6. Introjecting Kitsch
Werner Schroeter, Music,
and Alterity
Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Aestheticism is the product of times without hope, of states that kill hope.
—HEINRICH MANN
Kitsch is the element of evil in the value system of art.
—HERMANN BROCH
What Nietzsche attempts to resurrect in the remark above is precisely the "killed-off hope" that Heinrich Mann militates against. In this chapter, I turn to an especially demeaned form of aestheticism—kitsch—which can offer not just a sense of "hope," but new ways for viewers of the New German Cinema to approach the past, particularly its less pleasant (and perhaps most removed) aspects. As the above quotes demonstrate, kitsch, as a form of aestheticism, is usually associated with unproductive decadence. We've already seen how queer German directors openly challenge that condemnation of decadence in their use of camp. For all of its excesses and breaches of taste, kitsch can effect an even more direct confrontation with and embrace of alterity and difference, especially in the hands of director Werner Schroeter. Schroeter's kitschy aesthetic has remained a constant throughout his film career, which began in the late 1960s, and in his theatre and opera work, where he has been especially active in recent years. His films include Eike Katappa (1969), The Death of Maria Malibran, Willow Springs (1973), Flocons d'or / Golden Flakes (1976), Weisse Reisse / White Journey
An abbreviated form of this chapter was published as "Embracing Kitsch: Werner Schroeter, Music and The Bomber Pilot," in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. K. J. Donnelly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 129–51. Reprinted by permission.
Schroeter's films receive accolades around the world. A recent Locarno film festival mounted a retrospective of his work; among his fans was Michel Foucault, with whom he had a published dialogue/interview. Yet Schroeter's films remain largely unavailable and often unknown, especially to contemporary audiences outside Germany. Even during the New German Cinema, he was never center court. As Timothy Corrigan notes, "Schroeter and his films have remained barely on the visible fringes of the cinematic family and historical movement which he, in many ways, helped to deliver."[1] In North America, the most widely known thing about him may well be Fassbinder's 1979 "Homage to Werner Schroeter," an essay in which the late director found Schroeter's influence everywhere, most infamously in Syberberg, whom Fassbinder attacked as a "merchant of plagiarism." In contrast to the internationally recognized Syberberg, he argued, the market had consigned Schroeter to the "underground," rendering his films "in a flash beautiful, but nonetheless exotic plants, ones blooming so far away [and] so strangely that in the end, one does not really have to deal with them at all."[2] It is a fitting kitschy description.
Schroeter has had difficulty even getting his films shown, especially before The Death of Maria Malibran, his most acclaimed work. Yet despite perpetual financing troubles and an infamous campaign mounted against him by conservative Bavarian politician Jozeph Straus, he has never been concerned about his marginality, moving nomadically from country to country for different projects and with different entourages. Schroeter is lackadaisical about marketing, and his films are notoriously hard to find. He shrugs off status as well as success. When asked about Syberberg in light of Fassbinder's attack, he simply laughed, "No, no comment. Really, there is no comment."[3] More pointedly, in 1972, when the New German Cinema was basking in its early success, he stated: "I have no intention whatsoever of playing a leading part [in the New German Cinema], and submit to the expectations of producing Kulturscheisse[literally, Cultureshit], even if it may be true that I carry around with me and into my films the past of this Kulturscheisse. I neither depend on it, nor do I admire it. The elements of this Kultur are the materials I play with."[4]
Schroeter's interest in playing with the dregs of the national body-culture is reminiscent of Kluge, although his scatological aspersions on the movement decidedly are not. The director's disinterest and detachment are more than just
Music, especially opera, is key to his alchemic project. Although many of the New German directors use opera in sophisticated ways (Straub/ Huillet, Syberberg, Herzog, Kluge), nowhere is its connection more elaborate than with Schroeter. He differs from his colleagues in seizing its overthe-top, extreme elements. As Gary Indiana, one of the director's keenest observers, notes:
Schroeter's use of opera is metaphoric and comically grandiose. He extracts scenes from overworked masterpieces as media for a richly allusive mental theater, runs bits and pieces together, jumbles the sublime with the ridiculous to the point of indissolubility, with the result that classical opera regains a bizarre vitality in this shredded, irreverent form. As it appears in Schroeter's first feature films, opera evokes not only a canon of musical works but also the modern perception of the operatic mentality as a species of camp.[6]
Not for nothing does Indiana use camp in describing the director's "radiant spectacles," to borrow Corrigan's formulation.[7] For Schroeter's films are filled with the sort of heavy-handed artifice, staginess, uprooted objects and quotes typical of camp. But again, Schroeter's style goes farther, producing "shredded, irreverent" work by appropriating particularly abject Kulturscheisse and historical debris. Significantly, that waste is taken not from minoritarian or "othered" arenas but from the kernel of high German culture. It is not a typical kind of kitsch.
This chapter, then, pursues the means by which Schroeter's embrace of kitsch, in all its abjection, is engaged. I look closely at an experimental film
Carla, Magdalena, and Mascha: Liszt kitsch at the beginning of Schroeter's Bomber Pilot
THE OUTSIDER: TRASH, NINETEENTH-CENTURY
ROMANTICISM, AND KITSCH
With its Yiddish etymology, "kitsch" immediately suggests ethnic difference and alterity to white Germanic norms.[8] Ludwig Giesz attributes it to verkitschen (to cheapen), and takes it from den Strassenschlamm zusammenscharren, literally "to collect rubbish from the street," a point confirmed by other critics, who locate its origins in a form of street-sweeping or pilfering.[9] According to Peter Ward, established art critics first used it in turn-of-the-century Vienna (a book called Der Kitsch was published by an Austrian art critic in 1925); to verkitschen etwas meant to cheapen an object or knock it off quickly.[10] Trash, debris, and expelled matter are indispensable not just to the definition of kitsch, but to its status as a concept and aesthetic category. Since it trades in rubbish, kitsch has been more or less removed from the domain of "pure" aesthetics, just as its ethnic etymological associations might be said to taint it. Needless to say, such presumed purity is highly suspect, especially when considered as a stable, fixed category. Kitsch's tainted qualities are, in fact, surprisingly mobile. Its current association with—among other things—bad taste, exalted taste, the lower class, the upper class, urban cultures, rural cultures, gays, lesbians, queers, and straights demonstrates how historically variable the construction of abject "otherness" actually is.
