From Caligari to Tarantino

Germany and America in History’s Two-Way Mirror| Uta Grundmann

“History breaks down into images, not stories.”
Walter Benjamin

I
We seem to always understand the here and now too late. Norbert Elias called this history lagging behind, since historical change, though arising from plans, takes place in an unplanned manner. Change may be induced by goals, but history has no goal in itself. This is why events that come to be seen by posterity as historical turning points may even be perceived as such in their own time, but it can only be possible to understand their real meaning and the true nature of changes in outlook and social values when we can look back on their results. If we look at the history of Germany and America in the twentieth century, then this observation is just as true of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 as it is of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, of World War Two and of the Viet­nam War, of the downfall of the communist empire in 1989 and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001—and, today, of the collapse of the financial markets and Barack Obama’s election to president of the United States. All of these events are linked with specific images that we might call “cultural figurations,” with their ensuing effects on collective memory and on specific values associated with them.
Relations between Germany and America have been underpinned by a common history ever since the very first German immigration. Whereas Germany figures as a society that underwent long historical development in “old Europe,” the United States seems to be a country that is forever reinventing itself, because it defines a state of belonging to the American people by means of the neutralization of the origins of the (foreign) individual who enters America. The early immigrants of the seventeenth century already saw themselves as God’s chosen people, with America as an “unspoiled wilderness” gifted to them so that they might erect a “new Jerusalem.” These notions were based on the deep cultural roots of the Puritan Awakening, which committed the nation to renounce the past in the name of progress and to embrace a new visionary future. This is why it is the higher authority of God, promised to each and every individual alone, that to this day holds together American civil society and clearly defines the difference between good and evil. At the same time the “incarnation of the New World” is also the world’s “oldest modernist community,” representing a universal order that saw the emergence of the very first institutions based on democratic principles, freedom, and equality.(1) Both of these states of being—as God’s chosen people and as the pioneers of the rule of law—justified the belief in America as an exceptional society.
There is plenty of evidence that in Germany, notwithstanding much enthusiasm for the USA, America’s mere existence has led to considerable reservations. America is all too often taken for the epitome of the crass rule of money, consumption, and brainless popular culture. Looking, for example, at debates on film as the visual medium of modernism and on the influence of Hollywood on German culture since the early 1920s shows that cinema was equated with everything that a conservative German cultural critique of modernism de­spised—and that critique was then applied to America as a whole. American (film) culture was seen to endanger traditional German high culture as the guarantor of national identity. Still today, the ubiquitous American entertainment industry is met with a subtle paradox: on the one hand it is an infectious object of desire, and thus, in part, internalized as identity; on the other it still engenders unease, as American desires signal the loss of an own cultural authenticity. Why this is the case is perhaps explained by the fact that it was cinema that made America what it is today. Through the movies Americans of different origin and speaking different languages grew together to become a nation with a common history. This was possible because the medium internalized iconic fragments of a myriad of cultures, transforming them into universal myths and legends, which then in turn could be internalized beyond America’s own topographical borders.(2)
The animosity toward America of recent years also has a second origin. World War Two and the Holocaust determined relations between America and Germany like no other historical events; political relations, cultural self-images, and mutual perceptions right up to the present day have been shaped by interpretations of this history, and could even be said to be inextricably interlinked. On both sides of the Atlantic we still encounter a paradoxical rhetoric of direct or indirect metaphors referring to World War Two and the Holocaust. As a result, relations between Germany and America, like those between Germany and Israel, are highly symbolic. Both states are entities that are not defined by how they really are or what they do, but by what they stand for.(3) It really is time to attempt a closer look at this dynamics of mutual cross-referencing, the symbolic nature of each side’s images of the other, and their visual manifestations. Within the context of this catalogue there are, after all, a number of topical questions that might be asked: What is the connection between the unconscious occupation of our visual world by American culture and the unconscious of a policy that advocates military invention in other states; and what is the connection between this occupation of the visual world, or of another country, and the much-cited “ahistoricity” of America itself? Or how are shifts in the American view of German history or Germany’s perception of America manifested?

II
We can be sure that for a long time now the visual has dominated the space of social experience in our societies, and that the technical image media have become the tools of the creation of the world, controlling our cultural perceptions, and impinging on our memories and emotions. Since Antiquity the global knowledge of a given era and cultural space has been collected in symbolic narratives and myths, with fiction making comprehensible order out of the complexity of reality. Today the technical images of the mass media have taken over this function of providing interpretative orientation. Back in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer, the German journalist, film critic, and analyst of modernist mass culture, devoted his energies to decoding the surface appearance and everyday phenomena of contemporary bourgeois society, and in particular cinema, as symbols of the constitution of the age; his goal was to explore these symbols experientially, and thereby to determine their social, historical, and philosophical significance.(4) Kracauer came to see cinema, which he initially had granted the emancipatory potential of revealing true contexts of “physical reality,” as “society’s daydreams” typifying ideals of how society wished to see itself.
In 1941 Kracauer emigrated via France to the USA, and in 1947 he published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film in Princeton. Here he traced images and narratives of German intellectual history that had doubtlessly played a role in the rise of National Socialism. His main thesis was that German Expressionist cinema, from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror, Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse and Metropolis, Paul Wegener’s Golem to Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with their bizarre sets and characters telling of split identity and superior powers, their enslaved masses and evil fates, all reflected deep layers of a collective German mentality that were enacted more or less unconsciously. In consuming these films, the Germans had ascribed to inner psychic dispositions that paved the way for fascist ideology and Nazi tyranny.
