Hunting Scenes from Bavaria

Like Hollywood with films like In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Deliverance (1972), German cinema of the late-1960s/early-1970s has its fair share of humorously hateful and cinematically libelous anti-redneck lynch mob flicks where rural southern folk persecute outsiders because their little itty bitty hick brains cannot handle being in the presence of weird folk, or at least that is what these films depict. In Germany, these films were described as anti-Heimatfilm/new Heimatfilm and are essentially a hysterical far-left/marxist reaction to the nationalistic Heimatfilm genre that was popular in Germanic countries like Germany, Switzerland and Austria from the late 1940s to the early 1970s and that depicted a sentimental and romantic view of peasant life, thereupon making these films cinematic poison for 'progressive' city folk and xenophiliac leftists. The first hit anti-Heimatfilm was Hunting Scenes from Bavaria (1969) aka Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern directed by Peter Fleischmann (Dorothea's Revenge, Hard to Be a God) in what would be the filmmaker's first feature-length film and adapted from a play written by Martin Sperr, who also plays the leading role in the film. Although chosen as West Germany's official submission to the 42nd Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria did not receive a nomination for the award, but managed to earn two Bundesfilmpreise awards in 1969, including Filmband in Gold for Best Actor (Michael Strixner) and Filmband in Silber for Best Feature Film (Peter Fleischmann). Of course, considering it portrays Bavarians as barbarian untermensch bigots of the brazenly boorish and brutal beer-chugging sort, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria was not exactly popular with everyone in Germany, including the locals from the small village of Unholzing in Postau where the work was filmed, who apparently took a militant stance to the fact a leftist pro-fag/anti-redneck movie was being made in their hometown and denigrating the reputation of their tight community. As Fassbinder/German cinema scholar Thomas Elsaesser wrote in his book New German Cinema: A History (1989) regarding Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, “Like Katzelmacher, the film is less the portrait of an individual than the study of a community. It is comparable to a cruel Chabrolian picture of rural France, or to red-neck films about Appalachian hillbillies and Alabama sheriffs, and it recalls William Faulkner at least as much as it recalls Brecht.” And, indeed, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria is less a tribute to a victimized hillbilly homo than it is a pseudo-realist agitprop piece and a conspicuously callous and cynical condemnation of rural Southern German folk, who are unwaveringly depicted as nothing short of being Catholic-bred countryside cavemen who have the same hygienic standards and sexual appetites as the farm animals they slaughter. The story of a mild mannered and country-fried cocksucker who returns to the same village where he grew up and inevitably encounters hostile hatred from the people who he has known his entire life after they realize he is more homo than hick, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria lets the viewer know that the National Socialist ‘blood and soil’ is alive and well in bumfuck Bavaria as it is an innate part of the kraut country character that was there long before an Austrian peasant named Uncle Adolf came to town. 

 At the beginning of Hunting Scenes from Bavaria, the viewer is treated to a country Catholic church service where violent and bloody religious paintings are featured prominently, thereupon demonstrating the ostensible root for the Bavarian need to go hunting for homos and other unholy beings.  After church, gay boy Abram (Martin Sperr) arrives at his hometown village via bus and everyone seems glad to see him except his mother Babara (Else Quecke), who will not even look him in the eye when he lovingly greets her because she seems to know something unsettling that the rest have yet to find out. Abram may be a fairy but he is a handyman of sorts whose repair talents are certainly needed in the town, even if the villagers find him a bit strange and passive. Abram is not the only misfit in town, along with the local whore Hannelore (German New Cinema darling Angela Winkler of The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and Knife in the Head) who is constantly physically, verbally, and emotionally degraded by men who have no problem screwing her when no one is around. The local retard teenage Ernstl (Johann Lang) is also sometimes attacked, but he does most of the attacking, including pelting lumber at Hannelore and calling her a “whore.” The town also has a couple Turkish ‘guest workers’ who like describing the locals as ‘huns’ but, aside from being mocked for being Muslims and their lack of Catholic church going, are generally treated with respect and like the villagers and vice versa. Of course, things begin to turn bad one day when a beautiful blonde busybody named Paula (Fassbinder's leading lady Hanna Schygulla in her first feature-length film acting role) tells the villagers that Abram apparently does “dirty things with men.” One fine sunny day, Abram’s mother tells him, “see that you leave the village. Get lost!,” thus essentially disowning her boy in the process, but he respectfully replies, “I have the right to stay. Like you.” Clearly offended by the sheer audacity of her sinner sodomite son’s remark, Abram’s mother hatefully replies, “You have no rights. You don’t have rights when you’re contrary to nature. I hope they beat you until you leave voluntarily. I hope they chase you out of the village. I wish it. Here in the village it’s not like in town where that’s modern. I know people are down on you….Just say you’re doing it with men. Everyone knows it anyway.” Hannelore essentially admits he is gay and proud to his mother, which makes him a marked man in the neighborhood, but that does not stop him as he soon attempts to make moves on teenage town idiot Ernstl while giving him a ride on his motorcycle, which does not go down well with the boy’s parents. 

