Books on Berlin II

Moss, T. (2020). Remaking Berlin: a history of the city through infrastructure, 1920-2020. The MIT Press.

“An examination of Berlin’s turbulent history through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures.

In Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss takes a novel perspective on Berlin’s turbulent twentieth-century history, examining it through the lens of its water and energy infrastructures. He shows that, through a century of changing regimes, geopolitical interventions, and socioeconomic volatility, Berlin’s networked urban infrastructures have acted as medium and manifestation of municipal, national, and international politics and policies. Moss traces the coevolution of Berlin and its infrastructure systems from the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920 to remunicipalization of services in 2020, encompassing democratic, fascist, and socialist regimes. Throughout, he explores the tension between obduracy and change in Berlin’s infrastructures. Examining the choices made by utility managers, politicians, and government officials, Moss makes visible systems that we often take for granted.

Moss describes the reorganization of infrastructure systems to meet the needs of a new unitary city after Berlin’s incorporation in 1920, and how utilities delivered on political promises; the insidious embedding of repression, racism, autarky, and militarization within the networked city under the Nazis; and the resilience of Berlin’s infrastructures during wartime and political division. He examines East Berlin’s socialist infrastructural ideal (and its under-resourced systems), West Berlin’s insular existence (and its aspirations of system autarky), and reunified Berlin’s privatization of utilities (subsequently challenged by social movements). Taking Berlin as an exemplar, Moss’s account will inspire researchers to take a fresh look at urban infrastructure histories, offering new ways of conceptualizing the multiple temporalities and spatialities of the networked city.” – from MIT Press

Callaghan, M. (2020). Empathetic memorials: the other designs for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Palgrave Macmillan.

“This book is a study of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial Competitions of the 1990s, with a focus on designs that kindle empathetic responses. Through analysis of provocative designs, the book engages with issues of empathy, secondary witnessing, and depictions of concentration camp iconography. It explores the relationship between empathy and cultural memory when representations of suffering are notably absent. The book submits that one design represents the idea of an uncanny memorial, and also pays attention to viewer co-authorship in counter-monuments. Analysis of counter-monuments also include their creative engagement with German history and their determination to defy fascist aesthetics. As the winning design for The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is abstract with an information centre, there is an exploration of the memorial museum. Callaghan asks whether this configuration is intended to compensate for the abstract memorial’s ambiguity or to complement the design’s visceral potential. Other debates explored concern political memory, national memory, and the controversy of dedicating the memorial exclusively to murdered Jews.” – from Springer

Weiner, J. (2016). Berlin notebook: where are the refugees? Los Angeles Review of Books.

“The chronicle of a fall and spring in Berlin during the peak influx of refugees into Europe in 2015-16, Joshua Weiner’s Berlin Notebook opens a new view on German society’s attempt to cope with an impossible situation: millions of people displaced by the Syrian civil war, fleeing violence, and seeking safety and the possibilities of a new life in the west. As some Germans, feeling the burden of the nation’s dark past, try to aid and shelter desperate asylum seekers, others are skeptical of the government’s ability to contain the growing numbers; they feel the danger of hostile strangers, and the threat to the nation’s culture and identity. Unlike other contemporary reports on the situation in Europe, Weiner’s sui generis writing includes interviews not only with refugees from the east, but also everyday Berliners, natives and ex-pats – musicians, poets, shopkeepers, students, activists, rabbis, museum guides, artists, intellectuals, and those, too, who have joined the rising far-right Alternative for Germany party, and the Pegida movement against immigration. Intermixed with interviews, reportage, and meditations on life in Europe’s fastest growing capital city, Weiner thinks about the language and literature of the country, weaving together strands of its ancient and more recent history with meditations on Goethe, Brecht, Arendt, Heidegger, Joseph Roth and others that inflect our thinking about refugees, nationhood, and our ethical connection to strangers.” – from LA Review of Books

Carrington, T. (2019). Love at last sight: dating, intimacy, and risk in turn-of-the-century Berlin. Oxford University Press.

