Queer Moments and Cruel Optimism in Evelyn Schmidt’s Das Fahrrad (1981)

In Das Fahrrad, Evelyn Schmidt examines the fraught relationship of the protagonist, Susanne, to ambition and belonging in her social and national environment. The film shows how her attachment to the fantasy of good motherhood reins her in when she transgresses and continues to function even when her attachment to national narratives of happiness and success through work and a heterosexual relationship breaks down. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s and Lauren Berlant’s contributions to contemporary affect theory, this essay categorizes Susanne’s responses to the world as queer, willful, happy, and cruelly optimistic in order to reframe the film’s perennial themes. Ultimately, I argue that the othering of lived experience and its representation in the GDR contribute (intentionally or not) to triumphalist discourses that posit neoliberal capitalism as the proper response to the systemically driven drabness, monotony, limitations, inequities, and unhappiness so often associated with life in communist and socialist states.