Justin Vicari

justinvicari@verizon.net

I

 

If only because of his difficult and unenviable historical position as a postwar German (he was born in 1945), Fassbinder could not escape bearing witness to the destructive impact of the Holocaust in every frame of his films. I believe absolutely without question that the Six Million were the most brutalized victims of the Third Reich, and that the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis were and are unpardonable, and although I think Fassbinder would have considered it aesthetically “vulgar” to include such a bald statement in one of his films, there is nothing in his films that contradicts it, and in fact his films affirm it.

 

But first of all, how does one depict the atrocities of the Holocaust in a film? No film has ever succeeded in being bleak enough, devastating enough; instead, films about the Holocaust often come to seem like traditional war movies, with the camps as one more horror among many to be resisted or suffered through. In contrast, Fassbinder depicts the Holocaust as a kind of negative presence, a shadow on the present, the return of the repressed, through moments in which violently disturbing unconscious material breaks through the deceptively calm surface of consciousness: the way that Hans, in Katzelmacher, suddenly beats Joanna and pulls her hair because she has stood up to him; the devious, narrowed eyes of the sister-in-law in Fear of Fear (1975) as she spies on Margot; the way the mother in The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971) crushes her son’s first choice of careers (auto mechanic) because she fears the stigma of a job where he must “get his hands dirty”; and the sickly, perverse smile that the nightclub owner gives to the Kusters daughter, in Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (1974), propositioning her just after she has learned that her father is dead. These four examples, pulled at random from Fassbinder’s work, are like lightning-flashes in a dark sky whereby we glimpse a tiny visceral wedge of the psychopathic, amoral parade that was the Third Reich, and the widespread collective inhumanity that was the Holocaust. They are notes deliberately struck to expose what I would call “the Nazi moment,” dramatic translations of something vast and unknowable into something pointed and barbed, something that can be rendered palpable.

 

This is also the point of the surreal moment in Despair (1977) when Herman Herman, at a sidewalk café, watches brownshirts throw bricks at the windows of a Jewish butcher’s shop. In fact the brownshirts do not succeed in breaking the windows, even when one of them kicks the glass with his boot. They skulk away and the shop owners desultorily come out to clear away the bricks. If Fassbinder had staged this scene like one of the overheated, operatic street-fighting scenes in Bergman’s The Serpent’s Egg (1977), for instance, he would have been competing not only with the brutality of history itself but also with the history of film, which has provided many “textbook” examples of Nazi violence. Instead, Fassbinder focuses on the intention, sinister and horrible enough, to destroy.

 

Another example, which occurs toward the end of Katzelmacher: Paul’s girlfriend Helga is pregnant; in order to induce a miscarriage, Paul, on the advice of his friend Erich, beats her and throws her in the river. She loses the baby; but she still loves Paul, and he, realizing that he loves her, agrees to marry her (what he had hoped to avoid in the first place). Fassbinder does not show this violent scene on-camera. Instead, we hear about it, as gossip, just another incident in the flow of daily life, from two other friends in this social group. Fassbinder’s approach is more like a documentary filmmaker’s than like that of a director of “escapist” cinema. This indirect approach is more horrifying because of the matter-of-fact way in which he inscribes the brutal act within a larger pattern of brutality and socialization: the act itself, already a fait accompli by the time we hear of it, is rationalized and accepted as normal by its witnesses. That even the most violent atrocities and crimes can be justified, that “might always makes right,” that true love can only blossom out of sadomasochistic cruelty–these assumptions underpin the fascist state in Fassbinder’s work.

 

Compare Fassbinder’s treatment of this theme–by showing a man violently inducing miscarriage in his girlfriend–with Gaspar Noe’s graphic presentation of the same scene in I Stand Alone (1996). Watching I Stand Alone, one becomes queasy, one’s adrenaline races, one is thrust right into the middle of the action and eventually, being able to withstand watching it at all, one grows numb to it. One is placed in the position of accepting it into one’s reality: one becomes, in short, a complacent voyeur. In Katzelmacher, however, one can remain enough outside the event to feel outraged by the way the others in the film have become numb to such things. One’s immediate visceral response does not overtake and overwhelm one’s ability to reason through the inappropriate and inhuman ways in which the other characters confront violence. Fassbinder refuses to place the audience in a complacent voyeuristic position, and instead draws us into an active, critical dialogue with the material–a dialogue by means of which complacency can, in fact, be rejected.

 

If Nazism (and its legacy, its psychical aftertaste) comes to be linked in Fassbinder’s work with a pungent emotional neglect and domestic brutality–the twisted leer and the offensive remark, the man taking every opportunity to brutalize the woman and the woman taking every opportunity to betray the man–then this expression needs to be understood first of all in Freudian terms, as a return of the repressed. Traumatic, repressed emotion cannot be confronted all at once but must be excavated carefully through the work of analysis, which the prolific, constant outpouring of films becomes. And exactly what is being analyzed? Not only the vast amorphous subject of “German history” or “the repressed emotions of the postwar Germans,” but Fassbinder himself, his childhood and early life. Fassbinder’s insistence on representing fascism mainly as emotional neglect and brutality needs to be related to his own primary experience growing up in a broken home in postwar Germany: by all accounts he was subjected, as a child, to emotional neglect. For Fassbinder, this becomes inescapably the sign of the parental generation that put Hitler in power. It is finally as traumatized son that Fassbinder approaches the entire subject of the Third Reich, with all the strange admixtures of hatred, anger, jealousy and love that the status of “traumatized son” implies.

 

II

 

The protagonist of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira Weishaupt, used to be a man, Erwin Weishaupt; as a baby Erwin was abandoned by his mother and raised in a Catholic orphanage. Later Erwin becomes associated with a man named Anton Saitz, who had been a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp when he was a boy. Having survived the war, Anton is determined to become rich. His first business ventures are in meat-packing, and his dealings become more and more underhanded; at one point, Erwin willingly takes the rap for one of Anton’s fraudulent deals and serves time in prison. Erwin feels that he loves Anton, though he cannot explain these feelings to himself, since he does not believe himself to be homosexual and had never felt love for another man before. One day Anton asks Erwin why he always stares at him so strangely, forcing the issue. “I love you,” Erwin rashly and recklessly confesses, more as a child would than an adult. Anton reacts by laughing: “If only you were a broad.” Hearing Anton’s offhand remark as a commandment (or a proposal), Erwin immediately flies to Casablanca and undergoes a sex change.

