A subsequent cut to Bernward Vesper carefully changing his son ’ s diaper - a fairly obvious contrast to Baader ’ s interaction with his child - further widens the gap between Baader and those construed as some of his more reasonable contemporaries. Roth ’ s editing here calls for us to distinguish politically informed and reasonable protest from cavalier antiauthoritarianism that borders on the sociopathic and to distinguish the APO from an Andreas Baader who can be interpreted as a ridiculous and comic exaggeration of masculinity. Juxtaposed to Krone ’ s reasonable description of the APO ’ s position and to Vesper ’ s gentle fatherhood, the filmic characterization of Baader renders him a narcissist and socially and interpersonally inept. Just as Roth employs generic and formal tools to call our attention to the multiplicity of texts on Baader and to jolt viewers out of their comfort zone, he 25 Genre, Gender, and Gaze invokes the gaze to underscore identity too as text, to suggest the inexorability of narrative, and to further unsettle the viewer. Like his use of disjunctive editing and his offbeat genre choice, his treatment of the gaze works to undermine the viewer ’ s privilege of sitting in the dark, consuming easily digestible images, and receiving a clear message without doing too much labor or reflecting too much on the process of one ’ s own consumption. His examination of the gaze, particularly of how Baader «gazes» at himself, also serves to strengthen the parodic elements in the depiction of Baader, his groupies, and an alienated viewing public. One way in which Roth introduces the concept of the gaze is in his explicit referencing of other cinematic representations of bad guys. He cites Klaus Lemke ’ s 1968 bad-guy film 48 Stunden nach Acapulco - it is the film Baader and Ensslin see when they go to the theater together - and, in terms of style and theme, he invites comparisons to bad-guy films from the sixties such as Jean- Luc Godard ’ s 1963 À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le fou and Arthur Penn ’ s Bonnie and Clyde mentioned already above. In Á Bout de Souffle, Michel shoots a policeman and, on the run from the law, captivates a young American woman with his nonchalant approach to life and his performance of masculinity. Scenes of Baader in Paris and driving down tree-lined avenues in France evoke similar scenes in À Bout de Souffle, and Roth ’ s editing choices give Baader a jagged rhythm reminiscent of Godard ’ s style. À Bout de Souffle sought to, among other things, underscore the construction of the masculine in the bad-guy hero, Michel, who appears to be bad just for the sake of it and for the erotic charge the danger provides him. Posters of Bogart and a match on the Bogart twitch draw the viewer ’ s attention to Michel ’ s masculinity as a self-conscious construction, and to Michel ’ s conscious modeling of himself on his noir heroes from the big screen. Indeed, Baader ’ s stride after he exits the Lemke film mimics that of Dieter Geissler in the scene we saw from 48 Stunden bis Acapulco and points to Baader ’ s similar self-production and self-stylization. In an interview provided as an extra feature on the DVD, Roth discusses his understanding of Baader as someone who liked film and saw himself in some of the bad guys he watched on screen. In reaction to Godard ’ s Pierrot le fou, Roth tells us, Baader is purported to have said «Das ist ja nur ein Film. Das machen wir selbst» (minute 9: 30 - 9: 39 of interview). Roth goes on to refer to Baader as a man who behaved almost like a film director for his own life, always staging action, drama, excitement (minute 24: 38 - 24: 42 of interview). Both in his own explicit discussion of the film and in his editing and formal choices, Roth investigates identity and identity construction as functions of narrative and representation, emphasizing that the Baader «brand» began with Baader who wrote himself and stylized himself first 26 Muriel Cormican and who was then rewritten and restylized by the media, among others. The stylistic and thematic parallels to À Bout de Souffle and Pierrot le fou together with the incarnation of Baader as someone interested primarily in his own coolness contribute to the repositioning of Andreas Baader as a man who never got over his adolescent need to be cool and thus as an object of ridicule rather than as a serious political and social activist. In Paris in 1969, Baader is shown admiring himself in the mirror, carefully touching and caressing some nice clothes he finds in the apartment they borrow, and playing to the super 8 camera and the women. This does not constitute a depiction of a Bader who is «cool» or a hero. It presents instead a Baader who finds himself cool, and a depiction of someone perceiving himself as cool is, after all, significantly different from a straightforward depiction of someone as cool. Roth ’ s emphasis on Baader ’ s gaze at himself changes the viewer ’ s gaze and pushes for a reinterpretation that questions the kinds of characteristics that sometimes are equated with heroism and «coolness.» In short, Roth ’ s Baader is shown to be someone more interested in his clothes, his appearance, how pretty women perceive him, and in cars than he is in any political principle or humanistic cause. The depiction of Andreas Baader in this eponymous film skirts around whatever psychological complexity might have existed in him, nods to it in the occasional reasonable voice-overs it allows him, but the film avoids delving into those same complexities in the way that, I would argue, Uli Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex does - Edel ’ s film shows a development in Baader from an aggressive young uneducated rebel to a more reasonable, theoretically informed adult. In Roth ’ s film, however, Baader emerges as self-assured, pig-headed, abrasive, abusive, and unshakeable in his faith in violence. He becomes the face of the RAF and its goals while the women operate behind the scenes to enhance his image, to articulate his position, to interpret and present in clear political language what he means when he resorts to angry roars of «Spaghettifresser! » «Fotzen! » «Kameltreiber! » and «Schwanzlutscher! » In the final scene of the film, Baader succumbs to a violent death while two apartment dwellers gaze down on him and the action passively. The inhabitants ’ gaze parallels ours as viewers, adds irony to the scene, and draws attention to its staging, to Baader ’ s performance, and to our own reactions to this high noon shoot out. Within the diegesis of the film, we have two viewers who are lounging about at home, seem unmoved by the violence in front of them, and only sort of vaguely curious. On the one hand, we have the sexy, brash, well-dressed young man providing the action and entertainment. On the other, we have the middle-aged apartment dwellers. Cool, active, and undomesticated meets what is without a doubt uncool, passive, and 27 Genre, Gender, and Gaze domesticated - see the curlers and bathrobe. But rather than make Baader a hero, Roth ’ s comedic twisting of the gaze and the western here implies a criticism of Baader ’ s self-stylization as well as of the viewer who embraces the murder and mayhem perpetrated by the rebel on the wild frontier while rejecting urban guerilla forms of resistance as murderous and sociopathic. Behind Baader in the garage, we are privy to his colleague ’ s prediction of what Baader will do now that he has been shot in the leg and cannot escape. He mimics in advance, and to the sounds of Can ’ s «Sing Swansong,» Baader ’ s final stand, intimating that Baader ’ s grandstanding is predictable. But in our parallel to the onlookers, we do not escape criticism either. We are these viewers sitting in our darkened cinemas, safe, unseen, and entertained by a kind of violence that it is publicly suspect to condone. In this closing sequence, femininity and masculinity, domesticity and untamedness, are humorously contrasted in such a way that they become parodies. Domestication in general serves as a comical device in this film and allows Roth to underscore the gaping chasm between daily life and our expectations of it and media representations of daily life and our expectations of them. Indeed, a major element of the film that has been omitted in its critical reception is its reliance on parody and subtle comedy, both of which depend, in large part, on an explicit treatment of the gaze and on the manipulation and exaggerated representation of gendered behaviors. Baader suggests that many of the women in the RAF were drawn to Baader and the RAF by an erotic charge. Roth depicts the women as groupies and emphasizes Baader ’ s recreation of problematic authoritarian, patriarchal structures within the Baader-Meinhof group, begging the question of why intelligent, educated, articulate and politically engaged women accepted Baader ’ s oppression and abuse. Roth chooses to depict the Baader-Ensslin relationship, for example, as based more on sexual chemistry than on shared political goals by focusing on the role of attraction in the kindling of their relationship. Baader is shown first catching sight of Gudrun Ensslin on television while sitting in a darkened room with a group of friends, watching newsreel and smoking. He perks up when Ensslin is shown being playful in a line of students whose t-shirts spell «Albertz abtreten» in protest of the Shah ’ s visit to Berlin and the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. In a traditional shot reverse-shot, Baader ’ s gaze becomes ours as it zooms in on Ensslin ’ s smiling face. Roth cuts from Baader ’ s first glimpse of Ensslin on television to an actual personal encounter during a discussion among the political activists about how to move forward. While the others discuss how to proceed peacefully, Baader repeats aggressively «es muss auf die Fresse geben,» but seems more interested in making eye contact 28 Muriel Cormican and flirting with Gudrun Ensslin, in performing masculinity for her, than in discussing anything or listening to anyone. At this point the film takes a detour into the development of their sexual relationship that shows neither of them in a particularly positive light; he performs for her, and she abandons her lover and child for cheap thrills with him. To his violent bravado in fleeing from and shooting a cop in the first part of the film proper then, we have moved on to his inability to listen to his colleagues and his perception of women as sex objects first and foremost. The scene in which Baader sets a toaster on fire is not only a further amusing commentary on his destructive tendencies but also on his groupies ’ passivity in the face of them. In a scene in which the character blocking is significant - the three women sit on one side of the table staring in Baader ’ s direction; he occupies the other side of the table alone - Baader sticks a fork into a toaster, and all are mesmerized by the flames, by how he destroys and blows things up, as it were, and they all stare at his work in a dazed and drugged stupor. Just as in his courtship of Ensslin, Baader does not emerge here as someone who is particularly committed to a political ideal, rather as someone who is disturbed, without orientation, destructive, deceptive and authoritative in a manner that is worse than that of the state he despises. 3 A comparison of the representation of this same historical moment - their arrival at Meinhof ’ s apartment in search of refuge - in Baader and in Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex can serve to highlight what I argue for as Roth ’ s characterization of the women in the RAF as groupies. In Baader, as described above, three women and Baader sit around the table, getting high and drunk, and setting a toaster on fire. The scene ends with Baader ’ s only addition to the women ’ s list of commandments that must be broken in the name of the revolution: «Du musst töten.» All three women repeat Baader ’ s declaration, the camera pans to a close-up of Baader ’ s face, establishing him as the central figure in the scene, and we cut suddenly to a photo session with Baader that initially looks like a photo-op for the star, our main man, Andreas Baader. (As it turns out, he is just having his photo taken for a falsified passport.) In contrast, the scene in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is sober and focused primarily on the relationship between Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof. Gudrun ’ s gentle awakening of Ulrike is almost erotic, and their tender hug and brief discussion in Ulrike ’ s bedroom suggest a warmth and respect between them that trumps any relationship existing between Meinhof and Baader or Ensslin and Baader at this point. In Edel ’ s rendition of this scene, Baader makes one of his usual brief, aggressive and critical statements before declaring his desire to go to bed and following Ulrike ’ s boyfriend, Peter, out of the kitchen to his bedroom. The three women - Gudrun, Ulrike, and Peggy - are left behind alone and move into positions 29 Genre, Gender, and Gaze around the table to continue the discussion of the struggle. Although Gudrun all but deifies Baader here, arguing that he embodies more revolutionary power than all of the rest of the movement together, the viewer is forced to question her deification of him and to see her valorization of his behaviors as questionable, even incomprehensible. Baader emerges as an oppressive and offensive thug who has somehow found himself propelled into a leadership position despite an enormous lack of leadership qualities. He functions in Edel ’ s film as a figurehead behind whom the women orchestrate activities and articulate positions. Whereas Roth ’ s Baader suggests that many of the women were drawn to Baader and the RAF by an erotic charge and depicts them as groupies, Edel ’ s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex marginalizes Baader, especially intellectually, and depicts the women as operating relatively effectively despite, rather than because of, him. Baader ’ s abrasiveness and aggressive autocracy is further emphasized in Roth ’ s depiction of him as repeatedly relying on the word «Fotze» to refer to the women around him and of his naming of any attempt of theirs to argue with him a «Fotzenaufstand.» The women are depicted as erotically drawn to this hypermasculinity that becomes for us viewers, however, a parody of masculinity. They seem content to accept in their relationship to him the sort of patriarchal authority and abuse they condemn in the state. Whereas they are all content to impose their cultural norms on the Palestinians who take them in as guests for guerilla training in the name of women ’ s rights and gender equity, the group as a whole tolerates Andreas Baader ’ s chauvinism and tyranny. Roth ’ s Andreas Baader can be considered «cool» and a «hero» then only from a very strange and questionable perspective, given that the director is not particularly sympathetic to any of the characters he depicts. None of them are depicted as complex human beings who struggle with the boundaries between resistance and cooption. The film seems to me then to work at demythologizing the RAF and the Baader-Meinhof group. It reduces the renowned figures involved to indiscriminate, unthinking, and sexually driven caricatures who coalesce around a problematically patriarchal masculinity that reminds us of the marginalization of women in previous generations in Germany. In the same way that the early cross-cutting between Baader in prison, Kurt Krone, and Bernward Vesper provides for a background against which it is difficult not to see Andreas Baader in a negative light, a later juxtaposition of a news report about the Frankfurter Brandstifter that interpolates them as serious actors on a political stage and a music-video style scene of these same people around a car by a body of water, getting high and drinking to the sounds of Can ’ s «Sing Swan Song,» points to a disconnect between a perception of the Baader-Meinhof gang as a politically engaged group of 30 Muriel Cormican activists and a diegetic reality of them as a group of disoriented thrill seekers more tied to a pop culture than a political scene. Baader is cavalier, obsessed with superficialities, self-absorbed, and domineering and lacks any sense of self-doubt, and Roth ’ s portrayal of him and his followers elicits unusual but useful comparisons of the radicals of the RAF years to the much criticized, politically disengaged Generation-Golf. Florian Illies has characterized Generation-Golf as a generation of consumers to whom everything is given and for whom entertainment, fun and amusement are the signposts by which they navigate through life. The Generation Golfers are unquestionably cool, progress from purchase to purchase, party to party, event to event but do so, not infrequently, with a distinct sense of disenfranchisement or alienation that they are at pains to suppress - consider, for example, the narrator in Christian Kracht ’ s Faserland. With his particular rendition of Baader, Roth implies that the gulf separating the politically engaged 68ers and Generation Golf may be less gaping than we sometimes imagine, that what is commonly called Generation-Golf and criticized as a generation of disengaged, fashionmad, money-grabbing prima donnas are not as different from 68ers as often assumed. Just by even implying this comparison, Roth levels a criticism at the mythologizing of the 68ers of which he has been accused. At the same time, however, in his introduction of reasoned leftist positions as alternatives to Baader ’ s shouting and slogans, Roth ’ s film does offer an international riposte to a discourse on leftist radical politics that would brand it all as dangerous and given to terrorism, and it offers a riposte to international discourses on terrorism that, especially in the years of the Bush administration in the United States, became monologic, insensitive to grey areas, and blind to many of the complexities (perspective / ideological conviction as different from truth) that make terrorism so controversial, conceptually slippery, and difficult to combat. Simplifying and trivializing in part, and clearly (as responses by surviving relatives showed) offensive to many who have suffered directly as a result of terrorist acts, Baader nonetheless - or perhaps precisely because of this - invites us to reflect on important questions such as the following: Who defines terrorism? What is the difference between vigilantism (often valorized in pop-culture depictions) and terrorism (vilified in the majority of pop-cultural products)? And to what degree do sociopolitical situations and contexts contribute to and fuel terrorism? Roth ’ s Baader is a fascinating and complex film, both formally and in its use of gender and gaze, and it extends to viewers a productive and challenging invitation to revisit the established narratives of German history and their media representations. Brigitte Mohnhaupt ’ s admonition to the post-Baader- Meinhof generation of domestic terrorists in the final scenes of Uli Edel ’ s Der 31 Genre, Gender, and Gaze Baader Meinhof Komplex can serve as a warning to all of us perhaps: «Ihr sollt sie nicht so sehen, wie sie nicht waren.» Mohnhaupt ’ s interest in uttering this statement is to reject any understanding of Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin and so on as victims. But Edel ’ s film might be seen to articulate this sentence in closing as a corrective to a variety of representations of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof and as a call to self-reflection for both those of us who might lean toward mythologizing the RAF and look back nostalgically on a politically engaged youth movement and to those of us who would choose to reject the student movement outright as violent and dominated by terrorist radicals with no legitimate arguments against the kinds of injustices that continue to be enacted today by democratic governments and their repressive state apparati and to be condoned by international organizations and global citizens. Notes 1 In Jump cut, Knörer writes, among other critical things, «die Inszenierung bleibt dabei so bieder und einfallslos wie das Spiel der Darsteller.» Stefan Aust declares in an interview with Ursula Leitner, «Ich finde den Film Baader extrem schlecht, ehrlich gesagt. Ich habe mich auch in mancherlei Hinsicht wirklich geärgert über den Film» (118). And Isabelle Reicher summarizes condescendingly, «Gelangweilte Poseure in einer Medienlandschaft: Der deutsche Regisseur Christopher Roth übersetzt mit seinem Spielfilm «Baader» ein Stück deutscher Nachkriegsgeschichte in Oberflächenreize.» 2 Compare this to the opening of Schlöndorff ’ s Die Stille nach dem Schuss, made in 2000. It catalogs faces and events of the time in a very similar way but without the contrasting pastoral scenes. Schlöndorff opens with scenes of a bank robbery shot with a hand-held camera in which the robbers offer the customers Schokoküsse and jewels of advice such as «Eigentum ist Diebstahl.» A drunken beggar under a bridge who asks for a Mark has hundreds of the just stolen coins poured into his hat, and Rita ’ s narrative of justification begins: «Das waren die heiteren Jahre. Wir dachten, dass wir die Grössten sind, Tatjana. Irgendwie wollten wir das Unrecht abschaffen und den Staat gleich mit. Oder umgekehrt. Beides hing ja zusammen. Politik war Krieg. Überall auf der Welt! » The opening titles are accompanied by the sound of the Rolling Stones ’ «Street Fighting man» and a montage of images associated with anticapitalist and international revolutionary efforts: a sheet of paper with Brecht ’ s «Wenn das so bleibt was ist, seid ihr verloren. . .,» an image of Benno Ohnesorg ’ s death in June 1967, a poster of Jimmy Hendrix and of Louis Malle ’ s 1965 Viva Maria, a bust of Marx, an LP by Ton Steine Scherben, a book on Ché Guevara, a biography of Ho Chi Minh and so on. Thus, in a few minutes German domestic terrorism is tied to a revolutionary pop culture and international revolutionaries just as it is here. The montage has become a trope in German films about domestic terrorism. 3 We might compare his authoritative, controlling demeanor to the pleasure that the government officials take in ordering the police force around through the microphone- 32 Muriel Cormican outfitted helmets that Krone demonstrates to them. The film suggests that there is a kind of fetish about authority that pervades every level of masculine behavior and society. Works Cited Aust, Stefan. Der Baader-Meinhof-Komplex. 3rd expanded ed. Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe, 2008. Baader. Dir. Christopher Roth. Perfs. Frank Giering, Laura Tonke. 2002. Universum Film GmbH, 2002. Chatman, Seymour. «Parody and Style.» Poetics Today 22: 1 (Spring 2001), 25 - 39. Der Baader Meinhof Komplex. Dir. Uli Edel. Perfs. Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck. 2008. DVD, Constantin Film Verleih GmbH, 2008. Dittgen, Andrea. «Radical Chic.» Sight and Sound 18.12 (2008): 24 - 26. Hofer, Stefanie. «Das Ende der Generationseinheit von ‘ 68: Völker Schlöndorffs Die Stille nach dem Schuss.» Seminar 61.2 (2005): 125 - 48. Illies, Florian. Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion. Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001. Knörer, Ekkehard. «Christopher Roth: Baader.» Jump Cut Filmkritik. <http: / / www. jump-cut.de/ filmkritik-baader.html> (1 Dec. 2012) Kracht, Christian. Faserland. München: dtv, 1995. Kriest, Ulrich. «Baader. Das kannst du nicht so sagen, baby! » <http: / / www.intro.de/ kuenstler/ interviews/ 23013366/ christopher-roth-baader-das-kannst-du-so-nichtsagen-baby#> (25 Nov. 2012). Leitner, Ursula. « ‹ Gesichter des Terrors › : Andreas Baader - Ulrike Meinhof - Gudrun Ensslin. Analyse zur Figurengestaltung historischer Vorbilder,» Diplomarbeit, Universität Wien 2010. <http: / / othes.univie.ac.at/ 8582/ 1/ 2010-02-18_0501902. pdf> (27 Nov. 2012) Reicher, Isabelle. «Ein Stück deutsche Nachkriegsgeschichte, in Oberflächenzreize übersetzt: Christopher Roths RAF-Bebilderung Baader.» <http: / / derstandard.at/ 1149474/ Es-muss-auf-die-Fresse-geben> (1 Dec. 2012). Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. 33 Genre, Gender, and Gaze Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Angelika Baier „Ich muss meinen Namen in den Himmel schreiben“ Narration und Selbstkonstitution im deutschsprachigen Rap ISBN 978-3-7720-8467-6 Memory and the Politics of Emotion in Das Leben der Anderen BRIGITTE ROSSBACHER U NIVERSITY OF G EORGIA The ability of cinema to structure identification and feelings about the past has sparked heated debate about representational politics and historical accuracy, most recently in relation to Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ’ s critically acclaimed film Das Leben der Anderen (2006). Set in East Berlin in the mid- 1980s, the film centers on the figure of Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, who comes to discover his own humanity through his active surveillance of the celebrated playwright Georg Dreyman and his partner, the popular stage actress Christa- Maria Sieland. Slowly distancing himself from a corrupt state and increasingly drawn to the world of love, literature and music he witnesses, Wiesler transforms from the staunch ideologue who in the opening scene ruthlessly interrogates a prisoner in the Stasi remand prison Hohenschönhausen to the quasi guardian angel of the couple under his surveillance. At the film ’ s close, the camera lingers on Wiesler ’ s smile after he reads Dreyman ’ s dedication to him «in gratitude» of his first post-Wall novel, Sonata vom guten Menschen. Asked by the sales clerk at the Karl-Marx-Buchhandlung if he would like the novel gift-wrapped, Wiesler utters the final words of the film: «Es ist für mich.» In «Wieslers Umkehr,» an essay published in von Donnersmarcks ’ s 2006 Filmbuch for Das Leben der Anderen, the film ’ s historical advisor Manfred Wilke addresses a question that historians were quick to debate and viewers would likely also ask themselves: Were there really Stasi officers who refused to carry out their assigned duties or in other ways defied the Party? In anticipation of such questions Wilke emphasizes, «In der verkürzten Debatte über die Stasi wird gern vergessen, daß sie nur durch Menschen lebte und funkionierte. Es gab nicht viele, aber es gab MfS-Angehörige die opponierten oder ausstiegen» (201). In other words, because dictatorships require submission and the cooperation of the people to function, the human factor cannot be dismissed. Although there is no specific historical precedent for the figure of Wiesler, Wilke notes a number of relevant cases: the first two Minsters of State Security, Wilhelm Zeiser in 1953 and Ernst Wollweber in 1958, opposed Walter Ulbricht and lost their positions (201). Erich Mielke succeeded Wollweber and maintained his position as Head of the Stasi until 1989. During his time in office two Stasi officers were sentenced to death for treason and executed, Major Gerd Trebeljahr in 1979 and Captain Werner Teske in 1981. Wilke emphasizes that Mielke knew no mercy, quoting Miekle in 1981 as follows: « ‹ Wir sind nicht davor gefeit, daß wir mal einen Schuft unter uns haben. Wenn ich das schon jetzt wüßte, würde er ab morgen nicht mehr leben. Kurzen Prozeß! Weil ich Humanist bin, deshalb habe ich solche Auffassung › » (201). This justification of lethal methods with the de facto humanism of socialist ideology underscores the Stasi ’ s power and the corruption of socialist ideals. Through this logic, committing evil becomes «good» if it serves the greater cause. Von Donnersmarck explains the genesis of his screenplay for Das Leben der Anderen in Lenin ’ s famous words to his friend Maxim Gorky that he could not listen to Beethoven ’ s Appasionata because it made him want to stroke people ’ s heads and say sweet, beautiful things, when to carry out the revolution he had to smash in those heads without mercy. «It showed me how much the ideologue has to be at war with his own humanity to pursue his ideological goals. I thought, let ’ s see if I can find a way of telling a story where a Lenin figure would be forced to listen to the Appassionata just as he was getting ready to smash in someone ’ s head» (qtd. in BBC Collective). From his attic surveillance point, Wielser sheds a tear as Dreyman plays a moving piano rendition of «Die Sonata vom guten Menschen» upon hearing of the suicide of his close friend and former colleague, the theater director Albert Jerska. Because of a petition he signed seven years earlier — recalling the petition artists signed in support of Wolf Biermann upon his expatriation in 1976 — Jerska was no longer able to practice his art. Focusing on the contrast between the humanitarian vision of socialism and the abuse of power of the GDR dictatorship, von Donnersmarck creates a film that he characterizes as «more of a basic expression of belief in humanity than an account of what actually happened» (qtd. in Funder). Rather than to tell a «true story,» then, his ultimate aim was to explore what could have been true — to chart a course history could have taken. This focus on universal themes of human motivation and human conflict in a film that combines elements of a political thriller with melodrama helped contribute to the great domestic and international success of Das Leben der Anderen. Among other prestigious awards, the film garnered seven Lolas (German Film Awards) in 2006 and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007. In the United States the popular media response to the film was overwhelmingly positive: writing for the New York Times, A. O. Scott described it as a «suspenseful, ethically exacting» and «beautifully realized» drama. Others praise it as a «powerful but quiet film, constructed of hidden thoughts and 36 Brigitte Rossbacher secret desires» (Ebert), as «true to its self, and in its depiction of human nature — and human spirit» (Lawson). Anthony Lane concludes his review for the New Yorker by remarking on its seemingly universal relevance: «You might think that The Lives of Others is aimed solely at modern Germans — at all the Wieslers, the Dreymans, and the weeping Christa-Marias. A movie this strong, however, is never parochial, nor is it period drama.» Playing on the final words of the film, Lane concludes, «Es ist für uns. It ’ s for us.» While many of its themes are universal, Das Leben der Anderen is set in a very specific time, place and milieu: the cultural scene in East Berlin primarily in the years 1984 and 1985. The main section ends with the election of Gorbachev to power in the Soviet Union in March 1985. Jumping ahead four years, the Wall falls. Cutting to two years later, Dreyman discovers he was the subject of Stasi surveillance (the «OV Lazlo») and reads through the stacks of files on him. The film ends in 1993 with the publication of Die Sonata vom guten Menschen. With the film specifically focused on the control of cultural and literary activity by the Stasi Hauptabteilung XX/ 7, all major characters represent either the Stasi (Captain Wielser, Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, Minister of Culture and Central Committee member Bruno Hempf) or the cultural intelligentsia (Dreyman, Christa-Maria, Jerska, the journalist Paul Hauser). The only minor characters not belonging to these two groups are Dreyman ’ s neighbor, Frau Meineke, and a ball-playing boy whose family lives in Wiesler ’ s Plattenbau. Both of these characters play an important symbolic role in demonstrating the Stasi ’ s power and reach into micro-level of everyday life and, for the boy, Wiesler ’ s process of dissent as well. In 2006, a report by the Sabrow Commission pointed to the need officially to represent the complexity and ambiguity in the range of lived experiences in the GDR. 1 Headed by Martin Sabrow, director of the Center for Research on Contemporary History (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung) in Potsdam, it included scholars, experts in GDR history and former members of the opposition movement of the GDR. The commission based its report on research into the role of museums, monuments and archives in creating a memory of the GDR, as well as on interviews with experts and victims. The report ’ s suggestions provoked heated debate, some critics fearing that a greater focus on the social world and everyday life of the GDR would serve to downplay the actual terror of the regime — a fear echoed in critiques of Wiesler ’ s representation. For example, Anna Funder, the Australian author of Stasiland. Stories from behind the Berlin Wall stresses that the film is nothing less than pure fantasy, a narrative «that could not have taken place (and never did) under the GDR dictatorship.» In «Tyranny of terror,» Funder cites structural obstacles such as the thorough division of tasks and inner surveil- 37 Memory and the Politics of Emotion lance that made it impossible for Stasi members to save their victims. More disturbingly, she argues that they did not want to do so: «The institutional coercion made these men into true believers; it shrank their consciences and heightened their tolerance for injustice and cruelty ‹ for the cause. › » Indeed, through vivid stories of Funder ’ s post-GDR interactions with former Stasi members and their victims, Stasiland paints a harrowing picture of oppression in the former GDR. Funder thus sees Das Leben der Anderen as having «an odd relation to historical truth, a truth that is being bitterly fought for now.» Pointing not only to the terror wreaked by the Stasi in the GDR, Funder also addresses the «creeping rehabilitation» of former Stasi who are fighting against their designation in united Germany as former perpetrators in Germany ’ s second dictatorship, a contested «truth» that potentially influences how the GDR is remembered now and in the future. In «Das Leben der Anderen oder die ‹ richtige › Erinnerung an die DDR,» Lu Seeghers details how, both preand post-production, von Donnermarck employs numerous plurimedial strategies to market the film under the cache of authenticity. Lending credence to his ability as a privileged 32-year-old West German to offer a differentiated representation of the GDR past, von Donnersmarck stresses in pre-release the four years he spent intensively researching for the film, which included interviews with experts, former Stasi members and their victims. He also sets his project apart from the Ostalgiefilms Sonnenallee (Leander Hausmann, 1999) and Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang Becker, 2003), which had to date been the largest commercial successes dealing with the former GDR in united Germany. «Bei mir steht nicht die Spreewaldgurke im Mittelpunkt. Ich bin detailversessen, aber ich will nicht die äußere, sondern die innere Wahrheit der DDR zeigen,» von Donnersmarck insists (qtd. in Lichterbeck). Publication by Suhrkamp of his Filmbuch in 2006 represents an additional plurimedial strategy Seegers notes. Beyond the original screenplay, the book includes an essay by von Donnersmarck explaining the genesis of the film in Lenin ’ s reaction to Beethoven ’ s Appasionata. An interview with GDR actor Ulrich Mühe, who plays Wiesler, reveals Mühe ’ s own stories of Stasi surveillance and betrayal. In a case of life imitating art, Mühe discovered during the filming of Das Leben der Anderen that his former wife, actress Jenny Gröllman, had informed on him throughout their marriage in the 1980s. In the Filmbuch, Mühe explains how he was drawn to the screenplay for its ability authentically to capture the feeling of the time and his own experiences in the theater world: «Und plötzlich war da ein Buch, wo sich alles richtig anfühlte [. . .] Für diese Zeit habe ich ein Empfinden, weil ich in ihr gelebt habe, unter genau den Menschen, um die es in dem Film geht. Und die waren sehr authentisch, sehr einfühlsam geschildert, in ihrer 38 Brigitte Rossbacher Beziehung zueinander, zur Kunst, zum Staat, zur Stasi» (182 - 83). The final essay, «Wieslers Umkehr,» is by Manfred Wilke, well known as a consultant for the Enquette Commission and co-director of the Forschungsverbund SED-Staat at the Freie Universität Berlin. Wilke contextualizes and lends scholarly authority to the film ’ s representation of GDR history in general and Wiesler ’ s dissent in particular. Highlighting that Das Leben der Anderen is based on a fictional screenplay, Wilke nonetheless stresses its authenticity by situating the film squarely in the late phase of the GDR, stressing the realism of the major actions and situations in the film, and by citing actual cases of dissent within the Stasi and relevant paragraphs of GDR criminal code that support the plot. Beyond the Filmbuch, the promotion of the film in German schools and the production of a Filmheft by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung further functioned to validate Das Leben der Anderen as an informational, educational and authentic memory film. While it conjures memories for spectators familiar with the GDR, Das Leben der Anderen creates memories for those for whom this past really is a foreign country. Not the product of lived experience, the memories of this latter group can be termed «prosthetic,» to use the term coined by Alison Landsberg. «Prosthetic memories,» to quote Landsberg, «emerge at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theater or a museum.» Landsberg argues that these settings facilitate experiences through which a person «sutures him or herself into a larger historical narrative.» This process of suturing favors emotion and experience and involves taking on «a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past which he or she did not live through in a traditional sense» (222). Looking at the world through someone else ’ s eyes, taking on another ’ s point of view can be both meaningful and formative. Important for how they shape our thinking about the world, prosthetic memories, as Landsberg asserts, also have the ability potentially to foster an ethical relationship to the Other, often through means of the imaginative act of empathy (see 222) — an important aspect of von Donnersmarck ’ s tale of Wiesler ’ s redemption. Film scholar Johannes von Moltke takes the «emotional turn» in cinema of the last decades as the starting point for an analysis of how cinematic forms mediate affective attachments. In discussing emotional address in Oliver Hirschbiegel ’ s Der Untergang (2004), a film that represents Hitler ’ s final days in the bunker, von Moltke speaks of «Sympathy for the Devil.» Owen Evans questions in his article on the legacy of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen if the film ’ s production of empathy does not in fact «[r]edeem the deamon.» To varying extents both films can be viewed as representing perpetrators in German dictatorships as figures of audience identification. Beyond Der 39 Memory and the Politics of Emotion Untergang, recent historical representations he views as «characterized by strong affect and emotion» include television docudramas such as ZDF ’ s Dresden (2006) and Die Flucht (ARD, 2007) and feature films such as Sönke Wortmann ’ s Das Wunder von Bern (2003; 18). In adding Das Leben der Anderen to this list, I seek to highlight the tension between the film ’ s creation of a «feeling for history» or so-called Geschichtsgefühl and its historical reference point, the Stasi and the cultural intelligentsia of the GDR. Like the elusive term Heimat, which proves difficult to translate precisely because it involves not just a place of childhood, but a strong emotional attachment and feeling of belonging to that place, Geschichtsgefühl defies easy definition. Martin Walser, to whom the term is attributed, describes his Geschichtsgefühl related to Germany as «der Bestand aller Erfahrungen, die ich mit Deutschland gemacht habe.» Grounded in personal experience, Geschichtsgefühl can be understood as a rebellion against «die verordneten Geschichtsbilder der Republik» — a rebellion of an individual sense of history against a normative and politicized public memory culture. In the Berlin Republic, contested memories have included those of Germans as victims of air war, flight and expulsion, the personal stories long communicated in families but now also packaged in glossy coffee table books and aired in moving television docudramas such as Guido Knopp ’ s documentary on flight and expulsion Die große Flucht (2001). Geschichtsgefühl exasperates those historians who favor fact over emotion, the archive over the image. The editors of a double volume of Ästhetik & Kritik (2003) dedicated to Geschichtsgefühl conclude that, whether ultimately perceived as a danger or not, «Geschichtsgefühl ist eine eigene Macht, die sich nicht mehr mit den alten Koordinaten Vergessenheit/ Versessenheit einfangen lässt.» It is what obtains outside these traditional coordinates of German memory work, «ideologische Restmasse — bisher kaum organisiert oder addressiert» (Cammann et al 13). The Ästhetik & Kritik volume includes three contributions focused on the GDR. In «Phantom Ost,» Eva Behrendt focuses on what she terms «West- Ostalgie,» the exotic post-Wall attraction of the East for young Westeners perhaps best summed up by Behrendt in Philip Roth ’ s pre-Wende description that in the East «[n]othing goes, but everything matters» and in the West «anything goes, but nothing matters» (119). Alexander Cammann argues in his essay that contemporary historians have «forgotten» and «ignored» the revolution of 1989. A final piece by Wolfgang Engler centers on what Engler views as mass media ’ s banal representations of Ostalgie but also on the more differentiated and diverse «sounds» of a younger generation of «GDR» writers. These include Claudia Rusch, daughter of GDR dissidents who in 40 Brigitte Rossbacher Meine freie deutsche Jugend offers a highly personalized view of the Freie deutsche Jugend (FDJ) through ironic and oftentimes humorous vignettes of everyday life. All three essays center on experiences not captured in the Federal Republic ’ s dominant memory culture of the GDR, focusing instead on the sense of everydayness at the heart of Ostalgie, the serious desire to anchor in the past a longing to belong in the present for which objects such as Spreewaldgurken have become homey metonyms. With Das Leben der Anderen, von Donnersmarck himself strove to establish a serious memory of the GDR based on lived experiences. Although he sets his films apart from Ostalgie-films such as Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! and includes no consumer markers of everyday life in the GDR, through Wiesler he represents a contested memory of the GDR. Similar to Good Bye, Lenin! , which Hodgin describes as providing a view of the GDR «uncoupled from its corrupted ideology, a view of what the GDR might have been» (183), Das Leben der Anderen moves beyond corrupted socialist principles to depict the latent possibility of socialism with a human face. Von Donnersmarck thus goes beyond the prevailing discourse in united Germany of the GDR solely as an Unrechtsstaat to focus on the complex relationships between the power of the state and everyday life. Through these relationships, the multiple hierarchies of power become apparent. One way von Donnersmarck (re)creates the «real feeling» of the GDR is through mis-en-scène. In manipulating the film ’ s color palette, von Donnersmarck and cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski seek to elicit identification and also clearly distinguish the memory of the GDR from that of the Federal Republic. In an interview entitled «A World Without Red and Blue,» von Donnersmarck explains, for example, how he created a distinct color palette to capture the feel of the GDR. 2 «I really tried to reconstruct that [East German] world and by looking at pictures I realised that red and blue, two colours that seem the most shocking to the eye and which have very extreme qualities to them were largely absent. It occurred to me that we could reconstruct the East by simply leaving out these two colours all together» (229). After experimenting with this idea, he showed his drawings and designs to friends and relatives from the East who found that this «GDR without red and blue» really reminded them of the GDR. «Of course, there was red and blue in the GDR,» von Donnersmarck adds, « but eliminating them made it feel more like the GDR than it would if you reconstructed things exactly as they were» (230). Touring the East with the film, he found that people were astounded how the film allowed them to «re-enter their past,» a past which appeared more real than the «real» images of the GDR: «I decided not to tell them about my little trick with colour,» he notes (230). The GDR without red and blue is 41 Memory and the Politics of Emotion one saturated in muted tones of gray, brown, green and beige — a GDR that at once recalls and goes beyond the grayness of everyday life, the Wall and the socalled «graue Herren» of the Stasi. Regarding color, Paul Coates argues that while the artists and Stasi occupy distinct physical spaces and emotional lives in the film, they share a uniform palette. This leads Coates to conclude that the «[t]he German Democratic Republic itself becomes a fusion of colour and monochrome whose ‹ seeping sepiasation › of reality may have sought to anaesthetize the populace, neutering oppositions than could have engendered change» (47). Lending credence to Coate ’ s theory are the similar trajectories away from the State of Wiesler and Dreyman. As with the manipulation of color, the clothing of the writers and artists is consciously more appealing than GDR clothes of the time would have been, an additional means of heightening identification. In an interview, costume designer Gabriele Binder explains that the goal in creating costumes was to fashion people who from our current perspective appear respectable. Using actual GDR clothing styles and colors from the mid-1980s would likely have made the characters seem somewhat laughable. Costume design was thus driven by the following questions: «Was mögen wir? Wie wollen wir die Menschen sehen? Was wollen wir ausblenden, weil es aus der heutigen Sicht nicht mehr verstanden würde oder gegen die Würde des Menschen arbeitet? » Interestingly, because of the dearth of GDR photos of certain settings, such as of a premiere party, the book chosen to guide costume choices was a small volume depicting Croation artists from the years 1978 - 1983. A goal was to keep the costumes minimalist and fitting to the individual without appearing eccentric or glamorous. Dreyman sports the same worn corduroy jacket throughout the film. At the premiere, Christa-Maria wears an authentic GDR dress whose lines were changed to give it more sex appeal. It maintains a hint of the East, however, as the dress ’ s synthetic silk lacks real silk ’ s natural flow. The narrow lines of Wiesler ’ s uniform were designed to stress his containment and isolation. Its buttons, Binder stresses, eerily appear as another set of eyes. A GDR jacket but not originally a Stasi uniform, it becomes one in the film through Ulrich Mühe ’ s masterful performance. For some critics, however, such as British historian Timothy Garton Ash, author of The File, the costume design contributes to the sense that von Donnersmarck is getting things wrong. Ash, who lived in East Berlin in the late 1970s, is deeply moved by the film yet also responds, No! It was not really like that. This is all too highly colored, romantic, even melodramatic; in reality, it was all much grayer, more tawdry and banal. The playwright, for example, in his smart brown corduroy suit and open-necked shirt, dresses, walks, and talks like a West German intellectual from Schwabing, a chic 42 Brigitte Rossbacher quarter of Munich, not an East German. Several details are also wrong. On everyday duty, Stasi officers would not have worn those smart dress uniforms, with polished knee-length leather boots, leather belts, and cavalry-style trousers. By contrast, the cadets in the Stasi training school at Potsdam-Eiche are shown in ordinary, studenttype civilian clothes; they would have been in uniform. Ash is of course right, yet precisely such details enhance the audience ’ s emotional investment in the film. The colors offer a beautiful filmic experience; Dreyman ’ s clothing helps those more familiar with the West relate to him as a bohemian cultural intellectual; the Stasi uniforms function to enforce their role in the second German dictatorship; and the student-type clothing worn by the Stasi cadets facilitates identification. One cadet responds to the audio recording of Wiesler ’ s merciless interrogation of 227 with the question why the prisoner had to be kept awake for so long. «Das ist doch unmenschlich,» the cadet asserts. In response, Wiesler scans the seating chart and places an «x» by the student ’ s name to mark his audacious breaching of one of society ’ s invisible but very real borders. Other aspects of the mise-en-scène have greater historical authenticity. Music by GDR bands recreates acoustic experiences. For example, the Manfred Ludwig Sextett plays at the premiere party, and «Wie ein Stern» by GDR pop musician Frank Schöbel provides background music in the bar scene. When possible, the film was also shot in original Berlin locations. These include the former Stasi Headquarters in the Normannenstraße and the office of the Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen or Gauck/ Birthler/ Jahn Behörde, both symbolic memory sites in the Berlin Republic. The director of the memorial site at the former Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen, Hubertus Knabe, however, denied von Donnersmarck permission to film on location on the grounds that the screenplay falsifies the site ’ s history. