Schmutz

While typically best known for being one of the most talented actors in the German-speaking world, even if he has aged horrifically over the past couple decades, Austrian actor Paulus Manker (Benny’s Video, Brother of Sleep) is also an audacious auteur filmmaker who has directed some of the most immaculately assembled, if not acutely aberrant, Austrian films of the post-WWII era. Learning the craft of filmmaking by working with some of the most pathologically provocative and nihilistic filmmakers from his homeland, including Michael Haneke (Time of the Wolf, Funny Games) and Franz Novotny (Exit... But No Panic, Die Ausgesperrten aka The Excluded), Manker started his directing career with the completely unclassifiable and totally chilling yet suavely stylized post-industrial ‘horror-thriller’ Schmutz aka (1987) Dirt – a uniquely uncompromising and absurdly ambitious film that would earn a number of awards at festivals, including "Prize for the best director" and "Special recommendation for the soundtrack" at the 1987 Flanders International Film Festival Ghent, and would even be adapted into a book written by German writer Thorsten Becker, yet I doubt any novel could capture the fiercely foreboding and enthralling yet equally alienating atmosphere of the film. Centering around a humorless security guard who takes his unglamorous job watching over an abandoned paper mill a little too seriously and who experiences a brutal break with sanity after losing said job, Schmutz is like a nihilistic adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) aka Der letzte Mann for the post-WWII generation with its pomo post-industrial setting and irreparably lost protagonist, so it should be no surprise that Manker’s former collaborators Novotny (who came up with the “idea” and “treatment”) and Haneke (who wrote some of the dialogue) also contributed to the film as writers. For all those individuals who have worked at a job with a dreary dildo of a dude who treats every aspect of his work as if the fate of the world depends on it and brown-nosing the boss like a pathological shit-eater at what is nothing more than a dead-end job fit for a masochistic monkey, Schmutz makes for a horrifyingly ‘postmodern human, all too postmodern human’ work about a dispiriting dystopian world where a true ‘purpose’ in life is nowhere to be found.  Featuring a super seductive synth-driven score by Swiss synthpop group Yello, Schmutz is probably the mostly readily digestible work ever made about the slow but steady mental disintegration of a maniac child killer.

 Herr Joseph Schmutz (Fritz Schediwy, who played the Nietzsche-quoting, dipsomaniac criminal Willy in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) directed by R.W. Fassbinder) is an undeniably remarkable man whose life is about to change rather dramatically as a result of his new false sense of ‘self-worth’ after being hired to work at a monstrously sized abandoned paper factory as a meager security guard. As his seemingly megalomaniac of a boss (Hans-Michael Rehberg) tells him in a sinister fashion regarding his patrolling job, “Keep in mind, whatever the person in front of you is doing, whether he’s a trespasser or stray, child or criminal, he is in the wrong. He should not be where he is if you are standing opposite him. What do the peoples of the world call an invader into their territories?...Enemy.” A creepy kiss ass of the miserable middle-aged sort, Schmutz does not only go on the defensive against trespassers, but also his fellow security guard comrades as a traitor of the worst kind. Immediately upon first working with a goofy new security guard named Fux (Siggi Schwientek), Schmutz gives gruff to comrade in a rather ridiculously monotone manner as if he were an asexual automaton. Indeed, Fux offers Schmutz on-the-job free booze and babes, but the ungrateful fellow reacts with irrational rage like a tyrannical toddler who has an unhealthy devotion to his mommy. When Schmutz discovers Fux’s collection of porno magazines, the shuddersome and seemingly sexually sterile security guard cuts all the faces of women out from the pages of the mags and makes a collection of them and, for whatever curious reason, keeps them hidden in a drawer. When the bossman discovers Fux sleeping on the job in an inebriated state with two equally drunk, foxy ladies, the new employee has a gun pulled on him and is inevitably fired, thus leaving psycho Schmutz to work by his lonesome and to further stew in his own delusions and get in touch with his impending insanity. A victim of television, Schmutz suffers from sexual displacement and derives sexual pleasure via soap bars due to a television commercial he saw of two naked ladies in an intangible paradise advertising the wonders of sexy soap suds. Being the lone Führer of the post-industrial wasteland he guards with his rather worthless life, Schmutz begins attempting to murder any person that may have the misfortune of passing by the vicinity of where he works. After his boss breaks the bad news that his company no longer has a security contract with the owners of the decrepit paper factory, Schmutz loses his cool and venomously shouts at his boss, “You were entrusted with leadership! You can’t just simply elevate people and destroy them!” so he is naturally fired, but the screwy security guard stays at his job post, drawing up elaborate security plans and maliciously murdering anyone that crosses his pernicious path. 

 As someone who has worked with German New Cinema co-founder Alexander Kluge – a man whose first film, the experimental documentary short Brutalitat in Stein (1961) aka Brutality in Stone, attempted to depict National Socialist architecture as something frightfully superhuman that was used to apparently ‘dehumanize’ the individual due to its preposterous massiveness – in the past, Paulus Manker was certainly someone who was in touch with all-encompassing alienation caused by industrialization and bureaucracy as portrayed in Schmutz – a film that does for technocratic post-Nazi Austria what David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) did for the putrid post-industrial hellhole that is Philadelphia. Schmutz also gives a number of nods to classic works of German-language cinema, but the most obvious is a tribute to Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Like M, Schmutz features a scene where the calamitous kiddy killer’s shadow appears hovering over a little girl in a dress who is playing around, but Manker’s scenario is all the more disheartening and disturbing because the murderer is not motivated by an innate sexual perversion that he cannot control, but by slavishly doing a dubious duty for a job he no longer even has, thus making him more of a sad schlemiel of his environment as opposed to someone born with a broken brain. Manker also makes a number of allusions to Austria’s infamous Nazi past, which is especially obvious by the eagle emblem the security company Schmutz works for uses and is featured prominently on the guards’ hats as it looks strikingly similar to the one featured in the coat of arms of the Nazi Party, thus allegorically symbolizing the nation’s perennial connection to its naughty National Socialist past of blind allegiance to an authoritarian state that advocated violence against the individual, thus turning Austrian against Austrian and mensch against mensch.

 In another rather allegorical and acutely apocalyptic scene, Schmutz the putz, after being fired from his job, shoots a television ad featuring the Austrian flag, thus making it seem as if Uncle Adolf’s homeland is still in flames due to its infamous legacy, but like many scenarios featured in Schmutz, reality and virtual reality are nearly impossible to distinguish. The one thing that gives Schmutz any semblance of inner ‘humanity’ is his longing for ‘paradise’ (in the form of an old postcard of a tropical island he finds at the plant) and ‘romance’ (in the form of a soap bar and TV commercial), but neither of these things are organic objects, but rather, abstract ideas advertized by companies, thus one could easily argue that the super slayer of a security guard, not unlike the anti-heroes of Manker’s two other feature-length films Weiningers Nacht (1990) aka Weininger's Last Night and Der Kopf des Mohren (1995) aka The Moor’s Head is a victim of the postmodern condition, albeit one suffering from a rather extreme and hopeless case of the decidedly damned sort. In the end, Schmutz calls out to the archangels Gabriel, Raphael, and Michael as a fallen man whose spiritual descent and revolt against god has put him in league with the evil archangel Lucifer.  Indeed, no other race but Faustian man, European man, has managed to fall from the grace so hard and so fast with Schmutz being a meager member of this tradition.  As the same country that has sired Adolf Hitler, Viennese Actionism, and Peter Kern, it is no surprise that the totally talented Paulus Manker was able to churn out an auspicious celluloid work like Schmutz – a film that acts as an esoteric expression of the psychosis-ridden Austrian collective unconscious.  With epic Riefenstahl-esque camera angles in ostensible sardonic anti-tribute to Triumph of the Will (1935) aka Triumph des Willens and a postmodern pessimism in the tradition of his filmic gurus Michael Haneke and Franz Novotny, Manker's Schmutz is a seamlessly assembled hodgepodge of twentieth century Germanic cinema ingredients that has only become all the more relevant as the years have past in an age where it seems that every month there is an autistic shooter who has went on a rampage at a school or movie theater.