 

This kind of sacrificial love–which doubles as self-repression, an ongoing death-in-life–figures prominently in In a Year with Thirteen Moons. Elvira’s sex change, her radical transformation into a machine designed to please, acts as a metaphor for cultural forgetting; she represents West Germany, erasing all memory of the Holocaust in order to reinvent itself as a satellite of American capitalism. The total, brutal change from man into woman–that sweeping cut that changes an entire identity irreversibly–symbolizes German amnesia. The fact that Elvira is clumsy and awkward as a woman, that she’s not “well-disguised” and is still grotesquely mannish, as well as the central inescapable fact that she isn’t happy–all of this constitutes the violent breaking-through of what has been repressed. (There is the central assumption at the heart of all Fassbinder’s work, that the German people never fully processed their collective memory of the Nazi years in the aftermath of the war: all bridges to the past were destroyed.)

 

Elvira Weishaupt joins a long line of forgetters in Fassbinder films, whose repressions serve a larger cultural and historical need. Walter Kranz, the blocked writer in Satan’s Brew (1976), in his movement from left-wing “poet of the revolution” to eventual apologist for the Third Reich, has to suppress his own identity for a period of time, believing that he is in fact the nineteenth-century decadent poet Stefan George. In Bolwieser (1977), set in Munich in the late 1920s, a husband turns a deliberately blind eye as his wife sleeps with several different men (who all sport vaguely Hitlerian mustaches!) until he perjures himself in a court of law to protect her honor and ends up going to prison. Maria Braun remains tied to her husband, a Wehrmacht soldier, even though he is no longer in her life; no matter how rich and independent she becomes, something gnaws at her, leaving her unsatisfied and unfulfilled and finally driving her into a psychopathic state. By the time these forgetters have awakened from their somnambulistic trances, it’s too late for them; they’ve already become completely deformed, hapless, self-immolating victims of an oppression in which they have unwittingly collaborated.

 

Because Elvira is an allegory of Germany, it becomes significant that In a Year with Thirteen Moons plays out as a series, almost a domino-chain, of symbolic acts of revenge against Elvira staged by members of the very groups that were persecuted under the Reich. The film begins with Elvira cruising a riverfront park, where she is beaten up by Polish hustlers; this becomes the symbolic reversal of Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Later, the character Soul Frieda stages the “gay revenge” against Elvira–hysterical and operatic–in his apartment. And then, of course, there is Elvira’s betraying friend Red Zora: the loaded adjective that is part of her name suggests not merely hair color, but Communism. (This secondary meaning is made even more explicit in the French release, where the character is called “Zora la Rouge.”) The final death-blow is struck by the Jewish Anton Saitz, survivor of Bergen-Belsen. The collective victims of Nazi oppression and of the Holocaust rise up, group by group as it were, to register their protest.[1] Of course Elvira is not to be equated with Hitler: she is only the symbolic body on which this protest is enacted, the scapegoat. Her passivity, more than anything else, places Elvira in this position: had she lived under the Third Reich, she probably would have been packed off to a concentration camp (wearing a pink triangle). However, she is not exactly innocent either: she does vaguely espouse pseudo-fascist values (in the slaughterhouse scene) and she dresses like a fashion plate of 1930s and 40s haute-couture, a throwback to the fascist era.[2] Moreover, her only way of standing with the victims, of showing solidarity, is to demand some kind of love from them: she attempts to buy the love of the Polish hustler; she supports her lover Christoph financially, in a transparent effort to make him love her more; most strikingly, she attempts to blackmail Anton’s love with her sex change. All of this, in itself, can be regarded as hostile and invasive: love has become so rare a commodity that Elvira’s desperate attempts to corner the market, so to speak, can only be read as a kind of fascist takeover. Her overwhelming need for love threatens the very stability of a social economy that has no love to sell her.

 

The concept of achieving or exposing one’s difference via any form of bending one’s gender or sexuality has always been considered highly suspect; gays and transsexuals (and for the sake of argument I will include Elvira in this category, though she doesn’t inhabit it easily) often find themselves as minorities among minorities. The sexually different are seen as adding–to the legitimate difference of, say, Jewish people–an illegitimate difference that can be hidden at will or read as a sign of “shameful weakness.” Sexual difference cuts across too many issues of family loyalty, religious belief, and intangible questions of self-respect and even “honor.” The gay figure still stands very much alone, accused of fighting selfishly on behalf of sexual pleasure: yet the torments undergone by Elvira make explicit that her fight has nothing to do with claiming pleasure, but with claiming (or refusing) her very identity itself.

 

In this sense, Elvira is like Sarah Jane in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959). Sarah Jane is black, but looks white; she chooses to pass, a decision that breaks her mother’s heart and eventually forces Sarah Jane to renounce her mother (a black maid) and move far away from her. (Arguably, slavery in American history is analogous to the Holocaust in German history: a shattering historical event that casts its shadow for generations into the future.) At the end of the film the mother dies; Sarah Jane belatedly returns and, at the funeral, acknowledges her black mother and, by extension, her own blackness. But this acknowledgment comes too late to do the mother any good; and ultimately, what will it do to Sarah Jane? The film has established her as a character who hates her own real identity, and who is ill-equipped to cope with it. What she does, at the funeral, in a paroxysm of guilt, is liable to have the gravest consequences for her in the future. (And there is another, more cynical way to read Sirk’s “happy” ending: with Annie–the only fully black-identified character–now gone, the “white” characters, including Sarah Jane, are free to form an exclusive and contented family.) Like Sarah Jane, of course, Elvira others herself in order to gain the approval and acceptance of a social category (men like Anton Saitz) to which she, as Erwin, once belonged by definition but without feeling exactly that she belonged. (If its title wasn’t already perfect, In a Year with Thirteen Moons could well have been called Imitation of Life, since Elvira lives without ever “really” living, which is to say, finding a way to be happy.) The sharp, nagging sense of difference precedes the act of othering oneself: Sarah Jane becomes the light skin she displays externally, while Erwin becomes the desiring female he feels himself to be inside, vis-à-vis Anton. Each becomes an other in her own skin: a tragic figure trapped forever between two identities, neither of which is tenable and neither of which makes sense.

