The Beginner’s Guide: New German Cinema

The Germans who came of age in the decades immediately following World War II were angry. The West German government put forth a face of propriety and integrity to the outside world, but inside the country, young people were struggling with the fact that their parents’ generation had been both active and passive participants in one of the greatest genocides the world had ever known. A regime of deNazification had supposedly taken place, yet there were former Nazis still serving in prominent positions of government and business. Germany had changed, but it hadn’t yet changed enough – and the new generation of Germans was determined to make that happen. One way they sought to do so was through their art.

In 1962, a group of young German filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto, which infamously declared “The old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema.” The new cinema would exist outside of the existing German film industry, which was deemed too commercial by these rising artists, and operate on incredibly low budgets. The new cinema would reflect the radical politics of the new generation of Germans – politics that often sympathized more with the socialist regime in the east than the capitalist regime in the west. The new cinema would be critical of the West German bourgeois democracy and its discriminatory treatment of those who fell outside of traditional social norms, despite repeated claims that Nazi dogma was a thing of the past. For all these reasons, the new cinema would be controversial and would struggle at the domestic box office despite growing acclaim abroad.

These films, heavily influenced by the French New Wave and unafraid of taking risks, would be known as the New German Cinema. And despite having been produced forty or so years in the past, one cannot help but see the parallels to society today when watching some of the era’s most memorable works. The five films that follow epitomize the New German Cinema and provide an accessible entryway into one of the most intriguing movements in cinema history.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder has been called the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, and rightfully so – he was by all accounts a bit of a terror to work with. And work he did, a lot: before his tragic death from an overdose at the age of 37, Fassbinder directed more than 40 feature films, along with numerous television series, plays, shorts and other projects. His earliest works, such as Love is Colder Than Death and Gods of the Plague, draw heavily upon the French New Wave in style, story and attitude – low-budget, black-and-white dramas about gangsters and the women they love. But then, Fassbinder became obsessed with the films of Douglas Sirk and dove deep into the making of melodramas.

One such melodrama is Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a film heavily inspired by Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955). In Sirk’s film, an upper-class widow falls in love with a gardener who is her junior both in age and social stature, much to the chagrin of her family and community. Fassbinder took that story, moved it to his hometown of Munich, and centered it on a German widow named Emmi (Fassbinder regular Brigitte Mira, in one of her greatest performances for him), who falls in love with a much-younger guest worker from Morocco named Ali (El Hedi ben Salem, who happened to be Fassbinder’s lover at the time). As a result, Emmi’s children claim she’s lost her sanity, her neighbors ostracize her, and local shopkeepers turn up their nose at her.

Fassbinder’s films are infused with an undercurrent of rage at bourgeois West German society and the discriminatory streak that still ran through it; despite many who tried to argue that the old Nazi attitudes of racism and xenophobia were now dead and gone, Fassbinder sought to rub Germans’ noses in what remained of their prejudices. Notably, in the film Katzelmacher, Fassbinder cast himself as a Greek immigrant who struggles to assimilate into German society and is forced to deal with the antipathy of the Germans around him. (That Fassbinder was an out homosexual at a time when this was still not widely accepted in society no doubt influenced his attitudes.)

But Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is Fassbinder’s most poignant reminder that even the most woke among us can still harbor hidden prejudices. Indeed, even Emmi starts to acquire some of her family and friends’ bad attitudes towards Ali, demanding that he do things for her and showing off his muscular body as though he were an object. Why does Emmi do this? To better fit in with the rest of society and repair the relationships that she lost when she fell in love with Ali.

By showing that she too sees Ali as lesser, Emmi reassures her fellow white Germans that she hasn’t lost their twisted sense of values. She nearly sabotages her relationship with Ali – the one that matters most – for the sake of her own re-assimilation into a racist society. Yet the film isn’t without empathy for her actions, just as it also isn’t without empathy for Ali when he seeks solace in the arms of a young bartender. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a film that knows, unfortunately, nothing in life is simple, least of all the unlikely romance at its center.

