1. Edgar Reitz, "Arbeiten un unseren Erinnerungen," Medium 5, no. 79 (May 1979), 21–22.

2. Elie Wiesel, "Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction," New York Times (16 April 1978), section 2, p. 1.

3. For an account, see Renate Möhrmann, "‘Germany, Pale Mother’: On the Mother Figures in New German Women's Film," in Women in German Yearbook 11, ed. S. Friedrichsmeyer and P. Herminghouse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 67–80.

4. Recently, melodrama has been considerably reconfigured as a generic, industrial and (trans)national phenomenon. The 1980s understanding of melodrama was thus demarcated by certain assumptions and interests dominating film studies—and production—at the time. Some of the reigning defining characteristics of melodrama of the time, like its domestic setting, its femalecenteredness, or its relative inattention to action, have been brought into question. See essays in J. Bratton et al., Melodrama: Stage/Picture/Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994); and Christine Gledhill's "Rethinking Genre," in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. C. Gledhill and L. Williams (London: Arnold, 2000), 221–43. To situate the New German Cinema within this historical context, I will be using the 1980s conception of melodrama, which gravitates towards domestic family dramas in (primarily) English-language cinema of the 1930s to 1950s. My aim is to examine the historically coincident obsession with excess and ideology in melodrama studies at the time, when interest in the New German Cinema was high.

5. The term is from Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

6. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976); and David Grimsted, "Melodrama as Echo of the Historically Voiceless," in Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-Century Social History, ed. Tamara Hareven (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), 80.

7. Richard McCormick, Politics of the Self: Feminism and the Postmodern in West German Literature and Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).

8. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 51.

9. Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," 50.

10. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, "Minnelli and Melodrama," in Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is, 73.

11. Raben's collaborations with Fassbinder extend beyond his role as composer. The two also worked together as theatrical directors and actors. In fact, it was Raben who, as director of the Anti-Theatre ensemble in Munich, first introduced Fassbinder to the group (of which he soon took charge) in the mid-1960s.

12. That same year, Fassbinder's mother, Liselotte Eder, had a different version successfully pulled from circulation. That version, fifteen minutes shorter, had been authorized by Raben, who had replaced the U.S. and Canadian songs with his own compositions. For a critical account of Raben on the matter, see Michael Töteberg, "Wie man einem film verstümmelt," Taz Berlin, 21 June 1990. After the death of Eder, Fassbinder's young editor and partner Juliane Lorenz continued to contest Raben's claims concerning authorized film versions and compensation for his work in this and other films. In the mid 1990s a court awarded Fassbinder's estate full royalties for the songs for which Fassbinder wrote the lyrics and Raben the music, and it is possible that Fassbinder's films may be scored anew. The turf wars between Raben's and Fassbinder's estate-holders seem to have been sparked in part when Raben was the finance officer of the Anti-Theatre's X films, a task he seems to have performed with less skill than his composing.

13. Russell Potter, "Not the Same: Race, Repetition, and Difference in Hip-Hop and Dance Music," in Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory, ed. T. Swiss et al. (London: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 31–45; and James Snead, "Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture," in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. R. Ferguson et al. (New York and Boston: Museum of Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1990), 212–30.

14. This is dramatically exemplified in his uncredited score for Uli Lommel's Zärtlichkeit der Wöofe / The Tenderness of Wolves (1973). Raben chops the music of Bach into astonishingly short passages and orchestrates it in such a way so that it more closely resembles his own work than Bach's, adding another layer of historical context to a text already brimming with overlapping, intergenerational references.

15. Christian Braad Thomsen, Fassbinder: The Life and Work of a Provocative Genius (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 102, 107–8.

16. Norbert Jürgen Schneider, Handbuch Filmmusik I, 109. Schneider's conclusions on this point differ from my own. According to him, music fulfills its standard role as "co-worker and assistant" to film narration, albeit more intensely, in Fassbinder's melodrama. "Where it involved the emphasis of a feeling everything was placed on this point [of emotional intensification]: dialogue, frame, sounds, colour, music. Measureless according to the aesthetics of many filmmakers, and correctly following the principles of melodrama, music narrates and illustrates alongside the film narration—as an even more intensive co-worker / assistant. This is how entire epics rose—like the music from

17. Fassbinder was very aware of this, according to Raben. In an interview with me, Raben discussed the director's fascination with redemption—that melodramatic moment of recognition, the secular affirmation by the other—and his obsession with liturgical music that might point to that redemptive possibility (Munich, 8 July 1998).

