Dominik Graf's Komm mir nicht nach (2011) or the Power of the Past

Whether crime stories or coming-of-age tales—the work of Dominik Graf is inscribed with the experience of guilt. In this way, he investigates social topographies and their morality. Komm mir nicht nach (Don't Follow Me Around, 2011) provides an excellent example. Twenty years after German reunification, the film explores a small town in Thuringia: in the town of Dreileben, Graf's film shows the corrupt police, the lifestyle of the locals, and the newcomers from former West Germany. This paper analyzes how the film exposes aesthetically the social topography and its morality.

Komm mir nicht nach presents the middle film of the Dreileben (Three Lives) trilogy. Graf explores the town Dreileben through its central institutions—the police station, hospital, hotels, restaurants, and a neighborhood—and their mutual entanglements. By contrast, Christian Petzold's Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011) and Christoph Hochhäusler's Eine Minute Dunkel (One Minute of Darkness, 2011) approach Dreileben from the margins, focusing on fringe characters and settings to explore the same location. Petzold's main characters, an unequal couple, exhibit a lack of interest for one another. Yet Graf 's characters competently voice their opinions and question their relationships with each other. They, too, suffer from miscomprehension, but they are more aware of it than Petzold's characters. Petzold explores in a critical fashion the plans and hopes of young people in Dreileben. In contrast to this preoccupation with the future, Graf focuses on the ruptures of the past, such as German reunification and its consequences for the present. This historical point of view highlights, on a larger scale, differing conceptualizations of life to which the characters adhere. In this way, Graf's contribution to the Dreileben trilogy runs counter to his colleagues' focus and thus serves as a contrast, invigorating the whole oeuvre of Dreileben.

Plot

Two fellow students, Vera and Johanna, meet again after many years, realizing that they used to flirt with the same man, Patrick, the summer before they first met. Their earlier fascination with this man leads to a dialogue that challenges every decision they have made in the meantime. Vera, happily married to Bruno, a writer, is settling down in an idyllic country abode in Dreileben, situated in former East Germany. Now, however, she desperately wants to see Patrick again. Johanna, a single mother of a young girl, was, like Vera, born in former West Germany. As a criminal psychologist, she has been sent to the picturesque town of Dreileben in order to expose the corruption of the local police. At the same time, Johanna assists in searching for a sexual offender, Molesch, who has recently escaped from prison. Johanna focuses on accomplishing these professional objectives in Dreileben, but by remembering Patrick she also begins to question her way of life.

Archaeology within the Oeuvre

Graf borrows the basic plot from his essay film München—Geheimnisse einer Stadt (Munich—Secrets of a City, 2000). One of the episodes presents two men facing the same conflict. Similar to Johanna and Vera, they become fascinated with a woman from their past. Earlier feelings lead them to question their current relationships. This episode is key to München—Geheimnisse einer Stadt, and also relates to Graf's very first short film, Carlas Briefe (Carla's Letters, 1975).¹

Several background elements concerning Johanna's and Vera's experiences during their youth in Munich are also borrowed from München—Geheimnisse einer Stadt. The women realize they attended the same David Bowie concert the summer before they met. This realization makes a clear intertextual reference to München—Geheimnisse einer Stadt, where Graf includes archival footage of the concert dating back to the seventies, when he himself was in his twenties. Even though Johanna and Vera were obviously not young adults during the seventies, Graf nevertheless assigns them such elements from his biographical background.

The film's frame of history and topography consists of conveyed past and present events. Vera and Bruno consider Thuringia as a colony in which to live out their Western dreams; at...