3. Kluge's Assault on History
Trauma, Testimony, and Difference in The Patriot
The task of the materialist historian is to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.
—WALTER BENJAMIN
I don't believe in dialectics as a mode of abstract thought. I believe in a dialectic we can feel with our fingertips.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
INTRODUCTION
Benjamin's desire for explosive historiography describes the project of many New German Cinema directors. It operated in the different appearances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony discussed in the Introduction. Literal "blasts" occur in a wide array of other films—not surprising for a movement concerned with World War II and its aftermath. Even those not set on the battlefield dramatize the explosive efforts needed to force Germany to come to terms with the past: Germany, Pale Mother, Lili Marleen, and Maria Braun all have explosions that connect their female protagonists to war and, in the case of Maria Braun, to memory and forgetfulness. As Benjamin makes clear, these blasts function as attacks on the materials of history itself: its myths, its omissions, its tools, its institutional supports, and the many pieces that go missing.
Benjamin's program is well suited to almost all of the socially and politically motivated directors of the movement, but his ideas reverberate with special force in the work of Alexander Kluge. At a formal level alone, the director's strategies can be called explosive: the collage-like structures of films like The Patriot and The Power of Emotion tear apart diegetic settings and narrative structures, interrupting them with intertitles, oral disposition, extradiegetic inserts, and with a provocative porousness between documentary and fiction. Kluge's cinema—as well as his creative and theoretical writings—offers a veritable glut of visual and acoustic objets trouvés, citations of the known and unknown, artifacts of high and less-than-high
In keeping with Kluge's punning rendition of materialist dialectics, there is a pressing, insistent physicality to the pieces that constitute his collage-like works both thematically and formally. They take form in the stereoscopic views, tinted film footage, and discussions of obsolete scrap metal in The Blind Director, the knee and the bush that witness battles from the eastern front in World War II, the elephants in Artists Under the Big Top, whose memory of a deadly circus fire is as weighty as the imprisoned beasts themselves. With The Patriot—and the questions it poses about history, survival, and bodies—its material objects function as witnesses of the past, texts upon which personal and public stories are marked. In that regard, they serve as physical reminders of the endurability of that past, literalizing its ongoing presence. Kluge's obsession with blasting open seemingly sealed, impermeable narratives and histories (and constructing new stories from their remains) continues in The Power of Emotion. Here, bodies are actants operating in larger economies of emotion and commerce such as opera and prostitution. The film's sustained focus on opera brings music into the spotlight more than The Patriot did (in a way, The Patriot is a prelude to The Power of Emotion, providing tools with which the latter film may itself be "blasted open").
Both films devote considerable energy to human bodies and how histories are inscribed on them or brought into being through them. Given Kluge's interest in materialism and materiality, that emphasis is hardly surprising. Yet both his theoretical work and his film work construct human bodies problematically, particularly when national, ethnic, and, especially, gendered features are involved.
The Patriot and The Power of Emotion examine the question of history through speaking and singing bodies, respectively. Of special concern to The Patriot is the speech of survivors, those who experienced trauma, and to an extent, the film proposes traumatic representation as its strategy of stylized remembrance. Just as we traced Peer Raben's interest in modernist shock back to interwar modernism, Kluge's focus on trauma draws our attention to shock's aftereffects, situating his concerns within post war scenarios. That movement away from shock is evidenced in his emphasis on bodies that endure different forms of trauma, a focus that raises the question of survival, which in turn is intimately tied to knowledge, power, and privilege. The Patriot seems to construct new forms of remembrance through speaking witnesses and the wounds of traumatized bodies, suggestive of the oral histories used to recount the Shoah. Yet its critics have
TEACHERS, CRITICS, AND CORPORALS:
HISTORY IN A BLENDER
Hessian high school history teacher Gabi Teichert is one of Kluge's most endearing characters. She graces the cover of Rainer Lewandoski's Die Filme von Alexander Kluge, and Anton Kaes devotes a chapter to her in From Hitler to Heimat."Gabi," as she is usually called, makes her first cameo in Germany in Autumn as an archaeologist trying to extract secrets from German soil. The next year, she struggles "to present history in a patriotic fashion" in her own feature. In The Patriot, Gabi Teichert is the historical materialist incarnate, armed with a pickaxe and torchlight, battling wintry ice and storms to get at "better materials" of German history. In her underground study, the teacher takes saws, drills, and mallets to books, literally attacking les grands récits she deems inadequate to the task of a "patriotic representation of history." (Books are, after all, history's "byproducts," as she tells a bewildered party member at an actual Social Democrat convention.) Gabi's zeal to get at this history ends up distracting and tiring her: she is less able to function at school and grows increasingly detached. Over the course of the film, her experiences are constantly interrupted by various nondiegetic story fragments, old drawings, photographs, and manipulated film footage; one of the few unifying tropes of the film is Kluge's voice-over. The Patriot ends on a quasi-upbeat note on New Year's Day, with Gabi optimistically (naively?) facing the upcoming year. After this, the film fades to video blue.
Clearly Gabi's quest responds to Benjamin's call for history-making as a form of critical archaeology. But she does more than that. Gabi joins any number of female characters in the New German Cinema intent on piecing together histories from leftover pieces of the past: modern Trümmerfrauen, the women who sifted through rubble of the war for useful building materials. To be sure, actual Trümmerfrauen conducted their work with little interest in correcting history, but rather out of sheer survival. Their iconographic role as figures rebuilding "Germany" was potent enough for an entire genre of films to emerge around them in the late 1940s and, a full generation later, the New German Cinema would reference both the Trümmerfrauen and the Trümmerfilm in Germany, Pale Mother, Maria Braun, The Patriot, and other films. Real Trümmerfrauen joined fictional female
Post-1968 German cinema features as many excavations as it does explosions. Perhaps most famous is Sonja in Michael Verhoeven's Das Schreckliche Mädchen / The Nasty Girl (1990), who digs into the local archives for a school essay, "My Hometown During the Third Reich," and exposes her town's complicity with the Nazis (like most of Verhoeven's work, The Nasty Girl is based on actual events). The guarded vaults of Sonja's town library and records are clear references to institutionally suppressed stories and spaces. Gabi Teichert tries to "dig up" materials of Germany's past, turning to what lies literally buried in German soil (in doing this she turns the Nazi worship of "blood and soil" on its head). If in the end Verhoeven's Sonja uncovers more useable material than Gabi does, each is still ostracized by her community for having made the effort.
