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You Can't Go Home Again: A West German Film Breaks a Taboo
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14843 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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10 / 1988 |
1,588 Words |
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Paul Coates
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"Welcome to Germany" reads the subtitle of Thomas Brasch's recent film about a Jewish film director who returns from Hollywood to the country where he once suffered in a concentration camp. Even before the story begins, however, title and subtitle give intimations of the ambiguity of the welcome. The title, The Passenger, was also that of the last unfinished film of the great Polish director Andrzej Munk, set in a concentration camp; whereas a welcome to "Germany" is an uncanny invitation to a place that does not exist. There has been no "Germany" for forty odd years now, despite the half-lazy, half-compensatory West German usage that pretends otherwise. The Germany that still exists in this film is the place whose trauma haunts the director. He is returning to its geographical location in the hope of divesting himself of its vampirical weight.
Taboo Area
Brasch's film, the official West German entry at Cannes this year, ventures into an area that has been taboo to West German filmmakers: the representation of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Edgar Reitz has evoked the experience under Hitler of Germans located at a convenient distance from the centers of power; Hans Jurgen Syberberg has given us Hitler, the demon doll, still ruling from his grave; and, most seriously of all, in The German Sisters, Margarethe von Trotta has traced the roots of recent West German terrorism to a nihilistic and masochistic identification with the tortured images of concentration camp victims. After several years in which there has been a dearth of Vergangenheistsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) in West German cinema, this film may seem to mark a new departure.
Brasch's film is clearly an extension of his work as a playwright; it is not a representation of the events of the past, but rather their Brechtian presentation that the film offers by showing the director's efforts to turn his own experiences into a film. In his combination of a Brechtian distaste for illusionism with a willingness to probe the legacy of the Nazi years, Brasch is perhaps closer to Syberberg than anyone else. The fact that both men came to West Germany after growing up in the GDR suggests that the East German may be better equipped to speak of these things than his Western counterpart: The state ideology of East Germany, that deems the Bundesrepublik the prime refuge of fascism, has given him from birth the sense of the past's distance and difference that renders it fit for representation, while his own experience of East German rule clearly facilitates identification with victims of an earlier German totalitarian regime.
Ironic Subtitle
In theory then, Brasch's film is welcome, and not just in Germany: Its ironic subtitle, "Welcome to Germany," offers an appropriate rejoinder to the self-righteous evasiveness of the "Made in Germany" logo of Reitz's Heimat, itself an intended riposte to Holocaust's Hollywood-like appropriation of German experience. And yet Brasch's film does not work. What goes wrong?
Tony Curtis plays Janko Cornfeld, a famous Hollywood director who has returned to Berlin (West) in order to exorcise his own experiences in Nazi Germany. People receive him ambivalently: the German technicians with whom he will work savor the whiff of Hollywood he brings, but no one is really very eager to dig up matters that are best
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