Still, this has not stopped critics and scholars from debasing kitsch. One often hears that kitsch occupies a hyperbolized position of art for art's sake, for instance, leading some to argue for its purported obliviousness to and disengagement from historical and cultural context. Of course, that aesthetic autonomy has nothing to do with the treasured functionlessness of Kantian art, nor the critical, counterhegemonic potential in Adorno's aesthetics, even though it remains stubbornly suggestive of both. For most commentators, kitsch nearly constitutes a category unto itself, so beyond the pale of aesthetic value and moral and ethical respectability is it. For instance, in Kitsch and Art, Tomas Kulka argues that kitsch cannot even be considered bad art, since the latter reflects poor ability rather than an out-and-out breach of aesthetic value.[11] Kulka's position is heavily influenced by the work of novelist Hermann Broch, who wrote, using a provocative somatic metaphor: "Kitsch is certainly not ‘bad art’; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like
One thing that critics agree on: kitsch, like its only slightly more esteemed cousin, camp, came into being in mid-to late nineteenth-century European culture, when mass-produced production, commodity accumulation, and display were skyrocketing (recall Kluge's searing presentation of the Crystal Palace). The period's expanding trade venues and general consumerism found their match in the increasingly elaborate style of its artifacts, its penchant for ornate, gratuitous objects, and movements like Art Nouveau. Functions, purpose, conclusions, and totalities mattered less, it seemed, than the beautiful detail. Kitsch is remarkably well suited to this context, and not just for its orientation towards the flourish. A form of production gone amok, kitsch is either too much (commodity clutter) or too little, too remote, or too out-of-touch (as with rural crafts or bad souvenirs). A form of counterproduction, it generates horribly useless objects, and is unsuitable to standard capitalist or heterosexual notions of production or reproduction. In this way kitsch may challenge our need to assign objects specified functions, or to have them participate as part of a whole, lead to a conclusion, or have, in short, any purpose or meaning.
Perceiving kitsch as a refuge from social, economic, and ideological contexts is just that—a perception, not a material reality. "Functionlessness" is a function critics ascribe to aesthetics, and it is sustained by a variety of philosophical, aesthetic, and economic institutions. Pierre Bourdieu described this brand of aesthetics as one that "presupposes [its own] distance from the world … which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world."[13] Kitsch takes that dominant, middle-class function and runs with it, something Clement Greenberg famously observed when calling kitsch "the culture of the masses,"[14] appealing to the lowest common denominator, which Greenberg tied to realism. Given its resemblance to conventional notions of art, it is hardly surprising that commentators work overtime to assert kitsch's lack of taste and productivity so as to resituate those qualities elsewhere, for instance, in "high," heterosexualized, white, wealthy art. In
Although Strauss's waltzes offer an obvious example of kitsch, we might turn to serial music, which flourished at about the same time in Europe. At this historical moment, serial and atonal music, kitsch, and decadent aesthetics held a number of shared assumptions about textual production, structure, and representation. All relied on metonymic over metaphoric organization; all rejected linear or progressive structure; and all valued fragmentation and accumulation over the sense of organic gestalt or completion. This is evident outside of music in novels like Huysmans's A rebours / Against Nature and in the essays of Oscar Wilde.[16] Rational but not rationalized, serial music and kitsch emblematize a mode of production that differs from a hierarchical assembly line of meaning. Denouement does not really matter; goallessness prevails. That goallessness, in fact, helps distinguish kitsch and camp from parody, whose intent is clear-cut, its meanings comparatively fixed. Similarly, desire in these late nineteenth-century aesthetic systems became overtly, unabashedly unfulfillable. For the Decadents, it was not even legally expressible, projected instead onto sets of objects that would never end, much less satisfy.[17] Importantly, this prompted cultural producers not to feel alienated from these objects so much as eroticize or enhance their value. As Wilde writes, "Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it."[18]
The minutely detailed bourgeois homes of the mid-to late nineteenth century revealed a certain fear of the void. Benjamin noted the period's obsession with wrappings, linings, casings, facades, and ornamentalism, observing that "‘kitsch’ [functioned as] the cluttered, aesthetic style of this mass marketing, as bourgeois class guilt: ‘the overproduction of commodities; the bad conscience of the producers.’ "[19] As I noted in relation to Kluge, this European period was also fully in thrall to ethnic alterity in the mutually entangled realms of politics (colonization), economics (trade, tourism), and aesthetic and leisure forms (opera). Viewed this way, kitsch may have functioned at the time as a way of managing alterity through domesticated exoticism.[20] As Arthur Koestler argues, Victorian kitsch was both a false cover of and an ironic response to the bald facts of industrialization and colonialism; the irony, he maintains, was in denying "modern man's" relationships to his others, be they Darwin's primates, colonized peoples, or the "law of the jungle." He asks "how it was possible that in the
Understanding nineteenth-century European culture as a garish meeting ground of capital and colonial expansionism, and as a dress rehearsal for the cinema, gives kitsch very precise historical origins. At the same time, the denial of kitsch's historicity is pivotal to its very historicization and is asserted in most definitions and understandings of the term. It is evident in Koestler's remark that art more generally could be "completely separated from reality." Kitsch takes that disinterested, detached function and goes further, mangling historical perspective so that advertisements can show Michelangelo's David hawking cheap wristwatches on his raised arm.
Yet critics keep returning to the late nineteenth century, correctly connecting kitsch to the aesthetic ideology of Romanticism, in whose twilight it ascended. Matei Calinescu influentially called it a "hackneyed form of romanticism";[22] for Saul Friedlander, "Kitsch emotion represents a certain kind of simplified, degraded, insipid, but all the more insinuating Romanticism."[23] Commentators are generally careful to avoid claiming that Romanticism is kitsch, preferring more delicate phrases, such as having given birth to kitsch—but the link is nonetheless solid. For all the historical roots Romanticism gives kitsch, though, it is important to acknowledge Romanticism's own investment in universalism and timelessness—in short, in ahistoricity.
KITSCH AND CAMP
If a central concern of camp is the construction of psychic and socio-sexual identities (as in its send-ups of white heterosexuality), kitsch, by contrast, functions more as a consequence of economic and social structures, without which the categories of taste and tastelessness would be impossible in the first place. Camp may be "failed seriousness," to invoke Sontag, but kitsch is failed judgment. Where camp is childish, kitsch is an irresponsible adult. It should "know better" and so is tied to a sense of inappropriateness that exceeds taste or decorum, trespassing moral and ethical terrain (this is especially clear in debates surrounding representation and the Shoah). Even Brecht stated, "There are effective films that have an impact on people who see them as kitsch, but there are no effective films made by people who see
Indeed, kitsch is rarely valued in anyone's scheme. Even queer commentators keep it at a distance, as if its proximity endangered the precarious status of camp or gay and lesbian cultures tout court. That is frequently achieved by constructing it as the antagonist to camp's more playful, "affectionate" send-ups. Sontag, for instance, referred to camp as "a kind of love," the absence of which is "why such kitsch items as Peyton Place … aren't Camp."[25] More recently, a reader of Esquire wrote, "Straight people don't have camp, they have kitsch,"[26] relegating it to the trash bin of heterosexuals. One term of opprobrium that critics constantly evoke is kitsch's investment in sentimentality—a feeling, of course, but not one of love. For them, sentimentality can be automatically rigged and triggered; it engages exaggerated, scripted reactions to things that are vicariously experienced. It is unearned emotion, in short. This leads to the claim that kitsch evinces predictable "stock emotions."[27] One can only deduce that sentimentality in this scheme is somehow mass-produced, whereas "authentic" feelings are the mark of (pre-industrial?) individualization. Others tie kitsch's sentimentality to nostalgia, which in turn suggests a problematic, emotional reaction to history. Whether a surfeit of emotionalism and lack of control, sentimentality has been roundly feminized, a point I develop below. And even though sentimentality has proven enormously lucrative for Hollywood and other industries trading in the "marketplace of emotions," it is still considered a very cheap feeling indeed.
