Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
The deceptive comfort of community.
Thomas Harlan and Alexander Kluge writing cinema history
(draft version, June 2013)
Andreas Schmiedecker, KU Leuven
andreas@schmiedecker.co.at
1
A simple and effective way to establish a community is to put names together. The three
names for tonight are: Fritz Bauer, Alexander Kluge and Thomas Harlan. The most evident
thing that connects these three names is to be found in Fritz Bauer's occupation.
Born in 1903, and of Jewish descent, he emigrates from Germany in 1936 and
returns after the war to become a general state attorney. He is most known for being the
driving force behind the prosecution of war criminals in the "Auschwitz trials" of the mid
1960s. This already accentuates one connection to Thomas Harlan: Thomas, born 1929, is
the son of Veit Harlan, probably the most prolific entertainment film director under the Nazi
regime. Thomas, the son, leaves Germany, becomes a revolutionary, a writer, a film maker,
an artist. Starting with the late 1950s he is active in Poland, provides documents, evidence
for war trials in Germany. Fritz Bauer is his main contact in the legal system of Western
Germany; but also more than that, almost a father figure. The year 1968 is an abrupt end for
this little community: Bauer is found dead, apparent suicide; Harlan quits his research in
Poland even a few years earlier.
In 2006, he publishes a novel, Heldenfriedhof ("Cemetery of Heroes"). It is a
monstrous narrative, combining several threads of German history while and after the
second world war. Both real and invented biographies of war criminals and those chasing
after them cross paths in various scenarios. Embedded in one of these fictitious narratives,
we find an account of Fritz Bauer's funeral.
In an almost page-long sentence1, Harlan sketches a heterogeneous community of
citizens, artists, left-wing intellectuals, all of them as much drawn towards Bauer as they are
divided, dispersed by something that, it seems, cannot be named. Among the names, Harlan
also refers to our third protagonist for today: Alexander Kluge.
1
Harlan, Thomas. Heldenfriedhof. Berlin: Eichborn, 2006, 406.
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Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
2
Kluge, born 1932, was at this time (1968) already a well-known filmmaker, proponent of the
New German Cinema (Neuer Deutscher Film), driving force behind the Oberhausen
Manifesto.
His latest collection of stories, published in April 2013, is dedicated to no other than
Fritz Bauer. Its title: "Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht ist ein Verräter"2 - "He who speaks a
word of comfort is a traitor". Its foreword is an account of Bauer's funeral. Similar to Harlan,
Kluge gives a sketched overview of the group that came together to mourn. Again: Artists,
Politicians, common people. However, in an earlier edition of this text, at exactly this point,
there is a footnote. This little note qualifies the said community from a very telling angle.
"This group", Kluge writes, "was held together by nothing but a certain anti-Fascist
position, that was directed with a common aversion against new and very old
reactionary forces. [...] He, who comforts, is a traitor."3
Kluge drafts a small community, united against something and in death.. Anybody who
denies these two negative forces, who comforts, has betrayed this basic truth. The comfort of
the positively formulated groups, of nations, of a "Volksgemeinschaft" is false and deceptive.
This truth as the basis for community, as ontological grounding is something we will have to
come back to a little later.
I argue that Kluge's way to deal with this situation is to employ a counter-strategy that
tries to connect the seemingly opposites of singularity and plurality.
The New German Cinema, is, parallel to the Nouvelle Vague, a movement that
emphasizes individual authorship. Against the "ready-made film", as Kluge calls it, the
industrial, commercial film, that deceptively seems to apply to anybody, he relies on
personal, subjective artistic expression. However, there is an important modification. At one
point4, Kluge formulates 5 important properties of what he believes to be responsible practice
of the politics of the Autorenfilm. The last two are actually claims in respect to production
practices: "shared labour" (Arbeitsteilung) and "dehierarchization" (Enthierarchisierung). But
not only one the production level, also on the reception level Kluge formulates a poetics of
collaboration and cooperation:
"If you want to develop the auteur film further, because you believe in it, then the only
way is through cooperation. Auteur cinema is not a minority phenomenon: all people
relate to their experience like authors, rather than - managers of department stores."5
2
Kluge, Alexander. "Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter." 48 Geschichten für Fritz Bauer. Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2013.
3
Kluge, Alexander. "Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht ist ein Verräter." Chronik der Gefühle. Band II.
Lebensläufe. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2000, 239-241. (Trans AS)
4
Kluge, Alexander. "Autorenfilm / Politik der Autoren (1983)." In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg
den Tod. Texte zu Kino, Film, Politik. Ed. Christian Schulte. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 1999, 62-65. (Trans AS)
5
Kluge, Alexander. "On film and the public sphere." Alexander Kluge. Raw Material for the Imagination. Ed.
Tara Forrest. Amsterdam UP, 2012, p 34.
