Caryl Flinn,
The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style.
University of California Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 520 23823 0
331pp
US$19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by the University of California Press)
Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, filmmakers of the New German cinema became preoccupied with what at the time was known as the Unmastered Past. These were the repressed years of the Third Reich and Hitler’s totalitarian dictatorship. Some 30 years later, recovering that past was considered to be a morally commendable and a long overdue task. When in international circulation, retrospective films, like those made by Fassbinder, Syberberg and Kluge, could well be viewed as a form of cultural reparation, [1] whereas at home, resurrecting the Unmastered Past could be seen as the first step towards healing the psychic and emotional wounds that were part of Nazism’s invidious patrimony. Caryl Flinn revisits and reassesses this phenomenon and debates surrounding historical recovery through film in her scintillating and accomplished new study, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style.
Flinn retraces the trauma and humiliation of Germany’s defeat in the Second World War, which was widely acknowledged as leaving bewildered survivors with chronic historical amnesia. Particularly in West Germany, the vast majority severed ties with the past. Whether they were complicit with the Nazi regime or passive conformists, the past they shared brought them little more than shame, accusations of collective guilt and international condemnation. Fear of punishment and recrimination led millions in the West to conceal their past and deny any involvement in, or collaboration with, the regime.
Disavowing the past was expedient for many if they were to maintain much of the power, authority and profit they had garnered under the Nazis. A large number of figureheads in law, education, industry, medicine and politics successfully white-washed their pasts, and prospered accordingly.
When the Allies took control of the Western zones of occupation after the War, they treated Fascism as a plague and used medical metaphors in “treating” Fascism. It was viewed as an illness against which Germans had little, or no, immunity. The Allies rationalized that West Germans needed to be quarantined, based on the fear that they could relapse if they were once again exposed to Nazi imagery. On the part of the Allies, “Denazification” may have been well intentioned, even if inconsistent and at times seriously ineffective. It carried with it profound ideological repercussions. The inclination to treat Nazism as an historical hiatus served the Cold War well: structural affinities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic were effectively masked. However inadvertent, this provided some consolation for West Germans after the War, simultaneously providing an ideological arsenal for a divided Germany: in the Federal Republic Communists were still the enemy. The Nazi past was unspeakable, and for decades the silence was deafening.
The erasure of the past was effected within both the public and private spheres. During the period of the Economic Miracle, for instance, there was scarcely a history lesson on Nazism in West German schools. For their part, filmmakers effaced the past in the reconstruction years by taking a protracted holiday from history. There were legal grounds for this. Restrictions were placed on producers; they were advised to shoot up-to-date material to obtain a valid filmmaking license.
Film drew considerable political scrutiny during this time. The ban on films about Nazism (mostly documentaries rather than popular entertainment from the Third Reich) extended through until the 1970s. Direct references to Nazism in imported films, as much as any suggestion of industrialists’ support of, or involvement in, the Third Reich, were tacitly forbidden. [2] Accordingly, imported feature films that made reference to German Fascism were censored. Scenes were deleted; dubbed dialogue was rewritten and points of reference changed; plot lines were altered and characters were subject to behaviour modification. On occasion, Nazis were reclassified as Communists, and stories of war time espionage resurfaced in West German cinemas as tales of drug smuggling. Even as late as 1972, scenes were deleted from Cabaret for its German distribution. [3]
There were further psychological grounds that induced the majority of West Germans to expunge their past. The type of collective amnesia so many West Germans displayed after the War came to be viewed as a defensive response to trauma. Speculation about the impoverishment of the West German national psyche was rife in the 1970s. Freud had initiated discussion of the aetiology of mourning and melancholia in his 1915 essay. There he observed that mourners successfully “work through” their grief in time, and the process leaves their egos unscathed. Not so for the melancholic whose sense of self is diminished by the loss of the love object. He/she has introjected various traits and values of the love object, and this act of appropriation bolsters his/her own ego.
Consequently, loss of the love object works to the detriment of the ego, and the melancholic suffers a narcissistic injury, the cause of which he/she cannot consciously determine or fathom. Both the mourner and the melancholic have suffered losses, but the melancholic is unable to identify what he/she has lost. Melancholia leaves the subject haunted by the past, unable to identify its ghosts. Those suffering from melancholia cannot define what is no longer “there.” They remain oblivious to the psychodynamics of their condition and the impact introjection of the love object has had on their egos.
