A Changing of the Guard? Some Thoughts on New German Films at the 75th International Berlin Film Festival

Once a not-to-be-missed fixture on the calendar of anyone with a keen interest in contemporary German cinema, the Berlinale continued this year with its highly noticeable retreat from its longstanding role as the world’s premiere showcasing event for the latest cinematic productions from a country that has long been struggling to attract interest in its annual output from critics, distributors, and exhibitors outside of its borders. Whereas, as I wrote on last year’s festival, the Berlinale’s 74th iteration screened only approximately fifty percent of the number of films it used to show pre-COVID, this year’s version reduced the presence of German cinema even further.¹ By my count, only 25 films (it used to be around 60) could be considered German productions in the broadest sense, i.e., including films made by German filmmakers that have otherwise nothing to do with Germany in terms of setting or subject matter, such as Jan-Ole Gerster’s suspense film Islands, set on Fuerteventura (Canary Islands) featuring an international (i.e., exclusively non-German) cast led by Sam Riley (who played Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn’s Control, 2007) and Stacy Martin (who has starred in several Brady Corbet films, including The Brutalist, 2024), or Sirens Call, a hybrid film consisting of a mix of performance, documentary, and fiction about the merfolk subculture in the US by Miri Ian Gossing and Lina Sieckmann. The argument for this paring down of the homegrown presence (which itself is part of the overall reduction of the festival’s size), including the elimination of sections that either exclusively focused on German debut films (the popular “Perspective German Cinema” series) or, with an eye on international buyers and critics, presented a sweeping overview of German theatrical releases from the previous year, is that this would ostensibly both sharpen the focus on only the best of what the country’s film industry has to offer and, by no longer siloing them, put those films more directly in conversation with their peers from around the world.

Sirens Call © GossingSieckmann / filmfaust / Kochmann

To be sure, this idea has merit. There is no question that in previous years one of the real challenges visitors interested in contemporary German cinema faced was to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff: one had to have a lucky hand (and benefit from good word-of-mouth information) to find the real gems among a high number of unremarkable films. However, even though the cumulative presence of German films was somewhat unwieldy, its sheer breadth nevertheless provided indispensable filmic context for the handful of highlights – which more often than not were films by directors associated with the Berlin School, whose absence at this year’s festival was especially noteworthy: I believe this might have been the first Berlinale in at least 20 years that featured not a single film by the likes of Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Thomas Arslan, Christoph Hochhäusler, Benjamin Heisenberg, Maren Ade, Valeska Grisebach, Ulrich Köhler, Henner Winckler, or Maria Speth, which is even more remarkable since this group of filmmakers is in the midst of one of its most productive periods since what I have called its “annus mirabilis” between the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and the 2007 Berlinale, during which they released over a dozen films.² Yet even though several of these filmmakers had new films completed prior to the festival’s submission deadline, they were conspicuous only by their absence. One can only speculate about the cause for this: is it the case that these directors (and their producers) held films back in the hopes of premiering them at the more prestigious A-list festivals (i.e., Cannes or Venice), or did the festival reject their submissions, as one might speculate was the case with Benjamin Heisenberg’s new film, Der Prank—April, April! (The Prank – April, April!), a children’s film that premiered in German theatres less than a month after the festival ended, even though it could have easily been selected for the festival’s “Generation 14” section – and likely should have, judging by the positive reception the film has garnered upon its release.

April, April! (The Prank)

Perhaps this absence of any trace of the very group of filmmakers whose films have been virtually the only German films to have received at least a modicum of steady interest and critical respect abroad in the last two decades might signify a changing of the guards; or perhaps it is simply a blunt manifestation of the overall German film industry’s longstanding hostility to what has arguably been the only German film movement to have emerged since the country’s unification that has tried to throw an intellectual and aesthetic wrench into a film production machinery characterised more by a desire to address the big topics of the day in ways that offend exactly no one than by a cinematic intelligence that affirms that any question of content (the what of a film) is necessarily first an aesthetic question (the how of a film).

