University of
Leeds
Over the last 10
years there has been a resurgence of interest in the urban terrorism that
dominated West Germany’s political climate in the 1970s. With a slew of new
films, revelations about the activist past of Germany’s Foreign Minister,
Joschka Fischer, and a planned exhibition on the mythology of the Red Army Faction[1],
terrorism is without doubt back in vogue. However, now it is being
reassessed in order to establish its place in the prehistory of the now unified
German State. What is particularly surprising in terms of scholarly
interest in this latest cycle of films is that there has to date been very
little interest in their relationship with the New German Cinema, a moment in
German cinematic history which produced a number of important filmic responses
to events at the time. With this in mind I wish to look at two films,
Margarethe von Trotta’s The German Sisters (Die bleierne Zeit)
released in 1981 and Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In (Die innere
Sicherheit) released in 2001. Arguably the most controversial film of the
New German Cinema to deal with the question of urban terrorism in the Bonn
Republic, The German Sisters still resonates strongly within the latest
constellation of films to address Germany’s terrorist past; indeed,
laced throughout with a similar aesthetic sensibility, Petzold’s filmic text
can be read as a direct reply, or even as an unofficial, quasi sequel to von
Trotta’s work. In the course of this paper I will consider the continuities and
discontinuities in filmic representations of the RAF as evinced in this pairing
of films over the course of 20 years of a shifting social context.
Played out against the background of West German terrorism, The German Sisters[2] dramatises the conflict between two sisters (Marianne and Juliane), figures loosely based on the RAF founder member Gudrun Ensslin and her sister Christiane, charting their relationship from childhood to the present day. In the eyes of the RAF, initially a fringe group of student radicals, peaceful protest was achieving nothing, and the only answer to what they viewed as being a politically repressive State was violence. The film dramatises the period shortly before Gudrun Ensslin’s arrest in 1972 to her subsequent death in Stammheim prison.
As Marc Silberman notes, Von Trotta’s dramatisation, ‘elucidates neither the political terrain of terrorist activities nor the ideological convictions that drove them’[3] because for von Trotta such details are superficial in light of what Norbert Elias termed ‘the latent fissures that exist in West German society’[4]. Terrorism is important in the film only in that it is the articulation of a hidden malaise in West German society – at once the trigger and the expression of what Paul Coates refers to as ‘a cry in the echo chamber of the Nazi past’.[5] Accordingly, in an attempt to shed light on the root causes of the social fissures, von Trotta’s sole concern is ‘with contextualising a past in order to bring into play its absence in the political discourse of the present’[6] in a move to explain why the events that culminated in the terrorist violence of the 1970s. The clearest indication of the direction of the film is in the title. Given the innocuous titling for its international release, the film’s original title of Die bleierne Zeit means ‘the leaden years’ and stresses the notion of the inescapable bearing of the past on a troubled present as well as providing a link between the grey time of the 1950s in which many of the events of the recent past had become a taboo subject, and the historical and political repression of the 1970s.
Von Trotta’s visual realism reinforces this notion of the prevalence of the past in the present and never more so than in her choice of locations. The sisters’ first meeting takes place in a museum yard that contains monolithic stone sculptures of historical figures, underscoring the weight of history on the present. The sombre atmosphere of the locations is supplemented by the sober aesthetics of the film’s look, which Paul Coates refers to as being ‘black and white in colour’, or an ‘anticolour film’.[7] Indeed, the film’s colour palette stresses cold blues, greys and browns in both the flashbacks to the sisters’ childhood and their present lives, providing a visual link between the past and present. Having the same colour palette for past and present is an obvious way in which von Trotta suggests that little has changed in thirty years of German history.