Kracauer’s readings can be exemplified in his view of Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which he sees as linked to the filmmakers’ experience during World War One and the early 1920s. The plot of the original screenplay by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer takes place at a fairground, where Dr. Caligari performs with the help of his medium, the sleepwalker Cesare. When the fair enters town a series of murders begins, spreading fear among the inhabitants. A student tries to get to the bottom of the mystery, and discovers that Caligari, who was suspected of being the murderer and takes refuge in an asylum, is in fact a psychiatrist and the director of the asylum, and that he is using Cesare as a “killing machine.” The film’s director Wiene added a framework to the plot, turning it into a tale imagined by someone suffering from mental illness. For Kracauer this amounted to toning down the story to accommodate the tastes of the audience, which would always prefer to be able to declare one of their own insane rather than address questions concerning the interconnection of a lust for power, blind trust in authority, and madness. Kracauer saw this as the film’s real subject; it revealed a collective soul torn between the two extremes of tyranny and chaos. Tyranny, addiction to authority, and a lust for power were, for Kracauer, embodied in the character of Caligari, an early prefiguration of Adolf Hitler, while the plebeian medium of the fairground symbolized the opposite pole, which did not promise freedom, but should rather be understood as the “enclave of anarchy” that breeds chaos. Kracauer further argued that the Expressionist set and lighting served to transform material objects into “emotional ornaments” and to characterize phenomena on the screen as the workings of the soul. In this way, the movie conflated reality and hallucination and exemplified the Germans’ collective retreat into themselves.
Kracauer looks at motifs in the movies he analyzes, including the doppelgänger, recurring mirrors and shadows, dream scenes, and split identities. He sees these in the fantastic tradition of German Romanticism from Chamisso to E.T.A. Hoffmann, and as the dark side of modernism. Using Freudian psychoanalysis he explores the psychic mechanics of these motifs, which are based on inner division and projection as a duel between truth and lies, good and evil, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.(5) Kracauer’s structural analysis of the film material leads to the confirmation of his thesis that the aesthetic effect of these movies is to enforce new constellations of power within the visual programming of the viewers, particularly since the medium itself entails a crucial historical escalation of violence: Where else could the doppelgänger of the real body be immortal? For Kracauer both the world created by the Nazis and the film Caligari were full of acts of terror and panic attacks, of sadism and destruction. He believed that the frequency of these traits in cinema was a sure sign of their significance in the collective unconscious.

III
Kracauer’s book, commissioned by the Rockefeller and the Guggenheim Foundations, was one of the best-received studies on the psychology of German fascism of its time. It was particularly successful in America. His verdict on the traditional German tendency toward antirational, mythological thinking, with its home in the collective unconscious, influences American views on German cinema to this day, in spite of the fact that Germany since 1945 has witnessed a rather distanced relationship to all forms of romantic and fantastic narrative. From Caligari to Hitler was so influential because it seemed to confirm the much-discussed thesis of German collective guilt for fascism. This reading also meant that there was no need to address the darker sides of American history, including anti-Semitism and the fact that the genocide of European Jews had been knowingly not prevented. An unconscious sense of these failings may have contributed to the fact that American cinema took on the responsibility of telling the story of the Holocaust and of making sure that it was widely understood.
Hollywood’s image of Germany remained highly naive even long after the 1938 Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom against the Jews in Germany, and provided a sinister contrast to the news of concentration camps and the war from 1939. This image included entertaining comic movies like The Ducktators of 1942, showing Hitler merely as an object of ridicule. The most important anti-Nazi film of the time, Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler parody The Great Dictator, was made outside Hollywood and met with much controversy in America.
It was only after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the Americans entered the war that Hollywood made films clearly declaring Nazi Germany as the enemy. The subject of anti-Semitism was still avoided entirely, although the US State Department had been informed about plans for a “final solution of the Jewish question” as early as August 1942. The reason for this may well be that the film studios themselves were subject to considerable anti-Jewish sentiment. At the end of the war it was Hollywood cameramen who, as members of US army units, filmed the liberation of the concentration camps, while President Eisenhower had their studio bosses fly to Europe to see the horror of the extermination camps with their own eyes. Now films were to be made that bore witness and promised to educate, since, as Jack Warner said, the mass murder meant that the movie business could no longer justify its fantasy worlds. For the first weeks and months after the war, the newsreels in Germany and America showed authentic pictures from the camps, but economic interests meant that nonetheless the crimes were soon shrouded in collective silence. Germany was now destined to become an American-style democracy, open for American ideas and values—and exports.
