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!).

Julian Radlmaier’s 2021 political comedy, Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers), is set in the late summer of 1928 in an unnamed Baltic Sea coastal village in Germany. Communism, capitalism, and fascism are in the sultry sea air, and vampires occupy the upper echelons of society. Indeed, entry into capitalism, specifically through the purchasing of stocks, is predicated on sucking the blood of an unsuspecting proletarian. In this freighted historical setting, we already know how the tale of political parody will end. In the diegetic world of Radlmaier’s film, a local Chinese man, known simply as “der Algensammler” (algae collector), becomes a scapegoat for hate against the capitalists: the proletarian crowd turns into a fascist lynch mob. The capitalists perceive the communists as a much greater threat than the fascists because, as Corinna Harfouch’s character Tante Erkentrud unapologetically declares, “Mit denen kann man wenigstens reden” (One can at least talk to them).

We evoke Radlmaier’s most recent feature to open our discussion about contemporary transnational German film and the futures it points to, because Blutsauger’s portrayal of capitalists not only as vampires but as facilitators of fascism in a historical setting also appears to speak to our era of neoliberal crises and the sweeping embrace of authoritarianism across the globe. Through the diegetic employment of an array of old and new objects and styles, the film’s anachronistic portrait of the Weimar period indirectly locates it in contemporary Germany and foregrounds the link between past and present. Despite its comedic mode and playfulness, Radlmaier’s potentially historical projection of neoliberalism’s trajectory is unmistakably bleak: the film dramatically concludes with murder by a fascist lynch mob. Beginning with a reading circle of volume one of Marx’s Capital, however, the film also reminds us of the collective possibilities that open up at any moment of political instability, including the present late neoliberal moment.

Already in the early 2000s, Lisa Duggan declared that “if the triumph of neoliberalism brings us into the twilight of equality, this is not an irreversible fate. This new world order was invented during the 1970s and 1980s, and dominated the 1990s, but it may now be unraveling—if we are prepared to seize the moment of its faltering, to promote and ensure its downfall.”

THIS CHAPTER DISCUSSES transnationalism and cosmopolitanism against the backdrop of two recent novels, Christian Kracht's Imperium (Empire, 2012) and Teju Cole's Open City (2011; 2012). Kracht's novel about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century dropout and South Seascolonizer August Engelhardt is thematically significant in this context, particularly insofar as colonialism—as a historical context marked by extremely asymmetrical transnational movements—constitutes a crucial backdrop for contemporary uses of the term. In contrast to Herrmann and Taberner in this volume, however, this chapter argues that Kracht's novel cannot therefore be called transnational in a more programmatic sense. As detailed below, the publication of Imperium unleashed a major feuilleton controversy in Germany. On the one hand, the author was accused of right-wing sympathies and racism; on the other hand, that charge was attributed to a lack of appreciation for the literary form of the novel, specifically its uses of irony. Critically engaging the terms of this debate (and thereby affirming the significance of aesthetics also for political readings of literature), my own close reading of the text suggests that the narrative voice, intertextual archive and rhetoric of Imperium's literary fantasy return audiences into a colonial loop. The ironic inflections of its German narrator's voice, I demonstrate, do not translate into a clearcut intervention against the colonial mentalities he is evoking. Despite its thematic focus on transnational movements, Imperium thus does not resonate with the, in my view, most productive layer of transnationalism in its recent conceptualizations. As developed in the central section of this paper, I understand transnationalism (in the programmatic sense, and differing from its contextualization in the introduction to this volume) as a methodological perspective that foregrounds a critique of nationalist mythologies. This perspective does not imply the insignificance of nationbuilding, but it investigates the contingent historical processes through which nations came into being, and specifically the imperialist and racist mythologies supporting the process of German nation-building in the colonial era.

With its literary failure to effectively critique these mythologies, Kracht's novel is arguably indicative also of broader challenges for contemporary German literature as produced and read in a context still marked by these legacies of imperialist (and later fascist) nation-building.