In a more masculine vein, Benjamin likened his work to that of an "engineer" who "builds" as he "blasts."[2] Kluge similarly referred to his films as "construction sites,"[3] no different from the work of those who build railroads and bridges or who found cities, except, as he said, that he does not use straight lines. Lines create order, tradition, and direction, paving the way for cause and effect, linear logic, and teleologically driven stories/ histories / constructions. Not surprisingly, organizing centers are hard to find in Kluge's work, and he repeatedly asserts that his films are incomplete and must be filled in or "constructed" by readers/critics/viewers. Narrative scraps and stories disperse, repeat, and interweave among themselves. This was so much the case with The Power of Emotion that reviewers in Germany complained they could not locate a "story" at all, to which Kluge replied that, on the contrary, there were twenty-six—deploying the ironic statistics that run through his work.
Gabi pursues Kluge's interest in the "ruins that have become treasures" most obviously in terms of what Germany has buried in its violent past and its equally violent attempts to keep it covered—the historical issue so many Young German and New German Cinema directors confronted. But Kluge's emphasis on excavation, on bringing ruins to light, means not only recovering repressed materials, but scrutinizing them in a new light and transforming trash into tools. Like Benjamin, he shuns large, institutionalized artifacts in favor of banal objects like abandoned buildings, small city streets, toys, fairy tales, wishes, worn-out images, and old pieces of music.
These, he felt, were the tools out of which counter-histories could be produced. To introduce repressed memories and buried forms meant the possibility of recharging those meanings, even of changing the contexts into which they might now be placed. Given the similarity of Kluge's interests to Benjamin's, it is hardly incidental that the director relies heavily on metaphors of verticality and depth, which were common in modernist epistemology (psychoanalysis, realist theories of photographic technology, and so on). Kluge uses them to describe Gabi's efforts, in which the character assumes some form of exegetic "truth" might be found beneath layers of distortion and disguise. So infused is The Patriot with Gabi's efforts to excavate and uncover that at one point the film asks the question of how deep into the earth one may legally dig.[4] Once more, taking his lead from Benjamin, Kluge says, "What had been mere commodities for earlier times are for the amateur archaeologists who dig them out, treasures," a point Miriam Hansen has developed. She writes that Kluge's films "engage in salvaging historical rubble from the drift of amnesia, taking on objects as cumbersome as the battle of Stalingrad" or as small as the dead soldier's knee that narrates The Patriot, exemplifying what she calls "events breaking into discourse." "The method," she continues, "is allegorical … wresting fragments from petrified contexts and inserting them into a new discourse while preserving their strange and jarring character."[5]
Ruins have fascinated Kluge since his first short film, Brutality in Stone, which opens on the architectural debris of Nazi meeting spots in and around Nuremberg. Their function as material witnesses is confirmed by the accompanying voice-over: "The deserted structures of the Nationalist Socialist Party reactivate, as stone witnesses, the memory of that epoch, which ended in the most horrible catastrophe of German history." It is only superficially contradictory to say that ruins show the transitory nature of social and political systems as well as the capacity of these systems to endure. Much the same thing was the case for Benjamin writing before the Shoah, for whom nineteenth-century bourgeois culture was a chief reference point, as Susan Buck-Morss stresses in her analysis of the Passagenwerk.[6] The same tension is evident in his rumination on history, in which ruins offer the uncontestable evidence of the victor's spoils and also the "barbarous document of history." Benjamin makes the point in his famous analysis of Paul Klee's 1920 painting "Angelus Novus," the "angel of history" who casts a slightly terrified backward glance on the accumulated destruction that is the byproduct of historical progress. "Where we perceive a chain of events," Benjamin writes, "he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet."[7]
In his earlier, more optimistic work, Benjamin construed ruins rather differently. Allegorical readings of ruins and overlooked objects could reveal the "courage" of the nonvictorious for having once functioned as tools for work, play, fantasies, and so on. The very banality of these objects seems to give them their significance. It is this early Benjamin, the advocate of allegorical readings of everyday artifacts, with whom Kluge has the most in common.
Whether as ruins of official culture or of repressed hopes, objects are marked by their own material histories, contexts that are borrowed and temporary rather than fully possessed. This may be the most direct link between Benjamin and Kluge. Since objects do not exist without the inscription of history, temporality is evident even in the most inanimate things; hence the positioning of ruins as possible witnesses. In The Patriot, for instance, Kluge flatly states, "Here is a puddle. A puddle has a life span of three days"; then he introduces a bush as being forty kilometers from the Polish border, near a town "formerly called Koningsberg. Of course, the bush is not aware of this." In his 1964 "fact novel" on the battle of Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung / The Battle, Kluge offers a tip from a military manual: in sufficient thickness, snow can protect soldiers from bullets. The same emphasis on the material life of things was voiced by survivor Primo Levi in his postwar memoirs: in the camps, he wrote, "death begins in the shoes."[8]
Objects are thus as much infused with history as history is with objects. But, as Kluge and Benjamin maintain, artifacts are not nearly as important as the uses to which they are put or the critical interpretations that draw out what Benjamin calls their "expressive potential," as Levi's observation also illuminates. Allegorical readings achieve that for Benjamin; Kluge postulates a form of active interpretation called Zusammenhang— literally, a hanging-together or connection-making.[9] Both reading strategies do violence to the original meaning(s) of their artifacts, much like a fragment does violence to the unity or integrity of a physical object, including, as we will see, the human body. Here the disunified (or, with Kracauer's mass ornament, speciously unified) quality of the artifact is especially important. Kluge's films are filled with fragments that don't add up or provide any unifying structure. No one history of Germany is available; no singular, idealized nation-body exists. Nor is there a clear alternative history to discover and apply. This apparent lack of historiographical strategy is itself a strategy, for Kluge makes it more or less impossible to believe that alternative histories already exist. As Hans Kellner states, "I do not believe there are ‘stories’ out there in the archives or monuments of the past, waiting to be resurrected and told. Neither human activity nor the existing records of
The epitome of that honest historian, Gabi Teichert follows a similarly circuitous route. Her approach to historical understanding recalls what Benjamin articulates in his "Work of Art" essay. Eschewing the hagiographic distanciation and inaccessibility that art required before mechanical reproduction, Gabi's tools dig directly into the "byproducts of history" (i.e., books) and thus eradicate the mythologizing aura of History. In this sense, Kluge's patriot is as probing as the cine-surgeon Benjamin hypothesized: it's just that she becomes, as Benjamin put it, "distracted" by her subject matter. In fact, The Patriot suggests that the sheer abundance of artifacts she uncovers generates the same paralyzing overload that Benjamin and Kracauer had criticized in commodity culture. Gabi, its seems, has accumulated too much—and processed too little.