 

This dual citizenship in the world of the oppressed and of the oppressors is something uniquely central to Fassbinder’s philosophy, a hard kernel at the heart of his work that many have found indigestible. His oppressors who are also oppressed show that each person has his or her point of vulnerability. The drive for pleasure and power becomes fatally and inextricably bound up with the death drive. In Beware of a Holy Whore, the controlling Jeff is drawn to the one person, Ricky, whom he can least control: within his obsessive love is inscribed the seed of its own doom. Jeff rails and rages that he wants more freedom, more power, but all of this ranting is compensatory: he really wants less. He flees his own “name”: in the end, when he is given a newspaper with an article in it about him and the movie he is making, he chooses to read aloud from a police report, on the same page, about a serial killer who has finally been apprehended. “I guess I won’t really be able to rest until I know that he’s completely destroyed,” Jeff says in the end, hanging his head: with a shock we realize that he’s talking about himself. Similarly, Maria Braun is invincible to everything except her own past, which she neurotically cultivates in the form of the dead and dying roses her husband continues to send her as a kind of antidote to her own power: at one point she enters her house and plants her pocketbook in the vase, instead of the rose she has just received. “Maria Braun,” she tells herself, “you’re starting to lose it.” Again, there is the need for the powerful to diminish his or her own authority, and again, this need centers on a strange linguistic turn to the third person–she confronts herself as the specter of her own detested power, she attacks her own name.

 

Why do the powerful–the oppressors–detest their power? Aside from the fact that both Jeff and Maria remain humane in some way, and thus are disgusted by the machinations of power and by the ways in which they are driven to hurt others, I think they recognize that love is absent from their power, that the drive to achieve this power is already a kind of death drive, since it has made it impossible for them to attain a “pure” and “equal” love (if this even exists in the first place).

 

III

 

When he was nineteen, Fassbinder wrote a play called Water Drops on Burning Rocks, which, I believe, contains an early draft of the story that later became In a Year with Thirteen Moons (I’m going by the text of the play filmed beautifully by François Ozon in 1999). The play is about a “round-robin” sexual game centering on the figure of a charismatic seducer. Near the end, in a startling confession, the seducer’s ex-girlfriend delivers the following tearful monologue:

 

I’ve suffered in every way imaginable. So much sadness . . . I’ll suffer forever. . . . I’m his creature . . . . When I met Leopold, I had just come to Germany. I was like you: young, innocent and most of all: lost. Starved for love. He taught me everything about sex. It was wonderful. He was so good, he made me feel like I existed for the very first time. I was happy. That is, until he stopped desiring. He touched me less and less. Everything changed. It was unbearable. So, I took a drastic measure, crazy, crazy with love. He’d said to me once, “If you were a woman, I’d have married you.” I had a sex change for him, out of love for him, so he’d want me again. I spent all my savings. For a while, his desire was revived. It was the newness. I deluded myself. Then the desire died again. He made me a whore. Then he left me.

 

There are certain prototypically Fassbinderian elements here: the feeling of finally being happy “for the very first time” is equated with a feeling of being in love and truly alive, beside which all the dull, ordinary moments of life seem to pale or become, in fact, “unbearable”; the person who finds and then loses happiness becomes doomed to spend the rest of life chasing after the lost, fleeting feeling, like a drug addict who seeks larger and more potent doses to attain the same longed-for euphoria and oblivion. The one who loves becomes the creature of her love, no longer the free living being that happiness had once, briefly, made her. We also see how economic considerations parallel emotional ones: “I spent all my savings” (all happiness requires some funding) and “He made me a whore” (what has ceased to become useful and productive in the emotional sphere, must be turned to use and exploited in the economic one). In this earlier version of the story, the sex change works, briefly, as a sexual novelty or proof of devotion, which slightly prolongs the beloved’s jaded interest. The radical othering of the body in order to please and serve is, for a short while, accepted by the man as a gift, in the spirit in which it is given. This is no longer the case with Elvira, whom Anton rejects as flatly after her sex change as he had before.

 

The seducer in Water Drops on Burning Rocks who elicited the gift of an “othered” body is named Leopold Bloom, a reference to the Joyce character. Bloom, the “Rich Jew” in Fassbinder’s play Garbage, the City and Death, and Anton Saitz form a triad of Jewish men who are marked as ruthless seducers and despoilers of the innocent, and also cut-throat businessmen, all qualities that recall the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi era. Honestly, what are we to make of these Jewish characters who seem to be deliberate constructs of inflammatory anti-Semitic projection? To suggest that Fassbinder is venting some kind of personal anti-Semitism seems wrong: there is something in the way these Jewish characters interact with the German ones that stresses the element of projection. For one thing, consider the fate of these German characters. The Nazi generation accused Jewish men of being “feminized” men; the extent to which this was meant to compensate for the Germans’ uneasiness about their own sexual identity is revealed in the ways the following German generation begins to explore and revise its sexual identity vis-à-vis Jewish men. Raoul the pimp, seduced by the Rich Jew, discovers that he was gay all along; Franz, the adolescent in Water Drops on Burning Rocks who seems to be a kind of surrogate for Fassbinder himself, tries gay sex for the first time with Leopold Bloom, and falls in love with him; Erwin, in love with Anton Saitz, decided to become a woman for him. Here, the transparent process of being or becoming “feminized” is owned directly by the German male characters; it is now the Jewish men who awaken and precipitate the longing to be feminized, or the acknowledgment that one is already feminine.

