From Jugendbewegung to RAF: Youth, Friendship, and Protest in Post-Wall German Cinema

Recent German-language films frame anti-establishment activities as a rejuvenating force. In Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (2004) and Was tun, wenn’s brennt? (2001), the young filmmakers Hans Weingartner and Gregor Schnitzler take a nostalgic approach to the tradition of protest in Germany. Volker Schlondorff, in contrast, builds on first-hand memories of the 1970s and the RAF, depicting the escalation of violence in Die Stille nach dem Schus (2000). This paper explores the ways in which the three films foreground personal motivations, rather than political causes, arguing that friendship is used to gauge the success of protest. While the friends in Die fetten Jahre and Was tun? are (re)united through their activism, the terrorist plots portrayed in Stille lead to the protagonist’s isolation and untimely death. Ultimately, Schlondorff places German history at the center of the tragic plotline, whereas the younger filmmakers take a position of ironic distance vis-a-vis the past. By placing a strong emphasis on community, these three films indicate that reunification and globalization give rise to dreams of friendship and protest in post-Wall Berlin. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/3 From Jugendbewegung to RAF: Youth, Friendship, and Protest in Post-Wall German Cinema Nicole Thesz* Miami University, Ohio The transition to the Berlin Republic created a sense of new beginnings and a desire to revisit history. In the consumerist ‘normalcy’ of unified Germany, the unruliness of the 1960s symbolizes a bygone era of idealism. A number of recent films about friendship, self-discovery, and love revisit encounters between young idealists and the establishment: “It is easy to be cynical about the student movements of the 1960s, but easier still to be romantic” (DeGroot 9). Rebellion and friendship are nostalgically portrayed in Volker Schlondorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schus ‘The Legend of Rita,’ Gregor Schnitzler’s Was tun, wenn’s brennt? ‘What to Do in Case of Fire,’ and Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei ‘The Edukators.’ The explosive mixture of youth and protest evolves within the generational and political contexts of the respective filmmakers in the Berlin Republic.1 Cinema forms “a technological memory bank that is shared by everyone,” and this repository of images “shapes and legitimizes our perception of the past” (Kaes 310). Recent protest films offer a largely positive evaluation of activism as a counterbalance to the apolitical Generation Golf and the pragmatic turn of the former 1968ers.2 The films by Schlondorff, Schnitzler, and Weingartner create a tension between the solidarity of friendship and the threat of isolation in cases where protest fails. While the portrayed friendships seem to legitimize activism, there is some question as to how seriously these narratives consider the history of protest since each film foregrounds relationships in the manner of the Beziehungskomodie ‘romantic comedy.’ These works have in common a “deliberate flirtation with the myth of left-wing 1 Thesz: From Jugendbewegung to RAF: Youth, Friendship, and Protest in Pos Published by New Prairie Press 24 ST&TCL, Volume 34, No. 1 (Winter 2010) terrorism” that is very different from the “sober and analytical” approach of New German Cinema in portraying the German Autumn of 1977 (Palfreyman 39). The following discussion examines the directors’ engagement with motivations behind social protest, taking into account such varying influences as German unification, changes in funding policies, and generational passage. Protest: Past and Present The 1960s contributed to the image of German post-war society as “a culture appreciative of criticism and protest” (Von Dirke 31). The films by Schlondorff, Schnitzler, and Weingartner are situated in three distinct post-war eras, examining 1970s terrorism, caricaturizing radical anarchists in 1980s Berlin-Kreuzberg, and, finally, exploring anti-capitalist activism among the new generation of millennials. Predominately, Germans use generational models to define their past (Bude, “ubertriebene ‘Wir’” 138). Sociologists distinguish between the skeptical generation of the flak helpers (Helmut Schelsky), the critical 1968ers (born between 1938 and 1948), the politically disinterested youth of the 1980s, the technology savvy generation @, and the entrepreneurial individuals of the “Berlin generation.”3 The directors’ individual approaches can be traced to their respective experiences. Schlondorff (born in 1939) has been associated with the New German Cinema, even though he “eschewed the idiosyncratic styles” of the Autorenkino ‘author’s cinema’ (Crowdus and Porton 18). He dealt with the history of terrorism in Deutschland im Herbst ‘Germany in Autumn,’ while collaborating with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Schlondorff ’s Die Stille nach dem Schus portrays a former terrorist hiding in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). While the film explores the misguided idealism of leftist endeavors, it foregrounds the former East’s heritage by incorporating the background of GDR screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase and Schlondorff ’s own experience as director of the newly-founded Babelsberg studio after the privatization of the East German DEFA (William 128). Schnitzler (born in 1964) describes a group of former anarchists in Was tun, wenn’s brennt?, uniting nostalgia for youth with glossy images of the new Berlin. While Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei is also set in the capital around the year 2000, he portrays an 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 34, Iss. 1 [2010], Art. 3 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol34/iss1/3 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1710