“Love at Last Sight is a history of dating in the modern metropolis. It opens with the seemingly simple question, “How did single people meet and fall in love in new big cities like Berlin at the turn of the century?” but what emerges from this investigation of daily newspapers, diaries, serial novels, advice literature, police records, and court cases is a world of dating and relationships that was anything but simple. The murder of Frieda Kliem, a young, enterprising seamstress who was using newspaper personal ads to find a husband—the story of which serves as the book’s central narrative—reveals the tremendous risk associated with modern approaches to love and dating. The risk of fraud, censure, or worse was ever present, especially for the many Berliners who strove for the stability of middle-class life but were outsiders to the social power structures of German society. Indeed, though the technologies and opportunities of the big city offered the best shot at finding love or intimate connection among the urban sea of strangers, availing oneself of them—pursuing a missed connection from the streetcar or using a newspaper personal ad—meant putting one’s livelihood, respectability, and life on the line. This was the romantic dilemma facing the vast majority of city dwellers at the turn of the century, and a great many chose to risk everything for some measure of connection and intimacy. This book explores their stories as a way of illuminating this core tension of modern, metropolitan life.” – from Oxford Academic

Brass, A., & Light, P. (2021). On the barricades of Berlin: an account of the 1848 revolution (A. Weiland, Trans.). Black Rose Books.

“The 1848 wave of worker rebellions that swept across Europe struck the German states with the March Revolution. While Richard Wagner and Mikhail Bakunin fought side by side in Dresden, the writer August Brass led the successful defense of the barricades in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz public square. Published in English for the first time, On the Barricades of Berlin provides a riveting firsthand account of this uprising. Brass’ testimony begins with the tumultuous events leading up to the revolution: the peaceful democratic agitation; the demands that were brought to the king; and the key actors involved on all sides of the still peaceful, yet tense, struggle. It then follows the events that led to the outbreak of resistance to the forces of order and sheds light on the aftermath of the fighting once the exhausted Prussian army withdrew from the city.” – from Black Rose Books

Books on Berlin I

First attempt at building a personal archive of books about Berlin. I plan to randomly search for books online or in bookstores and find texts on the different aspects of the city, hopefully from different disciplines. I was firstly inspired by a bookstore’s “Books on Berlin” section. I have no end goal, but I’m hopeful about the process. In the worst case, I’ll be reading some book promotion paragraphs.

The first list includes two books I frequently see in bookstores: The Undercurrents and Revolutionary Berlin. They are published pretty recently, both non-academic. I haven’t seen The First Days of Berlin, but it’s also translated into Turkish. I’m reading that one now. Free Berlin looks like a more art-focused version of it. Finally, we have Berlin Contemporary focusing on the architecture and rebuilding of the city.

Gutmair, U. (2021). The first days of Berlin: the sound of change (S. Pare, Trans.; English edition). Polity Press.

“Berlin in the early 1990s, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is the place to be. Berlin-Mitte, the central district of the city, with its wastelands and decaying houses, has become the centre of a new movement. Artists, musicians, squatters, club owners, DJs and ravers are reclaiming the old city centre and bringing it back to life. This interregnum between two systems – the collapse of the old East Germany, the gentrification of the new Berlin – lasts only a few years. West Berliners, East Berliners and new residents from abroad join together to create music, art and fashion, to open bars and clubs and galleries, even if only for a few weeks. In the months following the fall of the Wall, there is a feeling of new beginnings and immense possibilities: life is now, and to be in the here and now feels endless. The phrase ‘temporary autonomous zone’ is circulating, it describes the idea – romantic and naive but, in the circumstances, not absurd – that, at a certain moment in history, you can actually do whatever you want.