By now images of the horrors of war and the camps had long become part and parcel of American postwar cinema. Often it was directors who had emigrated from Germany whose film noir productions looked at both the traumas of recent history and the dark side to the American dream. In 1946 Siegfried Kracauer pointed in his essay on “Hollywood’s Terror Films” to the brutality and authoritarian worldview of these films. He believed that the portrayal of the war and also the newsreel reports on the concentration camps had allowed viewers to become accustomed to hitherto unseen violence on screen, and that this was now functioning as a kind of prophylactic hardening of the psyche. Violence had now become a key feature of American cinema.(6)
The rise of the civil rights movements in the 1960s was accompanied by a new consciousness of Nazi crimes, and not only in Germany. Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremburg of 1961, with Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, and Richard Widmark in the leading roles, was the first movie of this period to draw on documentary archive film, using it as a film within the film. Seventeen years later Marvin Chomsky’s television series Holocaust brought the inconceivable nature of the destruction of European Jewry home to a mass audience. Every second American and between ten and fifteen million Germans watched this melodramatic family epic. It led to controversy in both American and Germany, with debate on whether this version of history as a superficial fiction far from any real experience might not in fact eliminate the real memory of the victims and survivors, and thus deprive the event—the Holocaust—of its historical context. This discussion peaked again in 1993, when Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, his film about the “true story” of the German Nazi party member and factory owner Oskar Schindler, who rescued over a thousand Jews from the Krakow ghetto and a nearby labor camp by recruiting them as workers in his factory. His opponent is the unpredictable and evil camp commandant, SS officer Amon Göth, who stands on his villa balcony like a mad dog, shooting at Jews in the camp as if they were animals. From movie to movie (the examples mentioned are just those that have most influenced images of the Holocaust) the visual horror of mass murder became more realistic, more drastic. These movies also remained committed to Hollywood’s dream of salvation, embodied in a meaningful and concrete plot based on clear notions of good and evil and conveying a message of hope—and thus made it at all possible for viewers to enter into and react to the “experience” of violent Nazi crimes.
Schindler’s List is also a film that no longer refers directly to the historical events, but rather to the images and stories that the media has created and passed down about these events. This movie creates a fiction of history with a documentary character using picture quotations that further inscribe these images as icons of the Holocaust in our collective cultural memory. In this movie, the Holocaust became a component of American culture as the epitome of absolute negation and the measure of all evil.(7)
The same can be said for portrayals of the Germans in films about World War Two. Because Hollywood felt bound to posit a narrative of the war and an image of the Nazis for the whole world, it lost sight of human agency and the historical nature of the crimes. The Nazi became a stereotype of evil pitted against an individualistic positive hero waging war in the name of everything that was good and just.(8)

IV
Moving beyond the analysis of specific film content, Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler can be read as a phenomenology of film as a medium whose aesthetic structure inherently bears the potential to numb audiences to violence and subjugation. This insight is reflected in the opulent novel Flicker of 1991, by the American historian and sociologist Theodore Roszak. His best known book is The Making of a Counterculture, a standard work on the 1960s protest movements. Flicker is an intelligent world conspiracy thriller about cinema as the reflection of cosmic conflict and as a new kind of contemporary prophecy. It is the story of the film student and movie freak Jonathan Gates, who comes across a feature by the German UFA director Max Castle in a dingy underground movie theater in 1950s Los Angeles. This film is about hypnotism, madness, and murder—in the tradition of Dr. Caligari. Via this rather cheap and simple movie, Gates becomes obsessed by Castle, discovering in his movies, which he seeks out with great determination and creativity, an immanent technical effect on the subconsciousness that is able to confront viewers with pure terror—a view into their own souls. The novel cleverly combines a biography of Castle with a history of cinema, and the more Gates learns of the filmmaker and his secrets, the clearer it becomes that he has stumbled upon a massive conspiracy by a secret brotherhood reaching way back into pre-Christian times. Their aim is to take over the world and destroy all kinds of human loyalty, and also to bring about the end of history. Flicker ends on an inconclusive and sinister note on a dark and remote island with a bunker full of movies and a collection of works of German Romanticism, Joseph Conrad, and Raymond Chand­ler, and also a book about film: Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler.(9)

V
The militarization of US society during World War Two and the Cold War radically transformed economic fundamentals. Political culture changed as the victory over Nazi Germany led to a stronger sense of cultural identity. The universality of American values, which had emerged from the heterogeneity of cultures, now ce­mented within American politics a missionary zeal directed at the whole globe, and World War Two was retrospectively seen as a first crusade for freedom and democracy. Victory had now finally given America an irreversible world power status, and it actively pursued its national interests all over in the world. “Retreating” back to the North American continent was not an option.
In the west of Germany(10) after the war there was some ambivalence toward the American victors—who were there to be the new bosses—and liberators—who deserved respect. In addition collective consciousness was deeply insecure, not only having to deal with defeat and unconditional surrender, but also the burden of collective guilt for Nazi crimes. Both of these factors made the Germans more open for outside influence. America justified the Germans turning away from authoritarian rule as a kind of unavoidable fate and committed them to thinking positively and looking to the future. The victor proved to be very generous too, offering the former enemies the prospect of realizing the American dream, and the old cultural order was thus replaced by promises of freedom and democratic security provided by the liberator. When John F. Kennedy spoke in Berlin in 1963 and declared “Ich bin ein Berliner” he turned the perpetrators into victims, and the integration of Germany into the western community of values seemed to be complete.
