A RECURRING NARRATIVE APPEARS in a growing number of contemporary German films: lonely people, isolated in a technologically advanced urban environment that promises the good life but delivers no real emotional connections, desperately seek to escape social constraints and embark on a new course. Seeking both freedom and a sense of belonging, they radically break with their past and venture out in new directions with varying degrees of success. This narrative is accompanied by reflexive cinematography that highlights the protagonists’ vulnerability, sense of confinement, and desire for meaningful union with others. Three recent films demonstrate a compassion for their characters that allows viewers to question gender, ethnic, and class stereotypes and biases. Nicolette Krebitz's Wild (2016), Thomas Stuber's In den Gängen (In the Aisles, 2018), and Jan Speckenbach's Freiheit (Freedom, 2017) exhibit the tender gaze as defined by Muriel Cormican, a way of framing the characters that “does not condescend or reify … and invites the viewer to cast a compassionate rather than a cold eye on others.” The tender gaze in film “imbues the people and events depicted with a multidimensional complexity, decenters dominant cultural perspectives, and foregrounds anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, anti-homophobic, and anti-ableist heuristics in encounters with the other.” These realistic portrayals in the films examined here are marked by empathy toward flawed but generally decent individuals who display transgressive behavior including bestiality, recklessness, secret lives, self-preservation at all costs, and suicide. The combination of emotional content, narrative gaps, and reflexive camerawork helps viewers to feel empathy and understanding while also providing the distance needed to think critically. Jennifer Marston William has convincingly argued that emotional responses, and specifically empathy, are not divorced from cognitive thought, but rather they have the potential to elicit “prosocial effects of reduced prejudice and increased compassion that come from practicing perspective-taking at the movies.” The films under investigation employ techniques associated with Brechtian alienation effects while also affording opportunities for strong emotional reactions, and it is the balancing act between compassionate empathy and alienated distance that makes them so effective and contributes to the tender gaze.

In this essay I argue that the escape narratives reflect a concern with broadening acceptable notions of the relationship between self and community, freedom, and acceptance of difference.

Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary, this chapter focuses particularly on the philosopher’s key concept of “redemption.” A fascinating yet significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates to the power of the literary imagination and becomes increasingly important in his consideration of solidarity and social justice. We will explore the development of this concept in Rorty’s oeuvre with particular reference to John Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Uniting the work of Rorty and Boyne, we will argue, is a critique of standard religious practice and an affirmation of the human as ultimately redemptive.

DESPITE THE COLLAPSE of the SED regime and unification, the German Democratic Republic continues to live on in the social imaginary, especially in contemporary German cinema. Since 1989 a plethora of feature films set in the GDR have graced the silver screen, and while they employ different perspectives, conventions, and aesthetic approaches, they share a fundamental interest in the past that coalesces them into a genre. Genre is notoriously difficult to characterize definitively. Predictable storylines, recurring characters, and familiar visual cues form a distinct connection between texts, but “genres do not consist only of films, they consist also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema, and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (Neale 2000, 46). Genre encompasses more than a set of texts with shared formal characteristics and themes. It is also a discursive network, in which the expectations of multiple and often competing stakeholders (filmmakers, viewers, and critics) are presented, interpreted, negotiated, and contested. Genre is distinguished by a continuous process of transformation, which entails a messy course of articulation, disruption, and renewal rather than a smooth evolution. Rick Altman (1999, 195) has suggested that “genres are regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric. As such, genres operate like nations and other complex communities. Perhaps genres can even teach us about nations.” The history-film genre can be seen as a bellwether of how the German nation seeks to integrate competing discourses on the GDR past into a single unified social fabric.

Over the last few decades the history film has gained increasing credence as a valid source of historical knowledge. Robert Rosenstone (1992, 1138) offers a broad definition of the history-film genre by suggesting that its primary salient feature “is its willingness to engage the discourse of history—that is, the facts, the issues, and the arguments raised in other historical works.” Like many historians and cultural critics, however, Rosenstone (1995, 11–12) presents a twofold classification that segregates what he calls standard or mainstream history films from the serious inquiry found in postmodern history films.

Nineteenth-Century French Philosopher Ernest Renan suggested that the violence and traumatic events upon which nations are formed must be forgotten if unity is ever to take hold among competing factions that make up the whole. Forgetting past transgressions constitutes a logical step for bringing former adversaries together. Such willful amnesia allows rival groups to establish a clean slate from which to build a common future. Such a simple agenda, however, is fraught with difficulties. At stake is not merely what should be forgotten, but who chooses, and what criteria the past will be judged by. If social accord requires the mindful elimination of past conflict, what happens to the principles of justice, responsibility, and Wiedergutmachung, the straightforward German word for reparations that literally means making things good again? Can a nation afford to forget past crimes and wrongs, and won’t they simply return in symbolic forms and in very concrete disputes that demand attention? Nation building, like writing history, requires equal parts of remembering and forgetting, but acknowledging this truism does little to solve the inherent problems of dealing with a collective past. Part of the quandary is that amnesia and anamnesis are solutions to competing agendas; the former works toward unanimity by erasing all evidence of conflict (hence its related term, amnesty ), and the latter strives for truth and reconciliation by exposing areas of dispute.