In light of the historical vacuum of the
1950s however, the German sisters of von Trotta’s film however find themselves
in something of a unique position. The father of Gudrun Ensslin, the female
terrorist upon whom the character of Marianne is based, was a minister of the
Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) and a staunch upholder of the Protestantism
that the church advocated. The EKD was
formed in 1945 following Hitler’s downfall and its origins lay in the
‘Confessing Church’, which stressed the examination of conscience. The
fictional father in The German Sisters remains
true to the real life minister, imposing the rigors of Protestant ethics upon
his daughters and so burdening his young flock with a zealous guilt which will
shape their lives throughout the course of the film. The confession of past
sin and guilt, implicitly linked to the question of German culpability for the
past, are captured in a single image, that of Grünewald’s particularly gruesome
depiction of the crucifixion which take pride of place in the family home. The
vivid red of the blood of Christ jumps from the print as the antithesis of the
blue/grey tonalities that reflect the changelessness of history in light of
historical amnesia, and that otherwise dominate the film’s palette.
The effect this has on the sisters is to imbue them with a social consciousness that challenges the status quo of social values, in particular society’s comfortable State of historical amnesia. During their childhood it is Julianne who is the more rebellious of the two sisters. When asked to read the poetry of Rilke at school she refuses, stating that ‘I prefer the ballad of the Jewish whore’ by Brecht and so is asked to leave by her teacher who would rather ignore Germany’s troubled past. Marianne also demonstrates a strong social conscience by suggesting that she wants to carry out charity work in Africa but she demonstrates none of Juliane’s antisocial behaviour, preferring instead to be a ‘daddy’s girl’; she sits on her father’s lap, seemingly indulging his patriarchal style of parenting whereas Juliane smokes and defiantly wears black Jeans to school.
As adults, however, the roles seemingly reverse. Juliane, while not abandoning her social conscience, advocates a far more reasoned approach towards social ills. Working as an abortion activist and a staff writer on a feminist magazine, Juliane’s theories have revolutionary potential but she will not take up arms; as a critical intellectual her weapon is, as Silberman notes, the pen. Marianne, on the other hand, leaves her husband, Werner, and her son, Jan, to join a terrorist group that advocates (violent) praxis in order to enforce its theory and she becomes bitterly resentful of Juliane’s peaceful pursuit of reason and bourgeois lifestyle.
However, as I have already mentioned, von Trotta’s political strategy elucidates nothing of the terrorists’ ideology and has left many critics puzzled over the question of Marianne’s motivation. For critics such as Ellen Seiter, Barton Byg, E. Ann Kaplan and, in particular, Charlotte Delorme, the major complaint is ‘the reduction of politically motivated actions to matters of family history […]’[8] which robs the film of its true relationship to history. However, I would argue that such criticism misses the core point of von Trotta’s filmic text; namely the politics of the personal, and the importance of history at the level of the individual. Somewhat ironically Marianne shares Delorme’s blinkered view of family history. Angered by an article that Julianne wrote about her, Marianne declares that ‘you can’t describe me from the perspective of our personal history. My history only begins with the others… The most important thing is reality, don’t you understand, not words’. Juliane’s retort, however, answers both her sister and Delorme: ‘As if our childhood were not a reality. Anyway, I don’t believe that we can free ourselves from our personal history’.
As Paul Coates rightly points out, ‘the traumatic images [of the historical past] do not gather dust in a museum of the collective unconscious but haunt the awareness of the sisters’.[9] Indeed, the sisters’ personal history is shown by von Trotta to be a strong and character-defining reality in that, as Thomas Elsaesser argues, she ‘depicts the working law of this family as the motivational core of urban terrorism’[10] and although only one daughter turns to terror, both are radicalised by the monstrous guilt passed on by their parents, and in particular their father. In effect, Marianne is terrorised into terror. The final trigger for Marianne’s radicalisation is implied in the final flashback in which the sisters watch a documentary about the victims of American napalm bombings in North Vietnam in 1968 – the year most associated with the German student movement and which would later be used to denote an entire generation in German post-war history. Identification with the victims is the overriding image, and this time it is Marianne who declares ‘I can’t accept that nothing can be done about it’. Throughout the film Von Trotta creates a nexus of continuities with fascism, contrasting her contemporary present with the return of the repressed trauma of Germany’s Nazi legacy.
