The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold

258 Imaging Germany The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold Marco Abel The task is first of all once again to see something, to hear. —Christian Petzold,“Mailwechsel‘Berliner Schule’”1 In my contribution to this volume, I would like to pick up its central argument —that German cinema at the turn of the century has once again become a politically charged arena—by turning to the work of a director many observers in Germany consider among the most significant of the post-Wall era: Christian Petzold. On the most general level, focusing this essay on Petzold’s work affords me the opportunity to introduce his work into the scholarly discourse on contemporary (German) cinema, which thus far has barely taken note of him, even though his stature in Germany continues to grow and,judging by his films’reception at home, already outshines that of most of his peers.2 In specific terms of this volume ,however,examining Petzold’s oeuvre in some detail has the distinct advantage of dealing with a body of films that raise the question of the “political” precisely by refusing to make explicitly political films. That is, what is of particular interest for the goals of the Collapse of the Conventional is Petzold’s films’ tendency to reopen the question of what counts as political in the first place by insisting, with the likes of Theodor W. Adorno and Gilles Deleuze, that art’s capacity for the political lies in its specific aesthetic nature rather than in its ability to communicate a message .3 Importantly, Petzold’s films’ insistence on cinema as an aesthetic operation—and the notion that these films, in the end, are political precisely because of their specific aesthetics—reflects a larger phenomenon 04 Chapters_10_12.indd 258 7/7/10 8:25 AM 259 Imaging Germany: The (Political) Cinema of Christian Petzold in contemporary German cinema that by now has been codified under the label “Berlin School.” To get at the political nature of Petzold’s work, then, it might be best to situate his work within the debate on the Berlin School as a means to show how the political discourse on contemporary German cinema has played itself out in recent years and how that discourse itself raises the more general question of political resistance in contemporary Germany in the age, as is often said in Germany, of Hartz IV.4 The latest wave of creatively innovative German films began to emerge subterraneously, largely unnoticed by the (German) press from the mid1990s on—at the very moment when German mainstream cinema was dominated by what film historian Eric Rentschler aptly describes as“cinemaof consensus”productions,suchasKatjavonGarnier’sAbgeschminkt (Making Up, 1993) and Sönke Wortmann’s Der bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, 1994), which appealed to a national “fun culture” audience but were largely ignored internationally.5 This“cinema of consensus”can itself be traced back,as David Clarke argues,to what prominent German film historians Hans-Günther Pflaum and Hans Helmut Prinzler “had already noted in the films of younger directors in the 1980s: namely, a ‘cinema of affluence.’ In this the conventions of commercial cinema and the privileging of technical competence over critical subject matter were significant factors.”6 The Berlin School is distinguished from these cinemas of affluence and consensus. In fact, the Berlin School films neither willfully universalize their cultural-historical specificity—as do, for instance, many postunification German comedies of consensus such as Rainer Kaufmann’s Stadtgespräch (Talk of the Town, 1995)—nor sidestep the difficulties of the present by once again dutifully (re)turning to the by now neatly codified horrors of the past,as did the recent wave of“Hitler films” such as Dennis Gansel’s Napola (Before the Fall, 2004), Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). These films’ appeal to international audiences was hardly coincidental, for it is as if they (pathologically) wanted to corroborate the ideologically convenient belief perpetuated abroad that Germany is still almost exclusively reducible to its Nazi past.7 But perhaps most crucially, the Berlin School films also mark the first significant collective attempt at advancing the aesthetics of cinema within German narrative filmmaking since the heyday of the New German Cinema of Rainer Werner Fass04 Chapters_10_12.indd 259 7/7/10 8:25 AM 260 M A R C O...