Post-trauma, post-queer: the Hitlerian imago and New German Cinema

Abstract

An exploration of the concept of ‘post-queer’ through reinterpreting New German Cinema (NGC) as post-traumatic cinema processing the trauma of the defeat of the Third Reich, reveals the singular complexity of the conflict between the corpus and Nazi Germany's past. An intricate process associated with (post)queerness and masculinity takes place in the transfer between generations in NGC. At one end of the axis is the convoluted body, genderlessness and non-queer a-sexuality of Kaspar, the protagonist of Herzog's The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser; on the other is the ruptured body and anti-queer transsexuality of Elvira in Fassbinder's In a Year of Thirteen Moons. A re-reading of paradigmatic psychoanalytic studies pertaining to Hitler's image that analyzes it as a queer imago, and a close reading of these two paradigmatic filming embodiments, will shed new light on the entire corpus. In this paper, I contend that NGC acknowledges the trauma of the defeat and at the same time subverts fascist-Nazi aesthetics and ideology. Thus, un-queering the Hitlerian imago becomes the morally preferred subject position of the defeated perpetrator.

Keywords:

• New German Cinema
• Hitlerian imago
• post-trauma
• post-queer

Acknowledgements

My thanks to the editor of New Review of Film & Television Studies for his helpful and insightful suggestions, to Thomas Elsaesser for his support, and to Sandra Meiri for her thorough assistance and useful remarks regarding an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

 1. For example, Timothy Corrigan (1983), Thomas Elsaesser (1989), Anton Kaes (1989) and Susan E. Linville (1998).

 2. For analysis of NGC as post-traumatic cinema processing the defeat in World War II, see my book (Morag 2009).

 3. I use the term ‘queer’ following Alexander Doty's definition: ‘The intersection or combination of more than one established “non-straight” sexuality or gender position in a spectator, a text, or a personality’ (1998, 149).

 4. See Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich (1967) and Alexander Mitscherlich (1970). For criticism of the A. Mitscherlich ‘legend’, see Karen Brecht (1995) and Anson Rabinbach (1995).

 5. The prominent directors I discuss are clearly from the second generation, born around 1945. On the symbolic level, all those born around this date belong to this generation.

 6. I consider Linville's criticism (1998) of the misogyny and the matro-phobia in the Mitscherlichs' book as limited. First, she disregards the complexity of the image. Second, she misses the fact that the Mitscherlichs do not suggest the simultaneous existence of more than one possibility for gender and sexuality at different levels.

 7. Lifton (1979) contends ‘[M]ore typical is the quest for vitality around direct biological continuity – the tendency of many survivors to reassert family ties and reproduce, and thereby assert biological and biosocial modes of symbolic immortality. In any case … the struggle for resurgent modes of symbolic immortality, is crucial to the survivor, though rarely recognized as such’ (177).

According to this description, the symbolic structures analyzed in this paper – abandonment of the child, mutant sexuality, destruction of the family unit and couplehood, etc. – are indicative of post-defeat trauma that is uncharacteristic of the survivor as victim. Applying Lifton's terminology, and in light of what he calls the ‘psychic stigma of the annihilated’ (1979, 176), the German male is not presented in NGC as survivor-victim who does all he can to create ‘structures of symbolic immortality’ (building close relationships, establishing a family). Even if NGC as post-traumatic cinema does not overtly accept the position of the perpetrator, it includes a repetitive symbolic structuring of subjectivity that is not characteristic of survivor-victim. Instead, it structures the position of survivor-perpetrator.

 8. See Lacan (1977, 319): ‘But we must insist that jouissance is forbidden to him who speaks as such.’

 9. See Morag (2009).

10. For example, in Kaja Silverman (1981–82, 73–93), Timothy Corrigan (1983, 1986), Thomas Elsaesser (1986, 1989) and Gertrud Koch (1986).

11. This is not pre-Butlerian binarism. Following Grosz (1994, 191), my aim is to focus on this binarism as an open category.

12. See, for example, an analysis of Oskar's body and sexuality in Morag (2006).

13. For example, in Kaja Silverman (1992) and Al La Valley (1994).

14. This assumption prevails in the literature on the subject, including autobiographical research. For example, Judith Shapiro (1991), Sandy Stone (1991), Claudine Griggs (1998), Dwight B. Billings and Thomas Urban (1995).

15. ‘And Erwin said again that he loved him, and Anton said again that if Erwin were a girl, then … Erwin left the brothel as if numbed, and then he did something very strange, something he had never given any thought to before. He hailed a taxi, had himself driven to the airport, booked the next flight to Casablanca, and there, without a trace of hesitation, had himself transformed into a woman in a comprehensive operation’ (Fassbinder 1978, 188).

16. Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Marjorie Garber (1991), Judith Shapiro (1991), Bernice Hausman (1995), Richard Ekins and Dave King (1995), Claudine Griggs (1998), Jay Prosser, (1998, 1–17, 21–60), and Mandy Mek, Naomi Segal and Elizabeth Wright (1998, 1–10).

As Table 1 demonstrates, I differentiate between Gender (soul) and Sex (body/soul). Butler has not succeeded in defining this binarism in the transsexual context.

17. In this context it is worth pointing out that Fassbinder made Thirteen Moons following the suicide of his lover, Armin Meier. Fassbinder was the scriptwriter, director, producer, photographer, editor and designer of the film.

18. Ginsberg (1996, 2) claims that passing is ‘about specularity: visible and the invisible’.

19. See Billings and Urban (1995) on the psychological reactions that characterize transsexuals following a sex-change operation, such as depression, suicide, prostitution and the demand to restore the pre-operation body.

20. Term coined by Dan Diner, quoted in Thomas Elsaesser (1996, 205, 373n25).

21. Ironically, the sole person to address her as a woman does not look at her at all. This is the man Saitz fired because he had cancer.

22. The sole mise-en-scène containing surrounding mirrors is found in the restaurant toilet. Parts of Elvira's face are repeatedly reflected in them. Of course, the ‘body in bits and pieces’ is a metaphorical expression of what dramatically takes place in the scene. It is not specularization that constructs identity.

23. Even if we were to interpret this shot as Elvira's subjective shot seeing herself as the small Erwin looking up to the nun, this remains the single instance representing Elvira's consciousness. Since in this scene we are connected to the nun and Elvira is not present – physically or vocally – it seems to me that the possibility I posit in the text – that the shot evolves from the nun's point of view – is more appropriate. In any event, the absence of eye contact subverts the possibility of establishing Elvira's identity.

24. For example, Alice A. Kuzniar (2000). See especially 57–87 for a totally different perspective on Fassbinder's cinema.