One does not have to be a fan of the Berlin School to at least appreciate their collective effort (regardless of the significant differences between them and how each director’s oeuvre has evolved since their earliest films) to approach cinema as cinema by experimenting with the cinematic means that are available to affect their viewers. If nothing else, their films consistently exhibit an understanding that their politics (including explicitly political content) are embedded in and deeply affected by the primacy of the question of film aesthetics – by the fact that the how necessarily precedes the what in precisely the sense that on the recipient’s side whatever it is we see and comprehend is filtered through the affective – aesthetic – force that constitutes any given film’s cinematicness.

Alas, it is this seemingly obvious yet apparently far-from-widely appreciated fact that seems disagreeable to most of the powers-that-be in German film culture. Which is why it was fitting that the festival’s opening film (screed out of competition as part of the “Berlinale Special” section), Tom Tykwer’s Das Licht (The Light), unintentionally yet symptomatically encapsulated the (mostly sorry) state of German film culture today – one that’s neither fish nor fowl in that it neither goes far enough down the road of genre filmmaking nor proudly embraces, as other national cinemas do, an auteurist tradition whose films are allowed to rub mainstream film culture the wrong way, while occasionally creating a “cross-over” hit without actually chasing mainstream tastes. The Light is Tykwer’s first film since the Tom Hanks vehicle A Hologram for the King (2016) and the global success of the neo-noir streaming series Babylon Berlin (2017 – 2025), which Tykwer co-created, -wrote, and -directed. Like so many German films at this year’s festival, The Light focuses on a well-to-do German family in crisis: the parents, Tim and Milena Engels (Lars Eidinger and Nicolette Krebitz), don’t seem to have much left to say to each other, while their teenaged twin children are largely alienated from them, with the messy-like son (Julius Gause) escaping real life via his virtual reality games and the daughter (Elke Biesendorfer) oscillating between drug-infused marathon parties at Berlin’s dance clubs and Last-Generation-style political activism. 

The Light © Frederic Batier / X Verleih

Complicating matters further is the presence of a younger child that Milena, who operates a Nairobi-based arts organization, had with a Kenyan man with whom she had an extra-marital affair. After the Engels’s immigrant housekeeper dies of a heart attack – in one of the film’s many heavy-handed moments we see Tim, upon returning home, immediately getting rid of his rain-soaked clothes and walking naked in the apartment without noticing the dead body on the kitchen floor – Farrah (Tala Al-Deen, whose performance is the film’s highlight), a Syrian immigrant, appears at their door, is hired, and soon gains the trust of the family. And so the overwrought drama takes its course. One might certainly argue that it is to Tykwer’s credit that he at least dared to do something – in this case, mixing his trademark topical obsessions with chance and the nature of time with many of the stylistic devices we find throughout his oeuvre (going all the way back to his earliest films such as Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, 1998)), including hyper-kinetic editing, frequent switches from photorealism to an animated video-game aesthetic, and impressive camera movements (such as the film’s opening drone-powered tracking shot floating through Berlin’s ceaselessly rainy sky into Farrah’s apartment), all in the service of generating a kinetic experience for the viewer.

However, the real problem with this filmic strategy is not merely that after a while its effectivity is limited and loses steam due to its repetitiveness. Rather, the real problem is that Tykwer thinks politically in terms of content but not in terms of film aesthetics. And because the content is one big catastrophe – what Variety calls a “cri de cœur”³ that, it seems to me, desperately wants to address every big problem that Germany (and the world) is facing today, from immigration to climate catastrophe, from neo-colonialism to vapid consumerism, from addiction to impersonal online spaces to clueless politicians who have long lost touch with the polis they are supposed to represent and serve – the film’s stylistic excess bordering on arbitrariness remains merely a symptomatic excess of the experience of a do-gooder liberalism that thinks individualistically about the structural and systematic violence experienced by people with a migration background. It is hardly coincidental that The Light seems oblivious to how it limits Farrah to the “magical Negro” trope.⁴ Rather than taking interest in her for her own sake, the script makes her subservient to the German family whom she is supposed to heal with the help of a mysterious high-frequency strobe lamp that supposedly has scientifically proven therapeutic powers.