-Ty E 

Beethoven's Nephew

Without a doubt, Beethoven's Nephew (1985) aka Le neveu de Beethoven is the most stoically serious and professionally produced film ever directed by iconoclastic Roman Catholic and self-described conservative auteur Paul Morrissey (Flesh, Madame Wang's) – a 'counter-revolutionary' filmmaker whose talents only increased and whose films became all the more personal the more he moved away from his ex-collaborator Andy Warhol. A French-West German co-production that was, quite inexplicably, co-penned by talented French-German actor Mathieu Carrière (Young Törless, Malina), who also stars in the film in a more minor role, Beethoven's Nephew, not unsurprisingly, is oftentimes compared to the big budget, Academy Award winning Hollywood film Amadeus (1984) directed by Miloš Forman, yet despite having a much lower budget work and being a work that is barely recognized in the United States, Morrissey’s film goes to much greater extremes in giving a damning and demystifying depiction of the great German composer and his curious relationship with his nephew, so it is no surprise that it ultimately caused many modern day krauts to be sour, or as the director stated himself, “Beethoven was pure Molière, a character of lunacy and exaggeration, not the Shakespearean hero that the Germans now pretend. That was widely known during his lifetime.” Indeed, if one were to judge the perturbing portrayal of the seemingly megalomaniac of a maestro in Beethoven's Nephew, it is easy to see how the rapist/murderer anti-hero Alex from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) was able to find a kindred spirit in the music of Beethoven. Utilizing Jacques Brenner’s 1957 fictional memoir of Karl van Beethoven – a work largely rooted in fact that portrays the composer’s nephew as a helpless victim of his famous uncle – but especially the groundbreaking work Beethoven’s Nephew aka Il Nipote di Beethoven (1972) written by Italian author Luigi Magnani and excerpts from the composer’s own personal letters, Beethoven's Nephew portrays the composer as crazy a crank of a cripple whose talent for music is totally transcended by his obsession with his young nephew and hatred of the boy’s ostensibly whorish mother. A man who was apparently described by his own brother as having an, “almost total incapacity to have normal relationships with other people,” and who charged his patrons to watch him hedonistically gorge himself as if he were the bastard great-great-great-great-grandfather of Hermann Göring, the mad maestro is tragicomedically depicted in Beethoven's Nephew – one of only a handful of films that manages to portray the unflattering connection between pure genius and sheer madness as a sort of idiot savant pathology – as a possessive pervert who does not think twice about physically manhandling his nephew away when the lad has his member intertwined in a voluptuous housemaid’s meat-curtain.

 As a lifelong listener of the Teutonic composer himself, director Paul Morrissey has hypothesized that the new emotionalism in Beethoven’s late quartets and the choral finale of his Ninth Symphony was the feeling of passionate love he had developed for his nephew and this is communicated aesthetically in the film in the following fashion as described by the auteur himself, “When Beethoven looks at his nephew, his emotions are not spoken but heard on the soundtrack, the emotions of the idealized music.” Of course, as an aberrant authoritarian of sorts, Beethoven would also inevitably drive his nephew to attempt committing suicide by shooting himself in the head. As one learns while watching Beethoven's Nephew, Beethoven (Wolfgang Reichmann of Werner Herzog's Signs of Life (1968) aka Lebenszeichen and Woyzeck (1979)) completely and utterly hated his sister-in-law Johanna (Serge Gainsbourg ‘s one-time muse Jane Birkin), so when his brother Carl died of tuberculosis, he managed to take custody of his nephew Karl (Dietmar Prinz in his first and sole movie role) after a protracted legal battle against his brother’s wanton widow, who, in part, was denied custody due to her dubious morals (she has an illegitimate child with another man and was a convicted thief) and lack of financial support. In Beethoven's Nephew, the maestro wastes no time in coddling and constantly looking after his proto-twink nephew, which rather annoys the lad as he has no life of his own and certainly does not have the talent to be the great musical composer his uncle wants him to be. Even when Karl manages to move away and go to private school, the unhinged uncle follows him along and even walks in on the boy and his friends engaging in smutty sex-capades in their dorm room, which naturally enrages Beethoven, but he gets all the more huffy and puffy when he realizes that his nephew is regularly seeing his mother – a high-class harlot who fornicates with men not much older than her son. Aside from his nephew, who the composer wastes a small fortune on to pay for his school and hyper-hedonistic lifestyle, Beethoven treats everyone around him as objects and obstacles to be manipulated for his own personal gain, and eventually he begins writing new music just so he can earn money from his patrons and spend it on things related to Karl's lavish lifestyle. When Karl falls hopelessly in love with an older woman named Leonore (Nathalie Baye of François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) and the hit AIDS-themed TV movie And the Band Played On (1993)) who is a wealthy artist, the boy has finally managed to find a way to get away from his softcore sadist of an uncle, so Beethoven plots to irrevocably destroy the relationship. Finally fed up with the way his Uncle has dominated his personal life and has cock-blocked him innumerable times, Karl attempts suicide via bullet to the head, but miraculously survives. Using his uncle’s weakness for him against him, Karl inevitably has the last laugh…even if he never laughs.  In Paul Morrissey's mind, as well as apparently many Germans around the maestro's time, it was, quite ironically, nephew Karl who led to Herr Ludwig van Beethoven's worldly demise.

 

While many viewers have described Beethoven's Nephew as a homophile work portraying Beethoven as an incestuous pederast of sorts who has a hysterical hatred of women, including The New York Times star critic Vincent Canby, who described the film as being, “full of homoerotic nuances,” Paul Morrissey has vehemently denied what he sees as outright outrageous allegations. In fact, concerning the dubious dynamic of the one-sided relationship by the marvelously moonstruck maestro and his mostly emotionally monotone nephew in Beethoven's Nephew, Morrissey stated, “It’s inconceivable to think that Beethoven wanted sex with his nephew. That’s a “liberal,” Freudian idea. I never thought this. There was no eroticism. What he seemed to want was what Frankenstein and Dracula wanted, control and possession. That’s a much more powerful and confusing emotion. And although he never said it, maybe some kind of affection. His concerns with his nephew had more to do with his nephew’s maturing, the reality that he was growing up and would no longer be under his control…Wanting to control life makes him more sympathetic to me, a conservative, because remember, to me sex is the stupid religion of the “liberal.” In none of my films has sex ever been anything that anybody ever “wanted.” To read Beethoven’s motives as sexual is to swallow the pervasive liberal lie that sex is not just a positive value but the entire meaning of life on the planet! When you believe that lie, naturally it follows that all behavior gravitates towards that goal.”