But 1963 also marks a turning point of another kind, which changed the way the two sides perceived each other and their own self-images. The assassination of Kennedy on November 22 deeply shocked the American public and shook their faith in democracy. The growing civil rights movement, whose best-known proponent, Martin Luther King, repeatedly referred to the Holocaust in his speeches against racism, cast doubt on America’s view of itself as the peak of civilization. But the real damage to the notion of the “good” world power America was inflicted by the Vietnam War and the images of war, in those days still uncensored, that could be seen every evening on television screens all over the Western world. The Vietnam War was a military conflict that began with the objective of defending a bastion of the free world in Southeast Asia, and ended in brutal and uncontrolled violence challenging the entire canon of values that had justified America’s war effort.(11) The thesis may be controversial, but it could be said that the experience of inconceivable suffering in World War Two had become inscribed in the collective memory in images of violence that now played a formative role in the brutal excesses of the Vietnam War. If images are seen as a historical extension of violence, then it makes sense that some elite American units like the marines were only willing to fight if news camera teams were present.(12)
Certain key images have come to symbolize this war: AP photographer Nick Út’s picture of a naked Vietnamese girl covered in Napalm, her arms raised, screaming in fear and pain, walking toward the “viewer,” or the photos of My Lai by the American army photographer Ronald Haeberle, showing a Vietnamese village in which an American unit killed nearly the entire population on March 16, 1968. When the first long article on the My Lai massacre appeared on December 5, 1969, written by Seymour Hersh for Life magazine and including photos by Haeberle, this marked the turn in public opinion about the conflict. In the films of New Hollywood these images of utter brutality reflect a permanent state of emergency that is the complete Other of civilization: scenes of extreme violence, paranoid madness, completely arbitrary acts of killing and being killed. Arthur Penn’s gangster epic Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Sam Peckinpah’s Western The Wild Bunch (1969), Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) are just a few examples. For the first time, films told the primeval American story of violence, of the social reality of these years, and of the ongoing shock of the Vietnam War.
The anti-war protest movement was also a first glimpse of a dual America, torn between an imperialist missionary urge and a fundamentally democratic culture of protest that was deeply rooted in American tradition and that rested on the idea of civil disobedience. The opposition to the government expanded to become a rebellion by large parts of the young generation against technocratic society as such,(13) and this movement too influenced the whole world in various different ways. The German “1968 generation” adopted the slogans and forms of protest of its American forerunners, now giving them a decidedly ideological turn. They publicly demanded that German society take a self-critical look at the Nazi past and came to see themselves as the founders of a morally purified nation. At the same time they accused the United States of fascism while attaching to it anti-capitalist clichés within a conservative cultural critique: America was racist, its civilization superficial, democratic only in the interests of capitalist profit. Meanwhile the social expression of protest in America—literature, film, and above all music—was all too readily integrated into the young Germans’ own self-image and way of life.
The disintegration of the myth of America began in Vietnam, but was not really significant as long as the economic and security interests of the Old World remained identical with those of the United States. The epitome of the convergence of US-German interests was the implosion of the Soviet empire: Germany was reunited, while America won the Cold War. But this collapse of the old order led to a fatal form of triumphalism in the West. The sense of having been proved right by world history(14) led the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and many others along with him, to conclude that the end of history (of violence) had come and that the very spirit of history had determined that the American-European social and political model was the guarantor of the market, of freedom, and of democracy.(15)

VI
The attack on the great symbol of globalization and market fundamentalism—the twin towers of the World Trade Center—followed just over ten years later and not only represented the final decline of the postwar Western world order, but also the end of this history of modernism and capitalism that had culminated in America’s rise to the status of sole world power. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard interpreted the attacks on the World Trade Center as a reaction to America’s demonstrative show of hegemonic power after the breakup of the Soviet sphere of influence. The desire to destroy American dominance derived from its violent colonization of all aspects of life by its exclusively economic logic. This transformed even universal values into a negotiable instrument in the economic sense, with the objective of a unified ideal which subsumes everything that is individual or singular, every other form of culture, and ultimately everything that has non-monetary value.(16) For Baudrillard the economic paradigm of the ubiquity and universality of the meaningless and empty principle of economic exchange was symbolically blown apart by the sacrificial—and so meaningful—death of suicide bombers in a way that was anathema to the Western system.
The fact that seven years later events in Wall Street led to the collapse of the world’s financial markets (with geopolitical consequences that will be just as serious as the fall of the Soviet Union was) seems an irony of history. The collapse of the system repeated the human tragedy of the attacks in the form of a monstrous farce.(17)
September 11, 2001, also marked the return of apocalyptic images. The event corresponded to the character and the aesthetics of a two-thousand-year tradition of apocalypse—heavenly cataclysm, tortuous mass death, panic and flight.(18) In the biblical Book of Revelation, it is not only iniquitous humanity which faces God’s wrath, but also the symbols of spiritual and secular power—those symbols that the collective consciousness of the West has always visualized as the dual towers of city gates and cathedrals. The twin towers in New York represented everything that was American—modernity and progress, innovation and economic power, civilization and freedom—and in targeting them the attackers knew that they were referring to a long tradition in Western symbolism; they made sure that the images of the attack were such that Western observers would all too easily understand.
Baudrillard’s highly controversial idea that the USA had provoked this kind of resistance was in fact inscribed in the American collective consciousness long before he voiced it, as the countless Hollywood visions of imagined catastrophes and the downfall of America (and the whole world) since 1945 show.(19) The images of the attacks were like a déjà vu because they evoked scenarios of apocalypse that we had already experienced in the movies—Flaming Inferno (1974) with Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, and in particular Jack Gold’s The Medusa Touch (1978), with Richard Burton playing the role of John Morlar, who is able to produce catastrophes by mind power and who proves this to a skeptical therapist by steering a full passenger plane into a skyscraper. In this film, too, the television screen becomes the medium by means of which the self can reassure itself of its own identity, since Morlar’s therapist only believes what she has in fact seen with her own eyes when it is confirmed in TV news. Ultimately it is always an image, or the cinema that is “acquainting us with the world we live in” writes Siegfried Kracauer in his Theory of Film. The film image “exhibits phenomena whose appearance in the witness stand is of particular consequence. It brings us face to face with things we dread. And it often challenges us to confront the real-life events it shows with the ideas we commonly entertain about them.”(20) This is particularly true of images of September 11, 2001.
