In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Michael Kohlhaas Critics generally regard Michael Kohlhaas (Michael Kohlhaas—Der Rebell, 1969) to be one of Schlöndorff’s failures, a film whose story leaves audiences cool, whose acting is inappropriate and unaffecting, one that fails as literary adaptation , as precise political analysis, and as popular entertainment. As literary adaptation, it brings the text of Heinrich von Kleist to the screen. In updating Kleist, Schlöndorff deliberately relates the rebellion of the character Kohlhaas to the social unrest of the late 1960s, rendering Kohlhaas a work that mirrors and comments on the student and worker revolts of the more modern period. As mass entertainment, Kohlhaas evokes two popular film genres—the archetypal Hollywood form of the Western and the distinctively German genre of the Heimatfilm. The result is a motion picture pulled by the three often contradictory forces of literature, politics, and film genre. These tensions make Kohlhaas both interesting and inconsistent. Schlöndorff’s decision to adapt Kleist’s short novel, which was drawn from an authentic chronicle of sixteenth-century events, would seem to have held potential for a commercially successful film. Kleist’s novella tells of an honest, hard-working, religiously devout horse trader, Michael Kohlhaas, who becomes a terrorist, a guerrilla warrior against an aristocrat. Junker Wenzel von Tronka has cheated him out of two fine black horses. Kohlhaas becomes a popular Robin Hood–like hero among oppressed peasants in the land, a rebel against abusive authority, a leader with grass roots appeal. Yet Michael Kohlhaas is also a story of failure, of corrupted revolution. Characters like Stern, a stable hand who turns into a wastrel; Katrina, a prostitute; and Nagel (Nagelschmidt in Kleist’s original), an opportunistic robber, join up with Kohlhaas not out of a sense of justice or righteousness, but out of their own selfinterest . Kohlhaas’s revolution, doomed as it is to political failure, ends up losing its moral direction as well. This pessimistic outcome may well be one reason why the work had trouble finding a popular audience. 5 48 Michael Kohlhaas is a very different movie for a German audience than for a foreign one. For Germans, Kleist’s novel is a familiar classic; for international audiences it is largely unfamiliar. Schlöndorff’s choice of source material reveals a kind of ambivalence that has permeated much of Schlöndorff’s work as a literary adaptor: the movie Michael Kohlhaas is both a tribute to and a revision of Kleist, an homage to a major cultural stream in German literature and a modification of that source for a contemporary audience. Schlöndorff clearly wanted to explore the topicality of this subject. On European prints of the film, the credits appear over newsreel footage of student demonstrations in four countries around the world. Given the film’s time—the protest years of the Vietnam War era—producers clearly must have thought the subject would catch on with a young audience. The result is the first large international coproduction of the then Young German Cinema (the first wave of the New German Cinema). It surely hoped to capitalize on the success in the mid-1960s of the socalled “spaghetti Westerns” produced by Italy at the time. An International Production Schlöndorff reportedly began the project by writing the first script in German himself. This version of the screenplay is more faithful to Kleist than is the finished product (Schlöndorff). The producers then brought in Clement BiddleWood to work with Schlöndorff on an English version. The final screenplay was written in collaboration with Edward Bond, the British leftist playwright whose earlier plays, The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and Saved (1965), had approached themes similar to those of Kohlhaas in their attempts to show violence arising from class oppression. One commentator has claimed, inaccurately, that the movie script was based not on Kleist’s classic novella but rather on the sixteenth -century chronicle that had served the German writer as well (MunzigerArchiv . K: 13049). Although some of the scriptwriters’ departures reflect a return to the original chronicle—the film’s ending in particular—other parts of the movie retain elements of Kleist’s reworking. The adaptation remains generally faithful to the narrative lines of Kleist’s version. Overlaid on the structure, however , are various updatings and topical references, particularly to the student unrests that culminated—during the very shooting of the film in April through June of the same year—in the events of May 1968. Schlöndorff gave the film, which...

Share