The German Genius
directors, though Hans Jürgen Syberberg did confront Nazism, in the four-part Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland ( Hitler, a Film from Germany ; 1977). 55
Government support for the film industry fell away in the 1980s, but talent had begun to flow. This period saw the release of Edgar Reitz’s Heimat , 1984, an eleven-part chronicle of life in the fictional Hunsrück village of Schabbach, which was well received when shown on television both in Germany and elsewhere, and Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin ( Wings of Desire ; 1987). Partly written by Peter Handke, this tells the story of two angels—unseen to everyone but children—who wander through Berlin listening to everyday people and their problems. It won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The 1980s were also the years of several very good documentaries, notably Hartmut Bitomsky’s VW-Complex , and a raft of films by new women directors among whom Margarethe von Trotha was prominent.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 stimulated the production of many films, the most unexpected of which was the reunification comedy, inaugurated by Helmut Dietl’s Schtonk! , 1992, a satire on the “Hitler Diaries” fiasco, and Christoph Schlingensief’s Das deutsche Kettensägen Massaker ( The German Chainsaw Massacre ; 1990), a vicious parody of consumerist culture, in which a mad Wessi family seeks out Ossis and, using chainsaws and axes, turns them into sausages. In Good-Bye, Lenin! (2003), Christiane, who has lived a near-normal life in East Germany, suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma on the very day that the first big antigovernment protest occurs in October 1989. She doesn’t regain consciousness for several months, by which time the GDR is about to disappear. The doctors warn that any shock might kill her, so her children are forced to pretend—hilariously—that East Germany still exists. They bring back the old furniture, which they had in the meantime replaced, and concoct “broadcasts” that “explain” some of the changes (the government has generously allowed Wessis to flee east, as refugees from capitalist imperialism). In Das Leben der Anderen ( The Lives of Others ), written and directed by Florian Henckel, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2007, a Stasi officer gradually loses sympathy with the regime he is part of. Though he tries to help some of the people he has under surveillance, he can do nothing to prevent the various levels of corruption from combining to produce a tragedy that ends with the suicide of a woman he has himself, inadvertently, helped to trap.
Three things stand out about German television culture. One, it is very popular: ZDF, or Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, the Second German Television Channel, is the largest TV station in Europe. Two, internationally it has had much less impact than German music, painting, dance, or film. And three—perhaps most interesting of all—there has been much more controversy about the impact of television culture in Germany than elsewhere. Helmut Schmidt, when he was chancellor of Germany, stigmatized cable television as “more dangerous than nuclear power.” Several professional critics such as Günther Anders, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Jürgen Habermas all agree in seeing television as a cultural “black hole.”
T HE D OMINANCE OF D ARMSTADT IN M USIC
Music, we must never forget, had not suffered in the Third Reich as had other activities such as painting and scholarship. Despite what had happened, postwar Germany beyond the rubble still boasted—incredibly—some 150 opera houses and orchestras, unparalleled conservatories for musical education, an undiluted musicological tradition producing musical scholarship of unequaled quality and originality, and a larger number of specialized periodicals devoted to music than in any other country. 56
In West Germany composition and musical production quickly regained their former position once the “economic miracle” had begun to exert itself. In 1948 Richard Strauss remarked “I have outlived myself,” but it wasn’t true—the next year he produced what would turn out to be his ever-popular Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs). 57 The Berlin Philharmonic, under Wilhelm Furtwängler from 1947 to 1954, and then under Herbert von Karajan, a child prodigy on the piano, quickly recovered its pre-Goebbels pre-eminence and the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft was likewise reinvigorated. 58 Karajan’s Nazi
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