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Knabe asserts, «Der Stasi-Vernehmer als Held: Das verletzte die Gefühlte vieler Opfer und führt die Zusachauer in die Irre.» Von Donnersmarck also scouted Berlin for streets that retained a GDR look, something so important to him that even after realizing the impossibility of keeping Berlin graffiti artists under wraps, he stuck with his original plan and had the streets repainted daily before shooting. The Stasi equipment used in the film was procured from museums and collectors - everything down to the machine at the end that steams open the letters is, in the director ’ s words, «real Stasi.» In Erinnerungsorte der DDR, Martin Sabrow highlights three memory discourses of the GDR today: the Diktaturgedächtnis, the Arrangementgedächtnis, and the Fortschrittsgedächtnis. The dominant public memory discourse of the GDR, the Diktaturgedächtnis, focuses on the East German 43 Memory and the Politics of Emotion state ’ s power and modes of repression and on the binary relationship of perpetrators and victims (19). This is the black-and-white, state-sanctioned memory of the GDR exclusively as an Unrechtsstaat as opposed to the Federal Republic as a Rechtsstaat. Das Leben der Anderen initially reflects this prevalent memory by depicting the GDR solely as a repressive dictatorship, a country of the Stasi and Wall. The film begins with the following text: «1984, East Berlin. Glasnost is nowhere in sight. The population of the GDR is under strict control by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police. Its force of 100,000 employees and 200,000 informers safeguards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Its declared goal: ‹ To know everything. › » 3 In the opening scene, a uniformed guard leads a prisoner in civilian clothes down a long empty corridor at Hohenschönhausen. In the interrogation room is Wiesler, who forces the prisoner, referred to with the depersonalized label «Häftling 227,» to sit with his hands under his thighs. Wiesler proceeds with a harsh interrogation of 227, who is suspected of aiding in the Republikflucht of one of his friends, a crime that highlights the most iconic and repressive symbol of the GDR, the Wall. Initially 227 denys any knowledge of his friend ’ s planned escape and thereby implies that the state has arrested an innocent man. To this Wiesler responds, «Wenn Sie unserem humanistischen Staat so etwas zutrauen, dann hätten wir ja schon recht, Sie zu verhaften, auch wenn sonst gar nichts wäre» (15). 4 Not only real transgression, but the thought of transgression is a punishable offense. Wiesler pries a confession from 227 with brutal tactics that include 40-hours of sleep deprivation and threats to arrest his wife and have his children taken into the custody of the state and placed in a state-run home for children. A sign of the multiple levels of observation in the film, the recording of the interrogation is then put to didactic use at the Stasi school in Potsdam-Eiche where Wiesler trains cadets. In his lecture on surveillance, Wiesler issues the blunt proclamation, «Bei Verhören arbeiten Sie mit Feinden des Sozialismus. Vergessen Sie das nie.» Here the film diverges from the screenplay, which goes further by having Wiesler state in much more ideologically laden terms: «Vergessen Sie nie, sie zu hassen» (21). After the opening scenes in Hohenschönhausen and the Stasi training school, the viewer encounters a world of community, feeling, and humanity, first on stage in Dreyman ’ s play Gesichter der Liebe and then in the rich emotional lives of the artists themselves. 5 The clear «Hass/ Liebe» division between the Stasi and the Others becomes obscured, however, through the drama that plays out between these poles. It is here, in the complex relationships within and amongst the Stasi and its Others, that the film creates a «feeling for history.» This is the space of a second and less prevalent 44 Brigitte Rossbacher GDR memory discourse in Germany today, the Arrangementgedächtnis. Sabrow describes the Arrangementgedächtnis as concerned with the relationship between the power of the state and everyday life. Predominant today among former East Germans, this memory discourse centers on individual conflicts, solutions, and successes in a society where the Stasi had the power to control lives. Unlike the Diktaturgedächtnis, which affords a neat separation of the system of power on the one hand and biographies of everyday life on the other, the Arrangementgedächtnis highlights the interconnectedness of these two realms. In focusing on this interconnectedness, Das Leben der Anderen clearly hit what historian Stefan Wolle terms «an invisible nerve»: «[Der Film] wirft Fragen auf, die durch Wissenschaft nicht zu klären sind. Er zeigt, dass zwischen dem Alltag in der DDR und dem Stasi-System keine Grenze verlief» (498). These ultimatly subjective questions posed by the film have to do with courage, cowardliness, and an omnipresent fear — emotions of everyday life that defy scholarly categorization (Wolle 499). When asked to contribute an essay on the question of «Anpassen oder Widerstehen? » to Roman Grafe ’ s volume of the same name, Wolf Biermann describes the GDR as a «buntes Grau,» arguing that collusion and resistance can be variously defined. Resistance was widespread and had many facets in the GDR, Biermann argues, «vom Ulbricht-Witz über den Fluchtversuch bis zur offenen Opposition.» Mary Beth Stein sees the film ’ s greatest achievement as its creation in Wiesler of a sympathetic «perpetrator-victim» who represents and observes the contradictions of life in the GDR. I concur with Stein that the film «has moved die historische Aufarbeitung about the East German past beyond the fundamental opposition of victims and perpetrators and the black-and-white rhetoric of the 1990s» (577). The third and much less prevalent official memory discourse, the Fortschrittsgedächnis, describes the memory of progress that still clings to the idea of a Socialist or post-capitalist alternative to capitalism. This memory is maintained by former members of the GDR elite and left-wing activists of the PDS or other leftist political parties. In the post-Wall world of the film, Hempf represents this memory discourse. Meeting Dreyman in the lobby during the premiere of a modernized Gesichter der Liebe, he states, «Es war schön in unserer Republik. Das verstehen viele erst jetzt.» Hempf ’ s son, we learn in the screenplay, has become a PDS representative (149). The broader question of what it meant to work within the system — even in critique of it — can be seen by looking at the individual stories of collusion, accommodation and dissent of the three main characters: Wiesler, Dreyman and Christa-Maria. Wiesler represents Stasi Hauptabteilung XX/ 7, which at the time of its dissolution had a network of over 400 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. 45 Memory and the Politics of Emotion Playing out in this cultural realm, Das Leben der Anderen thus also highlights the complex relationship between institutions of power and the socialist public sphere. 6 While many critics equate the film ’ s representation of the Stasi with its depiction of Wiesler, his fundamental belief in socialism distinguishes him from the outset from his cynical and self-interested superiors Grubitz and Hempf. When Wiesler learns from Grubitz that the reason for the entire surveillance operation of Dreyman is to get rid of Hempf ’ s rival for Sieland ’ s affections, an important difference between the two becomes apparent: Grubitz views the «OV Lazlo» as a fortuitous opportunity for career advancement while Wiesler responds, «Sind wir dafür angetreten? Weißt du noch unseren Eid? ‹ Schild und Schwert der Partei › » (60)? Wiesler ’ s interactions with the self-promoting and hypocritical Grubitz highlight his growing disaffection with his role. In the Stasi cafeteria, Grubitz is shown as cruel and emotionally manipulative in his treatment of Unterleutant Stigler. Unware of the presence of his superiors at his table, Stigler begins to tell his friends a Honecker joke. Upon seeing Grubitz and Wiesler, Stigler ’ s fear is well founded and palpable, yet he is mocked by Grubitz because of it. Grubitz prods Stigler to continue with the joke. After having a good laugh, Grubitz curtly asks for Stigler ’ s name and rank. He then further asserts his status through his own telling of an equally damaging joke about Honecker. The screenplay contains the following note for this scene: «Wieder einmal wird [Wiesler] damit konfrontiert, wie anders als er andere ihren Glauben an den Kommmunismus leben» (62). Stigler, we later see, ends up steaming open letters in a basement. Hempf further provokes Dreyman by quoting Stalin ’ s dictum that poets are the engineers of the soul and appears as a callous glutton who abuses his power for personal gratification. Grubitz appears as a careerist who plays the game to get ahead. Portrayed in comparison to Wiesler as having been a weak student, Grubitz nonetheless receives the Doktortitel (without actually having the schooling for the degree). He boasts to Wiesler about the pseudo-scientific thesis on the five different artistic types in the GDR written by his first doctoral student, «Haftbedingungen für politisch-ideologische Diversanten der Kunst-Szene nach Charakterprofilen» (105 - 06). While historian Jens Giseke critiques the film ’ s representation of Wiesler as unrealistic by arguing that the Stasi was in fact characterized much more by «Antiintellektualismus, Machtbewusstsein, [und] . . . Bedenkenlosigkeit» (583), these attributes epitomize both Hempf and Grubitz. Das Leben der Anderen further develops empathy with Wiesler through filmic techniques. Through affective mimicry, we see that Wiesler shares the emotional tensions of Dreyman und Christa-Maria as he emulates their 46 Brigitte Rossbacher physical acts. For example, he tilts his head and wraps his hands around himself as Dreyman comforts Christa-Maria in a similar pose in their apartment below. 7 Frequent shared point-of-view shots also emphasize how he shares in the lives of the others, for example when he hears Dreyman ’ s playing of «Die Sonata vom guten Menschen.» After Dreyman utters the words, «Kann jemand, der diese Musik gehört hat, wirklich gehört hat, noch ein schlechter Mensch sein? » the director ’ s comments in the screenplay describe Wiesler ’ s facial expression, as shown in a close-up, «Wielser von vorne. Auf seinem Gesicht liegt ein vorher noch nie gesehener Ausdruck» (77). Moreover, Wiesler comes to occupy the same physical spaces as Dreyman in relation to Christa-Maria: he hides behind the inside door of Dreyman and Christa-Maria ’ s building from the Stasi, who have come to search for the typewriter he has removed from their apartment and hidden under his jacket. It is the same position Dreyman stood in to hide from Christa-Maria after he sees her getting out of Hempf ’ s car. Both men know one of Christa-Maria ’ s secrets and work to protect her. Upon Christa-Maria ’ s suicide, Wiesler is the first to appear, kneeling over her in a position then taken up by Dreyman after he appears on the scene. Wiesler ’ s growing emotional attachment to the artists and the world they represent parallels his distancing from «real existing socialism,» for which there is no distinct turning point but rather an accumulation of smaller acts — a lifting of the eyebrow about Grubitz; catching himself when, in the elevator of his Plattenbau, he begins to ask a young boy his father ’ s name in order to report him for defamation of the Stasi. Instead he asks «Wie heißt denn dein. . .Ball» (78)? Wiesler thus comes to represent the idealism and the belief in socialism «with a human face» that could no longer be sustained in the GDR of his time. In this Wiesler ultimately has history on his side — his demotion coincides with the election of Gorbachev as General Secretary. After Grubitz tells Wiesler he ’ ll be steaming open letters for the next twenty years until his retirement, the headline of Neues Deutschland from March 11, 1985 and a large picture of Gorbachev are visible on the passenger seat of Wiesler ’ s car: «Neuer Generalsekretär der KPdSU gewählt: Michael S. Gorbatschow.» Like Wiesler, Dreyman is a conformist, idealist and committed socialist. In the cultural sphere, he at first occupies a position distinct from that of his closest friends, the blacklisted theater director Albert Jerksa and the journalist Paul Hauser. Linientreu, Dreyman is a celebrated and privileged playwright, a Nationalpreisträger (2. Klasse) who arouses no suspicions and is a personal friend of Margot Honecker. «Für ihn ist die DDR das schönste Land der Welt,» Grubitz jests (25). The implications of Dreyman ’ s collaboration come to the fore upon Jerska ’ s suicide, a fate linked in the film to Jerska ’ s 47 Memory and the Politics of Emotion blacklisting, isolation and inability to practice his art: «Was hat ein Regisseur, der nicht inszenieren darf? Nicht mehr als ein Filmvorführer ohne Film, ein Müller ohne Mehl. Er hat gar nichts mehr. [. . .] Gar nichts mehr. . .» (46). After the suicide, Hauser, who had previously chided Dreyman for his «charming bedfellows,» criticizes Dreyman outright for his untenable position, «Du bist so ein jämmerlicher Idealist, daß du fast schon ein Bonze bist. Wer hat denn Jerska so kapputtgemacht? Genau solche Leute: Spitzel, Verräter und Anpasser! Irgendwann muß man Position beziehen, sonst ist man kein Mensch» (55)! While Hauser directs his moral judgment at the Anpasser Dreyman, the spectator sees that it also addresses Wiesler, who listens in on the conversation from the attic. For both Wiesler and Dreyman, the two characters the film initially casts as most genuinely committed to the socialist cause, the imperative of «Mensch sein» ultimately requires a distancing from the State. At Jerska ’ s funeral, Dreyman begins to confront the truth of his privileged position by silently composing an article on the GDR ’ s unpublished and high suicide rate. The article ’ s title, «Von einem, der rübermachte,» entwines the crossing over to the next life with the crossing of borders in this one, thus linking death and dissent in an homage to a lost friend. Eventually published anonymously in Der Spiegel, it marks Dreyman ’ s shift from a collaborator also published in the West to a dissident published only in the West. Through Jerska, the film conjures the symbolic significance of the oppositional GDR song-writer Wolf Biermann, whose expatriation during a concert in Köln in 1976 signaled for many of the GDR ’ s cultural intelligentsia the impossibility of working within the limits set up by the State. Like many others, Jerska signed the petition in support of Biermann and suffered the consequence of Berufsverbot, a fate linked in the film to his suicide. Critical of what he sees as the films unrealistic depiction of GDR writers in the figure of Dreymann, Slavoj Ž i ž ek states, «The film takes place in 1984 — so where was [Dreyman] in 1976. . .? » To answer Ž i ž ek one must look at Jerska. Unlike Jerska and Hauser, Dreyman operates within the borders set by the State, is unwilling to speak out against the system and initially is not the object of surveillance. Knowing how far one can go, for example, he expresses no sense of surprise when Hauser is banned from professional travel to the West. Through the different positions vis-à-vis the state occupied by Dreyman, Jerska, and Hauser, Das Leben der Anderen highlights the complex nature of collaboration, conformity and critique in the GDR public sphere. At the premiere party for Gesichter der Liebe, Dreyman attempts to appeal to Hempf on Jerska ’ s behalf through a presumed shared belief in socialist progress: «Wir müssen die Menschen doch mitnehmen, alle. Und [der Jerska] 48 Brigitte Rossbacher glaubt fest an den Sozialismus,» Dreyman asserts. Hempf ’ s cynicism resounds in his retort: «. . .das lieben wir ja auch alle an Ihren Stücken: die Liebe zum Menschen, die guten Menschen; den Glauben, daß man sich verändern kann. Dreyman, ganz gleich, wie oft Sie es in Ihren Stücken schreiben, Menschen verändern sich nicht» (34). In other words, while Dreyman ’ s play enacts the ideology of socialist humanism, the Minister of Culture himself rejects one of its central tenets — the development of the «new human being.» Das Leben der Anderen further represents the price of adopting a critical stance through the fate of Christa-Maria, who, like Jerska, loses her position in the public sphere. Quite literally, she decides no longer to be «in bed» with the regime and breaks off her affair with Hempf, who thereupon attempts to destroy her career by having her arrested for illegally procuring the prescription stimulants to which she is addicted. Interrogated by the Stasi, threatened with never again appearing on a German stage, she is blackmailed into revealing Dreyman as the author of «Von einem, der rübermachte,» an act of betrayal that leads to her suicide. Dreyman, Wiesler and Christa-Maria all distance themselves from the State: Dreyman by taking a position with the article in Der Spiegel, Wiesler by falsifying his surveillance reports from the «OV-Lazlo,» and Christa-Maria through her final rejection of Hempf. A montage scene with the GDR band Bayon playing «Versuch es,» a poem by Wolfgang Borchert, in the background beautifully represents how to be «good» means to face the elements. Borchert ’ s poem reads: Stell dich mitten in den Regen, glaub an seinen Tropfensegen spinn dich in das Rauschen ein und versuche gut zu sein! Stell dich mitten in den Wind, glaub an ihn und sei ein Kind - laß den Sturm in dich hinein und versuche gut zu sein. Stell dich mitten in das Feuer, liebe dieses Ungeheuer in des Herzens rotem Wein - und versuche gut zu sein The music sets in as Wiesler leaves Grubitz ’ s office, still clutching the manila folder containing incriminating evidence that he decided not to pass on to Grubitz. The film then cuts to Dreyman as he types his Spiegel article. We then see Wiesler as he falsifies his report by typing that Hauser, Wallner and Dreymann are working on a play about the 40th anniversary of the GDR. 49 Memory and the Politics of Emotion Next we see Christa-Maria as she leaves the dentist practice where she gets her illegal prescriptions. She looks around cautiously yet fails to notice that she is under Stasi observation. When Christa-Maria enters the apartment, she sees Dreyman hiding the typewriter used to compose «Von einem, der rübermachte» under the doorsill. To this point his authorship of the suicide article had been kept from her. In their conversation in bed that follows, Dreyman starts to tell Christa-Maria what he and his friends are really writing about, yet she says: «Du brauchst es mir nicht zu erzählen.[. . .] Ich bin jetzt ganz bei dir, ganz egal was» (111 - 12). The scene then cuts to a rejected and dejected Hempf sitting at the edge of a bed in a lonely hotel room. As the music fades, Dreyman passes on his article to Spiegel editor Gregor Hessenstein. The sequence ends as Dreyman and Christa-Maria watch the breaking news of the publication of «Von einem, der rübermachte,» an occurrence that would ultimately have been impossible without the dissent of Wiesler, Dreyman, and Christa-Maria. In depicting the effects of the limits of speech in the public sphere and in the private realm of interpersonal relationships, Das Leben der Anderen succeeds in establishing what Owen Evans terms «authenticity of affect»: «An affect is what lingers, . . . ‹ residue › , something we feel which is in excess of the representational system that produced it» (Phillips qtd. in Evans 173). This emotional authenticity ultimately explains the response of Joachim Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor and prominent GDR civil rights activist, upon seeing the film: «Ich bin im Kino, ich kenne, was ich sehe. Ja, sage ich, so war es.» Biermann, whose Stasi-files number 10,000 pages and contain 215 cover names of Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, also remained deeply moved by Das Leben der Anderen despite Wiesler ’ s unprecedented transformation: «In diesem Film nun sah ich, freilich als Kunstfigur verfremdet, zum ersten Mal solche Phantome als lebendige Menschen, also auch in ihrem inneren Widerspruch. Die Gespenster treten aus dem Schatten. Manchmal hat das Kunstwerk mehr dokumentarische Beweiskraft als die Dokumente, deren Wahrheit (sowieso? ) angezweifelt wird . . .» In conclusion, Das Leben der Anderen ultimately leaves the viewer not with the image of «good Stasi» — that is not the «emotional residue» that sticks - but with a sense of the very human struggles in a Stasi land. In so doing it reflects not only a GDR Geschichtsgefühl, but prostheticly helps us to imagine a GDR with color. This is its Appassionata. 