Indeed, considering virtually all of Paul Morrissey’s films feature some sort of handsome, if not sadly strung-out, hunk in some form of undress, it would be easy to see that the filmmaker was living vicariously through the authoritarian anti-hero of Beethoven's Nephew – a darkly comical and romantic cinematic work featuring what is one of the most unhealthy uncle-nephew relationships ever captured on celluloid, yet executed with the sort of restrained subtly of the silent era. Like the other famous Morrissey of Irish stock, many believe that Paul Morrissey has led a life of (Catholic) celibacy and his former collaborator Andy Warhol seems to have thought the same thing, writing, “The running question was, did he [Paul Morrissey] have a sex life or not? Everyone who'd ever known him insisted that he did absolutely nothing, and all his hours seemed accounted for, but still Paul was an attractive guy, so people constantly asked, 'What does he do? He must do something...,” yet no one seems to know what that “something” was as we only have his films as evidence and if something thing can be said about Beethoven's Nephew, it is that the director must really love Beethoven’s music and looks nostalgically on the good old days of Occidental high kultur and when men taught their sons (or, in this case, nephews) responsibility and discipline, like staying away from salacious young ladies with syphilis. Even though Morrissey portrayed Beethoven as a belligerent and boorish bastard of a man in Beethoven's Nephew, the auteur ultimately, “was always entirely sympathetic to Beethoven. I feel sorry for him because he was the victim of his own selfishness. I like the story because there’s such a connection between his music and his life. I was struck by the fact that Beethoven never pontificated about his music. He’d say it was the best and then leave it at that. That was the one little area in which he was secure. Otherwise he was blind, helpless, a little like Mister Magoo. This makes him very human, even sympathetic.” Indeed, one cannot help respect a man who is best known for depicting impotent hunk hustlers in a heroin haze and being the ‘Warhol Factory Filmmaker,’ yet finding a kindred spirit of sorts in Beethoven.

In our contemporary zeitgeist where the popular nasty noise that is played on MTV and Hollywood movies that are written by proud pimps, crackheads and dope fiends, clownish would-be-Whores of Babylon, enfant terrible twinks that sound like Negress soul singers, braindead pothead metalheads who drown their musical ineptitude in distortion, white trash wiggers who confuse spastic illiteracy with poetry, and so-called country singers who throw up if they ever smelled a steaming cow turd, Beethoven's Nephew makes for a classy work of cinema that reminds one that there was actually a time when a person could actually have 'too much concern' for the welfare of their kin.

-Ty E

Moritz, Dear Moritz

 

It is hard to believe now, but when I was like 10 or 11 years old, I thought that the Cameron Crowe penned teen coming-of-age sex comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) directed by Amy Heckerling was  one of the most subversive and delightfully delinquent films that I had ever seen, but nowadays I can only find such a film mildly entertaining, even if only for the fact that one is supposed to believe Sean Penn is a pot-addled Aryan philistine beach bum as opposed to a pot-addled Judeo-Catholic commie with a temper problem. Although I rarely watch coming-of-age films nowadays as I came-of-age what seems to be a rather long time ago, I recently decided to take a chance on the crazy kraut teen ‘comedy’ Moritz, Dear Moritz (1978) aka Moritz, lieber Moritz directed by Hark Bohm (North Sea Is Dead Sea, Für immer und immer). Admittedly, until rather recently, I had no idea that Bohm – a Fassbinder actor whose brother Marquard Bohm (Deadlock, Beware of a Holy Whore) was a somewhat popular German cult actor – was an 'auteur' in his own right who has directed some of the most anarchic and raunchy coming-of-age films in cinema history that put those churned out by Hollywood, especially the so-called ‘Brat Pack’ flicks, to shame. As someone who tends to play scrawny skidmark of characters, including a stupid hippie bastard in Rote Sonne (1970) aka Red Sun directed by Rudolf Thome who thinks he can wage a leftist revolution against weather and the Waylon Smithers-like character “Senkenberg” in Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), I must say I was rather shocked to learn Hark Bohm directed a film in which a teenager cut outs his teacher’s tongue and brutally beats a cat to death, but such is the world of the darkly comedic coming-of-age flick Moritz, Dear Moritz – a teen flick made for adults about a slightly disturbed fellow named Moritz who loves staring at his positively pulchritudinous aunt through a peephole and fantasizing about the many methods by which he can voyeuristically observe and/or sadistically torture his arrogant adult enemies in a variety of highly imaginative scenarios that surely must have inspired the deranged dream-sequences in Berlin auteur Jörg Buttgereit’s arthouse splatter flicks. 

 Coming from a nice upper-middle class family, enfant terrible teen Moritz Stuckmann (Michael Kebschull in his first of only two movie roles) is naturally the laughing stock of his particularly posh and pretentious high school because his father (Walter Klosterfelde), who ran his family’s 200-year-old business out of business in record time, is currently unemployed and spends all his free time studying American Indians. During the beginning of Moritz, Dear Moritz, Moritz is run over by a car while showing off for a girl on his bike. On top of establishing the fact that Moritz is far from the luckiest of young men, the boy also calls that man who ran him over an “asshole,” thus proving he does not take shit from anyone, especially bald bourgeois bastards whose lives revolve around upgrading their Mercedes. Although Moritz resents his pestering mother (Kyra Mladeck), he has a special love for his sardonic and terminally ill grandmother (veteran Hungarian-Jewish actress Grete Mosheim, who starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s early 1924 gay silent film Michael and pro-Jewish propaganda flicks like Dreyfus (1930) directed by Richard Oswald) – a feisty elderly woman who shares flasks of liquor with her teenage grandson and even tries to convince him to bring extra sleeping pills next time so she can commit suicide and do away with her miserable life. Moritz has special ‘sensual’ feelings for his statuesque aunt and makes sure to peep through the keyhole every time she goes in the bedroom or uses the bathroom. At school, Moritz is a laughing stock among his posh peers, who describe him as a “spastic” and tease him about his failure of a father, and his own teacher even says he is probably more suited for doing ‘manual labor.’ Disgusted with his own prissy peers, Moritz unites with some cool proletarian youth who ride skateboards and have a rock ‘n’ roll band, which he joins as a saxophonist. Herr Moritz also spends a good amount of his time stalking a blonde and voluptuous Christian girl around town. 

 Like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Moritz, Dear Moritz has a number of dream-sequences, but the difference being that instead of featuring fantasies about girls taking off their tops and winning surfing contests, Bohm’s films have more to do with S&M splatter and horror films, even if these sometimes sickening scenarios are meant to be farcical. An exceedingly eccentric and slightly autistic young man, Moritz is the constant object of persecution and discipline and the only way he can seek revenge is daydreaming such things as his bitchy mother's tit being mangled via a rabid cat and performing a surprisingly sadistic surgical procedure on his defenseless and naked math teacher who is tied to a table that involves cutting up his tongue with scissors and cutting opening his stomach, placing live honeybees in his organs, and sewing him back up while his whole class watches. Of course, Moritz has a violent side and wastes no time brutally beating a cat to death against a tree that killed his pet rat in a scene no less brutal than the callous kitty killing scenes in Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1997), thus proving the wealthy just make for more sophisticated killers. Of course, Moritz also has a couple less disturbing daydreams, including visualizing a group of grade school children playing with guns and actually killing one another. Needless to say, if there ever was a film that could have prevented the unhinged young men who committed the Columbine killings from going on their rather pointless rampage, it is most certainly Moritz, Dear Moritz – a titillating and seemingly therapeutic film to help those sometimes unhealthy young men suffering from an acute case of angst and pubescent sexual repression. 