The close of the film does however propose
a tentative resolution to the cycles of continuities with the Nazi past. After
Marianne dies in prison Julianne relentlessly works to prove that her sister’s
apparent suicide was in fact a murder at the hands of the State. When she feels
that she has enough evidence to make her case she approaches a newspaper with
her findings only to be told that her sister’s death is old news and that they
are no longer interested in it. It becomes apparent that the structure within
which Juliane can break the silence is not the public sphere but rather the
private, and in particular through Marianne’s orphaned son, Jan. Her need to pass the narrative on to Jan is
the key to the resolution proposed by the film. Passing the narrative on to Jan
does of course underscore a further shift to family commitment but not, as Byg
proposes, at the cost of the political and historical.[11] When Jan tears up Marianne’s picture in front
of Juliane she assertively yet sensitively tells him that his mother was a
great person and that she will explain it all to him someday. Jan commands his
aunt to ‘begin!’ demanding to know ‘Everything! I have to know everything’. Lisa Dicaprio is correct to suggest
that rather than a mere desire to preserve his mother’s memory, Jan’s Statement
is ‘a general moral command: ‘ “Tell my generation everything!” [and] the basic
imperative of von Trotta’s work’.[12]
With these imperatives Jan demonstrates the potential to free his family (and
his country) from the cycle of attempting to end terror through terror. As
such, von Trotta imbues the child with a utopian potential that could allow the
past to find a future.
With his 2001 post-Wende film The
State I Am In, Christian Petzold takes up the question of what becomes of
the tentative closure proposed by von Trotta, and more specifically, what
becomes of the utopian potential of the child. The film explores what has
become of the Baader-Meinhof generation of German political terrorists but is told
from the perspective of Jeanne, the 15 year old daughter of a couple, Hanns and
Clara, living underground following unspecified acts of terrorism in the 1970s.
Over 20 years on though, they are forced into returning to Germany, only
to find that the ideology they still cling to is dead. They have dropped off
the grid and out of history, taking their daughter Jeanne with them and so
deferring her potential to strike out by herself and carve her own identity.
Like von Trotta, Petzold is dealing in the politics of the personal,
specifically exploring the micro politics of a family unable to inhabit the
present. When they return to Germany they are ignorant of the fact that the
historical moment has shifted. Specifically, the social landscape they
have returned to is no longer wholly consumed by links to the Nazi past and the
scrutiny of State practices, as was the case for von Trotta’s German sisters.
When the family tries to secure help from a former associate, he tells them that he ‘doesn’t want anything more to do with that shit’ and discloses that his car is now tax deductible, the prospect of which enrages Hanns. The second former associate, Klaus, has sold his small firm to a large consortium. For him, the ideology of the late 1960s and 1970s is firmly dead but he agrees to help the family due to his fondness for Clara. The tidal wave of Capitalism, against which the student movement campaigned so bitterly, has become the social reality of the new millennium. The Germany that Hans and Clara return to is, after all, one in which one Joschka Fischer, a former member of the combative activist scene, who attacked a policeman at a student rally and was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails in the 70s, is now Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of the country. The problem for Hans and Clara is that they just cannot accept the new social reality to which they have returned. As such, it is not surprising that the visual pass code the family uses to confirm its arrival to Klaus is a copy of Moby Dick by Hermann Melville. The relevance of such a visual trope is clear to the spectator and foreshadows the film’s tragic conclusion; in the same way that captain Ahab’s blinkered and unremitting pursuit of the white whale leads him to an untimely death, Hans and Clara’s relentless and selfish pursuit of a dead political ideology will result in their ultimate destruction. The question is whether or not they will take Jeanne with them.
Hans and Clara are living anachronisms, ghosts who cannot occupy the present. This is exemplified in their bungled attempt to rob a bank near to the film’s climax; their disguises are comically out of step with the present and so the couple emerge as poor caricatures of the standard look for the urban terrorists of the 1970s. Jeanne too lives as a ghost but she desires to inhabit the real world and so is able to periodically step out of the shadows, coming up for air when she is sent to do the shopping or establish contacts, and finding time to experience snatches of teenage life, whether having a secret cigarette, looking for ‘cool’ clothes or fleeting encounters with boys. Ultimately, however, Jeanne is locked into a familial codex of denial, moral complicity and an ideology that she did not decide upon for herself, but was rather born into and, as such, it would certainly seem then that the utopian potential of the child as proposed by von Trotta has not amounted to much. Indeed, compared to Jeanne’s situation, Jan’s abandonment by his mother in Marianne and Juliane looks positively favourable.