The Light © Frederic Batier / X Verleih AG

Moreover, the film’s stylistic excess – not least also the ill-conceived and poorly staged, utterly unmotivated musical numbers – feed the film’s (and Tykwer’s longstanding) obsession with supposed “fateful” coincidences (the entire opening act is organised around how the various characters’ activities, disconnected from each other, develop in parallel fashion to the inevitable “coincidental” coming-together), which in the real world are anything but a matter of “fate.” But a filmic exaggeration into the magically real only works if the real is reflectedly subsumed into the magical, instead of understanding the latter as an inherent characteristic of a fantasised saviour of an ethically bankrupt class that the film only seemingly wants to expose. Ironically, the fact that the German film production system itself seemed to offer no resistance to this mess is the actual content of a film that is so self-absorbed in its show-values that its makers probably didn’t realise that they were gifting structural racism with beautiful images that, in their affirmative attitude, flatter the very viewers who always like to point out that “the Turk” or “the Italian” – the immigrant “Other” – around the corner is so nice that they have even made friends with them. But they still don’t know anything about them – and they don’t want to, just like the movie, which fails to tell us much of anything about Farrah, notwithstanding its 162 minutes running time. Indeed, the very fact that The Light manages to say so little about the ostensible emotional and political centre of its narrative (and instead wastes so much time with white-German protagonists about whom one might be forgiven for wondering why one should care about any of them) betrays the serious limitations of the film’s (and their makers’) political – which is to say also: aesthetic – imagination.

Equally problematic in this regard is Nele Mueller-Stöfen’s Delicious, produced by Komplizen Film for Netflix and screened in the festival’s Panorama section. A real misstep for what is otherwise a remarkably consistent producer of quality films, Delicious depicts a wealthy (white) German family of four on their vacation in the French Provence. As with The Light, Delicious fails to give us reasons to care about this bourgeois family and its problems, so that any interest we might take in the local serving-class population – especially Teodora (Carla Diaz), the “leader” of a motley group of hotel and restaurant workers who collude to take revenge on the wealthy vacationers for their liberal ignorance of how they themselves are a crucial part of the problems from which the downtrodden majority suffers – quickly disappears because of the awkward execution of a story about class disparity that falls far short of the kind of films Michael Haneke has perfected. Indeed, I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a clumsy way of getting a “political” message across to the audience as in the film’s last act. It’s already not overly original to have the global proletariat once again cannibalistically feed on the unsympathetic representatives of the bourgeoisie – but it borders on impertinence to then have the head “cannibal” explicitly comment on this in a voice-over that’s a particular egregious example of the “new literalism” pervading so much of contemporary film culture, so that even the most gullible streaming viewer understands that the former are the many and the latter only the 0.1%.⁵ In comparison to such flat-footedness, Haneke, whose detractors often complain about his films’ pedagogical tendencies as overly obvious, must be considered a true master of subtlety.

Delicious © Netflix

Underwhelming, too, was Ina Weisse’s Zikaden (Cicadas), which also screened in the Panorama section. Anchored by Nina Hoss, who also starred in Weisse’s previous effort, Das Vorspiel (The Audition, 2019), the film never manages to capitalise on the narrative and political possibilities inhering in its basic narrative setup of two dissimilar women – the well-to-do daughter (Hoss), coded as a “West” German, of a successful architect and a younger woman (played by Saskia Rosendahl), coded as “East” German, whose background remains moderately mysterious but is decidedly less well-to-do. The film hints at the potential for violence, as the latter woman’s motifs remain unclear, but by the end any such possibilities have been left underdeveloped by the script. One can only imagine how someone like Christian Petzold, with whom Hoss has made half a dozen superb films that shine precisely because of their subtle yet astute political analyses, would have realised this story set in the rural surroundings near Berlin. For example, the plot hints at Hoss’s character’s not entirely successful attempt at stepping into her somewhat overbearing father’s footsteps and contrasts their rural modernist retreat (designed by him) from busy urban life in Berlin with the considerably more modest living conditions of East Germans, who socioeconomically continue to lag West Germans, even 35 years after unification. Yet the film does not show any interest in putting pressure on what is rather obviously inscribed into the very architectural profession: the design of space and its subjectification effects, questions of property (and theft), and, in general, the political economy underlying all of it, not least the de facto takeover of East Germany by West Germany in the immediate aftermath of unification.⁶ The film’s highlights are the few moments when we get to see Hoss interact with the brilliant Vincent Macaigne (who played Olivier Assays’ alter-ego in Hors du temps (Suspended Time, 2024), which competed for the Golden Bear at last year’s Berlinale) as her struggling husband, whose presence lends the film a humorous note full of warmth – a combination that is rarely seen in German cinema.

