1968 as a German Political and Cinematic Event

The Year 1968, or rather the era of what Fredric Jameson influentially periodized as the long sixties, changed the world in countless ways, politically and socially. Anti-colonial and anti-imperial wars were being waged around the globe, in particular in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The protracted US-Vietnam War was emblematic of these selfliberation and self-determination struggles, and social movements sprung up internationally to protest it. In the United States, the civil rights movement challenged racism and demanded equal rights. The Black Panthers inspired countless other groups, including the American Indian Movement, a Native American advocacy group; the Brown Berets, a Chicano rights group; I Wor Kuen, an Asian-American rights group; the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group; and the Young Patriots, a poor and working- class white group. Many of these organizations came together to form the Rainbow Coalition, through the organizing efforts of Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, of José Cha-Cha Jiménez of the Young Lords, and of members of the Young Patriots Organization. The 1969 Stonewall Riots led to the first Christopher Street Day and gay pride protests in 1970. In European social movements, solidarity with third world politics played a key role. Additionally, feminists challenged patriarchal structures and sexism, also among the left, demanding changes in the workplace and at home, which led to the Wages for Housework campaigns of the 1970s. Solidarity alliances across classes were crucial domestically as well, as student protests and labor struggles joined forces, most notably but not solely in France.

In addition to these political changes, what we will call ‘68 here but will construe throughout this introduction and volume as the “long 1968” was also decidedly a media event. Graphic, gruesome images from the Vietnam War were broadcast on television on the nightly news and printed as photographs in the daily newspapers. Most famous among them, Eddie Adams’ photograph, “Saigon Execution,” shows South Vietnamese General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, chief of the National Police, firing his pistol into the head of suspected Việt Cộng officer Nguyễn Vén Lém (also known as Bay Lop) on a Saigon street, February 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive.

Few directors in German film history have enjoyed as long and prolific a career as Klaus Lemke. With almost fifty films to his name, Lemke, born in 1940, is still going strong. His most recent feature, Bad Girl Avenue (2018), premiered at the Munich Film Festival, fifty years after his debut feature, 48 Stunden bis Acapulco (48 Hours to Acapulco, 1967), screened in Munich’s Filmcasino on November 30, 1967. Over the course of his long career, Lemke has increasingly established himself as one of German cinema’s great Einzelkämpfer—a lone warrior who acts as a veritable gadfly to the German film industry, which he never tires of attacking with public stunts (such as baring his behind on the red carpet at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival to show what he thought of the festival after it once more rejected one of his films) and polemic salvos that target industry functionaries as well as his peers with gleeful irreverence.

One does not have to agree with each of Lemke’s positions vis-à-vis the history of German cinema to appreciate the relentlessness with which he has been trying simultaneously to realize his singular vision of cinema and life—where one is inextricable from the other and both are deeply embedded in a (fever) dream of America and its cinema of physis—and to fight what in his view is a well-codified left-liberal attitude that has dominated (West) German film at least since Alexander Kluge and others penned the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962). Both his films and his polemics seek to clear the path for a different cinema, for a different life—a cinema and a life dominated not by a politically correct consensus but by dissensus, especially with regard to the state as a regulator of an aesthetic regime that ends up delimiting what can and cannot be seen and sensed.Instead of making films of representative value—films whose value derives from the fact that they are about a more or less weighty topic about which they seek to edify their viewers—Lemke, from his earliest short films on, preferred to make films about nothing else but an attitude towards life, towards how to live life.

A Time to Come

What, then, is the Berlin School? I suppose it is possible that even at this stage in our discussion we have not arrived at a clear-cut answer to this question. Throughout the previous analyses, I have repeatedly suggested that one of the most interesting aspects of these films is their ability to force the viewers to confront something that is real but that usually remains outside of our day-to-day purview because our perceptual apparatus habitually tends, or is made, to block out such registers of social reality. I would be content if readers were to take this as my answer to the question of what the Berlin School is—an answer, nevertheless, that for me is marked by the same reservation with which Bazin viewed any definition of Neorealismi that “is based, to the exclusion of all else, on what is only one of its present aspects,” for doing so “is to submit [Neorealism's] future potential to a priori restrictions” (“In Defense of Rossellini,” 95). This is why I not only resisted the impetus to provide a list of stylistic criteria that would define the Berlin School, but also believe that any attempt to delineate the essence of the Berlin School with such a list—including the long take and its emphasis on temporal duration, precise framing, deliberate pacing of elliptical and fragmentary narration, sparse usage of extradiegetic music, and so on—presents us with the problem that any number of these characteristics can also be found in many earlier German films, not to mention contemporary films from around the globe.

Unique among the Berlin School directors, Valeska Grisebach, born in 1968 in the Northern German city-state of Bremen, actually grew up in Berlin. After studying philosophy and Germanistik in Berlin and Munich, she enrolled at the film academy in Vienna. Counting Austrian directors Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl among her teachers, she also befriended key members of new Austrian cinema, including Barbara Albert and Jessica Hausner; the latter, according to Grisebach, continues to be one of her main interlocutors. The importance of Grisebach's Austrian connection for her work has not gone unnoticed. In his insightful essay on her second feature, Sehnsucht, Robert Weixelbaumer suggests that her work combines “the clear consciousness of form and the intellectual sternness of the Berlin School with the cultural-sociological interest in exploring the petit-bourgeois milieus of Austria, which fueled the films by Michael Haneke, Ulrich Seidl and eventually also the filmmakers associated with the production company coop 99.” Yet, in contrast to the tendency of her Austrian colleagues, Grisebach's interest, Weixelbaumer argues, “does not lie with the multifaceted proof of some theses but, in contrast, with her cinematic world's ability to offer resistance against preformatted thoughts, including one's own.”

Absolute Refusal

In this penultimate chapter, I want to organize my discussion around a few select sequences from each of Ulrich Köhler's three features to date: Bungalow, which focuses on Paul (Lennie Burmeister), a young man who out of the blue “decides” not to rejoin his military comrades and instead heads back home to the empty bungalow of his parents, located in the rolling hills by Marburg, where he subsequently bides his time without a clear sense of purpose; Montag kommen die Fenster, which centers on Nina (Isabelle Menke), who one day “decides” to abandon temporarily her husband and preschool daughter and to roam the woods surrounding Kassel, another provincial city; and Schlafkrankheit, which loosely revolves around Ebbo Velten (Pierre Bokma), a German medical doctor working in Cameroon who “decides” not to follow his wife back to Wetzlar, Germany, to live together with their teenage daughter (from whom they have been separated for a number of years).