Gabi recalls the sort of laborer, the "magical" producer of phantasmagoria, Benjamin associated with aesthetic production prior to mass reproduction, hinting at the carryover of older aesthetic and epistemological forms. In contrast to the illuminated, institutional public places in which Gabi appears—and where she seems the most unproductive and lost—her study/workplace is dark, dimly lit, not unlike a developing room. It appears to be underground. Secret and shrouded, the "buried," unacknowledged work she performs there is reminiscent of the vertical mise-en-scène of Metropolis, whose Workers' City forms the foundation for the leisure activities of the aristocrats above. In an equally literal fashion, Gabi "synthesizes" her findings, loading pages of books into a beaker filled with potion and placing them in a blender. Drinking her concoction to soak up knowledge, Gabi's act raises the question of whether internalizing the potion (recall modernity's call to absorb shock as a defensive measure) will enable her to break through the impasse of German history. It certainly dramatizes her (Kluge's?) desire to incorporate that Germanness into her identity and her very body.
As we are shown Gabi's underground lab, Kluge states: "The soul of a person who works hard is like a factory, workshop, cellar, or a witch's kitchen." Conducting experiments with gravity from a staircase, probing the heavens through her telescopes, with her frothy potions and fleece coat, Gabi recalls nothing less than a medieval alchemist. Here too ghosts of Metropolis abound, notably that of Rotwang, who like Gabi is obsessed with the past, in the form of his departed Hel, whose loss is displaced onto his robotic, missing hand. In Metropolis, Rotwang's anachronistic existence
Historian as alchemist: Gabi Teichert in the "witch's kitchen" of Kluge's The Patriot. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive.
It is perhaps no accident that Gabi Teichert does not succeed at her task. There are a number of reasons why, perhaps not the least of which is her belief in a "patriotic" rendering of a history as full of carnage as Germany's. Her belief is presented as stubbornly naive, as is her faith in the retrievability of an authenticating truth through objects, interviews, or other means. Thus for as much as the film treats Gabi's work with affection (some say condescension), her character is unable to provide the Zuarbeit, the additional or supplemental work, to create meanings and connections (Zusammenhänge) on her own. Gabi cannot change the course of history, or even how it is taught. She is equally ill-equipped to handle the present, unable to hold her own in departmental meetings with male colleagues, whose responses to her range from patronizing irritation to supreme indifference.
In an important detail, Gabi's lack of basic survival skills is shared by another female character in The Patriot, Gerta Baethe, whom we are told perished with her children during a World War II Allied attack: "There were explosions heard in the distance. She was dressing the children when the bombs hit the air raid shelter of Koch's Printing Works. … It was no time for starting a strategy …, Gerta Baethe. The bombs fall on this woman in 1944. She wants to defend herself. But her last chance to check the misery of 1944 was in 1928. Gerta Baethe could have organized with other women." Interestingly, the film presents her story as "material for Monday's history lesson" for Gabi's class. Her case is read, interrupted, and discussed by several students as well as by Kluge's dry, nondiegetic voiceover. The Patriot makes two other possible references to Gerta. Before she is introduced, we briefly see an image interpreted by Kluge's voice-over: "A woman, two children, 1944, in a bomb shelter." Later, when we see images of a woman seeking shelter in what looks to be footage from an old fiction film, Kluge flatly states, "Gerta Baethe: strategy of below."
Strategies from above and below recur throughout the film in a variety of visual and thematic motifs. Gerta's and Gabi's digging into the earth "below" illustrates the latter; visual evidence of organization imposed "from above" is shown through numerous aerial points of view (especially as bombs are dropped) and the low-angle stills of contemporary and Naziera officials. Adding to this vertical topography is the information that in 1939, "Gerta Baethe knew a man from the Todt Organization who wanted to build canals [across alpine regions] and not an Autobahn across Germany."[12] In a stunning detail, once this unnamed character is introduced, Kluge's voice-over assumes the first person: "We had it completely planned," eschewing the disengaged third person that he uses to discuss Gerta, who was, after all, a victim for being unable to plan or produce a strategy from below. Given that Kluge's voice-overs seldom slip into the first person, the move here is conspicuous. As the film moves on, we see sketched plans for digging tunnels through the Alps and images showing passageways, links, and connections (forms of "organization") associated with the ground, as opposed to the organizational forms and strategies imposed "from above."
As a member of the Todt Organization (an official, if nonmilitary, auxiliary of the Nazi government, see n. 12), Gerta's friend can scarcely be associated with any meaningful kind of resistance, even if his disinterest in the Autobahn implies a possible deviation from official party lines or duties. With Nazi workers imposing forms of organization upon the earth, Kluge places operations "from below" onto party members and resistance figures, complicating what would otherwise be a simple top-down model of
In a way, The Patriot presents Gerta's inability to organize as entirely reasonable: "For a strategic perspective to start up, as Gerta wished on April 8th, seventy thousand teachers would have had to work twenty years." Organizing people, changing history, requires a lot of collective labor, calculated in Kluge's typically comic statistics. And, as he has written specifically in reference to the issue of organizing "women's labor," there is "no applied thought, no representational form, and thus no ‘organization’ that demonstrates a real ability to produce such alternative modes of living. Therefore it is not a matter of adapting women to politics, but of adapting politics to women's problems."[13]
Despite this claim, and despite Kluge's critique of history as a causal chain of events (Gerta's inability to defend herself in 1944 is somehow a result of her inability to organize sixteen years earlier) and his lampooning of progress as a statistically measurable phenomenon (seventy thousand teachers working twenty years), Kluge's presentation of Gerta cannot shake the sense of blaming the victim. The proportions of this blame intensify when Gerta's fate is compared to that of male victims of the war, as I have already noted with Gerta's anonymous male companion, and as I will argue in relation to Corporal Wieland's knee.
ALTERNATIVE LABOR FORCES: BURIED FEMININE ENERGY
[Film's utopian strain in the] unsophisticated imagination … is buried under a thick layer of cultural garbage. It has to be dug out. This project of excavation, not at all a utopian notion, can be realized only through our work.
To find is more important than to invent.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
If Gerta was insufficiently "organized," Gabi Teichert is even less organized, even if the consequences in her case are not fatal. No shortage exists of feminist criticism of Kluge for the way he mocks, patronizes, or silences
It is not incidental that Sander uses a domestic example to elaborate Kluge's idea of the "unwanted within the wanted." (What to do with all that foot powder?) If the "feminine" labor process Gabi's work represents for the director is so crucial, what is supposed to be done with the unexpected results and undesirable byproducts Sander describes? Heidi Schlüpmann criticizes Kluge's elevation of women's strengths, which are simultaneously considered weaknesses by the "dominant reality principle."[15] It is only through recourse to stubborn, "unwanted" forms of logic or alternative "realities" that hegemonic perceptions can be dislodged for Kluge. But, as Schlüpmann argues, his exploration of women's own social and psychic fantasies never gets very far: their value as metaphor in this other process is what matters to him.