It is no coincidence that The Medusa Touch links the image of Medusa (as envisaged by Caravaggio) with the TV screen. Again Kracauer: “We have learned in school the story of the Gorgon Medusa whose face, with its huge teeth and protruding tongue, was so horrible that the sheer sight of it turned men and beasts into stone. When Athena instigated Perseus to slay the monster, she therefore warned him never to look at the face itself but only at its mirror reflection in the polished shield she had given him. Following her advice, Perseus cut off Medusa’s head with the sickle that Hermes
had contributed to his equipment. The moral of the myth is, of course, that we do not, and cannot, see actual horrors because they paralyze us with blinding fear; and that we shall know what they look like only by watching images that reproduce their true appearance. These images have nothing in common with the artist’s imaginative rendering of an unseen dread but are in the nature of mirror reflections. Now of all existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence on it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The movie screen is Athena’s polished shield.”(21) The image in the shield of Perseus—on the TV screen—appears as the mirror image of the viewer recognizing himself in his desire for ever new television representations of catastrophe.

VII
The apocalyptic aesthetics of the images of the September 11 attack then contributed to the argument for the necessity of the Iraq war. This was apocalyptic thinking, with the war on terror positioned within the dialectic teleology of good and evil. To the world, this war was unlike earlier American “missions” because it remained invisible, at least up to the revelations of Abu Ghraib. Then images of the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers suddenly showed the “meaning” of this war, as symbolic “revenge” for the symbolic attacks in New York. The representation of events at Abu Ghraib related to both Christian iconography and recent art and film. It is certainly no coincidence that the well-known photo of a prisoner wearing a black hood, his arms and legs attached to electrical cables, standing on a stool in a gesture of crucifixion, is reminiscent of an art tableau vivant in performance art, or of Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty, or scenes from films by Pasolini, David Lynch, or Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Torture was staged as a spectacle for the media, following quite definite rules. It was like an initiation rite into the ubiquitous culture of shamelessness and the obscene pleasure of brutality, sex, and violence that underscores the “American way of life.”(22)
Russian philosopher Boris Groys interpreted these images as an attempt to force the aesthetics of Western contemporary art onto another culture, compelling it to adapt and thus destroying it in the process. The terrorist, he argues, sacrifices his life but is not prepared to sacrifice his dignity. In contrast, the West is always willing to sacrifice dignity, while death has no symbolic value due to the taboos that civilization has attached to it. This degradation is a programmatic calculated loss that has long been the essence of commercial mass culture, and it was this that images from Abu Ghraib re­vealed.(23)
These images were especially perfidious because their real target was in fact the perception of the viewers—and not just the tortured and their torturers. The aim was to make the observers looking at the pictures accomplices in the act of torture. The torturers instrumentalized the bodies of the prisoners so as to create a pictorial document of themselves as powerful and armed. This symbolic “act of image” creates a “reality” that is just as effective as the real use of weapons, since for many years to come it will determine the image of America in the Arab world.(24)
 
VIII
The way the visual media treated the events of September 11, 2001, or Abu Ghraib, showed that war is always also a battle for the control of the production and mediation of images. Reporting on the Vietnam War contributed to the loss of public support, and Hollywood’s critical interest began only several years after US troops withdrew. In contrast, there are no images of battle, or of the dead and wounded, from the “war on terror” in Afghanistan und Iraq, whereas quite a number of American feature films seem to have taken on the function of the news media in reporting and reflecting on the state of the American soul—films like the fictional documentary Redacted (2007) by Brian de Palma, a “soldier’s diary” about the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl and her family, and Paul Haggis’s film In the Valley of Elah (2007), in which the war has already come to America and is continued in a barracks at home. The war no longer appears as the hell of an anti-civilization as it did in the Vietnam films, but as everyday work and routine seen from the perspective of “geostrategic death workers” as in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009). This is the story of a special unit defusing bombs in Baghdad. The proximity of death becomes an elixir of life, and the only real psychological challenge that the soldiers now face is selecting just one breakfast cereal from the endless supermarket shelves when on leave back home. The American TV series Generation Kill (2008), which follows a reconnaissance unit of US Marines during the first weeks of the invasion of Iraq, and shows all sorts of strategic blunders, describes the war no longer as the opposite of civilization, but rather as its continuation by other means. One of the soldiers asks himself why they are in Iraq, and answers that the reason is “to set up a forward Starbucks” with “some shitty fucking music playing, like Norah Jones, a couple of high-school girls getting super fat on iced lattes, a homeless guy trying to scam the key to the restroom, and some faggot writing his novel on a laptop.”(25)
Even more than these movies specifically about the “war on terror,” contemporary American cinema in general is focusing on the nature of violence per se as if it were the anamnesis of a nation: No Country for Old Men (2007) by the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), and also Christopher Nolan’s bleak and completely amoral Batman film The Dark Knight (2008) all thematize the brutalization of an entire society and its impotence in the face of its own tradition of violence.