 Undoubtedly, with one look at director Hark Bohm, I think 100% of people will agree that he is an archetypical nerd with a particularly pathetic physique, a more than gulky face with four-eyes, and a high voice and sniveling essence that would probably lead some to believe he was a pedophile and his adolescent-obsessed films do nothing to help this very potential assumption. Personally, I do not think Bohm is a pathetic pedo, but a man who suffered a misspent youth due to his overwhelming geekiness and his films are just a way to live vicariously through his characters the teenage years he never had. Easily surpassing Clu Gulager’s kiddy arthouse short A Day with the Boys (1969) in terms of its subversiveness, albeit executed in a more tongue-in-cheek fashion, Moritz, Dear Moritz is a rare coming-of-age flick that everyone from jaded gorehounds to arthouse princesses can appreciate, sort of like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) meets Buttgereit's Hot Love (1985).  Indeed, if you have an angsty adolescent son and and want to give him some proper early life lessons as he transitions into manhood, then it is probably best for you get him to watch Moritz, Dear Moritz, and sadistically fantasize about dismembering such depressingly droll and vapid characters as Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, as opposed to fetishizing them (and ultimately transitioning into a rampant homosexual, or worse yet, changing his name from "Tony" to "Tonya").

-Ty E

Berlin Alexanderplatz

In terms of sheer size, artistic scope, and all-encompassing ambitiousness, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) – a 15 ½ hour film based on the 1929 Alfred Döblin novel of the same name that is considered the longest “cinematic film” ever made and was originally broadcasted on West German television in 14-parts, including 13 single chapters and an experimental two hour epilogue – was indubitably German New Cinema König Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s crowning achievement as, quite arguably, the greatest and most important filmmaker of his disillusioned and revolutionary zeitgeist as an ambivalent child of the post-WWII generation. Originally read by the director when he was only fourteen or fifteen years old, Döblin’s modernist magnum opus Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) would be described by Fassbinder as a life-changing work of literature that, confessing in a collection of “unorganized thoughts” on the novel that he wrote, he had, “unconsciously turned Döblin’s imaginings into my life. Yet once again it was the novel that helped me to overcome the alarming crisis that resulted and to work at establishing something that could eventually become, I hope, more or less that thing one calls an identity, to the extent that’s even possible with all this screwed-up mess.” And, indeed, traces of Döblin’s crucial influence can be seen scattered throughout Fassbinder’s cinematic oeuvre, including deriving plots for two of his early films (Love Is Colder than Death and Gods of the Plague) from Berlin Alexanderplatz and constantly recycling the name “Franz” (the name of the protagonist in the novel) for a number of his films, including his debut-feature Love Is Colder Than Death (1969), Katzelmacher (1969), Gods of the Plague (1970), and The American Soldier (1970), as well as going so far as even taking the protagonist's full-name “Franz Bieberkopf” for his highly personal work Fox and His Friends (1975). By no means a literal filmic adaptation of Döblin’s sometimes seemingly incoherent novel, Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is a more naturalistic work that does not wallow in montage nor the modernist Joyce-esque esotericism of its source material and features an epilogue that sums up the director's highly and singularly personalized interpretation of the novel as a filmmaker who had a transcendent talent for synthesizing the personal with the historical and sociopolitical, thus making for a relatively accessible work, even if it infamously enraged West German viewers during its initial TV broadcast, that portrays the rampant wantonness of the rarely working, working-class of Weimar Republic Berlin during the late-1920s within a melancholy microcosm of an ex-con and his mixed-up mind, and the people that make his life all but unbearable and tediously tragic. Centering on a fundamentally flawed anti-hero Franz Biberkopf (played by Günter Lamprecht) – an ex-convict who has just been released from prison after a four year stay for killing his prostitute girlfriend in the heat of the moment – Berlin Alexanderplatz follows a man that, no matter hard he tries, has a difficult time being ‘straight’ and living a live without crime, especially when a Svengali creature of a man named Reinhold (Gottfried John) turns his life – and everyone around him – upside down.

While most prisoners who have not made love to a woman nor lived in a room without bars for a number of years would be nothing less than overjoyed to be released from prison and get on with their personal lives, ex-pimp Franz Biberkopf is not your average fellow, even if he fits the timeless stereotype of a loud, boorish, boastful and belligerent kraut who feeds his bloated belly with beer more than he nurtures his mind with knowledge or even common sense. After being virtually forced off the grounds of Tegel prison after becoming a free man for the first time in four years, Herr Biberkopf is quite overwhelmed with his destitute and degenerate surrounds in what seems to be a moment of temporary insanity, but he is ‘nursed’ back to mental health by two eccentric Orthodox Jews who have a seething Semitic hatred of one another. Not long after, big brazen bastard Biberkopf virtually rapes a woman named Minna (Karin Baal), the sister of the prostitute girlfriend he killed four years before because he correctly believed she was about to leave him. Despite witnessing Biberkopf’s brutal murder of his lover Ida (Barbara Valentin), Frau Bast (Brigitte Mira), a kindly if not pathologically nosy landlady, has maintained the ex-con's studio apartment, so he need not worry about finding a place to stay. Naturally, being a jolly alcoholic who has not had a cold beer in years, Biberkopf soon goes to his favorite bar/hangout owned by his friend Max (Claus Holm) after meeting up with his best friend Meck (Franz Buchrieser) by happenstance on the seedy streets of Berlin. Taking Meck’s advice that Minna is bad news, Biberkopf befriends a new love interest in the form of a young Polish gal named Lina Przybilla (Elisabeth Trissenaar). After a wild session of sex, the ex-con vows to Lina that he will go “straight” and work an honest job as opposing to going back to pimping, but such things are easier said than done in a decidedly damning depression era where even normal men commit robberies and cutesy girls peddle their flesh just to survive.

Determined to live an honorable life, Biberkopf works a number of odd jobs, including peddling tie holders on the streets and, to the dismay of an old Jewish friend, naively selling copies of the National Socialist newspaper Völkischer Beobachter while wearing a swastika armband. A rather desperate fellow with a mostly apolitical political persuasion, Biberkopf finds it all but unavoidable that he will get in a barroom fight with some old communist friends. Seconds away from beating a babyish Bolshevik brute with a chair at Max’s pub, Biberkopf decides to find a new line of work and hooks up with Lina’s ‘uncle’ Otto Lüders (Hark Bohm), a fellow ex-con who, unbeknownst to Franz, never managed to shed his criminal ways, and starts selling shoelaces door-to-door. While on the job, Biberkopf ends up cheating on Lina with a lonely bourgeois widow and Otto later robs the woman after hearing about his partner’s salacious story about the lonely woman with a luxurious mansion apartment. When Biberkopf goes back to the widow’s house for another game of carnal knowledge, the woman closes the door on him, thus leaving him rather distraught, so he runs away to a flophouse, where he will stay indefinitely after realizing it is quite hard to stay 'straight,' especially when working with a dishonest partner with a pathetic proclivity for robbing harmless women. After failing to locate Franz, Lina and Meck end up hooking up and the ex-con goes on a delirious drinking binge for quite a number of days.

