_Deutschland im Herbst_. Directed by Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Alf
Brustellin, Bernhard Sinkel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Katja Rupé, Hans Peter
Cloos, Edgar Reitz, Maximiliane Mainka, and Peter Schubert. 119 minutes.
Germany: Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978.

Reviewed for H-German by Theodore Rippey, Bowling Green State University

Flowers in Winter

I. Unzureichend informiert

The first images we see are of mourners arriving at a funeral; the first words
are reserved for a former SS officer: "Lieber Eberhard, herzliche Grüsse an
euch alle, ich bin viel in Gedanken bei euch. Mir geht es zwar gesundheitlich
gut, aber ich bin über das Geschehen nur unzureichend und nur über die
Informationen meiner Bewacher informiert." Hanns Martin Schleyer would surely
not have stood for it, but might not a leftist intellectual have expressed,
minus the greeting to son and family, a very different notion with the exact
same words in the heart of the German Autumn? As Thomas Elsaesser notes,
manipulation of public opinion and a mandated news blackout marked these weeks
of crisis. Forget about The Whole Truth: What exactly would it mean to be
_sufficiently_ informed about what was happening in the Federal Republic in
September and October 1977? Was such a pragmatic objective in fact too
idealistic? Is it now?

II. Urtext des Deutschlandliedes

More on the Fassbinder segment, which follows the first set of Schleyer funeral
images, in a bit. For now, let us turn to Kluge's Gabi Teichert, the
schoolteacher "auf der Suche nach den Grundlagen der deutschen Geschichte."
After a sequence of painterly landscapes and details from actual paintings, set
to Haydn's "Kaiserquartett" (the melody of the Deutschlandlied), we see
Teichert digging in a field. Her story is intercut with the Schleyer funeral in
Stuttgart, then with another _Staatsakt_: the funeral of Feldmarschall Erwin
Rommel. We have pageantry, Mozart's requiem, solemnly bowed heads, and
swastikas that get swapped out for the Mercedes stars that rise over the
Daimler Benz works.

Is the uneasy relationship of the Deutschlandlied's loaded verses an allegory
for the contention among the verses of German history? If "Gott erhalte Franz
den Kaiser" and "Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt"
keep disrupting "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit," is it not because the
unresolved contradictions of the fascist period, the Weimar Republic, and the
long nineteenth century kept breaching the surface of the Federal Republic? Can
a Gabi Teichert, digging into German anthem and German history, excavate a
frame through which to view the autumn of 1977? Or is the surface of current
events one mirror, the surface of history another, such that counterposing the
two becomes an act of mise-en-abyme? A camera, tracking slowly through a
Daimler assembly-line hall that has fallen silent for three minutes to honor
the murdered boss, encounters another camera. With no perceptible irony, the
narrator remarks, "Die Medien sind anwesend."

III. Das revolutionäre Kino?

But perhaps the filmmakers are not so irony-challenged. In the midst of the
Horst Mahler sequence, we shift suddenly from the rehabbing terrorist's cell to
a cinema, where we encounter Franziska Busch, a young woman "expecting an
explanation." (Is her agenda more or less bold than Teichert's?) We watch her
watching Mahler on the screen. We watch her watching Wolf Biermann perform "Ein
Mädchen aus Stuttgart," a sort of ballad of Gudrun Ensslin. Then we learn that
she is involved in a small, independent film collective, making movies designed
to recall the revolutionary cinema of the 1920s. We see a "making of" sequence
with smoke machines and burning red flag, a crew and actors setting up in a
factory, and a sampling of finished images. These are straight out of early
Eisenstein: silent, black-and-white histrionics with all sorts of machinery
running at a furious pace in the background. The DIY revolutionary cinema
strikes the eye as earnest and inconsequential, a reenactment rather than a
compelling intervention. The artifice is both openly advertised and hidden in
plain view: unlike Mahler (but like her predecessor and analogue Teichert),
Busch is a fabrication. Does her docu-fiction hybridity suggest a resurgence or
a lack of imagination on the left? Has the Autumn crisis exposed a limit of
representational systems? A boundary at which a meaningful relationship between
aesthetics and politics breaks down?

IV. Dream of Spring

Another abrupt cut to another painterly image, this time of a crystalline
ice-coated landscape, through which a classic Citroen DS drives on its way to a
German-French border crossing. And another Lied: Wilhelm Mueller's
"Frühlingstraum," set to music by Schubert in 1827. The poet dreams of colorful
flowers, "[s]o wie sie wohl blühen im Mai," but waking shatters the image: "Da
war es kalt und finster, / Es schrieen die Raben vom Dach." The border guard
sizes up the female passenger of the Citroen against a sheet of
terrorist-suspect mugshots and takes great pleasure in his gaze as a projection
of desire and control. He concludes that she does not have "fanatical eyes,"
and sends her, her boyfriend, and the iconically French car on its way into
Alsace. Cue next Lied (again Schubert, but this time the text is Ludwig
Rellstab's "In der Ferne"): "Wehe dem Fliehenden, / Welt hinaus ziehenden! - /
Fremde durchmessenden, / Heimat vergessenden, / Mutterhaus hassenden, / Freunde
verlassenden / Folget kein Segen, ach! / Auf ihren Wegen nach!" No hope for
those who stay, no peace for those who leave.