 

Fassbinder has been criticized for depicting Jewish men as distant and unfeeling, while his German characters go through highly strung, deeply registered emotional changes: but for the anti-Semitic transference to work, this has to be the case. Feminization, once held by the Nazis to be a trait of the Jewish man, is shown not to apply in the slightest, while it’s the non-Jewish German men who go to pieces, who surrender to the neurotic realm of extreme emotionality, who are hystericized and in a word feminized . That this reversal is worked out through the next generation, among the children of the Nazis, is part of Fassbinder’s overarching vision of the slowness of the process by which worlds are remade.

 

The presentation of sanitized, saint-like Jews does not do enough to battle the anti-Semitic legacy of the Nazis: rather, this taint can only be reversed, exculpated, by the presentation of Jewish characters committing and now getting away with the very “crimes” against society that the Nazis foamed at the mouth to denounce. About the various “rich Jews” one encounters in Fassbinder’s films, Saul Friedlander writes:

 

The rich Jew reigns over his world, over property and hoodlums, but suddenly it becomes clear that he is also in league with the police and the town’s notables . . . . As for the patriarch Mendelssohn [in Lili Marleen (1980)], he knows how to pull all the strings from behind the scenes . . . . He is like a spider sitting in the center of his web, but a spider whose repugnant aspect [has] disappeared. A master of lies and duplicity, he seems a symbol of detachment and nobility. (110-11)

 

These Jews are now depicted as doing everything they can to justify the anti-Semitic judgment, so as not to have suffered genocide in vain, so to speak: the subtitle of Garbage, the City and Death seems significant in light of this, since Frankenstein-am-Mainobviously refers to the creation of a kind of monster. Only now, the figure of the Jew, once so flagrantly open to attack, has become untouchable. In place of a guilty Germany that refused all blame for its crimes and an innocent Jewry massacred for no valid reason, there now stands the sign of a Germany that can be found guilty simply for existing, and a Jewry that can be “let off the hook” even when it deliberately “sins.” The psychological extremism of this formulation measures the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust itself: in response to such massive devastation, the collective ego of society undergoes a violent transformation, under hammer blows as it were, and gets turned inside-out.

 

In this sense, Elvira also resembles the character of Muller in Garbage, the City and Death, the ex-camp-commandant who now performs a cabaret act in drag. Though seemingly harmless, Muller still espouses murderous Nazi values: “I wasn’t concerned with each and every one of the people I murdered . . . . I am a technocrat . . . . It’s no burden to be a Jew killer when you have convictions like mine . . . . So I’m waiting ’til my rights are rights again” (Fassbinder, Plays 185). Elvira is hardly so inflammatory and aggressive, but her sex change, her self-designation as Anton’s creature, also covers for her attempt to covertly carry on in the master role, now in non-threatening, emasculated disguise. How do we know she still seeks to dominate? The sex change can be read as a passive-aggressive form of emotional blackmail (which it also clearly is in Water Drops on Burning Rocks, victimized tears notwithstanding): Elvira does indeed other herself, her body, but in order to get something in return.

 

Thomas Elsaesser has argued that Elvira’s sacrifices for Anton represent a working-through of German-Jewish relations in the wake of the Holocaust, with Elvira as a kind of patron saint of empathic identification with the other, choosing a noble if extreme form by which to implicate herself as a German and atone for German crimes (206-15). I disagree with the emphasis he places on Elvira’s sense of guilt, which is not particularly pronounced, and I also disagree with the claim for Anton’s (relative) importance as the locus of her real longings and love. The most significant lost love for Elvira is the original loss of the mother, who abandoned the child Erwin.[3] Infected by ego-injuries from early childhood, Elvira is classically narcissistic; she makes Anton a symptom, in the Lacanian sense, of her own fantasies of redemption: any empathy she may have is contaminated by what she would like to receive in validation. When Elvira tries to get an introduction to Anton’s office from Smolik, Saitz’s right-hand man, he asks her if she knows Saitz personally, and she replies, “Doch, doch. Doch. Ich kenne die Anton Saitz.” What she says is: “But yes, yes, of course–I know Anton Saitz,” her use of the feminine definite article, “die,” in front of Anton’s name shows she has made him her symptom. This feminization of Anton, at the level of language, suggests that Elvira seeks to make him into her creature, her sex change, and to emasculate him. The deep-seated fear of an imagined Jewish sexual potency, which motivated German anti-Semites to accuse Jewish men of being “feminine” and to classify them as Untermenschen (lower-men), survives at a barely registered level as a hysterical coveting of Jewish sexuality under the disguise of love.

 

Having said this, I am nonetheless uneasy about the superficial equation that seems to be made between homosexuality/transvestism and Nazism. Both Elvira and Muller resemble Martin von Essenbeck from Fassbinder’s favorite film, Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969). At the beginning of The Damned, Martin, the black sheep son of a powerful industrial family, upsets his patriarchal grandfather by singing Dietrich’s signature song, “Einem Mann, einem richtige Mann” (“A man, a real man”) in full Blue Angel drag at a family celebration. Martin threatens to bring down the family by going to gay bars and molesting a little girl, but the family’s power is such–and the family steelworks are of such strategic importance to the Reich–that not only are these scandals hushed up, but Martin is recruited to the S.S. By the end he has traded his drag outfit for the uniform of a storm troop leader (a composite portrait of Martin Bormann?). He goes from singing that he wants “a real man” to being a real man, with the defining provision that the mark of this “real manhood” is that one knows how to kill.

 

Implicit in Martin’s journey is a recapitulation of Freud’s three successive stages of human psychosexual development. He begins at the oral stage, fixated on his mother, who presides, smiling strangely, over Martin’s drag act. In this phase he is reckless and compulsive; he “devours” the little girl. Later, blackmailed by Uncle Constantine, he suffers through the anxious rigors of the anal stage, withdrawing from the world, holing up in a dark attic. This corresponds to the historical moment when the new S.S. cleans house by massacring the old S.A. during a huge gay orgy, a recreation of the “night of long knives” that is easily the most stunning scene in Visconti’s film. Finally, Martin confronts his deep-seated Oedipal complex by the extreme and unlikely act of raping his mother. Reborn, Martin loses his former weakness and joins the S.S.; he gets a girlfriend and graduates to the genital stage. In the end he engineers his mother’s death, signifying that he has overcome the Oedipal fixation at the root of his former homosexuality.

