Its latest DVD release comes as part of what Facets Video calls its Alexander Kluge Collection, justified less by the fact that Kluge directed one of the segments and provides voiceovers, than by the fact that he is one of the prime shapers of the New German Cinema, the esthetic of which the film epitomizes. In Germany in Autumn, stance and style count for much, arising as they do from the anti-establishment tenets and counterculture impetus with which Kluge and 25 other signatories of the so-called Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962 launched a new generation of filmmakers in a guilt-haunted Germany still trying to live down World War II. They meant to purge German society of more than a few remnants of ex-Nazi presence in a country supposedly turned democratic. At the same time, they were determined to resist Western imperialism, chiefly as represented by the U.S. And of course bury what they saw as the vapid commercial cinema and TV of the time, which they saw as complicit in the widespread silence about who did what (and was still doing it, in some cases as postwar elected officialdom) during the Nazi era.
Made on the heels of the actual events, it assumes a familiarity with them, and it may be useful to list the pivotal ones. Terrorists bent on springing their imprisoned colleagues ambushed Schleyer's auto convoy on Sept. 5, 1977, killing four of his escorts, and spiriting him away. A stalemate ensued when the government refused to negotiate. On Oct. 13, the RAF and Palestinian allies, upping the ante, hijacked a Lufthansa jet, landing it in Mogadishu, Somalia. On Oct. 18, a West German task force stormed the plane, recaptured it, and flew it back to Cologne. That night Baader, Esselin and Raspe were found dead in their cells. The RAF members holding Schleyer then killed him and deposited his body in the trunk of a green Audi in France, where it was found on Oct. 19. Schleyer, given his past as an SS officer in World War II, and his rise from Daimler-Benz board member to rightist chief of various industry groups, must have seemed an ideal kidnapping candidate. Tellingly, footage of what amounts to a state funeral in Cologne, intercuts shots of the German flag with rows of flags bearing the corporate logos of petrogiant Esso and the three-pointed star of Merecedes-Benz hanging limp and lifeless. It's as if capitalism itself is in mourning. It's also as subtle as the film gets.
It illustrates as well a key tenet of Kluge's esthetic (actually a rewrite of the montage theories of Eisenstein and the Soviet innovators of the 1920s), in which the spectator is invited to collaborate by filling in the spaces between the cuts in diverse fragments - the looser the connection, the stronger the encouragement for the spectator to participate. He and his like-minded colleagues (including Edgar Rentz, who also directed one of the Germany in Autumn segments) stressed that to exert too much control over the finished product would turn it fascist - an anarchistic impulse congenial to the new generation, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945-1982), the edgiest and most provocative of the lot.
That enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, whose prodigious energy allowed him to make more than 40 films and antagonize at one time or another all sides of the social and political spectrum, also provides the liveliest and longest (26 minutes) segment of Germany in Autumn, although ultimately the most trivial. Filmed entirely in his dark and claustrophobic apartment, it features the director threshing about in various states of undress, essentially spending his on-camera time treating his lover (Armin Meier) and mother (Lilo Pempeit) badly. It can at least be said that Fassbinder's sense of humor doesn't entirely desert him. He interrupts his ongoing diatribe against social injustice to panic at the wail of police sirens in the street, run and get his stash of grass, and flush it down the toilet, a riff on drug-induced paranoia, a subject in which Fassbinder was well-versed. Meier mostly just patiently absorbs the verbal abuse of Fassbinder, who knocks himself out to get his mother to admit she'd rather see a repressive society than the loose-cannon leftists. It doesn't seem much of a victory, but it would be a mistake to conclude that Fassbinder was at the end of his rope. A year later, he made his best-known and arguably best film, the mordant social critique of postwar Germany, The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979).
Kluge, too, displays a tongue-in-cheek humor that doesn't always make it through his intellectualism. His segment centers on a teacher, Gabi Teischert (Hannelore Hoger), earnestly striding forth with a shovel to unearth the foundations of German history. Her piece of Kluge's inserted string of archival footage and color slides includes a prettified illustration of the madly (and lethally) romantic murder-suicide of Austria's crown Price Rudolf and his lover, Baroness Mary Vetsera, in the royal hunting lodge, Mayerling, in Austria. Not that the German school system wants any part of her findings linking the spiraling insanity of Naziism to German Romanticism. They and she are squelched because, the authorities say, they are too confusing.
The same thematic string is trenchantly plucked by Volker Schlondorff in his segment about what looks like a perfectly straightforward staging (for TV) of Sophocles' Antigone, starring Angela Winkler. It runs into censorship snags because its theme of a woman defying authority is deemed too sensitive for German eyes during a time of widespread social convulsion. The use of national emergency to justify authoritarian crackdowns is of course a theme that never ceases to resonate for long, and it keeps the heat on here. Not that one can't help noting the irony of the much honored anti-institutional Kluge having himself become something of an institution, and the unruly rebel Fassbinder having been kicked upstairs into the German cultural pantheon and even having a school named after him!
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by Jay Carr
