Information to Users

Home , Die Ratten, Gertrud Fussenegger, Hannes Messemer, Harry Piel, Joe May, Johannes Mario Simmel

INFORMATION TO USERS

This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer.

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction.

In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps.

ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. WHO CARES WHODUNIT?

ANTI-DETECTION IN WEST GERMAN CINEMA

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School

of The Ohio State University

Yogini Joglekar, M.A.

*****

The Ohio State University 2002

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor John Davidson, Adviser

Professor Anna Grotans Adviser Professor Linda Mizejewski ic Languages and Literatures Graduate Program

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3059271

__UMI ___ __®

UMI Microform 3059271 Copyright 2002 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Copyright by Yogini Joglekar 2002

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

George Bernard Shaw once quipped that Germans lack talent for two things- a

successful revolution and good detective fiction. That sentiment, which has plagued the

reception of German detective narratives ever since, may be valid for literature, but it

hardly holds true for cinema. Crime films were popular from the beginning in Germany,

and serialized detective films featuring Joe Deebs, Harry Piel, or the criminal mastermind

Mabuse enthralled audiences in Weimar Germany (1919-1933) and beyond. While

scholars have examined Weimar detective film and noted its absence in the Third Reich,

the tremendous complexity of this genre in post-1945 Germany has remained unexplored.

My study investigates the popularity and prevalence of detective cinema in West

Germany, concentrating on anti-detective films that challenge social and generic limits.

By anti-detective cinema I mean films in which the detective's investigations lead

not to a successful solution, but instead to a core of doubt enhanced by genre-subversive

means such as lack of closure and unresolved crimes. The formal idiosyncrasies exhibited

by the genre’s development in West Germany raise the question, “who cares whodunit?”

regarding the mystery format. My study demonstrates that the shift away from happy

endings toward anti-detection is not merely a formal innovation, but also a reaction to

contemporary political conditions, e.g., to debates about guilt and innocence in coming to

terms with the Nazi past and West Germany’s troubled status in the postwar world.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Covering the lifespan of the Federal RepubUc, this study analyzes the

employment of anti-detection in five representative films directed by Helmut Kautner,

Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Reinhard Hauff, and Doris Dorrie. My findings indicate that

these films achieve an anti-detective effect in two ways: (1) through their transgression of

traditional detective film formulae, and (2) through a critical reflection on contemporary

social issues. Anti-detective cinema moves away from a predominantly art-cinematic to a

more commercial mode between the postwar West German and the post-Wall German

context. The concern with political commentary, however, remains constant in West

German anti-detective films, giving them a unique critical edge with which they

symptomatically register the crises affecting a postwar society.

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the cooperation of many

people at OSU and home. My sincere gratitude goes to my adviser, John Davidson, for

his tremendous support of my project and his valuable guidance in all matters. Anna

Grotans has been a painstaking reader, and her inspiring teaching has set an example for

me. Linda Mizejewski gave generously of her time and took interest in my work, offering

important comments. The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the

Office of International Affairs at OSU provided financial support for my research trips to

the National Film Archive in Berlin, and helped me make rapid progress on this study.

My students in the German Literature in English Translation course at Rutgers-Camden

during Spring Semester 2002 must be thanked for their lively discussions and interesting

input on German detective fiction and film.

I would like to thank members of the Works-in-Progress group for their carefol

scrutiny of my work and their helpful suggestions. Nikhil Sathe and Jennifer William

were always willing to read yet another work-in-progress and to offer extensive

comments. Their good humor and friendship accompanied me on easy and hard days. Sai

Bhatawadekar has been a true friend in any situation, and I thank her for her

thoughtfulness and generosity. Ever since I have known him, Subodh Deshmukh has

been the best friend and companion I could ask for. In the past five years, he saw more

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. than his fair share of German and English detective movies, and I am thankful for his

brilliant insights into film and into everyday life. I dedicate this thesis to Aai and Baba,

who inspired me in several ways over the years and provided physical and emotional

support.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. VITA

August 21, 1974 ...... Bom - Mumbai, India

1994...... B.A. English Literature, University of Mumbai

1997...... M.A. German Literature, The Ohio State University

1995-2001 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University

Fall 2000...... Visiting Lecturer, University of Delaware

Spring 2002...... Visiting Lecturer, Rutgers University Camden

PUBLICATIONS

1. “Land without Nightingales? Kafka’s Vision of America inA me rilea,” The Image of America, ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo: University of Southern Colorado Press, 1999.

2. Zeppelin! by Alexander Hausser. Book review in Focus on Literatur 8 (Fall 2001).

3. World Cinema: Critical Approaches by John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, ed. Book review inFilm Quarterly 55/ 2 (Winter 2002).

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Germanic Languages and Literatures

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

V ita...... vi

Chapters:

1. Introduction...... 1

2. Investigating Anti-Detection...... 15

2.1 Theorizing Detection...... 16 2.1.1 Detecting Social Malaise: Kracauer, Benjamin, and Brecht ...... 18 2.1.2 From Detection to Anti-Detection: Bloch and Diirrenmatt...... 27 2.2 Anti-Detection...... 38 2.3 Anti-Detection on Screen...... 46

3. Dead Ends: Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid (Kautner 1950)

and Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (Siodmak 1957) ...... 50

3.1 German Detective Film from 1945-1955 ...... 52 3.2 Anti-Detection in Epilog and Nachts...... 55 3.2.1 Mise-en-ab!me ...... 59 3.3 Requiem to Detection: Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid ...... 61 3.4 Confronting the Past:Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam ...... 79

4. Return to History: Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse (Lang I960) ...... 100

4.1 The Return of Mabuse ...... 104 4.2 Anti-Detective Techniques in 1000 Augen ...... 109 4.3 Super-Vision: Die 1000 Augen des Dr M abuse...... I l l 4.4 Revisiting the Third Reich in the Economic Miracle...... 128

vii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5. New German Cinema and Anti-Detection: Messer im Kopf

(Hauff 1978) ...... 135

5.1 “ Die Nach-Nachkriegszeit” and the New German Cinema ...... 136 5.2 NGC and Anti-Detection ...... 139 5.2.1 Art and Commercial Cinema ...... 141 5.2.2 Contentism and Sensibilism ...... 149 5.3 Open Ending: Messer im Kopf ...... 153 5.3.1 Clue-Suspicion-Confirmation...... 158 5.3.2 Doubling and Open Ending ...... 161 5.3.3 The Personal-Political Configuration...... 168

6. Anti-Detection and Ethnic Noir in Post-Wall Germany: Happy

Birthday, Tiirke! (Dorrie 1991)...... 174

6.1 German Detective Film in the 1980s and 1990s ...... 178 6.2 Revisiting N oir...... 185 6.3 Anti-Detection in Happy Birthday, Tiirke! ...... 188 6.4 Ethnic noir...... 206

Conclusion...... 215

Bibliography...... 232

Filmography...... 244

viii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

This study investigates the popularity and prevalence of West German detective

cinema and its employment of genre transgression through anti-detection. By anti

detective cinema I mean films in which the detective’s investigations lead not to a

successful solution, but instead to a core of doubt enhanced by means such as lack of

closure and unresolved crimes. While scholars have dealt with conventional detective

films in Weimar and postwar Germany to some extent, the tremendous complexity of the

anti-detective sub-genre in the postwar period still remains unexplored. The formal

idiosyncrasies exhibited by the sub-genre’s development in the Federal Republic raise the

question, “who cares whodunit?” in regard to the mystery format. My dissertation

demonstrates that West German film’s move toward the mode of anti-detection is not

merely a formal innovation, but also a reaction to contemporary social conditions, e.g., to

debates about guilt and innocence in coming to terms with the Nazi past and Germany’s

troubled status in the postwar world. Spanning the lifetime of the West German state, this

study examines representative anti-detective films made between 1950 and 1990.1

suggest that these films undertake a two-fold examination of mystery and history: (1) by

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. actively questioning traditional notions of the detective film form, and (2) by

commenting on the West German political situation in the second half of the twentieth

century.

Richard Alewyn’s distinction between a Kriminalroman and a Detektixroman

based on the storyline has been crucial to the genre’s reception for many decades.

Alewyn proposes that aKriminalroman or crime novel follows the career of a criminal,

and culminates with the description of a horrific crime usually concluding this career.

The Detektixroman or detective novel takes crime as a starting point, reconstructing the

evidence until the mystery is solved in its climactic moment. My analysis of West

German cinema does not include Alewyn’s first category, or films featuring crime

narratives, in its scope. I use the umbrella term Krimi, which generally encompasses

stories of both detection and crime, to refer to films that narrate detective stories. Most

significant for my analysis is the distinction between conventional detective narratives—

novels, stories, and films that follow genre rules—, and anti-detective narratives, which

deviate from and question such rules.

German cinema, from its early beginnings, exhibited a strong passion for stories

constructed according to conventional genre rules. Even before World War I, detective

figures appeared in ambitious German films, such as Wo ist Coletti? (Mack 1913). Films

such as the Sherlock Holmes series from Nordisk, the Nick Winter films from Pathe, the

Nat Pinkerton series from Eclipse, or the Stuart Webbs series refute Siegfried Kracauer’s

verdict that detective cinema was not a conceivable genre in Wilhelmine Germany

although many films were produced between 1895 and 1918 (Knops 138). After World

War I, Germany further developed its indigenous variety of Krimis during the Weimar

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Republic (1919-1933). Critics of Weimar cinema have repeatedly interpreted detective

film as a genre that appealed to a cross section of society and thereby established the

medium of cinema. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, the figure of Stuart Webbs, the elegant,

aristocratic detective who could sink as low as he wished in social circles without getting

blemished himself, represents a solution to the primary dilemma of early German film—

how to legitimize itself culturally (1996, 21).1 In the 1930s, with the advent of Harry Piel

films, the German screen detective could shed his aristocratic skin and become a

“gumshoe” who professed a genuine enjoyment in sleuthing and pursuit. The Harry Piel

films owed their success to a combination of thrilling action and exotic locations. What

the Webbs and Piel films had in common was the indubitable authority of detective

figures, instituted largely through their successful reliance on logical reasoning and

legwork. The camera in both series shares its perspective with the detective. Viewers

typically enter or leave a locale with the detective and see clues through his vantage

point. Tilo Knops further points out that the plot in early German detective cinema does

not engage the viewers’ intelligence (139). The detective overcomes all difficulties,

playfully solving mysteries and riddles by unpeeling false appearances in primarily urban

locales.

In Weimar detective cinema, the everyday life of a modem metropolis turns out to

be nothing but a brittle cover, which can crack open at any moment into a labyrinth of

criminal conspiracies.- At the same time, the process of detection on screen de-mystifies

these conspiracies of their ominous aura and deconstructs the myth of crime. The

unmasking of the criminal is thus related in these films to another simultaneous

movement: the reduction of the impossible to the possible, of the inexplicable to the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. explained. Norbert Grob has traced three main directions in Weimar detective film: (1) a

“Schauplatz- und Sensationswechsel,” as in the Piel films; (2) a fascination with stringent

logic, as in the Webbs series; and (3) Fritz Lang’s detective film (especially his Mabuse

series), which refuses to offer any consoling solutions to the mysteries it presents: “Eine

Vision des Chaos, das durch Ordnungsformeln nicht zu bandigen ist” (1998,9-13).

Despite the common fascination of all three groups with thrilling action, Fritz Lang’s

Mabuse films mark a shift from the Harry Piel or Stuart Webbs films by exposing an

underside of tyranny and chaos beneath their fascination with fast-paced action and

modem technology.3

Lang’s Weimar detective films, including M (1931) and the first two Mabuse

films made in 1922 and 1933, foreshadow postwar German film’s engagement with anti

detection through their formal transgressions as well as their perceptive social

commentary. As Grob rightly observes, Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films break away from the

tyranny of an authoritarian detective figure. Instead, they present an intermediate position

between justice and injustice: uncovering crime becomes secondary in the face of

implacable terror. Mabuse is the evil incarnate, the great gambler combining the spectral

art of hypnosis with the genius of abstract organization, who leads the Weimar society in

its dance of death. The detective, also participating in this dance, can incriminate the

mastermind Mabuse, but cannot dispel the menacing sense of mystery from the world.4

Only the first two, more traditional trends mentioned by Grob continue in

detective films made during National Socialism, in whodunits like Alarm (Fredersdorf

1941) and thrillers like Flucht ins Dunkel (Rabenalt 1942). Erich Engels successfully

mixes elements of melodrama with detective narratives to create suspenseful thrillers like

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Mordsache Holm (1938) orDr. Crippen an Bord (1942). In both these films, as well as in

Engels’ 1939 film Im Namen des Volkes (Autobanditen), initially unfazed criminals break

down under an onslaught of investigations by unrelenting detectives. Nazi detective films

prefer to maintain the unquestioned authority of their investigators and to present a

triumph of law and order, often depicting detective work as being a useful and necessary

antidote to evil. Both formally and thematically, detective films made during the Third

Reich maintain a stringent distinction between good and evil, detection and crime. Not

surprisingly, morally ambivalent anti-detective films in the Langian tradition are not

found again until after 1945.

The publication Deutscher Spielfilmalmanach 1946-55 records 63 titles under the

entry Krimis made in West Germany between the years 1950-55. Detective films thus

amounted to approximately 15% of West German film production during these years,

among a total of approximately 400 films.5 Most of these films received a popularity

rating of between 2 and 3, and a press rating of between 3 and 4 (on a scale of 1 to 7, 1

being the best).6 Despite its regular occurence, a predominant theme in 1950s film

criticism was the dearth of detective film in postwar Germany:

Niemand wird leugnen wo lien, daB ein Genre vom deutschen Nachkriegsfilm recht stiefmiitterlich behandelt worden ist: der Kriminalfilm. [...] Wahrend des zuriickliegenden letzten Jahrzehnts [fullten] Importe aus ffanzosischen und anglo-amerikanischen Ateliers— wie etwa Filme von Hitchcock, Huston, Wyler, Reed, Dassin, Cayatte— die Parketts der deutschen Lichtspielhauser. ( Film-Echo, March 1, 1958)7

For more than fifty years since then, scholarship on German cinema has chosen to ignore

the prevalence of this genre in the West German cinematic imagination. Much of this

lack of attention can be traced to the misperception that detective film is a “non-German”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. genre that does not merit inclusion in the study of German film. Criticism of German

detective narratives has, in fact, been plagued by George Bernard Shaw’s infamous

witticism about the German lack of talent for two things: a successful revolution and a

good crime story (Teraoka 266). Discussion of post-1945 West German detective film

mainly revolves around the plethora of Edgar Wallace thrillers and whodunits that are

often read as antidotes to the postwar sense of alienation and emptiness. Such

conventional detective films succeed in creating reassurance through: (1) a sense of

closure, achieved by exposing and punishing criminals, and saving/ rewarding victims

and detectives; and (2) by shitting the drama of crime and detection to far-away locales

(e.g., London). To varying degrees, critics have contended that these films attempt to

divert attention from the “vacuum” of the postwar present. While these formulaic

narratives provide an important frame of reference for my study, I am chiefly interested

in anti-detective films, which question genre conventions with the effect of transcending

“the mere machinations of the mystery plot” (Merivale/ Sweeney 2).

Dennis Porter has described anti-detective texts as narratives in which:

The investigations conducted by a variety of protagonists lead not to the reaffirmation of a hidden order... but to a core of doubt, often by means of a parody of the detective genre. [...] The proliferation of clues and of apparently random symmetries makes it impossible to exhume the simple story that, as in detective fiction, would... signal an end to the nightmare. (245)

Anti-detective film uses the conventions and expectations set up by the three mainstream

varieties of detective cinema (the whodunit, the police procedural and the hardboiled

stories), drawing attention to its own constructed nature through an element of

“autocritique” (Cook 468), or an interrogation of the form, effects, and function of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. conventional detective cinema. My study focuses on the anti-detective films made in

West Germany by directors such as Helmut Kautner, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, and

Gerd Oswald. I contend that due to the unique presence of anti-detection, the German

detective film of the postwar period is not the insignificant kitsch it is usually made out to

be. Precisely because West German anti-detective cinema is aware of its double-edged

function— exposure of and a certain complicity in crime— it is able to offer artistic

representations of social problems.

Memories of the chiaroscuro world of Lang’s Weimar detective film are

hearkened back by an imaginative play with light and shadows in West German anti

detective film. Already in German Expressionist cinema, a restless and unstable screen

splintered with oblique lines and trapezoids portrays a world out of joint. Innocence has

long since been lost in this ambivalent black-white milieu, and no character, not even the

detective, can speak authoritatively from an emotionally and visually barren screen. In

postwar West Germany, when the crime of genocide potentially overshadowed any

individual crime, anti-detective film relentlessly explored the issues of guilt and

innocence in a society that feared it could be labeled criminal itself.

The dominant critical response to the genre after 1945, however, has paid scant

attention to anti-detection, and has been largely dismissive of conventional detective

cinema made in West Germany. Paul Buchloh and Jens Becker cite Horst-Eberhard

Richter’s extremely negative judgment on detective film as an example of a typical

reaction: “Die Rollenverteilung in diesen Filmen ist fast immer eindeutig. [...]Die

Zuschauer entspannen sichdurcheinseitig-blinde... Identifizierung” (32). However, they

also point out that reception of detective narratives sometimes lapses into “einer

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pauschalen Verherrlichung des Genres” (ibid.). This adulation can be verified in Norbert

Grab’s useful stocktaking of the developments in West German detective film that

nevertheless falls prey to the temptation to over-generalize. For instance, he insists on

celebrating the seditious strategies manifested by every detective film ever made:

“Kriminalfilme: Filme mit Ratseln, die Schritt fUr Schritt gelost werden, ohne daB am

Ende wirklich alles klar und eindeutig ist. Immer bleibt ein gewisser Rest, der

Unbehagen... weiter wirken laBt” (1998, 9). My work will acknowledge anti-detective

film’s genre-trangressions while rooting them in the broader context of traditionalKrimis

that continued to be plenteous in the Federal Republic.

Another typical move in detective criticism is to ignore the film medium

altogether. For instance, Edgar Marsch’s study Die Kriminalerzahlung writes off the

relevance of German detective cinema and chooses to concentrate on detective literature

written by Poe, Collins, Hoffmann, Durrenmatt, and Handke: “Der Kriminalfilm ist ein

Sekundiirprodukt des Kriminalromans. Innovationen finden im literarischen, nicht im

filmischen Bezirk statt” (38). German detective films have often been awarded such a

secondary status to detective fiction in scholarship. Examinations of detective films rely

too often on literary conventions, paying little attention to the uniqueness of film form.

Even Georg SeeBlen’s detailed commentary on the historical evolution of detective

cinema in Hollywood (with sporadic comments on GermanKrimis ) mainly tackles the

issue of Literatureerfilmung, or how detective literature can be effectively transported to

the screen. Seefilen does not consider distinct cinematic conventions developed by

detective sub-genres.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In contrast, my examination does not focus on detective fiction as the only point

of departure for a study of detective film, but takes its independent cinematic tradition

into account. My project is part of an increasing body of scholarly works dealing with

visual representations of detection in the German context. Here most critics have chosen

to focus on the golden era of pre-World War I German detective cinema (Elsaesser,

Knops, Hesse) or the Weimar detective film (Tatar, Wager). Works on detective cinema

made during the 1940s usually emphasize the experience of exile (Steinbauer-Grotsch,

Cargnelli/ Omasta). Research on the period after 1945 tends to concentrate largely on the

Edgar Wallace series (SeeBlen, Kramp), or the sub-genre of TV-Krimis such as Tatort,

Derrick, Polizeiruf 110 (Goyke, Bauer 1992). While the recently published anthology

Abgriinde der Phantasie skillfully combines formal analysis with details about the

production and reception of each film and presents short vignettes by various authors

about a number of German Krimis from Das Geheimnis des Abbe X (Brandt/ Dieterle

1927) toBella Block, die Kommissarin (Farberbock 1993), no book-length study has yet

been written on West German anti-detective film.8

Much in the spirit of detection, I tackle the black hole of disregard, a fate that has

befallen the West German anti-detective film The goals of my project are twofold. My

first aim is to provide a critical reading of a group of five films spanning the lifetime of

the West German state that share the fundamental feature of anti-detection, arguing that

their analysis is invaluable in our understanding of postwar society.9 The films under

consideration are:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid (Kautner 1950)

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (Siodmak 1957)

Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse (Lang I960)

Messer im Kopf {Hauff 1978)

Happy Birthday, Tiirke! (Dome 1991)

These films provide the best and most sustained, but by no means the only examples of

anti-detection in West German cinema. They complement the anti-detective nuances of

other contemporary films such asAm Tag, als der Regen kam (Oswald 1959), Schwarzer

Kies (Kautner 1961), Die dritte Generation (Fassbinder 1979), or Rotwang mufi weg

(Blumenberg 1995). The films I choose to examine in depth represent important stages in

the adaptation of anti-detection over various decades in the postwar Federal Republic.

As its second goal, my project attempts to answer the question: who cares

whodunit? This question is significant for my study due to two reasons. First, it addresses

the anti-detective film form. The recycling of anti-detective conventions, e.g., the

frustration of closure, raises questions about the continued efficacy of genre-subversion

over five decades: in other words, why would viewers continue to care whodunit in the

face of anti-detection’s repeated reversal of expectations? I point out that each film

creatively reinvents the genre through its formal innovations, transgressions, or

quotations, and thereby continues to spark viewer interest and attention. A constant

questioning of film form thus results in a revision or even abandonment of conventions,

and a need for reflection on the mutable, indeterminate nature of the genre and the world.

Second, the films tie their message about caring, or not caring, whodunit to West

Germany’s historical situation in each decade. My study shows how anti-detective films

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. confront debates about coming to terms with the Nazi past in the 1950s, remnants of the

Third Reich during the Economic Miracle, radical responses resulting from the

generational conflict during the 1960s and 1970s, and Germany’s unified, multiethnic

status at the beginning of the 1990s. By dovetailing genre innovation and sociopolitical

critique, the films I analyze offer viewers not so much an opportunity to escape their own

problematic existence, but rather a means of confronting this existence through a

heightened reflection on form and content through anti-detection.

Chapter 2 starts by establishing the connection between anti-detection and a

condition of suspicion that theorists such as Ernst Bloch interpret as being symptomatic

of German society. A juxtaposition of the two categories drawn from analyzing their

theoretical works— “intellectuals as detectives” and “detectives as intellectuals”—allows

us to refine our definition of anti-detection in the German-speaking context, and to relate

it to intellectual history. Using this tradition, I then map out the reception of detective and

anti-detective narratives in German and Anglo-American criticism, and draw attention to

key technical elements specific to anti-detective cinema. In Chapters Three to Six, I

decipher the cinematic style developed by West German anti-detective cinema with

reference to political conditions in after 1945 through a critical reading of each of my five

films.

A review of German detective film production between 1945-1955 becomes the

background for my investigation ofEpilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid and Nachts, wenn

der Teufel kam in Chapter Three. I posit that Epilog and Nachts counter the general

tendency of the West German public to assert a collective innocence in place of collective

guilt. They achieve this by making the confrontation with the Third Reich a central part

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of their anti-detective narratives. Kautner and Siodmak’s films use a mise-en-abune

structure, whereby a political dimension is gradually revealed behind their personal

stories of crime and detection. Epilog's reliance on parallel editing and Nachts'

conflation of points of view (POVs) achieve anti-detective effects that eventually result in

“dead ends,” fusing the detectives’ failure to conclude their investigations successfully as

a result of their deaths with a requiem to the epistemological ambitions of classical

detective film.

Epilog becomes the first example of anti-detective film in postwar West

Germany. Instead of following the conventions that had been the backbone of Weimar

and Nazi detective film, Kautner makes a connection to film noir, a form developed

primarily by German filmmakers in their Hollywood exile, and thereby suggests a way

out of the dead end for German detective film through his combination ofnoir, anti

detective technical devices, and a revisiting of the Nazi past. While Epilog only fleetingly

refers to the Third Reich and eschews direct confrontation with politics,Nachts is one of

the first films whose action is set in the Third Reich, unmediated by a postwar frame

narrative. Siodmak’s film marks his return to the West German film industry from exile

in Hollywood, where he had acquired much recognition as a leading film noir director.

However, Nachts spurns the flashback, voice-over narration typical to noir and subverts

the conventions of a police procedural to present its anti-detective message. Siodmak’s

film signals that the future of detection in the postwar world must be synonymous with a

questioning of the Nazi past, and employs the anti-detective structure to rupture the

boundaries between guilt and innocence, thereby questioning every person’s complicity

in the Third Reich.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four examines the interrelated nature of mystery, politics and film history

in Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse. The final work in Lang’s Mabuse trilogy reveals

connections between the West Germany of the Cold War era and its National Socialist

past symbolically through the Hotel Luxor, the site of crime and detection. 1000 Augen

echoes the anti-detective impulse of the first two Mabuse films in its plot and technical

details, and adapts it to the 1960s with its free intermixing of art cinematic and

commercial codes. Its reliance on a romantic sub-plot ostensibly creates a happy ending

that is, however, marred by a confusing use of ellipses and gaps. By diffusing the

investigative functions in multiple characters instead of presenting a master-sleuth, the

film undermines confidence in the act of detection. The use of a film-within-a-film

structure invites reflection on the link between vision and authority, and forms the core of

1000 Augen's anti-detective impulse.

The complexity of New German Cinema’s (NGC) use of anti-detection forms the

focal point of Chapter Five. Like1000 Augen, Hauffs film Messer im Kopf strikes a

middle ground between art and commercial film. My chapter links the issue of genre and

genre transgression with the oscillation within the NGC between sensibilism and

contentism The political situation in 1970s West Germany and the generational strife

embodied in the 1968 student movement forms the perfect backdrop for Hauffs

expression of dissent from detective film conventions, and links his work to films such as

The Parallax View (Pakula 1974) or Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976). Messer im K opfs use

of doubling renders its criminal and detective figures interchangeable, thereby continuing

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the pattern introduced in Lang’s film. The film’s inversion of the traditional clue-

suspicion-confirmation paradigm by unsettling the validity of all clues it investigates also

completely ruptures closure.

The transition from the dead ends of 1950s anti-detective films to the open ending

ofMesser im Kopf'va. 1978 shifts to the happy ending ofHappy Birthday, Tiirke! (Dorrie

1991). Dorrie’s Turkish-German detective solves the mystery, turns criminals over to the

law, and manages to stay happy and alive at the end of the film. Chapter Six investigates

how the anti-detective structure in Happy Birthday, Tiirke! intersects with issues of

ethnicity in the aftermath of German unification. Although it relies onfilm noir

conventions, the film nevertheless strikes a neutral ground between parodic quotation and

uncritical pandering. My study of Dorrie’s ethnic anti-detective noir film closes the circle

of West German anti-detective cinema begun with Kautner’s appropriation offilm noir in

1950. Through my work on this tradition, I further the current understanding of postwar

West Germany by showing how anti-detection relates to history through the film

medium. The next chapter will look back to the emergence of anti-detection in

intellectual, theoretical, and filmic discourse.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2

WIR HABEN DIE PFLICHT, AN ALLEM ZU ZWEIFELN”: INVESTIGATING ANTI-DETECTION

Our experience of truth is a palimpsest continually being re-written through the

process of interpreting clues, testing the validity of hypotheses, and drawing conclusions.