Drawing on Freud’s essay on mourning and melancholia, German psychologists Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich published an extremely influential book in 1966 which was in wide circulation in the early 1970s in German and English. They proposed that the German people suffered an inability to mourn. By extension, those in the Federal Republic were viewed as suffering from a psychological disorder stemming from the repression and “derealisation” of their past. The Mitscherlichs argued that West Germans experienced a debilitating psychic impoverishment after the War, when the ego ideals they recognized in Hitler and the authority of the Third Reich were denigrated and discredited. All they had honoured suddenly brought them hideous disgrace making their German name monstrous.
In her breath-taking new book, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style, Caryl Flinn revisits these treaties, and provides a sophisticated critique of the mourning/melancholia paradigm. She presents a rigorous re-evaluation of its relevance to the New German cinema. At one point, when writing about the trauma of the German past, she modestly poses a startlingly concise and illuminating assertion as if it were a minor, casual aside. Trauma, she notes, “is so overinflected with experience that it is rendered actually unbearable. Analysts maintain that people who undergo it understand it only retrospectively, not at the time of its occurrence” (127) Her observations about the disphasure of the event and the experience of trauma clearly pertain to the New German cinema’s belated and sometimes misdirected act of mourning, a matter I will return to shortly.
Another widely recognized reason that German filmmakers could embark upon historical recovery at this juncture related to a major media event – the 1977 broadcast of the American melodrama, Holocaust. Widespread catharsis surrounded its broadcast on German and Austrian television, galvanizing the broad, general public. The word Holocaust entered the German vocabulary for the first time. A media frenzy fed widespread public interest in and curiosity about this hitherto repressed chapter of German history. Hitler became a topic of TV and radio talk shows. The market for Nazi memorabilia flourished, with copies of Mein Kampf and Stars of David becoming dubious collectables. Wiesbaden’s Institute for Research into German Language identified Holocaust as “word of the year” for 1979. It was in wider circulation than end-of-the-decade neologisms such as boat people, alternative, disco and jogging. Germany was in the grips of what was labeled a “Hitler Wave” that also deeply influenced a broad range of cultural ventures.
Flinn provides a rigorous exposition of the ways in which filmmakers of the New German cinema reconstructed and resurrected the Nazi past in their films. She writes with passionate commitment. In the course of the book she provides highly original and inspiring analyses of some of New German cinema’s most challenging, idiosyncratic and multifaceted retro-scenarios. It is, however, a little disappointing that she does not examine one particular Fassbinder film – his deliriously manic In a Year of 13 Moons (West Germany, 1978), which in my opinion would sit well with her emphasis on the performative nature of melancholia in postwar German culture.
Queer, camp and kitsch are clearly prioritized in the author’s selection of films, and it is perhaps this umbrella that ensures that New German film is of interest long after its demise. The Rococo excesses of directors like Ulrike Ottinger and Werner Schroeter still have the capacity to captivate or unnerve new generations of viewers. These films, together with those of Monika Treut, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge are subject to unrelenting scrutiny and startling insight in Flinn’s book. Emphasis is placed upon the melodramatic stylistics of many New German films, in particular those of Fassbinder.
Flinn engages with the polemics of the Federal Republic’s so-called Unmastered Past with considerable tenacity. Her criticism of the term echoes that of Adorno, who claimed that its ultimate objective was to “close the books on the past” (n.1, 279). Flinn is perfectly justified in objecting to the term insofar as it “anticipates the language of the victor” and depends on “rhetoric of conquest and mastery” (55). These objections aside, she proceeds with a sophisticated and compelling argument examining the intricate relationship between melancholia, melodrama and the New German cinema. Films such as Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (West Germany/France, 1976), The Marriage of Maria Braun (West Germany, 1979), Lili Marlene (West Germany, 1981) and Helma Sanders Brahms gut-wrenching maternal melodrama, Germany Pale Mother (West Germany, 1980) are dissected with impressive dexterity and élan.
Flinn’s objections to the term Unmastered Past resonates throughout Chapters One and Three. From the perspective of another millennium, she is critical of the way in which various discourses, such as those on the inability to mourn, allow West Germans to claim status as victim. Indeed, when one examines New German cinema’s retro-scenarios, one encounters a series of telling absences. Insofar as wartime battles and atrocities are depicted in these films at all, they are usually relocated outside of Germany (in Germany Pale Mother Hans is traumatized when he shoots a partisan in France, the woman bearing an uncanny resemblance to his wife). Even more regularly these films focus on passive conformists to Nazism or they have apolitical protagonists. Card-carrying members of the Nazi party, on the other hand, are usually scarce. Communists are banished from the vast majority of these scenarios and resistance to Nazism is non-existent.