WHEN WATCHING THE EASTERN CINEMA of the Wende, one quickly notices the prominence, in several films, of actors who are primarily known for their roles in the West German oeuvre of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. These casting choices, which could hardly be neutral at that moment in history, form a productive starting point from which to explore questions of archive and intertextuality in the films of the DEFA Film Library’s retrospective, Wende Flicks: Last Films from East Germany. In approaching the films as complexly intertextual, I intend neither to reinscribe the idea of a national cinema at the expense of film production and reception’s more transnational trajectories, nor to suggest that Eastern Wende cinema only won its contours in belatedly drawing on the alternative traditions of the West’s New German Cinema. Rather, the story I would like to tell is one of cultural dialogue never entirely suppressed by the border between East and West and of DEFA directors’ engagement with tropes of New German Cinema in the broader context of European and transatlantic traditions once they were free of state censorship. But importantly, I argue that there is no single story to tell in the first place. As this contribution suggests, the appearance of Fassbinder actors in different Wende Flicks points to at least two divergent routes taken by the last generation of DEFA directors in their attempts to make sense of the Wende. The first might be termed an expansive movement toward “critical archival unification” of East and West German film history. The second was an (equally critical) reexamination of the DEFA tradition.

Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Latest from the Da-Da-R, GDR/FRG 1990) begins with the camera’s slow pan across and simultaneous zoom out of its initial close-up on a heap of prototypical GDR brown coal in the courtyard of the former prison Berlin-Köpenick. The first cast name displayed in the opening credits is that of Irm Hermann, whose role in the film is significant but secondary. Next, a cut takes us into the prison cell where the film’s two actual leads, Steffen Mensching and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, playing the clowns Meh and Weh, quietly sit in two different corners.

The representation of so-called ‘Gypsies’ (the term used to refer to Roma, the German Sinti and different travelling groups) in modern European literatures and cultures reads as a somewhat monolithic story: even more than in the case of other ‘minority’ groups, a hegemonic discourse seems to persist almost unchallenged by alternative voices or historical changes throughout the centuries. The exclusion of Roma and Sinti from the dominant culture's institutions of education has prevented the emergence of an extensive body of self-representations, and the enormous quantity of ‘Gypsy’ texts by non-‘Gypsy’ authors attests not least to the degree to which racial stereotypes are unaffected by differences in genre, political stance or historical change. This does not mean that the representation of ‘Gypsies’ is ahistorical: in the decades before and after 1800, the dominant early modern approach to ‘Gypsies’ – based on the ascription of social deviance – was replaced by an anthropological dispositif (Foucault), i.e. a set of discourses, policies and institutions gathered around the idea of ethnic and, eventually, racial identity. This modern perception, however, was informed by traditional anti-‘Gypsy’ discourse: the putative ‘anti-social’ vagabonds turned into a ‘nomad race unfit for civilization’. It was in this guise that the imaginary figure of the ‘Gypsy’ was handed down through the twentieth century. In Germany, the racist concept of the ‘uncivilized’, ‘anti-social’ nomadic people (on which Nazi ideology drew) resurfaced in the antiforeigner campaigns of the 1990s focused on the icon of the Gypsy as the quintessential stranger.

Even contemporary literature that attempts to treat the history of persecution and genocide critically seems to be overpowered by the force of this hegemonic discourse: thus, in her book Der weibliche Name des Widerstands: Sieben Berichte (Woman's Face of Resistance: Seven Reports) (1980), Marie-Thérèse Kerschbaumer treats ‘the Gypsy woman’ differently from all other (individualized) protagonists, having the narrator reflect on her inability to get over her own prejudice and her stereotypical view of ‘the Gypsy woman’. Struggling with the ‘given’ traits of the represented ‘Gypsy’, these texts show the force of the dominant anthropological discourse which constructs ‘the Gypsy’ as an eternal other to civilization and modernity.