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Article Excerpt
Murder, it is true, is a banal fact: one can kill the Other; the ethical exigency is not an ontological necessity. ... It also appears in the Scriptures, to which the humanity of man is exposed inasmuch as it is engaged in the world. But to speak, truly, the appearance in being of these "ethical peculiarities"--the humanity of man--is a rupture of being. It is significant, even if being resumes and recovers itself.
--Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity 87
Terrorism in post-war Western Germany culminated in a series of traumatic events during seven weeks in the autumn of 1977. On September 5, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, chairman of the DaimlerBenz Company and president of the German Federation of Industry, was kidnapped by members of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in a gun battle on the streets of Cologne. (1) His four companions were shot to death. In a videotaped statement, Schleyer was forced by his kidnappers to appeal to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt for his release in exchange for that of eleven imprisoned terrorists. In contrast to a preceding prisoner exchange, the government this time refused to negotiate. On October 13, a Lufthansa plane carrying eighty-six passengers was hijacked in an attempt to force the release of the captured RAF members. After a long ordeal including several stops around the Mediterranean, the aircraft eventually landed in Mogadishu, Somalia. On October 18, an antiterrorist elite unit was able to liberate all hostages from this hijacking. On the same day, in the maximum-security prison of Stammheim, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, three members of the RAF, were found dead. The circumstances of these suspected suicides, two of them committed with handguns, were so mysterious that an international commission had to investigate the matter. On October 19, Schleyer's corpse was found in the trunk of an abandoned car on the road to Mulhouse across the French border.
Two Funerals
Germany in Autumn (1977/1978), perhaps the most famous omnibus project of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Werner Herzog, Volker Schlondorff, and Edgar Reitz, among others, was shot in immediate response to the events of what was later called the "German Autumn." It is a film about two funerals: the state funeral of Hanns-Martin Schleyer, murdered by members from the RAF; and the joint funeral of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and JanCarl Raspe. We will have to explore the film's various membranous spaces by fathoming the recurring movement of crossing over politico-discursive as well as stylistic boundaries. The film commences as a documentary of the funeral of Schleyer, notable for the number of well-known visitors among the congregation. Appearing first is ex-Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and worked in the German foreign ministry's radio propaganda department. Other political and industrial elites of West Germany follow, figures such as Flick, Quandt, Filbinger, and von Brauchitsch who are known to the German audience for having paved or accompanied the Nazis' route to power, and who also gained, rather preposterously, prominence after the war in the context of Western Germany's foundation and economic rise. These very visible continuities in the history of the German elite are figuratively engraved into the face of a particular older gentleman marked by scars ensuing from Mensur fencing, the traditional form of fraternity dueling in which the wounds resulting from a hit were seen a badge of honor. This man tries to avert his gaze from the camera yet remains as much a focal point of the lens as the entire assembly of the former elite gathering in the name of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the background flags of the oil company "ESSO" flutter--"ESSO"--four letters amid which the "SS" can hardly hide, that "SS" in which HannsMartin Schleyer held the rank of an officer, an Untersturmfuhrer.
Notable are the many journalists with cameras and microphones. What is documented here for media distribution are condolences as part of a public act of grieving, that is, the passing of someone worth being mourned. The significance of this contiguity of mourning and public discourse, the discursive constitution of something notably grievable, becomes apparent in contrast to the funeral of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe two days later. This funeral, shown at the end of Germany in Autumn, is contested both with respect to its legitimization and its legitimacy; only under difficulties and due to the dismissal of official authorities can a burial place be obtained. A friend of the Ensslin family tells Kluge of the difficulties Gudrun Ensslin's father, Pastor Ensslin, experienced in finding a grave for his daughter and for Baader and Raspe:
Father Ensslin tried hard, despairingly hard, to find graves. In Stuttgart itself he had unbelievable problems convincing the citizens or anyone at all to bury three terrorists, in any case, people who stand outside society [Leute die ausserhalb der Gesellschaft stehen], within the city walls, or within the community [innerhalb von Stadtmauern oder innerhalb einer Gemeinde]. Outside on the land, all right, but not where so-called normal people are buried. (2)
Baader, Ensslin and Raspe stand "outside society" as "abnormal people"; "normal people," by contrast, are buried "within a community." Perhaps "normal people" are humans, fellow human beings (Mitmenschen) whose death causes us pain, people we recognize and with whom we therefore identify, in whose doom we partake. The act of grieving, symbolically taking into society those whom the event of death has placed physically outside society, binding affect-energies in the course of mourning rituals, quelling a pain and filling a vacuum left by the deceased, thus ensuring societal order and continuity for the polity, such acts of grieving seem entirely superfluous when it comes to the deceased Baader, Ensslin and Raspe--or this at least is public opinion. Ensslin's sister tells us: "when I came back from my vacation, the first thing I read in the paper was: 'Into the sewage,' and I knew that the people had already begun to call, 'Let them rot!'" Evidently, Raspe, Baader and Ensslin appear less worthy of grief and, as such, perhaps less human.