Aside from the trajectory of the child, there are numerous parallels which suggest that The State I Am In can be read as a quasi sequel to, or direct revisitation of The German Sisters that plays on and reassesses the tropes of the earlier film. Petzold employs the same sober aesthetics that coloured von Trotta’s film and which led to Variety describing The State I Am In as ‘a modest but potent suspense drama […]’.[13] We even find an obvious parallel in the choice of name: the male Jan in The German Sisters and the female Jeanne in The State I Am In. Even if over 20 years after the event the terrorist ideology is dead, the after shocks are still being felt by a younger generation. Much like her male counterpart in von Trotta’s film who is set on fire because of his mother’s terrorism, Jeanne suffers due to the sins of her parents in a string of politically motivated attacks. She is injured during an attempt to retrieve belongings from a locker at the station and is in the car with her parents during the film’s climax when the police force them off the road.
After
Jeanne sneaks off to spend the night with her secret boyfriend Heinrich, she is
caught by her mother and faces that which every teenager dreads – the parental
inquisition. For Jeanne, however, such probing takes on a far more serious
tone. When Jeanne asks for a glass of water her father says ‘this isn’t an
interrogation you know’ to which Jeanne replies, and no doubt with the support
of the spectator, ‘but it is’. Her parents defy expectation by not wanting to
know if their daughter had sex with this young man and, if so, whether she took
precautions. Rather, they only want to know if she has compromised the internal
security of the family. They seem far more comfortable dealing with Jeanne as
an associate rather than as their own daughter.
Perhaps the most telling parallel between the two films is the directors’ use of Alain Resnais seminal documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955). In von Trotta’s film Marianne and Juliane’s father screens the film in their school in another instance of his insistence on confessing past sin. Much of the sequence is shot over the heads of the sisters so that the cinema audience is aligned with both the images of Nazi atrocities and the sisters’ moral outrage at what they see. Von Trotta’s choice of excerpt shows the mounds of corpses at a Nazi extermination camp, as well as Nazi denials of guilt, and the extreme psychological effect these images have upon the sisters manifests itself physically as they are sick in the toilets.
A sequence in The State I Am In parallels von Trotta’s use of the Resnais film but to a radically different effect. During one of her shopping excursions Jeanne pauses by a school. A student passes by and asks her for a cigarette and, assuming that Jeanne is just another student, also asks whether or not she is going to the film being shown in place of class. Jeanne craves a normal teenage life and so without hesitation she nods in agreement and heads in. Petzold’s use of Resnais’ film is another conscious nod to the sober aesthetics of von Trotta’s film. Both filmmakers are working from the perspective of personal history but unlike von Trotta’s German sisters for whom the film is a trigger to increasingly question their parental generation over its involvement and complicity with the Third Reich, Petzold is not concerned with trying to explain terrorism in terms of Germany’s fascist past. In the case of Jeanne the inclusion of the film is similarly an indicator to the spectator of her questioning of history, but here micro rather than macro history is the focus. Absorbed with the question of what became of the generation of 68ers, Petzold seems to be indicating that just as the 68ers interrogated their parents over the Nazi past, they now have to face a line of questioning from their children over their past actions. Jeanne’s attempts to live a normal life are thwarted at every turn. As she strives to fit in with potential peers she is confronted with an episode in German history which von Trotta reads as being the possible motivational core for the terrorism of a fringe group of the 68ers, and so by extension for Jeanne’s parents as well.
