In 1962, the signatories of the Oberhausen manifesto proclaimed the death of the old German cinema. They welcomed the collapse of the German film industry (the ill-fated UFA had folded the previous year), because it removed the economic ground for a conventional mode of film-making, thereby giving the new film a chance to come to life. Less than interesting in its actual content and rhetoric, the manifesto presented the first public and collective statement by young German film-makers in the Federal Republic. As such it has become something of a mythological point of origin for critics and historians, as if the current international celebrity of New German Cinema had evolved more or less organically from an otherwise forgotten pioneer act in the past. To return to Oberhausen in an essay on GERMANY IN AUTUMN (1978) risks participating in a similar vein of mythologising; if a continuity nevertheless is claimed, it has to be traced through the contradictions and aporias which evolutionist myths tend to elide. What might appear as a detour from the development of one kind of cinema, may in fact open up alternative routes towards a cinema different in kind.

In a study published in 1973, Michael Dost, Florian Hopf and Alexander Kluge, co-signatory and spokesman of the Oberhausen group, analyse the situation of West German cinema against the background of other European film industries and the supremacy of Hollywood. A decade after the Oberhausen manifesto, the old cinema was hardly dead; its descendants were still thriving in the ruins, competing for the ground on which the Oberhausen film-makers had hoped to rebuild an altogether new German cinema. Dost, Hopf and Kluge state the existence of two warring factions in German film production. On the one hand, there were the aesthetically unspeakable enterprises of commercial cinema - polemically dubbed Pornokultur - which barely disguised their audience appeals under such pseudo-genres as Lederhosen comedies, doctors’ romances, or housewives’ ‘reports'. On the other hand, the authors discerned a Kunsifilmkuliur struggling for economic existence as well as for an audience; works by young German film-makers, barred from access to domestic theatres, premiered instead at international film festivals in Paris, London, or Stockholm.