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Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
Kluge's understanding of film practice is one of a basic equality of experiences. Of course,
there are still people who make movies and the ones who see them, yet their relationship is
not simply of producer and consumer. Rather, Kluge's essayistic style of making and
narrating movies, is a "subjective" account on a certain experience, political, aesthetic, etc.
But Kluge insists that this experience is one everybody could have made, and can make by
watching the film. Paradoxically, his singular expression aims to channel the very plurality of
a community. It is important to notice that this channeling or addressing does not employ any
notion of nationalistic, ethnic, class-bound etc. community. Neither does it draw on an
emphatic co-experience that would enable the spectator to live through a cathartic moment.
I will briefly illustrate this by formulating a short observation on Kluge's first feature,
ABSCHIED VON GESTERN6 (YESTERDAY GIRL, 1966). Almost an hour into the movie we
meet an old friend: Fritz Bauer appears in his function as a state attorney. The movie's
(fictional) protagonist, Anita G. is in trouble with the law, she wants to ask the help of the
famous Dr. Bauer. But he is too busy to see her. I'd like to point out that Fritz Bauer is
precisely not fulfilling the role one would expect in the logic of the "ready-made" movie. We
are neither confronted with a satisfactory help or dramatic rejection that would both qualify for
catharsis. What we experience instead, is Bauer in his "actual" plea for another form of
justice. He is heard saying that he doesn't think it's right that the defendant has to stand and
he formulates a proposal for a round-table model in order to find the truth. Kluge presents
someone acting outside of the paradigms of established narrations, yet addressing the
present situation very directly. Instead of an actor, we are confronted with a political figure
(Bauer) and claims that have an actual impact on the present world (in 1966 West Germany,
that is).
Therefore, a certain "communal" aspect seems to be a fundamental drive in Kluge's
filmic practice, both in terms of production and aesthetics. It is a plea for a very keen sensory
towards the specificities of a certain (historical) communities, and the films that can (and
should) be made in this environment.
At this point I would like to bring in another point of view on this concept that I have
stressed so much already. In the late 1980s and early 90s Jean-Luc Nancy has been one of
the most productive thinkers of the theory of community. In his work, he explicitly opposes a
notion of community as something that is "fabricated", "realized" and then somehow "put into
practice" (thus the title of his study from the late 1980s - The inoperative community).7 Nancy
will then go on to develop his theories into towards the strong ontological claims of Being
Singular Plural:
"Our being-with, as being-many, is not at all accidental, and it is in no way the
secondary and random dispersion of a primordial essence. It forms the proper and
6
7
ABSCHIED VON GESTERN, Dir. Alexander Kluge, BRD 1966, 83min.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
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Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
necessary status and consistency of originary alterity as such. The plurality of beings
is at the foundation [fondment] of Being.8"
The only conceivable way to think Being, for Nancy, is to accept the plurality of the "we" from
the very start. There is no essence to be found in the community produced in the people and
by the people, as the community is there from the very origin. I cannot say "I", says Nancy,
without always already having said "we".
Even though lacking both the means and the time to discuss the philosophical
implications of this claim in detail, I will briefly try to elaborate on some thoughts on the
background of the works of Kluge.
In his manifestos and everything on the German manifestation of the Autorenfilm,
Kluge tries the impossible balancing act between "singular" auteurism and "plural" production
(as film can never be realized just on our own). Similarly, Kluge assumes the active
participation of co-workers, as well as readers and spectators. Being an author and an artist
means for Kluge not just to communicate his point of view on certain aesthetic and political
issues. I call to your attention Fritz Bauer's proposal in his movie: justice as a "round table",
film as an open, discursive space. Just like Nancy claims an original community that is not
secondary to the essence of the singular individuality, Kluge argues for an equality of
experiences in filmic discourse. The title of a recent collection of essays on Kluge, "Raw
materials for the imagination" seems programmatic in this very sense.
3
From Kluges 1966 film we jump to 1984 and Harlan's feature WUNDKANAL 9 (GUN
WOUND). A meditation on German past and (then) present, the continuities between the
Nazi-regime and RAF-terrorism, the movie revolves around one particular character: Harlan
casts an 80-year old man, former Obersturmbannfüher Alfred Filbert, an actual war criminal,
as a fictionalized version of himself.
In this person, several traumatic threads of German past come together. What,
Harlan seems to ask, if the same persons were responsible for the Holocaust and the "forced
suicide" of the terrorists imprisoned in Stammheim? What if there indeed was ONE person to
blame? However, the setup of the film poses more questions than it answers. Filbert is
interrogated by bodiless voices, confronted with pictures and movies. A very prominent part
in this composition plays a film from 1944: IMMENSEE10, a melodrama meant to comfort the
troubled German population through the sufferings of the war. The director: Veit Harlan,
father of Thomas Harlan.
8
Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996, 12.