Cicadas © Judith Kaufmann / Lupa Film

Also set in the milieu of Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum – the well-educated bourgeoisie – is Frédéric Hambalek’s debut film Was Marielle weiß (What Marielle Knows), which was the somewhat better of the two German films in the festival’s Competition. The second film in the Competition was Ameer Fakher Eldin’s Yunan about an exiled writer, Munir (Georges Khabbaz), of unspecified Middle Eastern origin (Syria?) who travels to a Hallig – Hallige are, as we learn, small North Sea “islands” that are not protected by dikes, which is why unlike “proper” islands they easily flood – to, we surmise, commit suicide. But er hat die Rechnung ohne die Wirtin gemacht – the literal translation of this idiomatic expression would be “he calculated his bill without consulting the landlady,” meaning: he counted his chickens before they hatched – because the proprietor of the Hallig’s sole bed and breakfast (played by German screen legend Hanna Schygulla) affects this taciturn stranger in strange land with her no-nonsense, gently mischievous kindness. A film about displacement and estrangement from one’s home to which one nevertheless remains bound, Yunan, the second film of the director’s planned “Homeland” trilogy, benefits from the rugged scenery that cinematographer Ronald Plante nicely captures, but the film ultimately suffers from the very insularity of its locations – including the dream and/or memory sequences taking place in Munir’s arid desert homeland – that lend the film at times considerable visual power.

A Hallig under water in the North Sea, in Yunan

Whereas Yunan is ultimately bogged down by its repetitiveness and overly languid pacing that could have benefited from a dosage of humour to liven up its mostly one-note mood of serenity, What Marielle Knows, yet another study of a white middle-class German family, has the benefit of a conceit that infuses what cinematically does not exceed the typical made-for-German-television aesthetics with a degree of humour that clearly appealed to the members of the press with whom I watched the film at its press screening at the Berlinale Palace. Only seemingly a metaphysical conceit, the slap that teenager Marielle (Laeni Geiseler) receives from a girlfriend in the opening scene, which the film shoots in beautiful extreme slow motion, inexplicably gives her the ability to telepathically eavesdrop on her parents and thus transforms the teenager into a veritable truth machine – a family-system disrupter.⁷ Confronted with their daughter’s superpower, the parents are condemned to address all the things that often remain repressed yet leave affective traces in well-off, educated middle-class lives precisely because its liberal attitude is more ideologically claimed than materially lived. This leads, in turn, to many comic situations in which the reliably great Julia Jentsch (outside Germany, she might be best known for her part in Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators, 2004)) shines in the role of a mother “in her prime” who is bored, especially sexually, by her loving but somewhat staid husband.