Chapters Three and Four of Music, History, and the Matter of Style share a fascination with the ways in which Alexander Kluge’s films, The Patriot (West Germany, 1979) and The Power of Emotion (West Germany, 1983) solicit and at the same time frustrate interpretation (140). Although Flinn acknowledges that the latter film clearly elucidates one of late capitalism’s chief ironies, “it ignores human desires at the same time as it manipulates them” (151), she is critical of the way the film invites audiences into buying its “fatalistic world view” (141).
Flinn saves her most trenchant criticism of German history on film for The Patriot. Kluge provides the film with its voice over, which is identified as the obdurate relic of a Wehrmacht official, reduced to a fragment of his body. All that remains of the officer is his knee, which is imbued with the power of speech as it roams the German countryside pontificating on German history. Perhaps this physical residue is well suited to the film’s fragmented cacophony of images and sounds.
Flinn observes that the selection of the narrating knee, drawn from a poem by Morgenstern, echoes and embodies the organizing principle of Zusammenhang (literally hanging between-ness), a form of montage cherished by Kluge. It leaves a space for the generation of meaning and association between otherwise dissonant shots, images and sounds, much in the same way that the knee acts as a joint between body parts. It invites punning about the “‘articulation’ of bodily tissue connecting calf to thigh, poetry to science, living to dead, shot to shot” (my own emphasis, 126). In this context, Flinn’s rationalization for the inclusion of Morgenstern’s trope in The Patriot is even uncannier, as it was recommended by the film’s editor, Beate Mainke-Jellinghausen.
In more polemical terms, the knee is an historical witness that speaks on behalf of the nation’s dead. Comparing protagonist Gabi Teichert’s relative reticence and her bungling effort to excavate history, Flinn sees that through its talking knee, The Patriot genders trauma as male. Undoubtedly, she is justified in criticizing this narrational strategy, observing that it is disingenuous to cast a German fighting for the Fatherland as the party who suffers historical injury. In effect, this allows Germans to assume the position of victim rather than aggressor. As the author claims, “If Kluge laments the sixty thousand civilians who perished in the night Hamburg was bombed, he stops counting there” (133).
To her merit, Flinn examines various New German films within the context of contemporaneous debates in film theory. In turn she reassesses the relevance of Anglo-American writings on melodrama within the post-war German context. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s writing comes immediately to mind, especially his highly influential theorization of melodrama – a genre he views as driven by hysterical excess and displacement.
Whereas much 1980s writing on melodrama stresses that the genre’s psychoanalytic mode was hysteria, Flinn suggests that, at least as far as New German cinema goes, melancholia “might offer more exegetical force” and “a different representational modality altogether” (67). She leads to the conclusion that the nexus of mourning and melancholia, applied to much Anglo-American melodrama, can not be productively transposed onto post-war German film’s foray into the genre, at least as the model stands.
The author puts a new inflection on melancholia, disputing the emphasis Freudians place on the condition’s detached isolation and narcissistic internalization. She reasons that New German cinema’s appropriation of melodrama, like melancholia, involves a certain excessive display. The author succinctly observes that unlike mourning, melancholia has no socially sanctioned space (57). As noted above, a performative dimension is attributed to melancholia, which is seen as a “weirdly communicative, stylized component of articulating grief” (58). Flinn is loath to pathologize the condition to the extent that Freud did. She prefers to emphasize the melancholic’s exhibitionist tendencies (67). Her claim has specific relevance to Fassbinder’s work. Drawing on Paul Coates, Flinn acknowledges that both melodrama and melancholia are dominated by fortuitous events and “the desire for things to have ‘happened differently’.” Or in Coates’ terms, “melodrama torments one with an excruciating sense of ‘if only this had not happened'” (65).
Flinn utilizes an intricate theoretical apparatus, but she still manages to write with considerable wit and a fine tuned sense of irony. She refers to Christian Thomsen, who wrote a book on Fassbinder, as “the critic who wants nothing to do with anything remotely camp or kitsch” (52). Elsewhere she refers to hysterics, mourners and melancholics as “people who remember too much. Specialists in the past, they are consummate historians. Yet only the mourner gets it right by any conventional measure. For this reason, I believe that those who ‘get it wrong’ may have more to offer” (55).
It is perhaps when Flinn analyses the musical scores of a diverse range of New German films that she displays even more striking virtuousity. Her concise analysis of sound and music in Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette, for instance, is remarkably lucid and perspicacious (80-82). The insight she displays in analyzing the sound and musical scoring of the Peer Raben/Rainer Werner Fassbinder alliance is, without doubt, dazzling. She correlates Raben’s “acoustic apathy” and Fassbinder’s evacuation of the category of “the” political. This “emptying out” in turn imbues his films with an overwhelming sense of negativity, absence and dispersion (99-100).
