Introduction: The “Missing People” in the New German Discourse Comedy

In Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze famously observed that “the people are missing” in postwar Western cinema. This is in contrast to “classical cinema”: in the earlier twentieth century, the modern medium of film had been closely associated with the modern phenomenon of the crowd on more than one level. Film and cultural theory circled around the moral dangers and political potentials of collective reception, and on-screen crowds featured prominently in the political aesthetics of socialism as well as fascism and nation-building Hollywood. In the aftermath of Hitler and Stalin, however, these crowds all but disappeared in Western political cinema: visually imagining the masses as a collective actor became exceedingly difficult. As indicated by several contributions across this volume, the rupture diagnosed by Deleuze continues to reverberate until today. In the 2010s, to be sure, the crowd had a major comeback in cultural theory, sparked by circulating media images of emerging forms of transnational collective activism: Tahrir square, Gezi Park, Occupy. But even as scholars ranging from Judith Butler to Brian Massumi, Jodi Dean, Joshua Clover, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri newly set out to theorize the “political potential” of collective assembly, this resurgence of interest in a progressive crowd aesthetics has remained overshadowed by the parallel rise of right-wing claims to embody the people. With an eye to the German anti-immigrant organization Pegida, Butler repeatedly reminds us that a “surging multitude” of publicly assembled bodies would “include lynch mobs, anti-Semitic or racist or fascist congregations.” Now in the 2020s, we may think of a new generation of activist movements, prominently including Black Lives Matter, while events such as the Capitol Riot in the U.S. seem to have further cemented the spectral superimposition of the activist people with the fascist mob.

Julian Radlmaier’s Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (Self-criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, 2017) tackles the question of how to cinematically reimagine activist, potentially revolutionary assembly against the backdrop of these concerns. On the plot level, Selbstkritik probes the possibilities of worker organization on the “apple plantation OKLAHOMA,” located somewhere between contemporary East Germany and Franz Kafka’s and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s ambiguously heterotopic America. Radlmaier’s film quotes these two intertexts with a poster on a street corner as well as an extradiegetic intertitle culminating in the promise that fascinated Kafka’s protagonist: “Jeder ist willkommen!” (All are welcome!).