 

Staging of homosexuality as a weakness that forces an overcompensation of aggression goes together with the Freudian reading of “sensitivity and aggression,” the movement of psychical overcompensation that marks so many of Fassbinder’s characters. Under the mincing, lisping drag queen lurks a predatory killer waiting to lash out. However, in many cases the comforting, seductive logic behind this duality isn’t really logic at all: just the expression of a societal aversion at the level of gut instinct, so to speak. The paranoia of this scenario speaks to the fear that all “abnormal” sexual identities are expedient to one degree or another, that the omnisexual subject has an ax to grind. Is the drag queen a distracting cover for criminal behavior? Is the killer merely compensating for his own fears that he may be effeminate? If this were true, then why aren’t all gay men killers? Even Adorno insists that fascism and homosexuality are linked as the operations of a narcissism whose insecurity excludes everything “other,” everything that is not already of oneself:

 

In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones, who need the weaklings as their victims in order not to admit that they are like them. Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together. In its downfall the subject negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth merge in an order which asserts unalloyed the male principle of domination. (46)

 

This sounds good as far as it goes, especially the first part in which the fascist (as inverted victim) is shown to pick on those who are weaker in order not to be classified as one of them. But of course not all gays are self-loathing (or fearful) so that they must become killers of other men. Received judgments about homosexuality, especially when applied to a case as serious and delicate as the Third Reich, seem to want to let history off the hook, so to speak. Friedlander has also noted that The Damned, “in choosing to make Essenbeck’s grandson a complete pervert,” finds its own way of “neutralizing the past,” even as it attempts to trace the precise origins of Nazi criminality (100). The evil, and hence the guilt, are invested in an isolated scapegoat, in this case a figure of malevolent sexual ambiguity. Fassbinder himself sometimes seems to make the same glib elision that Visconti makes between sexual perversion and Nazism (a case could be made that Lili Marleen is really about the Nazis’ projected identification with an artificial idea of women: rather than being a traditional pin-up, Lili Marleen stages the closeted drag fantasies of the troops). At the same time, Fassbinder’s sensitive, “weak” characters are more likely to be heterosexually identified than gay (Hans Epp, Whity, Herr R., Peter Troepper, Walter Kranz). Fassbinder wants to explore how anyonecould be made into a killer or collaborator–as the Nazis proved–not only those already twisted by psychosexual problems. Indeed the shifting of the burden of guilt onto a few psychosexually twisted individuals does not account for the fact that Hitler had millions of followers (they couldn’t all have been in the closet, surely) and also that other sets of “others” were targeted (communists, gypsies, etc.) who had little to do with issues of sexuality.

 

IV

 

In a scene from In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira has come to the building where Anton Saitz has his headquarters; outside, a man begins talking to her. Like Elvira, he is an exile from the Saitz empire. He tells Elvira rather imperiously that he comes to stand in this same spot Monday through Friday during business hours, staring up at the windows of Saitz’s office where he used to work. This is a mini-portrait of alienated labor, a man so defined by his workaday job that, even after losing it, he is drawn back to the same office building, spending his time there even though he is no longer compensated for it.

 

Like some jilted lover, this ex-employee is obsessed with Saitz. He is a custodian of Saitz’s history. Visually, the guy is a grotesque. In close-up, his skeletal face suggests one of George Grosz’s caricatures from the Weimar 1920s, a talking skull in business suit and hat. I am also reminded of the portrait photographs August Sander took of ordinary Germans between the wars: Sander began his project working for the census, taking identification photos of as many Germans as he could get to sit for him. His later, more formally composed pictures of men and women in stiff suits or work-uniforms have an uncanny quality: I know, when I’m looking into these eyes, that I’m looking at people who became Nazis. Sander wanted to build up the morale of Germans defeated in World War I; in certain of his portraits, the subject looks at the camera half-astonished that Sander believes him worthy of being photographed, an unmistakable flicker of returning pride crossing his face. Did Sander, by turning his camera on these ordinary Germans, inadvertently encourage a return of their will to power? Consider the photograph “Pastry Chef (Cologne, 1928)”–this burly skinhead with Hitler-like mustache already looks like an S.A. crewman; or “Varnisher (Cologne, 1932)”–where the man’s military haircut, stained smock and big can of varnish all combine with his face’s slightly stupid expression to look distinctly sinister. Perhaps it’s just historicist hindsight that seems to tip the hand of these portraits, but a similar “trick” occurs with some of the characters in Fassbinder’s films: the longer Fassbinder holds on close-ups of their faces, the more a kind of latent fascism begins to seep out. The ex-employee goes on to say that, in his early days, Saitz took over a whorehouse, running it “with an iron fist in the way he’d learned in the concentration camp. A brothel run like a concentration camp. The whole set-up functions perfectly.” Details are glossed over here, we never learn exactly how the brothel was run, but I take Fassbinder’s simile at face value, not as hyperbole, and assume that the women who worked in this whorehouse were most likely beaten, starved, humiliated, raped, paid no money, and even murdered; the customers were perhaps blackmailed and robbed. As opposed to Elvira, who has learned to masochistically embrace her own victimhood, Saitz has gotten back at the world by evolving into one of the oppressors.

 

Is this logic cruel to the victims of the Holocaust and to other survivors who did not become like their oppressors? Perhaps, but isn’t it just as cruel to depict the Holocaust’s victims as nothing but victims, eternally destroyed again and again? “For it would, after all,” writes Elsaesser, “be too easy for a German to love a Jew, on condition that he is a nice, upright one” (197). The taboo against representing Jewish people humanly, with human faults and weaknesses like everyone, is yet another form of anti-Semitism, continuing to treat the Jew as Other.