Alice in the Cities (1974, Wim Wenders)

The films of Wim Wenders often deal with loneliness, in beautiful, rambling and introspective fashion. His films tend to wind slowly through the landscape, pausing to reflect on concepts such as what constitutes home and family before meandering on again. It makes sense that the genre of the road movie would hold such fascination for a director who has returned time and time again to these concepts. While Wenders’ most famous road movie is probably the Palme d’Or winning masterpiece Paris, Texas, it’s his earlier, loosely connected trilogy of road movies starring perpetually windswept actor Rüdiger Vogler that first earned him acclaim in the New German Cinema.

The first of these films was Alice in the Cities, shot on a shoestring budget on black-and-white 16mm film and starring Vogler as the itinerant German journalist Philip Winter – a character that would reappear in two further Wenders films. Winter has been in New York, tasked with writing an article about the United States, but after he fails to meet his editor’s deadline, he heads to the airport to book a flight back to West Germany. There, he encounters difficulties booking a flight, thanks to a strike; he also encounters a young German mother named Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer) and her daughter, Alice (Yella Rottländer), who are having difficulties doing the same thing. After Winter assists Lisa in booking tickets for the same flight to Amsterdam he too will be taking the next day, he returns to their hotel with them for the night. The next morning, Lisa is gone, leaving a note telling Winter that she’s gone to sort out the remains of a recently shattered relationship and asking Winter to look after Alice, with the promise of meeting up with them at the airport. But Lisa never shows, and Winter and Alice fly to Amsterdam alone.

From there, Winter embarks on an odyssey across Western Europe in the hope of delivering Alice to her grandmother. The only problem? Alice cannot remember where her grandmother lives, or even what her name is – all she has to guide them on their journey is a picture of her grandmother’s house. Winter is furious to have been thrown into this mess; after all, he’s dead broke and now must spend his own time and money driving around aimlessly in the hope of finding a little girl’s grandmother. Yet eventually he develops a warm relationship with Alice, the two of them bonding over the fact that they truly have nowhere else to go. They’re vagabonds, hovering on the outskirts of proper society, and despite having little else in common, that’s enough to tie them together.

As production on Alice in the Cities progressed, more and more of the script was abandoned in favor of improvisation. That natural looseness comes through in every scene between Winter and Alice, giving the film a hyperrealistic quality that helps keep it engaging despite it being relatively plotless. It helps that Alice is precocious, but not excessively so; she has a sharp wit but she’s still a child who cries at night because she misses her mother. On the occasion of the film’s release by the Criterion Collection in 2016, director Allison Anders – who served as a production assistant on Paris, Texas – praised Alice as “one of the screen’s most multifaceted child characters, and one of the most empowered female characters in cinema to this day.” It’s hard to disagree with her, and it’s a big reason why the film continues to resonate today.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1975, Volker Schlöndorff & Margarethe von Trotta)

Margarethe von Trotta knew she wanted to make movies after spending time in Paris and watching the films of the French New Wave as well as the films of Ingmar Bergman – her biggest influence and the subject of a recently released documentary by her. As von Trotta famously said in an interview, “I stood there and said, ‘that is what I’d like to do with my life.’ But that was 1962, and you couldn’t think that a woman could be a director. In a way, as an unconscious act, I started acting and when the New German films started, I tried to get in through acting.”

Indeed, von Trotta first rose to prominence in the New German Cinema as an actress in films directed by Fassbinder (Gods of the Plague, The American Soldier) and Schlöndorff (Coup de Grace), who also happened to be her husband. She soon began to collaborate with Schlöndorff behind the scenes as well, including co-writing the script for Coup de Grace. Eventually, von Trotta and Schlöndorff’s creative partnership (and even later, their marriage) would dissolve as von Trotta sought to emerge from Schlöndorff’s shadow as an artist in her own right. But, before that occurred, the two of them co-directed The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum.