Examining its etymology, Eve Sedgwick draws connections between sentimentality and the French verb ressentir, to feel (usually negative) emotions intensely; the standard English translation of the noun form is resentment. There is also sentir,"to smell," and se sentir,"to feel" in the physical sense ("I feel sick today"). All of these words chart a clear course between body, emotion, and disgust, a physicality that intimates anxiety over alterity and contagion. As Sedgwick notes, ressentir has been linked to "[t]he prurient; the morbid; the wishful; the snobbish … nauseating."[28] Sentimentality seems to be dangerously counterproductive; its historical associations have been "located in the private or domestic realm, [where it] has only a tacit or indirect connection with the economic facts of industrial marketplace production … and is intensively occupied with relational and emotional labor and expression."[29] Such perceptions only deepen the inscription of femininity on sentimentality, recalling Kluge, for whom feminine production was largely a matter of familial, biological reproduction. How to appropriate these terms? As Sedgwick observed, feminists began
When Sedgwick goes on to distinguish kitsch from camp, however, familiar antinomies and judgments emerge. Kitsch becomes a matter of "attribution," judgment, ridicule, and projection, turning its consumers into either victims or victimizers. There are the manipulated and "unenlightened" on the one hand, and the cynical and "transcendent" on the other.[30] She argues that camp, by contrast, is friendly and "more spacious": "Unlike kitsch-attribution, the sensibility of camp-recognition always sees that it is dealing in reader relations and in projective fantasy … about the spaces and practices of cultural production. Generous because it acknowledges (unlike kitsch) that its perceptions are necessarily also creations, it's little wonder that camp can encompass effects of great delicacy and power in our highly sentimental-attributive culture."[31]
My objection to Sedgwick's analysis is that the process of "recognition" she describes shuts out difference and reproduces sameness, sustaining the very culture of attribution she criticizes. Recognition runs the risk of closing down relational possibilities and in the long run may in fact be less"spacious" than kitsch—although not kitsch as defined in her terms, to be sure. How to undo a tradition that imposes pejorative unawareness (or, at the other extreme, cynical abuse) onto "kitsch" and, on the other hand, savvy appreciation of artifice onto "camp"?
Schroeter eschews this duality by finding undesirable alterity and difference within. In the sense in which the term is usually used, his is a queerer approach. This is not to say that kitsch, or even Schroeter's brand of it, is queer. Rather, it is to argue that kitsch may be every bit as "knowing" as camp and in this way can be useful to queer, lesbian, and gay constituencies. Given that empowered, majoritarian groups and institutions project negative features onto others whom they would like to degrade, the outsider status of camp, and especially kitsch, needs to be taken into account. Schroeter, for his part, explicitly refuses to buy into kitsch's averred "lovelessness." Instead, the overwrought performative, visual, and acoustic presentations in his films captures what Elsaesser calls an authenticity of feeling. This is not the feeling of sentimentality, but rather a feeling that can only be specified through its intensity, or perhaps as intensity itself. It is emotion without source and without goal.
KITSCH THROUGH THE CLASSES
Given that kitsch is usually aligned with a lack of awareness, education, urbanity, or sophistication, "low-end" examples are easy to name: the range extends from velvet Elvis paintings to plastic cuckoo clocks. One of its interesting complexities, however, is how kitsch incorporates these sorts of objects as well as those of purportedly refined, upscale "tastes" and socioeconomic prestige, like opera, baroque architecture, and big fountains. Kitsch is an affectation of extremes, upsetting bourgeois tastes by being either too pedestrian or too aristocratic.
Its connection to opera is especially deep, important here since Schroeter's kitsch is unfathomable without it. Of course, opera has lost much of its elite pedigree and prestige, even in Europe. Its insular, protected status is gone—it may still attract the fur coats in Berlin or London, but activists are there to throw blood on them. And as I have shown, critics like Kluge, Clément, and Potter have grown more aware of the blood letting of this particular leisure form.
In contrast to these critics, Schroeter is relatively unconcerned with the deadliness of opera's stories (although only relatively). He gravitates to the materials that convey these stories, opera's exquisite sounds and styles. His soundtracks repeatedly come back to the nineteenth-century world of haut bourgeois Europe, the twilight of late German Romanticism and the beginning of kitsch culture. Critics (most influentially, Corrigan) frequently refer to his film aesthetic as operatic[32] for its stylistic and emotional excesses. Schroeter's use of operas, opera cultures, and especially, diva cultures has led some to argue for "an obvious example of a gay encoding." Ulrike Sieglohr maintains that in his work, "male homosexuality remains a subtext within an aesthetic sensibility and thematic encoding." She quotes Karsten Witte's reference to Schroeter's "homosexual aesthetic," which is achieved through "hidden signs and signals—allusions and secret figures … insisting it is from a gay perspective that one understands [his] encoding as an aesthetic counter-strategy."[33] While I do not agree that these inscriptions codify "gayness," I agree that his work produces a "counterstrategy" that suggests the queer allegory Kuzniar theorized, a disidentificatory appropriation of operatic culture.
In The Death of Maria Malibran, for instance, the opera singer is such a pivotal force that she spills over onto several figures at once. All of the central actors (Magdalena Montezuma, Christine Kaufmann, and Candy Darling) portray the early nineteenth-century diva, who is voiced through recordings or impersonations of twentieth-century divas like Maria Callas and Janis
Schroeter's The Death of Maria Malibran. Courtesy of Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archives.
Critics have been understandably drawn to comment on Schroeter's high-end kitsch. Gary Indiana contrasts the purported "elitism" of his cultural references with the working-class milieux of Fassbinder films, writing that, "Schroeter's [films] move through the decors of high culture like omnivorous tourists."[34] What Indiana intimates here is that Schroeter's films—and their viewers and listeners—are less of that elite world than visitors, familiar but not identified with it. They are thereby separate from its privilege and power, even if they are still entranced by it. It is another example of disidentification in his work, as opposed to the simpler, resemblance-based forms of identification Sedgwick aligns with camp. This suggests that kitsch can be more generous and "spacious" than Sedgwick maintains, and that Schroeter's "elitism" might have a potentially critical edge.
KITSCH AND FASCISM
It goes without saying that kitsch is not always historically instructive, nor is it of constant significance to queer and gay cultures. With a variety of consumption contexts and audiences, it fulfills any number of different functions, as two film examples dramatize. One of mainstream cinema's more delightful kitsch sequences is Charlie Chaplin's balletic dance with the balloon globe in The Great Dictator. The sequence is famous for its total absence of dialogue; we hear nothing but Wagner's Lohengrin.[35] Chaplin's music, props, and performance give the "blood and soil" nobility Wagner exemplified for Hitler a ridiculous levity, while also pointing to its diabolical nature. The scene succeeds not out of any postwar, retrospective camping of the composer, but for demonstrating the vicious kitsch of Nazism's Wagner fetish in the first place.