The main protagonist of The Dark Knight is the Joker, a character with the aura of a clinical schizophrenic. Played by Heath Ledger, with the mask of terror as a cruel grin cut into his face, he is the allegory of a world in which good and evil merge, madness rules, and anarchy is the norm. Here Siegfried Kra­cauer’s reading of Dr. Caligari comes to mind: Kracauer sees the motif of fairground anarchy and chaos as the flipside of tyranny. With devilish sadism the Joker confronts his opponent Batman with one agonizing decision after another—decisions like that at the center of Alan J. Pakula’s Holocaust film Sophie’s Choice (1982), in which a mother on her way to a concentration camp is asked to decide which of her two children to save. In this way the struggle against the enemy without becomes an internal conflict of the soul that leads to the hero’s downfall.
Comic characters like Batman and Superman (“Superman is how America views itself. Batman is how the rest of the world views America”—Michael Caine) play a similar role in American culture to the heroic legends of Ancient Greek mythology. Like the gods, the super heroes of America have to subconsciously conquer the fears within deep layers of the collective soul (Siegfried Kracauer), so as to create a brief moment of hope. In Nolan’s film the hope has completely disappeared. The dialogue between the self-doubting ambivalence that Batman represents and Joker’s amoral nihilism reveals the whole hopelessness of the war against terror. All that remains is anarchy and chaos.

IX
Probably the most intelligent parable on cinema in itself, on cinema and its relationship with violence, on the “nature” and the “culture” of German fascism, on America’s view of the history of World War Two and the great narrative that it has become over the years, on that narrative’s visual metaphors and their inscription in memory, on the shifting view of Germany today—is Quentin Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds.(26) This is a wild and ironic fairy-tale spectacle in which cinema is allowed to triumph over fascism. Tarantino does not add another story to all the stories of World War Two, but has his characters permanently talk about language and images, with some interruptions for the director’s typical scenes of sudden and almost comic violence. Various kinds of betrayal and terror, power games and revolt are in evidence on both sides in this film. Habitual notions are deconstructed, and all the stereotypes turned on their heads: the hero, the Nazi, the Diva, the Jew, the Jewess. If the function of cinema is ultimately to allow a new perspective on reality and history, then the fact that the American director Tarantino made a film about German history that was shot in Germany with German actors in most of the main roles is the clearest evidence there can be that American perceptions of Germany have changed.
The plot of this fantastic correction of history in five chapters is simple enough. A group of Jewish-American soldiers is put down in occupied France so as to act as “basterds” and kill as many Nazis as they can. The leaders of these guerillas are the uneducated and somewhat vulgar “American Indian” lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and Sergeant Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) aka “The Bear Jew.” The French Jewess Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent) survives the massacre of her family in 1941, which was ordered by the decidedly charming and cultivated mephistophelean character SS colonel Hans Landa alias “The Jew Hunter” (Christoph Waltz). Under a false identity, Dreyfus runs a cinema theater in Paris, which she resolves to blow up, along with herself and the whole audience, using her entire collection of flammable 35mm film reels. The occasion she chooses is the German premiere of the propaganda film Nation’s Pride about the successful sniper Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who plays himself in the film, and who is an admirer of Dreyfus. The basterds also decide to plan an attack, together with British special agent Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), who before the war wrote books about German cinema, after hearing from the German UFA star actress and Allied agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) that Hitler (played as a choleric clown by Martin Wuttke), Goebbels (grotesquely embodied by Sylvester Groth) and their entire entourage will be guests of honor at the film gala. At the end the cinema goes up in flames—as a result of both attacks.
Like Jonathan Gates, the hero of Theodore Roszak’s Flicker, Tarantino spent his youth in Los Angeles in the cinema, and there saw every genre of European trash and American B-movies, and like Gates his passion became his profession. And while Flicker is a book about film whose manipulative power serves a gigantic fascist conspiracy, Inglourious Basterds is a film about film—whose power triumphs over the Third Reich. In his film, Tarantino refers to Enzo G. Castellari’s absurd movie Inglorious Bastards of 1978, which itself is a remake of Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen of 1967. Inglourious Basterds thus plays with diverse film traditions, which are cleverly intertwined. The names of the characters refer to other film characters and real actors; scenes and camera shots are ironically adapted using the styles of various periods and genres: UFA films from the Third Reich and war propaganda, Nouvelle Vague, spaghetti Westerns, and Italian World War films, the dirty war movies of the 1960s and 1970s, and Tarantino’s own oeuvre. The different narrative strands finally converge in the movie theater, whose destruction not only liberates the world of the Nazis but also of its symbolism. Tarantino clearly shows that images and language are just as much a part of the crime as they are of resistance to that crime.