Flinn’s exegesis of Ulrike Ottinger’s wry and extravagantly stylized pirate adventure, Madam X – The Absolute Tyrant (West Germany, 1978) sets queer and camp firmly on the agenda. Like the other two sections of the book “Queering History Through Camp and Kitsch” is meticulously researched. In Chapter Five she refutes the widespread assumption that camp is gendered solely as a gay male phenomenon that shies from historical engagement. Identifying the conventions of the pirate movie and the rituals of Nazism as male domains open to plunder, Flinn champions Ottinger’s ostentatious display of a queer, female directed camp, broadening the term’s currency (204). She sees that Madame X‘s camp sensibility infuses German history with a “sense of spectacle and of performativity” (206). Flinn identifies Ottinger’s engagement with history as quintessentially camp by virtue of her scurrilous determination to grid “the clichés of the pirate genre onto Germany’s ‘fascinating fascism'” (218).
In Chapter Six, Werner Schroeter emerges as the queen of kitsch. Flinn views kitsch as a confrontational “form of counterproduction … [that] generates horribly useless objects and is unsuitable to standard capitalist or heterosexual notions of production and reproduction (236), at least in Schroeter’s hands. She emphasizes that kitsch has class mobility through her observation that Schroeter uses kitsch to disruptive ends, “as an affectation of extremes, upsetting bourgeois taste by being either too pedestrian or too aristocratic” (241).
Flinn’s Coda sees the author return to an earlier assertion, that historical trauma is staged on the body, rather than with it in New German cinema (my own emphasis, 181). She notes that the idea of wounds articulating hidden trauma are at the center of Germany Pale Mother with its teeth pulling scene and Lene’s ensuing facial paralysis (129). “The wounded remains of Corporal Wieland” in The Patriot, together with Biberkopf’s amputated arm in Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the tattooed numbers on camp survivors’ forearms are sited as convincing evidence of trauma being inscribed on the body in these films (127). Indeed, traumatic mutilation and wounds feature in an even larger array of New German films than Flinn chooses to list. An avalanche of films come to mind: Elvira’s senseless castration In a Year of 13 Moons; the explosion that incinerates Maria Braun’s house and presumably its inhabitants at the close of The Marriage of Maria Braun; the attempted suicide that similarly closes Hungry Years; Laertes’ impromptu nose bleeds in Wrong Movement (West Germany, 1975); the sadistic impulse to savagely mutilate “Georg, the Greek from Greece,” in Kazelmacher (West Germany, 1969); the calculated and sadistic scaring of Martha in Fassbinder’s eponymous film; the abortion scenes in The Occasional Work of a Female Slave (West Germany, 1973) and so on.
Flinn’s detailed study of Music, History and the Matter of Style is as innovative as it is invigorating. Her reassessment of New German cinema’s attempts to come to terms with an invidious past is particularly valuable now. For more than a decade this chapter of German cultural history has been eclipsed. Throughout the 1990s a newly identified Unmastered Past emerged – that of the “other” Germany, namely the denigrated dictatorship of the former GDR. In the last decade, focusing on the terror, coercion and brutality of the Eastern regime deflected attention away from the heinous history of Nazism that plagued Germans in the West during the postwar years. In a way, West Germans could be partially and temporarily exonerated once this “new” Unmastered Past surfaced, for they were the victors whom the subjugated GDR citizens wanted to emulate. Moreover, West Germans could indulge in a measure of Schadenfreude, as they “only” subscribed to or tolerated a dictatorship for 12 years, whereas East Germans had complied to a ruthlessly oppressive regime for 30.
Even if the historical woes of the extreme Right and Left (namely terrorism) that galvanized the Federal Republic throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s were overshadowed by the burden of unification in the next decade, Flinn’s book deals with issues that are once again pressing and topical. Her study takes on an even greater relevance when one acknowledges that 19 members of Neo-Nazi parties recently gained seats in state elections in the East. In revisiting the debates that circulated about recovering the past, Caryl Flinn provides us with a poignant and timely reminder that, with the traumas of history and their concomitant upheavals and brutality, we would be well served to remember that we forget.
Leonie Naughton,
Melbourne, Australia.
Endnotes
[1] This is what Sheila Johnston obliquely suggests in her article “Fassbinder and the New German Cinema.” New German Critique 24-25 (Fall/Winter 1981-2): 57-72.
[2] Further detail is provided in my article, “Recovering the unmastered past.” History on/and/in Film. 3rd History and Film Conference, Perth, 1987.121-130.
[3] See endnote two.
Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04