A couple of years ago on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," the recent American talk show, O'Donnell gave her guest, Roberto Benigni, a hat once worn by Chaplin—she knew Benigni was "a big fan." Moved, he said he "didn't deserve it." He was probably right, particularly if one compares Chaplin's depiction of fascism with Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, the Oscargilded film that, as the title impresses upon us, is a "beautiful" film (as opposed, say, to a historical one), a squishy celebration of the human spirit. In his insightful critique, Jim Hoberman discusses Beautiful's self-proclaimed status as "fable."[36] With the precedent set by Schindler's List (Spielberg, 1993), Hoberman notes that the "Holocaust is now ancient history—the stuff of myth. Imagine a ‘simple fable’ of paternal self-sacrifice set in a Serbian concentration camp or in the killing fields of Rwanda. Had Benigni done so, he would have had a more difficult time calling his comedy Life Is Beautiful—let alone getting audiences to sit for it."[37]
Years earlier, Saul Friedlander had even more vigorously challenged the transformation of modernity's most brutal era into myth. His 1982 Reflections on Nazism was a crucial intervention in debates surrounding Naziretro films popular at the time, among them German films like Our Hitler and Lili Marleen, which, together with literary examples, constituted what he called the "new discourse" of Nazism. In them Friedlander located strategies of disavowal that masked atrocities of the Nazi past precisely as they were depicting and, ostensibly, exposing that past. He maintained that they achieved this by encouraging a "fascinating fascism," either through eroticism (The Night Porter[Cavani, 1973]) or banality (sequences of Our Hitler painstakingly detailing Hitler's daily life, which stress the ordinariness of the monster).
Even with well-intentioned films that insisted on the ongoing legacy of fascism in contemporary Europe, like The Spider's Stratagem (Bertolucci, 1970), Friedlander finds that their spectacularization—or, inversely, their banalization—of fascism mirrors fascism's particular brand of kitsch, a kitsch Friedlander ultimately links to death. Thus, in contrast to critics who regard kitsch as functionless or cheap failure, Friedlander stresses its very costly dangers in representing something as murderous as Nazism. For him, its tastelessness and inappropriateness reside in being unable to distinguish the regime's atrocities or the material horrors of death from their banalization, sentimentalization, or glorification. This kitsch process eroticizes, spectacularizes, honors, and mythologizes. For him, Nazism's relationship to death was both an aesthetic and anestheticizing one, similar to Benjamin's warning about the aestheticization of politics at the end of his essay, "The Work of Art." Friedlander is not alone in discovering kitsch in political contexts. Gillo Dorfles associates it with modern, right-wing regimes that devote themselves to ritual and pageantry and retreat into the past for models. Their glorification of death, battle, and sacrifice all establish that kitsch, like camp, is not necessarily constituted after the fact by outsiders. The scary allure of the SS's leather coats, for instance, was certainly evident at the time, not emerging all at once in postwar s/m dungeons around the world. Nazism's fascination with ritual and formulaic repetition was also evident in its award ceremonies for mothers who produced multiple sons, in its pseudospirituality and "debased myths," in its fetishism of beauty and purity, and in its fantasy of an endless, thousandyear Reich.[38] Nazism's fascination with death and destruction is clear in its nostalgia for classical and national myths, the warriors of old, the "glory" of previous military victories, and other past and present sacrifices or genocides that buttress the idea of nation. Noting the historical implications of these obsessions, Friedlander writes, "Kitsch death is a means to digest the past."[39] Yet in Schroeter's work, kitsch introjects the past not to destroy it, but to begin to process it as it is moved forward.
SCHROETER'S KITSCHY BOMBER PILOT
Initially, Schroeter's ZDF-funded Bomber Pilot appears to be a risky, flagrant inversion of Friedlander's and Benjamin's admonitions against the aestheticization of politics. But it is too tacky, and Schroeter too aware of its silliness, its hokey cultural references, and the characters' inflated anguish over of the tension of art versus politics to be the kind of mindless, bombastic kitsch that critics deride. Three women are performed by Schroeter
Pilot's cinematic kitsch is easy to identify. It reprises the well-worn story of a group of undertalented women trying to make a go of "artistic" (read "showbiz") careers in difficult times (with the presence of a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead, it gives a kitschy nod to Les Girls[Cukor, 1957]) in particular).[41] Disregarding verisimilitude at every turn, we have very few spatial and temporal features to work with, leaving only metonymic markers of history and place—swastika banners here, 1960s miniskirts there (and this in one of Schroeter's few films with a historically explicit backdrop). Bomber Pilot merges the pounding familiarity of Viennese icons (pastries, waltzes) with the ritual of Sieg Heil ing; its soundtrack is predigested and stagy (bad recordings of Liszt; Elvis Presley singing traditional Neapolitan songs); props, sets, and situations are conspicuously low-budget (straps and clothes slide off characters' shoulders; the scenes in America were obviously shot at a U.S. military base in Germany). Clearly one cannot take the characters' good intentions or lofty aspirations seriously. Yet juxtaposing their emotional earnestness with the film's emphatically tawdry presentation creates something more compelling than cheap send-up.
Carla's pastry shop performance in Bomber Pilot
The film's three women are so far removed from the realm of individualized characters that their names are taken from the actresses who portray them, blurring the boundaries between fiction and production even more than Herr R or Holy Whore. Their actions are often intertwined to the point of interchangeability: Carla and Mascha share the same lover and wear some of the same clothing; Mascha and Magdalena each mother the other during their respective breakdowns, and so on. The film makes no attempt to convey authenticity or a credible, coherent diegetic world; the performance style is histrionic and over-the-top. Scenes ostensibly depicting their stage performances are shot no differently than those that follow their story more generally; we do not learn what causes Mascha's breakdown, and the eponymous bomber pilot who sleeps with Mascha and Carla is never shown for certain.
As is typical of Schroeter's early work, cameras are placed close to the figures, diminishing spatial context or continuity. Obviously this draws our attention to their facial and bodily expressions, another characteristic of his film work. The expressions of the women work to convey a series of intense emotional experiences, but it is important to stress that they produce only the signs of intensity. Emotions, in other words, are produced through the signs, rather than being the force that generates them: feelings are less of the characters than they are signaled by them. In that regard, Schroeter's
Thus the emotions and desires at work in Schroeter's film are not disingenuous; it's just that we can't understand or explain them. They are not, for instance, the provenance of a singular source or body. But neither are they abstracted, rarefied, or transcendent, despite their detachment from explicit human, psychological, and somatic sources. Indeed, the film's emotions are intense ones—grief, emotional breakdown, frustration, physical pain, longing. The materiality of the signs conveying them are too overwhelming to trivialize. Asynchronous screams and whimpers overtake characters who may look like they're singing; conversely, we hear them sing when they're not even moving their mouths. Familiar songs are performed out of tune, with absurd new lyrics; characters wear costumes of overdetermined fantasy scenarios, from sailor's suit to bustier and garters.
