“Das ist vorbei”: Untimely Encounters with Neoliberalism in Christian Petzold’s dffb Student Films

Harun (Farocki’s) premise was the insight that we do not even have any new images of capitalism yet. Sure, we have these airport boarding zones, where we see modern people with laptops, reading high-gloss magazines, wearing Rolexes and Burberry clothes. All this is only a surface, but we do not have images for how this new form of capitalism operates. We have books about it, but we do not find those images in films. In cinema, capitalism is still being imaged as Charles Chaplin did in Modern Times (1936).¹

In his career-spanning interview with Christian Petzold,²  Jaimey Fisher prompts the director to reflect on his student years (1988-1994) at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb), which coincided with the Wende – the fall of the Wall and the subsequent unification of East and West Germany.³ In this extremely interesting albeit short section in what is a far-ranging interview, Petzold briefly discusses one of his earliest filmic efforts, his short film Ostwärts –Fernverkehrsstrasse 2 (1990). Petzold claims he decided to make this twenty-four-minute film because at the time he had the sense that no filmmaker had yet “found a language to express what had happened” in the GDR.⁴ Prompted by documentary filmmaker Peter Nestler, who in a dffb seminar that Petzold attended had told his students that they should take their cameras and “look at what is happening,”⁵ he and his small cohort, including Thomas Arslan, set out to make short films to accomplish just this: to look at what is happening at that very moment and in so doing both enact cinema’s witnessing function and commence the laborious effort of developing a filmic language that might be able to express what had happened to the GDR as well as what had just gotten underway in unified Germany. Self-critically, Petzold assesses his own effort with scepticism. While praising Arslan’s film Am Rand (1991) as “very beautiful,” he expresses dismay about most other moving images produced at the time, including his own: “But mostly people shot things as if they were downloaded from the Internet, the images that we all knew. And I myself could not manage it – I did not really find any images, at that point, for the Wende. I realise that I should have directed the camera at myself as well.”⁶

While I think the experience of watching Ostwärts lends some support for Petzold’s self-critical assessment of his failure to find any images for the Wende with this early effort, the film nevertheless holds (film) historical interest because it somehow manages to capture the emergence of a process of subjectivation that would eventually come to define Petzold’s concerns as a filmmaker: the (German) people’s becoming-economic in the immediate post-wall era.⁷ It is perhaps no exaggeration to claim that Petzold must be credited as having been among the very first (German) filmmakers to have managed, intuitively if not intentionally, to render visible in filmic form a process that at the time was still in its nascent state but that eventually would, in my view, become more era-defining for unified Germany than unification itself: what we might want to call the neoliberalisation of Germany. This encroachment of neoliberalism upon Germany would of course productively serve Petzold with narrative fodder over the next two decades, whether for his early efforts such as Pilotinnen (Pilots, 1995) and Die Beischlafdiebin (The Sex Thief, 1998), his better-known later films Yella (2007) and Jerichow (2008), or his Dreileben contribution, Etwas Besseres als den Tod (Beats Being Dead, 2011).

Indeed, watching Ostwärts as well as some of his other early efforts – in particular Süden (1989), Weiber (1989), and Das warme Geld (1992) – I think it is possible to argue, as I intend to do below, that those student efforts, contrary to Petzold’s self-assessment, can be considered untimely responses to a process that would register on the broader public’s consciousness only belatedly, many years later. That is, while it is hardly news today to point out that Germany has been neoliberalised, at the time of the Wende the economic (and thus also political) transformation it would effect was still muted, hardly noticeable to all but the most astute socio-political observers. This process and its potential effects on the German socius were certainly not widely discussed, perhaps because the immediacy and magnitude of the seemingly era-defining event of unification itself blocked attention to and discussions of most anything else, but perhaps also because at the time neither the internet nor what we now call the sharing and service economies that are so characteristic of neoliberal capitalism (in the West, in any case) had fully developed in Germany yet.

