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

Introduction

1 Introduction Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager Since the turn of the millennium German cinema has been hailed as having “returned”—it has again captured the world’s attention and is again vital, dynamic, and engaged. Many see in it an aesthetic and substantive quality that had apparently diminished in the two decades before 2000. In light of renewed attention, filmmakers and critics find themselves embroiled in debates about the priorities and goals of that cinema, especially as concerns its politics. One striking example is Ulrich Köhler’s essay “Why I Don’t Make Political Films.” The director of Bungalow (2002) and Montag kommen die Fenster (Windows on Monday, 2006) positions himself against the demand that his films have a more political emphasis. He argues that politically motivated screenplays— ones guided by agendas—tend toward monocausal lines of argument that fail to capture the world’s complexity.Without ever referring to him, Köhler’s argument rehearses aspects of Theodor W. Adorno’s position on aesthetic autonomy: Art, insofar as film can be understood as art, is not an appropriate tool through which to express a political aim. Its strength, Köhler argues, lies in its autonomy (ihre Stärke liegt in ihrer Autonomie).1 That Köhler poses the question of political and artistic film at all is, at this particular historical moment, symptomatic of a tectonic shift in German cinema since the late 1990s. Over the past decade German cinema has aroused interest based on its international acclaim and on a widespread acknowledgment of its artistic merits. However, Köhler’s invective also reverberates like an echo. It speaks to old issues, ones raised decades ago by Alexander Kluge, Wim Wenders, Rainer Werner Fass01 Chapters_1_3.indd 1 7/7/10 7:54 AM 2 j A I M e y F I S H e R A n D b R A D P R A G e R binder, and others, who addressed the question of whether cinema that concerns itself with“vision”—with the artistic project of scrutinizing the veil through which we see the world—can be politically engaged and the extent to which films about Hitler and nazis force a truly critical processing of the past.2 Köhler’s position and others like it are taken as provocations to which the essays in this volume respond. German film is in rare form— it is engaged—and much in today’s German cinema recalls the old days, either directly or indirectly. but because the times have changed, any assessment must be critical and account for new contexts. There is surely a link that connects the aesthetics and politics of key contemporary filmmakers such as Oskar Roehler, Fatih Akın, and Christian Petzold with Fassbinder, Kluge, and others, but those last two filmmakers would have been among the first to hold their own cinema up for critical scrutiny. Moreover, the success of big-budgeted German films such as Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Sophie Scholl—Die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, 2005), and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006) likewise calls for critical assessment.When films are so heartily affirmed , they must themselves be affirmative. In these and other respects, German cinema’s old questions are new again. This volume examines the past and explores the links where they arise.To do that,however,one has to look back and take stock of a narrative that generally begins with the Oberhausen Manifesto (signed on February 28, 1962), frequently referred to as the inaugural document of young German Cinema, the movement that then paved the way for new German Cinema. Though the status of the Oberhausen Manifesto as an “origin” has been rethought and contested, it can still be constructively regarded as a watershed on the way to the politically engaged German filmmaking generally associated with the 1970s.3 The Manifesto is similar to other manifestos insofar as it begins with the proclamation that all that preceded it has definitively come to an end: its authors write of“the collapse of the conventional German film” (Der Zusammenbruch des konventionellen deutschen Films), and it subsequently concludes with a statement reaffirming this demise and asserting that something new has been born (“The old film is dead. We believe in the new one” [Der alte Film ist tot.Wir glauben an den neuen]). Many have suggested that the Manifesto helped usher in two decades of German film production rivaled only by theWeimar era as...