During the Wende, the transitional period between the collapse of the GDR in 1989 and the beginning of a unified FRG in 1990, the task of forgetting was not undertaken equally by the former East and former West.

On 3 October 1990 The Cold War officially ended on German soil. With the demise of the German Democratic Republic and the emergence of a unified state in the form of the Federal Republic of Germany, not only the Cold War but in some ways also the Second World War faded into history. The fall of the Berlin Wall and unification allowed the postwar era to take on the contours of a completed historical period that occupies the immediate past and provides an epochal buffer zone between the present and the Third Reich. The year 1989/90 marked a profound shift in international relations and allowed the postwar era to supersede the Third Reich as the defining moment in recent German history. The signing of the 4+2 treaty implied that the international community had formally pardoned Germany and, to more cynical minds, had lifted its sentence of postwar division as retribution for the atrocities committed under National Socialism. International approval of plans for unification implicitly paved the way for a redefinition of Germany as a reasonably contrite former combatant and morally acceptable modern state. But how can a divided country whose common jingoist, genocidal past has rendered nationalism deeply suspect begin to conceive of itself as a viable and future-oriented unified nation?

Divided Germany, more than any other country, marked the battle lines between the competing superpowers. In official rhetoric, the FRG imagined itself as a prosperous, peace-loving democracy repelling the Bolshevist threat and pitted against the rival GDR, which in turn saw itself as the showcase of the socialist planned economy and the bulwark against capitalism’s fascist legacy. Little of the GDR’s political and social institutions, artistic heritage, everyday culture, and value systems, or even material goods and architecture survived the unification process, which some critics have labeled an annexation.

The Portrayal of GDR History in motion pictures made since 1989/90 has sparked lively debates in the trade press, in nationally renowned newspapers and magazines, and among leading cultural and political figures. Commentators have repeatedly and often passionately questioned who has the right to tell the history of the GDR, Easterners or Westerners? Those who lived through it and can vouch for the authenticity of their story based on eyewitness experience or those who never took part in the events and therefore have the distance to look back on history and reflect upon it objectively? Without falling into the trap of essential-ism that would privilege one voice over another based on some perceived innate truth (or arguing that history can only be told by contemporaries), it is important to note that in the Berlin Republic the position of former GDR citizens is structurally inferior to that of Westerners, and that the debate about a filmmaker’s place of origin is fundamentally about this inequality. Contentious film reviews in the trade press are symptomatic of the larger debates over the emerging GDR memory landscape.

Already at the time of the unification process, then Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble stated for the record that the West did not view the East as an equal partner but more as the prodigal son returning to the fold under the protection of the righteous father. Schäuble maintained:

Entering into the union as the wayward state, the GDR and its citizens were given and accepted the mandate to shed their sovereignty and identity and adopt Western standards. This process of assimilation is far from over, and the distance between Easterners and Westerners continues today.

Twenty Years After the Fall of Communism, forty years after the student revolution, and sixty years after the founding of the Federal Republic, Germany has been afloat in anniversaries that beckon contemplation of the nation’s development since the end of the Second World War. Cinema has contributed to these commemorations with films that scrutinize postwar German history and the yearning for a just civil society. By telling stories about a shared past, cinema functions as a public forum for debates on national history: where the divided nation has been, what struggles it has won and lost, and what dreams the country has for itself. Not only does cinema satisfy the pressing need to understand how the nation became what it is now, but by focusing on a common past it helps to create a shared identity and sense of purpose, a collectivity that seems elusive in the present.

In a 2008 interview for Deutschland Radio, director Christian Pet-zold maintained that despite all the new technological advances that provide people with an insular mediated experience, the collective aspect of cinema would win out in the end: “Cinema is in essence the story of a community. Cinema belongs to the city. In essence, cinema belongs to the public realm.” Petzold acknowledged that in the near future cinema would most likely have a difficult time competing with computers and the Internet, but he argued that it would survive: “I believe that people will not endure individuality. I believe that they like to dream collectively once in a while.” Cinema’s affinity to collective dreaming and its ability to examine social issues through the lens of fantasy make it a viable and vital institution to mediate conflicts in the process of imagining the nation.

The collective experience of watching a film together in a public space gives viewers the opportunity to participate in a vision of reality that transcends the individual. Cinema holds utopian potential as a vehicle to overcome a myriad of boundaries and connect disparate individuals into something larger than the self. In the post-cold-war era, in which common political beliefs seem beyond reach, old ideals have lost their familiar contours, technological advances in communication make physical proximity unnecessary, and human encounters are increasingly mediated, there is a feeling that the collective has changed beyond recognition. How does the nation stay connected both politically and interpersonally?

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?