It is because of this socio-political context – that neoliberalism was not yet really “in the German air,” as it were – that I think Petzold’s dffb films can be considered untimely. Only today, perhaps, with the benefit of historical hindsight, is it possible to fully recognise that they were already responding to something – specifically: a new mode of power – that back then was merely “emerging” and had not yet become “dominant” (to appropriate Raymond Williams’ terminology);⁸ but, importantly, as I shall discuss below, Petzold’s goal was, even at such an early stage of his filmmaking career, not just to have his films show what “is” (that is, to merely represent the state of affairs) but also to act upon the potential of these really existing but still mostly dormant and thus primarily virtual forces in order to help actualize them at a future time, a time to come – but to actualize them in a counter-effectuating manner.⁹ That is, even these earliest filmic efforts in his filmography evidence how he approaches filmmaking as a matter of intervening in the distribution of the sensible, to use Jacques Rancière’s influential phrase: to use film not so much to teach viewers a lesson (à la Michael Moore, say) but to make us see, sense, and perceive something that the existing distribution of the sensible has blocked from our perceptive apparatus; and, as I have argued elsewhere, such re-distributing of the sensible is often a matter of a haptic or affective force to which Petzold’s films manage to subject his viewers.¹⁰

In an interview, Petzold recalls that Ostwärts’s topical focus was also inspired by Nester, who had told him: “What lies ahead of us is post-communism. Now there is the Treuhand. Now the world of work will be destroyed. These people do not even know yet what they will have to face. They will no longer have work, they will live in areas where there is no longer any industrial production.”¹¹ And Ostwärts (the full German title translates as “Eastbound – Freeway 2”) does image this suddenly emerging state of affairs both in the three conventionally shot interviews that form the film’s core and in the transitional shots of bare, uninviting landscapes, roads that are only infrequently traversed by cars or trucks, industrial wastelands that exhibit hardly any activity, or a train station – examples of the very non-places to which Petzold’s oeuvre time and again returns and the depiction of which resonates with Marc Augé’s work, to which Petzold frequently refers in interviews later on in his career.¹²

Derelict industrial landscapes in Christian Petzold’s Ostwärts –   Fernverkehrsstrasse 2

Viewed from the historical distance of a quarter of a century, the film, in devastating yet prescient ways, puts the lie to what at the time was the dominant unification discourse, which Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s rhetoric of “blühende Landschaften” (flowering landscapes) so powerfully framed: “By working together, we will manage to transform Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia into flowering landscapes in which it will be worthwhile to live and work.”¹³ Ostwärts’s auditory and visual archive shows that it was possible – at the very time when Kohl’s remark powerfully impacted the distribution of the sensible of what could be seen, sensed, and perceived about the reality of unification – to make visible, sensible, and perceivable precisely that which the overriding contemporary political discussion refused to acknowledge: the illusory if not delusional belief that the incorporation of the East into West German Basic Law would be anything but a takeover governed by economic and social principles that would challenge not only the lived experience of citizens of former East Germany, who were used to a planned socialist economy, but also the lived experiences of citizens of former West Germany, who were used to living in a social market economy.¹⁴

Petzold’s own words capture this sense of illusion, if not delusion. Remembering his thinking at the time of the film’s production, he tells his interviewers that back then he felt that people “from the East believed that one could earn money with this [computer courses, face art royal]. And those from the West thought that this [the East] is a new kind of California.”¹⁵ This dialectic – people from the East embracing “Western ways,” on the one hand, and, on the other, people from the West looking at the East as the German equivalent of the “Wild West,” as a land of endless opportunities – manifests itself in the film’s three interviews. The first interview features a young woman who relocated from the West in order to start anew – she claims that people in the new, but not in the old, Federal states accept her art, that people in the West reject things that are new, and that over there, art is tied to competition; in contrast, she says, in the East people are more open to new things, to avant-garde things, as she puts it.

First interviewee: Face Art Royal. Christian Petzold, Ostwärts –  Fernverkehrsstrasse 2

The second interview shows a man who describes the building complex we see in the frame, which is essentially a job-training site for East Germans; he expresses hope that at some time all of this would yield some success.