Ulrich Gutmair moved to West Berlin as a student in autumn 1989: two weeks later the Wall came down. He spent the next few years studying during the day in the West and exploring the squats, bars and techno clubs in the East at night. He fell in love with House and Techno and raved at Tresor, Elektro, Bunker and many other places that in the meantime have almost disappeared from collective memory. Ten years later he decided to write a book about that period in between, when one regime was brought down and a new one wasn’t yet established. When utopia was actually a place to inhabit for a moment.” – from Polity

Smith, B. J. (2022). Free Berlin: art, urban politics, and everyday life. The MIT Press.

“An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.

In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.

These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects.

With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.” – from MIT Press

Flakin, N. (2022). Revolutionary Berlin: a walking guide. Pluto Press.

“Few European cities can boast a history as storied and tumultuous as that of Berlin. For more than 150 years it has been at the centre of revolutionary politics; of era-defining struggles between the Left and the Right. It has been bombed, rebuilt and carved in two.

In Revolutionary Berlin, veteran tour guide Nathaniel Flakin invites you to stand in the places where this history was written, and to follow in the footsteps of those who helped write it. Through nine self-guided tours illustrated with maps and photographs, readers enter the heady world of 19th century anti-colonial struggles, the 1918 November Revolution and the 1987 May Day riots — encountering the city’s workers, queer community and radical women along the way.

The first English-language guidebook to tell the story of Berlin’s radical history, this is a must-have for Berliners and visitors alike.” – from Pluto Press

Bell, K. (2022). The undercurrents: a story of Berlin. Fitzcarraldo Editions.

“The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones.

When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.” from Fitzcarraldo

Walker, J. (2022). Berlin contemporary: architecture and politics after 1990. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

“For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions.

Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin’s political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.” – from Bloomsbury

the art of hangover

There were a lot of beautiful, practical examples in the book about paying attention to the little details of life, but I wanted to keep this one as a reminder as a drinker. A random French philosopher would have conceptualize this state as a ‘liminal’ one. I’ll filter the pieces from the book I might enjoy and start experimenting, especially the playful urban interactions and the forever-alone activities. Thanks to M. for recommending this.

“DRINKING TOO MUCH is a bad idea, and I’m not here to endorse it.

Some of you, however, will do it anyway, perhaps in part to experience the curious effects that alcohol can have on perception—heightening some feelings while suppressing others. That’s really none of my business. But I will pass along one piece of surprising advice, from my friend Josh Glenn: When the morning after rolls around, don’t try to squelch your hangover. Because it’s not a problem, he argues. It’s an opportunity.

“So what’s good about a hangover?” Glenn has written. “The hungover person is abnormally aware of sights, sounds (everything seems TOO LOUD!), tastes, odors, and textures which normally would go unremarked. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. The hungover eye, for instance, because it is neither obstructed by the blinders of our everyday biases, nor deceived by intoxicated hallucinations, is magnetically attracted to seemingly ordinary objects which take on an incredible, luminous significance: anyone who has ever experienced the ‘stares’ when hungover knows exactly what I mean.”

Glenn compares the hungover state to conditions of nirvana or grace.

You may or may not take his thinking seriously here—and I certainly don’t recommend a drunken binge for the sole purpose of obtaining a hangover. But should you find yourself in an altered state, you ought to inhabit it fully rather than struggle to find a shortcut out. Embrace it instead “as a form of reaggregation from the extraordinary into the ordinary, as a ‘middle state’ of perception in which one can for a brief time see the usual in an unusual manner.”

And if you conclude that this unusual manner isn’t one you enjoy, perhaps you’ll remember that the next time you start drinking.”

Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday, Knopf Publishing Group, 2019

Blog üzerine II

Bugün burada blog tutmanın bana verdiği zevke dair bir şey keşfettim. Şimdi pek yapmıyorum ama eskiden sık sık okuduğum kitaplardan hoşuma giden parçaları biraz da hatıra niyetine buraya geçiriyordum. Türkçe basılmış kitaplarla aramıza mesafe girmesi bırakmamda etkili oldu. Epeydir bir kitabı önüme açıp, klavyemin altıma kıstırıp, sesli okuyarak yazıya geçirmedim.

