Absence as Presence, Presence as Parapraxis: On Some Problems of Representing "Jews" in the New German Cinema

Absence as Presence Anyone looking for traces of the Holocaust in postwar West German films of the 1950s and 1960s, is likely to be disappointed: such, at any rate, is the common assumption.2 But the same seems no less true of the so-called "New German Cinema" of the 1970s: While in the films of some of the well-known names-Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, Hans Jurgen Syberberg, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Volker Schlondorff-Fascism and especially the German family under National Socialism eventually became major topics, the Jewish experience-persecution and annihilation-rarely figured. Nor did the postwar Jewish Diaspora and the difficult Jewish-German dialogue, sometimes known as the "negative symbiosis" after Auschwitz.3 In the case of Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, neither National Socialism nor the Holocaust plays a role before the 1990s. On the few occasions where Jewish characters do appear, their representations have invariably given offence. One thinks of Fassbinder's disastrously controversial play "The City, Garbage, and Death," made into the film Schatten der Engel (Daniel Schmid, DE/CH, 1976), Syberberg's resentful remarks about West Germany after the war having too readily accepted the Jewish emigre version of "German" culture, or Edgar Reitz's Heimat, where the brief mention of deportations and the camps seems to have alibi function at best. What is more plausible than to note a pervasive disavowal, and to conclude that in the face of these unimaginable crimes at such close proximity, repression and invisibility had set in? One could be forgiven for fearing that the most gifted generation of filmmakers in Germany since the 1920s had been guilty, if not of complicity, then at very least, had sinned by omission not breaking the silence: surrounding the Jewish victims, among the clamor and violence with which the "sons" accused the "fathers" of their Nazi past.4 Of course, such a judgment is retrospective in a particular sense. One now speaks from a vantage point that postdates 1979, the year the television series Holocaust (NBC, US, 1978) was first screened on German television, and 1989, the year of German unification, after which the Holocaust became the abiding topic of Germany's public life, media attention, and historical research. There are thus two points that this ubiquity of the Holocaust raises about its "absence" in the films during the 1960s and 1970s. Firstly, I am struck how it is always read across the Freudian paradigm of "repression" and "amnesia," of "denial" and "disavowal": in other words, how perfectly legible this absence now is from the vantage point and seeming security of our own position of knowledge from hindsight. What is it, one wants to ask, that in turn is now barely being seen, what is overlooked in the excessive looking during the 1980s and 1990s?5 And secondly, what makes me pause is also the way in which, more generally, presence and representation are equated, and given a positive valuation in an opposition that makes absence the purely negative term. An example of an outright denial can be found in Alexander Kluge's first film Abschied von Gestern/Yesterday's Girl (West Germany, 1966) where the heroine Anita G. appears before a judge for shoplifting. After going through her personal data and noting that her parents had been deported to Theresienstadt and their property confiscated, the judge provocatively asks whether Anita claims that what happened to her parents in 1938 had any bearings on the case for which she was being tried. "No," replies Anita, "none whatsoever." This scene, one could argue, makes denial visible, aggressively on the part of the judge, auto-aggressively on the part of Anita, and thus drawing the spectator's attention to the fact that "Theresienstadt" and what it stands for may indeed be a crucial fact in Anita's life and thus her actions. Today, the scene jumps at the viewer; at the time of the film's first release in 1966, it was read quite differently: the knowledge position of superior irony was entirely directed at the judge. …