Second interviewee. Christian Petzold, Ostwärts – Fernverkehrsstrasse 2

But I think it is the third interview – which features a fifty-year old former factory worker who built his own snack restaurant, well knowing that he would soon be laid off due to the Treuhand’s takeover of his former employer – that is the most interesting.¹⁶

What is fascinating is how lucidly this man gives voice to the very forces of neoliberal capitalism that must have been utterly new to him (but also to most Germans of the time, including the implied viewers for this film).¹⁷ Contrasting his entrepreneurial effort to the production-based economic activity of his former employment, he describes how he found himself eventually soliciting help from West German advertisement specialists in order to attract more customers to his fledgling business.¹⁸ The man expresses, understandably, hope for more profit, saying: “We all must place our hope in the future. But whether it will get better: we don’t know.”

Third interviewee. Christian Petzold, Ostwärts – Fernverkehrsstrasse 2

What the film reveals, here, is how the man is no longer reduced to productive labour but – worse, the film implies – to ineffable hope. We might say that the precise way in which he links necessity – must (müssen in the original) – and hope expresses the essence of the very neoliberal regime of power the emerging forces of which the film captures. After all, neoliberalism “governs by metaphorizing the market as a game, […] the state as its umpire, and […] individuals and populations as players for whom all choices are in principle possible – with the one exception of the choice not to play the game of the market at all” (20).¹⁹ Neoliberalism is predicated on us affirming our subjectivity as hopeful gamblers: we have no choice but to play, to gamble, to hope that the role of the neoliberal dice will yield a (more) profitable future. Yet, the film’s images presciently reveal that this hope, predicated on a desperate embracing of a process of becoming-economic, will prove to be successful in one specific way only: namely, insofar that the subjectivity of people like this man would become permeated with economic imperatives (out of need), while nevertheless, in most cases, not being able to achieve the hoped-for economic profit and well-being (something Yella and Jerichow powerfully dramatize in fictional, genre-specific ways). Watching the film a quarter century later is a harrowing experience, which is further intensified by the film’s stark documentary images of a landscape (and its people) that was anything but flowering and that, so those images implied already in 1990, would never be able to flower under the newly emerging regime of a “lighter,” non-production-based version of capitalism.

*****

But let us return to Fisher’s interview with the director: Petzold, by now a seasoned subject of hundreds of interviews, is undoubtedly one of the best analysts of his own work, and we would perhaps be well-advised to heed Nora Alter’s cautionary observation that we should not rely too heavily on directors’ retrospective statements about their own films, no matter how brilliant and suggestive their own account of their work might be.²⁰ Still, I think three points are worth foregrounding from this brief yet richly suggestively passage. First, Petzold’s remark about the need to find a (new film) language in order to render visible the transformational moment of the Wende gives voice to his belief that the real task for a filmmaker who wants to engage the world on a political level is not to make political films but to make films politically, to recall once more Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum.²¹ It is not enough simply to take a camera and capture what is in front of it; instead, an appropriate cinematic form has to be found if one wants to avoid producing the very clichés about, in this case, the Wende, which Petzold felt had already been dominating Germany’s small and large screens at the time (and that are hardly absent from productions that are more contemporary to our own moment).

Differently put – and this is the second point I want to make – this brief discussion in Fisher’s interview also highlights Petzold’s sense, already manifest during his student years, that filmmaking is also always a matter of attending to film history and historiography – and, I want to add, therefore also of film theory. The filmmaker has to be aware of both the history of images lest he merely reproduce them (and thus produce little more than clichés) and of how every film writes and re-writes the history of that which it renders visible.²² This awareness allows the filmmaker to abstract from the fullness of the screen the already existing images of an event in order to image something that we have not yet seen and that, importantly, might have enough force to impact how we subsequently might write the history of both the filmic engagement with the event and the event itself.²³

