It's Show Time

It all started with CABARET … suddenly, the Third Reich had become a subject for feature films, in fact, for a while it seemed to be, especially for European filmmakers, the subject. Luchino Visconti's THE DAMNED, Ingmar Bergman's THE SERPENT's EGG, Bernardo Bertolucci's THE CONFORMIST, Lina Wertmuller's SEVEN BEAUTIES, Louis Malle's LACOMBE LUCIEN, Lilian Cavani's THE NIGHT PORTER, François Truffaut's THE LAST METRO, Joseph Losey's M. KLEIN: the 1970s were the decade of films exploring what Susan Sontag had termed “fascinating fascism.” The combination of kitsch and camp, the cult of death and the ambiguous celebration of style which had made Nazi imagery, colors and iconography lead a second life, first in garish comics and then in coffee-table books, surfaced in the movie mainstream, to join the growing number of biographies, monographs and scholarly publications devoted to the period.

German directors were at first slow to catch the trend. For obvious reasons, the topic carried a special burden, not to be shouldered lightly or irresponsibly. But in 1979, when HOLOCAUST, the six-part television series made by NBC provoked unprecedented public commotion in West Germany, filmmakers felt duty-bound to respond to or protest against what Edgar Reitz, in a memorable phrase, was to call “the Americans … taking away our history.” After Hans Jürgen Syberberg's OUR HITLER (1977) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's DESPAIR (1978), there appeared in quick succession Helma Sanders-Brahms’ GERMANY PALE MOTHER 1979), Alexander Kluge's DIE PATRIOTIN (THE PATRIOT, 1979), Volker Schlöndorff's THE TIN DRUM (1979), Fassbinder's LILI MARLEEN (1980), and finally, in 1984, Edgar Reitz’ eleven-part HEIMAT. These are still among the titles most immediately associated with the New German Cinema, its identity apparently rooted in a brooding return to Germany's troubled past.

But clearly, more was involved than Germans claiming the right to speak up for themselves, and of coming to terms with Hitler's legacy. At stake seemed to be history itself, and the cinema's way of dealing with it. What mattered, many of these films argued, was the subjective factor, the individual experience, with the cinema only truthful where it concentrated on the personal, on private, often sexual obsessions, while the public sphere remained a colorful but often clichéd backdrop.