Winning a (Hi)story Out of Places: Christian Petzold's Germany in Etwas Besseres als den Tod (2011)

How to make a genre film that touches on Hollywood cinema and yet is not ashamed of being set in Germany? It seems to be the question that Christian Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011)—like Thomas Arslan's Im Schatten (In the Shadows, 2010)—seeks to answer. In what follows, I consider how Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod invokes the well-known Hollywood genres of melodrama, horror, and thriller, and affiliated conventions, but by relocating them to Germany simultaneously reworks the genres and tells new stories of postreunification Germany.

Places and Spaces¹

The Dreileben (Three Lives) triptych of films hinges on a common point of departure: convicted sex offender Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt) is on a daypass to take leave of his foster mother, who recently died at a medical clinic in the town of Dreileben (a real town in Saxony-Anhalt moved to a fictional location in Thuringia). He escapes, and a police search ensues. Whereas in Graf's Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around, 2011) the search forms the focal point,² and in Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011) the narrative focuses on the escaped convict and the crime that he may or may not have committed, in Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod, the hunt for the criminal forms the backdrop to a summer romance between the main characters, Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) and Ana (Luna Mijovic).

The shift allows Petzold to engage yet deemphasize the thriller genre, while moving other genres as well as the landscape to the fore. The criminal slips into the background literally and thematically, lurking in the forest on the hillside above the path Johannes and Ana use daily. The outskirts of Dreileben and the Thuringian forest located next to it forms the setting of the film. In Petzold's contribution to the Dreileben project, the two main points of preoccupation encompass the use of settings—which Petzold discussed with Graf and Hochhäusler in their "Mailwechsel," mentioning the way that Angela Schanelec's Marseille (2004) engages location—and play with genre.

Genre: Thrillers

All three filmmakers agreed on the thriller genre, even if its demarcating signs were to be subverted or blurred. Petzold consistently mentioned it in their e-mail exchange; Graf proposed psychological thriller; and Hochhäusler proposed crime or police thrillers. Petzold observed that in German crime thrillers, or Krimis, the city or the landscape is less important, as it is not experienced, shown, or made a pivotal experiential point.³ He proposed addressing this issue by bringing the landscape into the foreground.

One could take issue with Petzold's characterization of German thrillers. Although strongly influenced by American thrillers, German made-for-television Krimis, such as the West German Tatort and the East German Polizeiruf 110, take and took place in settings that were explicitly regional.⁴ As Nicodemus, discussing Tatort, puts it: "It is not just by chance that Horst Schimanski, the most popular police chief of German television, is a creature from the Ruhrpott, who appears to be inextricably intertwined with Duisburg's French fry stands, industrial warehouses, and local dive bars."⁵ Tatort, the most successful and longest running German crime show, does not by chance draw heavily on images quickly recognizable for their region and vary them week by week—it helps to ensure its success.

Petzold engages setting radically differently. Beyond focusing on the transitory places that have become a hallmark of his films—exemplified in Etwas Besseres als den Tod by Ana's work as a chambermaid at a hotel and by Johannes's civil service at a hospital—Petzold mainly locates his contribution to the Dreileben trilogy, unlike Graf, not in the small town of Dreileben but on the town's periphery. As the panning shot of the map used by all three directors for the filmic trilogy reveals, Petzold's chosen setting is peripheral.⁶

Not only Dreileben's location but the characters' relationship to it seems to be...