And, thirdly, to be able to do so – to abstract from a screen that is virtually jam-packed with other images, with clichés – it is imperative for a filmmaker to be alert to the present, or rather to how the present is always already bifurcating into past and future, is always, as Deleuze argues, the actualization of the virtual.²⁴ Or in more recognisable language established from the ongoing conversation about Petzold’s work, Petzold’s account about the need to look at what is happening is a remark about his desire to be present to both spatial and temporal transitions. Such transitions spatially manifest themselves in a preponderance of non-places in his films – what he himself frequently describes as “bubble” worlds – and, temporally, as an affectively felt sense of belatedness.²⁵ It is not only his films’ characters who profoundly feel this sensation of having arrived too late but also Petzold himself, who, as a leftist, is keenly aware of the fact that in the genealogy of (German) filmmakers and intellectuals his post-Wende moment is one that is decidedly after “1968.” As an intellectual filmmaker, he takes seriously the fact that he has arrived after something important has passed: to wit, the very conditions of possibility for a left politics and aesthetics that the cipher ’68 names – something of which we have now only rapidly fading memories but that were still available as lived experience to the filmmakers who taught him at the dffb and most profoundly influenced his ideas about filmmaking, especially his friend and mentor, the late Harun Farocki. And because of his own sense of having arrived too late for this kind of left politics and filmmaking aesthetics, as well as how this sense of belatedness is inscribed into his films through his characters, the mood of his films arguably compels viewers to partake in this sense, in this sensation, of having come too late as well; by cinematically subjecting us to this sensation of belatedness, his films force us to confront one of the central affective states of our own neoliberal world: its relentless a-historicism, its hyper-presentism.²⁶

As a first step to develop a film form capable of encountering the present qua transition – a step that today he might likely dismiss as a dead-end and that, in any case, is singular in his oeuvre – Petzold made what is arguably his most radically experimental film, Süden (which translates as “South”).²⁷ A ten-minute short shot on 8mm colour film stock, the film constitutes perhaps the director’s most avant-gardist effort. With no discernible plot or characters (we see various people, shot from chest down), the film is essentially an exercise in montage, linking a series of shots depicting cars, fragments of buildings, roads, newspapers blowing in the wind, a woman in her underwear, and a number of books shown in close-up, including the German translations of two pulp fiction greats, Jim Thompson’s Texas by the Tail (1965) and James M. Cain’s Career in C Major and Other Stories (1943), as well as Joseph Conrad’s novella The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897).²⁸ As the montage continues to single out in close-up the covers of books lying on the floor, we discover also Siegfried Kracauer’s classic film theory book, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), and another hallmark of film theory that in 1989 had just been made available in German translation, Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (originally published in French in 1983), in which the philosopher begins to revolutionise how we think about the cinema, arguing against the dominant view of the cinema as signifying or representational medium and instead puts forth an argument for its arepresentational, asignifying nature.²⁹

Books in the wind. Christian Petzold, Süden

Film Theory books. Christian Petzold, Süden

Essentially an example of associative montage, this scene is best understood as a loosely configured commentary on the film’s production circumstances: shot in a hot climate (similar to Thompson’s novel’s setting),³⁰ with a soundtrack of the Uruguayan band Sexteto Electronico Moderno’s song “Vivre pour Vivre” (the title story of Cain’s story collection is about a contractor who becomes an opera singer and reveals the author’s knowledge of music), the film is lit in an almost overexposed manner – the bright hot sunlight that gives the film an impressionistic character (the preface of Conrad’s novella is often considered a manifesto of literary impressionism).³¹ Each shot goes out of its way to register the material phenomena its gaze beholds in their opaque material singularity, as if to foreground their arepresentational signaletic force rather than their signifying quality (Deleuze) in order to visualize Kracauer’s central argument that “all these shots are more or less free-hovering images of material reality. As such they also allude to contexts unrelated to the events which they are called upon to establish. Their cinematic quality lies precisely in their allusiveness, which enables them to yield all their psychological correspondences.”³² Contexts these images allude to include, for example, that of Italian Neorealism (which Süden evokes with a shot of an image from Vittorio DeSica’s Lardi di biciclette [The Bicycle Thieves, 1948] included in one of the books) and the political tradition of anarchism, to which the film subtly points with a shot of the cover of Der Torpedokäfer: Ein anarchistisches Poesiealbum, a collection of pieces written by anarchist writers during the time of the November Revolution in 1918 and its immediate aftermath and assembled some six decades later in order to keep alive the memory of the tradition of revolutions and revolts. In the volume’s preface one finds a sentence that strikes me as intriguingly apropos in relation to what I take to be Petzold’s oeuvre’s main focus – to wit, the utopian desire to belong, which is blocked by the neoliberal economic operations immanent to constituted “Germany,” which remains nevertheless haunted by the politically constituent nomós “Germany”: “The new state [the Federal Republic of Germany] does not support the working through of the past but the gross national product. And the moral of economic success became the rule book for the past and the present. So it was up to him [the Torpedokäfer] to discover what his roots were.”³³