What Marielle Knows © Alexander Griesser

But the film doesn’t really spark – I have a hard time imagining someone would want to see it twice – which, I think, is due to something that Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands (like Tykwer’s film, it was presented as a “Berlinale Special” screening) gives voice to in a brief dialogue moment that (unintentionally) puts its finger on the problem afflicting all too many German films, including What Marielle Knowns and Islands. Gerster’s first English-language film after his first two well-received films, Oh Boy (2012) and Lara (2019), is a psychological suspense thriller that seems to have aimed for the likes of Réné Clément’s Plein soleil (Purple Noon, 1960) or Anthony Minghella’s version of the same Patricia Highsmith source material, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), or for that matter Jacques Deray’s La piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969). Trying to cinematically capitalise on its subtropical sun-flooded Canary Islands environment, Gerster’s film slowly and subtly builds up the sexual tension between a washed-up tennis player, “Ace” (Sam Ripley), who is said to have briefly played Raphael Nadal once on the hotel’s tennis court where he now gives mind-numbing lessons to tourists, and Anne (Stacey Martin), the icy blonde “femme fatale” wife of douchebag “bro” husband Dave (played by Jack Farthing), who takes the kind of interest in “Ace” that, we quickly gather, entails more than what meets the eye. I initially struggled with the film, as I really disliked Anne and Dave, while remaining puzzled why I should give a damn about Ace. And whatever one might say about Ripley and Farthing, they are not in the same league with Jude Law and Matt Damon, let alone the inimitable Alain Delon. The strength of Gerster’s film – which makes it nevertheless worth watching and deserving of a larger audience – is that it rewards, up to a point, the viewer for sticking with it, for it subtly and effectively develops the sexual triangle into a potential murder plot. However, I can’t help but feel that Islands somewhat unintentionally summarises its weakness when, in the film’s second act, “bro” Dave asks Tom, who gives the couple a tour of Fuerteventura, whether the island’s volcano is active. In response to Tom’s remark that the one on neighbouring Lanzarote is smoking, Dave wants to know whether it’s “gonna go off,” to which Tom casually says: “You never know.” If only it had erupted, I thought at film’s end, for as much as I appreciated the film’s subtlety, I ultimately wished Islands had leaned further into its noir logic.

Islands © Juan Sarmiento G. / 2025 augenschein Filmproduktion, LEONINE Studios

I think this stopping-short of its own courage is symptomatic of what afflicts many German films, including the above-discussed ones – something that became especially obvious when watching some of the films included in this year’s Retrospective of 1970s German genre cinema. Notwithstanding curator Olaf Möller’s controversial polemic against the curation (though not against the films themselves) of the Retrospective – he accuses it of having been conceived for people who “hate genre cinema”⁸ – I would say that films such as Rolf Olsen’s Blutiger Freitag (Bloody Friday, 1972), Ulli Lommel’s Die Zärtlichkeit der Wölfe (Tenderness of the Wolves, 1973), Roland Klick’s Deadlock (1970), as well as two films by the New Munich Group filmmakers Rudolf Thome and Klaus Lemke, whose Fremde Stadt (Strange City, 1972) and Rocker (1972), respectively, were festival highlights for me (to see them on the big screen was a real treat), put in stark relief the ways in which contemporary German films’ cinematic imagination seems handcuffed by an idea of cinema resulting from an obsession with reaching an alleged consensus about what the (German) film viewer wants to see or can possibly be expected to tolerate seeing.⁹ 

Strange City (left) and Rocker (right)

With that said, I’d like to end by recommending a handful of films that I thought shed light on contemporary Germany in interesting ways – considerably more so than the above-discussed ones. Constanze Klaue’s debut feature-length film, Mit der Faust in die Welt schlagen (Punching the World), which is based on Lukas Rietzschel’s novel of the same title and screened in the Perspectives section, sensitively tells a mostly cliché-free story from the perspective of two brothers who grow up in a structurally weak East German region. It gradually reveals how emotional attachments (and their absence) can produce an attitude among the young towards the world that can result in the burning-down of a school-cum-refugee home, without any real need for targeted ideological indoctrination. Indeed, it’s precisely the almost imperceptible, casual, and non-ideological drift towards fascist attitudes that the film reveals as the real horror, because what remains unspoken but is implied is the possibility that the wide-spread liberal assumption that “we” just need to do a better job educating “those” kids might just be an idealistic (imaginary) solution to what are really existing material problems. The calm, almost banal images shot by DP Florian Brückner, which are hardly disturbed by moments of xenophobic action, meet the protagonists with an empathetic gaze without forcing viewers to identify with them as “innocent victims.” The film’s gaze remains sober in its allusions to and omissions of the very things that the (German) media tirelessly present their consumers in form of the ever-same sensationalist images. Countering this tendency, Punching the World adopts a quiet, tender attitude towards its main characters, whose future, we come to realise, is not fatalistically predetermined despite all the Nazi mores that surround them, but which cannot just be magically conjured up in the form of a happy ending by a self-sacrificing mother either.