VOICE AND IMAGE
Given his cinematic separation of expression from source, it is perhaps not surprising that Schroeter has repeatedly attacked psychoanalysis and psychological readings and renderings throughout his career. Regarding Der Tag der Idioten, whose lead character, without much provocation, checks into a psychiatric hospital, he said,
The audience can use its own imagination to interpret the significance of her behaviour in the few scenes prior to her admission in the clinic. Psychoanalysis doesn't interest me. I don't believe in it—this system of psychological terror. Cinema is almost entirely made up of psychological dramas, of films, with this psychological terror that plays with archetypes.[42]
It should be equally unsurprising that Schroeter is no fan of Expressionism, derived as it is from the outward expression of psychologically constructed interiority. The asynchronous soundtracks of Pilot and most of his other early films reject the surface-depth model of both Expressionism and psychoanalysis, refuting their ability to unlock inner turmoil or explain emotional behavior. Disinterested in the source of emotions, Schroeter
It would be absurd to assert that the desire for beauty and truth is merely an illusion of our romantic-capitalist society. Undoubtedly, the desire for exalted, larger-than-life wish-fulfilment, as we find it in all traditional art, to which we can certainly add the modern "trivial" media of cinema and television, corresponds to a very general human need. In my films I want to live out the very few basic human moments of expressivity to the point of musical and gestural excess—those few completely authentic feelings: life, love, joy, hatred, jealousy and the fear of death, without psychologizing them.[43]
Because emotions are loaded with social and political resonance, the opposition that Schroeter intimates here between politics and aesthetics does not hold up. Nearly all of Schroeter's appreciators—from Fassbinder to Cahiers du Cinéma, Gary Courant to Gary Indiana—stress the intensely political nature of his "decadent aesthetics" to show "the death, the lies, the selfishness and self-destructiveness" of "consumer culture."[44] Thus, without announcing a specific political or even critical agenda (as he would indeed be loathe to do), Schroeter uses style and emotionalism to convey what is in effect the political need for its expression, rather than its solution.
If, as Kaja Silverman has argued, "the voice is the site of perhaps the most radical of all subjective divisions—the division between meaning and materiality,"[45] the singing voice accentuates that divide even further. Irrevocably tied to the body, it nudges the voice toward the realm of materiality. Barthes's notion of the "grain" of the voice comes to life in Bomber Pilot, where Carla's off-pitch voice seems to physically damage Strauss's work. The Native American chanting during Magdalena's "Snake Dance" obliges western ears to focus on sounds and rhythms without benefit of verifiable meaning. To use the masculinist/erotic vocabulary of Barthes, the singing voice pierces, cuts, soothes, soars, and climaxes. With Schroeter, listening also becomes physicalized: audiences may respond with tears, rapture, passion, and terror. Singing voices seem to be able to move people—perhaps not to an identifiable place—but to an uncharted, unoccupiable space where desires roam. Pilot accentuates that several times when, for example, we hear brief instrumental passages preceding operatic arias. It goes on then to withhold the arias, leaving us only with spaces we want to be filled in.
Some of the film's voices are used for their specific significance and references, as in the radio broadcast announcing Hitler's death or an English commentator describing an appearance of Winston Churchill. These, however, are the exceptions. Usually, the soundtrack seems detached from an
Schroeter claimed that with Pilot he wanted the words to be absurd and the images sincere. The remarks are misleading, since the film does anything but assure the sincerity of its images. One scene elaborates this inconsistency well. While working as an adult educator, Magdalena gives a desultory analysis of a book of photographs of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the German soprano of the 1950s and 1960s—who was not famous enough at the time in the film's diegesis to have had an album devoted to her.[47] As if to comment on the stagy presentation of the characters in Bomber Pilot, Magdalena approvingly refers to a photograph of the soprano after a performance: "An expression of great tension is visible in her face, it is a document of humanity. The composition itself shows the expression of enormous fatigue and happiness after a show." Yet the idea that expressivity (sincerity?) as producible though performance or posing is undercut by her next set of comments:
Here we have, on the other hand, a terrible photo, a portrait. Everything is posed. The lighting accentuates the completely artificial manner of holding her head, her heavenward gaze is clearly affected, an artificiality of her expression. This shows us a complete lack of sincerity. [And then, in complete contrast to Schroeter's claims:] This example shows us that as a means of expression, photography can only give us artifice and falseness of expression and artificial character.
The last snapshot depicts Schwarzkopf on a "beautiful day," "unposed," with her family and dog. For Magdalena, "the photography proves its full humanity." It is striking that Schroeter, whose stagy aesthetic articulates precisely this kind of ineffable human expression, would suggest that emotional "sincerity" resides with the unposed and the natural. (At the same
No matter how you approach it, the connection between artifice and something broaching "sincerity" remains significant in Schroeter's form of kitsch. Elsewhere in the film, as Carla adjusts her corset, she remarks in a strangely epiphanous voice-over: "I carefully watched my straps. I was surprised to see how I was standing straighter and how the expression on my face had changed. I felt as if I were experiencing my life, and I felt completely satisfied with myself." Carla makes this statement while facing a mirror that faces us, revealing another split, between self as actant and observer, which seems to acknowledge the other divisions cinematic representation imposes on us. It is no accident that this occurs just as Carla is asked to join the theatre, and that, while the soundtrack remains continuous, a dissolve links the first image, where Carla speaks in front of some tacky red Victorian wallpaper, to the second, where she is dressed in an evening gown and made up, supposedly in the theatre, but in front of the same garish wallpaper.
BOMBER PILOT: MUSIC AND KULTURSCHEISSE
The music in Bomber Pilot is a provocative grab bag of selections from Verdi, Strauss, Carmen Jones, West Side Story, Sibelius, Elvis, Wagner, and a number of U.S. and German pop tunes. Its simultaneously kitschy and critical functions are in evidence from the film's opening shot, in which the women Sieg Heil in undergarments as we hear the final, triumphant section of Liszt's Wagnerian-like Symphonic Poem No. 1, "Les Préludes." For as Wagnerian and full-blooded as the opening music is—and for the Nazi kitsch it immediately calls forth—its irony is already fierce, since Wagner's belief in opera as a means of unifying diverse aesthetic forms is utterly inapplicable to Schroeter's film, which is structured around fragments and so many border crossings. Like Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at the beginning of Maria Braun, the quality of the brief Liszt selection played is deliberately awful. Immediately following it is a traditional (and again, damaged) version of Johann Strauss Jr.'s "On the Beautiful Blue Danube," a waltz whose imagery of glittery rivers and fin-de-siècle Vienna, with its chipper soprano delivery, is fully inappropriate to the style and wartime story of Bomber Pilot. These pieces of musical kitsch are worked upon so vigorously that they no longer "work" except as shimmery acoustic relics.
These examples show the extent to which Schroeter uses and abuses German and Austrian musical heritage, and comparisons to Syberberg or even Kluge's Patriot might seem inevitable. But unlike them, Pilot makes clear that German identity cannot be stitched together from the wreckage of German culture. This is established in a crucial scene after the war, when we are told that the three women happen to meet "at a Bruckner concert in the Municipal Theatre." One by one, each enters the foyer after the performance has begun. Obviously, we expect to hear something by Anton Bruckner, whose favored status under the Reich is well known. (His work was even reorchestrated and conducted differently during the war.) Will Schroeter provide the Nazi-sanctioned version, or another? Neither. Instead, we get the final section of the overture of Nabucco, the early political opera by Verdi.
By selecting music that is not Bruckner, Schroeter again dramatizes the unreliable relationship between film image and sound. Yet, instead of pitting the two against the other (with the image showing "sincerity" and the soundtrack "deception," for instance), the soundtrack that announces Bruckner and gives us Verdi splits from within, exposing its own deceptiveness. Moreover, given the political weight of the reference to Bruckner, the acoustic sleight of hand raises other questions: What of the question of nation? Does the presence of Verdi mock Germany's postwar banning of Bruckner performances, a "refusal of coming to terms"? Or could Schroeter be commenting on the nearly transnational exchangeability of music that has been put to nationalist uses? (It must be noted that, despite his appropriation by the Nazis, Bruckner was not a nationalist composer.)