Gabi Teichert is a case in point. Her desires and fantasies remain stubbornly unarticulated—all we know is that she seeks "better material" with which to teach German history. We know that she is a female patriot (a contradiction in terms, for Sander),[16] and therefore "takes an interest in the country's dead." These, of course, are Kluge's interests, not necessarily those of women. Gabi's hands-on approach to history literalizes Kluge's "dialectic you can feel with your hands" (the "synthesis" of which is achieved as she drinks her potions). In historiographic terms, her method contrasts with that of idealist histories and the progressive teleological narratives they usually imply. At a school meeting, for instance, one of her unsympathetic male colleagues argues, "History is written in a certain way for certain reasons," with no intention of challenging the motives underlying such "reasons." If Gabi is illustrating, doing, or performing the kind of critical work advocated by the director, why then is his first-person voiceover never given to her, and why is she given so little of her own voice to begin with? What does Gabi (or Gerta) represent for Kluge?
VOICING HISTORY
B. Ruby Rich offers a particularly trenchant critique of Kluge's treatment of voice and speech in her analysis of Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin / Occasional Work of a Female Slave (1973). Its heroine, Roswitha, is like Gabi in that she tries to work for social change (as an abortion worker) but ends up alone and disaffected. Rich argues that although Kluge's female protagonists are given sympathetic goals, he maintains a detached, nearly condemnatory distance from them: "Pretending to offer a sympathetic analysis, Kluge instead offers a frame-up."[17] This is formally achieved through narrational voice-overs and intertitles. Rich goes on to note, "The narrator holds a position of omniscience as a deus ex machina privy to information unavailable to the film's characters and inaccessible within the film text. In this guise, the narrator quickly becomes the favored replacement for the viewer in search of identification. The narrator, in his display of wit and wisdom, wins the respect of the viewer over the course of the film. The viewer … unit[es] in a spirit of smug superiority with the narrator over and against the character(s)."[18] The silencing of female characters that Rich condemns in Kluge's voice-overs becomes even more important when women are placed into operatic contexts, as we shall see in the discussion of The Power of Emotion. Contrasting Occasional Work to Sander's Redupers, Rich simply calls Kluge's work "antifeminis[t]."[19]
Helke Sander is another outspoken critic of Kluge who uses his techniques and terms for her critiques. Her 1984 film Der Beginn aller Schrecken ist Liebe / The Trouble with Love, for instance, was in many ways a response to The Power of Emotion, adopting its fragmented story style and using a female voice-over to challenge Kluge's representations of women. Discussing The Blind Director (which Sander humorously wanted to retitle "The Assault of the White Man on the Rest of Time"),[20] she argues that, like "his thesis that our emotions are locked in various [historical] stages of development," Kluge's own attitude towards women is arrested in 1529, before Copernicus changed the idea that "the sun still revolved around the earth and the male was in god's image, the focus of creation."[21] Interestingly, and despite this stinger, Sander states in the same piece that "his anti-drama is a form … his form of kindness," that opens itself up to new uses, deliberately activating undesirable repressed desires.[22](It is highly improbable, for instance, that Kluge's lapse into the first person with the man from Todt was unintentional.)
Both as solo author and in his sociological work with Oskar Negt, notably Geschichte und Eigensinn / History and Obstinacy (1981) and Öffentlichkeit
For them, this potential labor force entails ways of thinking and organizing that are currently excluded from what they somewhat anachronistically call (even in 1972) the "bourgeois sphere." In metaphors pertinent to The Patriot, they argue that that which lies buried, when activated and organized, has explosive potential; it can form a constituent part of a number of alternative, unpredictable "counter public spheres." Like Kluge's careful refusal to present alternative histories as singular or unified, this laborform is not conceptualized as altogether separate or "other," not a utopia situated at the far end of a social spectrum awaiting recognition or dusting off. Born of bits and pieces, this alternative sphere never quite adds up, functioning as a potentiality or, again, "the unwanted within the wanted." Misunderstandings, gaps, or details that escape full mastery or understanding, for instance,[24] contain "the raw material of protest and the potential beginnings of a ‘proletarian’ or ‘counter public sphere.’"[25] Thus he was concerned with both used and unused parts of a social past, like untapped labor or emotions, or behaviors that don't "fit" within institutionalized, accepted notions of experience. In stressing their obstinacy and persistence, Kluge (theoretically at least) deprives them of the sense of being victimized, an idea that is crucial to the survivors depicted in The Power of Emotion and The Patriot.
Negt and Kluge wrote History and Obstinacy while The Patriot was being made, and the dense sociological treatise shares some of the film's unusual features. A highly atypical academic work, it refuses generic boundaries and conventions, with theoretical exposition abruptly breaking off; pages are punctuated by quotations, photographs, drawings, fairy tales,
Collagistic social theory in Negt and Kluge's Geschichte und Eigensinn / History and Obstinancy, p. 488. Courtesy of Zweitausendeins Press.
Although presented as a botched opportunity, Gerta Baethe's case remains critical for Negt and Kluge. Rather than restore neglected stories at individualized levels (as Steven Spielberg did with Oskar Schindler), they
Negt and Kluge controversially describe the untapped "productive force" as feminine. They maintain that this feminine mode of production is a residual of an earlier, matriarchal mode of production eclipsed by capitalism (their argument is reminiscent of Engels's history of the bourgeois family in that regard). Capitalism here is a negligent father, a system unable to fulfill, respond to, or even acknowledge human needs. Feminine productivity apparently acknowledges need, and does so, according to Negt and Kluge, in the exemplary form of motherhood. Their nearly biological exemplification of women's "labor" has drawn heated and justifiable criticism from feminists for decades, and Kluge has had a difficult time dispelling the idea that his concept of femininity is somatically driven. Debates were especially intense after the release of The Occasional Work of a Female Slave, prompting a flurry of exchanges between Kluge and members of frauen und film.[27] While this is not the place to reproduce that debate, it is worth underscoring the tension between Kluge's contention that the undercompensated "feminized" labor capacity is a consequence of socio-historical phenomena and the weight he places on women's labor in childbirth and child rearing. On the one hand, one could construe his literalized examples of female labor as part of his materializing aesthetic—Kluge refers to bodies as "sites of social experience and political resistance," after all.[28] Yet that doesn't change the fact that he fails to examine these resistances beyond the narrow symbolic function ascribed them, nor does he consider the historical and social particularities of women's labor.
