Introduction:

Revolutionizing German Society and Film

The relationship between the deutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb) and the West German student movement was a contentious one. That might come as a surprise, considering that the dffb was founded on the heels of the infamous 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto, when twenty-six West German filmmakers rebelliously declared “the old film is dead” and professed the necessity for West German films free of conventions and commercial influence. The institutional effects of the Oberhausen Manifesto were the creation of state funding for film and the creation of three film programs:the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (School of Design Ulm, hfg), led by Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, and Detten Schleiermacher in 1962, which would close due to financial problems in 1968, as well as the dffb in West Berlin and the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich, hff), both founded in 1966.

According to Hans-Rüdiger Minow, a member of the dffb’s first cohort, he and his fellow students did not identify with the Oberhausen signatories.Directors such as Kluge and Reitz were nearly twenty years older than Minow, who began his studies at age twenty-two and found that the topics and conventions of Young German Cinema were just not sufficiently political for his cohort. While Fabian Tietke acknowledges the ideological break between the generations on the dffb’s website, he does not focus as much on politics as Minow, who states, “there were points of contact to the political interests we had. But that wasn’t decisive. … Rather, it became evident that the coalition failed at the very moment when political interests were at the forefront of a situation instead of libertarian interests, like in the case of the Vietnam War” (Minow). Thus, Minow’s statement points to a gap between philosophy and praxis, not in terms of filmmaking but of political action. The Oberhausen directors may have strived for social changes that reflected more liberal art and lifestyles, but they were not as committed to effecting concrete political change as Minow and his colleagues.