50 Brigitte Rossbacher Notes 1 For more on the Sabrow Report and official memory debates in the GDR, see Silke Arnold-de Simine and Susannah Radstone ’ s «The GDR and the Memory Debate.» 2 In the Projections interview, von Donnersmarck also comments on color patents developed in the 1960s to which the East did not have access. «I was very aware that the Eastern bloc had a very different palette of colours to the West. I even talked to a chemist who explained that the reason for this was that there were certain patents developed from the 1960s onwards that people in the East did not have access to. In the East the colours stayed similar to what they had been in the late 1950s: more subdued and less neon than those in the West. This also gave the East a more dignified and calm look; I was very aware of that from my trips to the East and the two years I spent in the Soviet Union just as the Soviet Union collapsed» (229). 3 The Sony DVD, which is in German and includes optional English subtitles, presents the text in English only. 4 Quotations of the film ’ s dialogue cited from the published screenplay in the Filmbuch are noted with page numbers. 5 For a thought-provoking analysis of Gesichter der Liebe, see Herrmann 100 - 101. 6 David Bathrick points to this in his conclusion to The Powers of Speech: «The story of the Stasi and the poets does not just tell of individual literary figures or the empirical workings of the intelligence service. It is also about restructuring and reclaiming one ’ s history; the nature of complicity, control, and dissent in the process of everyday GDR life; the search for new and different norms of morality and values. . .» (221). See also Bathrick ’ s more recent article directly related to Das Leben der Anderen «Memories and Fantasies about and by the Stasi.» 7 For an insightful analysis of affective mimicry (in Der Untergang), see von Moltke. Works Cited Arnold-de Simine, Silke and Susannah Radstone. «The GDR and the Memory Debate.» Remembering and Rethinking the GDR. Multiple Perspectives and Plural Authenticities. Ed. Anna Saunders and Debbie Pinfold. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 19 - 33. Ash, Timothy Garton. «The Stasi on Our Minds.» The New York Review of Books. May 31. 2007. http: / / www.nybooks.com/ articles/ archives/ 2007/ may/ 31/ the-stasi-on-our-minds/ ? pagination=false. Last accessed March 14, 2013. Ästhetik & Kommunikation. «Geschichtsgefühl.» 122/ 123. 34 (2003). Bathrick, David. The Powers of Speech. The Politics of Culture in the GDR. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995. — . «Memories and Fantasies About and By the Stasi.» Remembering the German Democratic Republic. Divided Memory in a United Germany. Ed. David Clarke and Ute Wölfel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 223 - 234. BBC Collective. «The Lives of Others Interview.» April 12, 2007. http: / / www.bbc.co. uk/ dna/ collective/ A21636407. Last accessed April 5, 2013. 51 Memory and the Politics of Emotion Behrendt, Eva. «Phantom Ost.» Ästhetik und Kommunikation. 117 - 22. Biermann, Wolf. «Buntes Grau.» Die Schuld der Mitläufer. Anpassen oder Widerstehen in der DDR? Ed. Roman Grafe. Munich: Pantheon, 2009. — . «Das Leben der Anderen. Warum der Stasi-Film eines jungen Westdeutschen mich staunen läßt.» Die Welt. 22 March 2006. http: / / www.welt.de/ print-welt/ article205586/ Warum-Wolf-Biermann-ueber-den-Stasi-Film-Das-Leben-der-Anderen-staunt.html. Last accessed March 14, 2013. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Filmheft. Das Leben der Anderen. http: / / www. bpb.de/ shop/ lernen/ filmhefte/ 34052/ das-leben-der-anderen. Last accessed March 14, 2013. Cammann, Alexander. «1989 - die ignorierte Revolution.» Ästhetik & Kommunikation. 123 - 30. Cammann, Alexander, Jens Hacke and Stephan Schlak. «Editorial. Geschichtsgefühl.» Ästhetik & Kommunikation. Coates, Paul. Cinema and Colour. The Saturated Image. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Das Leben der Anderen. Dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. DVD Sony Classic Pictures, 2006. Ebert, Roger. «The Lives of Others.» Chicago Sun-Times. September 21, 2007. http: / / www.rogerebert.com/ apps/ pbcs.dll/ article? AID=/ 20070920/ REVIEWS/ 70920002/ 1023. Last accessed April 6, 2013. Engler, Wolfgang. «Dämonendämmerung und Aasgeruch. DDR-Vergangenheit zwischen literarischer Archäolgie und medialem Schlußverkauf.» Ästhetik und Kommunikation. 131 - 38. Evans, Owen. «Redeeming the deamon? The legacy of the Stasi in Das Leben der Anderen.» Memory Studies 2.2 (2009): 166 - 77. Funder, Anna. «Tyranny of Terror.» The Guardian. 5 May 2007. http: / / www. guardian.co.uk/ books/ 2007/ may/ 05/ featuresreviews.guardianreview12. Last accessed March 14, 2013. Henckel von Donnersmarck, Florian. Das Leben der Anderen. Filmbuch. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007. — . «Es hat ja schon viele Versuche gegeben, die DDR-Realität einzufangen.» Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck und Christoph Hochhäusler im Gespräch mit Ulrich Mühe. Das Leben der Anderen. Filmbuch. 182 - 200. Herrmann, Mareike. «The Spy As Writer: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ’ s Das Leben der Anderen.» Gegenwartsliteratur 6 (2008): 90 - 113 Hodgin, Nick. Screening the East. Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989. New York: Berghahn, 2011. Landsberg, Alison. «Memory, Empathy, and the Politics of Emotion.» International Journal of Politics and Culture. 22 (2009): 221 - 29. Lane, Anthony. «Guilty Parties. The Lives of Others.» The New Yorker. 12 February 2007. http: / / www.newyorker.com/ arts/ critics/ cinema/ 2007/ 02/ 12/ 070212crci_cinema_lane. Last accessed March 15, 2013. 52 Brigitte Rossbacher Lawson, Terry. «Moral dilemmas dominate in The Lives of Others.» The Detroit Free Press. March 1, 2007. http: / / www.freep.com/ apps/ pbcs.dll/ article? AID=/ 200703 02/ ENT01/ 703020363/ 1035/ RSS04. Last accessed April 5, 2013. Lichterbeck, Phillip. « ‹ Die innere Wahrheit der DDR. › Über die Dreharbeiten.» Der Tagesspiegel. 5 December 2004. Last accessed March 19, 2013. http: / / www.tagesspiegel.de/ kultur/ die-innere-wahrheit-der-ddr/ 568048.html Phillips, Patrick. «Spectator, Audience and Response.» Introduction to Film Studies. Ed. Jill Nelmes. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2007. 60 - 78. Sabrow, Martin. «Die DDR Erinnern.» Erinnerungsorte der DDR. Ed. Martin Sabrow. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009. 11 - 27. Scott, A. O. «A Fugue for Good German Men.» The New York Times. 9 February 2007. http: / / movies.nytimes.com/ 2007/ 02/ 09/ movies/ 09live.html? _r=0. Last accessed March 14, 2013. Seegers, Lu. «Das Leben der Anderen und die ‹ richtige › Erinnerung an die DDR.» Film und kulturelle Erinnerung; plurimediale Konstellationen. Berlin and New York: DeGruyter, 2008. 21 - 52. Der Spiegel. «DDR-Experte Hubertus Knabe: Das Problem liegt bei der PDS. › » http: / / www.spiegel.de/ politik/ deutschland/ ddr-experte-hubertus-knabe-dasproblem-liegt-bei-der-pds-a-437210.html. Last accessed March 11, 2013. Stein, Mary Beth. «Stasi with a Human Face? Ambiguity in Das Leben der Anderen.» German Studies Review 31.3 (2008): 567 - 69. vierundzwanzig.de. Das Wissensportal der deutschen Filmakademie. Interview mit Gabriele Binder. http: / / www.vierundzwanzig.de/ kostuem/ interview_mit_gabriele_binder. Last accessed March 17, 2013. Von Moltke, Johannes. «Sympathy for the Devil: Film, History and the Politics of Emotion.» New German Critique. 102 (2007): 17 - 43. Walser, Martin. «Über ein Geschichtsgefühl.» Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. May 10, 2002. Wilke, Manfred. «Wieslers Umkehr.» Das Leben der Anderen. Filmbuch. Ed. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. 201 - 14. Wolle, Stefan. «Stasi mit menschlischem Antlitz.» Deutschlandarchiv 1 (2006): 497 - 99. Wood, Jason. «A World Without Red and Blue. An Interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.» Projections 15. European Cinema. Ed. Peter Cowie, Pascal Edelman and Derek Malcom. London: Faber & Faber, 2007. 225 - 35. Ž i ž ek, Slavoj, «The Dreams of Others.» In These Times. 18 May 2007. http: / / inthesetimes.com/ article/ 3183/ . Last accessed March 14, 2013. 53 Memory and the Politics of Emotion Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Harald Kleinschmidt Geschichte des Völkerrechts in Krieg und Frieden 2013, 512 Seiten geb. €[D] 49,00/ SFr 65,50 ISBN 978-3-7720-8450-8 Das Völkerrecht hat eine mehr als 4000 Jahre lange Geschichte. Bis in das 17. Jahrhundert regelte es als Gewohnheitsrecht in verschiedenen Teilen der Welt die Beziehungen zwischen staatlich organisierten Gemeinschaften in Krieg und Frieden. Seither ging von Europa das zunehmende Bestreben aus, das Völkerrecht nicht nur gewohnheitsmäßig anzuwenden, sondern auch durch allgemeine Verträge zwischen mehreren Parteien zu setzen. Diese europäische Vertragspraxis fand zunächst auch in Amerika Anwendung und wurde seit Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts verstärkt auch auf andere Teile der Welt ausgedehnt. Harald Kleinschmidt beschreibt den Strukturwandel des Völkerrechts vom Alten Vorderen Orient bis zur Gegenwart vor dem Hintergrund der mediterran-europäischen, islamischen und ostasiatischen Rechtstraditionen. Auf der Grundlage rechtsrelevanter Texte altsumerischen, altägyptischen, hethitischen, griechischen und römischen Ursprungs sowie der abendländisch-lateinischen, arabischen und ostasiatischen Kulturen verortet Kleinschmidt die Faktoren Völkerrechtsentwicklung sowohl im praktischen Handeln von Herrschern und Regierungen als auch in den jeweils zeittypischen Theorien des Rechts des Staats und der zwischenstaatlichen Beziehungen. Revisiting the Memory Industry: Robert Thalheim ’ s Am Ende kommen Touristen FRIEDERIKE B. EMONDS U NIVERSITY OF T OLEDO Almost seventy years after the end of WWII, Germany has institutionalized an official culture of remembrance focusing on the memory of the Holocaust. This Erinnerungskultur permeates all aspects of life. In the past two decades Holocaust memorials as well as counter-monuments (Young, Counter- Monument 271), commemorative centers, plaques, stumbling stones («Stolpersteine») 1 in addition to museums and special and permanent exhibits have been established; and former concentration camps have been preserved or restored as educational centers to publicly remember the Holocaust. Similarly, the public memory discourse — shaped by commemorative events, public lectures, intellectual debates, and special educational programs — reinforces the public ceremonies of Holocaust remembrance throughout the year. In addition, German mass media have been prominently featuring interviews, articles and book publications on Holocaust memories, (auto)biographies, and fictionalized accounts (Grass 31 - 32; A. Assmann, «History, Memory» 262; Neumann 337) while more documentaries, talk shows and discussions air on various German television and radio channels (Moltke, Sympathy 180). This media trend coincides with the US and German boom in feature film productions focusing on the Holocaust since the early 1990s (Koepnick 349; Berghahn 300; Ebbrecht 157). 2 In German schools, the Holocaust is a «mandatory, binding subject» for all students age 14 and up, and Holocaust education constitutes an integral part of the history curriculum as well as in subjects such as literature, religion, ethics and civics («German Holocaust Education Report»). Since 1996 Germany officially observes January 27 as its national Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with a commemorative session in the German parliament. 3 In January 2010, German Bundestag president Norbert Lammert reaffirmed the importance of this day in his introductory remarks: «Für die zweite Demokratie in Deutschland gehört die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Holocaust gewissermaßen zu den Grundlagen unserer Verfassung.» Lammert ’ s proclamation that Holocaust remembrance lies at the core of the German nation state reveals the double-edge of Germany ’ s official remembrance culture with all its monuments, public discourses and educational goals: while on the one hand, his moral reminder to German audiences exposes Germany ’ s top-down approach to Holocaust remembrance, on the other hand his remarks are supposed to demonstrate to the world the democratic strength and therefore trustworthiness of the modern German state. Aleida Assmann pointedly comments on this discrepancy: «Die Medien achten darauf, im Bundestag werden Reden gehalten. Aber es fehlt das Persönliche. Zu Auschwitz haben die Deutschen kaum persönlichen Bezug» (Assmann/ Welzer, «Familienerbe»). Clearly, today there are lingering doubts about the means and intentions of Germany ’ s official Holocaust remembrance culture over the past thirty years. It is certainly not a coincidence that the German government intensified its concerted Holocaust commemoration efforts in the early 1990s, right after Germany ’ s unification, in order to forge a common, overarching German national identity between the two formerly hostile German states. To be sure, the strong ideological differences in each country ’ s official perception of both the National Socialist past as well as the guilt and responsibility for the death and destruction of millions of people in the Holocaust had to clash when trying to find «a shared myth of a common past,» in order to construct a new German national identity (Fulbrook 17). Hence, the overwhelming official demonstration of Germany ’ s Holocaust commemoration in the early 1990s may have served as a «corrective» to East Germany ’ s official rejection of responsibility for the Nazi regime and crimes, and as a means to reeducate the former East German population about the now-unified Germany ’ s guilt and special responsibility for those crimes of their shared past. This kind of imposed and therefore artificial collective memory, intended to achieve stronger cohesion between the two German societies that have only very reluctantly been growing together after a 40-year division, was doomed to fail on both fronts, as it neither aided nor accelerated the social integration process nor contributed to a meaningful Holocaust remembrance. 4 The long and intense debates around the official national Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the early 1990s until its final completion in 2004 is a case in point (Young, «Holocaust Problem» 65 - 68). Holocaust remembrance instrumentalized in the service of post-Wall unification efforts is an ill-fated endeavor as many critics of Germany ’ s «memorymania» have long questioned the purpose and effectiveness of Germany ’ s obsession with Holocaust memorials and monuments, warning that «[t]he more monuments there are, the more the past becomes invisible, 56 Friederike B. Emonds the easier it is to forget» (Huyssen, «Monumental Seduction» 193). Indeed, despite or perhaps because of the dramatic upsurge in public memory culture and its institutionalization in the past two decades, increasing concern and uncertainty about the future of Holocaust remembrance prevails (Huyssen, «Monumental» 192 - 193; Huyssen, «Present» 11 - 14; Urban, «Anti-Semitism» 3 - 4; Assmann/ Welzer, «Familienerbe»). This precariousness grows even more acute in view of the frequent official surveys and opinion polls regarding the importance of Holocaust remembrance and their strikingly contradictory conclusions. Though Dana Giesecke and Harald Welzer, citing a poll among adolescents commissioned by the weekly newspaper Die Zeit in 2010, come to the following conclusion: «Das Erziehungsziel der historischpolitischen Bildung kann also als erreicht betrachtet werden» (22), other polls such as the one in 2012 issued by the magazine Stern points out that 21 % of young people between 18 and 29 didn ’ t know what the term Auschwitz meant («Stern Umfrage»). Likewise, Giesecke and Welzer in the above-mentioned poll reported that «[e]in Drittel war der Auffassung, in der Schule lerne man zu wenig über das Thema» (21), even though Benedikt Haller, First Special Envoy for Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Affairs at the German Foreign Ministry, claimed in 2008 that there is an «over-infusion» of Holocaust education in German school curricula (Haller qtd. in Lefkovitz). Indeed, though the interpretations and conclusions of those opinion polls and surveys seem at best inconsistent and at worst downright contradictory, a closer look reveals a common thread underlying all of their conclusions, namely a deep concern for a meaningful Holocaust remembrance among today ’ s younger generation. This concern is fueled by the recent phenomena of a widespread Holocaust fatigue not only in Germany but also in large parts of the Western world. 5 While revisionism and negationism have continuously threatened responsible Holocaust commemoration since the end of WWII, «Holocaust fatigue» constitutes a «more subtle challenge to the memory» of the Shoah, yet perhaps «more disturbing for its subtlety», as it is particularly displayed by today ’ s younger generation (Shafran). 6 Marianne Hirsch, in her influential article «The Generation of Postmemory» (2008), illuminates the problem of Holocaust fatigue by examining the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experiences, especially that of the Holocaust. She describes «postmemory» as «the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right» (103). If «postmemory» is the successful result of memory transmission to the later-born generation, then the third generation ’ s fatigue would represent the utter failure in this 57 Revisiting the Memory Industry transmission between the second and third generation. This serious rupture in the chain of responsible memory work could severely threaten the Holocaust ’ s secure and meaningful place in the collective memory of future generations. So, what went wrong? Is the transition between the second and third generation a natural threshold in memory transfer because the event to be remembered lies too far in the past? Or in our particular case, does this ‹ Holocaust fatigue › present an inverse reaction to the enormous top-down efforts put forth by the German government, public discourses, the media and schools to institutionalize the memory of the Holocaust as explained earlier? Before I address these questions, we need to look at another factor that compounds the urgency of this issue. To fully understand the problematic consequences of the younger generation ’ s fatigue one must consider that the generation that witnessed the Holocaust and still has living memory to hand down is getting older and many of its members have already passed away. As Giesecke and Welzer have noted, «Von denen, die heute geboren und im Jahr 2024 Geschichtsunterricht haben werden, hat niemand mehr Großeltern, deren bewusste Lebenszeit in das ‹ Dritte Reich › zurückreicht» (73). With the community of Holocaust survivors dwindling, living communication will fade away and with it the immediate access to the past that is necessary to keep those memories alive. As Avner Shalev, Director of the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in Israel, has observed, «The presence of witnesses - the remnant who survived - ensured a certain moral strength; their absence creates a moral, cultural and educational vacuum.» Clearly, with the demise of the witness generation and the younger generation ’ s fatigue, Holocaust remembrance faces a double challenge in today ’ s society. But I would argue that there is another factor that compounds the current dilemma. Jan Assmann ’ s differentiation of cultural and communicative memory, based on Maurice Halbwachs ’ s theories of collective memory, sheds some light on this multifaceted predicament. In Assmann ’ s model, the transition from communicative memory into cultural memory takes place between 80 - 100 years after the event to be remembered and represents a «moving horizon of 3 - 4 interacting generations» (J. Assmann, «Communicative and Cultural Memory» 117). While communicative memory is based on everyday communication and is intrinsically connected to the living witnesses of such memory, cultural memory draws on institutionalized depots, official ceremonies and formalized rituals to store memories. Assmann explains, «[j]ust as the communicative memory is characterized by its proximity to the everyday, cultural memory is characterized 58 Friederike B. Emonds by its distance from the everyday» (J. Assmann, «Collective Memory and Cultural Identity» 128 - 29). Nearly 70 years after the end of WWII we are approaching the threshold where communicative memory turns into cultural memory. For meaningful Holocaust memory work, the danger of this transition is its complete relegation to «objectivized culture» such as museums, monuments and other cultural institutions (J. Assmann, «Collective Memory and Cultural Identity» 128). As outlined above, this process is already well under way in Germany. In fact, I would argue that the German government ’ s official culture of remembrance in the service of post-Wall unification efforts in the 1990s has accelerated this transition, solidifying Holocaust memories prematurely in cultural memory with the effect that today ’ s third generation in Germany is struggling even more to make a meaningful connection to this past and its relation to their everyday lives and thus is even less prepared to take over the «guardianship of the Holocaust» (Hirsch 103). Therefore, some of the central questions that need to be addressed are: after years of misguided political instrumentalization of Holocaust remembrance, how can members of the so-called «hinge-generation» (Hirsch 103) be compelled to face their task in the generational chain of responsible memory work? How can we facilitate their responsible access to a past they did not experience? How can Holocaust memory work be made meaningful, compelling, and ethically responsible to a generation for whom Auschwitz has no meaning? For whom «Juden nur Zahlen von Toten in Geschichtsbüchern sind» (Thalheim qtd. in Mering 169) and the Holocaust is a mediatized event represented by such movies as Schindler ’ s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997), or The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002)? Pointedly phrased: Is there a future to the remembrance of this past? In his introductory speech at the 2013 Bundestag commemorative session of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Lammert officially called for «neue Formen der Erinnerung» because «[m]it den Zeitzeugen der damaligen Ereignisse schwindet der unmittelbare Zugang zur Vergangenheit («2013»). Though it seems as if Lammert ’ s announcement marks an important turning point in Germany ’ s official culture of remembrance, many historians and cultural critics such as James Young, Elie Wiesel, Aleida Assmann, Volkhard Knigge and Harald Welzer among others have long called for changing the paradigm of Holocaust commemoration in Germany to ensure its future. While Wiesel recommends the formation of a chain, «eine Generation von Zeugen von Zeugen von Zeugen» («Prinz Harry»), to keep the memories of the Holocaust alive, Assmann suggests that video testimonies are particularly valuable in 59 Revisiting the Memory Industry «forging a transgenerational link between faces and voices of victims and those who listen to them» (A. Assmann, «History, Memory» 261). Challenging the effectiveness of video testimonies as «weitgehend uninteressant» because they are lacking the «emotionale Rahmen der face-to-face Interaktion» (74), Giesecke and Welzer propose more actively engaging and experiential strategies of information searches and knowledge transfers, such as «event- und erlebnisorientierte Spielformate im Bereich von computer games, aber auch im Film und im Fernsehen» (115). Such interactive models of memory transfer, they claim, may appeal more to today ’ s third generation, so versatile in computer gaming and media usage, than the «Pathosformeln» and moral claims commonplace in official Holocaust commemoration (97). 