Ara sıra bu not defteri gibi kullanmaya çalıştığım blog’a girip bir isim yazıp ya da rastgele bir post açıp bir kitap alıntısı okuyorum. Bu alıntıyı okumak bana genelde yeni bir şey gibi geliyor çünkü okuduğum şeyi hatırlamıyor oluyorum. Bazen kitabı bile unutmuş oluyorum. Durumun beni şaşırtmasının sebebi bana sanki daha önce sevip unuttuğum bir şeyi tekrar karşıma getiriyor oluşu. Belki şimdi okuduğumda saçma bulacağım, belki anlamayacağım, belki yine etkileneceğim. Hepsi de oluyor. Bazen o notu buraya geçiren kendimi küçümsüyorum, bazen neden o alıntıyı geçirdiğimi anlamıyor ya da anlamadan geçirdiğimi düşünüyor, bazen de ah be ne güzel metinmiş diyip tekrar keşfediyorum.

Bunun bir örneğini geçenlerde blogdaki Bayazoğlu, Ergüder Yoldaş ve Normalleşme Üzerine yazısına denk gelip okurken yaşadım. Hayal meyal hatırlıyordum bu pasajı ama detayları kalmamış aklımda. Okuyunca Bayazoğlu ne yapıyor diye merak ettim, epeydir bakmamıştım, yeni bir kitap yazmış Arap Kızı Camdan Bakıyor diye, merak ettim. İyi de bir söyleşisi varmış, şansıma, onu dinledim biraz fikir edinebildim.

Böyle bir not alma pratiği okuyup geçmişte kalan bir kitabın hatırlanmasına dair aşındırıcı bir etki de yapıyor, her şey toz pembe değil. Hiç akademik ya da sistemli bir okur olmadığım için, okuduğum metinlerin ana fikirleri, hipotezleri, soruları pek aklımda kalmıyor. Böyle bir iki uzun pasajı da ayırıp kitabı temsil eden bir şekilde kayda geçirdiğimde sanki kitap bu alıntıdan ibaretmiş gibi bir izlenime mahkum ediyorum kendimi. Neredeyse hiçbir zaman alıntının kendisi kitabı temsil edebilecek kapsamda olmuyor. Daha ziyade kitabın çok sapa bir noktası oluyor hatırlamayı seçtiğim kısım. Örneğin Bauman’ın Küreselleşme kitabından taşıdığım Turistler ve Aylaklar bölümü gibi. Kitabın genel tezlerine katkı yapmak için verilen örneklerden belki de en minör olanlarından. Ama sanki başka bir estetik değer taşıyor gibi hissediyorum. Belki de tekrar baka baka o değeri ben kafamda kurup atfettim. Uzun süre bir diziyi izleyince artık dizi iyi de olsa kötü de olsa karakterlere yapılan duygusal yatırımın sonucu olarak o diziyi hiç izlememiş birine göre farklı bir hisle izlemek gibi.

Bunun adına Blog Üzerine II dedim, geçmişte bir blog alıntısı yapmışım çünkü birincisini birkaç yıl önce Crary’nin 7/24: Geç Kapitalizm ve Uykuların Sonu kitabından yapmışım.

Germany’s Counter-Cinemas, Julia Hertäg (Notes)

I took some notes from Julia Hertäg’s “Germany’s Counter-Cinemas” article published in New Left Review. All the quotations in the notes are from the article:

Hertäg, J. (2022, May/June). Germany’s Counter-Cinemas. New Left Review, 135. https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii135/articles/julia-hertag-germany-s-counter-cinemas

Germany’s Counter-Cinemas

The author gives examples of the export-driven cinema in Germany with the films about coming to terms with its past, containing films about Nazism, the Stasi, the fall of the GDR, and the Red Army Faction. The style: “conventional, Hollywood-style cinematographical narratives” [1] Following the mainstream style conventions, one difference is that these films are partially state/publicly funded. Some quotes about the consequences: films that “stay inside a corset of conventional narrative” or “cineastic low-fat quark”.