 

Later, Elvira is initially refused entrance to Saitz’s office. Saitz’s chauffeur and right-hand man, Smolik, tells her she can only come in if she knows one of the “codewords.” She turns her back to mnemonically sound out the password, summoning it up from the recesses of deep memory. Suddenly, out of her mouth pops “Bergen-Belsen!” Smolik gives a wolfish whistle: “Why didn’t you say so? That’s Code 1-A. . . the only password that’s never been changed. With ‘Bergen-Belsen’ you can even disturb him when he’s screwing!” Elvira, now inside the inner sanctum, laughs girlishly, pleased with herself for one of the few times in the entire film. The word itself, “Bergen-Belsen,” of course represents the return of the repressed. This makes Smolik’s last remark hilarious, since, in Freudian terms, traces of repressed traumatic memory can result in, among other neurotic symptoms, sexual dysfunction. What can “disturb Anton when he’s screwing” is the unwanted driving of unconscious memories (from his childhood in Bergen-Belsen) into consciousness.

 

Some critics have felt that the concentration camp references here are arbitrary or unsubstantiated, but I don’t think there is a single Fassbinder film that is not about the camps to a greater or lesser degree. It was his heroic insistence that everything Germany had ever done, and everything Germany had done since the war, should be made to answer for the unspeakable horrors of the camps. Again, he would never have made a film directly “about” the camps; with his characteristic irony, he was incapable of making such an artistically blunt statement. Instead, the camps become a phantom presence: in Katzelmacher, in the way the circle of friends spend their time stabbing each other in the back, and then finally turn on the figure of the immigrant worker and beat him up, we see a schematic of “Nazi behavior.” Emmi, on several occasions in Fear Eats the Soul (1973), smilingly and nostalgically reminisces about Hitler and being in the Nazi Party when she was a little girl; shortly after marrying the Moroccan Ali, she will betray him in order to get back into the good graces of the other, racist ex-Nazis in her social circle–to “re-join the party,” so to speak. In Chinese Roulette a ruthless truth game is played: one team picks someone from the other team, and round after round questions are asked: “What kind of animal would the person be?” or “What author might have invented this person?” By the answers given, the other team is meant to try to guess which one of them has been chosen. The daughter Angela picks her own mother as the target in this game; the ultimate question is “Who would this person have been in the Third Reich?” Angela replies: “Commandant of the camp at Bergen-Belsen.” The Nazi era is evoked (in the context of a decadent 1970s party game) as a definitive crucible of human behavior.

 

For Fassbinder the subject of the camps was so vast and terrible that it could only be rendered obliquely like this, broken down into human-sized stories: a chocolate manufacturer losing his mind in Berlin in 1929 (Despair); a has-been movie star committing suicide ten years after the end of the war and the simultaneous end of her career (Veronika Voss); the dissolution of a marriage in Weimar-era Munich due to rampant personal anxiety and pathological infidelity (Bolwieser); or the complete crisis of original thought and identity faced by a contemporary writer who cannot come to terms with Nazi history except by brutally recreating it through random acts of murder and S & M (Satan’s Brew). All these films are implicitly about the camps. Even the period piece Effi Briest, set in the Prussian nineteenth century, features a train–an obvious emblem of the Holocaust–as the sinister bringer of (state-sanctioned) death, in the duel scene. In In a Year with Thirteen Moons, the recycling of a dreaded camp name, Bergen-Belsen, into a fairly innocuous codeword or password (so redolent of not only espionage and crime, but of a boys’ clubhouse) is classic Freudian psychology: the trauma of the past is reduced to a kind of private joke, cut off from its social meaning. Part of the joke is the sheer mnemonic effort it requires for Elvira even to summon up the name in the first place. By doing so, she demonstrates that she is one of the ones who remembers; and for this alone, she implicitly consents to bear the burden of guilt. As part of the Nazi past that has been subjected to wholesale cultural amnesia, “Bergen-Belsen” can be remade to mean anything at all, a nonsense sound, or it can be completely pushed out of mind, buried so far down in the unconscious that it is completely forgotten.

 

Similarly, when we hear that Saitz ran his whorehouses like concentration camps, we shudder to think what might have gone on in them. But the actual historical memory of the camps is shown to be so vague and imprecise that hardly anyone in the film ever surmises what crimes Anton may have committed. Rather we have a sense that what is implied is a generic kind of “order and discipline,” snap inspections: the same techniques of behavioral control used by all modern business offices. Big business cannot help but have absorbed the lessons of administrative efficiency and fine-tuned totalitarian infrastructure of Hitler’s death camps; the camps are a model of advanced-capitalist business administration, with their high-tech smoothness, their intricate chains of command allowing for guilt to be shifted from the top to the bottom, their dual agency (workhouse/slaughterhouse), and the secrecy with which they concealed corruption behind a benign, even purportedly humanitarian exterior. Fassbinder is linking all modern big business to the camps–or, more precisely, all the operations in modern society where people are reduced to numbers and stark functions are shown to be derived from the model of the camps, where human beings were also definitively reduced to numbers and to functions.

 

V

 

At the end of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira has died but her voice continues speaking, via a tape-recorded interview with a journalist: her monologue helps to explain her misbegotten life, even as it leaves some of her inherent contradictions intact. Fassbinder quotes this motif of the tape-recorded voice transcending the speaker’s literal death from the end of Sartre’s play, The Condemned of Altona (1959). Sartre was the first artist to address the legacy of Nazi violence in the reconstructed West Germany of the Wirtschaftswunder: the psychological dissolution and decay of a powerful industrialist family, the von Gerlachs, is shown to be in direct proportion to the extent of their crimes in the Third Reich and their material prosperity in the aftermath of the war. The eldest son, Franz, served as a Nazi officer, and earned a reputation as a sadistic torturer of prisoners; he returned from the war emotionally and psychologically destroyed. He has been hiding out for the past ten years in the attic of the family mansion, refusing to speak to anyone but Leni, the sister whom he loves incestuously, and the imaginary army of crabs that he believes lives on the ceiling of his room and that he also believes will one day take over the world. Holed up in this room, he obsessively audiotapes himself delivering rambling psychotic speeches. Rather than acknowledge Hitler’s defeat, he has replaced Hitler. He has convinced himself that Germany is still a defeated nation on its knees, in rubble, the way he left it when he went into seclusion; that way, he can content himself that the Nazi cause, for which he fought and sacrificed himself, had never been betrayed.