Inglourious Basterds also reacts to the repressed history of Hollywood—the blindness of American Jews toward the fate of their European counterparts. It realizes the dream of the Jewish screenplay writer Ben Hecht, who invested an enormous amount of energy in his attempt to finance a “Jewish” group of partisans in Europe, but failed in the face of the opposition of the leading Jewish protagonists in Hollywood. Tarantino might not have known that this kind of lone warrior really existed. But he created one in the character of Corporal Wilhelm Wicki (Gedeon Burkhard), a Jew of Austrian origin who emigrated to America and then returns to France in the service of the American OSS secret service, a basterd character resembling the real Austrian Rudolf Charles (actually Karl Hugo) von Ripper (1905–1960), right down to physical likeness. Baron von Ripper was a Surrealist painter and a drug-addicted bohemian who frequented artists’ circles in Berlin and Paris, until he was arrested and badly beaten by the Gestapo in 1933. He served in the French Foreign Legion and fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. In 1938 he emigrated to the USA and he lost his German citizenship in 1939 when his satire on Hitler, From the Unholy Organist, a Hymn of Hate (from the cycle Ecrasez l’Infame!), appeared on the cover of Time magazine. In 1941 he volunteered for the US Army and was sent several times behind the enemy front lines as an Office of Strategic Services officer with the aim of kidnapping or liquidating high-ranking Nazi officers. He was placed top of internal “Nazi-hunting” lists within the OSS, and his nickname was Jack the Ripper.


X
The end of a world that was divided politically and morally into two seems to be the key development of the last twenty years. If we look at the history of Germany and America since the early twentieth century through the mirror of media representation (as I am attempting to do in this essay), then one thing is sure: This is a history of common political and economic success that also stands as a history of the global advance of the market and freedom, of Wes­tern ways of life and culture all linked in a horrifying manner to a history of the violence of modernization.(27) War and violence and the visual medium of modernity, the cinema, are clearly simultaneously intertwined. The military occupation of another country that has been a preferred instrument in American politics since World War Two, and the occupation of the visual world by American culture understanding itself as a world culture because it has appropriated the treasures of the imagination and worldviews of “other” cultures, are therefore two sides of one coin. Both of them correspond to a dialectic of triumphal self-representation and repressed acts of violence toward other cultures, accompanied by the idea that the nation can reinvent itself at will.(28) For a long time the frequently violent process of modernization was synonymous with Americanization, and not just in Germany. Today the same can be said of the phenomenon of globalization. But to apportion responsibility in this way is wrong. “I’m not a monster, I’m just ahead of the curve,” laughs the Joker in Nolan’s The Dark Knight. That can apply to America too; America is not the “monster” that has unleashed modernization and globalization, but merely the “beginning” of this development.(29)
Walter Benjamin believed that the past could be changed by what people do in the present. By that he meant that with the knowledge of the consequences of past events, history could be rewritten. Present action can bring to light the hidden significance of history and thus make renewal possible. That also means that to delete the past would be to block the way forward into the future. The election of Barack Obama to US president last fall was seen throughout the world as America’s avowal of its multi-ethnic identity and acknowledgement of its history of racism. In Benjamin’s sense this was a sign of “redemption” and showed that the four-hundred years of civil war that black America had collectively experienced were overcome. The politics of recent months has shown that Obama’s government no longer divides the world neatly into good and evil, and one effect has been to redefine America’s relations with Germany and view of German history.(30) Above all the significance of the Holocaust has shifted. While remaining a key experience that determined identity within the common history of the two nations, it no longer stands for unique German guilt and German “mission,” but now serves as a moral universal in a global condemnation of any racist politics, of politics of exclusion, and of genocide; the mass media presentation of the Holocaust in American films played the key role in this shift in meaning.(31) But neither Barack Obama’s presidency itself nor Germany’s new role in alliance with America mean that critical assessment of the national catastrophes of history can now be laid aside. Like Benjamin’s theses, Siegfried Kracauer’s concept of the “redemption” of history depends on revealing specific experiences through images, since only the image preserves knowledge and experience, and since it is in the image that the power of Perseus can unfold: “In addition, the myth [of the Medusa] suggests that the images on the shield or screen are a means to an end; they are to enable—or, by extension, induce—the spectator to be­head the horror they mirror. [...] Perhaps Perseus’ greatest achievement was not to cut off Medusa’s head but to overcome his fears and look at its reflection in the shield. And was it not precisely this feat which permitted him to behead the monster?”(32) It remains essential to do as Perseus: look in the mirror.

(1)     Dan Diner, “Vorreiter der Moderne: Warum sind die Vereinigten Staaten vielen Menschen so suspekt,” SPIEGEL online, October 21, 2008.
(2)    Like photography, film developed as a global means of communication in the context of the dissemination of the capitalist world order. In his 1981 essay “The Traffic in Photographs,” the American photographer and critic Allan Sekula investigates the 1955 New York MoMA photo exhibition “The Family of Man,” and shows that a technological understanding of photography as the universal language of humanity is inextricably linked to capitalist power interests. This insight also holds true for film. See Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal, vol. 41, no. 1, spring 1981, 15–24. American pop culture’s appropriation of themes and motifs from the world’s cultures was shown for example in the exhibition “Walt Disneys wunderbare Welt und ihre Wurzeln in der europäischen Kunst” (Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Munich 2008).
(3)    C. K. Williams, “Das symbolische Volk der Täter,” DIE ZEIT, no. 46, November 7, 2002.
(4)    Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge/ MA 1995).
(5)    See Friedrich Kittler, “Roman­tik – Psychoanalyse – Film: eine Doppelgängergeschichte,” in Draculas Vermächtnis: Technische Schriften (Leipzig 1993), 83.