After breaking out of his hallucinatory hootch hypnosis, Franz B. hooks up with sexy streetwalker Eva (Hanna Schygulla), who quite inexplicably, is perennially in love with the overweight ex-con as he used to be her pimp, thus holding a special softspot in the hot little harlot's heart. In fact, exquisite Eva is so in love with Herr Biberkopf that she is the one that is responsible for paying the rent at his flat when he was away at prison, thus proving her deep-seated devotion to the ex-con, even if she is a prostitute who sells her pussy to make a living. Franz also meets up with Meck again, who admits his short fling with Lina, which his friend has no problem with, but now he has moved on to much bigger things as a member of a posh fellow named Pum’s criminal crew. While Pums (Ivan Desny) immediately offers Franz a job 'selling fruit,' the ex-con turns him down as he wants to stay straight. Franz also meets a stuttering sadist named Reinhold (Gottfried John), an ex-revolutionary who is part of Pums’ criminal enterprise and who, for better or worse, will inevitably become the most important and influential person in the ex-cons life. Reinhold devises a dubious scheme where he passes old and now undesirable girlfriends onto Franz, which works out quite well for a while, but things go awry when Mr. Biberkopf decides he prefers to keep a cabaret singer/dancer named Cilly (Annemarie Düringer), which infuriates the stuttering girlfriend-swapper, thus inspiring him to seek revenge against what he sees as a 'disloyal' friend. A delightful chap who hates drama, Franz is eventually coerced into committing a robbery with Pums’ gang, but it is not until he is actually involved with carrying out the crime that he realizes the magnitude of what sort of criminal corruption he is involved with, thus causing him to freakout on his compatriots, who don't taken kindly to his hysterics. While driving away with the loot, paranoid Reinhold accuses Franz of being a ‘stool pigeon’ and throws him out of the backdoor of the car into a car behind them. Although everyone believes he is dead, Biberkopf has merely lost his right arm.

Not unsurprisingly, Franz B is nursed back to health by Eva and her seemingly slavish lover Herbert (Roger Fritz) and eventually gets involved with a criminal enterprise after meeting a flamboyant Nietzschean conman named Willy (Fritz Schediwy) at a cabaret.  Through Eva, Biberkopf also meets the love of his life in the form of a sweet and beauteous yet slightly dimwitted prostitute, a character that was apparently partly modeled after the character Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) from Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), that he ‘christens’ "Mieze" (Barbara Sukowa) in a symbolic act of his singular love for her. Although Mieze initially support the one-armed Franz, he gets tired of living off of a woman, so he does the seemingly unthinkable by visiting Reinhold – the Mephistopheles-like man that tried to kill him and will inevitably take him to hell and back – so that he can join up with Pums’ gang again. Franz also introduces Mieze to his criminal compatriots, including Reinhold, who seems to have a rather dubious and even strangely romantic feeling for the man he once tried to exterminate and who becomes immediately jealous of his one-armed friend's seemingly immaculate relationship with the seemingly angelic girl. After learning that Mieze loves a young man and that she wants Eva to have Franz’s baby since she’s infertile, Biberkopf nearly beats her to death, but the two inevitably reconcile their differences and become stronger than ever after taking an amazing trip to a folkish forest in Freienwalde, but a malicious man named Reinhold has pernicious plans for the little lady so as to seek revenge against Herr Biberkopf for falling in love with a woman. After blackmailing Meck into getting Mieze to travel to Freienwalde, a special place where she and Franz originally fell in love, like a little lamb being led to the slaughter, Reinhold commits the most unholy act of lover's revenge by proxy against the intrinsically innocent flesh-peddler. With all that has happened, Franz Biberkopf still cannot seem to get Reinhold out of his heart.

The last two hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz, a surrealist epilogue entitled “My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin,” seems in rather stark contrast to the rest of the film’s naturalism due to its Clive Barker-like sadomasochistic and sexually subversive imagery, not to mention its pseudo-Luciferian essence as if Goethe's Faust were set in the mind of a Weimar era mad man entering metaphysical hell. While Reinhold is in jail and is, quite reluctantly, finally embracing his latent homosexuality, Franz is in a mental institution and in a comatose like state, thus the majority of the epilogue takes place in his haunted mind, which is comprised of seemingly real phantasms of his past and present. Guided by to two rather cynical yet wise and stoic, Super Aryan guardian angels named Terah (Margit Carstensen) and Sarug (Helmut Griem) that look like they came out of a Fidus painting, Franz is reunited with the dead, including Ida – the woman who has haunted his life ever since the day he beat her to death and sent her straight to hell – and Pums, who has apparently committed suicide. In a seemingly Satanic slaughterhouse dream sequence of psychosexual phantasmagoria, Reinhold raises a bloody hatchet as if he is the grim reaper over a pile of naked and immobile bodies belonging to Franz’s former lovers, whom the one-armed wonder later joins after stripping off all his clothes. Franz also has a transsexual moment in preposterous pancake make-up drag where he speaks to "Reinhold Christ," a grotesque Willard-esque scene where he crawls on the floor with an army of rodents, has a surrealist boxing match with old Reinhold in the spirit of the real-life match between German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling and American negro Joe "Brown Bomber" Louis, an attempt by old Pums to literally rip his heart out, and even becoming Jesus Christ the crucified himself in an apocalyptic Hieronymus Bosch-like scenario recalling Germany’s physical and cultural destruction during both World Wars. Mr. Biberkopf also encounters bands of Nazi SA brownshirts fighting communists in scenes that vaguely echo Fassbinder’s enemy Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s cinematic magna opera Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977). Indeed, like Syberberg’s Wagnerian Hitler epic, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a rare example of cinema as ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ and the epilogue of Fassbinder’s daunting Döblin adaption, which features Richard Wagner’s "Liebestod" aka “love death” ("Mild und leise wie er lächelt") from the opera Tristan und Isolde, is not only the icy, albeit darkly romantic, icing on the cake of the miniseries, but also the cinematic coda to the filmmaker’s entire life as a lonely man searching for love and an identity, but only really finding both esoterically via cinema.

