The Past Remains in The Present, as fragmentary impressions in the imagination, as relics and recycled imagery, and as stories that reveal lessons for today. While the history film in the narrowest sense reenacts the past, with its action taking place in an earlier time period, there are feature films set in the present that explore history in a critical fashion and deserve to be examined under the rubric of the history film. Alexander Kluge’s Die Patriotin (The patriot woman, 1979) stands as a prominent example of a film with a contemporary setting that is heavily invested in an exploration of the past and how history is written and disseminated. The central figure in Kluge’s film, high-school history teacher Gabi Teichert, is dissatisfied with the limited materials available to teach her students about German history. Determined to uncover more suitable resources, Teichert takes her shovel into the forest on an archeological dig in search of what has been buried, lost, or forgotten. Dissecting history textbooks with saws and dissolving them in liquid so that she can readily digest them, Teichert seeks new ways to make history meaningful and accessible to herself and her students.

The post-Wall films under investigation here do not feature characters who interrogate German history quite so blatantly as those in Die Patriotin, nor do they display the montage principles used by Kluge to encourage audiences to participate actively in the process of historiography. What they share with Die Patriotin is the same pedagogical fervor. They look to history for lessons and guidance on what ideas deserve to be salvaged from the dustbin of history. Unlike Kluge’s avant-garde film, which tries to recover long-forgotten wishes of ordinary people and give voice to a multitude of perspectives, the post-Wall films contemplate two historical traditions to gauge their relevance for the present day.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of Communism in Europe have contributed to a growing sense that currently there is no politically viable alternative to capitalism. Living in a world in which the clear lines between bipolar superpowers have been erased and nearly every imaginable youth rebellion since 1968 has already been tried and failed to overthrow the system, what is left for an activist-minded young generation to do to eradicate social injustice?