To be sure, Kluge and Negt's binarist presentation of male/female systems, forces, or historical epochs is a product of its time (male-female oppositions were common in the 1970s, even in feminism). Yet it has never been enough to reverse the equation and devalue the masculine term (linking it to an alienating capitalist system, for instance), and associate femininity with pre-or post-capitalist alternatives, especially when they are encumbered with such clichéd qualities as "nurturing." (Indeed, it is highly
The repercussions of these theoretical positions are played out on the human figures that inhabit Kluge's diegetic worlds. Female leads operate against a backdrop of unsympathetic male characters and masculinized institutions: Anita G is shuffled from one cold place/man to another in the West Germany of Yesterday Girl; the misguided Ferdinand is overinvolved with his guard duties in Der starke Ferdinand / Strongman Ferdinand (1976). As even these characters establish, the assembled "fragments" and "ruins" Kluge calls bodies get marked and gendered quite differently. Women's bodies are constructed in terms of (illogical, blundering) potentiality in Kluge's films; male bodies as (unmoving, blundering) actuality.[30] Neither sex succeeds in narrative-or character-centered terms, and in contrast to the clean metaphoric correspondences of films like Germany, Pale Mother or The Tin Drum, the body itself—be it male or female, German or not—is a haphazard collection of fissures, potentials, pieces. The fact that it never functions as a totality suggests how open "it" is to change, to alternatives, even to resistance. But Kluge makes no guarantees about those outcomes; indeed, they don't occur in his films, recalling Fassbinder's Franz Biberkopf and Elvira. To cast it a bit pessimistically, modernist (and postmodernist) fragmentation, so epistemologically, hermeneutically, and even politically cherished, may be nothing more than the inability to "pull together" or to perform Zusammenhan g.
THE BODY AS RUINED FRAGMENT
In reality, every human being is a concerto of different capacities or elements. … Human images are composed of fragments; they are fragments of ruins. … Each experience, the experience of resisting as well as the experience of a defeat, constructs little personalities that coexist. … I want to develop a massive quantity of differentiating capacities, to differentiate the subcutaneous from the dominant aspects.
—ALEXANDER KLUGE
Aesthetics was born as a discourse of the body.
—TERRY EAGLETON
For Kluge, the human body is an unstable power center of potential. It is inscribed with hegemonic patterns of work, thought, and feeling, as it is with opposing ones. This conception enables him, theoretically, to position subjectivity within history rather than have it simply function as a site of passive reflection. A line from The Patriot,"history is the history of bodies," is significant in that regard, with proof coming in the form of the knee-narrator, a "character" that has attracted as much critical commentary as Gabi Teichert, and one to which she has been often compared. The knee is all that remains of a young Corporal Wieland, a German officer killed just days before the end at Stalingrad, the notorious battle of 1942–43 in which thousands of German troops perished in an extravagantly ill-conceived campaign that Hitler, rebuking his military advisors, refused to see as hopeless. The knee comes from a poem by Christian Morgenstern read in Kluge's voice-over:
| A knee walks the earth alone. | |
| It is a knee, nothing else. | |
| It is no tree, it is no tent, | |
| It is a knee, nothing else. | |
| Once there was a man, | |
| Cut down in war. | |
| Only his knee remained untouched, | |
| Like some holy relic. | |
| Ever since: | |
| A knee walks the earth, alone. |
The corporal's knee is an illogical, impossible leftover, the absurdity of whose narration is acknowledged later in the film: "You don't have to accept what I'm saying. Actually I'm not a knee at all—I have no speech organ. I'm not a kneecap, not the space behind it, the upper leg or the lower leg. They died. But I'm the connection, the joint." Absurd (and chatty) though it may be, the knee/director/"holy relic" shifts effortlessly from speaking poetry ("A knee walks the earth, alone") to bearing witness (detailing conditions at Stalingrad) to reciting Latin, covering in this way more ground than even our man in the Todt Organization. But its speech becomes progressively fractured and unsure of itself: "I say ‘fundamental’ too often," or "At this point I wanted to say something more … but I forgot what I wanted to say." It defensively asserts its superiority to the brain—the dead brain cannot quote Charlemagne; the brain cannot keep pace with the knee, ever "forward striding."
To an extent, the absurdity of the knee's being able to speak (much less the nutty things it says) undercuts its authority. But as the perfect
In addition to having the apparent respect of the film's director, the nomadic knee has that of his fellow dead as well: he tells us that they refer to him as "the Father of Accuracy." Even the soundtrack pays him an indirect, troubling homage. After introducing Gabi Teichert, we see film footage of barely identifiable war carnage through a red filter, over which is played the powerful theme for Alain Resnais's documentary on Holocaust memory and responsibility, Night and Fog by Hanns Eisler. Although the music helps concretize the historical context of the abstracted, manipulated images at this point, it does so from a very different perspective than it did in Resnais's film. Anton Kaes observes: "This musical quotation may hint at a consciousness that does not want to exclude Auschwitz from the patriotic Trauerarbeit. But even those who can appreciate the subtle allusion to the [theme] from Night and Fog are soon pulled back to the side of the German war victims because the music is combined with images of German soldiers at Stalingrad. The victims of the Germans at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and many other concentration camps are not part of the picture."[33] Kaes is right to voice objections about using Eisler's piece to mourn the German military dead, given that it was initially composed to honor the dead that this military produced. As a fragment of these soldiers and their "ever-accurate spokesman," the Nazi official's knee becomes the recipient of the mourning in The Patriot, which in Resnais's text had belonged to Nazism's victims. (The piece makes another troubling reappearance when the man from the Todt Organization is introduced.) While it is difficult to imagine that Kluge intended this effect to be without irony or contradiction, irony is difficult to find.
The knee goes on to speak over a series of postcard-like images of Germany at its bucolic best—springtime blossoms, castles, landscapes—kitschy presentations of Nation replacing the previous red-soaked images of war. It is difficult to gauge whether these tacky images are offered as critique, or if the knee is simply more successful at summoning forth the "better [more pleasant?] material" of German history than Gabi is. Indeed, just as the patriotic history teacher is introduced as "taking an interest in Germany's dead," the knee, speaking for itself, remarks over these images:
It's said that I'm interested in history. That's right, of course. I can't forget the story that I'd still be a part of something bigger, if Corporal Wieland, my former master, part of something bigger, part of our beautiful Germany. … As a German knee I'm naturally interested, above all, in German history: the emperors, peasants, blossoms, trees, farms, meadows, plants.
As "part of something bigger … our beautiful Germany," the knee is an obvious emblem of a limping, homeless nation, lamenting a lost unity that is as phantasmatic as the knee itself. But its speech, as well as its ability to speak, points to a peculiar, Klugian form of history that includes in its materials plants, body parts, buildings, and other neglected artifacts—the kind of buried matter Gabi might be excavating. Critics, however, have not failed to notice the contrast between Gabi's very physical historical work and the more cerebral abstractions of the chimerical knee. The film itself progresses along these very lines, in fact, moving from a dense melange of concrete "German" materials at the beginning—plants, castles, war footage, soldiers, and so on—to a highly abstract closing shot after Gabi faces the new year. Near the end of the film, the screen fades to a blank screen with a quote from Karl Krause: "The more closely you look at a word, the more it recedes." After these words disappear, Kluge adds the word "Germany." Over this image the final chorale Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is played.