 

Because the patriarch of the von Gerlach clan (himself a Nazi collaborator) is rapidly dying of cancer, the family attempts to break Franz out of his delusional isolation. But when the past is forcibly excavated through a series of conversations between Franz and his sister-in-law, and then an “interview” between Franz and his dying father, Franz can’t deal with the memory of the crimes he committed and witnessed, and he especially can’t deal with the present time, in which a recovered Germany has moved on and forgotten its past, of which Franz is a part. In the end, as his father wants, he drives a car with himself and his father in it off a bridge, killing them both. After he has died, Franz’s sister Leni plays one of Franz’s tape recordings, highlighting his complete crisis of identity: “Oh tribunal of the night,” he seethes, ” you who were, who will be, who are–I existed, I existed!” (178).

 

Both The Condemned of Altona and In a Year with Thirteen Moons are expressions of a deep-seated postwar misanthropy, and both are studies of scapegoats in a group dynamic. Franz begins as an innocent boy who gets pressed into becoming a savage oppressor, a killer; he finally succumbs to his own frail, guilty victimhood: he simply can’t live with himself as a butcher. Elvira, similarly, renounces her original profession as (animal) butcher, then becomes a sacrifice. Both Franz von Gerlach and Elvira Weishaupt are the “walking dead,” existing in a semi-hypnoid state, waiting only for real death to finish them off, and leaving behind enigmatic epitaphs for their enigmatic lives. Both Fassbinder and Sartre use this posthumous voice ironically: the life eulogized by the voice is already sacrificed, in fact was sacrificed long before it ended; nothing can help it now. In The Condemned of Altona Franz’s surviving family files out of the room, indifferently leaving Franz’s tape to play on; in In a Year with Thirteen Moons, Elvira’s shell-shocked loved ones stand around, at a loss as to what to do, seemingly still pondering the enigma of this person whom they never really understood. If they seem to be paying more attention to Elvira now, this does Elvira no good; their attention comes too late.

 

While Fassbinder and Sartre deplore Germany’s cultural amnesia, both depict their main characters–Elvira and Franz–as crushed by their attempts to swim against this amnesic tide. Knowing what happened does not save Franz from being devastated by this knowledge–in fact it makes him even more vulnerable. Likewise, Elvira is moved to investigate her past and is destroyed, in large part, by what she uncovers. I think that the blame, however, is not to be placed on the act of remembering itself, but rather on the lack of a supportive collective structure to help the individual process these memories: the family unit, bonds of friendship and love, society’s fabric, are all shown to be rotted away, unable to uphold the sacrificed victim who wants to make the effort to overcome the traumas of the past. Both works dramatize what is an essentially psychoanalytic, Freudian process–but one conducted not by a sympathetic professional, but by peers of the protagonist with axes to grind. In both, the traumas turn out to be so profoundly damaging that the individual’s recovery becomes impossible. The catharsis of the drama is, then, the failure of self-knowledge, the collapse of the protagonist under the weight of his or her own sickness. Sartre, like Fassbinder, draws on Freud in his critique of the prosperous “new Germany.” Franz and Elvira, latter-day hysterics, manifest a return of the repressed in psychopathological symptoms and in their general malaise and anxiety. As the key to Elvira is her fixation on love as a substitute for the lost mother, so Franz is revealed through his idée fixe that Germany remains exactly the same as he left it, in 1945, a mass of bombed ruins, destroyed and fragmented. In reality only Franz is broken, in ruins. And, like Elvira, Franz is the victim of a downward mobility: he has lost control of the von Gerlach business empire, which was to be his, to his younger brother Werner. For Franz and Elvira, insanity is a helpless response to the call of a higher, less sublimated reality, that of the collective and individual traumas that everyone else has forgotten:

 

JOHANNA: Madmen often speak the truth, Werner.

 

WERNER: Really? Which truth?

 

JOHANNA: There’s only one: the horror of living. (115)

 

Franz’s mental instability–again like Elvira’s–is shown to have been rooted, at its deepest point, in an unbearable family constellation: a brutal domineering authoritarian father, and an incestuous love relationship with his sister. The von Gerlach clan is riddled with overt and covert incest: the patriarch manipulates his daughter with creepy, pseudo-sexual caresses and compliments, and Franz, as the second generation, brings the latent incest-wishes of the father to fruition in his affair with Leni, as he also brings the power-mad dreams of the father to fruition in the Nazi army. Like the sick philosophy of Nazism itself, this unhealthy incest-mentality masquerades as a hypocritical agenda to keep the bloodline “purified,” as when Leni tells Franz: “I don’t amount to anything, but I was born a Gerlach, which means I am mad with pride–and I cannot make love to anyone but a Gerlach. Incest is my law and my fate” (88). The psychotic family bears a psychotic son, who finds (and invests) in the Nazi Party all the justification and fulfillment of his psychosis. The murderous violence of Nazism is shown to have grown directly out of these already pathic syndromes, a collective summoning and channeling of latent psychotic energies that remain unchanged and destructive after the war and the collapse of the Third Reich. The “Third Reich,” then, was just a temporary name given to an already existent condition of brutality and sadism. For Elvira, who gravitates toward violence and murder (in the slaughterhouse sequence) and who exposes the latent aggressions of her peers, one can say that, like Franz, she stands both within the collective psychosis and outside of it, its member and its victim. The collective victimization of Franz and Elvira–and ultimately their suicides–absolve them of complicity, but at the cost of their lives.