This process also forms the crux of detection. Yet what happens when one applies the

investigative process to the genre’s own assumptions about detection? One result of such

self-examination, this chapter will posit, is the emergence of anti-detection. Anti

detective narratives encourage readers and viewers to interpret like a detective a story

that cautions against interpreting Like a detective, thereby shaking up the belief in logic,

order, and security that the genre tends to affirm1 Anti-detection is thus founded on

Inspector Maigret’s credo of one’s duty of doubting everything, or, as Richard Alewyn

describes it, “ein vielleicht perverser, vielleicht normaler Hunger nach dem Geheimnis,

ein bisschen Unsicherheit und ein bisschen Angst” (404).

Perhaps it is the same “hunger” for mystery, insecurity, and tear that characterizes

the fascination for detective narratives exhibited by various twentieth-century

intellectuals writing in German. While the earlier chapter established the film-historical

context in which German detective cinema evolved, I will now turn to the twentieth

century German tradition of reading society through the lens of detective fiction. I start

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. with the cultural-critical ideas that Weimar thinkers posit in their treatment of the

detective genre. This connection between societal conditions and detective narratives also

comes to the fore in post-World War II society’s intense confrontation with guilt and

innocence, and can be traced to a specific focus on anti-detection that develops in the

German-speaking context, for instance, in Friedrich Diirrenmatt’s novels. I am primarily

interested in placing the theoretical works in a cultural context, in order to re-historicize

their conclusions about the conditions under which detective stories are produced,

consumed, and analyzed. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to an analysis of the

anti-detective sub-genre, and briefly review various approaches that have guided the

reception of detective and anti-detective narratives in German and Anglo-American

criticism Finally, my chapter details a working definition of anti-detection as well as the

technical aspects that anti-detective cinema privileges and eschews, in order 1 0 estabhsh

the ground rules for my examination of the anti-detective film form developed in West

Germany.

2.1 Theorizing Detection

“Gute Zeit also fur Detektivistisches schlechthin,” writes Erast Bloch about the

postwar world, and suggests that it has been tainted with a speedily diffused suspicion

(252). The skepticism associated with detection permeates everything in the postwar

context for Bloch. Bloch deems post-1945 Germany an ideal setting for the wearing of

masks and the brewing of intrigue, but also for the uncovering of crimes, for detection.

Similarly, Michael Holquist, writing about intellectuals in the twentieth century, observes

that they have a deep sense of chaos that they find reflected in the world of detective

narratives (64). All certainties of the nineteenth century— positivism, scientism,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. historicism— seem to have broken down, and the world is a threatening place. Holquist

further claims that “during [the twentieth century], when rationalism was experiencing

some of its most damaging attacks ... intellectuals, who experienced these attacks first

and most deeply, would turn for relief and easy reassurance to the detective story” (ibid.).

Building on this statement, I will examine works that thematize detective fiction in the

German-speaking context, by thinkers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, Walter

Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Friedrich Durrenmatt.2 Focusing on the sense of loss and

alienation prevalent in Bloch and Durrenmatt’s postwar texts, I will ask: What relation do

these ruminations have with contemporary intellectual and philosophical debates? My

findings show that the detective narrative does not continue to provide “relief and easy

reassurance” throughout the twentieth century, as Holquist suggests. Instead, thinkers

read (anti) detective literature and film as a social seismograph. Detective fiction’s

solution of the mystery or anti-detection’s lack of closure promotes some degree of

abstraction and reflection about the genre as well as the society that consumes and

produces it. Therefore, I put forward a moment of concurrence, where critical essays and

detective narratives continue beyond their investigation of the murder mystery to pose

(but not necessarily to solve) enigmas about communal existence. I start with the

category “intellectual as detective” and posit that thinkers from Kracauer to Bloch

function to some extent as detectives themselves, reading symptoms of social conditions

within detective stories. This section concludes with thoughts about the “detective as

intellectual,” or the reflective stance and critical space that both categories share. Finally,

I propose an affinity, based on social critique, between the theoretical works and anti

detective films I discuss.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2.1.1 Detecting Social Malaise: Kracauer, Benjamin, and Brecht

The interwar period was the golden age of the classical detective novel, and the

Weimar intellectuals Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht were avid

readers of the genre. Between 1922 and 1925, Kracauer worked on Der Detektiv-Roman,

which he sub-titled a “philosophical tractatus.” Only the chapter “Die Hotelhalle” was

ever published during Kracauer’s lifetime in the collection of essays that came out as Das

Ornament der Masse , and the entire manuscript was published only in 1971, meaning

that it remained inaccessible to philosophical musings on detective literature up to that

date (Frisby 2). Yet thinkers of detective fiction, including Benjamin and Bloch, could

access and respond to Kracauer’s other writings on the genre, such as his reviews of

detective novels in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer’s reviews had in turn started with

his Chesterton reception under the title “Hamlet Becomes a Detective,” and continued by

examining Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace’s novels.

In Der Detektiv-Roman, Kracauer expounds upon the idea of a compositional

principle behind the detective genre—a principle that involves looking not just at genre,

but also, more broadly, at society. His recalcitrant critique of modem society adds a sharp

edge to his formal and thematic analyses of various aspects of representing detection.3

Further, Kracauer connects the structure of the detective novel to his own theological and

sociological views. Gertrud Koch points out that the first section ofDer Detektiv-Roman

makes use of Kierkegaard’s concept of the “median being,” the position occupied by

humans between the spheres of “nature” and “super-nature” (33). Humans, as far

removed from the natural state as they are from the “higher” sphere of God, exist within a

paradox and tense interim domain between the spheres—and humans are human

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. precisely because they inhabit this domain. What makes Kracauer’s study so unique is his

rereading of Kierkegaard through the medium of a popular literary genre: he tries to

prove by means of philosophical argument that the status of the detective novel as a

literary genre can be transformed.4 Kracauer pronounces the trivial genre of detective

literature an occurrence worthy of sociological and psychological interest: “Ohne

Kunstwerk zu sein, zeigt doch der Detektiv-Roman einer entwirklichten Gese Use haft ihr

eigenes Antlitz reiner, als sie es sonst zu erblicken vermochte [und] erschliefit im

asthetischen Medium das Geheimnis der... Gesellschaft und ihrer substanzlosen

Marionetten” (117).

The treatise as a whole relies on sociology, one of the two sciences that Kracauer

claims are applicable to the “world of socialized man” (Koch 12).5 At the same time, he

asserts that the objective side of sociology, which addresses those laws that emerge from

socialization itself, is impervious to the deductions of systems of transcendental

philosophy. This prompts him to place an emphasis on the religious and theological

spheres in his treatise. At the same time, Kracauer does not give his exegesis in these

spheres greater clarity other than to state in a regretful tone of cultural criticism that the

unconditional nature of divine law has degenerated into petty bourgeois conventions.

Kracauer posits, in a structure that anticipates Adomo and Horkheimer’s critique of

enlightenment, that the detective novel depicts “einen Zustand der Gesellschaft, in dem

der verbindungslose Intellekt seinen Endsieg erfochten hat” (106). The genre becomes, in

his reading, a mere reflection of an alienated society, and the detective personifies the

cold rationality of the detective novel, which in turn reflects the rootlessness of early

twentieth-century Europe.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This discourse about the detective novel reflects a break from the “Gotteshaus”

and a sense of lament or loss (129). By means of his analysis of the detective novel,

Kracauer attacks the apathy of a society that produces narratives of crime and

investigation, yet remains untouched by them. The detective becomes the sole figure who

can unmask the emptiness of the social structure, by means of his rational prowess: “die

ratio entleert die noch gegebene Wirklichkeit so lange, bis sie zum Bild ihrer eigenen

Unwirklichkeit wird” (139). The detective, personifying the ratio, is the “secular priest”

who gathers confessions from his criminals. On the one hand, the detective teams the

mystery behind everything, while the police merely embody legality devoid of meaning

that has left the higher sphere of law behind it, because it only consists of an absence of

the illegal. However, Kracauer posits that the detective’s omnipresence and ultimate

omniscience is futile because of the absence of the divine sphere in his rationalized

universe: “Dieser Detektiv-Gott ist Gott in einer Welt nur, die Gott verlassen hat und

darum nicht eigentlich ist ” (142). The detective novel is thus an inadequate substitute for

heaven in a godless world, in which there are no mysteries, only incorrect reasoning.

Having deciphered everything, nothing remains but a void.

Like the detectives of Weimar cinema, Kracauer’s sleuth is a magician who can

explain away his duplicitous milieu to nothingness, but who remains unaffected by the

sham:

Der Detektiv begeht die Abenteure der ratio um ihrer selbst willen und [besitzt nicht] die Unersattlichkeit des Abenteurers, dessen stete Hoffhung und stete Enttauschung bleiben ihm fern; er schweift nicht in die unendliche Ode, um zu erlangen, was ihm verloren ist; vielmehr die “Falle” stoBen ihm zu oder werden ihm zugewiesen. Hintertreibend von Aufgabe zu Aufgabe, stellt er lediglich den progressus ad indefinitum der ratio dar. (144)

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Although the study is couched in the tone of the cultural criticism of the time, its tone

remains as detached as the detective it describes, and its analysis is curiously indefinite.

Der Detektiv-Roman contains hardly a single quotation or longer descriptive passage

taken from the detective novels that Kracauer read and reviewed so regularly for

newspapers at the same time that he wrote the treatise. Instead, his approach remains

entrenched in the categories of a programmatic system rather than venturing out into the

oft-cited empirical reality. On the one hand, Kracauer’s attitude to the genre endeavors to

establish the track to be taken by a critical interpretation that wishes not to be

metaphysical. On the other, it remains decidedly ensnared in the religious-theological

legacy of metaphysics.

Yet Kracauer’s comments on the fragmentary civilized society of detective novels

can be extended to contemporary metropolitan existence. The labyrinth of the metropolis

and its aimless unrest also forms the starting point for Walter Benjamin’s analysis of

detective novels. Benjamin’s Einbahnstrafie has frequent references to the social

significance of detective novels, and his essay on Baudelaire makes the detective

narrative one portion of his wide-ranging observations on urban society, consumerism,

and French literature. Looking back to nineteenth-century Paris, “Charles Baudelaire: Ein

Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus” (1938) discusses the socio-cultural

implications of the rise of detective fiction in contemporary urban societies. Specifically,

Benjamin lists two features characterizing the “social content” of detective texts: (1) the

obliteration of individual traces in the city crowd— an anonymity that fosters crime; and

(2) the popularity of journalism and mass media, which aids in rapid detection.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Der urspriingliche gesellschaftliche Inhalt der Detektivgeschichte ist die Verwischung der Spuren des Einzelnen in der GroBstadtmenge. Eingehend widmet Poe sich diesem Motiv im „Geheimnis der Marie Roget“... Gleichzeitig ist diese Novelle der Prototyp der Verwertung joumalisticher Informationen bei der Aufdeckung von Verbrechen. (1972, 546)

According to Benjamin, detective fiction is the product of a society fraught with

replication and consumerism, but he also sees this threat dispelled through the highly

scientific and logical construction of detective fiction. He further points to modem

technology, e.g. photography, which simultaneously makes the work of detection easy

(by individualizing the city crowd) and more difficult (photography becomes a means of

perpetuating deception). Detective texts depict the functioning of an increasingly urban

society, one that is characterized by the shield of anonymity, as also by anonymity’s

threatening qualities.

In Einbahnstrafie Benjamin explains this enigmatic pronouncement about the fate

of modem urban society, by revealing its key quality of Verstellung, or masking (1977,

93). Detective texts thus become both the apotheosis and collapse of a bourgeois culture,

goading the fantasies of law-abiding citizens with clichds of depravity: bookcases that

rotate at the touch of a button or Victorian salons with Oriental decor that hide gambling

and opium dens are indicative of the duplicity that has made everyday objects mysterious

and threatening and that has become an inseparable part of social life. Such reflections

depart only tangentially from the metaphysical abstraction of Kracauer’s treatise, and at

the same time run contrary to it. Benjamin’s study of the detective genre is located in the

modem metropolitan world occupied with mundane things such as monetary exchange

and travel. For instance, he points out that people did not read while traveling in a

stagecoach, and draws parallels between the growing popularity of detective fiction and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. railway journeys. But the dislocation of time and space in railway journeys connects to

the theme of emptiness that is part of Benjamin’s social analysis. Both Kracauer and

Benjamin consciously penetrate the fictional world of detective literature in a manner

imitating the detective's practice of scratching and looking beyond surfaces. Detective

narratives are key to reading social reality for both these thinkers. However, Bertolt

Brecht argues that the detective novel, in which everything and everyone leaves a trace,

forms a direct contrast to reality, to “das Leben der atomisierten Masse und des

kollektivierten Individuums, [das spurenlos] verlauft” (516). At the same time, Brecht’s

essay, “Uber die Popularitat des Kriminalromans” (1938) echoes the eclectic connections

established by Benjamin between detective texts, urban anonymity, mass media, and

scientific or technological advances.

Like Kracauer, Brecht does not provide his readers with a single example of the

form, nor does he refer to specific titles. Yet his essay situates the detective novel as a

significant part of popular culture, and awards it a central role in Weimar cultural and

intellectual life. Unlike Kracauer, however, Brecht does not dismiss the detective text’s

aesthetic quality merely on the basis of its popular success. Instead, he argues that the

pattern of variation on the same motives that the detective novel in the early twentieth

century evinces is the sign of a cultivated literary genre. He argues for the high value of

detective texts in the modem, scientific age: “Sieht man jedochdie Verb indung

[zwischen Joyce, Doblin, oder Dos Pas so s und dem Kriminalroman von Sayers, Freeman

und Rhode], dann erkennt man, dafi der Kriminalroman bei all seiner Primitivitat (nicht

nur asthetischer Art) den Bedurfhissen der Menschen eines wissenschaftlichen Zeitalters

sogar noch me hr entgegenkommt, als die Werke der Avantgarde es tun ” (506).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Brecht terms the reading of Krimis an “intellectual habit,” thereby forming the

basis for his subsequent comparison of the mental agility that is the prerequisite for the

production and consumption of detective novels, and the cerebral nature of scientific and

intellectual thought: “Man kann das Lesen psycho logisc her (oder wo lien wir sagen:

literarischer) Romane nicht mit derselben Sicherheit eine intellektuelle Beschaftigung

nennen, denn der psycho logische (literarische) Roman erschlieBt sich dem Leser durch

im Wesen anderer Operationen als durch logisches Denken. Der Kriminalroman handelt

vom logisc hen Denken und verlangt vom Leser logisches Denken” (504). Brecht’s high

evaluation of detective texts is variously motivated by his critique of contemporary

literature, and his defense of popular culture and the communicative and pedagogical

function of literature. In another development, Brecht draws parallels between the modus

operandi of detectives and physicists, and especially pointing to the scientific reasoning

which forms the basis of “good”Krimis. He then dubs the conclusions of detective texts

an experiment, or the test of the working hypothesis: “Wenn die These richtig ist, dann

muB der Morder auf Grund einer bestimmten MaBnahme dann und dann da und da

erscheinen. [...] Man sieht die Annaherung an den wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt”

(505).6

However, Brecht also reads the detective genre as transcending the vagaries of

life and the irrevocably forward momentum of history. Brecht’s optimism about the genre

is interwoven with a pessimistic strain, even as he reflects on the irreversibility of history,

which flies in the face of the flashback structure of the detective story. Brecht thus points

out that (hi)stories are written onlyafter catastrophes, and then makes this connection

between intellectual thought and detective narratives: “Wir machen unsere Erfahrungen

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. im Leben in katastrophaler Form ” (509, original italics). Pointing to the fallacy of

observations which mass media attempt to disseminate, Brecht builds in his essay a sense

of life-experience as catastrophe to a crescendo, by varying on such sentiments as “Wir

sind weder Herr unserer Schliisse noch Herr unserer Entschlusse” (318). The sense of

bafflement evoked by the catastrophes he lists—war, unemployment, and political

scandal-- also intensifies the desire to know the “inside story,” which, however, remains

unattainable: “Nur wenn wir... wiiBten, verstunden wir” (509). Brecht then contrasts the

subjunctive mood of this statement with his thesis about catastrophes and (hi)story: “Nur

die Geschichte kann uns belehren iiber diese eigentlichen Geschehnisse... die Geschichte

wird nach den Katastrophen geschrieben“ (510). Like history, the key feature of Krimis is

their pedagogical function of enlightening readers about catastrophes and crimes,

providing them an opportunity for hindsight within the narrative framework, by enabling

them to guess whodunit.

Diese Grundsituation, in der die Intellektuellen sich befinden, dafi sie Objekte und nicht Subjekte der Geschichte sind, bildet das Denken aus, das sie im Kriminalroman genussvoll betatigen konnen. Die Existenz hangt von unbekannten Faktoren ab. [...] Wenn Uberhaupt, dann kommt Klarheit, aber erst nach der Katastrophe. Der Mord ist geschehen. Was hat sich da zuvor zusammengezogen?... Nun, man kann es vielleicht erschlieBen. (510)

Along with its other compensatory functions, the detective story reinstates the

faith in intellectual work as being active and consequential, as Brecht’s use of the term

“betatigen” suggests. The detective genre not only facilitates logical thinking and

exercises the mind; it is, in fact, essential for continued belief in the efficacy of logic and

human intellect. Brecht contends that the form of the detective novel— concluding with a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revelation of the “inside story”— offers its readers respite from the vagaries of an

uncertain existence; the laws of logic and rationality seem to work again as all clues fall

into place: “Im Kriminalronum funktioniert es wieder” (520).

In the final part of his essay, Brecht again makes an overarching gesture to the

intellectual life of his times, one marked by uncertainty and obscurity: “Die

Gelegenheiten, die wir vorfinden, sind hochst undeutlich, verhullt, verwischt. Das

Kausalitatsgesetz funktioniert hochstens halbwegs” (509). However, the fixed causality

of detective novels provides its readers “die hauptsachlichste intellektuelle VergnUgung”

(509). In contemporary society, Brecht argues, the detective novel has, foremost, a

compensatory function: it provides surrogate thrill, which echoes the condition of the

society which produces it, but—more importantly, provides surrogate relief, by

reaffirming logic, certainty, and closure (something which, Brecht argues, even an

advanced science such as physics cannot accomplish). Brecht does not devote any

attention to the figure of the detective in his essay, but the comparison with scientific

methodology makes it clear that the detective, much like in Kracauer’s work, is a

representative of rationality, working from varied hypotheses until he finds a “fit”

between mystery and solution, conjecture and reality.

Kracauer, Benjamin, and Brecht refrain from referring directly to the socio

political context in which they construct their observations on detective texts, and resort

to generalizations about a highly rationalized society that languishes in social spaces

drained of meaning, such as hotel lobbies (Kracauer), about urban, technocratic societies

(Benjamin), or about life as a series of catastrophes (Brecht). Ernst Bloch’s intellectual

path crossed with that of Kracauer and Benjamin in Weimar Germany and in exile, but he

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. starts theorizing detective fiction later than the other thinkers. The fact that he writes

about the genre in a post-Holocaust context becomes evident in his allusions to West

Germany and the Third Reich in a central section of his essay.

2.1.2 From Detection to Anti-Detection: Bloch and Durrenmatt

Ernst Bloch’s 1960 essay “Philo sophische Ansicht des Detektivromans” continues

Kracauer, Benjamin and Brecht’s emphasis on rationalization as the main element of

detective stories. However, Bloch also argues against Kracauer and Benjamin’s negative

associations with detective fiction, and draws parallels between the genre and all great

works in literature (e.g. Sophocles’Oedipus Rex) that manifest a movement from a

primeval darkness of mystery to light through detection. Significantly, Bloch’s essay

itself starts out in the form of an enigmatic statement: “Etwas ist nicht geheur, damit

fangt das an” (242), and then quickly declares that its primary interest is the examination

of the formal structure and aesthetic function of the detective genre.

Naming Hoffmann’s “Das Frauiein von Scuderi” (1819) and Poe’s “The Murders

in the Rue Morgue” (1841) as the earliest predecessors of the form, Bloch argues that

Hoffmann and Poe ensured the literary value of this new genre, a value that has been

preserved through the artistic merit and cultural significance of works by Conan Doyle,

Gaborieau, Heller, Oppenheim, Christie and Chesterton. Bloch differentiates between the

meaning-preserving category ofKolportage or trivial literature to which detective fiction

belongs, and the “meaningless” forms ofKitsch und Schund (246):

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. [Als Kolportage], die immer wieder Bedeutungen bewahrt, wie sie in besserer Literatur langst keinen Platz mehr haben; dabei sei genau an die ublichen Kriminallandschaften von Horchen, Klopfen, Uberraschen, Indizienlesen, jahem Schlagblitz gedacht [...]. In summa: Kolportage enthalt streckenweise Bedeutungen, die auch an hoheren Stellen, in Dichtung und Philosophic, vorkommen, dort aber selten mehr so unbegleitet, ungeleitet hervortreten. (246-47) The detective text as Kolportage can thus contain the purest form of abstract thinking and

cerebral activity, which seldom appears in philosophy and “high” literature in this

unmediated manner. In fact, Bloch equates the rise of detective fiction with a rise in the

tendency, even in high-cultural artifacts, “entlarvend her[zu]gehen” (252). This potential

for a movement from darkness to light, from simple to highly developed and abstract

thinking, also marks Bloch’s analysis of the structure of detective texts. He lists three

main features of detective fiction: (1) guesswork; (2) revelation and enlightenment; (3)

the development from unnarrated to narrated, from pre-text to text (this last element is,

for Bloch, the most crucial aspect of detective fiction, and characterizes as detectivistic

even those texts that lack an explicit detective figure.)

Bloch equates the structure and theme of detective texts with the impulse to

uncover, which he finds to be central to scientific (Freud), “high” literary (Sophocles,

Fielding, Ibsen), and philosophical or religious (Kabbala, Bohme, Baader, Schelling)

discourse:

Wahr aber ist in all den angegebenen Odipus-Metaphysiken, jenseits ihrer Mythologeme, daJ3... ein Dunkel, ein Inkognito des Anfangs darin reflektiert worden ist. Das lautet sehr mythisch, hat doch ebenso sehr Rationelles: in Untat hineinleuchtendes Licht. (258-60)

The completion of the movement from darkness to light concludes Bloch’s essay on the

detective novel; but in drawing a full circle, Bloch returns to the original puzzle which

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. started his musings on the genre: “etwas ist nicht geheuer, damit fangt das an” (261). The

repetition of this statement now serves to summarize his thesis of the genre’s movement

from the uncanny to the explained, and is posed as a conclusion rather than as a

conundrum

Bloch’s essay also posits that detective fiction, because it dovetails private and

public consciousness, is an excellent example of a genre where the troubled relationship

between Uberbau and Unterbau is most visible: “Solch Detektorisches... lost unechtes

Gold auf, macht so verbleibend echtes im... substantiellen UberschuB iiber die Ideologien

desto unverwechselbar kenntlich” (254). What detective fiction exposes is ultimately

“[den] getamten Menschen, die unechte Umwelt, ein Talmi selber, wie es seit iiber

hundert Jahren dieser Art von Kolportage zusteht” (250, original italics). Bloch expresses

his unshaken faith in the enlightening function of detective texts. The heuristic feature of

detective novels also enables them to expose social symptoms in the guise of uncovering

mystery; detection becomes an (ErjFindungskunst (an art of finding or creating).

Concomitantly, Bloch believes that a change in social conditions is echoed by a change in

detective methods. Whereas a Sherlock Holmes, operating during the turn of the

nineteenth century, could rely on positivism, Agatha Christie’s Poirot signifies the shift

from such induction to the intuition of the late bourgeois society in which he functions.

What is vital in both cases is that the detective retains his proclivity to express doubt

(Bedenken ). This questioning attitude gives detective texts the unique ability to uncover

pretensions and to disrupt the facade of bourgeois complacency.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In an important section, Bloch’s essay traces a shift that manifests itself in the

course of the twentieth century. He refers back to periods of speedy suspicion in the past,

such as the Inquisition, but posits an increase in the chaotic insecurity of life in the

postwar period. He suggests that interpersonal relations have become fraught with

heightened anonymity and suspicion especially after the Third Reich, in “den stilleren,

nach dem Nazismus wieder gesitteteren, doch anonymen Verschlagenheitszeiten,

doppelten Sinns” (251). Bloch plays with the multiple meanings of the term, suggesting

that detective fiction condemns its audience to an inescapable sense of terror and

abandons them in a wordless silence ( Verschlagenheit) with its sly ( verschlagen)

strategies of masking and pretension.

Bloch’s argument that the increasing mistrust of the postwar period is a lingering

legacy of the Third Reich remains vaguely formulated compared to his detailed

examination of the literary value of detective stories. However, his explicit reference to

Walter Benjamin’s connection between detective narratives and the sham characterizing

early twentieth century society establishes a continuum between Benjamin’s concept of

Verstellung, related to Weimar Germany, and his own sense of Verschlagenheit after

1945.

GewiB auch, so etwas wie der Detektivroman driickt in der metierhaften Grundsatzlichkeit und Weite seines Verdachts diesen Entffemdungszustand nur auf unterhaltende Weise aus und sensationell aufs Verbrechen outriert: ohne eine allgemeine Zeit der Verstellung aber hatte sich in dieser Literaturart nicht ebenfalls, wie Benjamin sagt, “ein Stuck des biirgerlichen Pandamoniums” ausgepragt. (252)

The Weimar detective novel exposes its own duplicity or Verstellung and provides

closure through unmasking. However, detective stories after 1945 sensationalize and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. exaggerate the divorce between appearance and reality, thus making the idea of simple

masking or Verstellung slide into the more complicated, and ultimately less hopeful,

Verschlagenheit. Compared to the relative security of the early twentieth century, Bloch

argues, the postwar period has added a general mistrust to Benjamin’s notion of duplicity.

Bloch’s contention renders any “Indiz ex machina” that might save the day for the

detective and for detective texts impossible, and describes the ethos that prompts anti

detective narratives. Written in the post-World War II conditions of increased suspicion

that Bloch so effectively theorizes, Friedrich Durrenmatt’s anti-detective works can be

seen as the fictional embodiment of the very connection between detection and society

that Bloch, building on Kracauer, Benjamin, and Brecht, analyzed in his critical essay.

The pessimistic turn from the doubting to the self-doubting detective forms the core of

Durrenmatt’s anti-detective novels.