Psychoanalysts have observed that if the dead keep returning, they must never have been "properly buried" in the first place.[34] Our roaming narrator does not disagree:
I must clear up at once a fundamental error: that we dead are somehow dead. Wrong. We're full of protest and energy. Who wants to die? We march through history and examine it. How can we escape history that will kill us all?… I want to set things straight, no one is completely gone when they're dead. The knee remains. I speak; I am a part of people, a part of history.
The knee is "a part of history" that he passionately contends has been ignored. It dramatizes being cut off from history, and its logic-defying endurance is suggestive of the untapped histories and underlying labor forces in which Kluge sees so much potential. But how "cut off" is he really? Compared to fellow historian Gabi Teichert, who is a mere assembler and instructor of historical material, the knee is that as well as a participant in history. At once raw material and historian, wound and witness, the knee proves to be the central character of The Patriot and its most significant historian.
Even anatomy adds to the knee's overdetermined privilege. Comprised of the patella, a floating bone attached to the leg by fragile ligaments, its very structure puts "betweenness" into relief. We might recall here Kluge's remark in the preceding chapter about the "space between shots" and the "after-images" as the sites of cinema's truly "subversive work." The knee literally embodies the exegetic practice of Zusammenhang,"hanging betweenness,"[35] a joint and punning "articulation" of bodily tissue connecting calf to thigh, poetry to science, living to dead, shot to shot. (Not incidentally, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, Kluge's editor, suggested using the poem by Morgenstern.) All of this makes it easy to see why the knee ultimately fares better than Gabi, who cannot provide viable answers to the "Question of Zusammenhang," the section in which she and her girlfriends struggle over Schiller's text to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. What the knee of The Patriot finally represents is less an object, character, or even a metaphor than a critical point of view: "As a dead knee I naturally have a different perspective on things." Gliding between past and present, living and dead, its position is akin to Klee's angel, "forward-moving, if backward-looking," inhabiting the in-between spaces so esteemed by Kluge.
By moving from character-body to wound and then following its existence after death, Kluge pushes Fassbinder/Raben's notion of physical "shock" into the realm of aftershock. To be sure, all of them want to unsettle conventional perception and thought, but Kluge is ultimately concerned with the aftereffects of shocks as materials in and of themselves. If, as we hear in The Power of Emotion, bodies can only take so much and then, after a point, they rise up and explode, what happens when the body has no choice, when explosion or trauma is imposed on it?
SOME SPEAK, OTHERS DON'T
Clinically speaking, trauma is an extreme form of neurosis in which patients "suffer from reminiscences," as Freud and Breuer described hysteria. Past traumas get articulated via delayed, displaced symptoms acted out by an unknowing body. Just as Breuer and Freud once commented that the hysteric experiences her life as both observer and participant, Cathy Caruth claims that trauma produces a "double telling"[36] between experience and articulation. We can see these kinds of divisions already taking shape in the corporal's knee.
Be they physical, psychological, or both, traumatic experiences incite later patterns of repetition, flashbacks, and countless other delays and displacements. So extreme is this disturbance to standard representation and
Traumatic memory and representation thus reveal how inaccessible the Real is to us: it only surfaces in fragments, errors of speech, altered bodies. Historiographically, the process shows how remembrance overcomes retrievability, and that remembrance itself will be unsettled by the illogical forms that traumatic representation can take—not unlike the machinations of Kluge's films. The question this raises, then, is how it can be articulated at all, particularly in light of the ego/body's tendency to shield it from symbolization. What can the body say, what does it remember, how does it speak? For Caruth, the injury becomes "a voice that is … released through the wound."[40] The very word "trauma" is in fact etymologically derived from "wound."
In the New German Cinema, wounds appear frequently, staging historical trauma on particular bodies—Biberkopf's amputated arm comes to mind, as do the tattooed numbers on camp survivors' forearms. But even when trauma affects actual people—not just film characters—its scars and effects originate not from the body but from a source often characterized as otherworldly. In this way, trauma challenges the way that bodies and subjects are read and interpreted. The wounded remains of Corporal Wieland, for instance, can hardly be read through psychological realism. What all of this suggests is that when personal memory and trauma are activated, larger social stages are at work.
No shortage of scholars has considered the symptomology of the wound—and the divided, imperfect body it conjures up—alongside the German condition. For a country that has seen more disunity than cohesion or unity, the idea certainly makes sense. In that way, the wound exaggerates the material
Gendered wounds in "Whore with War Cripple [Dirne und Kriegsverletzer (Zwei Opfer des Kapitalismus)]," by Otto Dix (1923). Reprinted by kind permission of Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte.
Leslie Adelson pursues the idea in her study of female bodies in postwar German literature. Arguing that human cells are treated as carriers of
Disabled speech in Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother
As I noted in chapter One, Freud's model of somatic conversion in hysteria influenced film scholars analyzing melodramatic excess in the 1980s. Yet over half a century earlier, in 1918, Sándor Ferenczi provocatively referred to postwar traumatic symptoms as "a museum of glaring hysterical symptoms"[44] of defense formations "in the service of the instinct of selfpreservation against the repetition of the unpleasant occurrence."[45] These defense formations saturate The Patriot: the quirky reflections of the knee, for instance, intimate that it is protecting and repressing something. What is eluding symbolization; what are the wounds trying to say? The idea of wounds articulating hidden trauma is clearly central to The Patriot's stylistic strategies. But as Adelson reminds us, there is no such entity as "the" body. Circumscribed in difference, bodies' wounds speak differently. And some do not speak at all.
Much as Kluge's work differentiates bodies of survivors in problematic gendered terms, official definitions of trauma (and of course, hysteria) reproduce these same biases, as Laura S. Brown has noted. The (then recently
In this way, Brown notes how classical psychoanalysis masculinizes trauma and turns it into a public affair of widespread concern. By contrast, Freud's hysterical female patients suffered from the unseen, unaddressed traumas of day-to-day domestic life, recalling the unarticulated histories, forces, and experiences that Kluge also feminizes. Thus symptoms of traumatized war patients, widely experienced and publicly witnessed, seemed a less contestable fact than "ordinary hysteria," whose diffuse causes were difficult to ascertain. Indeed, World War I offered Freud, Ferenczi, Ernst Jones, and Karl Abraham an ample forum through which their theories could reach wider audiences. They used evidence of war traumas to challenge critics who disputed the sexual basis of neuroses, observing that if the same trauma could provoke severe neurosis in one veteran and not another, then war wasn't the primary cause of the symptoms.