 

I have no doubt that The Condemned of Altona was on Fassbinder’s mind in 1978. Certain other motifs from Sartre’s play had already surfaced in Peter Marthesheimer’s screenplay for The Marriage of Maria Braun, which Fassbinder had filmed earlier that year. An example: when Franz von Gerlach comes home from the front, he finds his sister having sex with an American G.I.; the two men fight, and Leni saves her brother by bludgeoning the G.I. to death with a bottle. This dramatic incident migrates almost wholly into The Marriage of Maria Braun. In both, the ease with which American soldiers are dispatched–by German women, with bottles of German wine!–seems like an ironic commentary on the fact that, even during the Occupation, the Germans were already regaining their former power, as well as the sadism and blood-lust that had fueled the Third Reich. Also, the ending of The Condemned of Altona–a murder-suicide by crashed car–was scripted as the original ending of The Marriage of Maria Braun: Fassbinder changed it at the last minute to a more ambiguous scene (in which Maria blows up the house, accidentally or on purpose, by leaving the gas oven on–itself a sardonic Holocaust reference), perhaps because he saw how closely Marthesheimer’s ending paralleled Sartre’s.

 

Of The Condemned of Altona, Fredric Jameson writes, “the abstract future becomes visible. . .as the burning judgment of some unimaginable and alien posterity” (305). Franz, in his recorded speeches, ruminates on how the future will see him and his Germany–a future dominated by an alien race of evolved crabs. The end of In a Year with Thirteen Moons, with the emphatic words of the Connie Francis song, “Schoner Fremder Mann,” also turns toward the idea that the future will come to redeem the past: “the time will come/when all my dreams at last/will be reality.” Fassbinder and Sartre themselves stand at a pivot point, like their protagonists, wondering if these dubious redemptions will ever arrive; but they also stand as avatars of that “posterity” with its “burning judgment,” looking back at the ugly wreckage of history, excavating backwards from the incomprehensible sign of damaged life toward the origin of the damage itself: the parents spanking their children in Fassbinder’s BRD are ex-Nazis, and the children, the inheritors of both individual and collective damages, are left the choice of either perpetuating these cycles or breaking out of them. The former route is easier, but leads to a living death and to death itself; the latter means lifting the historical curse, curing the sickness, but how does one go about this, all alone? It is part of Fassbinder’s unique sensitivity to understand that the cruelest fate of the outsider–whether female, Jewish, gay, or anything–is that he or she must figure out how society works and how to overcome it, an obstacle with which those who flock to the status quo never have to deal.

Notes

 

1. This kind of radical paraphrasing or re-staging of German history, particularly the events leading up to World War II, can also be seen in Beware of a Holy Whore, where the mass presence of the German film-crew, “taking over” the Spanish resort, is implicitly likened to a Nazi invasion; and in Martha, when Helmut, with a maniacal and proprietary glint in his eye, tells Martha on their honeymoon, that “next year,” as a traveling salesman, he “will be in Germany, Austria and Switzerland,” not uncoincidentally the first countries controlled by Hitler.

 

2. It almost goes without saying that such fancy, formal attire stands in stark contrast to the pungent scruffiness with which Fassbinder presented himself: in The Niklashausen Journey (1970), for example, his matted, unwashed hair and faded, mud-stained jeans signify the sincerity of his solidarity with the workers’ revolution. And one of the identity crises Fox faces, in Fox and His Friends (1974), is that his upper-class lover is critical of his casual, proletarian clothing, and wants to “make him over” in silk shirts and lounge slippers.

 

3.”Unrequited” love between parents and children is one of Fassbinder’s great subjects. The cruel games of Chinese Roulette are driven by the daughter Angela’s feelings of having been wronged by her parents. Effi Briest wants to re-establish contact with her daughter, and her heart is broken when she realizes that the little girl has been trained by Instetten to despise her. Hans Epp and Peter Troepper have both been destroyed by lack of parental concern: they seem fixated in a moment of wanting to go back and re-make the past, but the objects of their unrequited love (for Hans his mother, for Peter his father) leave them coldly behind.

 

Works Cited

 

• Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2002.
• Beware of a Holy Whore. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Lou Castel, Eddie Constantine, Marquard Bohm, Hanna Schygulla. 1971.
• Bolweiser. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Elisabeth Trissenaar, Kurt Raab, Bernhard Helfrich, Karl-Heinz von Hassel. 1977.
• Chinese Roulette. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Anna Carina, Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Ulli Lommel. 1976.
• The Damned. Dir. Luchino Visconti. Perf. Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Griem, Helmut Gerger. 1969.
• Effi Briest. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Wolfgang Schenck, Ulli Lommel, Lilo Pempeit, Herbert Steinmetz. 1974.
• Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. Plays. Ed. and trans. Denis Calandra. New York: PAJ, 1985.
• Fear Eats the Soul. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Brigitta Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin. 1974.
• Fear of Fear. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Marget Carstensen, Ulrich Faulhauber, Brigitte Mira. 1975.
• Fox and his Friends. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Peter Chatel, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karlheinz Böhm, Adrian Hoven. 1975.
• Friedlander, Saul. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. Trans. Thomas Weyr. New York: Harper, 1984.
• In a Year of Thirteen Moons. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Volker Spengler, Ingrid Caven, Gottfried John, Elisabeth Trissenaar. 1978.
• Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974.
• Katzelmacher. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Lilith Ungerer, Rudolf Waldemar Brem. 1969.
• Lili Marleen. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Giancarolo Giannini, Mel Ferrer. 1981.
• The Marriage of Maria Braun. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch, Ivan Desny. 1979.
• Martha. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm, Barbara Valentin. 1974.
• The Merchant of Four Seasons. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Irm Hermann, Hans Hirschmüller, Hanna Schygulla, Klaus Löwitsch. 1972.
• Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Brigitte Mira, Ingrid Caven, Margit Carstensen, Karlheinz Böhm. 1975.
• The Niklashausen Journey. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Michael Fengler. Perf. Michael König, Hanna Schygulla, Margit Carstensen, Michael Gordon. 1970.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Condemned of Altona. Trans. Sylvia and George Leeson. New York: Knopf, 1969.
• Satan’s Brew. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Perf. Kurt Raab, Margit Carstensen, Helen Vita, Volker Spengler. 1976.
• Water Drops on Burning Rocks. Dir. François Ozon. Perf. Bernard Giraudeau, Malik Zidi, Ludivine Sagnier. Zeitgeist DVD, 1999.