18. Paul Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 232–33.

19. Peer Raben, "Musique et film, la cantate de Bach dans l'érable," CinémAction (1984), 126, 125.

20. Judith Mayne, "Fassbinder and Spectatorship," New German Critique 12 (1977), 61–74.

21. Quoted in Christian-Albrecht Gollub, "Transcending the Genres: Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta," in New German Filmmakers, ed. Klaus Phillips (New York: Ungar, 1984), 298.

22. Barbara Kosta, Recasting Autobiography: Women's Counterfictions in Contemporary German Literature and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).

23. Möhrmann,"‘Germany, Pale Mother’"78.

24. Ibid., 77–78.

25. See the work of Sabine Hake, Miriam Hansen, Julia Knight, Gertrud Koch, Barbara Kosta, Susan Linville, Richard McCormick, Renata Möhrmann, Heide Schlüpmann, Marc Silberman, and others for discussions of the textual strategies used by female filmmakers at the time and the material conditions in which they worked.

26. After Sander relinquished editorship of the journal, its offices were dispersed across several cities. As Miriam Hansen observes in her historical overview of frauen und film, by 1983 the Berlin and Frankfurt offices represented different approaches; the former producing a journal of film criticism, the latter one of theoretical inquiry. See Hansen's "Messages in a Bottle?" Screen 28, no. 4 (1987), 30–39.

27. I borrow this observation from Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 30.

28. Barton Byg, "German History and Cinematic Convention Harmonised in Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane," in Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, vol. 2, ed. S. Frieden et al. (Providence, R.I.: Berg, 1993), 265.

29. Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 202.

30. Charlotte Delorme, "On the Film Marianne and Juliane by Margarethe von Trotta," trans. Ellen Seiter, Journal of Film and Video 37 (Spring 1985), 51. Originally published in frauen und film 31 (1982). U.S. critic Seiter's own critique of the film, "The Political is Personal," appears in the same issue of Journal of Film and Video, 41–46. She condemns "the terrorist actions of Marianne portrayed as personal tragedy."

31. Schneider, Handbuch Filmmusik I, 265; 265; 263.

32. The song, composed by Peer Raben, tells the story of a French woman in a foreign country unable to get home, where she longs to be. Ingrid Caven sings it in both German and French, and its reprise is:

33. Schneider, Handbuch Filmmusik I, 107.

34. Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany, 145.

35. Ibid., 152.

36. Interview, 8 July 1998. Schmid thought it would convey the idea of "heaven" in the mind of the (autobiographically based) boy in his film, confirming Raben's view of the song.

37. Thomsen, Fassbinder, 294.

38. Ibid., 296.

39. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 47.

40. Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany, 150.

41. Bathrick, "Inscribing History," 34–53.

42. Friedlander quotes Goebbels's reference as "a melodramatic song on top of a macabre dance," in Reflections of Nazism, 40.

43. Personal conversation, April/May 1995.

44. Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze, 139. Eco borrows the line from Hermann Broch. When interviewed, Raben said of Fassbinder, "It takes a lot of bravery to depict things simply, because that can get you labeled easily as kitsch" (interview, Munich, 8 July 1998)—not necessarily a bad thing for Raben, who greatly respects Schroeter's "kitsch for kitsch's sake." But where Raben perceives simplicity—and as noted above, some of his own compositions are deceptively uncomplicated—others, like Coates, see only the tinkering with empty, vicious signs. That perspective forms the basis of Friedlander's criticism of the "new discourse on Nazism" in European films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In addition to appropriating Nazism's more conspicuous, clichéd signs—goose-stepping, swastikas—he argues that this cinema either banalized or normalized these signs, or transformed them into part of a seductive spectacle that replicated rather than renounced fascism's own mechanisms.

45. Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze, 140.

46. Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany, 57. Compare with Fassbinder's remarks about the comic elements of Die dritte Generation / The Third Generation (1979): "I hope then, beyond the laughter, a kind of shock happens to the viewer [he calls it a shock of recognition]. Because this is basically not funny." Quoted in Imke Lode, "Terrorism, Sadomasochism, and Utopia in Fassbinder's Third Generation," in Perspectives on German Cinema, ed. T. Ginsberg and

47. Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" October 43 (1987), 208.

