Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, Cinephilia. By Mattias Frey. New York:
Berghahn Books, 2013. 218 pp. $90 Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-85745-947-3.
German historical films of the recent past, specifically films that depict German
twentieth-century history, have experienced worldwide success. Films such as Good Bye Lenin,
2003) and Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004) have consistently performed well in German and
international movie theaters. Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001), Das Leben der
Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), and the Austrian co-production Die Fälscher (The
Counterfeiters, 2007) all won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. These films
have also received much critical attention from established film critics like Katja Nicodemus and
Sylvia Nord, as well as from scholars such as Jennifer Kapczynski, Lutz Koepnick, and Marc
Silberman. Termed “heritage films” by scholars and critics, the postwall wave of historical films
tends to be seen as lacking a deeper engagement with the past, offering instead reverent
appropriations of the past through “attempts at naïve material authenticity” (139). These films
are most often criticized for their naïve engagement with national identity, ideology, and a
tendency towards apologetic historicism. In his monograph, Postwall German Cinema: History,
Film History, and Cinephilia, Mattias Frey seeks to broaden this perception by discussing the
recent wave of historical films in the wider context of film history and historiography. In his
critical analysis of important examples of postwall German cinema, he establishes connections
between current German historical films and classics of German and international film history
and assesses how these contemporary historical films depart from previous paradigms.
With his book, Frey examines “how recent German historical film deploys constellations
of film history to recreate the past,” in order to elucidate “the postwall German film historical
imaginary” (7). In doing so, he intends to reveal German postwall attitudes to Germany’s
twentieth century past. Over five chapters, Frey examines the historical and film historical
contexts of seven films, following a chronological order in his arrangement of the chapters.
These seven films are: Das Wunder von Bern (The Miracle of Bern, 2003), Baader (2002), Der
Baader Meinhof Komplex (The Baader Meinhof Complex, 2008), 23 (1999), Goodbye Lenin
(2003), Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others, 2006), and Die Unberührbare (No Place to
Go, 2000). Out of these films, only two, namely Der Baader Meinhof Komplex and Die
Unberührbare, do not fit the mold of conservative aesthetics and high production values that,
according to Frey, characterizes the German postwall historical film. Rather, these two films
constitute critical engagements with the past as well as political commentary on the present. In
the sixth chapter, Frey summarizes his findings in a discussion about the contemporary role of
Germany’s twentieth century past in the millennial society and concludes that the postwall
historical films are results of a new relationship with national history and a market-driven film
industry. I find his discussions of Das Wunder von Bern and Die Unberührbare especially
innovative and insightful, and my overview of these two chapters will stand as examples for his
monograph overall.
In his discussion of Das Wunder von Bern, Frey examines how the film personalizes
national history, in this case Germany’s surprise win of the 1954 soccer world cup, by connecting
it to an emotionally-laden family story. He contrasts how the film’s employment of this narrative
strategy in its benevolent attitude toward the early postwar years, especially toward the father
generation returning from war, with the unforgiving attitude of the 1970s/80s New German
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Cinema, which is apparent in films such as Die bleierne Zeit (Marianne and Juliane, 1982) or
Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun, 1979). In these artistically ambitious
and socially critical films, the 1950s are presented as a time “when [the] patriarchal structure
from the Nazi period remained intact” (19). Das Wunder von Bern, by contrast, is empathetic to
the homecoming father generation, exemplified in the film by the character of Richard Lubanski,
“who returns home from war and tries in vain to reestablish his authority” (20). The audience is
eventually led to empathize with Lubanski as he struggles to reconnect with his family and has to
rethink his patriarchal values in the postwar society. In his analysis, Frey focuses on the
prosthetic memory that he sees mythologizing “the restoration of a nuclear family as the rebirth
of a nation” (21), while erasing “the subsequent traumatized recollection of the event” (ibid.).
Frey thus argues that this film, like many postwall historical films, intends to recuperate the
memory of contested periods of German twentieth century history.