7 Without delving deeper into Giesecke and Welzer ’ s innovative memory research, I contend that Robert Thalheim ’ s film Am Ende kommen Touristen (2007) vividly illustrates such an interactive approach in film. In the second part of this study, I argue that the film engages its audience in a dialogue, thereby provoking us to question and reevaluate our own static views and reconsider different perspectives on Holocaust commemoration, means of intergenerational memory transmission, and the memory culture of the Auschwitz memorial site long after the film has ended. Surprisingly, Am Ende kommen Touristen has thus far triggered little discussion abroad. Though highly acclaimed when it opened at the 2007 Cannes film festival and nominated for several honors and awards in Germany, including the Eberhard Fechner Scholarship as part of the Grimme Preise, which it received in 2011, the film hasn ’ t received the attention of international film critics and cultural studies scholars that it deserves. While Tobias Ebbrecht ’ s and Gerd Beyer ’ s excellent analyses offer great insights into the narrative structure and cinematic effects of the film — and I will refer to their respective studies throughout my own analysis — it is Sabine von Mering ’ s interpretation against which I will formulate my own thesis. In her discussion of Am Ende kommen Touristen, Mering maintains that Thalheim solves the problem of the Holocaust memory transfer by «show [ing] that only true empathy with the victims can help overcome [. . .] the dilemma for many Germans today» (168; my emphasis). She further explains «true empathy» or rather she implies that in his movie Thalheim dramatizes that «[e]mpathy [. . .] must be based on real feeling and cannot be obtained through reading or studying alone» (168 f; my emphasis). Focusing on «true empathy» and «real feeling,» Mering ’ s discussion of Thalheim ’ s film conjures up Martin Walser ’ s connection between «Geschichts-Gefühl» and «Geschichts-Mitgefühl,» with which he concludes his speech «Über ein Ge- 60 Friederike B. Emonds schichtsgefühl» delivered in Berlin on May 8, 2002, at that year ’ s anniversary of the end of WWII. Indeed, Am Ende kommen Touristen was produced and opened amidst the widespread, intellectual discussions on the emotional turn in Germany ’ s historical discourse triggered by Walser ’ s provocative speech. His somewhat vague and uncritical notion of «Geschichtsgefühl» — »[m]ein Geschichtsgefühl Deutschland betreffend ist der Bestand aller Erfahrungen, die ich mit Deutschland gemacht habe» — resonated with many historians, philosophers and other intellectuals. 8 Likewise, as Johannes von Moltke convincingly argues in his excellent 2007 study «Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion,» recent media ranging from TV docudramas (Dresden 2006, ARD) to feature films, such as Sönke Wortmann ’ s Das Wunder von Bern (2003) and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ’ s Das Leben der Anderen (2005), reverberate with strong emotional representations of the German past, leading von Moltke to conclude «the media have supplied a stream of historical representations characterized by strong affect and emotion» (18). Does Am Ende kommen Touristen indeed need to be added to that category of films as Mering wants to make us believe? In contrast to Mering ’ s interpretation, I contend that Thalheim ’ s film does not simply appeal to emotions but conveys a much more ambitious agenda. The film ’ s unstable camera work (the scenes are filmed with a 16 mm handheld camera without a tripod), its repeatedly rough editing job (often transitions between scenes are not smoothed out), and the frequent narrative ruptures succeed in making film as a medium visible in the film itself (Bühler 12). Emphasizing its own production, the film resists viewer identification and catharsis and instead triggers critical reflection throughout, especially at the end. So much so that when the film is over, the audience is not done with the film. Consistent with its cinematographic representation, the film ’ s narrative doesn ’ t offer any solutions to the problems raised. Instead, the film instigates a dialogue, not only within the plot but also with its audience. By means of montage, the film juxtaposes multiple, often contested perspectives and contrasting perceptions of Germany ’ s past, its heinous crimes of the Holocaust, and today ’ s official culture of remembrance to keep those memories alive. Within the film ’ s narrative, these divergent viewpoints frequently lead to painful reactions among the characters. However, they also compel the resistant protagonist to identify social injustices and cause him to recognize new ways and possibilities to act in a socially responsible manner beyond traditional patterns of learned behavior. As the film pulls the protagonist out of his comfort zone, it also challenges the viewers with frequent visual irritations and paradoxes, which we struggle in vain to reconcile because they 61 Revisiting the Memory Industry force us into the uncomfortable position of reevaluating or even questioning the effectiveness of the core of our official Holocaust remembrance culture: memorials, witness testimonials, and even Auschwitz itself as perhaps the central most important commemoration site. For the purpose of this study, my film analysis concentrates primarily on the relationship between Stanislaw Krzeminski, the Holocaust survivor still living at the Auschwitz memorial site, and Sven, the young German taking care of him during a year of civil service, before I examine the memory conventions at Auschwitz and its effects on Stanislaw Krzeminski, Sven and the audience. However, I will start with a brief summary of the plot and a close examination of the opening sequence as it refuses an easy entry into the film, thereby setting the tone from the very beginning. Am Ende kommen Touristen takes place in contemporary Os´wie ˛ cim, a small town near Krakow, Poland better known for its gruesome history by its German name Auschwitz. The film narrates Sven ’ s experiences as a young German doing civil service in lieu of military service (Zivildienstleistender). It contrasts Sven ’ s work, caring for the sole Holocaust survivor still living at the memorial site, with his personal life in Os´wie ˛ cim, where he falls in love with the young Polish tourist guide of the Auschwitz memorial site. But Sven is clearly not a hero and only a very reluctant protagonist at best, as he doesn ’ t play along and is rather slow in figuring out the part he is supposed to play. His seeming indifference, expressed by his lack of empathy, responsibility and sensitivity vis-à-vis the fragile 80 year-old survivor Stanislaw Krzeminski in his charge vividly illustrates the third generation ’ s inability to relate to the Holocaust and its lack of commitment to remembering the past. However, Sven is not the only problematic representative of the third generation portrayed in this film: there is Ania, the young Polish tour guide fluent in German, her brother Kryzsztof who works in the local chemical plant, formerly the infamous IG Farben plant (now owned again by a German company), and the German apprentices at the chemical plant. They all have in common that they seem to care less about the gruesome history of Auschwitz than their lives and careers in modern-day Os´wie ˛ cim or beyond. The film sets in with the sounds of an arriving train while the screen is all black, then changes into the opening credits still on black background. When the first scene fades in, the high-angle camera shot shows several parallel train tracks, an old train arriving at the station and numerous rusty, uncoupled train cars to the side. The image is unmistakably modern, but for a split second the viewer is reminded of the familiar pictures of deported Jews arriving in Auschwitz. Yet the film is quick to correct this stereotypical association in the following scenes. After Sven exits the train car with his heavy suitcase, the 62 Friederike B. Emonds train moves out of the picture, revealing the name of the place: we are not in Auschwitz but in modern-day Os´wie ˛ cim. The following scenes unambiguously reinforce the sense of place in the twenty-first century. As Sven is sitting in the moving taxi, the viewer gets to share his viewpoint and Polish pop music, which suddenly sets in. The camera pans over its surroundings: the small river with its pebbled beach, the tall church prominently centered, the city square with its small shops and modern cars. But the taxi drives on, leaving the town center of Os´wie ˛ cim behind as we gradually approach the infamous gates of the former concentration camp Auschwitz. Yet the somewhat nervous anticipation this scene creates is very undramatically undercut when the taxi, instead of driving through the gates as the film causes us to anticipate, slowly turns to the left and stops at the parking lot of the modern education center affiliated with the memorial site. Here again, the film foils the viewer ’ s assumptions, as it does not present us with the typical «Schockbilder» we come to expect in a film ostensibly about Auschwitz (Finger). A mere parking lot as part of the first impression of Auschwitz is rather anticlimactic. In the film, Sven has arrived in modern-day Os´wie ˛ cim, while we, the viewers, still grapple with reconciling the modern pictures of Os´wie ˛ cim with the vast inventory of gruesome historical images of Auschwitz in our collective memory. Indeed, the film ’ s careful camera and editing work in the opening sequence pervasively establishes a sense of place in the present right at the beginning, thereby thwarting our stereotypical expectation of Auschwitz as a place locked in the past. As we can see, before the actual plot begins, Thalheim clearly forces us to critically re-evaluate our preconceived notion of Auschwitz, which Lammert so pointedly encapsulated in the expression, «Auschwitz ist Chiffre, kein Ort» («2006»). But a cipher is not accessible while a place is, the film seems to vividly demonstrate to us. Indeed, while in our collective memory Auschwitz has solidified into a metonymy for the Holocaust as a whole, 9 in real life, as Jacques Derrida emphasized somewhat surprised in 1998, «the town . . . still exists: there are still restaurants in Auschwitz, there is a particular place» (22). And that is precisely what the film insists on: Auschwitz is a real place, albeit under the Polish name Os´wie ˛ cim. While the viewer is struggling to catch up with this premise of the film, so too, as we will see, is its protagonist. Upon his arrival in Os´wie ˛ cim, Sven is immediately confronted with a new language, Polish, which he doesn ’ t speak, the still somewhat strained Polish- German relationship, which he doesn ’ t understand, the legacy of the Holocaust, which he would rather forget, and the reality of the concentration camp Auschwitz and its enormous tourist industry, which is overwhelming 63 Revisiting the Memory Industry for him. By the time he finally reaches his room at the memorial site, he is disheartened by the plainness and anonymity of the place where he is supposed to live. It is clear to him that he has ended up at the extreme opposite of his original assignment, in which he was supposed to work with children in Amsterdam. To make things worse, his relationship with Holocaust survivor Stanislaw Krzeminski — the person he is assigned to take care of — is strained literally from the start. Their first encounter takes place in the shared kitchen when Krzeminski walks in right after Sven — thirsty from his long travels — takes a milk carton out of the refrigerator and drinks it up straight out of the container. As becomes clear, the milk was Krzeminski ’ s to use in his cereal. The ensuing shot-counter-shot sequence reveals Sven as the obvious intruder in the quiet kitchen as he sits at the table rolling a cigarette. Yet ironically, the visual composition of this scene reverses the roles of the two characters. Sven, the intruder, occupies the central space of the room with the kitchen table, so that the old man walking in is left to the margins of his own kitchen. Just as Sven has nonchalantly taken possession of the milk in the refrigerator, he also takes possession of the kitchen space. During this scene, there is no music that could possibly dispel the tension between the two men. As Sven tries to explain his blunder in an incoherent mixture of broken English and stuttering German, Krzeminski very quietly cuts through his jumbled verbiage to inquire if the milk carton was empty. Sven briefly confirms, then hastily moves on to express his joyous surprise of the other man ’ s German skills. The following countershot clearly shows the disdain in Krzeminski ’ s face as he stares incredulously at the new arrival, puts his untouched cereal bowl down and retreats. Bridging the gap between past and present, this seemingly long and uncomfortable scene forces the viewer to reflect upon this all too familiar incident in history at the same place: Sven ’ s careless blunder assumes new meaning considering the place where it happened: Auschwitz. His wrongdoings but even more so the cool nonchalance of his actions, conjure up images of mistreatment and abuse in the former concentration camp. From a cinematographic aspect, this short shot-counter-shot sequence already encapsulates the unlikely relationship between the old Polish survivor and the young German newly arrived in town. Theirs is an improbable bond: the two are connected by one of the most heinous crimes in history but divided by generations. It should be noted at this point, that nowhere in the film do we get any hints about Sven ’ s grandfathers or any other family member during WWII. In fact, the film withholds all information about Sven ’ s family or his past, leaving the protagonist to represent today ’ s third generation of Germans without the baggage of family history. 64 Friederike B. Emonds In the course of the film, Sven ’ s behavior toward the old man becomes more impatient and disrespectful as he seems to perceive Krzeminski as part of the memorial site ’ s inventory. Indeed, Sven simply refuses to get personally involved with Krzeminski ’ s traumatic past as a Holocaust survivor. As a young German, Sven does not want to get constantly reminded of a past he did not live through. No longer does he want to be made to feel guilty or responsible for crimes that he personally did not commit. In fact, Sven is tired of the Holocaust. He wants to forget the past, and live in the present. The film persuasively illustrates Sven ’ s attempt to escape from the past when he moves out of the place he shares with Krzeminski at the Auschwitz memorial site and instead into a room in Ania ’ s apartment in Os´wie ˛ cim. While Krzeminski ’ s presence signifies a constant reminder of the past and hence stirs up feelings of guilt and shame, the young museum guide Ania represents his love interest and promises emotional restitution and possible integration into the everyday lives of the young and modern generation of Os´wie ˛ cim. 10 Sven ’ s resentment is especially typical for the third generation as the close emotional ties to the actual crime, the Holocaust, are replaced by mediated reminders such as museums, films, and memorials. With the memory of the Holocaust fading into the past, this third generation seeks to find a new identity — one that is not fractured by guilt and shame of the past. As in Sven ’ s case, many young people today look to a strong united Europe for a new pan- European identity. This trend is symbolized in the film by Sven ’ s move to Os´wie ˛ cim. Stanislaw Krzeminski, the old Holocaust survivor, for his part, reacts to Sven in a mostly curt and cantankerous manner, refusing to engage in conversation with him though he speaks German fluently. He often addresses Sven in commands and with an air of reproach and self-righteousness that remind viewers of stereotypical Nazi commands reproduced in Hollywood films. He purposefully gives him menial tasks late in the day to extend Sven ’ s workday into his leisure time — tasks, which the latter only grudgingly performs. Krzeminski seems to relish the role reversal, where he is now in a position of power and thus able to command around the young heir of the perpetrators who victimized him. Though Krzeminski talks about his past in the testimonials several times throughout the film, the viewer, in fact, doesn ’ t learn much about him personally. The film doesn ’ t make any references to his religious identity. 11 We only learn that he has spent most of his life in Auschwitz. During National Socialism, he was a Polish inmate, survived the Holocaust and helped built the memorial site after the war. Yet, as we find out in the course of the film, Krzeminski also struggles with his life at the memorial site. In contrast to Sven, 65 Revisiting the Memory Industry Krzeminski does not want to forget the past but consciously lives with the pain of the past in the present. That Krzeminski is unable to work through his traumatic past becomes clear when he stubbornly refuses to live anywhere else but in the modest guesthouse at the Auschwitz memorial site. Something compels him to stay at this place. As we know, his mission at the museum is to recount to the visitors his traumatic experiences during the Holocaust at Auschwitz. But Krzeminski has another, «unofficial» task that at least to him seems just as important as his witness testimonies: he repairs the old suitcases from the museum. As the old man meticulously patches them in his «Werkstatt,» his repair shop, the museum ’ s curators ’ grow more and more unwilling to release the precious authentic memory pieces to him until they finally refuse, claiming that he would do more damage than good. What the curators and the museums officials don ’ t realize is that Krzeminski is bound by an old promise to take care of those suitcases. As a camp inmate, Krzeminski was forced to work at the infamous Auschwitz train station where he had to take the suitcases from the new arrivals. Knowing full well that their owners would most likely not survive the deathly concentration camp, Krzeminski nevertheless promised to safeguard their suitcases. The lingering sense of guilt for his albeit forced part in the Auschwitz machinery as well as his survivor guilt in face of the millions of dead victims here symbolized by the masses of empty suitcases compound his traumatic experiences at Auschwitz. 12 Hence, the preservation of the old suitcases represents Krzeminski ’ s obsessive attempt not only to keep his promise but also to keep the past alive. That is the reason he cannot leave the memorial site. Krzeminski ’ s fixation on living the past in the present and his life goal to never forget obviously clash with Sven ’ s noncommittal attitude of a disengaged present. Their latent animosity, however, escalates into a real standoff when Krzeminski is at a local pub with his friends and Sven has to wait for him to drive him home. As the evening moves on, and Krzeminski is still happily chatting with his friends, Sven interrupts several times to urge him to leave. But Krzeminski ignores him and even makes fun of him, albeit in Polish so that Sven doesn ’ t understand the reason for the other men ’ s laughter. Finally, as it is past his working hours and waiting for Krzeminski is infringing on his own «Feierabend,» Sven simply takes off, leaving the fragile 80-year old Krzeminski to find his way home alone. Indeed, Krzeminski makes it home unscathed — he is by chance picked up along the road late at night by an employee of the Auschwitz museum. When his boss Klaus Herold, the director of the International Youth Meeting Center, finds out about the nightly incident, Sven is severely reprimanded. Herold reminds him that Auschwitz is a sensitive place and 66 Friederike B. Emonds that if anything indeed had happened to the former Auschwitz prisoner on account of his young German caretaker, it would have been a huge scandal. Yet despite the stiff rebuke, Sven is slow in understanding that as a German he has a special responsibility for the Holocaust survivor. On the contrary, Herold ’ s confrontation only confirms and deepens his perception of himself as a victim. Consequently, neither his own transgression nor Herold ’ s lecture cause him to eventually change his attitude. Only when his own disrespectful behavior is mirrored by the bored look and rude questions of his own peers — a group of young German workers who were made to listen to Krzeminski ’ s memories of the camp — does his nonchalant façade of fatigue start to crumble. Ironically, it is not the gruesome stories that eventually change his attitude toward the survivor but the rude reactions of the audience who are doubting the authenticity of his prisoner number tattooed on in his arm. It is as if Sven has to witness Krzeminski ’ s suffering for himself before he can even begin to open up to the old survivor ’ s perspective on the past and his traumatic experiences. The most critical moment in Sven ’ s slow awareness process takes place at Monowice, the site of the former Auschwitz-Monowitz or Auschwitz III concentration camp. 13 This particular site has no visible remains of the concentration camp today. Ironically, it is the events at this site, which contains no authentic signifiers of the past, that open up Sven ’ s eyes to see Krzeminski ’ s pain of the past in the present. Yet the following scenes are not only critical for Sven, but, as we will see, constitute perhaps the most pivotal sequence in the entire film. The opening scene in the sequence depicts camp survivor Stanislaw Krzeminski, Sven, Ania, and a group of German executives from the local chemical plant in Monowice at the dedication of a new memorial erected by the young German apprentices of that chemical plant — a special project that Sven supervised. The beginning of this scene is characterized by nervous anticipation: the relentless sound of the pouring rain and the pitifully soaked speaker and his audience foreshadow the awkwardness of this dreary event. Furthermore, the unsteady hand-held camera contributes to the impression of an «unerfreuliche Pflichterfüllung» as Ebbrecht aptly put it — »einer öffentlichen Geste» rather than meaningful remembrance of the inhuman selection process that took place in Monowitz (177). 