Stylistically, of course, the film has little to do with Petzold’s later career; in fact, the director himself admits that his early efforts were so unsatisfying to him that he eventually took a break in order to just study how other filmmakers made their films before commencing his own attempts: “I thought that because I had studied literature – and I had also written a lot, short stories and such – it would be really easy for me to make narrative cinema. I thought I would write a script, cast some actors, get the production in order, and direct the film myself. But during the first year at the academy, I found out that I was not capable of doing this.”³⁴ Yet Süden is nevertheless noteworthy because it reveals how early in his career the seeds for his major films were already present: Petzold’s love for the thriller genre, especially in form of film noir or its literary origin in American pulp fiction; his self-understanding as an intellectual (“I was an intellectual, so any form of playing innocent would have meant lying to myself. I had no choice but to make films by reflecting on them.”); his theoretically grounded resistance to an understanding of images as signs (“I always thought that Roland Barthes was right when he argued that a film, an image, is not a sign.”); his fascination with the question of labour (even on vacation the artist/intellectual cannot stop working); and his awareness of the political history of post-World War Two Germany and how its development is genealogically haunted by a constitutive economic imperative overriding a properly political one – an insight that Michel Foucault puts forth in The Birth of Biopolitics and that I develop in the conclusion of The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School.³⁵

So while Süden has perhaps little merit as a film, it is nevertheless of film historical interest for our purposes because it evidences how Petzold took seriously his claim that it was necessary to find a new film language in order to engage the present of the Wende; even though the film is not “about” the fall of the wall and subsequent unification, we see here crucial traces of his will to experiment in practice with the question of film language, which this film perhaps visualises in a way that only student films would do and, in any case, does so in formal ways that do not similarly manifest themselves in his later films (i.e., Petzold’s career quickly moves from the associative avant-garde montage that structures Süden toward a more narrative-oriented cinema).

What we can also detect in Süden is that, for Petzold, the need to find a new film language in order to encounter the event (the moment at which a transition, a change in kind, occurs) and to figure out what, in fact, the moment of transition is transitioning away from and, perhaps even more crucially, toward – Süden gestures to the issue of work more circuitously than Ostwärts but nevertheless folds it into its mise-en-scène – is and always has been a matter of encountering the world not only as such, as it “is” in its brute facticity, but also as it has been shaped, and has been made accessible to us, by and through the history of moving images. Indeed, as Fisher’s monograph convincingly demonstrates, Petzold’s oeuvre is defined by its iterative enacting of a “ghostly archeology of genre,” something that is embodied in Süden in the materiality of the images of the pulp fiction books. Likewise, in Weiber (“Broads” might be the best translation of the German), a thirteen-minute long short film he shot on 16mm black and white stock prior to Süden, Petzold tells the story (if we can call it that) of two young men whose journey on the Autobahn ends in the setting of an amusement park by merging remnants of film genres such as the road movie, the coming-of-age story, the buddy film, and even, I would argue, science fiction. This mishmash of genres somewhat confounds viewers’ ability to make sense of the “story,” which focuses on a young man (played by Petzold’s brother) who does not yet have a driver’s license and is thus only allowed to play at driving car but who at one time seems to narrate, in voice over form, his first sexual experience. What we actually hear, however, is the reading of a literary text by Dan McCall, and it is unclear whether the voice over narrative is actually supposed to represent the protagonist’s thoughts or fantasy.³⁶ The film, moreover, has no original sound, which contributes to its peculiar mood, hovering somewhere between a small documentary-like story and something almost otherworldly. This otherworldliness is further enhanced by the use of slow motion and the odd sensation of seeing the protagonist being almost Gulliver-like in relation to cars and houses, which we only gradually realize are part of the scenery of the Miniaturwelt Minidom amusement park.³⁷