The
break from continuities with the Nazi past is reinforced through the banality
of what occurs immediately after the film is shown. As the lights go up the
students sit in stunned silence, but not so much, it would seem, due to the
content of Resnais’ film. Rather they are shaken by their teacher’s infuriated
attack on their level of attendance - how nobody turns up to class yet when a
film is shown he gets a full house. It is exactly by referring to as Night
and Fog as merely ‘a film’ and using it a tool in classroom politics that
the teacher negates the historical vivacity and resonance of Resnais’ filmic
text. Though the children belong to a generation that appears to be
anaesthetised to such echoes from the past (and so unlike von Trotta’s sisters
are not physically sick), the teacher’s silence over what is arguably one of
the most important films to deal with Nazi atrocities strikes its own
historical resonance; by shouting at his students instead of offering guidance
on the film he becomes complicit with the educators of the taboo time of the
1950s who ignored Germany’s troubled past in favour of a wholly contemporary
agenda. Even when Jeanne is able to temporarily escape the historical vacuum
which has consumed her private life, she is confronted with her country’s very
public past. Acts of terror(ism) spanning more than 50 years constantly frustrate
her attempts to occupy the present. Jeanne’s generation will, as Rachel
Palfreyman postulates, respond differently to the events of the past, but not,
as she suggests in her interesting and thorough appraisal of the film, entirely
‘to the same agenda’.[14]
In
interview Christian Petzold clarified his position on terrorism some 25 years
after the event:
Suggestions [for the film] always went along these lines: ‘please try to include dialogue driven scenes in which the political background will be depicted! At the start could the daughter not say to her parents: ‘Why did you have to kill that GI in Frankfurt?’ That really got on my nerves. If a family has managed to hold together under these conditions for 15 years, then they have an immense inner discipline. They aren’t going to talk about things from 1965, 1973 or 1977 anymore, and they aren’t going to talk to the spectators anymore either. I’m interested in the reality, in getting the physical picture of this family – and not a theatre group that babbles on with pedagogical twaddle.[15]
Hans and Clara’s acts of terrorism remain unspecified,
but not because Petzold views terrorism as the expression of a hidden malaise
that is inextricably linked to the Nazi past as was the case with von Trotta.
Petzold’s interest is in the effect that a terrorist past has had on this
family and the picture that results with Jeanne located firmly at the centre.
For Petzold, the utopian potential of the child as proposed at the end of von
Trotta’s film is caught in stasis. Jeanne is locked into her parents’ ghostly
existence and constantly paying the price, but she is increasingly determined
to break out. It is for this reason that she gives their secret away to her
boyfriend Heinrich. She has no choice but to seemingly betray her parents in
the hope that it will end their constant drifting through life. Desperate not
to lose Jeanne, Heinrich makes the call to the police that leads to a final
confrontation on the road between the terrorists and the State.
After the family is violently forced off the road
during the film’s climax it is only Jeanne who emerges from the wreckage. As
Jeanne crawls from the car she is bloody and battered yet potentially reborn;
her parents and their past can no longer dominate Jeanne’s life and so now it
would appear that she is free to pursue her self-identity. Finally liberated
from the shackles of an oppressive family unit the final continuity with the
terrorist past has been broken and only now does Jeanne find herself in the
position of opportunity that confronts Jan at the end of von Trotta’s film,
whereby she can attempt to explore what that future could be and fulfil her
potential as an individual and as a vehicle of utopian energy. It is perhaps
not surprising that the potential of the children of the 68ers to strike out by
themselves was viewed by Petzold as having been caught in stasis for the best
part of 25 years. Von Trotta’s Jan had firm roots in his parent’s contemporary
present, making him a direct target in revenge attacks for his mother’s
political convictions. As such, it is only after his mother’s death that we are
able to acknowledge that he might even have a future, let alone what that will
be. Jeanne on the other hand was born roughly ten years after the political
turmoil of the late 1970s and so should, therefore, as Nora M. Alter suggests,
‘have broken with a past heavy with guilt and memories and a present that
celebrates the public death of those who openly confronted and challenged the
status quo’.[16] The problem, however, is that although she is rooted
in the contemporary existence of the Federal Republic of Germany in the new
millennium, Jeanne has still not been able to fully escape the past. She has no
real links to the memories of guilt surrounding the fascist past which her parents
rebelled against, but she finds herself trapped, her life consumed by her
parents’ previous acts of terrorism and their ghostly existence. Petzold seems
to be suggesting that the generation of children who should have been imbued
with a utopian potential that might finally draw a line under the
violence of the 1970s, and with it the whole of Germany’s problematic past, are
frustrated in their attempts because they now have the actions of their
parents’ past to reckon with in what resembles a sick historical joke or
vicious circle. As such, Jeanne
finds herself trapped in her parents’ world, now paying for the consequences of
their actions. Unlike Jan, Jeanne has to actively break from her parental
generation. Only then does she come full circle to find herself in the position
that confronts Jan at the end of von Trotta’s The German Sisters.