Punching the World © Flare Film / Chromosom Film

Punching the World © Flare Film / Chromosom Film

Sarah Miro Fischer’s debut feature, Schwesterherz (The Good Sister), is a clever portrayal of an inner conflict in which Rose (Marie Bloching), the sister of the alleged rapist, must question her private loyalties to her beloved bigger brother and think – and feel – anew in the context of ethical and political issues. The way Fischer helps her protagonist achieve new clarity is truly inspired. She makes Rose – and the viewer – feel something of the violence that Elisa (Laura Balzer) had to suffer, but without suggesting any equivalence. Rose seeks Elisa out at her workplace, a beauty salon, under the pretence of wanting to get a bikini wax. Elisa, who recognises Rose from a brief encounter during the night of her rape (Elisa crashed on her brother’s couch for a few nights and heard sounds coming from her brother’s bedroom that the film purposefully leaves ambiguous), obliges with barely controlled rage and rips off Rose’s pubic hair. By combining a slightly exaggerated soundtrack with Bloching’s facial expressions, the film allows us to participate less in Elisa’s pain than in the moment when Rose begins to act with self-determination. I only wish the film had ended five seconds earlier, as I think that would have further strengthened what is still a relatively compelling open ending.

The Good Sister © Selma von Polheim Gravesen / dffb

Of the 25 German films playing at the festival, about a quarter were documentaries, but I was able to catch only one. However, of the ones I was unable to see, I heard good things about Martina Priessner’s Die Möllner Briefe (The Moelln Letters) and Philipp Döring’s Palliativstation (Palliative Care Unit). The former is about a racist-motivated arson attack that took place in 1992 in the small city of Mölln; it won the Panorama section’s Audience Award for Best Documentary. The latter, which won the Forum section’s Heiner-Carow Award, is a four-hour documentary in the direct-cinema style reminiscent of its master practitioner, Frederick Wiseman. This is the third German film in the last three years on this topic, after Jessica Krummacher’s Zum Tod meiner Mutter (The Death of My Mother, 2022) and last year’s terrific Ivo (2024) by Eva Trobisch. It might make for a fascinating, if sobering, movie marathon to put the latter two fiction films in conversation with Göring’s documentary.¹⁰ 

Palliative Care Unit © Philipp Döring

I did see, however, Marcin Wierzchowski’s Das deutsche Volk (The German People), a film I found both revelatory and moving. I’d say it’s one of the more important films about contemporary Germany in quite some time. Particularly impressive about The German People is how Wierzchowski (he was born in Poland, and his family was murdered by the Nazis) truly gives the stage to the families and friends of the nine young people who were slain on 9 February 2020 in the Hessian city of Hanau. Most of the murdered were born and raised in the city or its surroundings, while their families originally hailed from Turkey, Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Bosnia, and Romania. Wierzchowski shot the film over four years during which he earned the trust of the bereaved and accompanied them on their still ongoing journeys not only to process the horror in private but also to fight a governmental bureaucracy that, behind a liberal-seeming veneer, gradually if unintentionally reveals its structurally racist core. Not long after the massacre, it was revealed that the special police unit deployed in the region was itself riddled with neo-Nazis – news that caused the state government to close the unit down. What the film powerfully shows, however, is that this action against “a few bad apples” ultimately provided cover for a more profound and disturbing truth. For notwithstanding the many smaller – and surely genuinely felt – gestures made, and statements of solidarity issued by, politicians and citizens of Hanau (and beyond in Germany), when the rubber hit the road, the “good” people of Hanau closed ranks and opposed the primary wish of the grieving families: to create a monument to the murdered that would be placed on the Hanau market square right next to an existing monument to the memory of the Brothers Grimm, who, in 1848, unsuccessfully sought to amend the draft of a German constitution (which ultimately failed as well) with a motion that stated that the “German people are a people of free men, and German soil tolerates no servitude. It sets strangers and the unfree who dwell on it free.” The purpose of the monument, then, is to suggest that even though the Grimm’s motion was rejected during the days of the ill-fated German revolution in the mid-19th century, the spirit of their proposal ultimately prevailed in a post-fascistic, democratic, and now unified Germany. The irony, then, of white-majoritarian Germans, who take pride in this lieu de mémoire, to use Pierre Nora’s famous phrase, rejecting the families’ wish to commemorate their murdered family members on this very spot is glaring: apparently, these brown, dark-eyed people – many of them officially citizens of Germany – were not German enough to justify the placement of a new monument that would not so much compete with, let alone disrespect, the existing monument than stage a “monumental” conversation that would likely have performatively forced the “good” people of Hanau (and any visitor) to reflect on who, exactly they – and as a German I need to say: “we” – mean when “we” talk about the German people. 