IV. Only one alternative

More jarring movement, more historical footage: this time a montage of workers
and soldiers rising up in 1918/1919, set to "Auf, auf zum Kampf!" "Der Rosa
Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand," goes the refrain. The narrator quotes the
canonized revolutionary: "Es gibt nur eine Alternative für Deutschland:
Sozialismus oder Barbarei." A cut takes us suddenly to images of hanging,
Nazis, more hanging, more Nazis. Barbarism wins the battle thus sketched; the
song (as viewers of sufficient age would recall in 1978) was re-crafted as a
German war anthem. On the heels of the explicit stills of atrocity, a sequence
implying continuities between the militarized society of the Third Reich and
the perfectly-comfortable-with-tanks-running-down-my-town-streets society of
the Federal Republic. "Ich hab' keine Angst," reports a grinning Hausfrau as
the armor rumbles by. It is the Bundeswehr on "Autumn maneuvers," honing their
skills to defend democracy on the frontlines of the Cold War.

V. Consuming

But what is there to defend? In the SPD Parteitag sequence that follows, Max
Frisch at the podium argues that the current state of German democracy is a
non-state: "Demokratie, gesetzten Falls man wolle sie nicht nur retten, sondern
man wolle sie herstellen, das wäre ein Ziel über die eigene Konsumperson
hinaus." Has the consumerist paradigm so deeply permeated the text of the West
German self that there is no space in which a narrative of democratic
subjectivity can unfold? Here we can turn back to Fassbinder, who both verbally
and corporally performs the crisis that Frisch rhetorically outlines.
Fassbinder's strung-out telephone conversations, his intense exchanges with his
mother, and his alternately violent and pathetic wrangling with his lover,
Amin, all bespeak simultaneously existing fury and paralysis--an acute
manifestation of the chronic afflictions of the critically inclined artist in
the FRG. The visual aesthetic of Fassbinder's segment departs from the more
customary patterns of documentary framing and editing that typify the balance
of the film. The camera work here is so severely minimal as to become almost
static. An occasional zoom underscores the anxiety written on a face, but the
camera often seems stationed, more like an instrument of surveillance than one
of cinematography. Voyeuristically taking in the artist's collapse, we are
somewhere between the Big Brother of Orwell and that of reality TV.

VI. Grundwassergefährdet

Burial upon burial: First, the Böll-Schlöndorff sequence of TV execs shooting
down an _Antigone_ production. "Verweigerte Beerdigung! Aufsässige Weiber!"
blasts one suit. Another agrees that Sophocles is dangerously "aktuell." Then
the funeral of Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan Carl Raspe as the film's
closing act. The postmortem rituals come into focus here as signifiers
virtually fated to semantic volatility and thus political struggles over the
signified. The Desert Fox's son Manfred is Lord Mayor of Stuttgart. Upon the
terrorists' death, he issues a prompt executive order for their burial in the
municipal Dornhaldenfriedhof--against popular calls to let the corpses rot. The
area is "grundwassergefährdet," and a muddy embankment rises beyond the burial
sites. The sealing of graves should bring closure, restore an integral surface,
but the integrity of the bodies' enclosure is threatened by subterranean
seepage: they rest in a territory marked by slippery slopes and shaped by
ground invisibly giving way.

VII. Flowers in Winter

Is the entire film an attempt to come to grips with a lethal combination of too
much information and too little? Suspicion and anxiety in light of insufficient
knowledge, and a flood of Kulturbarbarei every time one scratches the surface
of the present in an attempt to discern how the past informs it. No readable
Urtext, only an overwhelming proliferation of palimpsests, fragments, and
images captured but never controlled. As Elsaesser argues, the film's own
attempts to bring structure to the depicted historical moment break down.
Indeed, these attempts to render the present are at best oblique tracings of a
preferable future alternative. For that present is a moment when one expects
the climate to worsen before it improves. And when one ponders the possibility
of imagining brighter days but fears that the fruit of such imagination will be
absurd. The last words of the film are reserved for Joan Baez, whose ode to
Sacco and Vanzetti swells after the last skirmishes between
mourner-demonstrators and police die down: "The last and final moment is yours
/ That agony is your triumph." But is this text compelling in this re-framing?
Or is seeing triumph in agony seeing something that isn't there? I keep
returning to a stanza of "Frühlingstraum," reflecting on its meaning within and
against the film that Autumn, and wondering how that meaning has complexified
in the three decades since Beate Mainka Ellinghaus made her final cut on
_Deutschland im Herbst_:
Doch an den Fensterscheiben,
Wer malte die Blätter da?
Ihr lacht wohl über den Träumer,
Der Blumen im Winter sah?

Work Cited
Elsaesser, Thomas.  "Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerrilla or Guerrilla Urbanism?
The Red Army Fraction, _Germany in Autumn_ and _Death Game_." _Rouge_ 4 (2004).
<http://www.rouge.com.au/4/antigone.html>

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