14 When Krzeminski starts to retell his experiences, the camera steadies, focuses on him, then pans over the dutifully disturbed faces of his audience only to reveal them as blasé masks. As he continues, the film audience slowly realizes that Krzeminski ’ s testimonial of past events, his description of the SS doctors during the selection process, also very aptly describes his current audience. Krzeminski: «Viele Male habe 67 Revisiting the Memory Industry ich den gelangweilten Blick der Ärzte gesehen. Es war Ihnen unangenehm, uns überhaupt anzusehen. Wir wurden nur beurteilt nach unserer Verwertbarkeit.» At this point, the camera cuts to Krzeminski ’ s audience and shows the bored look on their faces. Once again, it becomes clear that for the attending executives from Germany the whole ceremony is merely a political gesture for transnational business interests. However, even more telling in this scene is the premature and hasty interruption by the German representative of the chemical plant, Andrea Schneider, 15 right at the moment when Krzeminski elaborates on the «Verwertbarkeit,» the usefulness and value, of the forced laborers in the camp. Here again, the film bridges the gap between the past events and the current situation, revealing, as Ebbrecht describes, that «[a]uch in diesem Gedenkritual wird Krzeminski nach seiner Verwertbarkeit beurteilt. Nicht seine Erinnerungen, sondern seine Funktion als Zeitzeuge sind von Interesse» (177). The film confirms this interpretation in the next brief scene, in which Frau Schneider carefully optimizes the constellation of German executives around Krzeminski for a commemorative group photo, moving people to different positions when Krzeminski walks out of the picture. Without hesitation the group photo is taken without him — Krzeminski, the Holocaust survivor, is indeed not needed anymore. Apart from the scathing critique of this kind of official remembrance culture, this sequence very carefully portrays Sven ’ s recognition of Krzeminki ’ s predicament. While the rest of the audience simply goes along with Frau Schneider ’ s rude interruption and her busy photo arrangements, it is Sven who emerges from his sullen indifference as Krzeminski ’ s outspoken advocate. Witnessing Frau Schneider ’ s presumptuousness, Sven recognizes that he has to act. He breaks the silence of this misguided ceremony that the rest of the audience ’ s complicity maintains. He is the only one who speaks up for Krzeminski as he criticizes her rude interruption and severely questions her shallow excuse that Krzeminski ’ s speech was losing its effect. As the film convincingly shows, it is at this point, that Sven finally begins to understand that Krzeminski ’ s suffering is not neatly contained in the past but in fact continues into the present. Engaging with this new and different perspective compels Sven to stand up for his beliefs and defend the old survivor. Yet the ill-fated commemoration constitutes a pivotal moment not only for Sven ’ s awareness process but also for Krzeminski ’ s as he resignedly concedes, «Ein Mann wie ich wird hier nicht gebraucht. [. . .] Zeigen Sie denen Schindlers Liste. Das macht mehr Eindruck.» Krzeminski recognizes that in today ’ s society, historical witnesses have lost their «effect» and with that their central 68 Friederike B. Emonds place in Holocaust remembrance as the younger generation reacts to their testimonials with indifference while officials coopt the witnesses ’ recollections for their own purposes. Thalheim, who performed civil service in Auschwitz in the 1990s, commented on this recent development in real life in a 2007 interview: 16 Früher waren die Zeitzeugen das Zentrum der Begegnung mit diesem Ort. Heute sind die wenigen, die noch leben, sehr alt. Vor fünf Jahren stellte die moderne Museumsleitung, die ein wirklich gutes pädagogisches Konzept hat, die Frage, ob ein ehemaliger Gefangener ohne pädagogische oder historische Ausbildung überhaupt Gruppen durch das Lager führen sollte. Das ist tragisch: Die eigentlichen Zeugen geraten ins Abseits und sind nicht mehr die besten Vermittler ihrer eigenen Geschichte. («Wer dort wohnt») Counter to this trend in real life, however, the film ’ s convincing montage that connects the past events of Krzeminski ’ s testimonial with the present commemoration ceremony emphasizes the importance of witness testimonials not only for Sven ’ s awareness process but also for the viewer, as it reveals how such official ceremonies have deteriorated into empty gestures, which only obscure our understanding of the need for ethically and socially responsible remembrance of the Shoah. Furthermore, Krzeminski ’ s dejected comment that simulated historical experience through film seems to leave a deeper impression on the audience than witness testimonials also serves as a self-reference to the film industry, harking back to von Moltke ’ s earlier critique of the dominance of cinematic affect in Holocaust films. Clearly, the film criticizes the general notion that lasting effect can only be produced by (strong) choreographed melodramatic affect, thereby replacing experiential narration (witness testimonials) as the primary source of Holocaust education. As Griselda Pollock showed in her brilliant article «Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory,» film audiences are often seduced by mediatized reconstructions that convey the feeling of «authenticity» and «truthfulness» when, in fact, their representations of historical events are mercilessly falsified for the benefit of cinematic effect. This trend has impacted the tourist industry in an ironic twist as evidenced in the phenomenon of «Schindler-Tourism» where tourists now visit the sites in Krakow «used in the film [instead of] seeking out [. . .] the actual sites referred to by the film, though not used in the film for purely cinematic reasons» (Pollock 2003). 17 In contrast, Thalheim ’ s film avoids any kind of historical reconstructions and flashbacks. Instead, the film insists on its exclusive focus on present-day life in Os´wie ˛ cim. The viewer experiences the film ’ s intense engagement with the Holocaust past through the constant struggle between Sven and Krze- 69 Revisiting the Memory Industry minski and their opposed perspectives on that past. Interestingly, the conflicts between Sven and Krzeminksi are typically filmed at indoor locations, such as their shared kitchen, the local pub or Krzeminski ’ s repair shop. However, it is important to point out that the film also confronts its audience with contemporary images of ruins and reconstructions of the former Auschwitz complex throughout the story. These visual reminders casually form the backdrop when the story focuses on Sven and Ania, for example, as they ride their bikes along the restored fence of the former concentration camp to go swimming or buy a melon at a fruit stand near an old watch tower of the former camp. When they ride their bikes through a little village nearby, Ania shows him the unrestored Auschwitz II site — concrete ruins on a meadow mark the former extermination camp Birkenau, where up to four million people, mostly Jewish, were killed. Once again, the film confronts its audience with extreme paradoxes, causing irritations in viewers who are left to reconcile the horrible images of the Auschwitz camps — this «Topographie des Grauens» in our collective memory as Christian Buß rightly states — with the cautious and tender love story that develops between Sven and Ania. However, the simultaneous arrangement of the reminders of past atrocities and the unfolding love story does not trivialize the horrible events of the past. The film is very careful not to sentimentalize either story, the memory of the past or the love story, with flashbacks, nondiegetic music, or special effects as Thalheim comments in a 2007 interview with Der Tagesspiegel: «Ich wollte nicht über den Ort Emotionen erzeugen. In jeder Dokumentation kommt die Geigenmusik aus dem Off, dann wird im unscharfen Bild der Stacheldraht gezeigt» («Wer dort wohnt»). Instead, the film asks us to confront this paradox, rather than to resolve it or to smooth it out, and most importantly to live with it: the past as part of our present-day life. Life almost 70 years after Auschwitz in Os´wie ˛ cim, where love stories, humor and laughter, beer drinking and dancing in the local discotheque, swimming in the nearby river take place — all of that is possible. Yet, the film also confronts us with images of the modern-day Auschwitz memorial site though once again in an unexpected way. Since Thalheim — just like Spielberg before him — didn ’ t get permission to film inside the memorial, 18 he shows the nearby Auschwitz site as an efficient tourist attraction equipped with a huge parking lot for tour buses and a souvenir stand — indeed a site that processes over a million tourists per year. Though the audience gains insight into the educational working through («Aufarbeitung») of the Auschwitz experience at the International Youth Meeting Center, viewers are left to wonder how successful Auschwitz can possibly be as a solemn place 70 Friederike B. Emonds of remembrance given that mass tourism has turned the site into a memory industry. 19 Thalheim ’ s portrayal of the commodification of Auschwitz in his film hits a nerve in the current debate about Holocaust tourism as part of the enormous popularity of «dark tourism» or «Gruseltourismus» (Broder, «Auschwitz vergessen? ») — a debate that not only takes place in academic circles, such as in the newly established Institute for Dark Tourism Research (IDTR) in England, but also in literary discussions and texts, for example in Henryk Broder ’ s controversial work Vergesst Auschwitz! (2012) and in Doron Rabinovici ’ s fascinating novel Andernorts (2010). 20 Broder sharply criticizes the current memory culture, which according to him consists mostly of «Wohfühlrituale für die Nachkommen der Täter, die sich selbst darin bestätigen, wie vorbildlich sie mit der Geschichte umgehen» («Auschwitz vergessen? »). Though he admits that Auschwitz should never be forgotten, he insists in the same interview, «Aber heute steht Auschwitz eben auch für Selbstabsolution, eine Wellness-Oase für Vergangenheitsbewältigung.» Broder ’ s as well as Thalheim ’ s critique is directed against the highly perfected memory rituals and conventions at Auschwitz that due to the disproportionate musealization reshape the encounter with Auschwitz into «a memorable visit, rather than a visit of memory» as Pollock aptly puts it (177). Current, established memory conventions relieve the individual of the responsibility of active memory work because he or she can relegate this task to state-supported institutions. History feels safer when we put it into a museum. We can walk away from it. But there is an ethical dilemma as Pollock once again points out: «To go, to tour and to leave, is to defy that demonic logic, to put ‹ Auschwitz › back in a place with an entrance and an exit, to see its impoverished remains as the closed containers of a history that is past and fading» (176). At first glance, this perceived «closure» of the horrible crimes against humanity committed at Auschwitz seems to be implied in the title of Thalheim ’ s film Am Ende kommen Touristen — with its explicit reference to an end. 21 This impression is reinforced when we see Sven at the end of the film with his suitcase at the train station in Os´wie ˛ cim. After a fight with his girl-friend Ania — the last cause for his hasty escape — Sven packs his bags to leave Os´wie ˛ cim for good. However, unlike all the other tourists, Sven does not leave either Os´wie ˛ cim or Auschwitz. Instead, he changes his mind and returns — not to Ania though, who is going to leave Os´wie ˛ cim anyway in a few weeks for a new job in Brussels, but to the memorial site. With his decision to stay and return to the memorial site — a decision this time made on his own — Sven finally faces his responsibilities for the German past he did not 71 Revisiting the Memory Industry experience. As Sven helps a disoriented teacher with his school class to find the right bus from the train station to the memorial site, the film indicates that unlike these students and their teacher, Sven is not going to be a tourist, a mere passive bystander, anymore. It is at this point that the film ends very abruptly, leaving viewers once again struggling to tie up the loose ends, thereby forcing us to continue the dialogue that begins with the film ’ s narrative beyond its end. The lack of closure effectively reflects that the film ’ s narrative cannot provide a quick fix in the form of a happy end, nor is the film as a medium able to offer answers and solutions to the kind of difficult social and ethical life problems it raises. While the film persuasively raises the questions and makes the problems visible, it is up to the viewer now to continue the dialogue that the film started and search for answers and solutions in real life. Nevertheless the film ’ s ending carries a sense of hope. It doesn ’ t go so far as to hint at a possible friendship between the old Polish survivor and the young German or at any notion of atonement. But Sven ’ s decision to return to the memorial site reflects that through his work with Krzeminski, the past that he wanted to forget has become accessible and therefore meaningful to him. And even though Auschwitz, as official memorial site and mass tourist destination as well as historical site of past atrocities in close proximity to present-day life in Os´wie ˛ cim, confronts him with insolvable paradoxes, Sven is now committed to staying. Instead of trying to overcome or smooth out those paradoxes, he is willing to live and engage with them as part of his everyday life in Auschwitz and Os´wie ˛ cim. It is not a promise that the film makes but a sense of hope that the narrative hints at. As Elie Wiesel wisely asserted, «Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future» («Hope, Despair and Memory»). As to the viewers, Robert Thalheim ’ s film Am Ende kommen Touristen gives us suggestions on how to overcome the exclusiveness of an institutionalized memory culture. It successfully shows us possibilities in the balancing act of keeping Holocaust memory integrated into our everyday life and committing it to cultural memory. By providing us with a renewed sense of Holocaust memory as part of «living communication» through the active confrontation with incommensurate paradoxes in our present-day life, the film shows us that even in the future, dealing with the past is indeed full of possibilities. 72 Friederike B. Emonds Notes 1 German artist Gunter Demnig ’ s «Stolpersteine» are small memorials installed in the pavement to remember individual victims of the Holocaust. They consist of a small concrete block — about the size of a cobblestone — with a commemorative brass plate mounted on top. Today there are over 32,000 «Stolpersteine» throughout Europe («Stolpersteine»). 2 Given such mass productions in the German media, we are reminded of Eli Wiesel ’ s cautious deliberations: «After all, by what right would we neglect the mass media? By what right would we deny them the possibility of informing, educating, sensitizing the millions of men and women who would normally say, ‹ Hitler, who ’ s he? › But on the other hand, if we allow total freedom to the mass media, don ’ t we risk seeing them profane and trivialize a sacred subject? » (Wiesel, Foreword). 3 In 1996, former German President Roman Herzog officially declared January 27 as Germany ’ s national Day of Remembrance. Nine years later, in 2005, the UN General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. See also the interesting discussion between Aleida Assmann and Harald Welzer about a uniquely German national holiday similar to the 4th of July in the US. In this discussion, Welzer states, «Ich war kürzlich auf einer Fachtagung für Gedenkstätten. Da wurde diskutiert, warum Deutsche keinen vernünftigen Feiertag haben. Der 3. Oktober taugt nicht, weil ihm das sinnliche Moment fehlt, und der 9. November ist ambivalent. Der 27. Januar wurde interessanterweise gar nicht erwähnt. Sogar das Fachpublikum hatte dieses Datum nicht auf der Agenda» («Das ist unser Familienerbe»). 4 More than any other event in the past twenty years, the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany achieved an affirmative sense of national identity from the ground up among the German population similar to the 1954 World Cup, in which the West German soccer team emerged as the surprising winner. 5 For example, Jewish educators in New York have worried for some time that Jewish teenagers are seeing the Holocaust as less relevant, or even «overexposed» while in Israel, some Jewish intellectuals suggest «that the Jewish community puts too much emphasis on the Holocaust, thereby running the risk of alienating young people.» See http: / / njjewishnews.com/ njjn.com/ 121307/ njHolocaustFatigue.html 6 See also Elie Wiesel ’ s critique of today ’ s generation ’ s indifference toward the Shoah in the interview «Prinz Harry.» 7 To be fair, the ideas represented here make up only a small portion of Giesecke and Welzer ’ s innovative approaches to memory research that culminate in an all-encompassing, interactive model they call «Haus der menschlichen Möglichkeiten», which they outline as a hands-on humanities equivalent to the science museums where visitors need to make their own decisions and act out different possibilities to solve social problems. 8 This is evidenced for example by the 2004 double issue entitled «Geschichtsgefühl» of the leftist cultural magazine Ästhetik und Kommunikation. 9 Auschwitz was used as a metonymy for the entire Holocaust already in 1955 when Theodor W. Adorno chose Auschwitz and not any other name in his well-known statement that «to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric» (34). For an interesting discussion of Auschwitz as a metaphor, see James Young, Writing and Re-Writing the Holocaust 89 - 94. 73 Revisiting the Memory Industry 10 Interestingly, the promise of savior and absolution embodied by the young Polish woman — the old trope of «das ewig Weibliche» — doesn ’ t get fulfilled. Instead, Ania leaves Sven for a new job in Brussels. This is in part due to Sven ’ s lack of commitment for a shared future. It seems that he is unable to either commit to the future (Ania) or to the past (Krzeminski). 11 Tobias Ebbrecht contends that Krzeminski is not Jewish but that his character is based on the group of Polish inmates who were forced to build the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1941 (171). 12 The suitcases play several important functions in this film. They symbolize that unlike Sven, Krzeminski comes with the baggage of the past. As Gerd Bayer pointed out (127), they also serve to represent the striking absence of Jews in the film — a film ostensibly about Auschwitz, which, as I mentioned before, functions as a metonymy for the entire Holocaust. As Ebbrecht elaborates, the suitcases also come to play an important role in the relationship between Krzeminski and Sven (180 - 81). 13 The former Auschwitz-Monowitz or Auschwitz III concentration camp was a work camp for mostly Jewish prisoners who were used as slave labor for the German chemical plant I. G. Farben. Holocaust survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were prisoners in this camp. Today there are no visible remains of the Monowitz concentration camp. 14 For an excellent detailed description of this particular sequence see Ebbrecht 176 - 78. 15 As Sabine von Mering points out (167), the character of Andrea Schneider is pointedly played by Lena Stolze who became famous for her portrayals of two leading characters in two films by Michael Verhoeven: Sophie Scholl in Die weiße Rose (1982) and Anja Rosmus in Das unmögliche Mädchen (1990). 16 Thalheim insists that the film is not autobiographical: «Nein, es ist eine fiktive Geschichte, wenn auch inspiriert von der Stimmung, die ich damals im Umgang mit Besuchern und Polen gespürt habe» («Hart Spielberg»). 17 Interestingly, as Pollock points out, «the actual site of the ghetto was also not used in the film; instead, the parts of the town from which Jewish families and communities had been evacuated were substituted, thus actually reversing the movements of history for the sake of the cinematic picturesque» (176). 18 Auschwitz is considered a cemetery. That is the reason why filming is not allowed inside the memorial center. 19 Indeed, most characters in the film are shown to work at the memorial site or the nearby chemical plant. 20 Rabinovici ’ s protagonist Ethan Rosen argues for either side in the debate. While living in Vienna he speaks out for the importance of Auschwitz as memorial site, but while in Israel he attacks Auschwitz as «Disneyland der Vernichtung» (48). Rabinovici ’ s cleverly constructed confrontation of the opposing sides argued by the same character emphasizes the complex relationships between national, generational and identity politics in Holocaust memory work. 21 In a 2011 interview, Thalheim explains that he borrowed the film ’ s title from a poetry volume by the Berlin author Björn Kuhligk, though the poems in that volume have nothing to do with the topic of the film. As Thalheim elaborates on the film ’ s plot, he encapsulates the dilemma that the film deals with: «Auf der einen Seite liegt etwas Befremdliches darin, dass an einem Ort der Verbrechen des Nationalsozialismus heute Touristenbusse vorfahren und sich Leute vor dem Tor ‹ Arbeit macht frei › fotografieren. Auf der anderen Seite ist es eben wichtig, dass dieser Ort besucht wird und nicht in 74 Friederike B. Emonds Vergessenheit gerät und dazu braucht es eine gewisse museale Infrastruktur» («Interview mit dem Team»). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983. Assmann, Aleida. «History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony.» Poetics Today 27.2 (2006): 261 - 73. — . «On the (In) Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory.» German Life and Letters 59.2 (2006): 27 - 34. Assmann, Aleida, and Harald Welzer. Interview by Stefan Reinecke and Jan Feddersen. «Das ist unser Familienerbe.» taz.de. 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Koepnik, Lutz. «Reframing the Past: Heritage Cinema and Holocaust in the 1990s.» New German Critique 87 (2002): 47 - 82. Knigge, Volkhard. «Zur Zukunft der Erinnerung.» Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte. 25/ 26 (2010): 10 - 16. Lammert, Norbert. «Rede von Bundestagspräsident Dr. Norbert Lammert zum Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus im Deutschen Bundestag.» bundestag.de. Deutscher Bundestag, 27 Jan. 2006. http: / / www.bundestag.de/ bundestag/ praesidium/ reden/ 2006/ 002.html. Last accessed on 30 Oct. 2012. — . «Rede von Bundestagspräsident Prof. Dr. Norbert Lammert zum Gedenktag für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.» bundestag.de. Deutscher Bundestag, 27 Jan. 2010. http: / / www.bundestag.de/ bundestag/ praesidium/ reden/ 2011/ 002.html. Last accessed on 30 Oct. 2012. — . «Rede zum Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus.» bundestag. de. 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Perf. Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay. Universal Studios. 2002. Pollock, Griselda. «Holocaust Tourism: Being There, Looking Back and the Ethics of Spatial Memory.» Visual Culture and Tourism. Ed. David Crouch and Nina Luebbren. Oxford: Berg 2003. 175 - 89. Rabinovici, Doron. Andernorts. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010. Shafran, Avi. «Shafran: Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust.» Florida Jewish Journal. Sun-sentinel, 29 August 2012.. http: / / articles.sun-sentinel.com/ 2012 - 08 - 29/ opinion/ fl-jjps-shafran-0829 - 20120829_1_deniers-romanian-jews-blog-platform. Last accessed on 27 Oct. 2012. Shalev, Avner. «Mission Statement.» Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, n. d. http: / / www. yadvashem.org/ yv/ en/ about/ mission_statement.asp. Last accessed on 29 Oct 2012. Spielberg, Steven, dir. Schindler ’ s List. Perf. Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley. Universal Pictures. 1993. «Stern Umfrage zum Holocaust-Gedenktag: Deutsche wollen Erinnerung an Völkermord nicht verdrängen.» stern.de. Verlagshaus G+J AG, 25 Jan. 2012. http: / / www. stern.de/ politik/ deutschland/ stern-umfrage-zum-holocaust-gedenktag-deutschewollen-erinnerung-an-voelkermord-nicht-verdraengen-1777682.html. Last accessed on 7 Feb. 2013. Thalheim, Robert, dir. Am Ende kommen Touristen. Perf. Alexander Fehling, Ryszard Ronczewski, and Barbara Wysocka. X Verleih. 2007. — . Interview by Martin Schwickert.. «Wer dort wohnt, geht am Lager vorbei - zum Schwimmen.» Tagesspiegel.de. Der Tagesspiegel, 15 Aug. 2007. http: / / www.tagesspiegel.de/ kultur/ kino/ interview-mit-robert-thalheim-wer-dort-wohnt-geht-amlager-vorbei-zum-schwimmen/ 1013930.html. Last accessed on 29 Nov. 2012. — . Interview. «Am Ende kommen Touristen: Interview mit dem Team.» Filmering.at 7 Nov 2007. http: / / www.filmering.at/ special/ 1907-am-ende-kommen-touristeninterview-mit-dem-team. Last accessed on 29 Nov. 2012. — . Interview. «Hart Spielberg erreicht mehr Menschen als die Zeitzeugen.» Mopo.de. Hamburger Morgenpost, 16 Aug. 2007. http: / / www.mopo.de/ news/ interviewrobert-thalheim - hart-spielberg-erreicht-mehr-menschen-als-die-zeitzeugen-,506 6732,5578150.html. Last accessed on 29 Nov. 2012. 77 Revisiting the Memory Industry Urban, Susanne. «Representations of the Holocaust in Today ’ s Germany: Between Justification and Empathy Holocaust Education in Germany.» Jewish Political Studies Review 20 (2008): 1 - 9. Urban, Susann, «Anti-Semitism in Germany Today. Its Roots and Tendencies.» Jewish Political Studies Review 16 (2004): 3 - 4. Walser, Martin. «Über ein Geschichtsgefühl.» Willy-Brand-Haus, Berlin. 8 May 2002. Speech. Wiesel, Elie. «Prinz Harry - Was für ein Idiot! » Süddeutsche.de. Die Süddeutsche, 19 May 2010. http: / / www.sueddeutsche.de/ politik/ eli-wiesel-ueber-antisemitismus-prinz-harry-was-fuer-ein-idiot-1.917015. Last accessed on 29 Nov. 2012. — . Foreword. Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust. By Annette Insdorf. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. xiii-xiv. — . «Nobel Lecture: Hope, Despair and Memory.» Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB, 11 Dec. 1986. http: / / www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/ peace/ laureates/ 1986/ wiesellecture.html. Last accessed on 2 Nov 2012. Wortmann, Sönke, dir. Das Wunder von Bern. Perf. Louis Klamroth, Peter Lohmeyer, Johanna Gastdorf. Bavaria Film International. 2003 Young, James. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988. — . «The Counter-Monument: Memory Against itself in Germany Today.» Critical Inquiry 18.2 (1992): 267 - 96. — . «Germany ’ s Holocaust Memorial Problem - and Mine.» The Public Historian 24.4 (2002): 65 - 80. 78 Friederike B. Emonds Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt: Volker Schlöndorffs Ernst Jünger-Bild in Das Meer am Morgen und Der Fangschuß HANS-BERNHARD MOELLER U NIVERSITY OF T EXAS , A USTIN Welche Probleme werfen Kriege für interkulturelle Beziehungen auf und wie stellt Schlöndorff Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt dar? 1 Schlöndorffs Name und Leinwandwerk werden weithin mit Literaturverfilmung gleichgesetzt. Es gilt hier zu zeigen, welche Texte und Persönlichkeiten aus der Welt der Literatur er auswählt und verarbeitet, um Konflikte, Kollaboration und ihr jeweiliges Verhältnis zur Kultur zu veranschaulichen. Meine These ist, dass ihm Ernst Jünger als wesentliche Quelle für zwei Filme diente und Jüngers Funktion in Das Meer am Morgen anhand einer Analyse der Figur in beiden Filmen größere Tiefe erlangt. Auf jeden Fall spielt der Schriftsteller eine bedeutsame Rolle in dem Film Das Meer am Morgen, der im Februar 2012 in der Reihe «Panorama» auf der Berlinale in Deutschland erstaufgeführt (vgl. Abbildung 1) und am 23. März bei Arte im deutschen, französischen und belgischen Fernsehen gezeigt wurde. Zusätzlich verwertete Schlöndorff Jünger, wie hier nachzuweisen ist, schon für Der Fangschuß (1976), einen thematisch dem Meer am Morgen verwandten Film. Zugleich ist zu fragen, ob und inwiefern sich in den 35 Jahren, die zwischen der Entstehung der Filme liegen, Schlöndorffs Jünger-Bild gewandelt hat und welche Schlüsse in Bezug auf Schlöndorff als Filmemacher daraus zu ziehen sind. Zuerst zu Das Meer: Ausgehend von einem historisch verbürgten Vorfall vergegenwärtigt der Film anderthalb Tage im Oktober 1941. Im Internierungslager Chateaubriand in der Bretagne hält die Wehrmacht Franzosen in Gewahrsam, die mit den Interessen der deutschen Besatzer in Konflikt geraten sind (vgl. Abb. 2). Das Pariser Büro des Militärbefehlshabers Otto von Stülpnagel, dem Ernst Jünger in diesem Film und in der Wirklichkeit als Attaché zugeordnet war, erhält Meldung von dem tödlichen Attentat auf einen deutschen Offizier in der Stadt Nantes. Hitler fordert als Repressalie eine sofortige Massenerschießung. Der Film schildert nun, wie der deutsche Militärbefehlshaber und ebenso ein lokaler französischer Landrat sich bemühen, dieses Massenopfer zu verhindern oder wenigstens zu begrenzen, sodann wie man aus den bei Chateaubriand Internierten die Todeskandidaten bestimmt, und schließlich wie am Ende 27 Lagerinsassen exekutiert werden. Abb. 2: Insassen und Gendarmen im Internierungslager. (Volker Schlöndorff) Abb. 1: Auf dem roten Teppich des Friedrichstadt-Palasts vor der Premiere. Von rechts: Volker Schlöndorff, Leo Paul Salmain (Guy Môquet), Ulrich Matthes (Ernst Jünger), Thomas Arnold (Otto Abetz) und Harald Schrott (Hans Speidel) (Privatbesitz) 80 Hans-Bernhard Moeller Der Film Das Meer am Morgen ist keine Literaturverfilmung traditionellen Musters, die auf einer einzigen Vorlage beruht, vielmehr geht es um das Verweben von Motiven verschiedener Art, die der Filmemacher unabhängig verarbeitete. Hinzukommt Schlöndorffs außergewöhnliche persönliche Affinität zu dem Stoff, der ihn motivierte, selbst das Drehbuch zu schreiben. Der Regisseur hat wiederholt darauf hingewiesen, dass Filme, Literaturverfilmungen eingeschlossen, nur authentisch ausfallen, solange eine persönliche Beziehung zum Stoff zündet. «In an adaptation, it is not enough to base the film on the text; one must rediscover the author ’ s motivation, the force that made him write. I must find in myself equally powerful reasons,» äußerte er in seinem Vorwort zu einer amerikanischen Neuausgabe von Marcel Proust ’ s Swann in Love («On Adapting» vi). Ein solcher Bezugsfunken sprang offenbar über, als Schlöndorff 2010 die französische Fassung seiner Autobiografie Licht, Schatten und Bewegung in Frankreich vorstellte, 2 und der französische Journalist Pierre-Louis Basse dem Filmemacher sein Buch Guy Môquet. Une enfance fusillée überreichte. Als Siebzehnjähriger gilt Guy (Leo Paul Salmain) (vgl. Abb. 3) sowohl als der jüngste als auch repräsentativste unter den 27 am 22. Oktober 1941 in der Bretagne hingerichteten Geiseln. In eben diesem Alter hatte Schlöndorff selbst 1956 seine französischen Internatsjahre unweit von Chateaubriand angetreten und damals vage Andeutungen über ein Massaker deutscher Besatzer gehört (Schlöndorff - Matthes). Nunmehr ist er nicht nur aufgeklärt, sondern diese Geschichte liess ihn nicht mehr los. Abb. 3: Leo Paul Salmain als der siebzehnjährige Guy Môquet. (Provobis Film) 81 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt Trotz des Titels ist Basses Buch keine lineare faktische Schilderung von Guy Môquets Lebenslauf und Tod. Es ist vielmehr in einer vermischten literarischen Form abgefasst, die vorwiegend Vorstellungen Basses von Guys geografischer und sozialer Umgebung, von Empfindungen der Titelfigur und auch Elemente aus der Familiengeschichte des Autors semi-fiktiv verknüpfen. So wie Klaus Harpprecht in Arletty und ihr deutscher Offizier (2011) häufig über Gemütsbewegungen und Reflexionen seiner französischen Titelfigur mutmaßt, tut Basse das in seinem Buch, wobei beide Autoren ihre Texte in die Zeitgeschichte einbetten. Aber beides sind schließlich nicht Bücher von Historikern, die als ihre primäre Aufgabe Fakten zu ermitteln pflegen. Im Gegensatz zu Harpprechts Perspektive ist Basses viel enger, persönlicher, und es geht ihm nicht um deutsch-französische Liebe in Zeiten des Zweiten Weltkriegs, sondern um brutale deutsche Repressalien gegen einen Heranwachsenden. Darüber hinaus setzt Basse mit seinem Buch auch seinem Großvater Pierre Gaudin und seiner Mutter Esther Basse ein Denkmal. Gaudin war in ebendem Lager Chateaubriand interniert (und überlebte später obendrein das KZ Dachau) und Esther Basse, seinerzeit Schulkind, half 1941, letzte Zeugnisse der todgeweihten Geiseln aus dem Lager sicher zu stellen, die sie in Wandbretter der Baracke gekerbt hatten. Auch diesen Familienmitgliedern muss Basse ihr Erleben imaginierend nachempfinden, denn das Kriegstrauma hatte ihnen die Sprache verschlagen: sie haben die Kriegszeit nicht mit Basse besprochen, obschon seine Mutter ihm das Andenken an Môquet quasi zur Aufgabe gemacht hat. Es gibt Hinweise, dass Schlöndorff sich für sein Drehbuch ferner auf Aufzeichnungen Gilbert Brustleins, eines der drei französischen Attentäter, gestützt oder zumindest darin recherchiert hat (Schlöndorff - Matthes; Brustlein). Aber diese letztere Quelle war weniger bedeutend für Schlöndorff als Basse und die zwei deutschen, die ihrerseits auch wesentlichere Elemente für Das Meer am Morgen lieferten. An vorderster Stelle ist hier Ernst Jüngers Zur Geiselfrage anzuführen. Wie auch im Film dargestellt, hatte Jünger, der seit dem 1. Juli 1941 in den Pariser Kommandostab General Otto von Stülpnagels beordert war (Mühleisen 338), von diesem deutschen Militärbefehlshaber die Anweisung erhalten, ein Dossier zur Geiselfrage zusammen zu stellen. Sowohl Vichy-Frankreich als auch breite Kreise der französischen Gesellschaft, die in Nord- und Südfrankreich direkt der deutschen Besatzung unterstellt waren, hatten seit dem Waffenstillstand vom 22. Juni 1940 weitgehend mit den Eroberern kollaboriert. Der französische Präsident François Hollande erinnerte am 22. Juli 2012 in seiner Rede zum 70. Jahrestag der Razzia von «Vel d ’ Hiv» an «die dunklen Stunden der Kollaboration, 82 Hans-Bernhard Moeller unsere Geschichte und damit die Verantwortung Frankreichs.» Speziell mahnte er: Die Wahrheit ist, dass die französische Polizei auf der Grundlage von Listen, die sie selbst erstellt hatte, sich zur Aufgabe gemacht hatte, die tausenden von Unschuldigen festzusetzen, die am 16. Juli 1942 in die Falle gelockt waren. Dass die französische Gendarmerie sie in die Internierungslager geführt hat. Die Wahrheit ist, dass nicht ein deutscher Soldat, nicht ein einziger, für den ganzen Einsatz herangezogen wurde. («70. Jahrestag») Das französische Bürgertum erblickte im Dritten Reich ein Bollwerk gegen den Kommunismus, von dem es sich auch im Binnenland in Gestalt der starken kommunistischen Partei Frankreichs bedroht wähnte. Die französischen Stalinisten ihrerseits hielten still, solange der Molotow-Ribbentrop-Pakt in Kraft war. Erst seit der deutschen Invasion der UdSSR am 22. Juni 1941 begannen dann vor allem von kommunistischer Seite Überfälle auf die deutsche Besatzung. General von Stülpnagel suchte krasse Repressalien Berlins abzubremsen, damit sich das breite französische Volk nicht mit den Opfern der Vergeltungsmaßnahmen solidarisierte. Die Geiselakte, die Jünger führte, war zu Stülpnagels Beschwichtigungs- oder Rechtfertigungsversuchen bestimmt. Das Faszinierendste - und für Schlöndorff Bereicherndste - ist, dass Jünger seiner Akte als Anhang eine komplette eigenhändige deutsche Übersetzung der Abschiedsbriefe von den Todeskandidaten des Lagers Chateaubriand beifügte (Zur Geiselfrage 113 - 44). Eingedenk der Gestapo-Verfolgungen nach dem Attentat auf Hitler vom 20. Juli 1944 hatte Jünger seine Durchschrift der Geiselakte vernichtet. Aber eine zweite Kohlepapierdurchschrift, die er wohl vor 1944 gelegentlich eines Heimaturlaubs mit nach Haus genommen hatte, führte letztendlich 2011 zur Veröffentlichung in Buchform in Jüngers Verlag (Zur Geiselfrage 147 - 49). Hier boten sich reichliche Anregungen sowohl für das Geschick der Geiseln als auch die Darstellung Jüngers. Als zweite deutsche Vorlage diente Schlöndorff Heinrich Bölls Das Vermächtnis, eine umfangreiche Erzählung, die gegen 1950 entstand, aber erst 1982 als Buch erschien. Nach Bernhard Sowinski hat Böll darin Erfahrungen aus seinem Dienst «an der französischen Kanalküste, wo er [. . .] neben Wachdiensten auch beim Bunkerbau beschäftigt war,» eingebracht (4). Dort diente der Soldat Wenk unter einem qualifizierten, kameradschaftlichen Oberleutnant und einem tyrannischen, alkoholabhängigem Hauptmann bis die Einheit an die Ostfront entsendet wurde, wo der Hauptmann den Oberleutnant erschoss, ohne dafür bestraft zu werden. Der zeitlich spätere Rahmen spielt satirisch mit dem Hauptmann als Opportunisten des westdeutschen Wiederaufbaus. Neben dem Atmosphärischen entlehnt Schlön- 83 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt dorff hauptsächlich die Figur des Soldaten Otto (vgl. Abb. 4), den er frei nach Wenk und dessen Erlebnissen gestaltet. Ich komme später auf ihn zurück. Um diese Geschichte von Krieg und Konflikten zu erzählen, eine Geschichte, deren Ausgang historisch feststeht, wählte Schlöndorff einen relativ undramatischen, weniger illusionistischen, fast dokumentarischen Stil. Ihm lag offenbar daran, die Rädchen des Verwaltungsapparats von Berlin bis in das Lager bei Chateaubriand und bis hin an den Hinrichtungsplatz transparent zu machen, Rädchen, die unaufhaltsam auf den Tod der Geiseln zulaufen. Wie funktionierte die Kollaboration der französischen Gendarmerie? Wie wurden der Gendarmerievorsteher Touya und der junge Landrat Lecornu (vgl. Abb. 5), selbst der Exkommunist Chassagne, einmal hinein gezogen in die Verwaltungsapparatur, allmählich zu Kolloborateuren? Keine Befehlsverweigerung - alles verlief nach Vorschrift, wie am Schluss des Films die haarsträubende Exekution, die der deutsche Offizier laut vorlesend nach der Heeresdienstvorschrift 35/ 213 ausführen läßt. Um diesen Mechanismus vor Augen zu führen, verzichtete Schlöndorff weitgehend auf Personalisierung und Zuschaueridentifikation. Ungeachtet seiner Stellung als die Hauptfigur unter den Geiseln hebt Schlöndorff Guy Môquet im Fortgang der Filmerzählung relativ wenig hervor. (Der Siebzehnjährige wird zuweilen mit Sophie Scholl verglichen; beide wurden beim Verteilen von Flugblättern festgenommen.) Selbst wenn das offizielle Frank- Abb. 4: Jacob Matschenz in der Rolle des Soldaten Otto. (Provobis Film) 84 Hans-Bernhard Moeller reich alljährlich vorrangig des Märtyrers Guy Môquet gedenkt, war er eigentlich einer von 27 todesbestimmten Lagerinsassen. Guy erscheint auch im Bild häufig zusammen mit Timbaut, dem Wortführer der Internierten (vgl. Abb. 6). Entsprechend steht Ernst Jünger auf Seiten der Besatzer nicht hierarchisch an der Spitze seiner Gruppe. Er tritt vorwiegend mit seinem Vorgesetzten, General Stülpnagel (André Jung), auf. Diese Art Ästhetik stellt das Kollektiv oder die Gruppe mit dem Individuum auf eine Stufe. Als weiterer Aspekt eines solchen Stilwillens verringert sich die Identifikation des Zuschauers mit den hervorgehobenen Zentralcharakteren. Die minder identifikatorische Darbietungsweise sticht schon bei Ulrich Matthes ins Auge, der die Jünger-Rolle betont distanziert gibt («Attentat»). Darüber hinaus finden sich entsprechende filmische Kunstgriffe, wie die Bild/ Ton- Scheren, bekannt aus Filmen mit Brechtscher Ästhetik: Während die Bildsequenz weitergeht, springt der Ton zur nächsten Szene oder umgekehrt. Ähnlich wirkt die Tonsegmentierung bei den Voice overs während die Geiseln die letzten Botschaften an ihre Angehörigen schreiben. Ebenfalls schwächen verwinkelte Einstellungen, wie die von der Liste der Geiseln in der Lagerverwaltung und von Jünger und Speidel im deutschen Hauptquartier den Effekt des Vertrauten und Persönlichen. Insgesamt neigen diese Stilmittel zu einer minder identifikatorischen Darbietungsweise, personalisieren weniger und unterstreichen so den mechanischen Aspekt der Verwaltungsapparatur. Abb. 5: Die Vertreter der französischen Autoritäten, Gendarmeriechef Lucien Touya (Jean-Marc Roulot) und Landrat Bernard Lecornu (Sébastian Accart), und Kollaborateure vor der Hinrichtung der Geiseln (Volker Schlöndorff) 85 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt Abb. 6: Timbaut (Marc Barbé), Führungspersönlichkeit unter den kommunistischen Geiseln, als Mentor der Titelfigur. (Les Canards Sauvages) Abb. 7: Disput zwischen Botschafter Otto Abetz, General Otto von Stülpnagel (André Jung), und Oberst Hans Speidel (Harald Schrott). (Volker Schlöndorff) 86 Hans-Bernhard Moeller Nichtsdestoweniger gelingt es Schlöndorff, gerade den Wert des einzelnen Menschenlebens im Krieg hervorzuheben. Er erzielt das durch drei Disput- Sequenzen, durch die er den Film als Werk strukturell zusammenhält und vereinheitlicht. Wie in seinem Film Der neunte Tag (2004) steht ein Streitgespräch im intellektuellen Zentrum von Meer am Morgen. Anders als dort tragen es in dem neuen Film aber nicht zwei Protagonisten aus; vielmehr ist es auf drei Erzähleinheiten aufgeteilt. Die deutschen Militärs einschließlich Jüngers, die Geiseln und die drei französischen Attentäter diskutieren, jeweils aus ihrer Perspektive, erregt die geforderte Sühne für das Attentat: Sollen die 150, die Hitler fordert, oder weniger Franzosen für die Handlung der Täter mit dem Leben bezahlen? Beispielsweise entsetzt sich im ersten Disput General von Stülpnagel in Paris über Hitlers Gebot, 150 Geiseln als Vergeltungsmaßnahme hinzurichten. Diese von Otto Abetz, Hitlers Botschafter in Frankreich, persönlich vorgetragene Forderung diskutiert er mit dem Botschafter, Oberst Hans Speidel und Ernst Jünger (vgl. Abb. 7). Der General sieht sich nicht als «Metzger,» mehr noch: er sorgt sich darum, dass Massenerschießungen das den Besatzern bisher günstige politische Klima untergraben würden. Er beauftragt Jünger, zusätzlich zu seinem Amt als Briefzensor nun die Geheimakte über Geiselerschießungen zu verfassen. Bei dem zweiten Disput, dem im Lager, erklärt eine ältere Geisel, Granet, so viele «Genossen sind ein hoher Preis» (vgl. Abb. 8). Ein Lehrer stimmt ihm Abb. 8: Désiré Granet (Philippe Résimont) und Mitgefangene in der Lagerbaracke während ihres Disputs. (Volker Schlöndorff) 87 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt bei: «sollen die Täter bereit sein, mit ihrem Leben zu zahlen, statt Genossen erschießen zu lassen.» Im Laufe der Debatte äußert er auch: «Märtyrer sind was für den Vatikan. Ich kämpfe, um zu leben. Warum hauen wir nicht ab? » Zuguterletzt setzt der Wortführer der kommunistischen Geiselgruppe, Timbaut, genannt Tintin (Marc Barbé), sich mit seinem bitteren strategischen Argument durch: «Wenn so 30 von uns sterben [. . .] Hitler die Maske abreißen [. . .] vorbei die friedliche Kollaboration! » Im dritten Disput geraten die drei nicht aufgegriffenen Attentäter aneinander, als sie einen öffentlichen Anschlag lesen, der die Erschießung der ersten 50 Geiseln androht, sollten die Verantwortlichen sich nicht stellen. Marcel, der Jüngste von den dreien, kennt eine Handvoll der Opfer persönlich. «Und wenn wir uns stellen? Ich zumindest [. . .] besser als 50 Kameraden hinrichten lassen.» 3 Seine Mittäter entgegnen, sie dürften sich nicht stellen, damit die Besatzer annähmen, sie seien «mehr als einer. Eine richtige Armee, die wir bald sind.» Als Marcel beharrt, fällt der Anführer über ihn her (vgl. Abb. 9). Ein Schnitt endet die Prügel-Szene mit offenem Ausgang. Abb. 9: Die drei Attentäter geraten aneinander, als Marcel sich stellen will, nachdem ein Anschlag ihnen die bevorstehenden Geiselerschießungen bekannt macht. (Volker Schlöndorff) In diesen drei Konfliktsituationen schwankt der Wert des Menschenlebens offensichtlich zwischen humaner Signifikanz, Freundesbindung und politischem Kapital. Und stets spielt die Entscheidung über Kollaboration oder Verweigerung mit. Ob sich die deutschen Besatzer als Optimum das Modell Indien gewünscht haben, wo sich die über ein Jahrhundert anhaltende 88 Hans-Bernhard Moeller britische Herrschaft auf die Kollaboration der heimischen Kaufleute und Banker stützte? Das politische Moment in den Disputen ist unmittelbar greifbar in den polaren Argumentationen von Stülpnagels und Tintins, aber die Haltungen sind einander diametral entgegengesetzt. Dem General liegt an fortgesetzter Kollaboration der Besetzten; Tintin am Gegenteil. Allein welcher Unterschied bei der psychologischen Kriegsführung: Einerseits das Erwägen, ob man mit dem eigenen Leben zahlt, auf Seiten der Geiseln und des Attentäters Marcel. Andererseits pure Strategie beim General, der befürchtet, Massenerschießungen untergrüben das den Besatzern bisher günstige Klima. Die todgeweihten Internierten ringen sich zum patriotischen Altruismus durch. Gleich Schlöndorffs Pater Kremer aus Der neunte Tag und Agnieszka aus Strajk - die Heldin von Danzig (2007) entwickelt sich die Geiselgruppe zu Schlöndorffs charakteristisch kompromisslosen Helden. In seinem Dossier Zur Geiselfrage hat der geschichtliche Jünger wiederholt die unerschütterlich gefasste Haltung der Geiseln während der Exekution gewürdigt. Gemessen an ihrer Bestürzung und ihrem dennoch festen Standpunkt vermittelt Schlöndorffs Jünger im Film den Eindruck der Unbetroffenheit. Entsprechend hat der historische Jünger seine Chronik als militärisch objektiven Bericht abgefasst, ausgenommen vielleicht die erwähnten Abschiedsbriefe der Geiseln, die er persönlich ins Deutsche übersetzte und als Anhang seiner Schrift beifügte. 