Protagonist in Miniaturwelt Minidom amusement park. Christian Petzold, Weiber

What might at first seem like a poorly shot and constructed juvenilia – and, to be sure, it is juvenilia – can, however, also be regarded as yet another of Petzold’s early attempts at finding a proper filmic form that would allow him to respond to transitional moments, which is to say: the present. For as the program note accompanying the film’s screening in the context of a showing of short films by Berlin School filmmakers astutely suggests, the film “draws an empathetic picture of the worries and longings of a generation that has not yet found its beat” (my italics).³⁸ A film about a generation that has not yet found its own beat – which is to say: what its present is and how it is supposed to negotiate, respond to it – is a film about a generation in-between stages, in transition, not yet sure where it will be heading (this is of course literally true for the experience of transitioning from late adolescence to early adulthood, from school to work or university, from innocence to experience, and so on, all tropes to which the film’s narrative alludes). Yet, unlike so many films in one of the genres Weiber excavates for the (German) screen, Petzold’s early effort does not end with a clear sense of the “other side” of this transitional process; instead, it is telling that the young man ends up in one of the film’s many non-places: filmed in slow motion, we see him walking in the no man’s land near an Autobahn by Düsseldorf airport towards a fence that visualizes the fact that he is not yet able to satisfy his longing to join the drivers he sees traversing what Christoph Hochhäusler once called the “cathedral of arteries” that runs through the Federal Republic.³⁹

But it is worth pointing out that the film’s images of actual driving on actual roads does not at all correspond to the protagonist’s romanticized idea of driving – a romantic idea wonderfully captured by the almost drone-like camera movement as it smoothly “flies” across the miniature car scene in the amusement park. In other words, the film reframes for the viewer the protagonist’s romanticism and yearning – one historically shared by Germans whose obsession with their cars is pronounced and whose desire to escape the country by car at the first opportunity (vacations or long weekends) are themselves embodied responses to a cross-generational psychological unease about Germany. In so doing, it not only responds to the generic history of the road film but also anticipates Petzold’s early feature films, which all concern characters who dream of escaping Germany. Pilots is in this regard unique in that it is Petzold’s only film in which a protagonist actually manages to escape Germany. The film’s final shot might very well be one of the two most overtly optimistic in Petzold’s oeuvre (the other being the last shot of Barbara [2012]), giving us the rarest of images in his work: “a direct image of that momentary sensation of freedom and belonging, of freedom qua belonging, of freedom in belonging – albeit one located in Paris, rather than in “Germany,” a fact that is surely significant.”⁴⁰ In contrast, the protagonists’ attempts to escape Germany in Cuba Libre (1996) and The Sex Thief already end deadly; and The State I Am In concludes his film’s focus on Germans who desire to leave, showing a family on the run that, after failing to escape Germany (and Europe) for good, is forced to return to the very country that does not want it to re-join its socius.⁴¹

By excavating the remnants of the history of genre cinema, Petzold seeks to activate them in a post-genre filmmaking moment in order to “understand,” as Fisher argues in his contribution to this dossier, “the past archeologically, particularly its transitional and transformational moments, and the present’s relationship to them” and “to conjure moments of insight into both past and present, particularly the transition between them.”⁴² And this tripartite relationship between the need to heed film history/historiography, the affirmation of film form as a necessary political aspect of filmmaking, and the desire to respond to moments of transitions is already discernible in Petzold’s student films.

I do not want to assert that these films are of much more than film historical interest – they are not necessarily “good” or “successful” films, though especially Das warme Geld (literally: the warm money), a blueprint for The Sex Thief – clearly shows the promise that his later work would fulfil. However, I do want to complicate Petzold’s own assessment of his juvenilia as a failure because I am arguing that he in fact found images for the very event that we call Wende. An event, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, is not “of” history (and cannot be explained by recourse to a historical narrative); this also means an event cannot be “represented” in a way that I can photographically represent the table upon which my laptop currently sits. An event, the philosophers insist, exists only in its effects – and those are, by definition, always yet to come.⁴³ So perhaps unbeknownst to Petzold himself, his films succeeded in imaging the Wende precisely because he did not seek to “represent” it. Instead, he laboured to respond to the forces that were virtually percolating in and through this event in order to sense these forces, to render them sensible for viewers, and in so doing to act upon this event. He did so, however, not with an eye on representing what was at that moment the event’s most dominant manifestation (unification itself) but instead with the desire to shape the event’s future unfolding – an unfolding that would manifest new effects belatedly in relation to the event’s moment of historical irruption. And these belated effects as which the Wende continued to unfold over the next quarter century are what we call neoliberalism – a term that was barely present to us in 1989/90; that is, immanent to but not caused by the Wende, the virtual (neoliberal) forces that already inhered or subsisted in this event subsequently began to actualise themselves by creating new effects. And what I would like to submit here in admittedly speculative fashion is that Petzold’s seemingly innocuous student films managed to give its viewers an inkling of what ultimately turned out to be the real event of era-shaping proportions: the encroachment of neoliberalism on unified Germany.