Although Diirrenmatt writes and sets his works in Switzerland, he nevertheless

refers to a German tradition of detective fiction in his theoretical reflections on the genre.

In addition, Durrenmatt’s analysis of Swiss society in his detective novels constantly

refers back to the Third Reich, whether it is in the description of Albertchen’s strange

behavior during World War II and in the postwar years in Das Versprechen (1958), or in

the detective’s tireless digging up of the German past while following his prime suspect,

an ex-Nazi doctor, and the resulting comment on the continuities between the Third

Reich and postwar present in Der Verdacht (1951). Indeed, in Durrenmatt’s first two

detective novels featuring Kommissar Barlach, Der Richter und sein Henker (1950-51)

and Der Verdacht, the villains have shady, veiled connections to the National Socialist

past. Further, they insist that they represent a culpability that nobody can escape in a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. postwar world, and contend that what happened in Germany could happen in every

country if certain conditions occur: “Kein Mensch, kein Land ist eine Ausnahme” (1951,

31). In the next chapter, I will demonstrate that this uncovering of the past becomes a

central moment in 1950s German anti-detective film.

Durrenmatt’s works embody a metaphysical reflection on the state of detective

fiction itself. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, in a post-HoIocaust world, he

suggests that all rules of detective fiction must crumble under an onslaught of

coincidence, and the dichotomy of good and evil cannot be maintained. Perhaps the most

sustained commentary on detective fiction by means of a self-reflexivity appears in

Durrenmatt’s third novel, Das Versprechen (1958), which bears the striking subtitle,

“Requiem auf den Kriminalroman.” Interestingly, the starting point for Das Versprechen

was Ladislao Vajda’s film Es geschah am hellichten Tag, for which Durrenmatt wrote

the script in 1957. The film had a didactic theme and was shown in seventy countries.

Durrenmatt wrote the script as part of a project for enlightening parents about sexual

crimes against children. In the film police detective Matthai, investigating the murder of

six-year old Gritli Moser on the last day of his job, swears to her parents “by his

salvation” that he will find the killer. The peddler who has found the dead body, and who

also has a record as a sex offender, confesses after an eight-hour investigation, then hangs

himself in his cell. Determined to keep his promise, Matthai stays back and tracks down

clues to construct a profile of the murderer. After he is convinced that the real killer is

still at large, he “fishes” for him at a gas station he buys on the road on which, he

presumes, the murderer has traveled when he committed his serial killings. In the film

Matthai’s “bait” is Annemarie, a little girl whom the murderer must try to kill due to her

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. appearance. She is unknowingly successful in attracting the killer. The killer appears;

there is a struggle. Matthai is wounded but manages to kill the assailant. Annemarie

suddenly dashes into the site of confrontation, and Matthai distracts her from the grisly

scene with the same hand puppet that the killer has used earlier to lure her to the forest.

The camera pans back to a long shot of the wooded setting, focusing on the father-child

idyll, as the credits roll: the order that the murderer had disrupted has been restored.

The novel, however, eschews the detective’s success and closure. Instead of

catching the murderer, Matthai reaps the hatred of the young girl and her mother, who

realizes she has merely been a bait in an elaborate trap. Matthai sinks deeper into

alcoholism and depression; his perpetual droning, “Ich warte, ich warte. Er wird

kommen” (242) is a pitiful comment on his inability to comprehend defeat. The didactic

purpose now steps back in the face of the sheer futility of detection and its drive to

uncover, to expose. As the first half of the novel ends, so does the actual detective work.

The second half is given over to an interminable sense of waiting, of anticipation, and

finally, to the overwhelming sense of cruel fate as the truth is finally brought to light, but

without bringing the expected solace or material reward for the detective. That the system

works, justice is rational, and crime does not pay are universal lessons of detective texts.

Das Versprechen creates a rupture in this ordered world and affords readers a glimpse

into the machinations of blind chance, a glimpse now denied the hopelessly insane

Matthai. An old woman’s deathbed confession reveals that her feeble-minded husband,

“Albertchen,” was the serial killer fitting precisely Matthai’s profile—only he was killed

in a car wreck on his way to see Annemarie.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. What has rendered a masterful piece of detection absurd? Durrenmatt’s afterword

suggests that his intention was “die Fabel aufs neue aufzugreifen und weiterzudenken,

jenseits des Padagogischen” (243), and that his novel provided a critique of the

ratiocinating detective, “einer der typischsten Gestalten des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts”

(ibid). The conclusions of Richter and Verdacht, Durrenmatt’s earlier detective novels,

had reaffirmed a faith in their detective’s success at the conclusion. For instance, in the

latter work, the giant KZ survivor Gulliver saves detective Barlach from the criminal Dr.

Emmenberger’s diabolic plan and from defeat. Gulliver’s cynical final message,

however, anticipates the death-knell that Das Versprechen sounds for detective fiction’s

optimism: “Wir wollen die Welt nicht zu retten suchen, sondem zu bestehen, das einzig

wahrhafte Abenteuer, das uns in dieser spiiten Zeit noch bleibt” (116). Durrenmatt’s

thematization of chance, however, stands in direct opposition to early detective

narratives, which were often structured like mathematical equations, and could be

reduced to rules. In contrast, Durrenmatt claims, “Es gibt keine Regel, es gibt kein

Gesetz” (Pasche 14), and the only possible solution is the worst possible one. InDas

Versprechen, Dr. H., the retired commandant of the Zurich Cantonal Police and the

storyteller firom the frame narrative, accuses the detective novel of perpetrating a fraud,

and insists that crime can never be solved like a mathematical equation because we can

never anticipate nor know all the necessary factors, and because coincidence plays too

great a role. So the criminologist creates statistical models, whereas individual crime

stands outside the scope of the calculable. Das Versprechen destroys the last vestiges of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hope that the author has invested in his early detective fiction, and becomes a requiem not

just to nineteenth century detectives, but also to his first two Krimis which had been so

“harmlos fabulierend” (Brock-Sulzner 287).

To return to Holquist's statement about the assuaging effect of detective fiction’s

faith in rationality, it seems that neither detective fiction nor its theorization can provide

“relief and easy reassurance” against the breakdown of nineteenth century ideas like

positivism. Instead, both detectives and intellectuals must critically re-evaluate

anachronisms like ratiocination in a post-Holocaust world. Jeanne C. Ewert notes the

prevalence of anti-detection from the late 1930s to mid-40s in works like Heimito von

Doderer’s Ein Mord den Jeder begeht (1938) or Jorge Luis Borges’ “La Muerte y la

brujula” (1942), and connects it to “a feeling of tables being turned and the law-abiding

being prosecuted as criminals” (193). Ewert’s essay posits a historical link between the

sense of universal disaster evoked by World War II, and detection’s move away from

epistemology and positivism toward the mode of anti-detection, predicated on

unpredictability and the malignant necessity of chance. Further, she highlights the

intensification of what she calls “the attack on epistemology” evinced by postwar anti

detective texts like Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes (1953), Friedrich Durrenmatt’s

Das Versprechen (1958), and Georg Perec’s La Disparition (1969).

A similar skepticism regarding classical detective generic codes can be found in

the hardboiled narratives of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, and in the world of

film noir. Film noir, a genre or style of crime films permeating American cinema between

1940 and 1958, can be circumscribed by its employment of chiaroscuro, skewed framing,

urban locales, and dark endings that did not necessarily provide closure (Sobchack 135).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Joan Copjec’s foreword to her critical anthologyShades o f Noir cites the volatile social

and economic situation of the decade immediately following World War II as informing

the body of classic noir films, and Vivian Sobchack’s essay “Lounge Time” connects film

noir’s hyperbolized mise-en-scene of nightclubs, bars, roadside cafes, bus and train

stations, and wayside motels to American material conditions in the postwar context,

such as a shortage of housing and new concepts of leisure. Such a grounding ofnoir 's

cinematic elements within historical conditions runs parallel to my analysis of West

German anti-detective films in juxtaposition with sociopolitical conditions in the Federal

Republic. But while the link between the detective film form and political history is a

useful referent here,/i/m noir's foregrounding of urban nightmares, its convoluted

intermeshing of temporal and spatial coordinates, and its quick-witted and quick-fisted

private investigator form only one part of the anti-detective impulse within West German

cinema. Indeed, many West German anti-detective films question noir’s ultimate faith in

the detective as the upholder of moral standards in a depraved society, most famously

stated in Raymond Chandler’s characterization of the hardboiled private eye: “But down

these mean streets a man must go who is... neither tarnished nor afraid,... a man of

honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without the thought of it, and certainly without saying

it” (237). In contrast, investigators in the West German anti-detective films I examine are

both tarnished and afraid. Their status as readers of malaise is foregrounded more than

their sense of honor, and even the former is proven to be ineffectual since their reading is

overwhelmed by more powerful adversaries, and most often marked by failure.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In other words, while mostfilm noir can be classified as being anti-detective due

to its sense of past and future disaster and its fascination with unpredictability in form

and content, anti-detective cinema cannot be reduced to noir. Only two of the films I

examine in my study employ noir-ish visual elements. Film noir and anti-detective

cinema merge in their problematization of the traditional representation of detection and

their common exposure of the links between power, money, and politics. But anti

detective cinema’s agenda, broadly stated, consists of a questioning and revision of film

form. The boundaries between theorizing and fictionalizing detection are more or less

erased, and the resulting interconnection is linked to historical conditions. In this sense,

West German anti-detective cinema does not remain restricted to the noir vocabulary it

originally refers to in the 1950s.

West German anti-detective films create a link between perception and suspicion

regarding social conditions that comes close to the intellectual pursuit of brooding about

things and reading their fragmentary messages that I have detailed in the German-

speaking context.7 These films’ investigation of the West German social structure runs

parallel to their questioning of generic patterns. Deviation from genre conventions such

as closure becomes central to West German anti-detective film: the new sub-genre

constitutes a requiem for the classical detective film that gained its impulse from an

epistemological confidence in “discovering truth by questioning sources of knowledge”

(Ewert 179). In West German anti-detective film after 1945, the investigators’ analytic

brilliance matches that of their predecessors, but they belong to a different generation of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. detectives and to a narrative world that structures detection differently. The next section

will examine the concept and reception of anti-detection and will outline the key

technical elements of anti-detective film.

2.2 Anti-Detection

My section on anti-detection begins by considering rules of the detective genre.

By detective narrative, I mean a story whose principal action concerns the attempt by an

investigator (by detectives or quasi-detectives, such as an “Everyman,” a police team,

etc.) to solve a crime, ostensibly for the purpose of enlightenment and justice. Heta

Pyrhdnen has provided useful definitions of the various sub-genres of detective

narratives, such as “whodunits,” “police procedurals,” and “hard-boiled texts” (21-2).

The whodunit focuses on the investigation of a crime, usually by a single detective figure,

and is constructed like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are initially scattered, but fit

together at the end. Typically, the story develops through the testing and rejection of

various hypotheses, until a “fit” between mystery and reality is found, culminating in a

revelation of the criminal's identity. In the police procedural, the identity of the criminal

is usually known to the audience from the beginning, and the focus shifts to the

“competition” or chase between the on-screen detectives and criminals. This sub-genre

emphasizes the institutional nature of police investigation, technical expertise in reading

clues, and relations between the police, criminals, and society. In the hardboiled story, to

use Tzvetan Todorov’s famous formulation, “prospection takes the place of

retrospection” (47). Todorov explains that the emphasis is no longer on the preceding

moment of crime, but on the detective’s struggle for survival in the face of new,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. amorphous directions which crime takes. The setting is usually one of corruption and

urban anguish, and the mystery being solved is related not just to the crime but also to its

investigator, and to the society that houses both.

German-speaking countries cannot look back to a long tradition of detective

fiction like England, France and the USA, yet all three sub-genres are represented within

German detective fiction. Ulrike Leonhardt has traced a genealogy of German detective

fiction beginning with Schiller’s Erzdhlung “Der Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre” (1792)

and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Das Fraulein von Scuderi” (1819), followed by Annette von

Droste-Hulshoff s novellaDie Judenbuche (1842). Yet her work ignores the important

strides made by lesser-known authors such as Maximilian Bottcher, Auguste Groner, or

Adolf Streckfuss within the genre’s development. From the turn of the century, the

production of “native” detective fiction falls back as translations of the exploits of

English and American detectives become increasingly popular. Written between the wars,

Ricarda Huch’s Der Fall Deruga (1917) and Jakob Wassermann’s “Der Fall Maurizius”

(1928) are both courtroom-dramas, which also thematize detection. Jakob Studer, a

Fahnderwachtmeister with the Bern police, solves his first murder case in 1936,

becoming one of the predecessors of Georges Simenon’s Commissioner Maigret.8

Friedrich Durrenmatt’s anti-detective fiction continues in the cynical tone of Glauser’s

works, as Leonhardt rightly observes: “Immer geschieht eine schreckliche Gerechtigkeit,

deren Schrecken in der Erkenntnis liegt, dal3 es sie nicht gibt” (277). The combination of

genre-questioning and social criticism is continued in works such as Jakob Aijouni’s

Happy Birthday, Tiirke! (1985), Felix Huby’s Bienzles Mann im Untergrund (1986), and

-ky’s Alteres Ehepaar jagt Oberregierungsrat K. (1987).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Critical reception of detective texts in Germany has focused on conventional

narratives, discussing various aspects such as “high” versus ‘low” literature (Nusser) or

genre origins (Alewyn). Formalist studies in the German context have often focused on a

taxonomy of detective stories based on their plot structure (Nusser), and have closely

analyzed narrative features (Marsch, Zmegac) or detective characters (Buchloh/ Becker).9

Outside Germany, Heta Pyrhdnen’s formalist study of the detective novel as a game lists

the two kinds of games detective narratives reveal: (1) the game of make-believe, namely

the fictional chase of the criminal by the detective (the opponents being the detective and

criminal); (2) the playful competition between the author and reader to solve the mystery,

epitomized in S.S. Van Dine’s homology author : reader :: criminal: detective (the set of

opponents here extends to include “real-world” inhabitants, the author and reader).

Pyrhonen further argues that a solution to the mystery is only consummated when all

these stories converge. The knot of the enigma is finally untied at this point of closure. In

addition, Pyrhonen elaborates on “the ground rule” of detective fiction: the special

authority enjoyed by the detective and his privileged status as the “ideal reader” for

whom the author and criminal writes (165).

I will take Pyrhdnen’s game metaphor into account while examining the extent to

which anti-detective films privilege viewers with knowledge that their detectives lack,

and while looking into why these films preclude their viewers’ knowledge at key

moments within the narrative through technical means such as ellipses or freeze frames.

Further, I demonstrate that anti-detective films in postwar Germany tend to question the

very basic rules of the game metaphor by severely undermining the authority of their

detective figures, and jeopardizing their privileged status as ideal readers. Instead of

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. providing closure, German anti-detective films after 1945 portray a world gone out of

joint, one which can no longer be mended by a sweeping final solution, but one which

rather dramatizes the void.

Along with their emphasis on formal analysis, critical works on detective

narratives have expounded on the relationship between detective narratives and society,

privileging Marxist (Mandel), socio-historical (Teraoka), psychoanalytic (Winston/

Mellerski) and other approaches. A major focus of my study is anti-detective cinema’s

actual and figurative emphasis on concealing and revealing, and its interweaving with the

changing social conditions in West Germany from the 1950s to the 1990s. My

exploration of anti-detective films in the individual chapters merges formal and socio

cultural perspectives. I have especially benefited from the analysis of detective stories

offered by critics such as D.A. Miller, Joan Copjec, Jon Thompson, or Maria Tatar,

whose works situate a reception of detection in the context of intellectual and material

history. D. A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire:

Lacan against the Historicists both argue that detective narratives conceal and reveal

techniques of surveillance, which give access to the most intimate details of the

individuals they investigate, whether these individuals reside in fictional or real worlds:

“In detective fiction, to be is not to be perceived, it is to be recorded” (Copjec 67). This

concept of surveillance or “super-vis ion” (to use Miller’s term) will guide my study in

both its formal and thematic aspects, particularly in my analysis of Fritz Lang’s last

Mabuse film in Chapter Four.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. My critical reading of five anti-detective films investigates their representation of

crime and detection, and contextualizes their genre-transgression in contemporary West

German society. Maria Tatar’s Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany studies an

earlier period of German history and examines a broader range of visual culture, but

provides a germane analysis of Weimar film in the context of contemporary cultural

debates surrounding the representation of crime. Her reading of the relationship between

vision and detection in Fritz Lang’s M draws on two kinds of hierarchies— between the

detective and criminal, and between the criminal and victim. Further, Tatar’s

interpretation builds on two film theoretical concepts that she borrows from Carol Clover:

“assaultive gazing,” defined as a position in which the audience is invited to collude with

the camera and to experience sadistic pleasure in a character’s physical or emotional

torment, and “reactive gazing” that looks at and empathizes with the pain of the on

screen victims, or even sees itself as the target of cinematic terror. Her study shows that

these categories are gendered, with the assaultive gaze figuring as masculine/ sadistic and

the reactive gaze as feminine/ masochistic (37). Both categories become relevant for my

analysis of anti-detective cinema’s shifting camera perspective, and the related collusion

and collision of detective and criminal identities. Anti-detective cinema thus sets up the

very ideas of crime and detection as mysteries to be solved, especially reveling in the

possibility of creating enigmas through film form.

So far, I have traced the transition from detection to anti-detection within the

representation and theorization of investigative narratives to the crisis of knowledge

generated by National Socialism and the Holocaust. Critical attention to anti-detective

narratives was sparse in the immediate postwar period, but has become prominent in the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. last two decades of the twentieth century.10 Howard Haycraft first coined the term

“metaphysical detective story” to describe the convoluted plots and theological-

philosophical intentions of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries (539). The name

has since been applied to detective fiction from Poe to Durrenmatt and Borges to signify

stories which fail to solve the crime and flaunt conventions by means of parody and

paradox. Other names devised for this genre besides “metaphysical detective narrative”

include philosophical, analytic, ontological, and anti-detective narratives.111 use the term

“anti-detective film” because it signifies a movement antithetical to the conventions set

up by Weimar detective cinema, a point on which I rely in my reading of postwar

German film. I do not see anti-detection as a “deliberate negation” of the entire detective

genre (Merivale/ Sweeney 3; my emphasis). Rather, I find that the tradition launched in

Weimar detective film is not negated, but revised and subverted in postwar detective

film.

Despite the genre-transgressive strategies adopted by German fiction and film, a

focus on anti-detection has clearly been lacking in the German reception of detective

narratives. A notable exception is the collection of essays,Experimente mil dem

Kriminalroman (1993), edited by Wolfgang Diising. The essays in Diising’s anthology

cover a broad spectrum of twentieth century German detective fiction, examining a range

of authors from Jakob Wassermann and Odon von Horvath to Gertrud Fussenegger and

Peter Handke. Diising’s foreword isolates two central moments in these “experimental”

Krimis: (1) the detective novel becomes a vehicle for communicating something more

than the simple murder-and-investigation story and constitutes a self-conscious reflection

on formal elements and narrative structure; (2) it analyzes the contemporary social

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. conditions in which it is written. For example, Wassermann’sDer Fall Mauritius deals

with the Weimar justice system, whereas Heimito von Doderer’s novels form “ein

geeignetes Mode 11 fur eine kritische Darstellung von Faschismus und Kapitalismus” (11).

Perhaps the most relevant article in Diising’s book, especially for my next chapter on

1950s anti-detective cinema in Germany, deals with Die Pulvermuhle by Gertrud

Fussenegger, whose aim is “die Aufarbeitung einer lange verdrangten Schuld durch

Erinnerungsarbeit... in Anlehnung an den Detektivroman” (54). The anti-detective Films

from the 1950s that I examine in depth achieve a similar Erinnerungsarbeit (work of

memory). I demonstrate that the individual films link their interrogation of the detective

film form with the connections they make between mystery, memory, and German

history from the immediate postwar decade to the end of the twentieth century.

Since DUsing’s collation of individual essays uses different methodological

approaches to examine the various manifestations of German crime and detective fiction

over the twentieth century, he prefers the idea of an “Experiment mit dem

Kriminalroman” rather than the termAnti-Kriminalroman. In film genre criticism,

however, the use of the epithet “anti” is not completely new. The reception of anti

detective films in both the German and Anglo-American contexts has developed from

other examinations of film genre, such as the Western. German film scholar, Norbert

Grob, follows Andre Bazin’s definition of the Super-Western to propose a reading of

1960s German detective film as “post-naive” detective cinema (1993, 216). Grob uses the

term Super-Krimi, and defines it as being more than a genre film: “Es geniigt nicht, was

sich gerade entwickelt an Konkretem und Abgnindigem, es muB etwas Zusatzliches

wirksam sein, etwas Psychologisches, Soziologisches, Politisches” (214-15).12 The prefix

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “super” here performs a similar genre-subversive function to my own use of “anti” with

reference to detective film. But Grob’s observations are restricted to the years 1959-60,

and address a limited array of pre-NGC films, namely: Das Madchen Rosemarie (Thiele

1959), and Am Tag, als der Regen kam (Oswald 1959), and Schwarzer Kies (Kautner

1960). Nevertheless, Grob’s article forms an important first step in acknowledging the

presence of genre-questioning within German detective film.

I trace the anti-detective moment further back than Grob, to films made during the

first postwar decade in Germany, and also discuss the sub-genre’s Weimar

manifestations, particularly in Lang’s films. Further, my study of the developments in

German anti-detective film spans five decades, and takes into account the classic-

exhaustion-parody cycle detailed by critics such as Thomas Schatz in their analysis of

film genre (148-161). I show that German anti-detective films take the criticism of

classical detective film as their starting point, and offer a requiem to the traditional genre

in the 1950s. This moment of exhaustion gives way to the New German cinema’s parody

of detective stories, and by the 1990s, the various stages merge in a collage of quotations

that is symptomatic of postmodernism. My use of Schatz’ genre-stages with regard to

German anti-detective cinema is not meant to suggest that they cannot co-exist at any

given time, but rather takes into account the dominant trend expressed in representative

anti-detective films over the second half of the twentieth century. My study does not

spend much time in analyzing the three stages. Instead, I explore the two qualities that

give the films that I examine their anti-detective impulse: the inclusion of (1) genre

criticism and (2) an assessment of socio-political conditions in the folds of an

investigative structure.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Schatz has observed that genre films not only establish a sense of continuity

between our cultural past and present, but also attempt to eliminate the distinctions

between them (31). As social ritual, genre films function to stop time, to portray our

culture in a stable and invariable ideological position. Schatz further points out a shift in

emphasis within genre from an early social, ritualistic function to a later aesthetic, formal

function:

We tend to regard early genre filmmakers as storytellers or craftsmen, and later ones as artists. Naturally, there are exceptions—Ford’s early Westerns,... all of Hitchcock’s thrillers—but these involve directors whose narrative artistry and understanding of the genre’s thematic complexity were apparent throughout their careers. (41)

One could make the same argument for German anti-detective film that starts with an

intense concentration on postwar society, but gradually shifts its focus away from the

political. However, the function of social critique persists even in the 1990s, and is fused

with aesthetic aspects both in early and late anti-detection. Factors such as historical

events, economic conditions, new cultural attitudes or new technical developments also

redefine the anti-detective sub-genre. On the other hand, the familiar elements of anti

detection continue to be recast in German cinema from the 1950s to the end of the

twentieth century, continually reexamining some basic cultural conflict. I will now map

out a few recurring technical aspects that will be central to my critical reading of

individual anti-detective films.

2.3 Anti-Detection on Screen

Struggling with the double jeopardy of portraying the murder on screen, without

revealing the identity of the murderer, detective film perhaps demands as much cunning

and vice as does crime itself. Various technical aspects such as camera angles, editing, as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. well as shot composition and mise-en-scene, become instrumental in creating the illusion

of detection and involving viewers in it or, in the case of anti-detection, in creating a

distance from the illusion. The representation of detection on screen usually sets up

connections between certain essential narrative elements, such as motive, crime,

investigation, solution, and punishment. Traditional detective film empowers its viewers

by aligning the camera perspective with the detective’s POV. Connections between the

narrative elements are thus revealed on screen, usually following this linear pattern:

crime -> investigation retarding action solution and reconstruction of the motive.

Anti-detective film obfuscates the relationship of these elements through genre-

transgressive means. Some technical features that crop up regularly in the repertoire of

anti-detective film are (1) a diffused POV, (2) elliptical editing, and (3) unconventional

emblematic shots.

We have seen that in early German detective cinema, the visualization of

detection relied on complete identification with the detective figure, whose authority

could not be questioned. This model is loosely based on the literary whodunit. Two other

perspectives replace this identification in post-1945 anti-detective film made in Germany,

and disrupt audience identification with the detective. First, the film camera’s

monological perspective that generally corresponds with the detective’s POV is

increasingly diffused into different perspectives in anti-detective cinema.13 For example,

there are several instances where the all-seeing eye of the camera gives viewers a slight

edge over the detective by means of omniscient narration, by showing viewers images

that the detective cannot see. Kiiutner’s Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid uses parallel

editing for this effect. Second, the camera in anti-detective films presents the criminal as

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the point of identification, using the same technical devices—subjective shots, close-

ups— with which the detective is coded. Lang’s Mabuse films pioneer this detective-

criminal pairing in cinema. The similarities in mise-en-scene and lighting between

criminal and detective spheres make it impossible to tell the two apart. For example, in

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, the criminal and detective are both framed against vertical

lines, such as trees, their faces lit by low-key lighting which emphasizes their eyes. The

camera’s vision, instead of corresponding with the detective’s gaze, subsumes the

perspectives of detective, criminal, and victim, and this diffused POV ruptures the

exclusive authority of the detective on screen.

Further, the use of ellipses and overlapping in anti-detective film creates a discord

in the order of events witnessed on screen. Lang’s Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse often

switches between multiple time and space coordinates without explaining or linking

them, and the editing involves viewers in a kind of “calisthenics of perception” (Miller

62). Doris Dome’s Happy Birthday, Tiirke! (1991) employs ellipses and overlapping to

create fast-paced investigative action, but also uses slow motion shots from her

detective’s POV as a counterpoint to the rapid cutaways. Viewers engage in absorbing

the plethora of clues even as they watch anti-detective films, attempting to decipher

meaning out of the ellipses and gaps, exercising and straining their vision, and become

detectives themselves, who wish to solve the mystery of their own existence. Finally,

traditional detective cinema, through the solution of crime, attempts to close the circle

that the criminal starts by committing crime. However, viewers of anti-detective films are

abandoned without the promise of a redeeming solution at the end. Unlike traditional

detective films, where the emblematic shot usually shows a close-up of the successful

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. detective, and where the initial crime is reconstructed by means of flashback or through

confession of the criminal, anti-detective films indicate a lack of closure, often by

returning to the opening sequence in the conclusion, thereby emphasizing that their

resolution cannot necessarily be equated with a solution. Epiphanies become anti

epiphanies; viewers often find that the film’s investigative inquiries have become

metafilmic. This trend becomes especially prominent within New German anti-detective

cinema, and is exemplified by Messer im K opfs open conclusion that equates criminal

and detective spheres instead of disengaging them from each other. Anti-detective film

problematizes the convention of an emblematic shot, and the final shots focus on the

investigator’s departure, defeat, or death.

