Memory can play tricks on us so that what gets stuck in people’s minds is beyond our control. Therefore when talking about German cinema perhaps it makes more sense to first see which images have become engraved in the minds not just of Germans, but of the world at large. When Hollywood is mentioned, for example, the image that automatically comes to mind is Bogart looking into Ingrid Bergman’s eyes. For the French, Belmondo will always be sauntering along the Champs-Elysées with Jean Seberg, while for Italians, Mastroianni will be gazing at Anita Ekberg romping in the Fontana di Trevi.
Each country has cinematographic moments such as these, which immediately appear in the inner eye. So what do people see when they think of German cinema? What has become entrenched in their minds as regards its first century? Fade in – to the shadow of Nosferatu flitting up a staircase; the futuristic skyline of Metropolis; the horrific expression of Peter Lorre in the mirror when he discovers the M on his shoulder; Romy Schneider as Sissy, suffering for Emperor and Fatherland; the little drummer Oskar Matzerath whose scream shatters glass; the mad eyes of Fitzcarraldo forcing his ship over the mountain; the two angels in the sky over Berlin listening to people’s thoughts; and perhaps also Hanna Schygulla as Lili Marleen in front of the barracks, in front of the gate. Then the history of German cinema would seem to break off. The moments with which German cinema is identified worldwide can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Silent films, Murnau and Fritz Lang, a couple of Heimat films, then the New German Film, Schlöndorff, Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder. Then nothing. Fade out.
Looking back to the turning point
Before going forward, one must perhaps first look back to a decisive date in recent German film history, that turning point which separates the present from the past. On 10 June 1982 Rainer Werner Fassbinder was found dead in his Munich apartment. He was only 37 years old, yet he had already made a good 40 films – and there is general agreement about the fact that German cinema took a long time to recover from his death. With Fassbinder’s departure, an era in the New German Film came to an end, although it was considered at the time to have just reached its zenith. It is useful to recall the international successes enjoyed by German cinema then. Fassbinder had won the Golden Bear in Berlin in February 1982 for Veronika Voss. In late May, Werner Herzog received the director’s prize in Cannes for Fitzcarraldo. In September, Wim Wenders was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice for The State of Things. The previous year it had been won by Margarethe von Trotta for her film Marianne and Juliane. Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot had been released in the USA in 1982 and the following year was nominated six times for an Oscar.
A stream of prizes in the early 1980s
The stream of prizes had begun in 1980 with an Oscar for Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and it reached its full force and its end in 1982 with the awards at all the three big film festivals. After that, German cinema was scarcely noticed for two decades. And it is a bitter irony of film history that two weeks before Fassbinder, Germany’s only world film star Romy Schneider died at the age of 43. Fade out.
Yet it is by no means the case that after Fassbinder’s death nothing more was to happen in German cinema. All the subsequent successes, however, were restricted to Germany – that is, if one disregards the fact that Germany exported two talents, Wolfgang Petersen and Roland Emmerich, who made Hollywood films – Air Force One and Independence Day – that were more American than what Americans were themselves shooting. Nor should we forget cameraman Michael Ballhaus, who, once in Hollywood, perfected the round track he had tried and tested with Fassbinder and with it captured, among other things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s magic in a unique way. Then suddenly, ten years ago now, a red-haired girl ran and ran to change the course of history. Tom Tykwer’s film Run Lola Run was the first in a long time to also enthral viewers outside Germany, and the image of Franka Potente’s fiery red hair blowing in the wind sent a spark of inspiration through German cinema.
A bit more time was required, however, before this stimulus could unfold its full force, but since then, people have had to reckon with German cinema again. Suddenly it was also producing the kind of images that become engraved in people’s memories, and not just inside Germany’s borders: the bust of Lenin hovering past the woman who had slept through the fall of the Berlin Wall; the white woman lost Nowhere in Africa and trying, far from her fascist home country, to get by with her family; the young Turkish woman who does everything in her power to run Head On into a wall; the Stasi man who walks up and down inside the chalk outline of the bugged flat below while trying to listen in on The Life of Others. Fassbinder seemed to have finally been overcome, his death to have actually become a kind of watershed in German cinema.