Machinery of consensus

Referring to the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962, which called for free filmmaking for the artists. In the late 1960s, following France’s model, the state started to fund films for their cultural value. Artists whose early works were funded by ZDF or ARD: Fassbinder, Reitz, Kluge, Farocki.

In the 1990s, the competition for a larger audience starts instead of striving for cultural prestige. Meanwhile, the power of ZDF/ARD bureaucracies increases. In general, the films needed state funds together with TV channel co-production. The factors: “in addition to cultural and aesthetic criteria, potential commercial success and promoting the ‘positive development of the industry’ should be key factors in the allocation of funds”. The political/ideological influence comes from the responsibility of the state-TV channels to serve the ‘public interest.’ How do you define it?

The film-funding machinery works, but it is not easy for non-mainstream cinema producers to get into it since it’s against free filmmaking – does that exist anyways? On average, the films have 5-6 maybe more institutions who fund them, more the number more people who intervene in the production process. The production of the films takes 6-7 years. Hard to get approval. “’market-conforming’ bureaucracy” (Merkel) or ‘dictatorship of mediocrity’ (Lars Henrik Gass). A public service aiming for commercial success.

Wrapping political enlightenment in history (Ulrich Köhler) or serving a menu for an international audience with series like Babylon Berlin and Deutschland 83/86/89. On the national TV front, Eldorado KaDeWe: Jetzt ist unsere Zeit. Hertäg’s remark: “… in fact rather uninterested in the era it is depicting; its narratives of sexual liberation, deprivation and excess might as well be set in the here and now”.

Berlin School and after

Directors challenged Germany’s self-image and economic miracle in the 70s and 80s: Fassbinder, Kluge, Reitz, von Trotta. In the 90s and early 2000s, Berlin School was a counter-example of mainstream cinema. The term arose with Schanelec, Petzold, and Arslan being shown in festivals after some stagnant period for alternative filmmakers. It first appeared in Die Zeit in 2001, finding a similarity between the films of these directors: “…a liking for ellipsis and for keeping a distance; a similar way of dealing with space and time; the same diffuse bright light. Most important, ‘all assertion has gone, replaced by observation’; in a country whose filmmakers were ‘diligently learning streamlined storyboarding’, this was a blessing”.

Berlin School:

  • presentist cinema
  • resisting the psychological realism, conventional dramatic structure and well-worn political tropes favoured by the system
  • exploring forms of realism, ‘a sensation of the reality of the present’ (Marco Abel)
  • set ‘in the here and now of unified Germany’ (Marco Abel)
  • low budget, easier to shoot
  • subtle alienation effects
  • loosely bound second generation: Hochhäusler, Grisebach, Heisenberg, Ade, Köhler (~10 directors, ~50 films)
  • styles diverge in time (Hochhäusler)

Hertäg aims to conceptualize “‘Post-Berlin’ cinema of the 2010s and 20s, including recent films by the School’s founding members”. Two trends:

  1. Outward turn
    1. Toni Erdmann (2016): Romania, a multinational corporation
    2. Western (2017): Bulgaria, German workers, construction
    3. Transit (2018): Marseille, re-contextualizing the refugees of the 1940s today
    4. Le Prince (2021): German art world and a businessman from DRC
    5. Giraffe (2022): Polish workers on a Danish Island building a tunnel to Germany
  2. Historical turn: “experimenting with new aesthetic strategies for the representation of the past”
    1. Barbara (2012): the GDR of the early 1980s
    2. Phoenix (2014): post-war Berlin
    3. Undine (2020): present-day Berlin and the world of Romantic mythology
    4. Blutsauger (2022): in 1928
    5. Gold (2013): a German party’s journey to the Klondike of the 1890s
    6. Fabian (2021): Weimar era, based on Erich Kästner’s novel from 1931
    7. Die Andere Heimat (2013): 1840s, with Rhinelanders as economic emigrants
    8. In My Room (2018): the future, resembling a distant past

“The heterogeneity of German counter-cinema over the past decade defies rigid categorization, even in terms of its oppositional stance.”