Verdi, by contrast, was a national (and nationalist) treasure in Italy, a key cultural figure during the Risorgimento. Significantly to Schroeter's film, his opera Nabucco tells the ancient story of a captive Jewish people wanting to form their own state—for obvious reasons it was enormously successful in nineteenth-century nationalist Italy. Documents show that massive crowds spontaneously started singing one of its famous and more patriotic choruses at Verdi's funeral. Yet for all of his nationalist fervor, the Italian composer does not so much escape or oppose "Germanness" as to help constitute it. Bypassing Verdi's place with Europe's history of modern nationalism, bypassing even Nabucco's plot, his Italianness gives the film more material for its examination of Germanness. Germans have been preoccupied with Latin cultures like Italy and Spain in a fascination that is as economically real (tourism) as it is phantasmatically potent, and the binarisms sustaining such ethnic othering are both obvious and obnoxious.[48] This kind of other nationwithin-nation formation is nearly as significant as Nabucco's story line. For by occupying the acoustic space that was to have been Bruckner's in
The Germanness that Verdi's work both censors and constitutes is influenced by other music as well, which establishes Germanness through various geographical and cultural twists and hybrids emerging from "outside" of Germany. We hear a short bridge from West Side Story, a text that blurred the musical's popular status with higher, purportedly artistic forms (partly through the teaming of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein) and whose own story of interethnic romance dramatized the consequences of other kinds of border crossings. Elsewhere in Bomber Pilot, Elvis sings the Neapolitan "Santa Lucia" in a particularly bizarre cross-pollination. Elvis's and Bernstein's "American" music may be said to infiltrate Schroeter's film just as the American bomber pilot infiltrates the German bodies of Mascha and especially Carla. An especially interesting example is "Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum," taken from Carmen Jones (1954), the film adaptation of Bizet's Carmen ("Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum" is based on a portion of what was originally the "Gypsy Dance"). As we have already seen, Carmen epitomizes nineteenth-century Europe's colonialist impulses: fetishizing, eroticizing, yet degrading the ethnic/national/ regional/sexual other. Otto Preminger's 1954 film adaptation is well known as being one of the few all-black Hollywood productions of the classical era (more accurately, its cast was black). It was released about the time when Bomber Pilot's fictional women are considering bringing their integrationist message to America. Director Preminger was another German (actually, Viennese) who came to the United States with a special interest in the racial "other." Preminger maintained a relatively long-term affair with Dorothy Dandridge, the actress who portrayed Carmen Jones. He kept the relationship under wraps, eventually ending it out of concern for his career (clearly, the fear of "Carmen"‘s alterity had not diminished over the years). In the film, moreover, Dandridge was dubbed by a white singer, Marilyn—not Lena—Horne.
"Rhythm on a Drum" appears in Bomber Pilot several times, usually in stagy, repeated scenes of Mascha, Magdalena, and Carla "smoking a marijuana cigarette at the breakfast table," a probable reference to Carmen's job in the cigar factory in the opera. In these scenes, we are told that the women are preparing their integrationist message to take to the United States. They are motionless, except for the collective, kitschy jump from their seats a few seconds after the first-person voice-over, influenced by the song's lyrics, that states, "Our hearts took a leap." This detail, however
Magdalena: deadly beauty at the river's edge in Bomber Pilot
A different scene recalls Peer Raben's remarks on irony and beauty's ability to coexist. At the end of the war, a despairing Magdalena is "looking for an issue, an issue towards humanity" and goes to a river to drown herself. The long shot is depicted in black-and-white in diffuse focus and lowintensity light. Compositionally, the image is devoted to the exquisitely beautiful landscape rather than character. Magdalena's voice-over tells us about her problems with productivity ("My problem was never being able to complete a project"); then we hear the German broadcast announcing Hitler's death, and then a British transmission of an appearance by Churchill. If image, sound, and psychologized character motivation were working in tandem, one might assume that Magdalena's desire to die was a result of the Führer's death. The film's stylistic strategies do not facilitate such a reading, however, even with other diegetic details, like the success of her wartime cabaret act and her problems finding self-worth or employment
The "Vienna Blood Waltz" that Carla sings shows how a clichéd cultural icon functions as an acoustic builder of national and subjective identities. To most listeners in the West, Johann Strauss Jr.'s tune would already be familiar to the point of kitsch, and Carla's frequent and deliberately awful renderings do nothing to dispel that. "Vienna Blood Waltz" was initially written without lyrics, as an orchestral piece. Strauss later incorporated his waltz into an 1899 operetta of the same title, and a subsequent rendering by Willi Forst in 1942 would prove very popular within the Nazi regime. The following are the transcribed lyrics from the original operetta. Although they are not what Carla sings (more on that in a moment), they show how music plays easily to regionalist, nationalist ends. Of particular interest is the focus on the body as a carrier of regional identity:
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Eig'ner Saft, | |
| Voller Kraft, | |
| Voller Glut! | |
| Wiener Blut, | |
| Selt'nes Gut! | |
| Du erhebst | |
| Und belebst | |
| Unsern Mut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Was die Stadt | |
| Schoenes hat, | |
| In dir ruht! | |
| Wiener Blut! | |
| Heisse Flut! | |
| Allerort | |
| Gilt das Wort: | |
| Wiener Blut![49] | |
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Makes you fly | |
| Like a song | |
| To the sky. | |
| Makes your heart | |
| Ever gleam, | |
| Gives a wing | |
| To your dream! | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Vienna blood! | |
| Makes you see | |
| Paradise | |
| In the smile | |
| Of two eyes. | |
| Makes you laugh, | |
| Makes you cry, | |
| Really live | |
| Till you die![50] |
With this piece in mind, it is worth returning to Friedlander's criticism of the song "Lili Marleen" in Fassbinder's film. Kitsch, he maintains, is produced through deliberate, predictable, and formulaic repetition, just as it is supposed to produce predictable, formulaic emotions. Norbert Schultz's sentimental song functions that way for Friedlander, who, not without irony,
HOMEOPATHIC INTROJECTION
Not despite the kitsch to which it is drawn is Mahler's music great, but because its construction unties the tongue of kitsch, unfetters the longing that is merely exploited by the commerce that the kitsch serves.
—THEODOR ADORNO
I want to reformulate what I initially presented as Schroeter's embrace of kitsch in terms of homeopathy, whose relevance to postwar Germany was made evident in Santner's Stranded Objects. Since science is unable explain how homeopathy works, it functions as a stubborn, indigestible "other" to the medical establishment—exactly as kitsch functions in regard to aesthetics.[52] To be sure, homeopathic principles organize Schroeter's brand of kitsch, taking in (introjecting) elements that in other circumstances (or for other people) would be harmful or unwanted.