4 Als puren Beobachter zeichnet Schlöndorff Jünger auch in der Salon-Szene seines Films, u.zw. in mehr als einem Sinne. Der geschichtliche Jünger strebte ungeachtet der Kriegssituation danach, transnational den Stellenwert der Kultur zu respektieren. Bekanntlich konnte er sich in Paris außerhalb seiner Dienststunden in Zivilkleidung umtun und in den Kreisen der dortigen Intelligenz und besseren Gesellschaft als Repräsentant deutscher Kultur verkehren. Jüngers Pariser Tagebücher bezeugen regen Austausch mit Persönlichkeiten des kulturellen Lebens von Sacha Guitry über Jean Cocteau und Paul Firmin Léautaud, Gaston Gallimard und Paul Morand, bis hin zu Henry de Montherland (Kiesel 504). Schlöndorff hat die Sängerin in seiner Filmszene Charmille genannt, einer mehrerer Decknamen, die Jünger im Pariser Tagebuch für seine mehrjährige Geliebte Sophie Ravoux benutzte. Nach ihrem Gesangsvortrag führen die beiden folgendes Gespräch. Er eröffnet ihr, dass er mit dem Gedanken spielt, sich nach Ende des Krieges in Paris niederzulassen. 5 (Vgl. Abb. 10.) Charmille: «Sehen Sie denn ein mögliches Ende? [. . .] In der Tradition des Tyrannenmords? » Jünger: «Es gibt Leute, die so etwas vorhaben.» 89 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt Ch.: «In Deutschland? » J.: «Auch hier.» Ch.: «Sie? » J.: «. . . ich bin eher Beobachter.» Ch.: «Zuschauer oder Voyeur? » J.: «Nein. Als Soldat bin ich Mann der Tat. Aber kein Mörder. [. . .] Jedenfalls fühle ich mich nicht berufen, ins Räderwerk des Weltgeschehens einzugreifen.» Ch.: «Das tun Sie aber, indem Sie hier sind als Offizier der Besatzungsmacht.» Schlöndorffs Jünger ist letzten Endes Teil des nationalsozialistischen Molochs, der die Geiseln so vernichtet, wie er in seiner gesamten Hegemonialsphäre destruktiv wütete. Davon abgesehen spielt diese Szene zusätzlich auf den Kontext des 20. Juli 1944 an. Charmilles «Tyrannenmord» und Jüngers «Auch hier» beziehen sich auf den Pariser Kreis, der bei der «Operation Walküre,» dem Stauffenberg-Attentat, mitwirken sollte. Bekanntlich war Jünger im Bilde über die Pläne des verschworenen Militärs, wenn auch nicht über alle Einzelheiten (Jünger SW 1.Abt. III: 241 - 243; Kiesel 525; Mitchell 48). Er schloss sich allerdings den Verschwörern nicht aktiv an, sondern arrangierte sich, obschon er durch seine Nähe zu deren Pariser Kreis Berlin suspekt schien. Entsprechend wirkt Schlöndorffs Jünger politisch unverbindlich. Abb. 10: Ernst Jünger (Ulrich Matthes) und Charmille (Ariel Dombasle) im Salon. (Provobis Film) 90 Hans-Bernhard Moeller Vielleicht um diese Neigung Jüngers zur politischen Unverbindlichkeit zu unterstreichen, hat Schlöndorff den Erzähleinheiten Lager Chateaubriand, Attentat und Pariser Hauptquartier noch eine vierte hinzugefügt, einen Küstenstandort der deutschen Armee in der Bretagne. Hierher verschlägt es nach einer Verletzung an der Ostfront Otto, einen jungen Soldaten, der in einem nicht-diktatorischen Land wahrscheinlich Wehrdienstverweigerer geworden wäre. Er ist die Figur, die Bölls früher Erzählung Das Vermächtnis nachempfunden ist, Böll/ Otto bietet als Kontrastfigur im Gegensatz zu Schlöndorffs passivem Jünger und seiner geschichtlichen Vorlage ein Bild des Protests, wie schmal die Toleranz für Andersdenkende im Dritten Reich auch immer gewesen ist. Sichtlich hat sich Schlöndorff in Das Meer am Morgen von der Welt der deutschen Literatur inspirieren lassen. Die Entlehnung aus Böll ist gestreift, die Anlehnung an Jüngers Dossier Zur Geiselfrage und überhaupt Elemente aus Jüngers Leben und Werk verdeutlicht, indessen sind die Bezüge zwischen Schlöndorffs Werk und Jünger längst noch nicht ausgeschöpft. Nachzuweisen ist noch, dass sich Schlöndorff auch in seinem früheren Film Der Fangschuß (1976) von Literatur hat anregen lassen, und inwiefern Jünger dabei mitspielt. Diente nicht eigentlich Marguerite Yourcenars Roman Coup de Grâce als Vorlage für Schlöndorffs Film aus dem Jahre 1976? Dem Meer entsprechend filmte Schlöndorff damals über französisch-deutsche Bezüge, drehte er eine deutsch-französische Koproduktion, handelt der Film von kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen, geht aus mit eiskalten, wie routinemäßigen Exekutionsszenen, spielt im transnationalen Kontext und bietet sprachlich eine Mischung von Französisch und Deutsch. Noch wesentlicher als diese Parallelen zwischen den beiden Filmen ist für unseren Zusammenhang, dass in Schlöndorffs Schaffen Ernst Jünger und dessen Schriften über drei Jahrzehnte mit Unterbrechungen einen bedeutenden Faktor darstellten. Vor einem kurzen Inhaltsabriss des früheren Films ein Wort zu der wenig bekannten historischen Situation, in die er eingebettet ist. Im Baltikum ließen die Alliierten Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg trotz seiner Niederlage eine Schutztruppe aus Freiwilligen aufstellen, um das Vordringen der sowjetischen Räte und Armee einzudämmen. Das kam den deutsch-baltischen Großgrundbesitzern gelegen, die sich um ihre traditionelle Vormachtstellung und ihre Herrensitze sorgten. Der Fangschuß schildert Kämpfe, in denen die aus mehreren Nationalitäten bunt zusammen gesetzte Verteidigerschar das Schloss Kratovice - einst ein Vorposten des Deutschen Ritterordens - zu halten sucht. Es ist der Familiensitz Konrads von Reval und seiner Schwester Sophie, aber sein Waffenbruder, Erich von Lhomond, Freikorpsoffizier, übernimmt den Oberbefehl. Zwischen ihm 91 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt und Konrads Schwester Sophie entspinnt sich in dem Kriegschaos eine Beziehung, die nicht weniger verwirrt ist als die militärische Lage. Sie verliebt sich in den wiedergefundenen Jugendgespielen, ohne Gegenliebe zu erfahren. Politisch sympathisiert sie mit den roten Räten, zu denen sie schließlich überläuft. Beim Rückzug vom Schloss wird Erichs Truppe in ein Feuergefecht verwickelt. Unter den Roten, die man gefangen nimmt, befindet sich auch Sophie, die vielleicht schon vorher mit ihnen kollaboriert hat. Als die Gefangenen hingerichtet werden, verlangt sie, dass niemand anders als Erich an ihr den «Fangschuss» vollstreckt, was er wie in Yourcenars Vorlage ausführt (vgl. Abb. 11). Abb. 11: Der Fangschuß. Erich von Lhomond (Matthias Habich) exekutiert Sophie von Reval (Margarethe von Trotta). (Studiocanal) Inwiefern hat sich Schlöndorff indessen beim Fangschuß außer an die französische Romanschriftstellerin auch an Jünger angelehnt? Der Protagonist Erich ist mit dem historischen Jünger der Stahlgewitter verwandt: Beide sind in ihren Mittbis Spätzwanzigern, Offiziere und Anführer einer rechtsnational eingestellten Truppe. Aus Yourcenars Roman wissen wir über den reiferen Erich, «Er hatte sich an den verschiedenen Bewegungen beteiligt, die schließlich in Mitteleuropa Hitler an die Macht brachten» (8). Sowohl Erich als auch Jünger verkörpern den maskulinen Stereotyp, der die deutsche Vormachtstellung in den drohenden Gefahren der Moderne des 92 Hans-Bernhard Moeller frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, insbesondere im Krieg, verteidigt, wobei Ehre, Willenskraft und Mut zentrale Werte bilden. Beide gemahnen dabei zu einem gewissen Grad noch an das ältere Ideal des Kriegerstandes für Mannestugend. Beide sind mit kriegerischer Gewaltanwendung verbunden. Beide bilden komplexe Persönlichkeiten: «Ein Mann vom Typ Erich von Lhomonds lebt,» Yourcenar zufolge, «im Widerstreit mit sich selbst» (Yourcenar «Nachwort» 135). Was anders gilt für Jünger angesichts seines Nebeneinanders von Soldat und Ästhet, dem Widerstreit der Rollen wie Schlöndorff ihn in der Charmille- Szene in Meer am Morgen einzufangen sucht? Beide führen «Aufsicht bei der Erschießung» einer Person, die die eigene Sache im Stich gelassen hat, wie Jünger in einem Eintrag vom 29. Mai 1941 in seinem Ersten Pariser Tagebuch bezeugt (SW 1. Abt.Bd.II: 244 - 47). Es fällt schwer, vor den Parallelen zwischen dem historischen Jünger und Schlöndorffs Protagonisten die Augen zu verschließen. Sogar noch mehr als aus der Biografie Jüngers hat Schlöndorff dessen Schriften entlehnt. In Stahlgewittern diente ihm in mehrerlei Hinsicht als Quelle. In Yourcenars Roman sucht man vergeblich nach Details der kriegerischen Handlungen; sie bleiben abstrakt, bloße Nebensätze. Das passt zu ihrer Darstellungsform: ihr Roman ist angelegt als Erichs Erinnerung. Schlöndorff hingegen drehte einen Kriegsfilm. Er integrierte in den Fangschuß Episoden vom Grabenkrieg, die Jüngers berühmtem Kriegsbuch abgesehen sind. Dazu gehört auch ein heiteres Zwischenspiel, mit dem Jünger einmal die bluttriefenden aber dennoch grundsachlich und gestochen technisch beschriebenen Schlachtdarstellungen der Stahlgewitter unterbricht. So heißt es dort: «Selbst in diesem furchtbaren Augenblicken geschah etwas Witziges. Ein Mann neben mir riss sein Gewehr an die Backe, um wie bei einer Treibjagd auf einen Hasen zu schießen, der plötzlich durch unsere Linien sprang» (Jünger, SW Abt. I, Bd. I: 247). Diese Jagdepisode, die bei Yourcenar fehlt, taucht im Fangschuß auf der Rückreise der Militärs von ihrer Fahrt nach Riga wieder auf, als einer der Offiziere unvermittelt aus dem Auto ein Stück Wild erlegt. 6 Schlöndorff selbst hat in einem Interview und einer Mail die versteckte kritische Nachahmung von Jünger und dessen Kriegsaufzeichnungen bestätigt. 7 Dabei verweist er auf In Stahlgewittern. Offenbar hat Schlöndorff aber auch aus Jüngers Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis zitiert. Dort finden sich folgende Passagen: Der erste Tote [. . .] jedem bohrt sich für alle Zeiten ein anderer Eindruck ins Hirn. Dem einen die Hand, wie eine Kralle in Moos und Erde geschlagen, dem anderen die bläulichen Lippen über die Weiße des Gebisses, dem dritten die schwarze, blutige Kruste im Haar. Ach, man konnte noch so vorbereitet sein auf diesen Augenblick, alles zerschellte an dieser grauen 93 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt Gestalt am Wegesrand [. . .]. Diese Gestalt und die unzähligen, die noch folgten, erchienen immer wieder in ihren tausend verzerrten Stellungen mit zerrissenen Körpern und klaffenden Schädeln, bleiche, mahnende Geister irrer Grabenbesatzungen in den Minuten vorm Sturm, bis der erlösende Schrei zum Angriff erscholl. [. . .] Unverkennbar ist der Geruch des verwesenden Menschen, schwer, süßlich und widerlich haftend wie zäher Brei. Nach großen Schlachten brütete er so lastend über den Feldern. (Jünger, SW Abt. 2, Bd. VII: 20 - 21) Das Echo dieser Abschnitte findet sich im Fangschuß, als Konrad von Reval mit seiner Schwester Sophie einen Spaziergang in der Umgebung des Schlosses unternimmt (vgl. Abb. 12). Abb. 12: Der Fangschuß. Konrad von Reval (Rüdiger Kirschstein) beschreibt seiner Schwester Sophie auf einem Spaziergang die Grauen des Krieges. (Museum of Modern Art/ Film Stills Archive) Unverkennbar ist der Geruch, nach den Schlachten über den Feldern. Der erste Tote - jedem bohrt sich ein andrer Eindruck ins Hirn, dem einen die Hand, die wie eine Kralle auf die Erde schaut, dem andern die bläulichen Lippen über dem weißen Gesicht, dem andern - weißt du, man kann noch so gut vorbereitet sein, es ist immer wieder dasselbe Grauen; zerrissene Körper, klaffende Schädel, bleiche Gesichter. Man wird ungeduldig, man wartet auf den erlösenden Schrei zum Angriff. Wortwörtliche Entsprechungen also und über Erich hinaus sind sie auch mit Sophies Bruder Konrad verbunden. Spielt vielleicht schon das erste Wort des Dialogs, «unverkennbar,» voller Ironie mit der aufgewiesenen Intertextualität? Unter Intertextualität verstehen wir die Wiederverarbeitung oder -aufbereitung literarischer Vorlagen, und die literarisch-kulturellen Ingre- 94 Hans-Bernhard Moeller dienzien in Schlöndorffs Der Fangschuß sind offensichtlich wesentlich komplizierter, als die Forschung bisher annahm. Das kriegerische Element des Films lebt ebenso von Jünger wie von Yourcenar. Um Krieg, Konflikt und Kollaboration darzustellen, hat Schlöndorff also auch hier biografische und literarische Modelle aus der Welt der Kultur ausgeschöpft. Weil der Filmemacher mit Meer am Morgen zu der Thematisierung von Jünger zurückkehrt, stellt sich die Frage, ob sich sein Jünger-Bild in den 35 Jahren, die den Fangschuß und Das Meer trennen, in Einzelzügen gewandelt hat. In beiden Filmen bindet Schlöndorff Jünger in den Kontext von Krieg und vom Zerstörerischen von Konflikten ein. Während im Fangschuß sowohl die Gestalt Jüngers als auch dessen Bildsprache zur Darstellung der Konflikte dient, verfügt der Filmemacher in Das Meer am Morgen primär über die historische Gestalt des Schriftstellers, um Verhaltensweisen in Konfliktsituationen zu zeigen. Dabei kontrastiert er Jünger nicht nur mit einem an Böll gemahnenden Deutschen sondern auch - und vor allem - mit einem jungen Franzosen, die beide mehr Auflehnung gegen das Dritte Reich als Jünger ausdrücken. Damit liegt der Filmemacher auf den ersten Blick durchaus weiterhin auf der Linie des Neuen Deutschen Films. Andererseits ist das reine Nachleben Jüngers bei einer Hauptfigur des Neuen deutschen Films erstaunlich, wenn auch noch so kritisch rezipiert. Auf den zweiten Blick erweist sich freilich bei dem Schlöndorff des 21. Jahrhunderts auch noch ein Unterschied. In Übereinstimmung mit der Hauptrichtung des Neuen Deutschen Films fokussierte Der Fangschuß, so transnational er war, auf deutsche Belange: er implizierte Kritik an Jünger als Repräsentant des Militarismus und der deutschen Geschichte. In Das Meer am Morgen hingegen steht die französisch-deutsche Geschichte im Mittelpunkt, wenn deutsche Geschichte, dann unter europäischem Vorzeichen. Offenbar denkt der Urheber dieses Film europäisch, wenn er über seinen Film äußert: «Es ist eine kleine Geschichte, unendlich groß durch den Mut der Beteiligten, unerbittlich in ihrem Ablauf wie eine griechische Tragödie - und fast unverständlich im heutigen Europa. Es ist gut, sich an sie zu erinnern, wenn immer Europa infrage gestellt wird» (Das Meer am Morgen, Das Arte Magazin). In Zeiten, in denen Euro und europäisches Geschichtsgefühl eine schwere Krise durchlaufen, deutet Schlöndorff seinen Film geradezu als Appell zu Gunsten der Europäischen Union («Mehr Europa wagen»). Aber ist Das Meer am Morgen wirklich als Befürworter des Übernationalen anzusehen? Oder bedeutet der Film eigentlich doch ein hohes Lied auf das Nationale? Sind nicht Mut, Disziplin und Selbstlosigkeit, wie sie die Geiseln im Lager und die drei Attentäter in den zwei Disput-Szenen personifizieren, in den Dienst des französischen Nationalismus gestellt? Ist nicht auch die 95 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt hohe Wertung der Opferbereitschaft ein grundkonservativer Zug? (Aufopferung für die Allgemeinheit pflegt vom heutigen Zeitgeist weniger privilegiert zu werden als bürgerliche Zivilcourage.) Alle diese Tugenden sind allerdings von Schlöndorff in seinem Film höchst komplex dargeboten: es sind Kommunisten, also Internationalisten, die im Widerstand gegen Unterdrückung zu Gunsten der Nation ihr Leben hingeben. Die Grenzen zwischen Nationalem und Übernationalem verschwimmen hier. Wenn sich der reife Schlöndorff noch Reserven gegenüber dem Schriftsteller Jünger auferlegt, werden diese heutzutage durch das grenzüberschreitende Element sichtlich gemildert. Er ist sich gegenwärtig nämlich auch der mit Jünger geteilten Frankophilie, besonders der erwiderten Liebe zur französischen Kultur bewusst: «Ich habe damals in Frankreich Karriere gemacht, nicht obwohl, sondern weil ich Deutscher war. Dieses Schicksal teile ich mit Jünger» (Kilb Z 4). Er anerkennt auch weitere Parallelen und Affinitäten zu Jünger, vielleicht einschließlich der Neigung zum abgerückten Beobachten, die der Filmemacher seinen Charakteren von Törless über Oskar Matzerath bis zu dem Journalisten Laschen in Die Fälschung mitgegeben hat. Schon während Schlöndorffs Schul- und Studentenjahren in Frankreich will er von Jüngers sachlicher Observiertechnik in den Stahlgewittern, der Registriersprache im Zeitalter der technischen Kriege, angezogen worden sein («Volker Schlöndorff auf»). Allein er räumt ein: «Ernst Jünger ist mir als Figur [. . .] erst richtig durch die Lektüre des großartigen Tagebuchs Gärten und Straßen nahegekommen. Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass ich in diesen Zeiten als Offizier ähnlich gefühlt und gehandelt hätte» («Ich hätte wie « S. 3 von 4).» Ich kann mich gut mit beiden identifizieren,» äußert er kurz darauf im Rahmen der Berlinale 2012 im Bezug auf Jünger und die utopiegeleiteten kommunistischen Geiseln, allerdings nicht ohne hinterher zu schicken, er sei freilich auch gegen «den Jünger in mir» angegangen. 8 Man sieht, der reife Schlöndorff schätzt Jünger differenzierter ein als der Filmemacher des Neuen Deutschen Films in den 1970ern. Indessen veranschaulicht er den Schriftsteller auch noch 2012 eher als den Soldaten, der nicht nur mit Kultur sondern mit Krieg, Konflikt und Kollaboration befasst ist. Anmerkungen 1 Für konstruktive Kritik und Vorschläge bin ich Dr. Sheila K. Johnson und Marlis Schroeder zu Dank verpflichtet. Für die großzügige Hilfestellung mit Abbildungen schulde ich auch Volker Schlöndorff Dank. 2 Tambour battant: Mèmoires de Volker Schlöndorff, trad. Jeanne Etoré et Bernard Lortholary. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. 96 Hans-Bernhard Moeller 3 Vgl. «Volker Schlöndorff presente La mer à l ’ aube.» S. 2 von 4. 4 Vgl. dazu Schlöndorffs Aussage im selben Interview,» Volker Schlöndorff presente»: «Parfois, il les a méme embellies. On sent qu ’ il a essayé de les faire valoir. C ’ est l ’ un des rares moments où j ’ ai découvert une sorte de compassion.» 5 Vgl. Jüngers Eintrag von Paris als «zweite geistige Heimat» in SW II: 382. 6 Nebenbei gesagt, kehrt dieses auflockernde Zwischenspiel auch in Das Meer am Morgen wie eine Reminiszenz wieder, als in dem spannungsgeladenen Augenblick, als Kugeln um den Soldaten Otto herum pfeifen, ein Kamerad einen Hasen erlegt hat. 7 Volker Schlöndorff, «Ich hätte wie.» Ferner: Mail an den Verfasser 19. 12. 2011. 8 «Volker Schlöndorff auf der Berlinale.» S. 1 von 3. Bibliografie Basse, Pierre-Louis. Guy Môquet. Une enfance fusillée. Paris: Éditions Stock, 2000. Böll, Heinrich. Das Vermächtnis. Bornheim: Lamuv Verlag, 1982. Brustlein, Gilbert. Chant d ’ amour d ’ un terroriste à la retraite. Paris: édité à compte d ’ auteur [Selbstverlag], 1989. Jünger, Ernst. Tagebücher I. Sämtliche Werke 1. Abt. Bd. I und III. Stuttgart: Klett- Cotta, 1978. 9 - 300. — . «Das erste Pariser Tagebuch.»Tagebücher II. Sämtliche Werke 1. Abt. Bd. II. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. 223 - 406. — . «Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch.»Tagebücher III. Sämtliche Werke. 1. Abt. Bd. III. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979. 9 - 294. — . «Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis.»Sämtliche Werke. Abt. 2, Essays I. Bd. VII. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980. 9 - 103. — . Zur Geiselfrage. Schilderung der Fälle und ihrer Auswirkungen. Mit einem Vorwort von Volker Schlöndorff. Hg. Sven Olaf Berggötz. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2011. Kiesel, Helmut. Ernst Jünger. Die Biographie. München: Siedler Verlag, 2007. Kilb, Andreas. «Requiem für einen Knaben.» Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 4. 2. 2012, Z 4. Matthes, Ulrich. «Attentat und Kaffeehaus.» Interview mit Kira Taszman. Neues Deutschland 28. 2. 2012. Dossier 62. Berlinale. Auch on-line: www.neues-deutschland.de/ artikel/ 218248.attentat-und-kaffeehaus.html? sstr=sarkozy. Mitchell, Alan. The Devil ’ s Captain. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Mühleisen, Horst. Bibliographie der Werke Ernst Jüngers. «Zeittafel.» Erweiterte Neuausgabe. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1995. Schlöndorff, Volker. «Das Meer am Morgen.» Das Arte Magazin. 23. 3. 2012. On-line Version www.arte.tv/ de/ DAS-MEER-AM-MORGEN/ 6418596.html S. 1 von 3. Abgerufen am 23. 3. 2012. — . «Ich hätte wie Jünger gehandelt.» Interview mit Heimo Schwilk. Die Welt, 15. 2. 2012. On-line Version www.ernst-juenger.org/ 2012/ 02/ ich-hatte-wie-junger-gehandelt-volker.html. Ferner: Mail an den Verfasser vom 19. Dez. 2011. 97 Krieg, Kultur, Kollaboration und Konflikt — . Licht, Schatten und Bewegung. Mein Leben und meine Filme. München: Hanser, 2008. — . «Mehr Europa wagen.» Cicero Online. www.cicero.de/ berliner-republik/ aufsteiger-politische-these-schloendorff-mehr-europa-wagen-euro-verfassung/ 47726. Abgerufen am 20. 1. 2012 — . «On Adapting Swann in Love for the Screen.» Preface in Marcel Proust. Swann in Love. Transl. C. K.Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Random House, 1984. v-xviii. — . «Volker Schlöndorff presente La mer à l ’ aube.» Interview mit Sylvie Véran. Le nouvelle Observateur on-line Ausgabe: http/ / : teleobs.nouvelobs. com/ articles/ interview-volker=schlondorff-presente-la-mer-a-l-aube. Abgerufen am 23. 3. 2012. Schlöndorff, Volker, und Ulrich Matthes. Interview mit Cécile Schortmann. «Gespräch zu Das Meer am Morgen.» ARD Sept. 2011. Auch on-line: www.ardmediathek.de/ ard/ servlet/ content/ 3517136? »Gespräch zu Film am Morgen»ARD/ docmented=8485390.html. Abgerufen am 14. 12. 2011. «70. Jahrestag der >rafle du Vel d ’ Hiv< Rede von Staatspräsident François Hollande.» www.ambafrance-de.org/ IMG/ pdf/ 120722_hollande_vel_d_hif.pdf. Der englische Text, «The ‹ Crime Committed in France, by France › « in The New York Review. Sept. 27, 2012: 40 - 41. Sowinski, Bernhard. Heinrich Böll. Sammlung Metzler 272. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993. «Volker Schlöndorff auf der Berlinale.» Rhein-Zeitung Magazin. On-line www.rheinzeitung.de/ magazin/ kino_artikel,-Volker-Schloendorff-auf-der-Berlinale-_arid.38 0843.html. Abgerufen am 25. 2. 2012. Yourcenar, Marguerite. Coup de Grâce. 1939. 1939. Deutsche Übersetzung: Der Fangschuß. Mit einem Nachwort von Yourcenar. Aus dem Französischen von Richard Moering. Köln: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1968. — . «Nachwort,» ebenda 131 - 39. 98 Hans-Bernhard Moeller Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Gabriela Marques-Schäfer Deutsch lernen online Eine Analyse interkultureller Interaktionen im Chat ISBN 978-3-8233-6733-8 JETZT Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG www.narr.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Matthias Granzow-Emden Deutsche Grammatik verstehen und unterrichten ISBN 978-3-8233-6656-0 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG • Dischingerweg 5 • D-72070 Tübingen Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 • Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 • info@francke.de • www.francke.de JETZT BES TELLEN! Christiane Hochstadt / Andreas Krafft Ralph Olsen Deutschdidaktik Konzeptionen für die Praxis UTB M 2013, 250 Seiten, €[D] 17,99/ SFr 25,40 ISBN 978-3-8252-4023-3 Der Band bietet erstmalig eine Übersicht über alle deutschdidaktischen Konzeptionen für Studierende sowie Lehramtsanwärter und -anwärterinnen. Dabei orientiert er sich an den Kompetenzbereichen der KMK-Bildungsstandards. Jede Konzeption wird nach einer überblickshaften Darstellung raturhinweise ergänzt. 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