The only question that remains is whether or not the
experience of Jeanne’s stasis will prevent her from discovering a future beyond
her parents and their terrorism. The physical marks of the film’s, literally,
explosive ending when the flash-bombs send the car careening off the road will
fade with time but as the credits roll we are left far more uncertain about the
mental scars that Jeanne has incurred. She has had her wish granted and
is now free of an endless drifting through life, but at what cost? She had no
choice but to betray her parents for her own survival and so start the chain of
events that led to their presumed deaths. However, unlike Jan,
rescued by his aunt who understands his situation and who will be able to help
him come to terms with his mother’s past, Jeanne does not find herself in a
utopian situation – the only person she has left is Heinrich, a mere boy who
has failed to truly understand her situation throughout the course of the film
and so Jeanne’s freedom is ultimately tainted by the fact that she is now all
alone.
The German Sisters presents the spectator with an immediate response to the urban
terrorism of the 1970s in the Bonn Republic in an attempt to contextualise the
factors behind the call to arms for a fringe group of student radicals, the
motivational core of which von Trotta locates firmly at the family table. 20
years later The State I Am In relocates the terrorist aberration to the
Berlin Republic and, in light of a new social context, reassesses the
historical epoch of the 1970s through the optic of the child, for whom the
personal history of her family’s terrorist legacy has become a suffocating
anachronism. Whilst consciously nodding to von Trotta’s aesthetic sensibility, The
State I am In examines the outcome of the utopian potential of the child as
proposed by The German Sisters, assessing to what extent it is possible
for Jeanne’s generation to find a usable and sustainable identity of its own in
light of the legacy of the 68ers.
[1] Better known as the Baader-Meinhof group, the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion, RAF) was an aberrant militant group that emerged from the student movement in West Germany to become the country’s first urban terrorist organisation. For a full account of the history of the RAF see Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Hoffman and Campe, Hamburg, 1987).
[2] The German Sisters was the title given to the film in the United Kingdom. For its North American debut the title was changed to Marianne and Juliane.
[3] Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Wayne State University Press, Detroit), p. 205.
[4] Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 24.
[5] Paul Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism and the Image of Horror (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 193.
[6] Silberman, German Cinema, p. 204.
[7] Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze, p. 226.
[8] Charlotte Delorme, ‘On the Film Marianne and Julianne by Margarethe von Trotta’ in Journal of Film and Video, vol. 37, Number 2, Spring 1985, p. 48.
[9] Coates, The Gorgon’s Gaze, p. 209.
[10] Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (Macmillan Press, 1989), p. 235.
[11] See Barton Byg, ‘German Cinema and Cinematic Convention Harmonised in Margarethe von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane’, in Gender and German Cinema, Vol. II: German Film History/German History on Film (Berg publishers, 1993), p. 266.
[12] Lisa Dicaprio, ‘Marianne and Julianne/The German Sisters: Baader-Meinhof fictionalised’, in Perspectives on German Cinema, eds. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten Mona Thompson (Macmillan Press, New York, 1996), p. 400.
[13] David Stratton, ‘The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit)’ in Variety, October 9. 2000.
[14] Rachel Palfreyman, ‘The Fourth Generation: Legacies of Violence as Quest for Identity in Post-Unification Terrorism Films’ in German Cinema After Unification, ed. David Clarke (Birmingham University Press) Forthcoming.
[15] Ulrich
Kriest, ‘Im Hinterland des Nihilismus: Ein Gespräch mit Christian Petzold über Die
innere Sicherheit’, in film-dienst, 03/01, p. 11 (my translation).
[16] Nora M. Alter, Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000 (University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 73.