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  • The Haptic Horrors of War:Towards a Phenomenology of Affect and Emotion in the War Genre in Germany, 1910s to 1950s*
  • Jaimey Fisher

In a much-quoted passage from his celebrated essay “Der Erzähler,” Walter Benjamin suggests that the First World War constituted a notable break because it had made its participants poorer, rather than richer, in communicable experience: “Es ist, als wenn ein Vermögen, das uns unveräußerlich schien, das Gesichertste unter dem Sicheren, von uns genommen würde. Nämlich das Vermögen, Erfahrungen auszutauschen” (439). Rather than dwelling on experiential impoverishment in this passage, as is typically done, I will focus instead on the word austauschen – why would Benjamin limit the loss of experience to that which is exchangeable? Such an emphasis on the communicability of certain experiences raises the spectre of alternatives, namely incommunicable experiences. Experiences of war, in ways hitherto underexplored, do not operate only, or even primarily, on people’s minds in ways that they can fashion into material for communication. Rather, wars operate as well, or even predominantly, on the body, on the haptic and affective levels, which yield a different kind of experience, and representation of it, altogether. It is on such phenomenological levels of the body, affect, and perception that I would like herein to query filmic representations of war, particularly representations that forgo conventional communication and attempt to register their effects directly on the body.

Cinema serves well in tracing such elusive textual effects on the body, affect, and perception: it offers both deliberately structured narratives and collectively staged events that help clarify the mechanisms of pre- or protocognitive affect, experience, and the body. Such deliberately conjured structures and events help address one of the recurring problems of analysing in a phenomenological vein, namely the danger of just generalizing one’s own subjective senses or perceptions of experience/affect/emotion. Cinema offers works that are highly artificial, calculated, and collectively created, such that the subtle attempts at such effects on the viewer become clearer – what Carl Plantinga calls “structural features” [End Page 51] of films help reveal the affective-emotional goals of texts.1 It is therefore not a surprise that much of the work done in cultural studies about such matters has been done in film studies. Indeed, I intend this essay as an engagement with the affective turn in recent film theory, as in the work of theorists like Ed S. Tan, Plantinga, Torben Grodal, and Julian Hanich, works that all demonstrate the thin line between the affective-emotional and the phenomenological aspects of film.2 These theories build on work previously carried out in the direction of film-theory phenomenology, to which the aforementioned scholars pay clear homage, including especially that of Vivian Sobchack (Address; Carnal Thoughts).

The present inquiry, however, is also meant as a critique and extension of work like Tan’s, Plantinga’s, Grodal’s, and Hanich’s in (at least) three ways. First, these theorists often offer typologies, lists of affects or the means of generating them, and such typologies tend to downplay detailed readings of individual texts and their narrative arcs. Second, war films, which these authors almost entirely neglect, illuminate aspects of their approaches, particularly around specific narrative tendencies (for example the recurring collective protagonist). And third, the theorists identify specific affective-emotional effects (for example the ubiquitous lived body under duress). With these narrative tendencies and affective-emotional effects in mind, this essay will take up three war films from different periods that are in some way emphatically negative about the experience of war. Unsühnbar (1917), Westfront 1918 (1930), and Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben (1959) all work via certain narrative peculiarities by evoking conspicuously negative affects that they then can leave, at their conclusions, open-ended. While not all three are, in the end, entirely critical of war, all demonstrate how affective-emotional effects can guide the ideology and politics of viewers’ experiences. In these three ways – by using such theory to read films rather than to list affects, by attending to war films neglected in such theories, and by considering how war films deploy such affect-emotion towards political ends – the present essay engages...

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