Frey’s approach to seeing the film as a reflection on New German Cinema is especially
successful when he compares the different ways in which Herbert Zimmermann’s iconic radio
reportage of Germany’s win over Hungary in the final of the 1954 world-cup is employed
differently in Das Wunder von Bern and the Die Ehe der Maria Braun. In Das Wunder von Bern,
representative of postwall historical cinema, Zimmermann’s by now iconic play-by-play
coverage of the last fifty seconds of the game is spoken by an actor visible in the film. This gives
the audience visual pleasure by retroactively instating the radio reporter Zimmermann as a
physical presence, akin to a TV presenter. The visually enhanced reportage furthermore functions
to heighten the film’s apparent authenticity through the employment of shared cultural memory,
while this memory at the same time offers a revision of the past by showing Zimmermann, where
previously only his voice could be heard. By contrast, in Die Ehe der Maria Braun, a
representative of New German Cinema, Zimmermann’s radio reportage is employed for a very
different purpose. This film uses a melodramatic story about unfulfilled idealistic love and the
necessity to arrange oneself with the materialistic realities of postwar Germany in order to cast a
critical view on Germany’s postwar years. The radio reportage is employed at the ending of the
film and is not the aural focus, but rather competes with dialog and other sound effects. This
effect, which Frey labels a “multi-layered soundtrack” (40), creates chaos and discord instead of
national unity as in Das Wunder von Bern. By comparing the different uses of Zimmermann’s
reportage in those two films, Frey succinctly evokes the different intentions, historical
circumstances, and interpretations of the past that are programmatic for New German Cinema
and postwall German cinema.
Another interesting aspect which Frey could have explored in more depth in this chapter
is his discussion of the similarities between the Das Wunder von Bern and Das große Spiel (The
Great Game, 1942)—a soccer film from the Nazi period that similarly focuses on the uniting and
exhilarating victory of a team of underdogs. According to Frey, that film, just like Das Wunder
von Bern, painstakingly focuses on creating authenticity and using color “to create a utopian
historicism.”(36) While Frey discusses this film mostly in regard to similarities in the use of
color and narrative, it could also have productively extended his discussion of masculinity and
the archetypical story of the underdog and its role in different political systems.
Die Unberührbare by contrast, does not belong to reverent mainstream postwall German
cinema but is, in its socially critical attitude, reminiscent of New German Cinema, specifically
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films by Helma Sanders-Brahms or Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The film juxtaposes the fall of the
Berlin wall with the demise of the fictional West German novelist Hanna Flanders—a character
based on the writer Gisela Elsner. Flanders, a writer of culturally critical literature that
sympathizes with socialist values, senses that the end of socialist East Germany will mean the
end of her writing career, falling into a deep depression as the historical reunification looms and
eventually committing suicide in 1990. Although he acknowledges and engages with the film’s
connection to New German Cinema, in his analysis, Frey primarily explores the film’s
connection to film noir, not on a narrative level, but rather in its atmosphere of spatial anxiety.
He argues that Die Unberührbare “attends to space and material culture in a way that is
reminiscent of film noir and reinscribes both into the specific sociocultural environment of
millennial Germany, another locus of great spatial and cultural transformation” (143). Frey notes
how Hanna’s paranoia and neurosis make her reminiscent of a noir character, akin to Norma
Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). Desmond is a former silent film actress. Although past her
prime, she is still convinced of her own importance and works on her next big project, delusional
to the fact that it will never come to fruition. Starting from this observation, Frey expertly traces
how Die Unberührbare employs film noir tropes and cinematography to visualize Hanna’s
disorientation and increasing anxiety. In doing so, he references the use of framing through
windows to connote the characters’ feeling of paranoia and the use of television as the sole locus
of the fall of the Berlin wall. In the film, this historical event is only present in the background
on TV screens, while Hanna’s personal drama is the focus.
Especially interesting is Frey’s analysis of Hanna’s anxious and direction-less journey
through Germany, w