*****

In this regard I find it revealing how Petzold describes the evolution of his career in the second part of the section in his conversation with Fisher in which they discuss his dffb years – a passage worth quoting in full, as it contains much that is crucial to our understanding of his career but that also includes a remark that I want to suggest we need to read against Petzold’s own account as a way of thinking about his dffb films and seeing their connection to his career and what it has most essentially been about:

I think one really has to live with the confusion for a while. And with the Wende, I was totally confused, as were my parents – they came from East Germany, and they really did not know what to think. This state of balance just was not maintained. And then I thought, this has always preoccupied me, so after The State I Am In, which was really a matter of working through the 1970s, I was able to finally address what happened: the transformation of a state-socialist system into a neoliberal system. In particular, I wanted to explore what happened to the people in the process of this transformation – and what kinds of films could be made about that.⁴⁴

With films such as Yella, Jerichow, and Beats Being Dead, Petzold implies here, he was at long last able to address what had taken place during the Wende years, as it was with these films that he started to dramatize in more explicit ways the impact neoliberalism has on his characters – to wit, their becoming-economic.⁴⁵ While it is undoubtedly correct to assert that these films, all set in the former GDR, do just what he claims they do in the passage quoted here, it seems to me that his student films already planted the seeds for what would come to fruition only more than a decade later, precisely because he approached his films from the start as a matter of encountering moments of transformation. And after he used his lens to look at the moment of transformation from adolescence to adulthood (Weiber) and from pre- to post-unification Germany (Ostwärts), as well as having engaged in a meta-reflection on the very question of film form (Süden) as a tool for cinematically encountering such transformational moments, his last dffb short film, Das warme Geld, finally turns explicitly to the question of the changing economy – to wit, the transformation of a social market into a neoliberal economy – and the fact that, as Petzold puts it when describing the impetus for Yella quoted as this essay’s epigram, “we do not even have any new images of capitalism yet.”

In other words, just as Ostwärts was prompted by the lack of images for the Wende and Yella by the lack of images for neoliberalism, so Das warme Geld was prompted by the absence of images for the transformation away from one economic mode and into another that in the immediate post-Wende years was merely emerging. Importantly for Petzold’s subsequent career, his last short film, which the director considers somewhat of a breakthrough, inaugurates the long lineage of female protagonists that would come to dominate his features and arguably have earned him a place in the pantheon of great directors of female actresses, with Nina Hoss’s six lead performances to date obviously standing out.⁴⁶ That Petzold begins to focus on female rather than male characters may, however, not just reflect the fact that it “prevents [him] from getting too biographical”;⁴⁷ instead, this recurrent narrative approach – one that Fisher aptly summarizes as focusing on “women under economic pressure [who are] forced to navigate an inhospitable world both economically and romantically, such that the two become insidiously intertwined”⁴⁸ – became the solution to the very problem of finding cinematic means for encountering the event of the Wende. For the task was to find images not in order to represent the surface (political or historical) level of this event, as most films that have dealt with unification do; rather, the challenge was to find images that would make sensible the very neoliberal economic forces that were almost imperceptibly saturating this event but whose effectivity was merely emerging while nevertheless already containing the virtual potential of massive and ongoing transformative power: to wit, the process of becoming-economic that would profoundly affect the subjectivity of the collection of people held together by the nomós Germany. And what Das warme Geld dramatizes by drawing on genre elements from the film noir tradition (and thus also the femme fatale character) is that core of neoliberal economic activities that would eventually be theorized under the concept of “affective labour,” which as feminists have long pointed out has always been a key characteristic of what has traditionally been designated as “women’s work.”