Adapted from Heinrich Böll’s novel, the film focuses on the titular housekeeper (Angela Winkler, most recently seen as Miss Tanner in the new Suspiria, which touches upon themes of the New German Cinema and the politics of the time), who falls madly in love with a man she spends the night with after meeting him at a party. The only problem is, he’s an alleged terrorist. He disappears from Katharina’s flat the next morning, but that doesn’t stop the police – and the tabloid reporters – from swooping down on Katharina like vultures eager for a scrap of meat.

Despite her life being turned upside down by endless interrogations and intrusions from the press, Katharina maintains her dignity. Even when the police try to shame her for having a one-night stand, and the press write lurid stories about her sex life, and neighbors leave notes calling her a “commie whore” under her door, Katharina refuses to be ashamed for what she did. But as her personal boundaries are gradually erased by others, Katharina grows increasingly desperate to end the saga and get her life back where it belongs: out of the papers and behind closed doors. The phrase “the personal is political” is often applied to Margarethe von Trotta’s work; needless to say, in this, her first film as a director, the most deeply personal could hardly be more unfairly politicized.

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum is a furious, feminist film that issued a searing indictment of tabloid journalism at a time when it was just beginning to kick into high gear. Böll’s novel and the subsequent film adaptation were released at a time when West Germany was in an uproar over the Red Army Faction, a far-left radical group that resorted to violent acts to get their points across. Against a backdrop of kidnappings, bombings and hijackings, the police grew increasingly oppressive in their tactics in order to squeeze out any suspected terrorists, while the journalists grew increasingly willing to do anything in order to get a piece of the action via the next big scoop – even if that meant destroying someone’s life.

Germany in Autumn (1978, Various)

The peak of Red Army Faction hysteria in West Germany took place during the autumn of 1977, when members of the RAF kidnapped German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. The president of two prominent commercial organizations, Schleyer was known for his aggressively anti-communist views and his past as a member of the Nazi student movement. In short, he epitomized everything the left-wing RAF hated about the West German bourgeois democracy.

The RAF hoped to use Schleyer as a hostage to ransom the release of political prisoners being held by the West German government. Instead, the government refused to negotiate with people they deemed to be terrorists, and Schleyer was killed. Later, in prison, four prominent members of the RAF were deemed to have committed suicide, but many members of the public believed – and still believe – that they were actually murdered by the state.

The omnibus film Germany in Autumn, which contains segments contributed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlöndorff, Heinrich Böll, Alexander Kluge and many others, tells the story of that troubled time through a mix of staged segments and documentary footage. The film begins with the funeral of Schleyer and ends with the funerals of the RAF members – one a lavish state affair, in which Schleyer is treated as a martyr, the other a haphazard assembly of fellow radicals who can barely give their comrades a send-off without being harassed by the police.

The general consensus one gets from watching the film is that while many of the auteurs of the New German Cinema agreed with the RAF politically, they did not agree with their use of violence and terror to achieve their aims. And yet, the film is also critical of the West German government and appears to take the stance that the government was indeed responsible for the RAF deaths in prison. As was frequently the case in the stories of the New German Cinema, nothing is as simple as black and white, right and wrong.

The most powerful segment in Germany in Autumn is actually the first one, written and directed by Fassbinder. In it, Fassbinder plays a version of himself – a hard-drinking, cocaine-snorting, constantly working filmmaker who frequently clashes with his more passive partner, Armin Meier. Scenes of Fassbinder engaging in violent arguments with Meier over whether or not the state is in the right to pursue potential terrorists so aggressively (Meier agrees with the government, Fassbinder does not) are interspersed with scenes of lively political debate between Fassbinder and his mother, who he manages to coax into speaking nostalgically of life under a dictatorship, as though things were indeed easier that way.

In one scene that straddles the line between hilarity and horror, Fassbinder sees a police car outside his apartment building and frantically flushes a giant pile of cocaine down the toilet, worried that the police are coming to knock on his door. The police do indeed enter the building, but they continue up the stairs past Fassbinder’s apartment. The scene has a comic bent that wouldn’t be out of place in a Judd Apatow film and elicits a great deal of laughter; Fassbinder always had a magnetic screen presence that lent itself particularly well to dark comedy. And yet, the sheer terror Fassbinder expresses at that moment reflects the state of extreme paranoia that the average German was living under during that autumn. It’s a potent mix of comedy and tragedy that highlights the absurd nature of life in West Germany at that time.