WUNDKANAL, Dir. Thomas Harlan, BRD/F 1984, 112min.
10
IMMENSEE, Dir. Veit Harlan, D 1943, 94min.
9
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Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
This can be interpreted along the lines of Harlan questioning himself and his filmic
practice. The interview, the interrogation as a means to find out the truth does not operate on
solid ground any more. Who are the participants of this conversation? A director and his
actor? An investigator and a criminal? A common human being and his conscience? But it
gets even more complicated. Parallel to WUNDKNAL, a second film is shot: NÔTRE NAZI11,
("OUR NAZI") a documentation of the filming process of WUNDKANAL. Among other things,
it further emphasizes a reading sympathetic to the "old man". Confronted with the dynamics
of the filmic process and his role in this, both of which he does not understand, Filbert seems
to become the victim and Harlan, on his part, the predator. This tempted, for instance, an
Italian Newspaper to exclaim the following reversal: "Harlan, you are the Nazi!"12
What I want to accentuate here is the ambiguous role of community Harlan seems to
evoke. While obviously distancing himself personally from the proceedings of the Nazi past,
the context, content and conduction of his filmic practice emphasize a distinct feeling of
community with this old Nazi, "after all". By prominently featuring the filmic legacy of his own
family and the guilt of his father (other than IMMENSEE also director of the infamous JEW
SÜSS), Harlan points out that the construction of the Nazi as the ultimate "other" simply does
not work.
Calling to mind Nancy's terms again: The being-with his father in a community based
both on profession and family ties is a central theme of the movie. Whereas Kluge seems to
affirm the being-with as an incentive for collaborative effort, WUNDKANAL emphasizes the
haunting effect of unwanted, yet present aspects of every community. Community, in
Harlan's case is built in connection to death (see the community of mourners, unwillingly
connected, showing up at Fritz Bauer's funeral), but death is not the end of it.
Here, we can finally formulate a direct link to our conference topic. In the words of
Michel de Certeau,
"Historiography tends to prove that the site of its production can encompass the past:
it is an odd procedure that posits death, a breakage everywhere reiterated in
discourse, and that yet denies loss by appropriating to the present the privilege of
recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge. A labor of death and a labor against
death."13
This twofold structure of historiography, simultaneously insisting on the ultimate "other" of the
past, but "appropriating it to the present", seems to mirror the wanted-unwanted past in
Harlan's filmic experiment. German history had to make an impossible balancing act after
WW2: both pronouncing an absolute break from the Nazi regime, yet continuing to live with
11
NÔTRE NAZI, Dir. Robert Kramer, BRD/F 1984, 113min.
Quoted in Greiner, Ulrich. „Über den Tod hinaus: Liebe und Hass. Die 41. Filmfestspiele von Venedig.“ Die
Zeit, 14.09.1984.
13
de Certau, Michel. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia UP, 1988, 5.
12
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Andreas Schmiedecker
Paper Ghent / Deceptive community / June 2013
all the people involved in it on several levels. This situation almost seems a cumulative
illustration of de Certeau's thesis and Harlan's film formulates it accordingly.
4
I have argued that the German filmmakers I've been talking about, confronted with a
community that the absolutely didn't want to be part of, had to strive for something new that
allowed for the paradoxical situation of both singular and plural "artistic expression". Put
differently: to speak both for your own position, as for and to your community. There seem to
be similarities to the problem of the production site of historiography, then. Siegfried
Kracauer, for instance, points out the need for a similar balancing act:
"In exact analogy to the photographic approach, the 'historical approach' comes true
only if the historian's spontaneous intuition does not interfere with his loyalty to the
evidence but, conversely, benefits his empathic absorption in it."14
A filmmaker's and photographer's duty is to find a middle position between formative and
realist tendencies, that is between imposing his determination to alter the reality he finds and
to depict it as straightforwardly as he can. One might compare this stretch to the singular and
plural tendencies Nancy talks about. The articulation of a singular is always proceeded by
the givenness of community, just like artistic formativity is based on the simple materiality of
"reality." This notion of reality, however, does not exhaust itself in a pictorial reality, but it is,
as we have seen in Kluge's example, also to be understood as social and political. The
"loyalty to the evidence" Kracauer demands, could be translated as acknowledging the
"being-with", evoked by Nancy. The demands of historiography, crudely placed between the
oppositions of "constructivism" and "realism", between "intuition" and "factual evidence",
could be placed in a similar terminological framework.
So maybe, and that is all I dare to say for now, somebody faced with the task of
"writing history", might benefit from considerations similar to Harlan and Kluge. When trying
to escape the deceptive comfort of community, one might want to come back to questioning
the personal pronoun legitimizing her position: I, the historiographer, speak to an "us", the
people, about a "them", the past, but actually, it is only a WE speaking all along.
14
Kracauer, Siegfried. History. The Last Things Before The Last. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995, 56.
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