However, as Michael Hardt points out and what I submit Petzold intuited and started to explore with Das warme Geld – a half-hour long black and white film shot on 16mm that tells the story of two women who, mostly unemployed, use their sex appeal to steal from men and dream of accumulating enough money to escape from Germany to the Philippines – is that this affective labour, which had long been pushed to the margins of economic activity, gradually began to move to the core of such activity.⁴⁹ As Hardt writes, “Although affective labour has never been entirely outside of capitalist production, the processes of economic postmodernization […] have positioned affective labour in a role that is not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms. Affective labour is one fact of […] ‘immaterial labour’, which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labour in the global capitalist economy.”⁵⁰ Petzold picks up on this event of economic transformation with Das warme Geld – a transformation the film title’s qualification of money as warm hints at. This qualification ascribes to capitalism an affective surplus. Heike, an unemployed translator who is eventually coached by her friend, Vera, to use her body to “earn” money instead of going to the social welfare office (getting money from that office “is a job,” she says), calls attention to this affective surplus when remarking, “The money is still very warm,” after they used one of their male victim’s bank card to draw cash from an ATM machine.

The money is still very warm. Christian Petzold, Das warme Geld

The film works with a number of film noir and thriller genre film elements and ultimately ends tragically with an off-screen noise suggesting Heike was hit by a car while trying to escape from one of her victims and, subsequently, Vera packing her belongings and the remaining money and walking off at night-time. That the two, like the women in The Sex Thief, fail to realize their dream is important, of course: embracing the logic of affective labour is no guarantee for economic success, just as Ostwärts’ East German interview subjects’ embrace of Westernized economic ideology is no guarantee for their economic success in post-unified Germany. But what I think is worth pointing out is something else: namely that the film explicitly foregrounds this moment of economic transformation. As the women discuss their options, Heike suggests she could return to a coffee factory where she used to job as a student: “Only one, two months before everything is alright again.” Vera, however, replies with one of the two key sentences in the film, saying: “In the past everything became alright again. Then this was a job. But now? End of the line.” What once was a viable economic activity on route to something else now has become a dead-end, a trap, precisely because of the transformation effected by neoliberal forces that, while mostly under the radar at the time, were nevertheless already in effect. Consequently, Vera also tells Heike that she keeps her luggage unpacked all the time because “When you are poor you have to remain mobile.” This need to be and remain mobile – against one’s will and without knowing where such movement might lead one – would subsequently characterise many of Petzold’s characters, and it would eventually be famously articulated by not one but two German presidents who admonished their people to become more mobile in order to move the country out of its late 1990s economic depression.⁵¹ But whereas the Presidents’ rhetoric affirmatively espoused a neoliberal rhetoric of mobility, Petzold’s film – avant la lettre, as it were – already counter-effectuated the forces of neoliberalism by directly forging a link between the essential engine of neoliberal economic activity – ever faster movement by everyone and everything – and poverty and subjection: subjected by an emerging yet still largely imperceptible system of (economic) power to involuntarily engage in a form of affective labour that demands that they be able to leave at any time, Vera and Heike embody the very fact that an era “is over,” as Petzold puts it in his interview with Baute and Patenburg when describing his situation as a burgeoning filmmaker around 1990: “The films we saw when we entered the academy, by Gerd Conradt and others, a tradition of which we automatically became part and liked being in –  namely, to attack society, to investigate, and to create laboratories… – I had the sense: this is over.”⁵²

We might say, in conclusion, that the remarkable accomplishment of Petzold’s dffb films is to have sensed that underlying what the dominant ideological discourse at the time proclaimed to have ended (socialism, History itself) was already a new beginning – namely, of a mode of economic power that, barely noticeable then, was in the process of effecting seismic changes of far greater import than, I think, unification itself did. The real event of the Wende – the turn, the transition, the transformation – was, according to these small films, less the political unification of two German systems than the emerging neoliberal forces cutting across the unified result. To give untimely images to this (initially) subtle but ultimately era-defining process of transformation – the event of Germany’s becoming-economic – is, film historically, a rare feat in the German filmmaking context and matched perhaps only by the seismographic investigations into the micropolitical operations of capitalist power by Petzold’s mentor, Harun Farocki.⁵³

Endnotes