Other impactful segments in Germany in Autumn include another amusing bit in which a panel of television executives want to censor a production of Antigone in case it incites women to terrorism (many leaders in the RAF were women), and an interview with imprisoned radical Horst Mahler, who speaks eloquently about his cause but disagrees with the violent approach of the RAF, arguing that it makes the far-left just as bad as the oppressive government they first rallied against. Not every bit hits home with the impact intended, but as The New York Times put it in their review of the film, “Illuminating even the most oblique episodes is a concern with the terrorism that has become the policy of dissent for the ultra-left-wing.” Indeed, Germany in Autumn asks a troubling question with no concrete answer: when does the fight against fascism cross the line, and become just as oppressive as fascism itself?

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, Werner Herzog)

Even if you’ve never seen a Werner Herzog film, you’re likely aware of him. Best known to international audiences for eye-opening documentaries like Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, which often feature Herzog himself in all his melodramatic, hyper-accented glory (the man’s voice is an international treasure), Herzog occupies an eccentric, utterly unique place in pop culture that extends far beyond the New German Cinema. And yet, that is indeed where Herzog got his start in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Like many members of the New German Cinema, Herzog tended to collaborate with the same cast and crew members over and over again. The most prominent of these was the actor Klaus Kinski, who appeared in five Herzog films and was later the subject of a Herzog documentary titled My Best Friend, which chronicled their rollercoaster of a relationship. The third of these films was Nosferatu the Vampyre, a stylistic remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent horror classic.

Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), technically a loose retelling of Dracula, is one of the landmark films of the German Expressionist era. This acclaimed period of filmmaking, which includes such masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis, is predominantly characterized by its bold visual style – think starkly geometric set designs, liberal use of light and shadow, and the rejection of realism in favor of the extreme. Based on these criteria, it’s no surprise that Herzog deemed the original Nosferatu the greatest film to ever come out of Germany; not only that, he was keen on making his own version, starring Kinski in the titular role.

Kinski’s Nosferatu bears a remarkable resemblance to Max Schreck’s original incarnation of the character; the already incredibly odd-looking actor, who boasted one of the most memorable faces in world cinema, sports a ghostly white pallor, goblin-like pointed ears, and a prominent set of pointed front teeth that verge on the rabbit-like. Yet the Kinski version of Nosferatu has an underlying current of loneliness and despair running through him that make him a far more empathetic character that Schreck’s version.

In Herzog’s film, Nosferatu’s pursuit of Lucy, played by Isabelle Adjani (a perfect match for Kinski in that they are both unfathomably striking to look at), is less about the hunger for blood than it is about the hunger for human connection that he has been starved for throughout the centuries. Kinski’s Nosferatu is weary of his everlasting existence and wouldn’t mind leaving it, so long as he can be held by Lucy before he dies. In these small ways, he is startlingly human despite his monstrous appearance and bloodthirsty behavior.

So many of Herzog’s films are about larger-than-life characters who engage in battles against nature in attempts to achieve seemingly impossible dreams – think Fitzcarraldo’s unfathomable obsession with building an opera house in the middle of the jungle, or Aguirre’s determination to find the legendary city of gold at all costs. Even in his documentaries, Herzog has always focused on the renegades among us, the people who hover on the outskirts of respectable society and thus achieve infamy, and embraced them as romantic, albeit often tragic, figures. In this way, Nosferatu, while a supernatural being, is a natural fit for Herzog’s oeuvre; his outsider status also makes him a natural fit for the New German Cinema.

New German Cinema: Conclusion

As you can see, despite the varying artistic styles of the different filmmakers of the era, the New German Cinema contains many recurring themes – the rejection of the typical bourgeois lifestyle and the loneliness that inevitably results from that rejection being key among them. Even if you’re not incredibly well-versed in the politics and culture of West Germany at the time that these films were being made, these are universal themes that resonate across time and borders – themes that remain all too relevant today.