Commenting on the physical nature of these symptoms, Ernst Simmel maintained, "The psycho-analytical explanation of the war neurosis has proved with wonderful clearness the correctness of the Freudian views on hysteria. … The body is the instrument of the mind upon which it (the mind) allows its unconscious to manifest itself in plastic and mimic expression."[47] Such physical expressivity recalls how trauma can turn the body itself into a historical actant. Contemporary theory's focus on identity's performative nature in this way is not restricted to academic classrooms or to dragshow runways. Rather we see its operation in specific historical contexts, even situations as extreme as war, the staging of which demands unnatural and unimaginable human acts. Paul Fussell's study of literary representations of World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, traces the war's metaphoric and conceptual "theatricalization" across a variety of genres—poetry, military instructions, and especially, memoirs. (World War II, he argued, would continue the "show" through cinematic metaphors.) Perhaps artifice and heightened performativity are effective ways to depict those traumas that can never really be conveyed.
Traumatic representation acknowledges that while there is an important history at work, no precise experience, event, or signified can be brought forth. This is not to say that it cannot be represented, but that it cannot be recovered by representation. As Shoah survivors have shown, narrating traumatic events does not really retrieve past events but rather is a form of indirect recovery. (Claude Lanzmann, by refusing to use archival footage in Shoah, acknowledged this idea.) That same irrecoverability also explains the repetitive forms that traumatic representation takes. The challenge is to find ways of moving past the vicious circularity we saw operating in melancholia and melodrama. Lanzmann seems to acknowledge this as well in the film's incessant returns to the train tracks near the entrance to Auschwitz.
The Patriot and The Power of Emotion are, to a certain extent, governed by traumatic representation. They deploy some very physical motifs: air raids, fires, injured bodies, excavations, and cold laboratories; trauma stalks their narrative strategies through illogical interviews, character silences, direct address to the camera, failed attempts to speak, and the unleashing of feelings that have no direct, appropriate correspondence to the situation at hand. Characters and scenes continue from film to film—not unlike the repetitive nature of trauma and hysteria.[48] Both obsessively present the power of natural elements (ice and historical "materials" for The Patriot, fire and emotion for The Power of Emotion), the means by which those elements are controlled (history books, fire brigades, opera houses), and the persistence of what Kluge calls at one point the "wishes, bodies, ribs" that don't fit in. Collectively, these details give a thematic and stylistic nod to the unconscious mechanisms of human memory. One of The Patriot's most powerful intertitles neatly sums up the impossibility of historical retrieval and the residual power of the aftertrace. By adding the word "Germany" to the line by Karl Krause ("the more closely you look at a word, the more it recedes"), narrative truth, meaning, history, and nation reappear and recede, just like memory itself.
Claiming that memory can only restore indirectly is not the same thing as saying that memory is never accurate. But it is displaced, filtered. And it is in those displacements that people can momentarily extend themselves or draw others into their experiences. The Shoah continues to demonstrate the need to bear witness to the wounded identities history might otherwise silence or leave behind. Consider concentration camp survivors, whose subjectivity was effaced through the deadly machinery of the camps. Referred to as "pieces," their heads and bodies were shaved, not just to humiliate, but to make these people as identical as possible; numbers replaced names as signs of obliterated subjectivity. Shoshana Felman writes, "What constitutes the outrage of the Holocaust … is not so much death in itself,
In addition to being unable to experience or understand trauma as it occurs, the sufferer has little way of articulating it at the time. Dori Laub writes that the Shoah presented a "world in which the very imagination of the Other was no longer possible. There was no longer an other to which one could say ‘Thou’ in the hope of being heard, of being recognised as a subject, of being answered."[50] Primo Levi described a recurrent nightmare that plagued him even after leaving the camps, in which he would stand in front of family and friends. He spoke to them, but they carried on as if he were absent. Levi was surprised to learn that other survivors had the identical nightmare.
As I have already suggested, The Patriot seems to be looking for a recipient for all of its traumatic memory. Packed with direct stares into the camera (notably, Gabi's) and lines like the knee's "I have a right to be heard," its diegetic porousness helps produce the spaces and cracks through which to make potential connections. Filled with history's "stranded objects," discarded bodies, repressed energies, ruins, and debris, The Patriot seems to engage in a form of homeopathic remembrance—with poisonous doses of the past, old fragments put into new contexts and presented to listeners for them to make meaningful, personal connections to history. Eric Santner even singled out the film for consideration in his epilogue. But, as he argued, The Patriot ultimately does not create that kind of dialogue with alterity and supportive social space.
INTROJECTING HISTORY
As I noted in chapter One, introjection is an important means by which autoerotic attachments are extended. According to Abraham and Torok, "By including the object—whence the name introjection—the process expands the self," including the instincts and desires attached to the object as well.[51] Constructing the self involves an ongoing system of introjections, a process they describe as "gradual, slow, laborious, mediated, effective."[52] Incorporation, by contrast, is a phantasmatic process that in a sense disguises itself as the introjection it is unable to perform. Instead of the self extending outward, incorporation brings a foreign object inward into the self, encrypting it and sealing it off from consciousness. In hiding the object and the loss it represents, it is a refusal to mourn.
The chief paradox of incorporation is that the foreign body is perceived as detached from the self precisely for being so deeply guarded and concealed
Abraham and Torok's contention that "Introjection speaks. … Incorporation keeps still" becomes almost damning in light of The Patriot's avowed interest in giving voice to what history leaves behind and in permitting certain dead figures to resurrect themselves in obstreperous protest.[54] The problem is having the knee function as sole survivor and wounded witness, which implies that only the experience of German troops was traumatic—thereby adding nation and militarism to the already gendered trauma Laura Brown observed. If Kluge laments the sixty thousand civilians who perished in the night Hamburg was bombed, he stops counting there. The film does not count non-German others nor assess the undesirable, murderous aspects of Germanness itself. It is a curious withholding in light of its formal mechanisms, stylistic strategies that would seem to allow open relationships like that to emerge.
Put another way, Kluge's/Wieland's/Morgenstern's knee initially suggests the possibility of articulating a previously unknown history. It raises the possibility of entering into a history of others to whom its appeals to listen are obstreperous and insistent. But what neglected alterity can this knee possibly represent? What does it mean to give the "right to speak" to the knee of a Wehrmacht official, to have it speak on behalf of the nation's dead? After the film was made, knees like Wieland's were honored at Bitburg by conservative real-life patriots Ronald Reagan and Helmuth Kohl, but these frightening realities only show the urgency of the questions. When a wound testifies, it is usually to its own repression and victimization; it is usually not victimizing, as the military knee would surely have been. Why didn't Kluge use the knee of a Pole killed during Germany's invasion? Or the knee of a camp prisoner whose leg had been amputated without anesthesia?