As Fassbinder wrote regarding the antagonistic yet hopelessly potent relationship between anti-heroes Franz Biberkopf and Reinhold in Berlin Alexanderplatz, “I read it as the story of two men whose little bit of life on this earth is ruined because they don’t have the opportunity to get up the courage even to recognize, let alone admit, that they like each other in an unusual way, love each other somehow, that something mysterious ties them to each other more closely than is generally considered suitable for men.” Indeed, unlike Döblin’s novel, Fassbinder’s adaption of Berlin Alexanderplatz makes no ambiguity of “The love that dare not speak its name” between the two strikingly different men: Franz, being an impulsive and extroverted philistine with a practical mind and a big, yet fragile heart; and Reinhold, a resentful and sadistic introvert with an intimidating intellect but without a shred of common sense who has led a life of repressing his feelings, thus resulting in violent acts sired by his sexual repression. While Berlin Alexanderplatz portrays a type of economic depression, more obvious and important to the film is the decided depression of the soul and collective unconscious of Germany, and as Fassbinder’s celluloid oeuvre demonstrates, the director had incurable cases of melancholia and Weltschmerz, thus acting as the highest expression of his nation's "heart" during the post-WWII era. While Fassbinder always saw Franz Biberkopf as his ‘alter-ego’ of sorts, his actions and behavior demonstrate that he was more like Reinhold, so it should be no surprise that he originally intended to portray the curious character in a feature-length version of Berlin Alexanderplatz starring Gérard Depardieu (as Franz B.) and Jeane Moreau that was ultimately aborted. Just as dullard Franz was always the victim of Reinhold’s psychopathic savagery, so were Fassbinder’s three great true loves – Günther Kaufmann, El Hedi ben Salem, and Armin Meier – victims of the perennially miserable and malicious filmmaker’s calculated cruelty, with the second two of his ill-fated boyfriends inevitably committing suicide as a result of his cruel and contemptible behavior. As contemporary German filmmaker Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run, The Princess and the Warrior) wrote in 2007 in an essay entitled Berlin Alexanderplatz: He Who Lives in a Human Skin, “Franz’s love of Reinhold is a mystery not only to himself but also to us—and yet we know what he’s talking about. The film touches here on a collective secret knowledge that, rumbling in our subconscious, brings to mind on some strange evening of our life a confusing feeling of deepest tenderness for a person we never really thought played an important role in our life.” Of course, where Döblin’s novel ended on a rather low and anti-climatic note, Fassbinder goes full-force with Berlin Alexanderplatz – an epic celluloid tribute by the director to love and hate, life and death, and the Whore of Babylon and the Grim Reaper in the forsaken Fatherland.

Although a rather unflattering anecdote, apparently Fassbinder went from envisioning Berlin Alexanderplatz as a mere feature film to a fourteen part epic in an attempt to fund an absurdly expensive drug habit, and was described by Michael Fengler, who helped draw up the one-year shooting schedule of the film series, as detailed by Robert Katz in the Fassbinder biography Love Is Colder Than Death (1989): “He was now so heavily into drugs [Fengler recalls] that Harry Baer and I came up with a precise plan on how we would manage the whole thing. We estimated that during the filming he would spend forty thousand marks a month to satisfy his need, about half a million for the whole year. We thought it would be idiotic to leave it all to chance, so we decided to buy all the stuff ourselves in advance and sell it off to him piecemeal, without his knowing that it came from us, of course. The idea was to have some control over his habit by knowing what and how much he was getting.” As early Fassbinder collaborator Peter Berling also revealed regarding the director’s coke-fueled direction of The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), which, despite being the most successful film of the auteur filmmaker's career, was squeezed in as a "cheap quickie" before shooting Berlin Alexanderplatz, “Whatever combination of drugs he’d concocted, it certainly stimulated output, though once he couldn’t move or be moved for two days…To keep the engine going, Fengler hired three assistants who did nothing but fly all over Europe to get stuff for Rainer, but his thirst for cocaine alone seemed unquenchable. It grew to seven or eight grams a day.”  Quite miraculously, Fassbinder ended up getting off drugs for the majority of shooting of Berlin Alexanderplatz and approached the film with the sort of fanatical professionalism that one would expect from Leni Riefenstahl's prodigal son, only to get coked up again around the time of shooting the particularly phantasmagorical epilogue, which one could argue was to the film's benefit due to its exceptionally ominous, oneiric, and otherworldly essence. Not unsurprisingly, Fassbinder was no different from his fictional ill-fated characters Franz and Reinhold in that regard as all three men more or less adjusted their drug intake according to their needs and, of course, it seems there was always a need as individuals who were always on the brink of existential crisis.  As was probably expected by those who knew him, Fassbinder ultimately succumbed to his deleterious addiction a mere two years after completing Berlin Alexanderplatz – a monolithic magnum opus of a movie that the director probably assumed he would never be able to top. After his death, a policeman apparently told a reporter that, "Even Fassbinder's just a man," and, indeed, it really was only a matter of time before the filmmaker's superhuman, stardust-charged work ethic caught up with him as a man who long ago made a 'Faustian pact' by sacrificing his life for his art.

Over three decades later and Berlin Alexanderplatz still seems like the virtual blueprint for popular premium cable channel shows like Six Feet Under (2001-2005) and Boardwalk Empire (2010-present), albeit Fassbinder’s work is more aesthetically and thematically intricate, morally dubious, and remarkably unforgettable that, not unlike how the German New Cinema master auteur described Döblin’s novels imperative influence on him, is for many viewers, a life-changing work. That being said, Berlin Alexanderplatz is more like an overextended, experimental melodrama recollecting Fassbinder’s entire life work as a filmmaker, and then some, as the epically melodramatic celluloid “romantic anarchist” equivalent to prophet philosopher Oswald Spengler’s final work The Hour of Decision (1934), a best seller that was ultimately banned by the National Socialists that predicted an apocalyptic scenario that involved the defeat of the Third Reich and destruction of Germany by the exact year, as well as the decline of power in the Occidental world and the rise of the Third World. In many ways, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a lovely and luxurious, if not patently pessimistic and prophetic, love-hate elegy for Germania as a lurid libertine melodrama set during the apocalyptic beginning of the end of the Teutonic Fatherland. Franz Biberkopf, a kindhearted, if not clumsy and boorish, man who may have had a much different life had he lived during a much simpler and less criminally inclined zeitgeist, is a symbol of German debasement and original sin, and whose story, as Döblin wrote in the preface of Berlin Alexanderplatz, is important because, “To listen to this, and to meditate on it, will be of benefit to many who, like Franz Biberkopf, live in a human skin, and, like this Franz Biberkopf, ask more of life than a piece of bread and butter.”  As chaos rises and engulfs all of the Occident and its former colonies, one could learn a thing or two about the pathology and metaphysics of tragedy in the post-national/post-Hitler and cosmopolitan technocratic age by watching Fassbinder's masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz – quite arguably the last great work of Gesamtkunstwerk of European history.

-Ty E

Supermarkt

While I appreciate the fact that the auteur filmmakers of German New Cinema opted for creating revolutionary cinematic works that were thematically and aesthetically antagonistic against "Papas Kino" and Hollywood, I would be lying if I did not admit that I have complete and utter respect for anti-intellectual auteur Roland Klick (Bübchen, White Star) for rebelling against his more cultivated and philosophical countrymen by creating gritty action films that remind viewers that not all krauts had their testicles stomped in after the Second World War. While his anarchistic psychedelic western Deadlock (1970) will always be my favorite work of truly brutal celluloid grit from the avant-garde action auteur Klick, his subsequent cinematic work Supermarkt (1974) – a fierce and unflinching flick centering around a fucked teen rebel who lives on the streets of Hamburg and who gets involved with dubious smalltime crooks, jaded journalists, posh poofs, and less than pretty prostitutes – is no less enthralling with its gusty guerrilla style direction, suave subversiveness, and decidedly busted moral compass. Described by its distribution company filmgalerie451 as being, “Between "The French Connection" and "Rebel Without A Cause", "Supermarket" is rightfully regarded as a cult classic of German cinema,” Supermarkt is indeed an uncompromising crossbreed between action-packed nihilism and sexually and morally confused teen rebellion that does to action-crime flicks and the city of Hamburg – a place that seems to have only superficially recovered from the firebombings it experienced during the Second World War – what Shadow of Angels (1976) aka Schatten der Engel directed by Daniel Schmid did for campy and morbid melodrama and the seemingly shitty city of Frankfurt. A more immaculate yet no less brassy depiction of the unruly criminal subcultures of Hamburg as portrayed in Klaus Lemke’s cult flick Rocker (1972), Supermarkt depicts a spiritually and socially devitalized post-industrial hellhole where both criminals and everyday citizens are colder than death, posh pederasts pay top dollar for teenage twinks and homely hookers peddle their putrefied pussies to support their forsaken bastard children, love is not even worthy of being described as an illusion, and journalists are more interested in hanging out with outlaws than their wives and work. Featuring groundbreaking cinematography from Jost Vacano, who would later provide his talents to Das Boot (1981) directed by Wolfgang Petersen and Robocop (1987), as well as virtually every other Paul Verhoeven flick, Supermarkt is arguably the first film to feature Steadicam-style camera work despite predating the release of the official Steadicam by two years, thus making for a hypnotic form of action cinema that throws the viewer into a Teutonic ghetto of erratic ecstasy and audaciously afflicting angst. If Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (1981), which directer Roland Klick was originally supposed to direct before he was fired by producer Bernd Eichinger, had a filmic big brother that was not addicted to heroin, it is most certainly Supermarkt – a crusty yet charismatic celluloid story from the seedy city streets that treats aimless crime as a crude yet compulsory way of life. 

