The Children of the Rubble

They grew up in the rubble and the silence. The directors of the New German Cinema were children during or just after the war, and they came of age in a prosperous West Germany that had decided, more or less collectively, not to talk about what had just happened. In 1962 a group of young filmmakers signed the Oberhausen Manifesto, declaring the old German cinema dead and claiming the right to make a new one. What that new cinema mostly did, for the next twenty years, was force a country to look at its own face.

It did so in at least three irreconcilable temperaments. Rainer Werner Fassbinder turned the reckoning into melodrama-as-indictment: working at furious speed, he used the forms of the Hollywood weepie to dissect German shame and the cost of the economic miracle, nowhere more sharply than in The Marriage of Maria Braun, where one woman's ruthless rise is the Federal Republic's. Werner Herzog went the opposite way, out of history and into metaphysical madness — the conquistador rotting on his raft in Aguirre, the Wrath of God, the man dragging a steamship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo, the holy fools of Stroszek and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser — obsessives staring down an indifferent universe. And Wim Wenders wandered, his films haunted by America and by distance: the drifter of Paris, Texas, the angels listening over a divided Berlin in Wings of Desire, the Americanized melancholy of The American Friend.

Indictment, madness, and exile — they look like three different cinemas, and the temptation is to treat them as such. But they share a single project, and it is in the word the movement kept circling: Germany. Fassbinder's melodramas, Herzog's jungles, Wenders' empty American highways are all ways of asking what a German artist could stand on after the ground had been morally destroyed. None of them could simply tell a national story straight, because the national story was the thing that had gone wrong. So one displaced it into genre, one into myth, one into geography — three escapes from the same uninhabitable house.

And behind all three stands an older ghost, which is why this belongs to a longer story. Herzog remade Murnau's vampire as Nosferatu the Vampyre — a German director of the rubble reaching back over the Nazi rupture to the German cinema of the 1920s, as if to repair a broken inheritance. The gesture is the movement in miniature. The New German Cinema was not only making something new; it was trying to reconnect a tradition the catastrophe had severed, to be the heirs of Lang and Murnau rather than of what came between. A generation that the country's silence had orphaned went looking, in jungles and deserts and on the autobahn, for a German cinema it could legitimately descend from — and by filming the search, became one.

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The line: Even Dwarfs Started Small → Aguirre, the Wrath of God → The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser → The American Friend → The Marriage of Maria Braun → Fitzcarraldo → Paris, Texas → Wings of Desire

This line crosses:

• The Shadow That Outlived the Light — the older German cinema the rubble generation reached back to repair; Herzog's Nosferatu literally remakes Murnau, leaping the Nazi rupture to claim Weimar as an ancestor.
• The Ten Years the Directors Won — the same decade's auteur explosion on the other side of the Atlantic; Wenders' love of America is New Hollywood seen from across the water.

Read through: Thomas Elsaesser, New German Cinema: A History · the Oberhausen Manifesto (1962).

A note on the argument: the movement, the Oberhausen Manifesto, and the films are documented record. The framing of Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders as "three escapes from the same uninhabitable house," and of the movement as an attempt to repair a severed tradition (read through Herzog's Nosferatu), is this essay's reading.