The cinematic narrative emerging here could be characterized as a surface discourse largely revolving, on the one hand, around the state funeral of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and involving the participation of the highest dignitaries, and, on the other, around the funeral excluded from public discourse of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe. In addition, we find a more subterranean discourse emerging, juxtaposing one funeral aligned with the generation of the Fascist fathers with another aligned with a younger generation of sons and daughters morally discrediting their parents for their crimes of the past and their crimes of the present. What, we will have to ask, are the implications of Baader, Ensslin and Raspe's funeral, which suggests that they are unworthy of mourning and should be deprived of any public form of recognition, in contrast to Schleyer's appearance as the grievable par excellence? "As to Eteocles, ... there shall be such funeral / as we give to the noblest dead," Creon says in Sophocles's Antigone, as cited in the short mise en abyme television production later in the film. "But as to his brother, Polyneices, ... / it has been proclaimed / that none shall honor him, none shall lament over him." We will return to the question of the interrelation of mourning and the dynamics of societal inclusion and exclusion, the public act of grieving for certain members of the socius, their stylization as "martyr" and paradigmatic "human," and the denial of public grieving as a means of excluding others, allegedly subhuman beings, "Untermenschen." (3)
Clearly, the question of humanization or dehumanization is intimately bound up with the question of presentation, and it is the task of cinematic presentation that Germany in Autumn pursues. In the 1978 manifesto "What is the Film's Bias [Parteilichkeit]?" the eleven filmmakers collectively proclaim: "Autumn 1977 is the history of confusion. Exactly this must be held on to. Whoever knows the truth lies. Whoever does not know it seeks" (Brustellin 81). In a less sweeping voice, filmmaker Bernd Sinkel, in the context of an interview with the directors, says: "We did ... not attempt to present the events of autumn 1977 or parts of them, but to show what kind of statement film can or cannot make about them" ("'Deutschland im Herbst'" 4). (4) When a film like Germany in Autumn, embarking upon an exploration of that spectral atmosphere of autumn 1977, with its anxiety, paranoia, public denunciation, and state authoritarianism, does not seek to present the events of the tragic fall ("nicht versucht die Ereignisse des Herbstes 1977 darzustellen"), what then can it do or state or probe? What can or cannot a film "say" about the events of the German Autumn ("was der Film daruber aussagen kann oder nicht") beyond their cinematic presentation? Those who rhetorically, cinematically, poetically eschew the dominant discourses of intelligibility and reason may be prepared for the traps of truth, whose narration is always only obtainable together with the lie. "Whoever knows the truth lies. Whoever does not know it seeks" ("'Deutschland im Herbst'" 4). Yet are the filmmakers of Germany in Autumn merely seekers? Would it be imaginable that another, whether friend or enemy or merely Other, dies, and those who tell the story give their account from a "neutral" perspective? Beyond the ambiguous rhetoric of the "humane," beyond the problematic efficacy of "humanist" endeavors, the question of the "human" and the act of grieving are intricately linked. The problem of "what is a human," and what it means to present a human being one way rather than another or perhaps not at all, are the very questions Germany in Autumn raises.
This consideration could begin, then, with one of the longest scenes of the film, the twenty-six-minute Fassbinder segment immediately following the funeral of Schleyer. Here the various "conditions" ("Zustande"), political, social, juridical, psychological, are presented in the disputes between a representative of the parental generation and a...
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