The Future of Melancholia: Freud, Fassbinder, and Anxiety after War

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My reflections on the 2015 conference topic of “time” (literature and time/art and time) have brought me to an important German-language thinker who attempted to theorize the relationships between emotions and time as well as the ways in which humans experience time: of course I mean here Sigmund Freud. Despite intermittent assertions to the contrary, we continue to be inundated by understandings of culture that are deeply informed by Freud’s reflections on trauma, on repression, and on mourning and melancholia, to name but a few Freudian concepts that have remained central to analyses of history and time in the German and European contexts with which my work is concerned. Today I would like to look closely at Freud’s articulation of these concepts in order to come to an understanding of their temporality that goes against the grain of the dominant interpretation within German cultural studies: namely, that mourning and melancholia—in particular melancholia—are linked intimately to trauma, the past, and to a depth structure of repression. Instead I will try to show that Freud understands melancholia as oriented to the future, an emotional state akin to anxiety, an affective concept that remains oddly undertheorized in Freud’s work. I will then look to Freud’s early and late writings on anxiety in order to highlight the puzzle that anxiety remained for him and to consider how melancholia and anxiety—as future-oriented affective states—might offer productive ways of thinking about post-WWII Germany in general and about the oddly melancholic films of the New German Cinema and enfant terrible Rainer Werner Fassbinder in particular.

A filmmaker who consciously presented himself as passionately concerned with confronting the horrible truths of Germany’s recent past, Fassbinder’s films (in particular those produced during his melodrama phase in the 1970s) nevertheless embody for me a future-oriented, anxious, and queer mode of melancholia, a concept I derive from Freud’s writings. While representing characters caught in a seeming repetition compulsion of domination and submission, Fassbinder’s films likewise point to tenuous futures that do not merely reproduce the past. These futures, I suggest, are both anxious and queer—deeply fearful but simultaneously offering a skewed take on well-worn narratives from the past. “Queer,” deriving from the German word quer, signifies precisely a relationship of liminality, one that presents an oblique but not directly oppositional relationship to dominant models and narratives. Indeed, literary critics Heather Love and Nicholas Royle have linked queerness metonymically to melancholia and the uncanny.

Prompted by recent scholarly discussions about futurity (see Adelson and Muñoz), I suggest that a new look at Freud’s writings might help us gain insight into an ethics of the future, just as the trauma-oriented readings of Freud’s notions of mourning and melancholia offered ethical avenues into our engagement with a traumatic past. In considering the global future, scholars turn frequently to Ulrich Beck’s notion of a “risk society” and the state of precariousness in which we live now. A return to Freud, a thinker whose writings on melancholia and anxiety were bookended by two world wars, might offer surprising insights into the place of the future in the present.

German cultural studies has been dominated by the concept of the “inability to mourn,” a heuristic model for understanding the structures of engaging with and repressing the past in German culture after World War II. This model emerged in sharp outline with the publication of the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 study The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior. The Mitscherlichs posited that Germans, the perpetrators and their heirs, were unable to mourn their tainted past. The Mitscherlichs borrowed from Freud’s 1917 essay on melancholia and mourning to point to what they saw as the “collective denial of the past” on the part of Germans in the 1960s.¹ Whether or not the Mitscherlichs’ thesis is verifiable, this understanding of the post-WWII emotional state of Germany has dominated cultural analyses of the period. Germans, it is said, were unable...