Through these and other genre-transgressive means that I will elaborate in my

critical reading of individual films, anti-detective cinema restores that very nightmare of

the centerless maze that traditional detective film is so eager to dispel. Chapters 3 to 6

will look at both the formal innovations and social commentary of individual West

German anti-detective films. I will develop comparisons between formulaic Krimis that

resist change and self-reflection, and anti-detective films striving to re-define the genre in

the five postwar decades I examine. Further, I connect West German anti-detective

cinema’s genre-questioning to parallel developments in anti-detective cinema made

outside of Germany. My analysis will demonstrate the films’ engagement with

sociopolitical events in each decade, and read the individual works as clues to

understanding West German society from Adenauer to Kohl.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 3

DEAD ENDS: EPILOG: DAS GEHEIMNIS DER ORPLID (KAUTNER 1950) AND NACHTS, WENN DER TEUFEL KAM (SIODMAK 1957)

In 1949, results from a public opinion survey conducted in the American Zone

ranked detective films third among most viewed genres after romantic films and

musicals. The same survey indicated that 51% of the viewing public wanted to see

entertaining films, while only 21% voted for “problem films” (Burghardt 242). Gert

Sautermeister’s list of the “four paths” taken by postwar aesthetics in response to the

Nazi past is interesting in this context. He mentions the following strategies: (1) non

confrontation of the Nazi past by refusing to acknowledge it; (2) recollection of the past

without admission of guilt; (3) focus on a new beginning; (4) self-criticism (Koebner 21).

From Sautermeister and Burghardt’s findings, one would expect that self-criticism would

figure last on the wish list of postwar German viewers and in detective film production.

Film scholars have often observed that unlike the Nullpunkt in German literature

and art, where an effort was made to consciously evaluate and spurn the legacy of the

Nazi past, filmmaking in post-1945 Germany thrived on a sense of uncritical continuity

with the past.1 Many of the directors, actors, and technicians had learnt their craft in the

UFA studios during the 1930s and 1940s. German detective cinema served as a fantasy

world that inhibited an open political analysis of the National Socialist past. The

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. investigative narrative successfully negotiated the stories of crime and detection to a

reified conclusion in the form of punishment for the criminal and reward for the

detective. At the most, it presented Hitler and his entourage as the guilty ones and the

common people as passive victims and sufferers. However, the first two postwar decades

in Germany also saw a new generation of detective films that exhibited a need to

incorporate a meticulous stocktaking of political history in the unraveling of mystery.

Anti-detective films such as Helmut Kiiutner’s Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid

(1950) and Robert Siodmak’s Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957) use the text of

detection as a pretext for revisiting the repressed National Socialist past, and insist on

conflating the categories of guilt and detection in post-Holocaust West Germany. In this

chapter, I argue that Epilog and Nachts can be described as anti-detective films not only

because of their engagement with the past, but also because they dispel classically

generic strategies of identification by rupturing the detective’s authority. Along with

negating the notion of detective film as a challenging, but decipherable conundrum, both

films break down residual detective filmic conventions from Weimar and Nazi Germany.

In opposition to the gripping images of conventional detective film,Epilog and Nachts

make the viewer aware of images as images. The films abound in gaps, leaps, montage

and ellipses, violating generic conventions, and force viewers to see critically and to

maintain a questioning attitude regarding the construction of investigative narratives.

Such self-reflexivity and self-questioning were not the norm in German detective film

production during the first postwar decade.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3.1 German Detective Film from 1945-1955

Manfred Barthel lists two common elements of German detective films between

1945 and 1955: (1) they were set in the postwar, berubbled present, and (2) the focus was

less on detectives and more on criminals, who turned themselves in (265). Although not

representative of all German detective films made in the period, Barthel’s description fits

a new generation o f detective film that concentrates on surviving the postwar years. The

crimes featured involve profiteering on the black market, trading and smuggling, and

shady deals made for bread and liquor, e.g., in Werfuhr den grauen Ford? (Wernicke/

Diekhout 1949). These pessimistic films, where a new life is predicated on petty crimes,

ironically treat Sautermeister’s third aesthetic category of the new beginning. However,

the criminals are simultaneously shown as victims, and treated with sympathy by well-

meaning detectives.2 In fact, the investigators become blemish-free representatives of a

new postwar beginning, and detective films can unperturbedly fall back into jigsaw-

puzzle structures in Der Mann, der sich selber sucht (Cziffra 1950) or Der Fall Rabanser

(Hoffmann 1950) and resort to happy ends, e.g., in Es geschah am hellichten Tag (Vajda

1958). All these films readily gloss over the recent past of National Socialism In fact, by

refusing to admit any doubt in detectivistic acumen or in the absolute categories of guilt

and innocence, they echo the black-and-white distinctions between crime and detection

characteristic of Nazi detective films like Alarm (Fredersdorf 1941) and Flucht ins

Dunkel (Rabenalt 1942), or the puzzle structure of Der Rufan das Gewissen (Anton

1945, released 1949).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Formulaic and entertaining detective films continue to thrive in a postwar

Germany eager to validate absolute categorizations such as the guilty and innocent,

perpetrators and victims, not to mention criminals and detectives. The non-confrontation

with the German past, the first aesthetic path listed by Sautermeister, is most evident in

the Edgar Wallace films, where the murdered body is displaced from Germany to the

home of crime stories in England. The cityscape of London, with its fog-covered streets

and menacing alleys, its shady warehouses along the Thames and its formidable

underworld creates an aura of peril, while the closed world of families or organizations

located in castles or country houses limits the number of suspects. The mentally and

physically agile detective poses questions, follows leads, and reasons adeptly until he

uncovers the truth. The criminal is promptly delivered to the law, while the detective and

survivors (potential victims and innocent suspects) rejoice in the restoration of order.

Although the spine-tingling Edgar Wallace series can be read as a counterpoint to the

mellifluous accord of many postwar films, their displacement of crime and detection

away from Germany indicates an unwillingness to explore the problematic issue of guilt

on home terrain.3 Other postwar detective films also dodge memories of the Third Reich.

The past appears only in the form of war, and occasionally, to the extent of indicating that

moral decency and individual courage had prevailed during National Socialism. In

Gesucht wird Majora (Pfeiffer 1949), for example, there is no reference to Nazis, and the

action is set either on the war front or amid postwar reconstruction in a chemical factory.

Solving the mystery about a missing chemical formula becomes relevant only with

respect to a moral code that prescribes fulfilling a promise made to a fallen war comrade,

and enabling his widow’s survival in the “Not des Nachkriegs.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. What happens to Sautermeister’s final category, self-critique, in postwar German

detective film? In the few detective films that do talk about the Nazi past, a flashback

device creates a safe distance and clear demarcation with relation to the Third Reich. The

investigative structure provides suspense, but a resolution of the enigma mitigates the

political import in favor of attention to the present, resulting merely in a coherent position

of knowledge. Der Verlorene (Lorre 1951), for instance, uses a flashback structure to

gradually unmask its main character, Dr. Rothe, as a scientist who metamorphoses into a

pathological serial killer during the Third Reich. In the frame narrative, set in the postwar

present, Rothe confronts the sole witness to his past crimes, ex- laboratory assistant

Hoesch. The investigative-cum-thriller framework inter-cuts between the past and the

present: the unmasking of Rothe’s past culminates with his murder of Hoesch and his

suicide, which in turn constitutes the end of the film. In spite of its confrontation of the

past, the film associates the Third Reich with lunacy, and thereby historically qualifies

Nazism as an act of madness. By setting crime in the past and its reconstruction in the

present, Der Verlorene encourages a reflection on guilt, but also precludes historical

knowledge of this guilt (and, by analogy, of a criminal Nazi regime). Helmut Kautner’s

film Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid (1950) anticipates the dark pessimism and noir

style of Der Verlorene— particularly its thriller format and flashback structure- and

brings to postwar Germany a genre practiced in Hollywood during the 1940s by German

emigres. On the other hand, Siodmak, possibly the German director in Hollywood exile

credited with compellingly establishing film noir, refuses to rely solely onnoir- ish

devices in Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957). Like Lorre’s film, Nachts re-visits the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nazi past. However, it does not employ a flashback, voice-over narration: the result is an

attempt at a new film vocabulary that abets an unflinchingly honest portrayal and a direct

on-screen confrontation of the Third Reich.

3.2 Anti-Detection in Epilog and Nachts

The negotiation of guilt and innocence with regard to the Nazi past was a widely

debated theme in the immediate postwar period. By February 1950, 3.6 million Germans

were tried in the so-called denazification trials (Lange 1). 25,000 were sentenced as

Hauptschuldige or Belastete (category 1 or 2). 150,000 were categorized as

Minderbelastete. One million landed in category 4, or Mitlaufer, and 1.2 million were

declared innocent (category 5). The sentence corresponded to these five categories of

National Socialist involvement, and ranged from fines, confiscation of property, loss of

voting rights, loss of the right to practice one’s profession, and imprisonment up to ten

years. After eight months, in December 1950, the Bundestag recommended the following

tor denazification trials: canceling categories 3 to 5 and lifting all sanctions against them

by April 1951; continuing trials for categories 1 and 2; excusing fines under 2000 Marks.

These measures, along with the fact that individuals such as Alfred Hugenberg, who had

occupied a prime place in the Third Reich’s hierarchy were declared to be merely

category 4, destroyed hope in the validity of Allied-led denazification and strengthened

the emphasis on forgetting. However, Kautner and Siodmak’s anti-detective films

insisted on casting a (self) critical glance at the Nazi past, and foregrounded the

connection between investigation and introspection, suspicion and self-incrimination.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. R. A. Stemmle got the idea for Epilog's script from a newspaper report about the

mysterious disappearance of a ship— this incident is fictionalized in Kautner’s anti

detective film. The opening montage sequence of newspaper clippings introduces the

mysterious sinking of the ship Orplid in August 1949, which led to the death of a

wedding party on board, including the groom Martin Jarzombeck; the bride, the artiste

Conchita; her lover Hoopman, a weapons dealer; his wife Eleanore; Hoopman’s weapons

supplier Hill; the FBI agent, Captain Banister, disguised as steward Stephen Lund; and

Leata, Conchita’s Malaysian helper and the pianist Aldo Siano’s lover. Siano is the

criminal exposed in Epilog. The film reveals that he is part of a radical political

organization, and has been given the task of assassinating the corrupt weapon dealers

Hoopman and Hill.

“Epilog” is the title of an investigative report composed by journalist Peter Zabel,

who is trying to find buyers for his sensational expose of a weapon-dealing scandal in

postwar Germany. Zabel becomes the primary detective figure in Kautner’s film, trying to

uncover the mystery behind the ship's accident by reconstructing the happenings on board

in the time-span from 10:08 to 11:20 on the fatal night. Kautner constructs the film’s

action on three levels. The frame narrative, set in 1950 in the publishing house Mondial ,

presents Peter Zabel’s conversation with the owner ofMondial and its chief editor.

Second, Zabel’s rapid narration of a remembered past (1949-50), namely his

investigation of theOrplid mystery leading to his report, forms the film’s opening

montage sequence that precedes the frame narrative. On a third level, the main narrative

presents Zabel’s recapturing of an imagined past (August 1949), namely his fictional

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. account of events on the board ofOrplid and his solution to the mystery of the ship’s

disappearance. Zabel’s reconstruction is based on the sketches drawn by Orplid' s sole

survivor, Leata, with whom he eventually gets romantically involved.

The action on board the Orplid quickly exposes Siano to be the assassin who

plants a bomb on the ship, and then presents his escape and the travelers’ frenzied search

for the bomb. A chance for survival arises with FBI agent Banister’s discovery of the

bomb, but Kautner dispels the hopeful moment by exposing the infighting on board,

which finally leads to the tragic sinking of the ship. In a parallel movement, the possible

exposure of a sub-text of political intrigue in the frame narrative is thwarted through

Zabel and Siano’s deaths in the final moments of the film. The film’s conclusion

foregrounds the death of its detective figure, Zabel, and the irrecoverable loss of his

journalistic report, which is seized by Siano’s accomplices and disappears from the

screen.

Like Epilog, Robert Siodmak’s Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam is based on a

newspaper account about serial killer Bruno Liidke, published in 1956 by Will Berthold

in the Munchener Illustrierte. Liidke confessed to more than thirty murders in the region

of Berlin-Brandenburg alone, but the police attributed the murders of more than eighty

men, women, and children to him in the course of a criminal career that spanned more

than twenty years and covered the entire country. Liidke was caught only by chance when

he was arrested for a minor offense on January 30, 1943. He was questioned, and then

taken to the Institute for Psycho-Criminal Research in Vienna, where he died

“accidentally” on April 8, 1944 as a result of “scientific experiments” carried out by the

SS.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Siodmak acquired the rights to Berthold’s story, but re-worked the historical event

with screenwriter Werner Jorg LUddecke. The plot construction (notably, the use of mise-

en-abime) highlights the social critique at the heart of this anti-detective film. In spite of

evoking the structure of a murder mystery, Nachts at once dissolves the tension at the

core of a classic “whodunit” by letting in the audience on the secret of the murderer’s

identity in its title sequence. The film initially follows the conventions of a police

procedural, and presents the chase of the serial killer Bruno Liidke by the detective

figure, Commissioner Kersten. In the first half of the film Kersten follows traces,

interprets clues, and interrogates witnesses, until he has successfully proven Ludke’s

guilt. However, the film continues beyond this initial mystery to reveal a lack of closure

similar to Epilog. Instead of a traditional conclusion through the punishment of its

criminal, the film implicates the suspect Keun, the murderer Liidke, and finally, detective

Kersten himself in the realm of murder. The detective function is relinquished in the

second half of the film to SS officer Rossdorf, who “punishes” Keun, Liidke, and even

Kersten with (imminent) death. By embroiling Kersten in the very crime he sets out to

investigate, the film underscores the devious mechanisms of the National Socialist

machinery, which revels in its duplicity and frustrates any possibility of closure.

Epilog and Nachts achieve their anti-detective effect through three means. Instead

of presenting new beginnings for postwar German detective film these works are “dead

ends.” Their unsettling conclusions lament the irreversible loss of detective agency in a

postwar world that is littered with corpses of criminals, victims, and detectives alike. By

defying the fossilized outcomes of classical detective film Epilog and Nachts create a

sense of despondency and uncertainty. The politically motivated sub-text in both films

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. negates the authority of detective figures and the efficacy of their search for certainties

like knowledge or truth, and hence contains an anti-epiphanic, anti-epistemological

impulse.4 Second, Kautner and Siodmak use innovative technical means to draw attention

to the film medium and to provoke reflection about issues like the various “seeing eyes”

(of the camera, detective, audience) in detective film and their significance. In addition,

they depart from detective-film conventions, replacing the fully-lit detectives and ill-lit,

fragmented criminals of classical detective film with chiaroscuro images which

problematize the perpetrator-victim distinction and echo the hidden uncertainty of these

postwar years. Third, both films employ a mise-en-abtme structure, whereby a “personal”

story of crime and detection forms a palimpsest revealing a larger “political” mystery.5

This layered structure opens up questions about the interrelationship between the

personal and political, or the individual and collective, simultaneously offering a critical

view of postwar Germany’s struggles to come to terms with the Nazi past.6

3.2.1 Mise-en-abime

Louise Dallenbach explains the word abime as being related to “abyss” and

referring to the heart of a shield. A figure is said to be “en abime” when it is combined

with other figures in the center of the shield, but does not touch any of these figures. She

continues, “What Andr6 Gide [who first coined the term] had in mind... must have been

the image of a shield containing, in its center, a miniature replica of itself’ (8). The term

mise-en-abime, therefore, refers to a structure where elements of a text reflect each other,

thereby making meaning unstable. The reduplication of images or text-within-a-text

paradigm, with the sub-texts mirroring each other, results in both reflection and self

reflection on the work’s meaning as well as its form.7

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. My examination ofEpilog and Nachts takes as its point of departure the following

definition: “A mise en abyme is any aspect enclosed within a work that shows a

similarity with the work that contains it” (ibid.). Dallenbach further observes that the

similarity could take several forms: (1) simple or intra-diegetic reflection, like the image

of a Quaker Oats packet on a packet of Quaker Oats, or the play-within-a-play structure

in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and (2) paradoxical or meta-diegetic reflection, represented by

Dallenbach’s comment on Quaker Oats, which reflects on the reflection (24), or through

Persona's (Bergman 1966) reflection on the illusory character of both the film medium

and the reality it pretends to record. In Epilog, the parallel editing between the frame and

main narrative and the homonymy between the characters and titles of the inserted and

enclosing narrative is an instance of simple reflection. InNachts, simple reflection is

achieved by ensconcing Kersten’s solution within Rossdorf s solution, and by the

repetition of settings and character constellations within the film. In both films, a meta-

diegetic effect is created by reflecting on the medium of film itself, and particularly by

drawing attention through filmic interventions (e.g., through montage inNachts ) to a

latent solution behind the obvious one. The result is uncertainty about the truths seen on

screen and a lack of confidence in agents who specialize in interpreting the truth, i.e. the

detectives.

My study of Epilog and Nachts will address the visualization of the mise-en-

abime and of the uncertain relationship between its multiple layers, wherein the

investigative narrative is merely an outer shell concealing yet another mystery. Unpeeling

these layers comes at a very high price for both detectives, namely, an annihilation of the

epistemological project of detection through their deaths. The conclusions ofEpilog and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nachts seem at first glance to be a non sequitur, impetuously negating the solutions of

their detectives. Yet, a closer examination reveals that the conclusions are deliberate and

pre-planned, a result of the nefarious interventions by powerful political forces. The

detectives in both films turn the magnifying lens on society, and expose the

incommensurability of the individual and epistemological enterprise of (classical)

detection in the face of a political system that deliberately fabricates and constantly

rewrites itself. Another aspect of the mise-en-abime explored in this chapter is the visual

representation of the (political) mystery-within-a- (personal) mystery paradigm, and its

anti-detective effects. I will show that these effects are directly related to the treatment of

German history during the first postwar decade.

3.3 Requiem to Detection: Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid

Helmut Kautner’s film Epilog was hailed by many as a symbol of the new

“autarken deutschen Leinwand,” (Neue Zeit, October 18, 1950), and of a “Neugeburt” for

German detective film after the caesura of World War II ( Der Spiegel, August 24, 1950).

Upon its release on September 29, 1950, reviews acknowledged Kautner’s unsettling film

style, which broke away tfom the unrelenting reliance on logic and the unquestioned

authority of detective figures that had dominated much of Nazi detective cinema. The

moral ambivalence ofEpilog was also read as a reaction to “die iiblich frisch-ffohliche

amerikanische Knock-out Sportlichkeit,” and Kautner’s unconventional use of lighting

and camera angles was compared with French Realism (ibid.). There were a few initial

murmurs of disapproval about the “trashy” quality of Kautner’s new product: for

example, Klaus Hebecker’s review in Filmpresse described the film as “Kintopp.

Intelligent, gescheit,... schrecklich “erwachsen,” aber schliefilich der Sensation wegen

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. gemacht” (September 29, 1950). However, Epilog soon received an unequivocal stamp of

approval after being showered with accolades by the foreign press and after being bought

by thirteen countries at the Biennale in Venice. The commercial and critical success of

the film was evident both in the summary of sales reported in Film-Echo of September

30, 1950 (“Geschaftliche Aussichten: sehr gut fur jedes Theater”), and in the inclusion of

the film as part of the Woche des deutschen Films organized in Wiesbaden ffom

September 29 to October 5, 1950, which showcased 50 German films out of the total 203

produced between 1946 and 1950.8

Undoubtedly, the most significant aspect of Epilog's reception was the sense of

being ‘‘mehr-als-Kriminalfilm’’ ( Filmpresse , September 29, 1950) that the film exuded, of

presenting not just an intriguing concoction of crime, adventure, scandal, and detection,

but of simultaneously unveiling a sense of incertitude about certainties like genre, happy

endings and successful solutions. My analysis of Epilog, accordingly, deciphers the

connection between the film’s genre-subverting elements, and its historical/ political

context. By doubling precedents ffom detective genres (such as the detective’s insatiable

search for truth) to finally undermine them (by revealing the unreliability of truth), Epilog

becomes the first example of anti-detection in West German cinema. The film signals a

departure ffom the epistemo logical model of detection, and undermines the traditional

method of questioning sources to reach truth. Instead, it casts doubts on all certainties,

including knowledge or truth, affirming only the inescapable truth of death. Kautner

suggests that detection means certain failure, and possible death, in the new postwar

world. The film does hope to achieve some degree of enlightenment, however, in two

ways: first, by inviting viewers to reflect on the limitations of truth and the possible

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anachronism of an epistemological model of detection, and second, by provoking viewers

to become more active interpreters themselves, and to re-examine clues on screen to

become more subtle readers of signs, whether of guilt, innocence, or a more pervasive

sense of ambivalence.

The sub-title of Kautner's film, “das Geheimnis der Orplid,” already arouses

viewer expectations about the centrality of mystery and detection, and the traditional

scheme of order-chaos-order.9 Ironically, the film opens with an inter-title cautioning its

viewers about the possible dangers of deciphering mysteries.

Rundfunk und Presse berichteten in letzter Zeit wiederholt von ungeklarten Flugzeugabstiirzen, Explosionen und Schiffsuntergangen. Oft sind politische Hintergrunde die Ursache. Dire Aufklarung ist gefahrlich. Auch das Schicksal der ORPLID gehort zu diesen geheimnisvoUen Fallen. Vieles ist daher nur angedeutet, manches offengelassen.

The cerebral act of detection through deduction is thus jeopardized and posited to be

impossible in a postwar world. The warning to viewers of postwar detective film is clear

enough, and so is the shift from personal motives like jealousy or greed (which motivated

Weimar or Nazi detective films) to the more collective motives of conspiracy and

political intrigue. Simultaneously, it is not clear whether the warning originates from the

filmmaker, the detective or any other surviving member of the dangerous mysteries. It is

only the final frame of the film that reveals the identity of the admonishers through the

words: “Die Geschichte dieses Tatsachenberichtes schrieben R. A. Stemmle und Helmut

Kautner, der auch Regie fiihrte.” Positioned in the credit sequence, after the “dead end”

of the film, the revelation seems to suggest the heroic nature of the film’s project, which

recounts the detective story in spite of its own admonition. However, the gesture toward

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the first inter-title (“Vieles ist daher nur angedeutet, mane he s offengelassen”)

simultaneously reduces the force of the film’s revelations, and undermines Zabel’s

insistence on truth throughout the film.

Epilog initially appears to follow classical genre conventions, such as the use of

an isolated setting (a group confined to a ship on sea) to play out the drama of crime and

detection, or, in the frame narrative, the unquestioned reliance on Peter Zabel’s rational

explanation of the uncanny disappearance of the wedding party. Yet “Kiiutner will- wie

immer- vom Schema los, will nicht das Giingige, das Durchschnittliche, sondern das

Unversuchte, das Einmalige” (Neue Zeit, October 18, 1950). The film constantly makes

viewers aware of the convoluted and dangerous nature of its mystery through its multiple

narrative levels. Kautner uses the detective form to challenge the acumen of his viewers,

tor instance through meta-diegetic devices like making the reel time (72 minutes)

correspond exactly to the “real time,” or to the 72 crucial minutes (from 10:08-11:20) in

the film’s main narrative, thereby inviting reflection on the visual representation of

detection.

The film encourages viewers to themselves become off-screen detectives or active

readers of signs, and not their passive recipients, most notably through a use of anti

detective formal devices, i.e. through its unconventional camera angles, challenging pace,

and use of parallel editing and cross-cutting to constantly shift between different temporal

and spatial coordinates. Kautner draws attention to the film’s various levels of

surveillance, instituted through the camera, the detective, and the audience. At the same

time, he also relentlessly exposes the unreliability of the main detective figure, forcing

the audience to grapple with Zabel’s loss of immunity, and constantly undermining

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traditional notions about the detective as ideal reader. Finally, Kautner’s black-and-white

film uses chiaroscuro and gray tones to capture its ambivalence about the issues of guilt

and innocence in a postwar, post-Holocaust West Germany, and to positfilm noir as an

unburdened form that can set forth the German detective film tradition in the 1950s. Its

refusal to provide closure provokes viewers to seek answers about crime and detection

within themselves, and to become voyeurs of their own souls.

Epilog is fascinating for its brilliant editing, which plays with the notion of

viewers as detectives by presenting them with a slew of clues in such rapid succession-

through swipes, cuts, dissolves, frequent zoom-ins and pans— that it becomes impossible

for the audience to untangle all the complications with complete confidence. For

example, the establishing shot with a voice-over of the detective introduces all characters

to the viewers at a dizzying tempo, so that it is difficult to correctly identify all of them

when the detective actually starts narrating the story of the investigation. The viewer

experiences Zabel’s reconstruction of the Orplid investigation through rapid cuts between

various spaces, such as a shipyard, a meteorology center, a restaurant, and a bar. This

opening montage sequence also bridges the temporal gap between the date of the

Orplid 's disappearance in August 1949, and the meeting between Zabel and his potential

publishers in 1950. The only cue provided to orient viewers through the sequence is

Zabel’s voice-over, which comments on the action in the various frames. Further, the

consistency of shot composition (medium shots/ medium close-ups, with the background

in deep focus), and the minimal camera movement (15-30° pans to right or left) in the

different frames of this sequence demarcate the remembered reconstruction from the later

imagined reconstruction (i.e., the main narrative) for the viewers. The interrogated

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. witnesses in the reconstruction are repeatedly presented in frontal shots, looking directly

at the camera to answer the detective’s queries (posed in voice-over), thus turning Zabel’s

identity into a puzzle for the viewers, playfully challenging them to solve it even before

the real mystery is introduced.