The film, then, brings to the fore how the white-German majority still cannot jump across its own shadow and think of their neighbours with migration background as being as much part of the German people as they are. As horrible as the brutal murders five years ago obviously were, in a way, the real horror The German People renders sensible – through its ability to present us in crystal-clear black-and-white images the “migrant Other” as a wonderful kaleidoscope of caring, intelligent, hard-working citizens – is that by the end of the day the white-majoritarian population still defines them in undifferentiated fashion as the “Other” that should not interfere with their own sense of who belongs to the Deutsche Volk.

Shot/reverse-shot of bereaved family member vs. “good” German politician in The German People

Shot/reverse-shot of bereaved family member vs. “good” German politician in The German People

Inspired by another, yet similar horrendous crime committed by neo-Nazis seven years prior to the events in Hanau, Hysteria by Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay (who also co-produced Sirens Call) can be read as a powerful fictional complement to The German People in that it, too, ultimately insists on the kaleidoscopic nature of the very people all-too-many white Germans deep down still regard as one homogenous “Other”: to wit, people with a migration background. With the help of a who-done-it plot that is hardly less convoluted than Fritz Lang’s classic noir The Big Heat (1953), Akif Büyükatalay’s meta-thriller, which is his follow-up to his excellent debut, the award-winning Oray (2019), succeeds in confronting its audience with the experience of how small the step from understanding to condemning is and how, as one almost imperceptibly takes this step, the work of (allegedly) rational interpretation is subtly but decidedly undermined by a tendency to hystericize the circumstances at hand. Intriguingly, the answer the film gives to this problem – in this case one that’s caused when a burned Quran is found on the set of a film that restages one of the most vicious incidents of racist violence in post-unified Germany that in 1993 saw four neo-Nazis set fire to a house of a Turkish family in the city of Solingen – seems to follow an affective logic of counter-hysterisation, rather than relying on rational Habermasian discourse, which the director’s stand-in, the filmmaker Yigit (Serkan Kaya), tries to wrest from a group of Muslim extras who react “irrationally” to the fact that the film apparently (though possibly without the director’s knowledge) chose to burn an actual Quran. Caught in the middle is Elif (Devrim Lingnau), a high-achieving migrant intern who seeks to earn the good graces of Yigit and his producer-wife, Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz), in the hopes of getting a stronger footing in the German film industry. Her aspirations, however, gradually lead her to lose control of the situation of which she was put in charge. The more “hysterical” circumstances get, the more the film’s commentary on a world in which subjects are what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “mediatised” – choking themselves on a surplus of information and ways to express themselves instantly, without any incentive to hit the pause button to find, as Gilles Deleuze once wrote, “little gaps of solitude and silence in which [one] might eventually find something to say … that might be worth saying” – becomes apparent, without, however, overloading its compelling plot with a “political message.”¹¹

Hysteria

A film that uses crisp genre filmmaking to pose important questions “about the responsibility and challenges in producing images of the ‘others’ under existing social class relations and power structures” (as the director puts it in the film’s press materials), Hysteria, like The German People, offers, to my mind, a productive (albeit considerably smaller-scale) alternative to Tykwer’s “grand vision” precisely because the former two do what the latter doesn’t: to think the question of politics aesthetically, and the question of film aesthetics politically. There may yet be hope for the future of contemporary German cinema.

Berlinale
13 – 23 February 2025
http://berlinale.de

Endnotes