(6)    S. Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films. Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” Commentary, August, 1946, 132–136. At the time of this publication, the journal Commentary was unofficially financed by the CIA. After the war the American government decided on a secret program to control the entire Western cultural industry as part of its campaign against communism. Right up to the 1960s, the CIA employed organizations such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and financed radio channels, newspapers and magazines, concerts and congresses in an attempt to gain above all the support of the West European non-communist left. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London 1999).
(7)    On the portrayal of the Holocaust in the movies see Daniel Anker, Hollywood und der Holocaust, ARTE/ZDF Television documentary of 2004; and Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Frankfurt am Main 2007).
(8)    Georg Seeßlen, “Schwarze Stiefel, kalter Blick: Über Hollywood und die Nazis,” Freitag, no. 34, August 20, 2009.
(9)    Theodore Roszak, Flicker (Chicago 1991).
(10)    On the image of America in East Germany see the article by Thomas Irmer in this volume.
(11)    On the war crimes perpetrated by the USA in Vietnam see Bernd Greiner, Krieg ohne Fronten: Die USA in Vietnam (Hamburg 2007).
(12)    See F. Kittler, “Romantik – Psychoanalyse – Film” (note 5), 93. Kittler, one of the most influential and controversial contemporary media critics in Germany, argues that war is the true driving force behind the development of media technologies. He rightly notes that the media not only program their consumers in terms of power structures (Kracauer), but also that in modernity the individual capable of reflecting on him- or herself is the product of a comprehensive form of psychological “mobilization” by the media. See Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon Film Typewriter (Berlin 1986).
(13)    Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (New York 1969).
(14)    Jürgen Habermas, “Nach dem Bankrott. Ein Gespräch über die Notwendigkeit einer internationalen Weltordnung,” DIE ZEIT, no. 46, November 6, 2008.
(15)    Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York 1992).
(16)    Jean Baudrillard, “‘Das ist der vierte Weltkrieg.’ Ein Gespräch über Amerikas Feldzug gegen den Terrorismus, den Widerstand gegen die Globalisierung und die Unbesiegbarkeit des Bösen,” SPIEGEL online, January 15, 2002; see also Jean Baudrillard, “The Spirit of Terrorism,” Telos, no. 121, fall 2001.
(17)    Slavoj Zizek, “Use Your Illusions,” London Review of Books, November 14, 2008.
(18)    Otto Karl Werckmeister, “Ästhetik der Apokalypse,” in Krieg und Kunst, ed. Bazon Brock and Gerlinde Koschik (Munich 2002), 196.
(19)    See Tom Engelhardt, “Ängste, Filme, Phantome: 9/11 – Terror und Kriegspolitik in einer medienimprägnierten Welt,” in Lettre International, no. 74, fall 2006; on the allusions to motifs from ancient mythology and the Jewish-Christian cultural tradition in American films see Gabriele Werner, “Christliche Ikonografie: Glaubensbekenntnis, Kulturtradition oder Metapher,” in WARUM! Bilder diesseits und jenseits des Menschen, ed. Matthias Flügge and Friedrich Meschede (Ostfildern-Ruit 2003).
(20)    S. Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton 1997), 304–305.
(21)    Ibid.
(22)    Susan Sontag, “Endloser Krieg, endloser Strom von Fotos,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 24, 2004; and Slavoj Zizek, “Die Amerikaner kontrollieren gar nicht! Nicht mal sich selbst!” Berliner Zeitung, June 23, 2004.
(23)    Boris Groys, “Die Körper von Abu Ghraib,” in Die Kunst des Denkens (Hamburg 2008), 68–86.
(24)    Horst Bredekamp / Ulrich Raulff, “‘Wir sind befremdete Komplizen.’ Triumphgesten, Ermächtigungsstrategien und Körperpolitik: Wie sind die Bilder der gequälten Gefangenen aus Abu Ghraib zu deuten?” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 28, 2004.
(25)    See Katja Nicodemus, “Mein Job im Irak,” DIE ZEIT, no. 34, August 13, 2009. Transcript www.movietranscriptions.com, accessed September 20, 2009.
(26)    Georg Seeßlen, Quentin Tarantino gegen die Nazis: Alles über Inglourious Basterds (Berlin 2009).
(27)    Thomas Assheuer, “Piraten der neuen Welt. Baudrillard, Enzensberger, Guéhenno, Rancière: Einige Theorien über den Ursprung von Gewalt und Terror in der Moderne,” DIE ZEIT, no. 40, September 26, 2001.
(28)    Manfred Henningsen, Der Mythos Amerika (Frankfurt am Main 2009).
(29) D. Diner, “Vorreiter der Moderne” (note 1).
(30)    The shift in political rhetoric was noticeable when Barack Obama visited the concentration camp in Buchenwald in June this year. He did not speak of the American victory over the Nazis, but of the shock American soldiers experienced when they “liberated” Germany. He spoke of the “cruelty in ourselves” that we have to protect ourselves against, and on the podium he stood behind the Jewish survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
(31)    In their book Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt am Main 2001) Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that in the case of memory of the Holocaust a global harmonization of values represents clear progress, with a new cosmopolitan memory. See also note 7.
(32)    S. Kracauer, Theory of Film (note 20), 305–306.

Uta Grundmann is an art historian and works as a freelance author, project manager, copy-editor and graphic designer in Berlin. She is co-author of the book Revolution im geschlossenen Raum. Die andere Kultur in Leipzig 1979–1990 (2002).