The Patriot's "traumatic" style seems to include the characteristics of introjection listed above. It boasts a dazzling array of still photographs, film footage, dreams, pictures, and musical pieces mixed and entangled in a way
SURVIVING DEATH TO TALK ABOUT IT
With the exception of burial ceremonies, death usually abolishes the social differences ascribed to bodies when they had been alive. "Paradoxically," as Elisabeth Bronfen argues, "this obliteration of gender, along with all other socially constructed features, is represented in Western culture through a gendered body, the superlatively beautiful, desirable feminine corpse."[57] Yet this "superlatively beautiful" female body is precisely what recedes in Kluge's work, and the body that supplants it is that of the Nazi soldier, Corporal Wieland. In another context, Kluge writes, "[A]s a personality, a man is a dilapidated ruin, a bearer of characteristics who lugs them around, as it were, in a sack or suitcase. With every social upheaval, certain pieces of this luggage remain behind. This is the basis for a specific, ahistorical radicality."[58] If "the dead are never as dead as one believes," we need to contrast
Since survival is intertwined with speech the obvious question The Patriot raises is that if feminine labor is such an esteemed force, why is the man's dead knee so vocal? Why is Gabi Teichert, equally concerned about "Germany's dead," so silent, unable to defend or even speak for herself? In the film's diegetic world, a colleague chides Gabi's quietness at a school meeting since, he claims, she had been "talking their ears off" earlier, condemning both her silence and speech. As I noted earlier, Kluge's voice-over speaks for her, as opposed to speaking as the knee or as Gerta Baethe's male companion. Gabi's speech, as Helke Sander notes, often takes the form of reading others' words—in contrast to the knee, which, literally born of another's poem, moves on to talk freely and obstreperously on its own.[59]
The construction of wounds, speech, and physical survival in The Patriot is troubling on a variety of levels. The trauma of war experienced by a knee is cruelly ludicrous when compared to the trauma experienced by the millions of others who were not defending Nazism or who were its direct targets. Whereas military, male bodies are kept alive to recount their stories, women are reduced either to unambiguous death or to the hysterical silence Gabi's colleagues would impose upon her. The obvious irony is that the buried female labor force Kluge extols for its political and theoretical potential fails to surface in The Patriot, whereas the male body part—of a Nazi soldier, no less—does, intimating that this is the repressed energy, the supposedly undervalued alterity returning for not having been "properly buried." Certainly Kluge was aware of the controversial nature of his choice, and at the very least, such a decision demonstrates that the process of Zusammenhang is not tied to a particular ideological project. Or perhaps this was a way for him to emulate characters like Gabi, who embark on an admirable aim to better their worlds only to botch it horribly, putting new structures to bad uses, leaving it for us to respond differently.
So we never learn about Gerta's experience, nor that of the other women with whom she was supposed to have organized. The exclusion of their histories, coupled with that of the victims of the Shoah, creates an unlikely climate for an I-Thou relationship of witnessing and testimony. Instead, that speech remains underground, unaccounted for, nor even recounted—a one-sided Zusammenhang. Was Gerta's sacrifice necessary for male agency and work to be made possible, whether as a destructive force,
To be sure, male victimization and resurrection play large roles in a number of films of the New German Cinema, which is populated by countless tyrants, vampires, and pitiful underdogs. But the wounds inflicted on male bodies in movies like Berlin Alexanderplatz (the aging newspaper vendor and, of course, Franz Biberkopf) do not deter them from carrying on, even undergoing, in Franz's case, a weird religious redemption at the abattoir. By contrast, female characters such as Mieze and Lina simply die from their wounds, just like Gerta Baethe, not living on as speaking fragments, holy relics, or historical witnesses. Berlin Alexanderplatz may compulsively restage Lina's death in flashback, but that ultimately gives us more information about Biberkopf's inability to break out of established patterns than about her.
THE SOUNDS OF GERMANY
In many ways, the score of The Patriot seems to help Gabi in her quest for "better" German materials. As Anton Kaes and Peter Lutze have noted, it is constituted overwhelmingly by German and Austrian pieces that are, in fact, key to giving structural coherence to the fractured, collagistic text: "The most disparate juxtapositions of images," Kaes writes, "are held together and united by music, mostly classical German pieces."[60] One conspicuous example occurs near the end of the film, as Gabi looks forward to the "new materials" the upcoming 365 days have in store for her. The Patriot concludes with an instrumental recording of the Chorale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Perfectly recorded, it seems to correct the earlier, damaged version she and her friends engaged with at the kitchen table. By withholding the lyrics, there is an additional sense that the women's attempts to understand the words are withdrawn as well. Unscratched, unscathed, "corrected," it is hard to detect much irony in this weighty sign of Germanness. Two years earlier, Syberberg had ended his epoch Our Hitler with a pristine recording of the same Chorale (with text), and as I argued before, there it is difficult to contest the piece's anticipatory sense of purpose, pride, and promise. Could Kluge be making a dry comment on Syberberg's exalted use of it as the finale to his "patriotic" Trauerarbeit? Or might he have considered the movement so much a spent, allegorical ruin that, like the film's male characters, it could be "resurrected
In the end, it may be impossible to resolve the film's uncritical use of Beethoven. Yet, however firmly "Germany" seems to be acoustically reinstated, it is rendered far more ephemeral and unstable in its visual presentation in the same final image, when the word "Deutschland" fades from view. That ephemerality is crucial, for whatever contradictory understandings of Germany The Patriot indicates, it stresses that the memories with which history and nation are entwined are lost to us. Although their aftereffects can be presented, the events themselves cannot be, much as "Deutschland" recedes from view in the one shot near the end. Interestingly, Kluge has stated in lectures that Germany is a country of contested borders and uneven histories, and is an imaginary state, much like the "imagined community" Benedict Anderson places at the heart of nationhood. One could argue that "Germany" is a disappearing object of The Patriot's story line, just as Gabi's patriotic history of it recedes the more she struggles.
The risk that Kluge takes here is in making the Shoah recede as well. While acknowledged in modest details like Eisler's music, it is frequently pushed aside as the film concerns itself with losses inflicted on German soil or to German citizens and troops. Perhaps The Patriot's surfeit of information is overcompensating for the inability of words and images ever to "make present" the enormity of that trauma. Perhaps the Shoah appears in thickly disguised, stylistic moments such as the old film footage washed in red. Yet because the film's examples rarely concern themselves with victims caused by German involvement, it is hard to pursue that kind of analysis very far. The Patriot operates according to processes akin to the fantasy of incorporation rather than to the work of introjection; it even points to the introjection of which it is incapable. Ironically, in taking in so much clutter, objects, and debris, the text hides or encrypts more basic traumas, foreclosing the possible "I-you" dialogue that talking wounds might engender, foreclosing that empathetic space in which we might receive what wounds have to tell us today. But if the film finally abandons that project, as Gabi must do with hers, its basic structures remain intact. For The Patriot's traumatic style demonstrates the importance of empathetic confrontation and of making Zusammenhänge with alterity. Perhaps it is up to us after all to find "better material" for that work to begin.