Willi (played by non-actor Charly Wierczejewski in his first film role) has a wayward way of life as a handsome yet homeless teenage-rebel-by-default who must do whatever he needs to survive while dogging Hamburg cops and much more corrupt criminals, including thieving and prostituting himself to despicable degenerates of the independently wealthy sort. During the beginning of Supermarkt, Willi runs away from the police for what seems to be no reason at all as he has committed no crime, but he is arrested any way and he and another teenage troublemaker make a getaway from the crowed police station, almost running over a cop with a stolen car in the process, thus ushering in the Weltschmerz-ridden anti-hero’s life as a feral-like fugitive of the law. To make ends meet, Willi has united with a highly manipulative middle-aged career criminal named Theo (Walter Kohut) who devises a pathetic scheme where the boy pretends to be a hustler and lures in wealthy homosexuals so the twosome can beat and rob them. Of course, being a rather empathetic fellow for a criminally-inclined teenage thug, Willi botches the plan and allows the John to escape and ends up brutally beating Theo in the process. The same homosexual (Hans-Michael Rehberg) offers Willi a ride in his car and the teen makes the mistake of accepting it and is ultimately sadistically sodomized by the affluent fairy who lives in an art-adorned manor with his Mommy. When Willi later attempts to collect the money he earned for reluctantly allowing the prick of a poofter to anally penetrate him, things go wrong when the fudge-packer makes the fatal error of belittling the boy due to his blatant lack of social prestige, henceforth resulting in the fickle fairy’s gruesome death. Although playing wide receiver on the pink team, Willi falls in love with a less than pretty prostitute named Monika (Fassbinder graduate Eva Mattes) who sports a tasteless blonde wig and a greasy pizza face full of unflattering zits. Although Willi’s willy fails to ‘rise to the occasion’ during an intimate moment with Monika, the prostitute loves the young hoodlum because he treats her little boy in a fatherly fashion and she has yet to meet another man that displays such gentlemanly behavior. Willi is also helped by an idealistic journalist named Frank (Michael Degen) whose wife resents the boy and the oddly obsessive interest her husband shows to him, but the young mensch cannot completely trust the career scribbler as a teenage murderer and fugitive of the law who is on the run, so he seeks sanctuary elsewhere. A radically romantic lady’s man, Willi hatches a master criminal plot with the philistine thug Theo to rob a supermarket's money transporter, but with the cops circling in on him and with a drunken and conspiring moron for a partner, the outlaw youth does not exactly have luck on his side, but he does have a stalwart spirit and an unconquerable will to survive.

Due to the seething hatred and criticism he received from his fellow German filmmakers and film critics, anarchic Aryan apostate auteur Roland Klick has remained a marginal figure of cinema both in his homeland and abroad, which is quite ridiculous considering he created highly accessible cinematic works like Supermarkt that do the seemingly impossible by bringing art and poetry to a terribly tactless genre that has traditionally been the celluloid equivalent of junk food. Breaking countless conventions of the outmoded genre, Supermarkt portrays a fellow whose crude criminality is a result of circumstance and not a contrived sort of action-hero courage, and who experiences the ultimate form of denigration and emasculation via anal penetration by an opulent queen who in his bourgeois arrogance, even tries to get out of paying the gay-for-pay anti-hero, thereupon demystifying the "rebel" archetype in the process. Indeed, as someone who is willing to risk his life for a girl he seems to have no desire to fornicate with, Willi is like a fallen saint in a post-industrial Sodom and a Teutonic teenage Travis Bickle who is willing to sacrifice everything (not that he has much, aside from his earthly life to spare) so that a bastard baby boy and his streetwalker of a mother can live a relatively normal life, even if it is with stolen money earned in a robbery that results in a freak death or two.

If one were to go by Supermarkt as a frame of reference, it is quite obvious that director Roland Klick would have churned out a superior and all the more seedy film had he been the one to direct Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo as planned as opposed to for-hire, semi-hack Uli Edel (Body of Evidence, Der Baader Meinhof Komplex), but instead, the auteur has only gone on to direct to a couple more disappointing features, including the excess-laden punk flick White Star (1983), which was ultimately sabotaged by its cokehead star Dennis Hopper’s incessant searches for nose candy, and a number of TV movies for US networks under a pseudonym. It seems that, like his enemies from German New Cinema, Klick can no longer procure the funds he needs to make films, so maybe it is about time he visits a supermarket.

-Ty E

Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven

Out of all of German New Cinema auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films that deal with the innate hypocrisy of the radical left, especially in regard to its impotent armchair (anti)intelligentsia of the post-WWII era, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven aka Mother Küsters' Trip to Heaven (1975) aka Mutter Küsters' Fahrt zum Himmel takes the most personal and uncompromising, albeit classically melodramatic, approach against what the director saw as a disease of the soul of the self-loathing, anti-bourgeois bourgeois. Borrowing its title from one of Fassbinder’s favorite films, Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (1929) aka Mother Krause's Journey to Happiness directed by directed by Phil Jutzi, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven has a message that is in stark contrast to the conspicuously com-symp film that partly inspired it, not least of all due to the fact that where the silent film portrays communism as the savior of the sub-working-class (even if the protagonist is too late in receiving such ungodly help), the Sirkian German New Cinema film portrays the Marxist doctrine as a tool used by members of the parasitic bourgeois, who in their intrinsic emotional and social sterility, still attempt to subjugate the proletariat, albeit through more pathologically patronizing, pathetic, and entirely misleading means. On top of both filmmakers cinematically adapting Alfred Döblin's novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Jutzi and Fassbinder would both go through changes in political persuasions during their filmmaking careers, with the older Jutzi going from being a leading director of proletarian films and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to a National Socialist party member and strangely prolific director of short films (from 1933 to 1941, he directed 49 short films) and Nazi spy dramas, and with the younger Fassbinder going from a rather cliché quasi-commie comrade who hung out with members of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group and made minimalistic films in the vein of Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Luc Godard attacking the supposed latent Nazism and authoritarianism of the bourgeois, to becoming a hyper-pessimist who described himself as a 'romantic anarchist' and directed a number of naked melodramas and black comedies condemning ‘money-changing Marxists’ and ‘aristocratic Trotskyites.’ What makes Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven especially effective in its condemnation of cardboard commies and antique connoisseur anarchists is that it utilizes a kindly and innocent grandma figure as the object of the bloodsucking neo-bolsheviks’ exploitation. Like his rarely seen TV movie Like a Bird on a Wire (1975) aka Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht made that same year, Fassbinder directed Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven in tribute to Brigitte Mira (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Chinese Roulette), who plays the title role as a working-class housewife named Emma Küsters whose world is turned irrevocably upside down after her husband runs amok and kills his supervisor and then himself.  While in a state of shock and complete and utter vulnerability, the widow becomes the unwitting pawn of predatory and posh poser proponents of the proletariat who, despite claiming to be friends of the working-class, have never done a day of real work in their entire lives.