In psychoanalytic terms, homeopathy describes the encrypted losses and attachments Abraham and Torok discuss in their work on the formation of the body-ego, as I discussed in chapter One. Santner notes how human psychic development is itself a homeopathic process, beginning with Freud's famous game of fort/da, in which the child stages and controls the disappearance of its mother through transitional objects (toys, etc.) that substitute for her. "[T]hanks to this procedure, he [sic] is able to administer in controlled doses the absence he is mourning."[53] Although the fort/da game, with its dosing out of negative elements, may give the child a sense of "mastering" its initial traumas, the sense of control and mastery is illusory, since with them the child "integrate[s] the loss of its narcissistic fantasies of centrality and omnipotence."[54] As Santner notes, negativity,
Critics always take a methodological leap when moving from medical or psychoanalytic accounts of subjective processes to film texts or, indeed, to entire national "bodies." Yet Santner compellingly argues that homeopathic principles are relevant to the New German Cinema, which emerged from a "wound culture," and whose films are filled with fragments, reworked icons, music, and histories in its attempts to come to terms with the past. Of all the directors discussed thus far, Schroeter best exemplifies the acceptance of the past that Santner describes and that I am developing here. Schroeter accepts the abject side of German Kulturscheisse, and, with Bomber Pilot,"takes in" controlled doses of unwanted aesthetics, political ideology, desire, and history. Spectators and auditors can disidentify with what is both depicted and undepicted (the latter point leading to the argument that Schroeter "encodes" his film with a clandestine gay aesthetic). Schroeter's materialized kitsch hyperbolically—if indirectly—depicts things that audiences are not supposed to talk about, desire, or lament. It helps us engage off-limit memories and desires, even though they seem to be at considerable remove from our current positions. What happens is less a control over undesirable aspects of the past than a momentary embrace, a way of bringing them into relationship with our present identity.
Lest I overstate my claims about "successful" homeopathic outcomes in Schroeter's film, let us return to the acoustic haunting of Carla by Strauss's "Vienna Blood Waltz." This piece gives the most concrete example of potential homeopathic introjection in Bomber Pilot and haunts the body of the film as a whole, so obsessively is it played. Frozen into acoustic iconicity, the tune is a kitschy relic of fin-de-siècle Viennese culture, with its waltzes, twinkling rivers, lavish pastry, and coffee shops, all interwoven and idealized. As the original libretto reveals, that fantasy extended to human bodies as well, intertwining geographic and somatic elements in an impossible fiction: Vienna literally runs through your veins. So fully at one with their surroundings are Viennese subjects that they are physically indistinguishable from them—blood, rivers, all flow together, the naturalized sources of this propped-up identity. From a post-Shoah perspective, the notion is hardly reassuring, to be sure, and is resonant with Nazi ideology (and decree) that established national and racial identity through bloodlines.
Schroeter exaggerates the pernicious element of the original "Wienerblut" through Carla's modified lyrics, roughly translated below:
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| Full of rot | |
| Full of force, | |
| Full of life. | |
| Vienna blood | |
| Vienna blood, | |
| You have conquered | |
| Our hearts and our souls | |
| Our weapon resides therein | |
| With the bouquets of Strauss melodies. | |
| Only Vienna blood understands us, | |
| The real Viennese. | |
| Still there are people who transgress | |
| Always fight, always agitate | |
| They make out to be Evil | |
| Leave goodness in limbo | |
| And who does it shame? Only us | |
| Viennese Blood. | |
| When our hearts are nearly broken | |
| We never complain. Shame is abused | |
| What's done is done | |
| The past is past | |
| One doesn't discuss it | |
| And holds out one's hand |
With his new lyrics, Schroeter illuminates the antihomeopathic choices available for Carla and postwar subjects to make: "What's done is done / The past is past / One doesn't discuss it." Rather than integrate the Nazi past into the present, it is cast out like so much bad blood. Its negative aspects are projected elsewhere to avoid contaminating the lively Viennese strain, which alone is believed to veil irritability, fights, or, presumably, an unpleasant little experience like Nazism.
Carla holds on to the poisonous song, unable to release the past pleasures it represents for her—namely, the sense of fulfillment she experienced in the Nazi era. Singing it over and over again, her character is oblivious to its potential as an object to help her move forward. She is equally unaware of its deadliness: importantly, she learns about the death of her real or theatrical lover (played by Schroeter) after she first performs the song. Nor is it incidental that she is actively harmed by the "angry," "spiteful"
The other two women seem unconcerned about the approval of their Viennese, Nazi, or U.S. military audiences—although I hesitate to psychologize the characters in this way (more on this below). The choice of musical pieces they perform for American troops toward the end of the film shows a Schroeter-like disinterest in what might please their listeners. Mascha gives an off-key rendition of "Schmerzen / The Bliss of Sorrow," from a Wagner song cycle, to virulent hisses; Magdalena performs her intense, Galas-like "Snake Dance." Carla, by contrast, is perfectly at home and sings an upbeat and well-received habañera (kitsch and exoticism again), "Abschied am Meer," still clinging to the water imagery of the Strauss waltzes. Mascha and Magdalena's performances know no such gaiety; theirs are intense expressions of vague, undefined emotion. It is kitsch, to be sure, but without the formulaic saccharine feelings routinely linked to it.
Mascha's lied incorporates a spoiled element of "Germanness" (Wagner off-key) into the postwar identity of which she is a figure, othering her own culture while dramatizing the "unwanted within the wanted." Magdalena's impassioned dance literalizes an attempt to embrace difference: her arms are actually outstretched as if to get that embrace. Her abject object is less defined than the Wagner in Mascha's performance. It may seem closer on the one hand to the realm of "pure" expressivity, but on the other, the Hopi rhythms chanted in voice-over concretize the performance's historical and cultural roots, which lie elsewhere. To be sure, presenting indigenous music as incomprehensible is problematic and provides a crucial instance of the film positioning nonwhite culture always outside of Germany. In contrast to Mascha, then, who finds abject kitsch within German culture, Magdalena brings it in from beyond its borders, importing its signs in her make-up and dress.
Magdalena and Mascha's embrace of alterity is connected to their desire to express "what they experienced under Hitler to the Americans" in an
When they return to Germany, the trio "finally decided to take responsibility for [their] past" in their strongest collective attempt at remembrance. They return to their cabaret act and, following the three solo numbers described above, collectively perform an aria they had performed for Hitler, Franz Lehár's "Meine Lippen sie kussen." Donning their garter and corset costumes once again, they move like the mannequins behind them on their makeshift stage. The dark backdrop and clearly defined edges of the stage ensure that we recognize this as staged performance, although there is no theatrical audience. Choreographically, there is nothing more than moving stills or poses, and in some ways the performance is as detached and mechanistic as their Sieg Heil s on all fours at the film's outset. The scene is immediately followed by Carla's final collapse, and then Bomber Pilot appears to perform some homeopathic administration of its own by repeating previous scenes. The first two are accompanied by Elvis's version of "Santa Lucia" and then Sibelius's "Valse triste"; they are emotionally intense, and the slow tempo of the music brushes the images with a vague sadness.
