Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia by Mattias Frey (review)

Something—one can no longer deny it—is happening in German film studies. A discipline that for the longest time studied German national cinema primarily as an historical phenomenon, looking to it as a way to make sense of the country’s past, appears in the process of recalibrating its critical lens. Without wanting to suggest that Germany’s history is no longer relevant to German film studies—landmark books such as Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton, 2011), the ongoing work by scholars such as Sabine Hake and Eric Rentschler, as well as the steady outpouring of scholarship focusing on East German cinema history would clearly belie such a claim—I am nevertheless struck by how, in recent years, an increasing number of scholars have investigated contemporary German cinema and its relation not merely to the country’s past but also to its present. One might speculate that German film studies’ turn toward the present symptomatically expresses larger sociocultural transformations affecting postwall Germany, not least the phenomenon of Normalisierung—the apparently growing desire among Germans to have their country be considered, at long last, a “normal” nation state. Without endorsing this Normalisierungswunsch, German films studies seems to acknowledge and respond to the possibility that the country’s terrible twentieth century history no longer has the same purchase on its present as it arguably still did just a decade ago.

Whatever the reasons, this adjustment in focus among scholars of German cinema is powerfully evidenced by various books published since 2010, including Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager’s The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010), Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s New Directions in German Cinema (2011), Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht’s Kino in Bewegung. Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms (2011), Pierre Gras’ Good Bye Fassbinder!: Le cinéma allemand depuis la réunification (2011), Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel’s Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds, and Screens (2012), Gabriele Mueller and James M. Skidmore’s Cinema and Social Change in Germany and Austria (2012), Paul Cooke’s Contemporary German Cinema (2012), and Roger F. Cook, Lutz Koepnick, Kristin Kopp, Brad Prager’s Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of the New Wave in German Cinema (2013). Mattias Frey’s monograph is an important addition to this steadily growing library.

In some respects one can understand Frey’s book, which focuses on “the prominence of the historical genre” (1) in contemporary German cinema, as offering a sustained reflection on this very change in German film scholarship. Frey reads recent German film productions’ encounters with significant historical events—the German soccer team’s 1954 World Cup victory in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003); the RAF crisis of the 1970s in Christopher Roth’s Baader (2002) and Uli Edel’s Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex, 2008); the paranoia affecting West Germany’s alternative Milieu during the Cold War’s waning days in Hans-Christian Schmid’s 23 (1999); the Stasi’s machinations in Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006); as well as the fall of the wall and its aftermath in, respectively, Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (No Place to Go, 2000)—as having as much if not more to say about the extradiegetic sociocultural circumstances surrounding their moment of production as they do about their diegetic content’s historical context. As Frey writes in his concluding chapter, “The Future of the German Past,” the “postwall historical films are products of a new attitude toward national history in general and a confident domestic industry in specific” (169). Enabled by a national and increasingly transnational funding system that approaches film as “more of a commercial enterprise...