  A rather naïve yet hearty woman of a limited education and even more meager monetary means, 60-something-year-old Emma Küsters faces virtual hell when her husband Hermann, a man who has worked a menial job at a tire factory for over twenty years, kills his boss and himself in an enraged moment of temporary insanity, thus leaving his wife a widow, who in turn becomes the proletarian prey of sleazy journalists and wealthy communists. As someone whose ‘rebel without a care’ James Dean-like son Ernst (played by Fassbinder’s then-boyfriend Armin Meier) is the passive cuckold of his overweening and domineering wife Helene (played by Irm Hermann) and whose daughter Corinna (Ingrid Caven) cares more about peddling her ass on stage in a selfish yet self-exploitative attempt at establishing a fruitful dance career than her father’s disastrous death, Emma naturally becomes the victim of wolves in sheep’s clothing in the form of a bourgeois communist couple named Karl (Karlheinz Böhm) and Marianne Tillmann (Margit Carstensen ) who, in a groveling and grotesque display of counterfeit empathy, tell her that her husband was a ‘revolutionary’ and victim of capitalism. While Emma initially finds the Tillmanns’ propaganda to be quite dubious, not least of all because her late husband described communists as unruly troublemakers and her daughter describes West German commies as 'armchair communists' and Red East Germany as a virtual slave state where a small minority rules over the majority thus totally contradicting the idea of a classless society, she eventually concedes to the Tillmanns’ wish to join the Communist Party. After all, while her daughter in now fornicating with an odiously opportunistic journalist named Niemeyer (Gottfried John) who wrote a scathing article about her husband, Karl Tillmann wrote a singularly sympathetic article of masterful and manipulative propaganda for the pink agitprop newspaper he is the proprietor of as a commie capitalist. In fact, Emma takes such an active role in the Communist Party that she even gives a speech at one of their meetings, where she later meets a nerdy revolutionary fellow named Horst Knab (Matthias Fuchs) – the sort of intemperate and anti-intellectual leftist terrorist that Fassbinder would portray in a more fiercely farcical manner in his subsequent film The Third Generation (1979) aka Die dritte Generation – who quite confidently proclaims, like a seasoned psychopath, he really and truly has her interests in mind. Fed up with the Tillmanns’ tedious verbal swill, but especially their lack of action as patronizing posh pricks whose passive actions have done next to nil in clearing her husband’s name, Emma joins up with cracked kook Knab and his gang of anti-everything anarchists, and is in for a big surprise when she and her new malcontent crew go to the office of the yellow press magazine Niemeyer works for and make some rather irrational demands.

To appease more fantasy-minded American viewers, Fassbinder created two radically different endings for Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven: one where Emma literally goes to heaven after a tragic showdown with the police and the second being a much happier one, to the point of absurdity, that recalls F.W. Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece The Last Laugh (1924) aka Der letzte Mann in its outstanding yet ostentatious optimism, but both conclusions thankfully express the complete and utter futility of radical left-wing action. Personally, I prefer the ‘happy ending’ as few filmic characters are more deserving of it and despite portraying a sort of ‘fantasy reality’ at the end, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven features a sweet and suitably sentimental scenario you would never see in Hollywood yet executed with an immaculate Sirkian flare that makes the Danish-German filmmaker’s films like All That Heaven Allows (1955) and Imitation of Life (1959) seem ostensibly outmoded and thematically irrelevant due to Fassbinder's socio-politically astute insights as a lapsed member of the extreme left. What makes Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven especially interesting is that not for one moment in the film does Fassbinder make it seem like protagonist Emma or any other member of the working-class will “break its chains” because, as history has proven, revolutions never happen from ‘below’ as demonstrated by the Russian Revolution, which was, in part, funded by Wall Street and led by mostly Jewish intellectuals from bourgeois and aristocratic backgrounds who were failed members of their own privileged class backgrounds (Russian SFSR leader Vladimir Lenin was from a wealthy family and was a failed lawyer whose interest in ‘revolutionary’ activity was due to his deep-seated desire for revenge against the czar for having his brother executed in 1887). In a sense, the armchair revolutionaries featured in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven are no different from the ethno-masochistic bourgeois American whites who describe themselves as “progressive” (but, at least as far as mother nature is concerned, are retrogressive) and dominate positions in mainstream academia, the media, and the government today – main difference between the two groups being that, while the kraut commies of the 1970s patronizingly ‘fought’ for the mostly white Teutonic proletariat (after all, there were not that many colored folks in the Fatherland back then like there are today), their contemporary Yankee quasi-commie compatriots confirm their sense of superiority over working-class whites by championing non-whites, illegal aliens, abberosexuals of every stripe, the disabled, and just about every other loser 'victim' group that confirms they are a degenerate class who has developed an inexorable slave-morality and a sickening sense of self-loathing, and epitomize the decadent elite who, in an act of social suicidal, inevitably wipes itself out as described in Italian philosopher Vilfredo Pareto’s The Rise and Fall of Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology.

In an interview featured in the book Chaos as Usual: Conversations About Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1997), Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven star Brigitte Mira described her experience with the film as follows, “I remember Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven: that practically caused a riot, people whistled and booed, not because the film was bad but because the subject was so controversial. I know nothing about politics and I don’t feel entitled to make any judgments. Rainer always said, “you certainly know your job.” That was high praise coming from him.” Indeed, a film that attacks a very large portion of the audience it was created for, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven also manages to give an honest, albeit patently pessimistic, message to the working-class that the bourgeois never did them any favors in the past and they certainly are not showing them any genuine empathy and support today, sort of like how white leftists in America have only all the more crippled the majority of blacks by supporting their campaign for independence and stability via the welfare state and anachronistic programs like affirmative action. Of course, it goes without saying that the media in Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven is portrayed as no less a source of exploitation of the working-class and victims of crimes, but everyone already knows that, so it makes for a less important and interesting aspect of the film.

Foretelling his own premature death, Fassbinder once admitted in an interview that his main motivation as a filmmaker was,“the concrete longing for this utopia. If this longing is driven out of me, I will not do anything else; that’s why as a creative person I have the feeling of being murdered in Germany, if you would please not mistake that for paranoia….I believe this recent witch-hunt…was staged in order to destroy individual utopias…If it comes to the point where my fears are greater than my longing for something beautiful, then I’ll quit. And not just quit working,” and, indeed, Mother Küsters Goes to Heaven, in its patent pessimism and uncompromising cynicism, seems like the work of a man disillusioned with politics and people, so it is no surprise that he would be dead seven years later as one of the few members of German New Cinema who had the gall to admit his generation had failed, but not without giving false hope to the hopeless in the process. 

-Ty E