48. Thomsen, Fassbinder, 212.

49. Ibid., 239.

50. Quoted in Thomsen, Fassbinder, 210–11.

51. In addition to Rickels and Butler's efforts to depathologize melancholia, see the work of Corey Creekmur, "The Cinematic Photograph and the Possibility of Mourning," Wide Angle 9, no. 1 (1986), 41–49; Caryl Flinn, "Music and the Melodramatic Past of the New German Cinema," in Melodrama: Stage/Picture/Screen, ed. J. Bratton et al. (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 106–18; Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (London: Routledge, 1997); Kathleen Woodward, "Freud and Barthes: Theorizing Mourning, Sustaining Grief," Discourse 13, no. 1 (1990/1): 93–110, later developed in Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); and, most recently, José E. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). As for its important place in queer studies, Butler associates melancholia with a [hetero]normative pathology, Muñoz argues for its importance as a form of queer intervention into identity/disidentity formations.

52. "Mourning and Melancholia," in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 243. Subsequent references are in the text.

53. Quoted in Laurence Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 335.

54. See n. 51.

55. These remarks recall Freud's observation that hysterics possess a "double insight" that enables them to observe as they participate within a scene.

That more positive special status, however understated in "Mourning and Melancholia," leads Juliana Schiesari to place Freud within a discursive tradition that aligns melancholic temperaments with dark, romantic forms of masculine creativity (The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature[Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992]). Freud, for his part, does not pursue the issue in any depth in the essay, arguing instead that the "fundamental truth" observed by melancholics is that of their own egoistic powerlessness and weakness. (Alternatively, that "truth" might be read as a way to acknowledge how the self is continually adapting itself to losses throughout its history.)

56. Santner, Stranded Objects, 21.

57. Santner, Stranded Objects, 151. The emphasis on "solution" is my own.

58. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 210–25; see also 263–65.

59. Parveen Adams, "Waiving the Phallus," Differences 4, no. 1 (1992), 78.

60. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L'écorce et le noyau (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1978), esp. 259–75. Discussed in Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes: Literature, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 88–90.

61. Jacques Derrida, foreword to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonom y (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xvi. Derrida's foreword gives a useful summary of the history of these terms.

62. Ibid.

63. Santner, Stranded Objects, 125.

64. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 1.

65. Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany, 131.

66. Quoted in and translated by Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 310.

67. Over the 1990s, the Society for Cinema Studies conferences in North America ran fewer and fewer panels on the New German Cinema—by the year 2000, none were held. In 1997, the fifth edition of Bordwell and Thompson's mass-selling textbook, Film Art, the "New German Cinema" was dropped from its survey of significant film movements, replaced by the "New Hollywood Film," for reasons of marketability. (The fourth edition, in which the movement was discussed, was published in 1993.)

68. Elsaesser, Fassbinder's Germany, 147.

69. Since the late 1980s, melodrama's special relationship to "excess"—insofar as excess was conceived as an aberration of narrative norms—has been replaced by terms like "sensation" and "sensationalism," terms that have been elaborated by historians like Linda Williams, Ben Singer, and Tom Gunning.

70. Linda Williams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Film Quarterly 44 (spring 1991), 2–13.

71. Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze, 232–33. My italics.

72. Perez, Material Ghost, 9.

73. Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze, 233. Coates astutely notes that melodrama, "founded on serial accumulation," is entirely in keeping with the ideology of colonialist expansionism and the rise of commodity culture during the midand late-nineteenth century, the heyday of Victorian melodrama.

74. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents, 117.

75. Although he stresses the importance of empathetically embracing alterity—something obviously impossible in fascist regimes—Santner never establishes the identity of "the" German mourner. Susan Linville rightly argues that this leaves us with a de facto male subject under discussion, one whose sexuality, ethnicity, class, nation, and location are equally "unmarked." See her excellent Feminism, Film, Fascism: Women's Autobiographical Film in Postwar Germany (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998).

76. I am indebted to Alan Wright for his observations on this topic.

77. Michael Schneider, "Fathers and Sons, Retrospectively: The Damaged Relationship between Two Generations," New German Critique 31, nos. 16/18 (1984), 43.

78. Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," 49.