As if to reinforce the viewers’ status as perceptive detectives on guard for clues,

the camera largely presents the detective’s perspective in the opening montage sequence,

filtering through data to zoom in upon and emphasize important items. For instance, in

the use of a magnifying glass during a long shot of the wedding picture, the camera

imitates the movement of the detective’s hand and eyes to keep the magnifying glass and

the object of his attention in the frame. In addition, the camera replicates the action

suggested in the voice-over. On sighting Leata’s sketches of the Orplid, the voice-over

begins, “Die Gesichter kamen mir bekannt vor. Ich sah genauer hin, und fand auf einer

der Zeichnungen den Namen Orplid.” On this cue, the shadow of Zabel’s hat moves to

reveal the name Orplid. Although the camera largely follows Zabel’s POV in the

montage sequence, it also pulls back at moments to present a third-person POV, playing

with the tension between the viewers’ knowledge and ignorance, for instance when a

medium shot frames the shadow of the detective’s hands on the manuscript (lower left

and right comers of frame) or the shadow of his hat on a shop window without revealing

the identity of the detective. By making its gaze independent of Zabel, the camera

establishes its omniscience and simultaneously exercises its authority on the detective

through the act of surveillance, i.e., by observing the observer.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The concluding part of the initial montage sequence also introduces the

connection between personal and political intrigue, which forms the core of this anti

detective film. Leata takes Zabel to Conchita’s villa, where Zabel examines an invitation

to Conchita and Martin’s wedding, sent to her co-worker Ermano. A close-up of the

invitation reveals the words “zu ihrem Tode” scribbled over the card, thereby providing

Zabel and the viewers with the first clue- unrequited love/jealousy/ hatred— in the

Orplid mystery. The following shot comments on the identity of various members on

board the ship, including a Herr Drobnitsch, who had not sailed with the ship at the last

minute. Suspicious of Drobnitsch’s involvement in the accident, Zabel tries to find out

more about him, but is warned by a barmaid: “Lassen Sie die Hande lieber von der

Politik.” Zabel’s voice-over comments simultaneously on this political twist to the

murder mystery: “Also kein Verbrechen. Aber es gibt ja auch politische Verbrechen. Ich

ging jeder Moglichkeit nach.”10 The nature of this political connection is divulged in the

final frame of the montage sequence. Captured in a frontal medium shot and looking

directly at the camera, an informer gives an extensive report on the shady dealings of

arms supplier Hoopman, asserting: “In unserem Auskunftsteil... fiihren wir alles iiber

Entnazifizierung.” Investigation in Epilog is here revealed to be a two-pronged act of

dismembering and remembering the Nazi past. The main narrative gradually exposes the

duplicitous continuity between the past and present, by revealing Hoopman and Hill to be

greedy profit-mongers, who had thrived on dealing weapons during “the last big war,”

and who profit from war and death in an ostensibly peaceful postwar world. Kautner’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. film thus indicts the linchpins of politics and business for their reprehensible dealings,

and makes a direct reference to the Third Reich as a pernicious source of crime even in

postwar West Germany.

The opening montage sequence capturing the remembered past ends by cutting

away from the informer sitting in Zabel’s apartment to his off-screen interlocutor, Zabel.

But Kautner subverts audience expectations of a graphic match in the new shot by

placing the detective in the publisher’s office (i.e., in the present). The remainder of the

film inter-cuts between the frame and main narratives. The film visualizes this transition

by superimposing Leata’s sketches reconstructing the Orplid accident in the film’s frame

narrative with a graphic match of the sketch, leading to the action of the main narrative

on board. Multiple intra-diagetic references converge at this point: the film Epilog tells

the story of Zabel’s report with the same title, which is based on Leata’s visual

representation of theOrplid mystery. The medium of film unites Zabel’s textual

commentary with Leata’s images, by combining his voice-over narration with the action

on screen. Another instance of mise-en-abime where the film’s reduplicates its visual

components is the dissolve from Leata’s charcoal sketches to thenoir -ish chiaroscuro of

the main narrative.

The main narrative is clearly distinguished from the frame through its different

formal codes. For instance, the frame narrative in theMondial office is characterized by

zoom shots, reverse-angle shots to simulate dialog, and natural lighting; the main

narrative on the Orplid is dominated by a tilted camera axis, a mise-en-scene that is

constantly in flux to simulate a ship’s motion, expressionistic lighting, and an effective

use of silence.11 The film constantly makes its viewers aware, however, that the two

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I

example, the frame narrative involving Zabel, Leata and the publishers intermittently

interrupts the unraveling of the murder mystery, most conspicuously through Zabel’s

voice-over narration, which comments on and adds to the information presented in the

main narrative. This inter-cutting heightens suspense by raising audience expectations

about a resolution to both sets of action inone of the narrative levels.

In a key sequence, Epilog gives its viewers a clue about the possible conclusion to

the two levels of action, by interrupting the parallel editing (between the different

temporal dimensions) with cross-cutting (between two different spaces, in which the

action occurs simultaneously). The cross-cutting between shots of Zabel in theMondial

office and those of Siano in a bar, or between the spaces of detection and crime usurps

the detective’s authority by exposing his ignorance and vulnerability.13 The viewers see:

1. A close-up of the telephone ringing in theMondial office, with the editor’s hand lifting the receiver and placing it on the table; CUT TO 2. Close-up of Zabel remarking, “die Orplid hatte keine Chance mehr,” mixed on the soundtrack with a voice repeating “Hallo’’ on the phone; CUT TO 3. Medium shot of Zabel pausing and handing the telephone receiver to the editor; CUT TO 4. Medium frontal shot of the editor, who listens into the receiver, and asks Zabel about the number of existing copies of his investigative report; CUT TO 5. Shot and reverse-angle shot between the editor and Zabel, closing with Zabel’s emphatic statement: “Das Manuskript hat noch niemand gelesen. Ich besitze nur dieses eine Exemplar. Wer spricht denn da?;” CUT TO 6. Medium shots of the editor and Zabel asking for the identity of the caller; CUT TO 7. Medium shot of the caller, with Aldo Siano in deep focus, signaling the caller to hang up; 8. Camera pans right to a long shot of Siano and accomplices exiting a bar.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The sequence ends with Zabel’s bafflement at the anonymous call, and his fear as he

recalls being shadowed during his investigations. Zabel’s fears are, in fact, confirmed for

viewers by letting them in on the caller’s criminal identity. By privileging its viewers

with information and leaving its detective in the dark, the film plays with the notion of

viewers as detectives and co-conspirators, thereby reaffirming its moral ambivalence.

Interestingly, the shots of Siano in the bar are characterized by expressionistic lighting,

low angles, and a titled camera axis-- all of which make an explicit connection to the

main narrative and are reminiscent of the Orplid's milieu of foreboding and death The

visual connection between the two narrative levels makes viewers anticipate a

confrontation between detective and criminal, and adds to the suspense.

In both the frame and main narratives, the action is largely presented through an

objective or third-person POV. The objective gaze of the camera in the main narrative

can be construed to be Zabel’s imagining gaze as he reconstructs the Orplid story,

completed aurally through his voice-over. This combination of first-person POV and

voice-over is reminiscent of the introductory montage, and continues the identification

camera= detective = viewer. However, the third-person POV in the main narrative is

regularly interrupted by subjective shots from the perspective of various ship members.

Significantly, although FBI agent Captain Banister occupies Zabel’s position as

investigator in the main narrative, the camera does not encourage viewer identification

with him. Epilog thus signals a departure from traditional detective films, in its

fluctuation between various perspectives on screen, including the POV of the detective

(Banister), criminals (Siano, Hoopman, Hill), co-conspirators (Leata, Drobnitsch), or

victims (the ship members threatened with death).

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The final sequence of the main narrative, i.e. the solution to theOrplid case,

continues to be presented through an objective perspective, yet it also evokes some

audience sympathy for Captain Banister. Ironically, Banister is falsely accused of being

the criminal who has planned the explosion on board. A medium shot of the groom,

Martin, and Banister on the deck is filmed in dim lighting and a deadly silence, which

foreshadows the ominous action that follows. A close-up of an anchor, cut with a close-

up of Martin’s grim face, cuts to a shot- reverse angle shot sequence that shows Martin

attacking and fatally wounding Banister with the anchor. A medium shot of the dying

detective is accompanied on the soundtrack with complete silence at first, followed by a

barely perceptible ticking sound that gradually becomes audible simultaneously to

Banister and the viewers. However, Kautner does not present the detective’s triumphant

unveiling of the bomb in the next shot. Instead, the audience sees a dead Banister in

medium shot, with a close-up of the bundle of rope concealing the bomb rolling near the

edge of the ship’s deck, seen from the deck, and with the sea in the background. At this

climactic moment, the camera suddenly switches perspective, and presents a medium

shot of the ship’s deck fromoutside (i.e., from the sea), and stays focused until the bundle

of rope rolls off the deck, followed, a few shots later, by a long shot of an explosion in

water. The violation of the 180-degree-rule serves to alienate viewers from the tragic

action that follows, i.e. Hill’s accidental damage to the ship leading to its sinking, and

makes the audience receptive to Zabel’s voice-over commentary about the ship’s final

moments: “Es war kein Attentat. Die Menschen sanken an sich selber, durch sich selber.”

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The film’s conclusion is similarly disorienting. The remarkable “open elevator”

sequence shifts the filmic perspective thrice- from an objective perspective to Leata’s

POV (which in turn conflates the gaze of victim/ perpetrator), and then back to an

objective perspective in the final frame. Moreover, by violating the 180-degree-rule in the

course of these perspective shifts, the film abandons any rigidity of (camera) position,

refusing, in effect, to “take sides,’’ and underscoring its ambivalence about guilt and

innocence. The concluding scenes of the film occur in the following order:

1. Low angle shot up the stairwell of two floors of theMondial building, foregrounding the rear close-up of a man; the man turns to face the camera and is identified as Siano; CUT TO 2. Medium shot of Zabel and Leata in the elevator (filmed from the lobby looking into the elevator), the next few frames show Siano entering the elevator, stabbing Zabel and moving toward the building exit, while Leata discovers Zabel’s revolver in deep focus; CUT TO 3. Leata’s POV, long shot of Siano from elevator; CUT TO 4. Close-up of tiles on the floor, fade-out as the open elevator passes between floors; FADE-IN TO 5. Long shot of Siano from elevator handing over the briefcase with Zabel’s manuscript to an accomplice, soundtrack playing revolver shot and Siano falling down, CUT TO; 6. Traveling shot of elevator in the background moving up to eighth floor, with Zabel’s corpse and Leata in darkness. Credit sequence begins.

In this final sequence, the film continues beyond the solution of its initial mystery

to an unforgettable climax through a second murder, that of its detective and narrator

Zabel. While offering a semblance of closure for theOrplid mystery by punishing the

criminal Siano with death, the film also subverts the impulse of traditional detective

narratives in awarding the same fate to its detectives (Zabel and Banister). Through the

use of Zabel, the dead detective, as its first-person narrator, the film thwarts any

possibility for audience identification, and underscores the futility of detecting guilt.

Along with Epilog's flashback and voice-over, its use of chiaroscuro and reliance on a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. dead narrator and its exposure of the connection between business and crime'- all make a

direct connection to Americanfilm noir, a point to which I return in the conclusion to this

section.14

In the final frame, an omniscient camera continues its surveillance and asserts its

authority on the dead bodies of both the detective and criminal. The obsessive, extreme

close-ups of clues throughout the film are replaced in the end through a long take, a

traveling shot that captures the dead reporter in the dark, narrow space of an elevator,

moving between floors as yet undiscovered, while the results of his investigation are

condemned to eternal silence. Moreover, the long shot departs from the medium shots

and close-ups that create the film’s claustrophobic space. The elevator, “wo es aufwarts

geht, aber nicht vorwarts” brings to mind this famous formulation by Hans Magnus

Enzensberger regarding West German society’s economic recovery and its upward

mobility in the 1950s, despite its drifting in a state of moral limbo (Bansch 27). The film

now relegates the space of crime and detection to the background, while foregrounding

the hustle and bustle of “normal” everyday life as it moves between different floors. The

camera’s distant, objective, but unfocussed POV seems, at the film’s conclusion, to

approximate the alienated and disoriented, but distressed gaze of viewers- the camera’s

co-witnesses to the rapid, brutal climax. Instead of empowering viewers, this shared

knowledge, placed in the film’s closing moments, creates a sense of hopelessness and

helplessness, revealing the sub-text of a mystery that seems impossible to fathom.

The main narrative of the film, Zabel’s imagined reconstruction of theOrplid

case, reveals whodunit (the criminal’s identity) and how (the presence of the bomb)

halfway through his story. What follows is a recounting of the “detonation” of the crime,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and the reactions of different travelers on the ship— namely, their notions of guilt about

the crime, and their attempts to ward off this guilt. The realization of imminent death

triggers both the “angeekelte, existentielle Stimmung” that this review addresses, and

introspection about accountability or guilt: “Wenn dann der sichere Untergang bekannt

wird, bricht das Furioso der Seelendemaskierung los“ ( Filmpresse , September 29, 1950).

The “moral”of the film, “Es war kein Attentat. Die Menschen sanken... an sich selber.

Sie waren schon friiher tot,” only makes a subtle reference to its contemporary political

situation, yet the allusion to collective guilt should have rung familiar to postwar

audiences. Epilog follows detective Zabel’s deciphering of the Orplid mystery to glimpse

into the nefarious connection between war, business and politics, and to expose the

corrupt reality behind the facade of postwar complacency. Further, Kautner locates the

beginning of this exposure in the Malaysian Leata’s paintings. She becomes the outsider

who becomes central to German reporter Zabel’s investigation of the German past, and

after his death, the sole surviving witness to both past and present crimes. Kautner’s film

becomes a timely comment on the prevalent discourse of collective guilt. Through

Hoopman and Hill’s continued culpability from the Third Reich to the present, it exposes

the fallacy of declaring entire populations as being “denazified” already in 1950.1S But

the film also loses some of its edge by refusing to name names and to pinpoint the Third

Reich in the discussion of guilt, innocence and investigation. In this regard, it is also

interesting to note Kautner’s choice of young actors like Horst Caspar and Peter van

Eyck, who started their careers in the postwar German film industry, to play the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. part of detectives Zabel and Banister respectively. Epilog here seems to follow the

impulse of films such as Der Verlorene, of dissociating the Third Reich from the postwar

present.

However, the subsequent action foregrounds the culpability of the ship’s

individual members, causing them to identify the guilt within themselves. As Zabel’s

voice-over informs us: “Jeder war mit sich selber beschiiftigt.” The camera cuts between

different “victims”- Orplid 's travelers, facing potential death- but does not portray them

with the sympathy victims are usually awarded by the genre. Instead, their contemplation

on past actions and their perpetration of present crimes makes them as reprehensible and

guilty as the criminal Siano. Interestingly, Zabel’s voice-over narration also mitigates

Siano’s guilt: “Aldo war kein Verbrecher im iiblichen Sinne des Wortes,” and points to

the true criminals on board: the political conspirators and weapons dealers Hill and

Hoopman. The film shows that Hill’s insatiable greed and ambition leads him to

desperately search for the hidden bomb: “Auch nach dem neuesten Krieg [konnte er] sein

geliebtes Handwerk nicht aufgeben ... er hatte seine Hande in alien Konflikten des nahen

Ostens.” The ship sinks due to his careless actions, and he becomes the true “criminal”

responsible for the deaths of his co-travelers. Similarly, Hill’s supplier Hoopman has to

pay for his crimes- for weapon dealing, and also for the callous treatment of his lover,

Conchita and his wife, Eleanore. Admitting his guilt (“Geniigt es Ihnen nicht, dass nur

der stirbt, der schuldig ist?”), he takes his life in the hope that his self-sacrifice will save

the others, but fails and is indelibly marked with his final crime. Another connection that

the film establishes to the Third Reich is through the groom, Martin, who is portrayed as

a bloodthirsty and bitter Heimkehrer, who is clearly haunted by the past and becomes

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. guilty of two murders in the film. The film also exposes the personal liability of

Conchita’s co-worker Ermano, whose jealousy of Conchita and Martin leads him to

proclaim, “Ich bin schuld” and to take his life with a revolver. Finally, the film exposes

its women to be co-conspirators, sharing guilt and responsibility with different men,

whether it is Conchita’s connections to men in powerful positions, Eleanore Hoopman’s

collaboration with Klaus to escape from “zwei Scheinehen,” or Leata’s silent

endorsement of Siano’s actions on board the ship. The film exposes postwar West

Germany to be a society where the shadow of war still looms large and the issues of guilt

and innocence continue to be negotiated.

In place of personal vendetta, Zabel’s report exposes a milieu of endemic

corruption and political and economic malpractices in postwar West German society.

Although Zabel refuses to compromise the “truth” and insists on exposing all true

criminals, the film also highlights the fact that his detection is not only a quest tor truth.

In fact, his journalistic report “Epilog” becomes a commodity that he attempts to sell to

Mondial 's owner, Dr. Mannheim. Perhaps it is the incommensurability of these two

projects that dooms Zabel’s detective endeavors to failure. Zabel’s potential buyer, Dr.

Mannheim, is skeptical of his ambitions, and wary of buying this radical text. Halfway

through Zabel’s reconstruction of the crime, Mannheim lauds him for having evaded

political details in his narrative, and announces his magazine’s explicitly unpolitical

nature: “In meiner Zeitschrift steht nichts uber Politik. Politik ist schwarz-weifi, das

ergibt grau. Ich habe eine farbige Zeitschrift.” This eschewal of politics is suggestive of

postwar responses to coming to terms with the past and could be construed as Kautner’s

comment on a society that is indifferent to crime, especially to its political variant. In my

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. reading, Dr. Mannheim functions in Kautner’s film as a spokesperson of the postwar

Federal Republic, which cannot bear to face the “truth” and by implication, one which

does not care whodunit.

The ending of the film reinforces this indifference. The final frames capture the

undisturbed daily life of the publishing house, even after two murders have just been

committed on its premises. The elevator captured in deep focus in the background

remains submerged in darkness, perhaps signaling to contemporary reactions to dealing

with the past, in which the desire to exorcise the ghosts of history lias been silenced.

Finally, the film undermines Zabel’s solution by making his report disappear from the

screen in its final sequence. The negation of the solution is equated with the death of both

detective and criminal, leaving viewers with a gaping void in place of closure. By making

the detective himself pay dearly for his solution, namely, with his own life, and by

emphasizing the indifference of surviving witnesses (like Mannheim and, possibly, the

viewers), Epilog raises poignant questions about the function of detection in postwar

society. Through the dead end of the film, which abandons viewers without any solution,

Kautner conceivably writes an epilogue to the era of classical detective film- a requiem

to the epistemological project of detection, and to the efficacy of concepts like truth,

enlightenment or justice.

The detective’s exit from the narrative through death is a film noir convention that

Kautner appropriates in Epilog to set the postwar West German detective film back on its

feet. Noir narratives had, of course, been developed by several German filmmakers in

exile in Hollywood. They also became a permanent fixture in 1950s American cinema,

and were a highly expressionistic visual arena for filmmakers to articulate the individual

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and cultural concerns that troubled postwar America. Most of Paul Schrader’s techniques

characterizing American noir are found in Kautner’s film: many of the scenes are lit for

night; oblique and skewed lines or camera angles are preferred to horizontal; there is an

attachment to water, windows, and other reflective surfaces, and to a complex

chronological order (Cook 404). The convoluted chronology, combined with the

detective’s death, creates the disturbing feeling that no one, especially the detective who

eventually reconstructs the past, can affect that destiny. Epilog's revelation of Zabel’s

death negates not only the mystery and its reconstruction, but also the entire filmic

project, which has been sustained on the various narrative levels through his voice-over.

The reliance on a dead detective as the first-person narrator culminates the anti-detective,

anti-epiphanic statement of the film. It also setsEpilog apart from other postwar German

detective films such as Der Verlorene, which insist on providing closure to all narrative

strands they introduce, from the Nazi past to the postwar present.

Kautner’s turn to the legacy of Hollywoodnoir for his anti-detective project

suggests two things. First, its noir stylization and blending of hopelessness with

irrecoverable time directly contrasts with Nazi detective cinema’s formal techniques and

its insistence on closure through the detective’s triumph. Second, social concerns

ultimately overshadow Epilog's dark style, clearly departing from Nazi film’s disavowal

of politics and contributing to its anti-detective effect. The dark elevator at the end of the

film can be read as a Nullpunkt or starting point for anti-detection, and the signal for a

redefinition of detective cinema’s images as the future of West German film. Returning

once again to the film’s mise-en-abtme structure, I conclude that its multiple references to

black and white suggest a means for this redefinition. “Politik ist schwarz-weiB, das

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ergibt grau.” In the light of Mannheim’s remark, Kautner’s emphasis on chiaroscuro in

Epilog (e.g., by not using fill lighting) and the predominance of gray tones suggests one

way out of the dead end, through an increased potential for self-consciousness, and

potentially, for self-criticism.

3.4 Confronting the Past:Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam

Epilog refers only fleetingly to the National Socialist past, evoking it through the

weapon dealing issue or Entnazifizierung. The film’s intentional ambiguity about the

connection between history and mystery is apparent in the first inter-title (“Vieles ist nur

angedeutet, manches offengelassen”), and suggests a reticence on Kautner’s part in

directly confronting postwar Germany’s recent past. Seven years later, Robert Siodmak’s

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam (1957), however, was acclaimed precisely for its explicit

engagement with the National Socialist past, as this statement released by the Ministry of

Internal Affairs on the occasion of awardingNachts the 1958 Bundesfilmpreis

demonstrates:

Einen Film wie diesen kann man nicht nur iisthetisch messen. Die entscheidende Frage war, ob der Film, der den neuralgischen Punkt unserer Existenz als Volk anriihrt, die Situation aus unserer jiingsten Geschichte richtig trifft. ...dies hat der AusschuB bejaht. [...] Dal3 dieser Film in Deutschland gemacht wurde,... ist ein Zeichen dafiir, dafi wir endlich anfangen, den Dingen gegeniiber innerlich frei zu werden. Nur indem wir das Vergangene geistig und seelisch verarbeiten... konnen wir zur Ruhe kommen. Dieser Film., kann der deutschen Filmproduktion neue Wege weisen.“ (FAZ, July 5, 1958)

Historian Norbert Frei observes that by 1957, ex-Nazis were already reinstated in their

previous leading positions in politics, business, and in the media. “Category One”

denazification trials of Wehrmacht officers came to an end in the same year. The number

of unemployed also fell to under a million for the first time since the end of World War

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. II, and simplified the forgetting of the Nazi past (Lange 1). Siodmak’s film becomes a

glaring exception to the increasing general belief in collective innocence rather than

collective guilt, more than ten years after the war. Nachts was one of the first West

German films to choose the Third Reich as its only setting, unmediated through a frame

narrative set in the postwar present.16 Siodmak insisted on offering an unflinching

portrayal of the recent past, and used anti-detective effects to problematize the

demarcations between guilt and innocence, or generic certainties like closure.

Siodmak’s emigrd status sets him apart from Kautner, whose Epilog is remarkable

for its aesthetic subversion of detective film codes, but which eschews a direct

engagement with politics.17 As a director returning from exile in Hollywood, and as one

who was clearly opposed to the Nazi regime, Siodmak’s confrontation of National

Socialism in Nachts appears to have acquired a special credibility and urgency. In fact,

the director was so passionate about his anti-detective project that he decided to produce

it himself, and in the process founded his own production company, Divina-Film (Alpi

233). The success of his first postwar film made in Germany, Die Ratten (based on the

Gerhart Hauptmann play), had re-established Siodmak’s career as director in the German

film industry, and Nachts promptly received financing from Gloria-Film. Herv£ Dumont

repons that Gloria-Film offered Siodmak the run of its small studio near Munich, in a

location which had once housed the studio of Josef Thorak, the official sculptor of the

Third Reich, with Thorak’s imposing eagles still on the gate (181).

Siodmak cast little-known actors in important roles in the film, most of them

theater actors, including Mario Adorf (Bruno Ludke), Hannes Messemer (Gruppenfiihrer

Rossdorf), and Anne marie Duringer (Helga Homung). Klaus Holm, the lead, was a minor

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. actor from East Germany. Siodmak’s choice of actors unencumbered by a Nazi cinematic

past in a film that is set in the Third Reich is another signal that he was interested in

problematizing the break from the past, and engaging it in service of the present. Both

Adorf and Duringer won prizes for their roles in the film In fact, the film won several

international and national accolades, including the “Bambi” for Best German Film; the

Best Direction prize at the 1958 International Festival at Karlsbad; the Berlin Senate’s

“Pradikat: besonders wertvoll;” and a nomination for the Academy award for the Best

Foreign Film of 1957 under its English title The Devil Strikes at Night. The film scored a

“sehr gut” ( h i g h e s t rating) for the categories “Publikum” and “geschiiftlicher Erfolg” in

the summary of sales reported in Film-Echo (October 23, 1957).

The conventions of a police procedural include cross-cutting between spaces of

crime and detection, a varied use of pace to heighten suspense, and chase sequences.

Siodmak adds a significant twist to these components. First, Siodmak and Liiddecke

made several changes in the historical facts. For instance, they set the story in 1944, and

interspersed it with Alfred bombings and reports of German defeats. Further, the plot

created an exact temporal correspondence between Liidke’s murders and the Third Reich,

and introduced a Jewish woman as potential murder victim The screenplay went through

six drafts “before they had effectively captured the parallel between Liidke’s crime and

those of his judges” (Alpi 234). Second, Siodmak’s film uses the serial-killer motif

employed effectively in films like Fritz Lang’s A/.18 However, while Lang focuses on the

criminal in the trial scene toward the end of the film Siodmak’s criminal simply

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. disappears halfway through the film, and returns only through a mention of his

“liquidation” at its conclusion. Siodmak’s film thus shifts focus from the text of crime

and detection to its historical context, as this film review acknowledges:

[DJieser Filmschopfer hat hier... nicht die Tragodie des Bruno Liidke [gesucht], Ein anderes Geschehen stellt er in den Vordergrund - die politisch-rechtlichen Hintergriinde des Falles namlich, die nicht minder unheilschwanger sind. [...] Diese Unholderei umeinen Unholden, vom Nationalsozialismus betrieben, setzt Robert Siodmak nicht ohne Sarkasmus in ein grelles Licht. (Neue Ziircher Zeitung, December 6, 1957)

As I have pointed out earlier, Nachts refrains from using the flashback structure

prominent in other postwar films such asDer Verlorene. Like Epilog, Siodmak’s film

also makes a critical reference to the aesthetic devices of Nazi detective cinema, which

created the nail-biting suspense of such police procedurals as Erich Engels’ Autobanditen

(1939) and Dr. Crippen an Bord (1942), or Hans Schweikart’s Die Nacht der Zwolf

(made 1945, released 1949). All these films present a power struggle between criminal

and detective forces based on the ingenuity and analytic skills of each, but resulting in the

ultimate triumph of detection, law and order. In Nachts, Siodmak effectively uses

technical means like montage and cross-cutting to emphasize the parallel crimes of Liidke

and the National Socialist state. Further, through his use of shifting camera perspectives

and positions, as well as through brilliant shot composition and mise-en-scene, Siodmak

unsettles and disorients viewers, thereby emphasizing the fluid nature of binary

oppositions such as culpability and innocence.