Just as Tykwer had instinctively sensed an energy engendered in reunited Berlin which flowed into Run Lola Run, so too Wolfgang Becker found just the right tone for that reunification in Good Bye, Lenin! The tragi-comedy about a woman who was in a coma during the demise of the GDR and whose children lovingly try to delude her into thinking that everything is still the same, succeeded in making this decisive chapter in German history altogether palatable both at home and abroad, earning it a European Film Prize, and above all awakening that curiosity about German cinema which seemed to have completely petered out.
Lola, Lenin and the early morning call
One should not underestimate the extent to which such successes functioned as a kind of signal, for since then, not only has one international prize followed another, you even get the impression that Germany has made a reappearance on the film map, with people even curious about those works which may not reach a large audience, but which are none the less expressive about the state of things.
And here too, we experienced one of those typical build-ups of international attention for German cinema. Only one month after the premiere of Good Bye, Lenin! at the Berlinale, Caroline Link won an Oscar for Nowhere in Africa, almost a quarter of a century after the last German Oscar for The Tin Drum (and only seven years after her first nomination for Beyond Silence). Since then, the run of successes has continued: in Venice in 2003 with a prize for Katja Riemann in Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse, in 2004 with a Golden Bear for Fatih Akin’s Head On, in 2005 in Berlin with a director’s and actor’s prize for Marc Rothemund’s Sophie Scholl, in 2006 in Berlin with a Bear for Jürgen Vogel in Free Will and another for Moritz Bleibtreu in Elementary Particles, in 2007 with a Bear for Nina Hoss in Christian Petzold’s Yella, and best screenplay prize for Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven in Cannes and at the European Film Awards – and above all, another Oscar, for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Stasi drama The Life of Others. And although an Oscar went to Austria in 2008 for Stefan Ruzowitzky’s The Counterfeiters, German involvement in that film was so great that we have every reason to celebrate as well.
Outstanding, but less visible
The strange thing is that all these prizes are just the tip of the iceberg. So this is perhaps the moment to focus more closely on all those filmmakers who, even without international prizes, have achieved a standard that can certainly compare, by capturing something whose significance extends beyond Germany: Dominik Graf and his police thriller, Doris Dörrie and her curiosity about new lifeworlds, Detlev Buck and his weird northern German humour, Andreas Dresen and his precise view of eastern-German reality, Hans-Christian Schmid and his tender explorations of emotion, Christian Petzold with his almost French view of the world, Helmut Dietl and his sense for classical comedy, Romuald Karmakar and his detailed probing of the past, Oskar Roehler and his “dance of death” of the emotions. And not forgetting outsiders like Christoph Schlingensief, Herbert Achternbusch and Rosa von Praunheim, whose radical stubbornness provided German cinema with something like frictional heat in those days when it seemed that nothing was being made other than comic films about agreeable relationship.
At the present moment, too, there are cinematic fronts whose course is leading our interest in other directions. In recent years, for example, a loose group has formed to jointly oppose the consensus. It is called the “Berlin School” and stands for a view of the present that rejects all obligingness and, as a result, presents other sides of the country: among them are Christoph Hochhäusler with I Am Guilty, Benjamin Heisenberg with Sleeper, Valeska Grisebach with Longing, and Angela Schanelec with Marseille. Notice has already been taken of them in France and Britain as independent voices in German cinema. Which is really what it’s all about: interest in a country that disappeared off the film map after Fassbinder’s death. So possibly it is now time to leave that year 1982 behind, for suddenly German cinema not only has a past on which it can draw, but above all a present.
Michael Althen is one of Germany’s most renowned film critics. He was co-director of the documentary “Eye to Eye – All About German Film”, which was premiered at the 2008 Berlinale.