 Meanwhile, despite not providing any evidence for her claims, village whore Hannelore tells everyone that she is pregnant with Abram’s baby, which is rejected by many of the villagers, including a fellow that thoughtfully declares, “I’m not so sure that its Abram’s. First of all she’s a whore. And second Abram only does it from behind.” Since archaic villages are apparently full of sexually repressed old women who have not had sex in decades and have nothing to do but plot destroying people’s lives, Abram’s mother’s friend declares she is going to take down the town homo herself because, as she states regarding the village’s men, “Here they stand around, the men, and none of them does something,” so she ultimately decides to take matters in her own hands.  According to a feeble old-timer with a horrendous hooknose regarding how the villagers would have dealt with Abram the abberosexual in the past, “We’d have cut off his willy in the old days.” Instead, Abram’s mother’s friend calls the police and manages to convince them to arrest Abram the next day. While Abram attempts to take the first bus out of town, he is a coward and allows a half-retarded redneck named Georg (Michael Strixner) and an elderly woman to pull him away from his one-way ticket to freedom, so he runs away like a little sissy girl. Hannelore follows Abram and when she finally finds him and tells him that he is going to be a father, he mockingly replies, “I have to throw up when I think of it…My child! You’re a whore. You do it with anyone. Get lost or I'll beat you up.” True to his word, Abram not only physically assaults, but stabs Hannelore to death after she refuses to leave him alone. Naturally, after killing the ostensible mother of his unborn child and said unborn child, Abram hides in the woods and a lynch mob, armed with rifles and Alsatian Wolf Dogs, goes hunting for him and eventually arrests him. In the end, after the death of pregnant whore Hannelore and the arrest of village poof Abram, everything returns to normal in the Bavarian village, including beer-chugging contests and a reelection speech from the village mayor, who simply states, “My election speech is very short….Everyone can drink a free beer on my account.”  As Hunting Scenes from Bavaria sardonically demonstrates, when it comes down to it, it is not blood, soil, or even fascism that keeps a Bavarian peasant happy, docile, and reasonably harmless, but beer, beer, and more beer.

 Almost as simplistically prejudiced and stereotype-driven as the barbaric Bavarian villagers it seeks to condemn and featuring a number of gratuitous scenes of farm animals defecating and fornicating as well as an extended pig-slaughtering scene, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria is essentially a patently pretentious, unintentional Hixploitation flick, thereupon making it ultimately much more entertaining than the typical anti-Heimatfilm, even if for all the wrong reasons. Marginally Herzog-esque/Korine-esque in its radical ‘realism’ and sporadically Schlingensief-like in its shameless stereotyping of kraut country bumpkins, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria only works today if approached like an absurdist satire work directed by anarcho-mystic Herbert Achternbusch (The Last Hole, Heilt Hitler! aka Heal Hitler!) because if taken seriously, Fleischmann’s film seems like far-left intellectual insipidity at its most innately idiotic. Of course, as demonstrated by his subsequent works Dorothea's Revenge (1973) aka Dorotheas Rache and The Hamburg Syndrome (1979) aka Die Hamburger Krankheit—a dystopian sci-fi flick that also incorporates elements of the anti-Heimatfilm—Fleischmann certainly has a sense of humor, even if of the sometimes sickening self-righteous leftist sort. Of course, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria is ultimately a film about so-called “everyday fascism,” depicting the hunting of a horndog homo by villagers as a metaphor for the SS cramming less than inconspicuous cocksuckers in concentration camps during the Second World. Undoubtedly, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria depicts the German peasantry as the ‘roots’ of fascism, which director Fleischmann and playwright Martin Sperr seems to think need to be ripped from the soil of Germany. Sort of the celluloid inverse of Jud Süß (1940) aka Jew Süss directed by Veit Harlan in its depiction of the German peasantry as opposed to money-changing Hebrews as the social plague of Germany society, Hunting Scenes from Bavaria is arguably the first big cinematic sign of how the Fatherland's new generation of filmmaker's had sided with the enemies and the victories of the Second World War and rejected their ancestral heritage, which still lingers on today in films like Michael Haneke's neo-anti-heimatfilm The White Ribbon (2009).  Of course, when it comes to violent and racist tribalistic behavior and crimes, especially of the hateful prejudiced sort, in contemporary Germany, its almost exclusively carried out by non-white (illegal) foreigners, including Turks, Kurds, and Middle Easterners, but no indigenous German filmmaker would ever dare to depict such a politically incorrect reality, lest they ruin their careers.

-Ty E