Much like film noir, Siodmak’s exclusive genre during his Hollywood career,

Nachts’ use of chiaroscuro enhances the unclear moral positions of his characters and

their settings, underscoring a sense of malaise and tension. Interestingly, the film initially

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. uses two distinct sets of imagery to distinguish the bureaucracy and ritual of the Third

Reich (which is fully lit, dry and formal) from the twisted world of crime (which is

fragmented by shadows and oblique lines, claustrophobic and threatening). However, as

the following analysis of key sequences inNachts will show, the gradual intertwining of

these two worlds through formal devices allows the film to achieve its anti-detective

effects.

The establishing shot of the film frames the Nazi leader, Keun, in a long shot

against a huge portrait of Hitler, placed between geometrically aligned, monumental

pillars and disciplined rows of BDM cadets in a parody of Riefenstahl. The next few

sequences transport viewers to Liidke’s chaotic world through their setting (a dimly lit

local bar captured on a screen spliced with diagonals), as well as in the action (the murder

of Keun’s girlfriend, Luzie, by Liidke). The following murder sequence, however, reveals

the dark underside of the orderly Nazi world in a brilliant montage, which inter-cuts

between close-ups of Liidke and Luzie, and images of war. Siodmak’s detective film thus

opens with an alignment of the personal with the political. The murder sequence is

framed by Keun’s visual identification with Hitler through a medium shot in profile of

Keun talking to a portrait of Hitler that he holds in his hands.19 The next frame cuts to a

long shot of a stairwell submerged in darkness. The sole source of light, a bulb in the top

center of the frame, illuminates only the center bottom of the screen. The dead silence on

the soundtrack contrasts with the loud argument between Luzie and Keun from the earlier

shot about war, scarcity of resources, and survival. The murder sequence unravels as

follows:

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1. [CELLAR WALL CAMERA POSITION] Luzie enters on the left of frame in the background, moves toward camera and exits right. PAN RIGHT 2. Camera pauses on a dark comer in lower right of frame, then a cut reveals an extreme close-up of Liidke’s grimly set face in the dark. CUT TO 3. [STAIRWELL CAMERA POSITION] Shot- reverse angle shot sequence between the murderer and potential victim; a long shot of Luzie moving toward the stroller containing smuggled food supplies is intercut with another close-up of Liidke. The soundtrack starts playing the buzz of airplane engines. CUT TO 4. Liidke’s hiding place. The soundtrack of wailing air raid sirens is matched with a swerve of the camera to the right in imitation of Liidke’s jump on Luzie. Medium shot of cellar wall with the letters LSR (Lufrschutzraum) and huge shadows of Liidke and Luzie, struggling in darkness extreme right of frame, and ducking out of the frame. CUT [CHANGE IN CAMERA POSITION TO CELLAR WALL] 5. Medium shot of the stroller shooting away from the camera, CUT TO 6. Montage sequence: inserts of documentary footage of air-raid. CUT TO 7. Medium shot of Liidke dragging Luzie’s corpse, inter-cut with long shots of people escaping the air raid into the shelter, ending with a close-up, from Liidke’s POV, of Luzie’s blood-smeared face and neck.

Unlike conventional murder sequences, which are shot consistently from an

assaultive or reactive POV, with a slight conflation of perspectives, the murder sequence

in Nachts constantly shifts the POV from Liidke to Luzie, and to a third person

perspective to disorient and alienate viewers. Siodmak uses montage to juxtapose the

documentary footage of war with the individual act of sexual murder, aligning the

individual and collective stories of crime. The viewers, who witness the murder through

strangling and share Liidke’s POV at moments, become co-conspirators with the criminal

and observers of its first misreading through the false charges filed against Keun. The bar

owner’s discovery of Luzie’s corpse is followed, in course of the same shot, with a

tracking of the camera to Keun’s face, thereby implicating him as perpetrator of the

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. crime. In another twist to the depiction of crime, the medium shot of Keun framed against

the door, with his hands raised to his neck in a gesture of ultimate self-sacrifice,

anticipates his eventual elimination by the Nazi state. The similar low-key lighting used

for close-ups of Liidke and Keun’s faces connects their individual fates at this point in the

film.20

The opening inter-title ofNachts , “Kriegssommer 1944,” forges an immediate

nexus to the Third Reich and provokes viewers to bridge the distance to a repressed past.

The title sequence immediately obfuscates the correspondence between the detective and

viewer, and puts its audience in the very heart of a chase sequence between Liidke and a

police team. The third person camera perspective pans from an establishing shot of still,

sylvan surroundings to a lingering medium shot of the criminal hiding under the bark of a

tree floating in a stream. Belying audience expectation of a resolution of the chase, the

very first sequence of Siodmak’s film creates audience identification with the criminal,

focusing on his attempt to escape the detective’s gaze. By repeatedly sharing the

criminal’s POV in the film (e.g., the murder reenactment sequence), the viewers become

co-authors of the mysterious case that forms the crux of this police procedural. While it is

not unusual in police procedurals for the camera/ audience to adopt an assaultive gaze

along with the criminal, Siodmak’s use of montage to blend the detective plot with the

political context of National Socialism makes this identification particularly provocative.

The film continues its reference to war in the next frame, set in the bombed ruins

of Berlin. Having evoked the milieu of crime, the film moves to the realm of detection:

the camera singles out commissioner Kersten walking through the rubble. In keeping

with the conventions of detective film, Kersten, whose reputation for acumen gets him

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Liidke case, becomes the audience’s chief figure of identification after his appearance

in the film. However, Kersten’s ambiguous positioning between the spheres of crime and

detection is already evident in his mobility between the two sets of imagery: between the

disjointed space of crime and the detached, dry world of detection. Ironically, the police

office- the setting of detection- is portrayed in the very next frame as being out of kilter,

with its precariously hanging ceiling. With brilliant irony, Siodmak presents the final

collapse of the ceiling soon after the departure of a Gestapo officer barking out his “Sieg

Heil.” The separate worlds of crime and detection are aligned in this shot, and associated

with National Socialism

Kersten is initially portrayed as an outsider in the National Socialist scheme of

things, who refuses to follow codes. For instance, he refuses to demonstrate subservience

to authority, e.g., when he cuttingly tells Gestapo officer Mollwitz: “Es war gar nicht

meine Absicht, aufzustehen.” Interestingly, unlike Keun or Liidke, who are both shot in

semi-darkness, with the lighting emphasizing their ambivalent/ dark roles, shots of

Kersten are devoid of any such ambivalence through much of the film Although Kersten

is distanced from the pernicious ideology of National Socialism through visual cues, his

principle of “Ducken und iiberholen lassen” suggests his foible: the possibility that he

might submit to injustice to avoid conflict. Siodmak here captures the core of

contemporary debates about responsibility by presenting a figure whose initial eschewal

of the prevailing ideology is weakened by his desire for security, and replicates the

middle-of-the-road protagonists of films such asDie Morder sind unter uns (Staudte

1946), who acquiesce in and condone a criminal regime. However, the film also uses

Kersten as a mouthpiece to ironize Nazi pomp and ritual. For example, Kersten’s superior

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Btthm warns him against expressing his cynical attitude toward the state: “Geben Sie dem

Kaiser, was des Kaisers ist.” The camera then cuts to a close-up of Kersten saying “Heil

Hitler,” followed by a long shot of the ceiling crashing on Bohm’s table, and a close-up

of Kersten smirking- an ironic metaphor for the collapsing Nazi regime at this point in

the film

Kersten’s first encounter with the murder mystery also occurs in the

Mordkommission sequence, through the close-up of a newspaper article about Luzie’s

murder, which Kersten finds in Bohm’s office. Kersten immediately makes the

connection between this murder and another murder three years ago, based on the modus

operandi of strangling. Kersten’s involvement in the case is desultory and marginal at this

point; his first few reactions to the case emphasize the Hamburg police’s responsibility

for the investigation. In subsequent sequences, the film will show Kersten’s increasing

engagement with serial murders. For instance, during his visit to love-interest Helga

Homung’s apartment in order to refurbish the wallpaper, Kersten coincidentally

discovers a “wanted” advertisement detailing a murder case from 1937, in which

strangling had caused death. Kersten immediately notes the connection to Luzie’s

murder: “Der Mord trat durch das Brechen des Zungenbeins ein.” In another sequence,

Kersten is shown in the background of the frame during Keun’s interrogation, listening to

Keun’s vehement denial of guilt. Deducing that Keun’s injured thumb makes him an

unsuitable candidate for the murderer with a strong grip, Kersten concludes that Keun is

innocent.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Siodmak introduces a romantic angle into his anti-detective tale by following

developments in the Kersten-Homung relationship. While these shots form the few

placating moments within this disturbing film, they are also overshadowed by a sense of

fear and foreboding. For instance, Kersten ruins his romantic date by his frantic searching

for clues under the wallpaper in Helga Homung’s apartment. This interruption is

indicated aurally by the interruption of florid chords on the soundtrack through their

strained dialog. At the end of this sequence, as Kersten smugly brags about his superior

memory (“Mein Gedachtnis!”), a distraught Helga fears the consequences of Kersten’s

findings: “Ich habe kein gutes Gefuhl bei der Sache. Ich wiinsche, Sie hatten es gelassen

- und nicht wegen der bifichen Tapete!” Similarly, their next date is abruptly terminated

by the arrival of Heinrich, SS officer Rossdorf s assistant, who whisks Kersten away to

the Gestapo headquarters. A medium shot of Kersten sitting in Rossdorf s car, framed

against an abruptly shut window that cuts off his communication with Helga, makes the

intermingling of the personal and political evident for a second time in the film after the

murder sequence. The establishing shot of the headquarters, a palace outside the capital,

is characterized by rapid editing— blends, dissolves, and cuts— which transports the

audience to a world of glamour and opulence, masking coercion, suffering, and death.

Siodmak introduces a few touches that underscore the duplicitous and vacuous nature of

the Nazi spectacle, e.g., a long shot of the chandeliers and Dutch paintings in Rossdorf s

office trembling under effect of an air raid.

Kersten finds instant support for his detectivistic endeavors in Rossdorf, who

views the case of a demented mass killer as a perfect illustration of his argument for

euthanasia. In the first meeting between Kersten and Rossdorf, Kersten appears in a

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. position of power, reveling in a demonstration of his deductive acumen. The film here

uses a series of low-angle shots of Kersten as he looksdown on Rossdorf. In a volley of

shot/ reverse-angle shots, the Rossdorf-Kersten dialogue reenacts the method of murder

used by the criminal. Although Siodmak uses an objective camera toward the beginning

of the sequence, it is clear that the sympathy (and audience identification) is with

Kersten. At the beginning of the murder reenactment scene, the camera pans left to

imitate Kersten’s movement. Kersten then performs the murderous strangling move on

Rossdorf s throat, while Rossdorf s face is contorted with discomfort in an extreme

close-up. At this point, the camera zooms out and assumes a third-person perspective,

although reiterating Kersten’s more powerful position both through the visual cue

(Kersten stands to the right and towers over a Rossdorf looking up at him), and through

the dialogue (Kersten says, “Ich habe leider nicht so viel Kraft in den Fingem,” albeit

without realizing the innuendo of his words at first.)

However, the use of shot-countershot in the conversation between Rossdorf and

Kersten anticipates the confrontation between Kersten and Liidke, thereby foreshadowing

Kersten’s defeat later in the film. Further, the sequence sets up the hierarchical

constellation Kersten-Liidke and Rossdorf-Kersten by means of shot composition. In

Kersten’s enactment of the murderer’s deadly grip on Rossdorf s throat, we see Rossdorf

in the bottom left comer of the screen, while Kersten fills up the rest of the screen. In a

later confrontation, Liidke leans over Kersten’s shoulder and dominates the screen in a

similar fashion. Kersten occupies the same minimal space as Rossdorf in the earlier shot.

The mise-en-abune, achieved through a reduplication of composition, is continued by

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revealing the possession of the criminal’s file. Kersten possesses Liidke’s file, and

Rossdorf is in possession of Kersten’s file from the moment of their first encounter.

The film also emphasizes the intricate relationship between crime and detection

by inter-cutting between Kersten’s investigations and Liidke’s criminal activities. Here,

too, the film departs from audience expectations about police procedurals. Instead of

portraying the criminal as a mastermind who constantly tries to challenge or outwit the

detective, Nachts presents Liidke as a monstrous criminal completely oblivious to the

consequences of his actions. In fact, Liidke’s partial confession to his neighbor Anna

about his collection of articles from murder victims, including a purse, provides the last

clue in Kersten’s chain of evidence against Liidke, leading to LUdke’s arrest.21 Liidke's

ready excuse of madness and consequent immunity from punishment— “Ihr kennt doch

den Paragraph 51. Ick bin doch verrickt!”—immediately refers back to M and Der

Verlorene, and echoes their discourse about madness vis-a-vis National Socialism.

Nachts adds another distressing element to this connection through Liidke’s failed

attempt to murder Frau Weinberger, a Jewish refugee hiding at the Lehmann apartment.

Siodmak uses a shot- reverse angle shot combination reminiscent of the first

murder sequence to portray the confrontation between Liidke and Frau Weinberger. Frau

Weinberger’s life is threatened by an individual sexual murderer while she hides from

another threat posed to her life by the National Socialist state. The irony of the situation

is intensified through Liidke’s utter ignorance about the political context. When Frau

Weinberger confesses her Jewish identity and describes how her husband was taken away

to Auschwitz, Liidke impassively remarks, “Auschwitz kenne ich nicht,” and instead

registers only her isolation. The camera cuts between Liidke’s close-up and his refrain,

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “Immer alleene,” and shots of closed apartment doors and windows, emphasizing that

Frau Weinberger is vulnerable to his murderous urges. The sudden entry of Frau

Lehmann, the hostess, diffuses the tension of this confrontation. Yet an extreme close-up

of Frau Weinberger’s dilated pupil and eye behind the peephole, seen from Liidke’s POV

emphasizes the viewer’s complicity with the murderer. This diegetic insert placed near

the beginning of the sequence points to another instance where the individual and

collective are conflated. Further, Siodmak satirizes postwar attitudes about the Holocaust

through his portrayal of Liidke’s ignorance about Auschwitz.

The ambiguous camera positioning between the poles of crime and detection is

complicated in the interrogation sequence, through a violation of the 180-degree rule. The

opening shot of the interrogation scene is from the interlocutor’s perspective, framing

Liidke in a frontal low angle medium shot as he stands on a table in handcuffs, but the

very next shot cuts to a frontal close-up of the interrogators looking directly at the

camera. The reversal of perspective is doubly unsettling for the film’s viewers, since it

confuses their sense of perspective, but also because it does not provide them with the

expected eye-line match in its reverse-angle shot (according to which the camera would

have shot the interlocutors in a high angle medium shot). The third-person perspective

continues in the rest of the sequence, ultimately destroying the dichotomy detective-

criminal, by showing both united, through their Hitlergrufi to Rossdorf, in the prevalent

discourse of National Socialism.

The parallel between detection and crime is further developed in the murder re

enactment sequence. After Liidke’s interrogation, the camera frames Kersten in a

medium shot, patting Liidke on the back in a gesture of solidarity between the criminal

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and detective. In the next sequence, the camera perspective shifts continually between the

criminal’s and detectives’ POV. A long shot of Liidke in the woods, pursued by

detectives, is followed by a tracking movement of the camera through long,

expressionistic silhouettes of pine trees. The camera then follows Liidke alone: there are

sudden cuts, abrupt stops, moments of lingering on a certain image, all of which capture

the perspective of both the hunter and the quarry, trapping viewers in the temporal and

spatial dimensions of the crime. The most potent image of this criminal- victim

dissonance comes toward the end of the sequence, when Liidke leaps at the camera and

proceeds to strangle the imaginary victim, framed in a close-up as he threatens the

spectators’ smug sense of security. As the camera pulls back, the viewers realize with a

jolt that they now share their perspective with the detective, standing at the end of a ditch

in which Liidke has consummated the crime. The murder re-enactment sequence seems to

close the circle of detection begun by a close-up of Liidke’s face in the title sequence.

The successful resolution to the mystery is further reinforced through the criminal’s

confession. In an interesting shot, the film cross-cuts between a moment of camaraderie

between Liidke and the team of detectives, sharing a light for cigarettes, and a medium

shot of Kersten and a Gestapo officer toasting to their success.

The sense of closure is short-lived, however. The film continues its mystery

beyond this purported solution, and uses the mode of crime and detection to uncover the

mechanism of terror characterizing the Nazi state. In a second confrontation between

Kersten and Rossdorf, Kersten increasingly submits to the principle of “ducken und

iiberholen lassen,” and lets himself be overpowered by Rossdorf, who orders him to close

the LUdke case, and deports him to the dreaded Eastern Front. In fact, the demarcations

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between crime and detection become murky in the film, as both spheres come to be

located in the person of SS officer Rossdorf. Further, the film continues its intra-diegetic

parallels between the detective and criminal figure in both constellations (i.e. between

Kersten and Liidke, and between Rossdorf and Kersten), as in the final confrontation

scenes in both instances. Kersten follows the clues of superhuman strength evinced by the

murderer to land in Liidke’s apartment, and secures his victory over Liidke by means of

physical agility, which seemingly makes Liidke willing to fulfill Kersten’s every demand.

The confrontations between Rossdorf and Kersten take place on a more cerebral level,

but the camera technique of shot-countershot is reminiscent of the confrontation between

Liidke and Kersten. Visually, Kersten’s defeat is portrayed through the camera’s almost

sycophantic following of Rossdorf s movements, as it zooms in on the SS officer’s face

and pans to imitate his circular motion around Kersten, closing in on the detective and

implicating him in the crime ofJustizmord. While Kersten uses physical agility to

overpower Liidke, Rossdorf overcomes Kersten by means of mental agility and rhetorical

sophistication, and leaves Kersten subjugated.

The mise-en-abtme leads to a second solution to the mystery, which emphasizes

the defeat of a detective mechanism by implicating the innocent suspect, the murderer

and even itself in the web of crime, and finally, by denying its own existence through its

negation of the crime: “Einen Bruno Liidke hat es nie gegeben.” Rossdorf s menacing

utterance of this statement is followed by a dissolve to a train wheel inscribed with the

motto, “Rader mUssen rollen fur den Sieg,” which reinforces the sense of futility of

detection. The final shot of Kersten shows him framed against a train window in a similar

fashion to the framing of Keun and Liidke. Moreover, the sequence emphasizes Kersten’s

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. impending “liquidation” on the Eastern front not just through dialog, but also by first

multiplying his white hand into the waving hands of other soldiers as the train moves (the

uniqueness of the detective figure is thereby negated), and finally by showing the hands

fading into a dark background. Significantly, the final image of the film is an extreme

close-up of a letter in Liidke’s infamous file, declaring that he has been ‘liquidated.” The

film's emblematic shot, instead of providing closure, creates uncertainty about the fate of

its detective figure and about the outcome of the mystery.22 Rather than presenting a

“meaningful, constructed ending” (Hayward 81), the film annihilates all meaning created

through its detective narrative, and thereby comes undone. Like Kiiutner’s Epilog,

Siodmak’s film writes a requiem to the sutured conclusions and epistemo logical

aspirations of traditional detective film.

In Nachts, the mise-en-abime structure is typified by multiple connections

between the stories of detection, romance, and the political narrative of war and National

Socialism. As in Epilog, its reduplication of images and structures renders all attempts at

reaching meaning or truth unstable, mainly through the revelation of a mystery-within-a-

mystery. Much like Kautner’s film, the relationship between the two levels of mystery in

Nachts is also based on the constellation individual-collective/ personal-political. In other

words, Kersten’s fulfillment of his duties as a Mordkommission officer in the Third

Reich, namely unraveling the murder mystery, conceals the sub-text of yet another

mystery and solution prefabricated by Rossdorf. One early reference to this layered

structure occurs when Kersten peels off the wallpaper in Helga’s apartment to reveal an

inner shell, a murder description. While this moment emphasizes Kersten’s skill as

detective in interpreting clues, it also points to the possibility that his solution might itself

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. be a palimpsest concealing another level of truth—one preferred and disseminated by the

Third Reich. Siodmak makes the connection between the personal and political by

showing innocuous domestic surfaces that hide pernicious details.

Similarly, Kersten’s apparently routine investigations of a serial-murder case are

revealed to hide a dark, twisted nuance. Rossdorf pounces on Kersten’s conjecture about

the mental instability of the mass murderer in their first meeting, and launches into a

diatribe against mental abnormality, connecting it to the discourse of National Socialist

race politics. The volley of shots and reverse angle shots draws to a close with Rossdorf

exclaiming: “Bringen Sie mir den Massenmorder!” Although Kersten first hesitates to

assume responsibility for the investigation, Rossdorf s threat, “Der Fall Liidke muC

stichfest sein. [...J Es hangt ja schlieBlich fur mich eine ganze Menge davon ab~ fur Sie

ubrigens auch!,” finally causes him to submit to the system. Kersten’s solution to the

Liidke case will thereby also serve as a solution in the larger National Socialist discourse,

as a Modellfall for the persecution of “abnormal” elements. Ironically, Kersten’s

promised solution turns out to be a red herring for Rossdorf, who receives an order to

snuff out the Liidke case because of what the state perceives to be its inherent

“contradiction” (i.e., the combination Germanness and abnormality). Rossdorf s

statement reveals his foiled expectations from the Liidke case: “Wenn er nur Jude

gewesen ware, oder Auslander!”23 The film’s connection between its criminal and the

main targets of Nazi atrocities, Jews and foreigners, reveals that the “devil” who comes at

night is not just Liidke: what Liidke does on a small scale, the state practices on a larger

scale. The metaphorical logic of this statement is led to its inevitable conclusion in the

film, whereby the Nazi state has to deny the existence of the serial killer in order to

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. safeguard its own survival.24 The state thus distorts Kersten’s findings and creates a new

solution at his expense, as per its maxim: “Gerecht ist, was dem deutschen Vo Ike ntitzt.”

The radio broadcast announcing that Keun has been condemned to death usurps

the validity of Kersten’s initial solution. The film creates a brief hope for a reassertion of

the detective’s authority: Kersten’s corpus delicti, his file on Liidke which documents all

his conclusions, is favorably received as evidence by the judge ruling on Keun’s case.

The judge’s seemingly benevolent warning, “Seien Sie vorsichtig im Rahmen des

Vertretbaren,” is undermined by the next frame, in which Kersten’s loss of

detective agency is visually captured through images of his emptied-out office and

through the irretrievable loss of the Liidke file. Helga’s repetition of the judge’s warning

at this point reveals a relation of equation between being cautious and staying within the

bounds of the Vertretbaren (of representation in both the legal and artistic senses of the

word). Kersten, the detective as representative of justice, oversteps his authority by

refusing to compromise his reading of the mystery in favor of Rossdorf s predetermined

solution, and becomes antithetical to the state’s detective project. Kersten’s transgression

is also reiterated through a violation of the aesthetic representation of detection, which

must consume itself through an anti-epistemological conclusion.

Enno Patalas argued that the film’s use of Kersten’s POV, particularly in his

confrontations with officers of the Nazi state, makes it possible for postwar viewers to

spurn culpability for the recent past: “Wenn der Film den Nazismus als schiere Barbarei

denunziert, so liefert er doch den Normalburgem ... das Alibi der sauberen Hande mit. Je

nachdem der Zuschauer es benotigt oder nicht, wird er den Film als Ausflucht oder

Wamung verstehen” ( Filmkritik, October 1957). The Nazis become straw men, and

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. everyone else, including the detective, turns out to be a victim of circumstances.

However, by destroying Kersten’s credibility and authority as detective, and by making

him succumb to his maxim “Ducken und iiberholen lassen,” the film ultimately

problematizes this distinction. Instead of a new beginning for detection in postwar

Germany, Siodmak’s film presents a dead end. Kersten’s imminent death on the Eastern

Front signals a “de-feat of detection” (Black 81), and his negation of the Liidke case casts

a shadow of futility over the entire filmic project. The final image of the film is a shot of

Kersten’s file on Liidke. Yet the final ffame reveals that Kersten’s version has been

obliterated by the ultimate solution: a letter indicating that Liidke has been “liquidated.”

A close-up of the letter cuts to a shot of the file being shut and superimposed with the

official stamp “Erledigt,” with its double reference to Liidke and to the Third Reich. A

similar double entendre can be read in the statement “Einen Bruno Liidke hat es nie

gegeben,” with its reference to attempts at negating Nazi atrocities by future generations.

The final frame is particularly intriguing for its connection toHangmen Also Die

(Lang 1943), which ends with a similar shot of a letter from the Nazi criminal files. Made

during Lang’s exile in Hollywood, the detective film shows Nazi officials in

Czechoslovakia investigating the assassination of their leader Heydrich, nicknamed

“Hangman.” Drobnov, the real assassin, escapes with the cooperation of townspeople,

while E.C., a Gestapo informer, is handed over as suspect. The aforementioned letter,

shown in close-up, states that the authorities are aware that E.C. is not the real criminal,

but have declared him as such to save face and to preserve Nazi authority. The state’s re-

appropriation of the solution to the mystery here underscores the defeat of the political

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mechanism, and is meant to activate resistance against the Third Reich. Dislocated from

the temporal and geographical dimensions of exile and situated in the postwar context,

Siodmak’s newer image of the criminal file conveys no such inspiration. YetNachts ’

revisiting of Lang’s image invites viewers to re-inhabit the past as the only effective

means to overcome it.

Kersten’s resigned affirmation of Rossdorf s statement, “Einen Bruno LUdke hat

es nie gegeben,” appears in an interesting scene which stands out in the melancholy mood

of Kersten’s final encounter with Helga Homung. A shot- reverse angle shot combination

of Kersten in the train and Helga on the platform at a distance cuts to a long shot of

Liidke’s neighbor, Anna, moving toward Kersten. In the next frame, Anna persistently

quizzes Kersten about the outcome of the Liidke case. Front-lit and dressed in white, and

occupying a central moment in the film’s conclusion, Anna seems to be the voice of

conscience and memory, and perhaps a signal to the audience that the future of detection

in a postwar world must be synonymous with a questioning of the Nazi past.

Epilog and Nachts make the confrontation with the Third Reich a central part of

their anti-detective stories, and use the conventions of whodunits and police procedurals

to subvert generic expectations. The fact that the films are made seven years apart from

each other also deserves attention. The greater temporal distance from the Nazi past

makes Nachts a more openly confrontational, “politischer Kriminalfilm”FAZ ( ,

November 25, 1957). Yet one of the earliest reviews o fEpilog also acknowledged its

status as ‘‘mehr-als-Kriminalfilm’’ ( Filmpresse , September 29, 1950). The mise-en-abime

marks both films’ requiem to the epistemological model of detection, making the very

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mystery they set out to investigate impossible to solve. BothEpilog and Nachts employ

the investigative structure to question every character’s moral complicity in the crimes of

the Third Reich, and encourage viewers to confront and accept their anti-detective

message as the only legitimate response to investigating guilt and responsibility in West

Germany during the 1950s.