Why do homeopathic administrations of the past fail to help the characters of Bomber Pilot? Diegetically, it can be accounted for by the Adenauerian context in which they find themselves. With its forward-driven, amnesiac ambitions and preoccupation with the German miracle, the period could hardly have offered the supportive context necessary for it to work. Nor would the American occupiers, equally eager to purge all traces
Caruso gesturing towards the audience in Schroeter's sequence of Herzog's Fitzcarraldo
Schroeter's use of close-ups, abstracted space, and direct address elaborate the film's appeals to externalized others. The importance of that emotional invitation is repeatedly illustrated throughout his work, including
"He looked right at me!" Fitzcarraldo's jubilant identification with Caruso
Listeners of Bomber Pilot may be like Fitzcarraldo, wanting to respond to the performance of its characters, but here they are prevented from perceiving them as actual divas or as psychologically credible figures. Take Mascha's nervous breakdown, for instance. We have no way to know why she has it or how to identify with her in any standard sense of the term. The kind of distance that this creates between audience and character is not the unemotional one 1980s critics thought they had found in Brecht, nor is it ironic or mocking. It isn't really camp, either. Instead, it is charged with signs of emotional expressivity, however unfixed and unclear. Without knowing how to situate ourselves in terms of understanding, sharing, or identifying the nature of Mascha's pain and collapse, for instance, we
The musical choices Schroeter makes help extend that openness to the film listener. Although the Liszt at the beginning and the Verdi at the concert hall make specific points, it is more common for the sheer beauty of the piece (or its ugliness, its anachronistic inappropriateness, whatever) to overwhelm, giving us little more than undirected, aimless sound. This is not to champion their abstraction, and, indeed, objections might be raised that the object in Schroeter's text is too ill-defined, his homeopathic ghosts too unspecified, to be worked through. But I believe that this openness is what enables a range of emotional positions and responses on our part, as so many "pieces" of Germany's past are introjected and presented to us. That he is able to do so out of pieces of "culture shit" renders his kitschy project even more compelling. As Schroeter describes his Love's Debris,"The title of this film is based on a very deep conviction that what we express vocally is the ‘product’ of our quest for a closer approach to the Other, for Love and all possible romantic aptitudes."[57] In this way, Bomber Pilot widens the space for empathetic listening that Fassbinder's melodramas and Kluge's "antiopera" had initially begun to clear.
HISTORY
Like the performance of history itself [Schroeter's] cinema inscribes the historical subject in both its beauty and its pain as a single moment, where an external history and a perceiving subject become momentarily and ecstatically lost in each other.
—TIMOTHY CORRIGANM
More than most directors affiliated with the New German Cinema, Schroeter deals in the raw "power of emotion" and desire. He does this by bringing objects into emotions, and then these objects into the self. And just as his notion of self becomes flexible and multifaceted, so Schroeter transforms the concept of Germany into a site of competing forces. It is German and un-German, full of beautiful music, full of tainted music; it
Schroeter's nonjudgmental attitude towards intense emotional expression is central to his treatment of kitsch. This is not to say that he is unaware of kitsch's dangers (Carla's story would have been impossible otherwise), but he is unafraid of the judgment projected onto it—its purported decadence, lies, cheapness, or Kulturscheisse. In short, he does not try to keep the negative alterity associated with it at bay by taking kitsch into his own work. He even finds beauty in kitsch, as Peer Raben could. That lack of fear of beauty is not trivial, given Broch's remarks about kitsch doing something beautifully, not well (and Bomber Pilot certainly could not be accused of doing anything well). In contrast to modernist and Marxist aesthetics, beauty here is not always already narcotizing or ahistorically transcendent, although Schroeter is aware that music has been put to precisely those ends, as in Nazism or Romantic aesthetics. By interweaving concepts like "authentic feeling" and "beauty" and so many kitschy props and artifacts into his text, Schroeter does not put them in the position of alterity, of abandoned, "othered" objects, or products of the realm of "non-art," to recall Kulka. In fact, he says as much in a discussion on Shakespeare: "[For me] there's no great divide between kitsch and art. It's just stupid to look for traditional values in art and culture—one should only try to find a vitality in them."[58]
It is worth returning to Hermann Broch. The full quote from which his earlier remarks were taken reveals how the attempt to ostracize kitsch, which he certainly wants to do, is actually impossible. Kitsch ends up like an unwanted body part that the body cannot reject:
Kitsch is certainly not "bad art"; it forms its own closed system, which is lodged like a foreign body in the overall system of art, or which, if you prefer, appears alongside it. Its relationship to art can be compared—and this is more than a mere metaphor—to the relationship between the system of the Anti-Christ and the system of Christ. Every system of values, if
Below, Nietzsche elaborates the "second glance" that Broch implies but does not elaborate. Secularizing the diseased, "foreign" body of kitsch, Germany, and himself, Nietzsche writes:
What is strangest is this: after [a long illness] one has a different taste—a second taste. Out of such abysses, also out of the abyss of great suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one's skin, more ticklish and sarcastic, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things with gayer senses [!], with a second dangerous interest in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times more subtle than one has ever been before. How repulsive pleasure is now, that crude, musty, brown pleasure as it is understood by those who like pleasure, our "educated" people, our rich people, and our rulers![60]
Nietzsche's diatribe against pleasure has little to do with Schroeter's agenda, yet associating its fecal "brown" characteristics with highbrow culture does. Nietzsche takes aim at a nineteenth-century German Kulturscheisse that the director subsequently adopts and brings inward. Especially significant is the renewal, that "second glance" or hearing that Nietzsche raises, which suggests an openness to the lessons of our predecessors as well as an ability to move forward in health. In a sense, Nietzsche offers a nascent theory of kitsch, one whose irony is stronger than Schroeter's and whose "tender tongue for all good things" is considerably more diminished. For texts like Bomber Pilot certainly offer that newly reborn body to us, rejuvenated but not juvenile in its second "tastes," over thirty years after its release and sixty years after World War II.
The words of Julia Kristeva suggestively hint at the productive capacity of kitsch: recall her reference to beauty as "the depressive's other realm." Building on Freud's theory of sublimation and artistic creativity and theories of allegory, she writes:
Sublimation's dynamics, by summoning up primary processes and idealization, weaves a hypersign around and with the depressive void. This is allegory, as lavishness of that which no longer is, but which regains for
Although Kristeva does not address the historical implications of the processes she observes, the absence (of the past) can be made hyperpresent through conspicuously beautiful allegory. Here kitsch, instead of being locked out of history, or called its murderer (pace Friedlander), makes it present, its "ephemerability" displaced as it brings its loss to life.
What does the kitschy aesthetic of films like Bomber Pilot do, in the end? Self-aware, as kitsch is not wont to be, it lacks disdain or judgment and produces critique—from which kitsch is also routinely dissociated. Othered in aesthetic, gay, heterosexual, and even political accounts, kitsch forms part of the national Kulturscheisse with which Schroeter works and in which he is able to find beauty, criticism, and tastelessness all at once. For him, kitsch in general, and music in particular, can create the kind of encounters with undesirable elements of history, self, and national identities important to homeopathic "recovery" and disidentificatory positioning. For Schroeter, Corrigan argues, "history becomes a recurring moment, where time and place are an almost arbitrary stage on which the individual releases emotion, where one chooses to enter history from outside in order to perform oneself as a spectacle of time."[62] Although that choice may not be quite as willed as Corrigan implies, the meeting of listener/viewer/ performer with history nevertheless suggests something more than simply fitting into the "socially supportive space" Santner delineated. It sets the stage for memories in which desire and yearning mesh with historical recollection and memories that audiences are asked to interact with. In contrast to Kulka's formulation, kitsch can articulate decidedly un formulaic emotions. And their overwrought, tacky musical expression is as historiographically compelling as it is generous.