Outward turns

Grisebach’s film Western is examined thoroughly by Hertäg. Its relation with the ‘western’ genre as an ‘eastern’, masculinity, encounter with the settler/colonialist, Germany in Eastern Europe, water rights, etc. are some core themes. In terms of style: it looks like a documentary, with landscape shots, spontaneity, non-professional actors, and physicality over psychology. A contemporary take on the “trans-border encounters.”

Ade’s film Toni Erdmann “examines managerial-level social stress and the highly gendered world of white-collar immaterial work.” The pressure of the competition, corporate sexism, her father, etc. Ines tries to surrender and fight back. Takes a look at the personal/professional interiors and interactions. A Berlin School rule is followed: “avoid psychology as causality.”

Re-framing past and present

A recent focus of filmmakers draws apart from the focus on the present in early Berlin School films. Petzold is a major example with Barbara, that does not conform to the official narratives of the GDR with extra elements that are lacking in films like Das Leben der Anderen. In Phoenix, the Jewish woman is not recognized by her ex-husband. He betrayed her to the Nazis and now trying to appropriate the heritage by using her as a doppelgänger. Transit and Undine also “indicate a certain urgency in finding new ways of relating past and present that go beyond naturalistic representation.” There are detailed analyses of these films, which I won’t go into here: “The tension between immersion and contemplation, being and seeing, experience and understanding, is always present in Petzold’s films.”

Fractured epochs

Dominik Graf, as an opposite to Petzold, the seduction cinema. He likes popular genres, also worked in TV a lot. He made Dreileben as a dialogue with Petzold and Hochhäusler, not far from the Berlin School. Hertäg looks at his latest, Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde.

A fractured, conflicted, distracted, dark, hand-held, spooky, glance-based, fast-montage filmmaking. Unlike “Babylon Berlin, Graf avoids the iconic sites of the capital.” The opening scene (the long-shot moving from today to past, in a metro station) and the Stolperstein “reminds us of what lies ahead of these characters.”

Capital as a genre

Here, Hertäg starts with Radlmaier’s Blutsauger and mentions L’etat et Moi. Since I noticed this similarity with my shallow knowledge, I’ll block quote this part. After this, one can find an analysis of Blutsauger.

“His graduation film, Selbstkritik eines bürgerlichen Hundes (Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog, 2017) already demonstrated this new approach, shared by others of his cohort, including Max Linz, Radlmaier’s contemporary at the DFFB. Their work explores the boundaries of what is possible within the German funding system, making films with multiple references to theory and cinema history, explicit political analysis combined with comedy and slapstick, and a visual language that on many levels obstructs conventional realism. (In Linz’s L’État et moi (2022), which reverses the coordinates of past, present and future, a time-travelling exile from the Paris Commune lives as a refugee in contemporary Berlin, where he appears as an extra in Les Misérables.)”

Note: See the article for more on Blutsauger analysis.

Different voices

Most films differ from the earlier ones in dealing with the past and transnational matters. Abel was mentioning statis and mobility for the Berlin School, the new wave focuses on capital and labor, or work. They also continue trying alternative ways of filmmaking economically. “While the Berlin School as a ‘school’ may have come to an end, its network of collaboration and exchange continues to exist.” Still, the attempts are mostly individual, a Oberhausen-like manifesto is needed to have drastic changes.

[1] Examples: Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Sophie Scholl (2005), Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others, 2006), Baader Meinhof Complex (2009), 13 Minutes (2015), Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs Fritz Bauer, 2015)

P.S. By the way, I found out that Christoph Hochhäusler has been actively writing a blog called PARALLEL FILM, since 2006. I’m reading it with auto-translate now, let me leave that here too.