Around the time of Nachts’ release, Fritz Lang returned from his Hollywood exile

to West Germany, and took up where he had left off, namely by continuing his Weimar

engagement with German anti-detective cinema. The next chapter on Fritz Lang’s Die

1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse (1960) examines the film’s overtures to its own anti

detective cinematic past, and to the corrupt foundations of a Nazi legacy that jeopardize

the smooth facade of West Germany’s economic miracle.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 4

RETURN TO HISTORY: DIE 1000 AUGEN DES DR MABUSE (LANG 1960)

At the end of the 1950s, West German cinema as a means of entertainment was

rapidly replaced by television, calling for a frantic effort by directors and producers to

make their offerings more attractive. The growth of the TV-apparatus as a ubiquitous

means of dissipating images and telling stories becomes the context for Fritz Lang’s third

Mabuse film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse (1960). The title’s thousand eyes refer to

multiple hidden cameras feeding images to television screens in the criminal’s secret

surveillance center. Taken together as a trilogy, the Mabuse films are, in fact, as much an

allegory for the development of cinema as a sign of their times. They mark key

transitions in film history from silent cinema to sound cinema, and finally to cinema

confronting video and television. The primacy of vision and the hypnotic gaze in the first

Mabuse film’s plot and the clever sound effects of the second Mabuse film are continued

in 1000 Augen's engagement with the power of vision and its diffusion. Speaking about

cinema as the locus of power, and through a detective film, warning about cinema and

those fascinated by its spell, 1000 Augen's plot revolves around what D.A. Miller calls

“super-vision” (29).

100

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In The Novel and the Police, Miller details three senses of super-vision for

investigative texts. First, detectives are gifted seers, privy to the meaning behind

minutiae, who can decipher a deep significance behind the most trivial detail with their

prying acuteness. In a second sense, detective texts supervise a society’s moral

functioning, privileging discipline and order in response to the chaos unleashed by

murder and crime. Finally, Miller uses the term in a narratological context. The

unidentified, but omniscient narrator exercises a panoptic or monological perspective,

and controls the practice of novelistic representation: “We are always situated inside the

narrator’s viewpoint, and even to speak of a “narrator” at all is to misunderstand a

technique that, never identified with a person, institutes a faceless and multilateral

regard” (Miller 24).1

Miller’s central hypothesis deals with the mainstream nineteenth century novel of

Dickens, Trollope, and Wilkins. He traces the theme of super-vision to the discipline

exercised by these novels’ middle-class protagonists and families, who preside over an

exact enforcement of morals and values, and constitute an informal and extralegal

principle of control. My use of Miller’s term needs to be qualified in at least one way.

The shift from novelistic representation to the visual medium of film imbues super-vision

with another level of significance not originally intended by Miller, referring to the link

between seeing and (narrative) authority that the film camera embodies. In the following

analysis of Lang’s anti-detective film, the term “panoptic” conveys an omniscient, third-

person perspective, and the film’s self-reflexive awareness of and detachment from this

perspective.

101

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The previous chapter has shown that West German anti-detective film of the

1950s problematizes the first two senses of Miller’s term. First, Epilog and Nachts

dismantle the detective’s acuity and authority by exposing his myopic vision or his

misperception (e.g., Kersten’s false sense of security as being “das Lieblingskind der

Gestapo”), and by a negation of the detective’s super-vision through his death. Second,

both films subvert the traditional narrational scheme of order-chaos-order, whereby the

uncertainty created by murder is gradually alleviated through the controlling mechanism

of detection. Epilog and Nachts reveal a continuation of the political mystery beyond an

initial resolution of the whodunit. Instead of destroying the super-vision, these dead ends

perpetuate it by ensuring its continuation in the political level of surveillance, but at the

same time severely question a traditional hegemony of morals that demarcates between

guilt and innocence, crime and detection.

This chapter draws on the subversion of super-vision effected by 1950s anti

detective film in the Federal Republic. I trace a similar phenomenon in 1000 Augen.

Lang’s film disavows the first two senses of Miller’s term, because it undermines the

detective’s perspicacity, and refuses to subscribe to a system of surveillance, such as

Miller’s middle class, which can set the delinquent and investigative spheres apart. Most

importantly, the third sense of super-vision, the meshing of surveillance and cinematic

narration, becomes paramount in Lang’s film. Already in the 1950s, West German anti

detective film established the authority of a camera perspective that was independent of

the detective’s POV. The camera’s panoptic gaze is located in an objective perspective,

which continues after the death of detective, e.g., after Zabel’s murder in Epilog. The

unmasking of the surveillance established by the camera’s “thousand eyes,” constructed

102

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. en-abime, sustains West German anti-detective film’s genre-subversive discourse at the

beginning of the 1960s. Significantly, 1000 Augen continues to engage and refer to the

Nazi past in the tradition of Kautner and Siodmak’s films by tracing the postwar

criminal's idea of hidden surveillance cameras back to the Third Reich.

Written in 1960, the year 1000 Augen was released, Ernst Bloch’s essay,

“Philosophische Ansicht des Detektivromans,” also plays with the notion of masking and

unmasking by talking about postwar decades in West Germany as Verschlagenheitszeiten

(251). Bloch’s discussion of a heightened suspicion as the Third Reich’s legacy in

postwar West Germany makes it a vehicle of cultural critique similar to Lang’s anti

detective film. Indeed, 1000 Augen exposes Nazi techniques of surveillance continued in

a Cold War, Wirtschaftswunder context in the Hotel Luxor. But while Bloch uses

detective narratives’ enlightening impulse to equate them with “high” culture, Lang’s

film resorts to blatant commercialization in its investigative plot.1000 Augen shifts away

from the dead ends of 1950s anti-detective film to sutured conclusions tying together its

detective and romantic narratives. Lang’s unabashed mixing of anti-detective strategies

with formulaic pleasures hardly seems like a new direction for West German anti

detective film at first glance. Yet his final Mabuse film incorporates both the detective

formula and its destruction. Lang’s return to filmmaking in postwar West Germany

reconciles his experience of exile in Hollywood, where he succumbed to formulaic

filmmaking demanded by the studios, but also symbolically presents his return to the

Weimar anti-detective film tradition in his re-telling of the Mabuse story.

103

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 4.1 The Return of Mabuse

1000 Augen is the third in Fritz Lang’s trilogy of Dr Mabuse films. The very first

Mabuse film, Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), depicts the competition on screen between

the criminal mastermind and soul-doctor Mabuse, who rules the Berlin underworld by

means of his impenetrable disguises and his hypnotic gaze, and the dynamic detective,

the state prosecutor von Wenk, who doubles Mabuse’s dissembling strategies to finally

emerge as a winner in the deadly battle of looks. However, von Wenk’s close escapes

from death, and his painstaking struggles to capture Mabuse, as well as his ultimate

capture and defeat of Mabuse only as a result of Mabuse’s (real or feigned) madness—all

indicate the beginnings of Lang’s engagement with anti-detection. Dr Mabuse reappears

as an inmate of a mental asylum in the second part of Lang’s trilogy,Das Testament des

Dr Mabuse (1933). Mabuse dies halfway through its narrative, but Lang uses super

imposition to portray the transfer of Mabuse’s “protoplasm” into Dr Baum, the head

doctor of the asylum, and a continuation of Mabuse’s legacy of terror through

Femhypnose. Unlike Spieler, the second Mabuse film does not portray a battle of looks

and avoids direct confrontations between the detective and criminal until the very end,

but instead, depicts detection as a chase, largely following inspector Lohmann’s POV and

his deductions to unmask the evil designs of Dr Baum in the nick of time.2 A nerve-

tingling car chase concludes the battle between master-criminal and master-detective, yet,

Baum’s descent into madness and his self-incarceration into a cell of his asylum suggests

that Mabuse might return, as he indeed does in 1960.

104

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Critics at home and abroad registered disappointment about Mabuse’s third

reincarnation and catalogued the faults of Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse, calling it

“unconvincing and melodramatic” and “deficit in dramatic tension” (Jenkins 201). But

the film fared well at the box office, returning huge profits, and even garnered the

coveted “wertvoll” rating. Set in contemporary West Germany,1000 Augen traces the

drama of crime and detection as it unfolds in Berlin’s Hotel Luxor during the period

1959-60. A series of abductions, murders, and political and economic scandals can be

traced back to the hotel, creating an atmosphere of terror and mistrust. The film’s

narrative is triggered by the last of these incidents, namely the murder of journalist Peter

Barter in his car on his way to report a scandal he had uncovered in the Hotel Luxor. An

investigation by the German police, assisted by the Interpol, connects the crimes to Dr

Mabuse, whose death in 1933, although witnessed by detectives, has not purged the

world of his thirst for political and economic power.

The film combines crime, detection, and romance, aligning the three simultaneous

levels of action through cross-cutting. The level of detection, i.e. the investigation of the

Barter murder by Inspector Krass, forms the chief ingredient of the plot. Like in the first

two Mabuse films, the illegal activities of Dr Mabuse and his aides form another major

focus of1000 Augen. The crimes are also linked to the suspicious activities of the

clairvoyant mystic Cornelius, the psychiatrist Dr. Jordan, and the insurance agent

Mistelzweig. The solution of the mystery reveals Cornelius and Jordan to be two

disguises of the postwar Mabuse, and Mistelzweig to be the incognito Interpol detective

who will finally solve the mystery. Finally, the film gives considerable weight to its

105

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. romantic subplot, i.e. to the love relationship between the American multimillionaire

Travers, who is the romantic hero-cum-detective of the film, and Mabuse’s aide, Marion

Meneel.

While Krass’ attempts at detection end in futility and narrow escapes from death,

and Mistelzweig’s sleuthing remains undercover, love proves to be more powerful than

hypnosis for Mabuse’s aide Meneel. She gives away Mabuse’s plot for world domination

to Travers, exposing the “thousand eyes” of TV cameras installed in the decorative

ornaments on the ceiling of each room in Hotel Luxor, Mabuse’s headquarters of criminal

operation. The film makes viewers privy to Meneel’s confession, but it does not reveal

the criminal’s identity right away. Instead, the camera focuses on the shady “insurance

agent,” Mistelzweig, and only gradually frees him of suspicion. Through his POV, the

film exposes Jordan and Cornelius as Mabuse, followed by his self-exposure as the

Interpol detective stationed in the hotel. The final sequence inter-cuts Mistelzweig’s

rescue of Travers and Meneel from Mabuse’s surveillance center in the basement of

Hotel Luxor with inspector Krass’ furious chase of Mabuse/ Cornelius/ Jordan, ending

with the criminal’s death as his car crashes on a bridge and plummets into the river

below. The last shot provides closure to both the detective and romantic plots by

portraying the happy reconciliation of Travers and Meneel to the strains of a wailing

violin. Something has changed since the gloomy endings of 19S0s West German anti

detective film. Or has it?

According to Frederick Ott’s account, Lang found himself frustrated during the

making of 1000 Augen by the regressive character of postwar West German cinema (61).

However, critics were quick to point out that Lang had himself failed miserably in

106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meeting their expectations about contributing to a rebirth of postwar West German film,

as this deprecating review acknowledges, “Der Film ist nach dem Rezept “Man

nehme.. hergestellt. Man nahm also die wesentlichen Elemente des Krimi-reiBers,

verstarkte sie durch einige Ingredienzien des Gruselfilms, gab einen SchuB alten Dr

Mabuse... dazu, und suBte das Ganze mit einer Portion Liebesgeschichte. [...] Die

geschaftlichen Chancen des Filmes dUrften demnach iiber pari liegen” (Film Echo,

October 1, 1960).

One reason for this reception might be that1000 Augen's plot summary reads

frighteningly like any of the hugely popular Edgar Wallace Gruselfilm series.

Interestingly, the Wallace films, too, have a penchant for disguises comparable to the

Mabuse films, and much of their suspense also arises from masking. The tension is

unfailingly diffused in the final few frames. Many Wallace films, in fact, show their

detective unpeeling the mask off the face of a dying or dead villain. At the same time,

even when the Wallace films cast doubt on the distinction between guilt and

investigation, it is meant as a joke. For instance, inDer Frosch mit der Maske (Reinl

1959), one detective says to another while trying to figure out the face behind the

criminal’s frog-mask: “Vielleicht fuhren Sie ein Doppelleben, und sind selber der

Frosch.” Yet the laughter accompanying the statement is a cue that it is not to be taken

seriously, and the solution leaves the reputation of detectives untarnished.

Fritz Lang hoped to have given away no such cues in 1000 Augen, and stated in

an interview: “Ich hoffe, auch die Leute im Kino werden... bis zum SchluB nicht wissen,

wer denn nun wirklich der Uber-Verbrecher ist” (Niimberger Nachrichten, May 14,

1960). Lang took full precautions to deceive and mislead viewers, and to preserve the

107

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suspense and suspicion about both the criminal and detective identities until the film’s

conclusion. According to the film’s titles (its opening sequence), Professor Jordan’s part

is played by Wolfgang Preiss and that of Cornelius by Lupo Prezzo. Lotte Eisner notes,

“The same actor played Cornelius and Jordan; Wolfgang Preiss used the Italian

translation of his own name for his second role. The make-up is so good that even Roger

Greenspun in his otherwise perceptive article did not notice the single actor in both roles.

Although Lang rarely played the ‘whodunnit’ game, in this case he simply did not want

the opening credits of the film to give the plot away” (394). At the same time, the

wordplay with names and the similar appearance of Cornelius and Jordan encourages

viewers to act as detectives, and to decipher the mysterious identities before the film’s

investigators. Such privileging of viewers with knowledge hidden from the detective is a

trope that Lang’s film continues fromEpilog and Nachts.

Further, 1000 Augen does work on the “Man nehme...” formula, but locates it

mostly in relation to Lang’s Weimar cinema. The final film in the trilogy contains

variations on several motifs ofSpieler and Testament. Critics have also pondered whether

Lang’s last film in the Mabuse trilogy lived up to the expectations, set up by the first two

Mabuse films, of being an image of the times. The first Mabuse film has the sub-title,

“ein Bildnis der Zeit.” Twenty years later, on the occasion of a New York screening of

Testament, Lang remarked that the second Mabuse film “is meant to show Hitler’s terror

methods as a parable. The slogans and beliefs of the Third Reich were placed in the

mouths of the criminals” (Eisner 129). The connection between Mabuse films and

Germany’s contemporary situation had thus, by the time of 1000 Augen, become

proverbial. My interpretation will show that Lang’s final Mabuse film provides a satirical

108

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. social commentary on the decadent underside of West Germany’s Economic Miracle. In

the next section, I ground the film’s stocktaking of German history within its engagement

with cinematic history, particularly the history of Lang’s own anti-detective cinema.

4.2 Anti-Detective Techniques in 1000 Augen

Film reviews clearly focused on the Krimi-Reijler formula of1000 Augen, its

inadequacy and transparency. However, they failed to point out that the film provokes

questions about detective film formulae and their subversion, and the non-identity of the

detective’s, camera’s, and spectator’s looks. Indeed, Lang’s engagement with the tension

between masking and unmasking, and his sense of the ultimate dissembling power of the

cinema has been commented by Raymond Bellour, who examines Lang’s focus on vision

“most obviously [articulated] through the presence of an investigator, the man who sees

and seizes appearances within the rectangular frame of the camera ’’ (28). I suggest that

Lang’s mixing of commercialization and avant-gardism results in a film that captures the

paradox of being locked into the generic codes and yet flouting them, of being

“seemingly naive, almost puerile” (ibid.), yet complex in being at once disconcertingly

open and remarkably veiled, thereby evoking once again the sense of being “mehr als

Kriminalfilm” that Epilog and Nachts exude.3 1000 Augen seems hackneyed and,

literally, “done to death.” Although Lang’s 1960 film does not appear to be a requiem to

detection, my chapter will demonstrate that it tailors West German anti-detective film to a

new decade through four interrelated strategies: (1) lacunae in editing; (2) diffused POV;

(3) mise-en-abime; (4) the personal- political interconnection.

109

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. First, the film’s editing is remarkable for its confusing employment of cross

cutting, parallel editing, ellipses and overlapping, that create lacunae in its otherwise

interlocking narrative. The unsettling is further underlined through multiple levels of

criminal and detective identities, which in turn are exposed only at the end. The question

“whodunit” and the tension between masking and unmasking thereby apply both to

criminal and to investigative acts. Much like 1950s West German anti-detective film,

1000 Augen poses a challenge both to its detective’s and viewers’ visual acuity, and—by

means of shifting POVs—to Miller’s second sense of super-vision as a societal

mechanism that must reinforce the binary opposition between crime and detection. The

film’s third-person POV largely follows a “strategy of disavowal” (Miller 2), refusing to

be located in the detective or criminal gaze, and thereby establishes a panoptic

perspective that seems infallible in its super-vision. Further, the film provokes both

collusion with the camera’s gaze and collision with the conventions of classical detective

film by situating the viewer inside this panopticism.

The mises-en-abimes in 1000 Augen thus refer to the film-within-a-film structure

revealed halfway through the narrative, and not necessarily to the split between the

personal and political levels of mystery, as inEpilog or Nachts. The thousand eyes of TV

cameras installed by the criminal mastermind everywhere in the Hotel Luxor, the locus of

both crime and detection, radically foreground the link between technologies of

surveillance and authority, while at the same time taking this connection to its

(techno)logical conclusion through the cinematic medium, i.e. by means of the film

camera’s panoptic vision. Finally, Lang’s anti-detective film explores the link between

history and mystery in two ways: (1) by revealing the rift between the personal and the

110

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. political in a different way than the 1950s anti-detective films we have examined. Lang

shows the two levels to be inextricably interlinked, as the detective’s personal mysteries

intrude upon the investigation of politically motivated crimes; (2) by revealing the

continuity between past and present crimes through the Hotel Luxor, “a site which the

Cold War inherits from Nazi terror” (Elsaesser 2000, 182). Lang’s film connects to

Bloch’s sense ofVerschlagenheit , and criticizes the false complacency of West

Germany’s thriving capitalist society.

The film’s use of the four anti-detective strategies detailed above lays bare the

incongruities behind the puerile pleasures of formulaic detective film. Lang responds to

the challenge of re-configuring German anti-detective film to the Wirtschaftswunder

society of the 1960s. In place of the deep crisis of knowledge produced in reaction to the

past in Epilog and Nachts, he replicates conventions such as the combination of romance

and detection, while parodying their smooth resolution of conflicts. Incorporating both

generic codes and their subversion, and ironically quoting from its own filmic past, 1000

Augen foregrounds the self-reflexive detachment of anti-detective film.

4.3 Super-Vision: Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse

1000 Augen establishes a causal chain that is motivated less by the tension

between crime and investigation than by Lang’s convoluted editing patterns. “The film is

constantly kept on the move by Lang’s characteristic... rapid cutting. If someone

mentions a person, an object, or an event, the next shot will show us something about this

person, object, or event. A question is taken up and unexpectedly answered in the

succeeding shot” (Eisner 393). The film achieves a precise interlocking of scenes through

Lang’s clever use of transitions. His use of overlapping is deceptively smooth, e.g., the

111

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. tapping sound of Krass’ pipe against the hotel bar continues on the soundtrack as the

image switches to a medium shot of Krass knocking on the door, as is the film’s

associative editing, e.g., a medium shot of Mabuse’s driver saying, “Mochte doch wissen,

wie der Doktor aussieht” cuts to a close-up of Cornelius saying- ironically, considering

that he is the postwar Mabuse—“Das weiC ich nicht.” However, instead of producing the

seamless transitions characteristic of continuity editing, the film exposes gaps in its

interlocking structure. The lacunae that mark the editing inevitably produce an unsettling

effect among the viewers. Elsaesser notes that compared to Hitchcock’s close-knit

weaving of suspense or build-up of drama, Lang’s manner of withholding character

motivation and evidence seems willful and irritating, as when he brutally and abruptly

manipulates POV or sequencing in order to conceal gaps (2000, 158). Indeed, 1000

Augen's elliptical shifts between several time-space coordinates often lead viewers to

false conclusions. For instance, in the telephone explosion sequence, a long shot of

Krass’ office follows his POV to a close-up of a circular object that looks deceptively

like a telephone dial and seems like a gesture to the murder weapon, but it is revealed to

be Meneel’s bracelet once the camera has focused on it. However, I suggest that the fixed

repertoire of elements, once set to the point-counterpoint pattern, lends the narrative a

unique rhythm, challenging viewers to become perspicuous detectives themselves, and to

follow the clue-suspicion-confirmation schema that the film sets up. The resolution

through repetition reestablishes the narrative control that the detective on screen

repeatedly loses, e.g., in the film’s opening sequence.

112

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The film opens with a shot of a man in his sporty white car as a black limousine

glides up beside him, echoing the famous scene of the murder of Dr. Kramm in

Testament. In the back seat is No. 12, the executioner of the new gang. There is a

cutaway to a police station showing inspector Krass answering a telephone call in which

the clairvoyant Cornelius details a car murder. The close-up of Cornelius emphasizes his

black glasses and thereby his blindness. On the word murder, the camera cuts back to the

cars, and to a medium shot of No. 12 aiming his rifle. The camera adopts the assaultive

perspective of the killer, then implicates its viewers in the perpetration of the murder by

cutting to a medium shot of the victim slowly slumping over his steering wheel. When

the light turns green, all cars move on, except the white sports car. Lang emphasizes the

continuity of his postwar Mabuse with the Weimar detective films by quoting this entire

murder sequence from Testament; however, the cuts here are more rapid, as if to indicate

the more urgent and menacing nature of the crime or of the age. As Eisner points out, the

only difference between this scene and the one from Testament is that Dr. Kramm’s

murder had been smothered by blaring car horns sounded by impatient drivers, whereas

1000 Augen leaves out this cacophonous detail (300). In addition to posing questions

about the victim’s and murderers’ identity, and complicating the murder sequence by

cross-cutting to the police office and to Cornelius’ apartment, the film poses one more

riddle to viewers familiar with Lang, namely, why he leaves out the aural detail of car

horns in his filmic quotation. The initial puzzle sets off the clue- suspicion- confirmation

pattern: indeed, the first sequence will provide even more clues, though not for detective

Krass, but for viewers of this anti-detective film

113

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The sequence continues by framing the interior of a monitor van, replete with the

most modem devices of communication, and cuts to a close-up of its slowly changing

number plates. The “masking” of the crime is accompanied by a voice-over issuing

instructions: “Der Wagen muB umgespritzt werden. Das Kennzeichen des Wagens muB

geSndert werden.”4 The next shot follows the Puzzlespiel conventions of a whodunit, and

reveals a transmitter in close-up. The camera tracks down to an extreme close-up of the

“Doctor’s” clubfoot, providing the first clue to the criminal’s identity. The sequence

closes with a confrontation between Krass and Cornelius. The lighting focuses on the

seeing eyes of Krass and the blind eyes of Cornelius, and the dialogue, accordingly,

points to Krass’ skepticism about magic formulae. Interestingly, the shot-counter shot

construction is framed against the background of various zodiac signs, part of the decor

on the walls of Cornelius’ room Through the particular camera angle that frames the two

figures, the constellation Libra becomes visible in the space dividing them The scales are

tilted on Cornelius’ side at this point in the film. Both Cornelius’ claim, “Vielleicht sehen

wir Blinde mehr als Sie sehen,” and the subsequent action reinforce this visual

insinuation.

The camera emphasizes Cornelius’ blindness through a close-up of his eyes, after

he has taken off his dark glasses. Krass stands up and dominates the frame, bending over

the desk and jeering at Cornelius about his failed prediction of murder at the traffic light

because police reports indicate that Peter Barter’s death resulted from a heart attack. Just

then, the telephone rings. The camera pauses on Krass’ face, twisted with consternation,

as he receives the news that Barter has been murdered, followed by a POV shot framing

Cornelius as a suspect. The sequence ends with Krass’ confession: “Sie haben recht.

114

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Barter ist durch eine Stahlnadel im Gehira gestorben” and dissolves into an extreme

close-up of the murder weapon, a steel needle. The silent murder weapon also provides

an answer to the viewers’ question about Lang’s decision to leave out the blaring car

horns.

The opening sequence sets the tone for the film’s illusion of a clockwork

mechanism. Yet, the tension between illusion and skepticism produces lacunae, which

fail to be resolved in the film’s narration. Our sense of scenes fitting into each other “like

cogs in a complicated piece of machinery” (Elsaesser 2000, 176) is simultaneously

juxtaposed in 1000 Augen with a refusal to subordinate the film to the principles of

continuity editing, e.g., through insert shots that interrupt the action in the police

conference sequence, where the inter-cut scene dominates and disrupts the one it

interrupts. Two insert shots interrupt the police detectives’ conjectures about Mabuse’s

continued involvement in postwar crimes in spite of his death in 1932: first of Mabuse’s

grave, cutting to a second one of his shut, dusty file. After framing a close-up of

Mabuse’s file, the camera tracks to the bottom of the file cabinet and to the floor,

lingering on the close-up of a clubfoot. The insert of the grave in the police’s discussion

about Mabuse suggests not just simultaneity but also hierarchy (ibid.). The interrupting

reference to Mabuse becomes more powerful than the investigative action whose space it

now occupies on screen. The second insert also suggests the continuity of Mabuse’s

crimes from the Nazi past to the postwar present, and their label

Reichskriminalpolizeiamt reveals that they have not been discovered since the end of the

war. This visual hint is echoed by the dialog, where the detectives puzzle over the

disappearance of the Mabuse files. Further, viewers catch a glimpse of the files and see a

115

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. clubfoot in the same shot. This image, accessible only to viewers, dislodges the detectives

from their positions of authority, while secretly providing viewers with a clue to the

“whodunit.” When the film returns us to the police conference, the detectives have

reached a despondent conclusion: “Und so geht es weiter. Alle Falle sind unaufgeklart...”

The result is a film that achieves its anti-detective effects through its constant reference to

loose ends, which it refuses to tie together, and which in turn refuse to let the film settle

down comfortably into the ostensibly sutured conclusion of its detective and romantic

plots.

The meshing of criminal and investigative levels of action is also reflected in the

film’s vacillation between POVs. Often, the camera begins a shot without locating it in

any POV. For instance, a close-up of the main clue, a steel needle found in Barter’s

autopsy, cuts to another close-up of a tom mattress, but it remains unclear where we are

or what are seeing.5 A dolly back and pan from right to left continues to reveal a topsy

turvy barstool, cushions, empty boxes, accompanied by a remark on the soundtrack:

“Und hier werden wir auch nichts finden.” Lang challenges viewers with this disorienting

shot, and presents objects in close-up without an establishing shot, and a voice-over

without revealing the speaker. The voice-over continues, “Meinen geliebten Peter, mit

viel Liebe zu unserem ersten Weihnachten, Corinna,” to accompany the close-up of a

card with a lipstick trace on it, and to the close-up of a woman’s picture. The camera then

pans right to a close-up of a book markedFemsehjoumal , which is a clue to viewers that

they are in the murdered journalist Barter’s quarters. Another pan to the right reveals

Krass as the speaker. The preceding images thus could have been seen from his POV. Yet

instead of tying together the clues presented in the shot to make sharp deductions, Krass

116

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. is captured in a medium shot composition dominated by his huge gray shadow cast on the

wall behind him. His mood is suitably dark, as he glumly predicts that the police will find

q o clues, no fingerprints.

The film continues inspector Krass’ investigative narrative in three successive

scenes after an interlude set in the Hotel Luxor that suggests a budding romance between

Travers and Meneel. Lang uses smooth transitions and minimal camera movement in the

three scenes, creating the effect of a smooth progression and progress of the

investigation. As a result, a disruption of the continuity editing toward the end of the

sequence creates a shocking effect and anticipates the catastrophic failure of Krass’

super-vision in the final scene. The first scene, Krass’ visit to Meneel, establishes his

discerning gaze, by showing him discovering hidden clues and frequently focusing on a

close-up of his eyes. The detective’s responsibility to supervise the actions of individuals

and to preserve the moral functioning of society, or the second sense of super-vision, also

comes into play here. Meneel protests that Krass has no right to intrude into her private

life. The next frame shows Krass asserting matter-of-factly: “Wenn die Kriminalpolizei

sich fur etwas interessiert, dann gibt es keine private Angelegenheit.” This revelation

underscores the ubiquitous nature of the detective apparatus.

In the second scene, the insurance agent Misteizweig faces the camera in a

medium shot and talks about having insured Barter shortly before his murder, while

Krass enters in the background, eavesdrops on the remarks, and moves toward the camera

and Misteizweig, catching him by surprise. Misteizweig’s remarks about the dark history

of Hotel Luxor, founded by the Nazis in May 1944, planned as a hotel for visiting

diplomats and politicians “um sie recht schon bespitzeln zu konnen,” actually provide a

117

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. clue to the solution of the mystery. But at this point in the narrative, the remark deepens

Krass’ suspicions about the insurance agent and sets him on the wrong trail, thus hinting

at the faultiness of the detective’s gaze. The third scene begins with the “accidental”

meeting between Travers and Cornelius, and uses an insert shot to reveal Krass as an

invisible observer of the encounter, thereby offering another instance of his super-vision.

There is a cut to Cornelius’ dark apartment, where Krass lies in wait for the clairvoyant.

The “blind” man’s actions—switching on the light, and a close-up of his face straining to

catch a glimpse of the man hidden behind the armchair—are registered as suspicious both

by the camera and by Krass. Evidently distraught, Krass asks Cornelius to intuit the

history of the steel needle that killed Barter. The viewers see:

1. An extreme close-up of the needle in a box, followed by a close-up of Cornelius’ “blind” eyes. Cornelius puts his hands on the needle and claims, “Ich sehe einen Mann—jetzt nichts mehr... Die dunkle Wolke, sie verdeckt alles, sie bedroht mich personlich. Deshalb ware ich Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie mich iiber den Fall Barter auf den Laufenden halten werden.” CUT TO 2. Medium shot of Krass revealing information about an anonymous call by an informant regarding the steel needle; Krass says the man would call again the next day. CUT TO 3. Medium shot of driver and No. 12 (the executioner); dialog about an anonymous phone call, insinuating that the driver had betrayed Mabuse. Medium shot of driver; soundtrack mixes sounds of pistol shots with his protests. CUT TO 4. Close-up of black telephone; zoom out places the phone on the writing table in the foreground in Krass’ office. The camera remains static and shows Krass’ assistant standing behind the table facing the camera; Krass enters in the background from the office door and stays there near a closet. Assistant starts talking about the phone being out of order; interrupted by phone ringing. The assistant continues, “Ein Mann von der Telefonzentrale...” Krass yells, “Nicht aufheben!” just as the assistant answers the phone. BLEND TO 3. Explosion; assistant falls left off screen, and smoke fills the entire frame. Parts of the ceiling fall; CUT TO

118

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6. Medium shot of Krass emerging behind the closet door, grabbing his head. Krass moves left to assistant; pan left to keep Krass in focus, then PAN FURTHER LEFT TO 7. Medium shot of dead assistant on the floor, trapped between various parts of the table.

The gradual intensification of aural and visual clues builds up the tension to a

climax that is diffused with the ringing of the telephone and with the subsequent

explosion, which the audience is led to anticipate through a masterful mixing of

assaultive and reactive perspectives. However, the surfeit of audiovisual information and

the quick pace of the editing also challenges the viewers’ deductive abilities to decipher

the connection between the driver’s murder and the telephone “repair” before Krass. Yet

this challenge is more than a playful game: it echoes the sense of 1950s anti-detective

film that detection, even if finally successful, comes at a high price, namely death. Like

Epilog's unsettling of the detective’s authority by inter-cutting between Zabel in the

Mondial office and the criminal Siano in a bar, the investigation sequence in 1000 Augen

completely undermines Krass’ super-vision by revealing the observer to be the observed.

The film adheres to a temporal progression, but disrupts the continuity editing through an

insert of Mabuse’s hideout in the middle of shots depicting Krass’ inquiries. As in Epilog,

the viewer is privileged with more information than the detective figure. Unlike Zabel,

however, Krass correctly deduces the link between the various clues, but his conclusion,

“Nicht aufheben,” comes a bit too late. A cut takes us back to the site of the explosion.

The camera pans left over Krass and other detectives, and focuses on the corpse, which is

carried out from the left of the frame. A frontal medium shot shows a dejected Krass

119

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. remarking, “Alles Routine... Ich bin schuld daran.” The detective figure of Lang’s third

Mabuse film thus acknowledges his own culpability, and erases the boundary between

guilt and detection.

The film begins by offering Krass as the figure of audience identification and

follows his POV in the three sequences described above. But it subsequently undermines

his authority through the film by using frequent close-ups of his wide-open eyes and

astounded face, for instance, after the attempts on his life in his office and at the stance.

The audience agrees with Krass’ listing of possible suspects (Cornelius, Meneel or

Misteizweig) after this murder attempt, but increasingly knows more than the baffled

commissioner through the diffusion of the function of detection into the omniscient

narration of camera, or into perspectives of two other detective figures—the insurance

agent Misteizweig and the American tycoon Travers. In this context, it is important to

pause and look back at the detective’s authority in Lang’s first two Mabuse films. The

criminal’s attempts on von Wenk’s life inSpieler do disrupt the detective’s authority, but

soon lead to an intensification of the investigation and to Mabuse’s downfall. Inspector

Lohmann ofTestament, on the other hand, remains immune to any such danger from the

beginning of the second Mabuse film. In fact, the film establishes the detective’s

unquestioned authority. The very utterance of his name sets off panic among the criminal

Baum’s assistants. Even though he meets his match in Mabuse’s reincarnation, Baum,

Lohmann’s conjectures are always shown to be correct, e.g., the writing on the window-

pane, or his inference about the connection between the murder in the Griinen Winkel and

120

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dr. Baum In 1000 Augen, the detective function is split up among three detective figures,

and thereby deprived of absolute authority. Technically, the film achieves this disruption

through a diffused POV.

Further, the audience also becomes complicit with the criminal himself. By

conflating the viewers’ POV with that of the criminal, or—more flagrantly—by using

insert shots to privilege viewers with information held back from or inaccessible to

detectives, the film both ironically signals the presence of the camera’s panoptic super

vision, and ensures the dramatic tension between its concealment and disclosure. Midway

through the film, the audience witnesses a romantic evening between Travers and

Meneel, in which Meneel avoids answering Travers’ questions about her unhappy

marriage. The camera remains static during their conversation, then zooms out to reveal

the same scene on a TV screen. The viewers’ suspicions about a ffame-within-a-frame

construction, or a TV screen within the film screen, are confirmed through another zoom-

out, which exposes several circuits and buttons; in a second, the image flickers and the

screen goes blank, even as Travers’ voice continues on the soundtrack and narrates

incidents from his life. A hand entering the lower right comer of the frame to adjust the

picture reinforces the audience’s knowledge of the criminal’s super-vision. With a zoom-

in, the film then takes away this moment of complicity, and restores the illusion of

reality.

“What greater way of being in control than making the audience lose their control,

but then to catch them, just as they think they are falling?” notes Elsaesser in his study of

the first Mabuse film (2000, 176). Indeed, 1000 Augen also repeatedly triggers its

viewers’ free-fall into the lacunae it exposes, and restores the equilibrium of its

121

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. investigative narrative— only to let the audience fall again. Lang’s film problematizes the

close relationship between vision and narrative control by constantly shifting

perspectives, much like 1950s West German anti-detective film, between criminal and

detective spheres. Interestingly, the non-identity of the spectator’s, detective’s, and

criminal’s look creates the thousand eyes that attempt to exercise their super-vision in the

film’s narrative, but ultimately subsumes them under the thousand cameras’ panoptic

gaze. By highlighting the artifice behind images, especially by exposing a fundamental

equivocation behind cinematic images and by privileging viewers with a glimpse into

Mabuse’s “thousand eyes” much before the deducing detectives stumble upon the

underground enclave, Lang’s film both implicates the viewers in the “super-vision,” and

exonerates them from it, creating yet another level of open ends.

The dinner date sequence inter-cuts Travers and Meneel’s conversation with shots

of Misteizweig watching both, and with Krass watching Misteizweig and his female

companion, who is actually a police agent. The inter-cutting establishes several layers of

seeing, yet the irony of the sequence lies in the supreme surveillance established over all

by the all-seeing eyes of the TV (and film) camera, visible only to the criminals and to

the viewers. The revelation of the TV screen completely usurps the detective’s claims to

super-vision, and lodges it uncompromisingly in the criminal sphere. Lang exposes the

gap between the represented and the act of representation by revealing the medium’s

willful control over the representation. The mise-en-abime, here presented as a film-

within-a-film structure, provokes reflection about the connection between vision and

power.

122

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The film underscores the mise-en-abime effect in the very next sequence, where

the viewers see that Travers sees only what he is meant to see, and no more. Further, the

POV shots from Travers’ perspective and third person shots portraying his deductions

invite viewer identification with Travers and foreshadow the fusion of romantic and

detective stories in the film, while at the same time providing ironic distance. For

instance, the hotel detective Berg’s revelation to Travers about a see-through mirror in

the room adjacent to Meneel’s quarters, which enables Travers to watch the object of his

affection without being detected himself, creates the illusion of his super-vision. Yet both

the framing device of the mirror and a frame-within-a-frame shot of the very action

invisibly observed by Travers destroys his authority, replacing it with the inescapable

panoptic vision of the camera—and, in the final level of this multi-layered mise-en-

abime—of the film’s omniscient gaze. The reduplication of TV cameras reveals that the

mise-en-scene of each scene has been vision itself, and metaphorically links back to the

juxtaposition between seeing and power. With an almost theoretical reflection on this

reduplication, the film appears to temporarily discard its popular-cinematic garb.

The different seeing eyes in 1000 Augen—all stacked into each other like Russian

dolls—embroil the viewer in an inescapable split between culpability and perspicacity.

As my examination of POV and mise-en-abime has shown, 1000 Augen completely

confuses the discourse of crime and detection. It also sets up parallels between detective-

criminal pairs. Krass and Cornelius are aligned through a mirroring of their offices and

methods. Misteizweig and Cornelius seem to be united by their “fifty-fifty partnership.”

Travers and Meneel’s love relationship bridges the detective and criminal spheres.

Through these parallels, the film approaches an apparent solution to the mystery. The

123

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. close-up of Meneel’s husband Robert’s clubfoot ties back to the criminal’s clubfoot from

the film’s beginning, and Robert’s “murder” by Travers seems to close the circle of

detection in the film. The very next sequence, however, leaves the mystery hopelessly

unsolved. A zoom-out once again captures the action in the hotel room on a TV screen in

a frame-within-a-frame construction, and a hand switching off the TV monitor points to a

continuation of the super-vision beyond Robert’s death. The next shot in a van interior

shows Robert rising in Professor Jordan’s ambulance, unhurt, and immediately being shot

dead by a gun that occupies the bottom right comer of the screen.

The retarding moment of the second murder simultaneously stalls and accelerates

the investigation. Lang captures this double movement by means of inter-cutting between

two parallel sequences: the murder, Professor Jordan’s arrival and his departure with the

“corpse” on the one hand, and on the other hand, Misteizweig’s departure from Hotel

Luxor and his POV shot of the ambulance inscribed with the words “Jordan Klinik,” and

finally, his encounter and fifty-fifty partnership deal with Cornelius after seeing through

the clairvoyant’s blindness. The inter-cutting achieves three effects: it reveals Jordan as a

possible post-war Mabuse; it includes Cornelius and Misteizweig in the circle of crime;

but also separates Jordan and Cornelius as distinct figures by creating the illusion of

simultaneity instead of ellipsis.6 However, Robert’s murder will also begin to close in the

net of detection on the master-criminal.

The investigation rapidly moves toward the point of revelation by means of key

realizations by its three detective figures in the next few sequences. Krass uses the

evidence of likeness in murder weapons to link Robert’s murder to the Barter case, and,

via the attempt on his own life at the seance, to Cornelius. Misteizweig, by perceiving

124

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and recording Jordan’s name and exposing Cornelius, links the two figures, and will

finally unmask them as being the same person. Most importantly, Travers, by exposing

the inconsistency in Jordan’s phone number, forces Meneel’s confession and the

simultaneous revelation to him and the audience of multiple TV cameras in each room of

the Hotel Luxor. The revelation in voice-over is accompanied by several zoom-in shots of

the hidden lenses. Captured in close-up and challenging the viewers with its gaze, the

technical device of the camera supremely subverts the process of detection, and

perpetuates the omnipresence and omniscience of the criminal. While reinstating the

panoptic perspective of the camera, Lang’s film launches it in the sphere of crime, not of

detection (as in early detective film).7 The close-ups of the “thousand eyes” in Lang’s

film institute a multilateral regard, giving access to the most intimate secrets of its

perceived objects: detectives, victims and viewers. Consequently, once Travers and

Meneel acknowledge the violence of their faceless glance, they have to pay for their

transgression with the threat of death.

My examination of1000 Augen's editing and its mise-en-abime structure has

demonstrated that Lang severely problematizes detectivistic, social, and narrative

techniques of surveillance. Elsaesser deduces a negation of the detective’s primacy, and

consequently, a departure from the evidentiary truth of detective film as central features

of the Mabuse films: “The intrigue ostensibly revolves around an investigation, but one

never shares the investigator’s point of view. [...] in other words, there is no voice of

truth that within the cinematic apparatus can speak about the truth” (2000, 186).

However, I posit that this negation is eventually reversed in 1000 Augen. The sequence

revealing the “whodunit” marks a return of super-vision and authority into the

125

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. investigative sphere by granting immunity to the detective figure and making him

impenetrable to the criminal’s, camera’s, or viewer’s gaze. If the film initially establishes

the camera’s panoptic vision though the thousand TV eyes, it reinstates its faith in the

investigator by revealing that the incognito Interpol detective’s super-vis ion has been

unidentified by this panopticism. By empowering the insurance agent Misteizweig with

impenetrable super-vis ion at the film’s conclusion, and acknowledging that his gaze has

been untouched by (because uncaptured by) the film camera’s panopticism, 1000 Augen

creates a voice that can solve the mystery and can speak about truth within the cinematic

apparatus, embedding it in the body of its master detective.

The scene of Jordan’s entry into the hotel to annihilate Travers and Meneel is

inter-cut with a medium shot of Misteizweig ffamed behind plants in the hotel lobby,

thereby secure from Jordan’s gaze while “recording” him. The hotel lobby becomes the

setting where the resolution to the whodunit enfolds. Close-ups of the elevator, and the

long delay in the elevator doors opening on the first floor lead Misteizweig to stumble

upon Jordan’s underground enclave. When Jordan emerges from the elevator bereft of his

disguise, a close-up of Misteizweig’s face indicates that he has identified Jordan and

Cornelius as being the two masks of Mabuse. In the same scene, Misteizweig finally

identifies himself as the Interpol detective. In fact, the film has surreptitiously provided

viewers with a clue to the incognito Interpol detective’s identity and to his supreme

authority. In the sequence where Misteizweig seals his partnership with Cornelius, the

sign of the weighing scales in the background is framed such that the scales are tilted

against the criminal, in Misteizweig’s favor, in direct contrast to the earlier Krass-

Comelius confrontation.

126

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. After establishing Misteizweig’s authority, the camera largely adopts his POV in

the climactic hotel lobby sequence. We follow his process of deduction, for instance, by

means of an insert shot of the elevator sandwiched between a close-up of Mistelzweig’s

face and another close-up of him nodding his head to confirm his suspicion. The clue-

suspicion-confirmation pattern, in which viewers are encouraged to formulate their

deductions, is echoed here. The mirroring effect between the viewers and Misteizweig

posits him as the “ideal” reader. Whereas the film’s equilibrium has been threatened by

the possibility of the thousand eyes, of physical presence and voice coming together in

Mabuse to initiate the narrative in the form of crime, it is now restored as the physical

presence, super-vision, voice, and authority come back together in the person of the

Interpol detective Misteizweig. The film thus subverts the hierarchy of looks it has

established, and undermines the camera’s panoptic vision.

The hotel lobby sequence culminates the film’s unmasking, by revealing both the

master criminal and super-detective to Krass and the viewers at the same time.

Interestingly, the multiple and elusive nature of the crime is emphasized, but also

countered by uniting the three detectives in the final action sequence. The closing

sequence inter-cuts shots of the hotel lobby where Misteizweig and Travers capture Berg

with a car chase where Krass exercises superior deductive skills and overpowers Mabuse.

At the conclusion of this wild chase that is reminiscent ofTestament, Mabuse’s car goes

out of control and breaks through the railings of a bridge to drop into the raging river

below. The film’s final shot focuses on its romantic hero and quasi-detective Travers. A

close-up of Travers and Meneel, the reconciled lovers, is bereft of dialogue, but is

accompanied by a wailing violin on the soundtrack. The message to viewers seems clear:

127

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. love has triumphed over hate, as Travers’ clever deductions and his good-natured

empathy have broken Mabuse’s cold and hypnotic spell and evil designs. The romantic

conclusion, rewarding the detective with a “prize”—usually a female victim—is

reminiscent of the popular formula of an Edgar Wallace thriller. Yet, to return to the

thesis with which I began my analysis, lacunae blight this sutured conclusion, e.g.,

through an editing which completely glosses over the fate of the two central detective

figures, Misteizweig and Krass. Also, since the story leaves several questions

unanswered, e.g., the mystery of Barter’s Mddel and Krass’ wife, Corinna, it points to the

inadequacy of this happy end to really conclude the film’s anti-detective narrative.

“It is maddening that there is such a disproportion between the visualizing power

of the eye and the camera. We should have eyes all round the head,” remarked Fritz Lang

during the making of Testament (Eisner 138). In the final film o f his Mabuse trilogy,

Lang seems to have thematized the disproportion: neither the thousand eyes of the

camera, nor the detective’s super-vision can solve all the mysteries that the film poses.

Much like Epilog and Nachts, 1000 Augen's anti-detective techniques dramatize two

interrelated moments: the explanation of mystery becomes more fragmented as a

syllogistic conclusion can no longer be provided. And, the film emphasizes the need to

investigate not just the mystery of death, but also the larger mystery about the link

between super-vision and power, or the personal-political connection.

4.4 Revisiting the Third Reich in the Economic Miracle

Travers and Meneel’s wordless union fuses together the detective and criminal

realms without commenting on the exposure of various levels of super-vision. While

traditional detective film generally cuts back to the detective’s reaction to the solution of

128

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the mystery, 1000 Augen does not offer Misteizweig’s comment on his brilliant piece of

deduction, and instead, eliminates his perspective completely. Similarly, the film’s elision

of Krass’ POV at the end echoes his earlier indifference, when he dismissed detection by

saying it is “alles Routine.” The continuity in the disruptive activities of Lang’s master

criminal Dr Mabuse, who challenges different detectives in each film (and more than one

detective in 1000 Augen), indicates the futility of any attempt to solve mysteries.

Whereas Weimar detective film provides closure through unmasking at the end,

1000 Augen's anti-detective strategies sensationalize and exaggerate the divorce between

appearance and reality to create a Blochian sense ofVerschlagenheit. Bloch’s essay on

detective texts, also published in 1960, provides an interesting counterpoint to the last

film in the Mabuse trilogy. The word Verschlagenheit has multiple layers of meaning.

Bloch uses it to refer to the duplicitous cunning that leads to crime and that detection

unmasks, as well as to the baffled speechlessness that the unmasking generates. In

Chapter Two, I traced Bloch’s argument about the transition, captured in detective texts,

from a Weimar notion ofVerstellung (masking) posited by Walter Benjamin to his own

sense of postwarVerschlagenheit. The act of unmasking through detection in Weimar

texts restores the equilibrium between image and reality. But Bloch contends that in

postwar detective texts, a heightened sense of suspicion precludes closure.

I suggest that a similar suspicion motivates the prolongation of mystery beyond a

solution to the whodunit in1000 Augen. The film crystallizes the triple sense of

Verschlagenheit. First, its fine balance between masking and unmasking is upset by its

sly employment of multiple mises-en-abrmes. With irony and self-reflexivity as the

primary mode of narrational authority, Lang’s film creates a deep-rooted suspicion that

129

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. goes beyond the illumination of its mystery, and offers the ultimate caution against image

as proof. Second, the film emphasizes another sense ofVerschlagenheit by repeatedly

portraying the stunned speechlessness of its detective figures (most often that of Krass),

thereby severely disrupting their authority. The solution to the mystery does not alleviate

the sense of danger propagated by the crime, a fact that points to the eschewal of1000

Augen to present detection as an antidote to the forces of crime and terror. Certainly, the

detective figures in Lang’s film are far from being invincible. But so, ironically, is the

criminal: framed in a frontal shot looking beyond the audience, Jordan expounds upon his

dream to be omnipotent like Mabuse, and seems to captivate the diegetic and non-

diegetic world in his gaze. Yet, the aura disintegrates; Jordan’s realization that his plans

of world domination have been foiled by Marion’s love for Travers lead him to pause, his

voice breaks, and the expression in his eyes becomes vacant. Robbed of any

identificatory figure, whether detective or criminal, the viewers can find security,

ironically, only in the feeling that their uncertainty is unending: “.. .und so geht es

weiter.” In a third sense, 1000 Augen, although continuing the terror and mistrust of the

Nazi state into an uncomforting silence, also prevents an important page in German

history from being overlooked, i.e. from beingverschlagen, and provokes the audience to

confront its incriminating past and its alienated present.

Lang’s last Mabuse film continues the anti-detective tradition initiated in Epilog

orNachts, in that it insists on setting forth the equation between uncovering the mystery

and revisiting history that the earlier films deemed necessary for coming to terms with the

Nazi past. Eisner reports that when the producers approached Lang to direct a remake of

Testament, Lang decided that “it might be interesting to show a similar criminal almost

130

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. thirty years later and again say certain things about our time—the clanger that our

civilization can be blown up and that on its rubble some new realm of crime might be

built up” (301). The film offers several references to the Nazi past. For instance, in the

police conference sequence, when questioned about the lack of information on Mabuse in

postwar Germany, a detective explains: “Der Fall ging nicht in die Kriminalgeschichte

ein, denn da kam gerade Hitler und der braune Spuk.” The association of Mabuse and

Hitler in one sentence suggests a parallel between the two, and indicates that the evil

history of Dr Mabuse has been replaced in postwar Germany by another

“Kriminalgeschichte,” that of the Nazi past. Yet the lapse in memory about Mabuse also

hints at a possible erasure of the “braune[n] Spuk[s]” through the reign of terror of a

postwar Mabuse, or, of the Nazi past through a postwar present combining international

intrigue with the international surveillance of the Interpol.

Critics repeatedly made the connection to German history in analyzing Lang’s

Mabuse films, arguing for anticipatory or cautionary parallels between Mabuse and

Hitler, and enfolded Lang himself in the schemes of his arch-villain and powerbroker

(180).8 Barbara Bongartz relies on Kracauer’s study on Weimar cinema, From Caligari

to Hitler, and suggests that her own work takes the next logical step in Kracauer’s

argument, namely, by making the connection from Hitler to the postwar Mabuse (11).

Just as Kracauer read the first two Mabuse films as psychological indices of National

Socialism, Bongartz insists that the return of Mabuse in 1960 must be directly equated

with Germany’s postwar situation. Her reading of films becomes problematic, in that she

interprets them as a direct indicator of the psychology of German masses, without

discussing production, film form, or history in depth. In addition, her equation between

131

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hitler and Mabuse’s 1960 incarnation cannot be sustained. Jordan and Cornelius, because

they are masked for most of the film, do not hold forth on their views about “die

Herrschaft des Verbrechens” at every chance: in that respect, they are unlike Baum or

Mabuse in the first two films of the trilogy. Bongartz further points out that the dynamic

and positive detectives in the new Mabuse film usurp the criminal's central role, but she

does not take into consideration the film’s equally weighted exploration of detective and

criminal identities. Finally, her argument that Lang’s successful detectives represent the

carefree psychological direction that postwar German masses take is not supported first,

by the film’s ambivalent portrayal of its sleuths, and second, through important

references that 1000 Augen makes to the continued, pernicious legacy of the Third Reich

in the postwar German present.

Lang’s anti-detective film explores the link between history and mystery

primarily through the Hotel Luxor, a structure that symbolizes a seamless continuity

between the past and the present characteristic of politics, business, and even the film

industry of West Germany during the Economic Miracle. Hotel Luxor becomes the

microcosm of 1960s West Germany, infused with an atmosphere of terror and mistrust,

and unable to free itself from its dark history. Thus, during the first meeting between

commissioner Krass and the insurance agent Misteizweig, the latter alludes to the fact

that the cornerstone of the hotel was laid by Nazis. The entity Bruno Liidke in Nachts

(the character, his file, and associations with crime and sickness) is comparable to the

symbol of Hotel Luxor in Lang’s film: both images force viewers to bridge the distance

to their past, and create a sense of unease and uncertainty which nothing, not even the

solution of the mystery, can appease. Lang claimed that he “wanted to make a brutal,

132

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. realistic film in a style evoking... the cold reality of today” (Jensen 199). Jensen further

points to Lang’s fascination with Nazi documents about hotels that were to be built in

Germany after the Nazi victory, for the use of visiting diplomats:

In each room would be found a microphone hidden in such a way that at a certain central spot the government would be able to know exactly what was happening in each room Pushing the idea to the point of imagining hidden TV cameras and a see-through mirror, it seemed to be a point of departure for a new, postwar Mabuse. (200)

Interestingly, the deteriorating appearance of the hotel during the course of the film

signals the gradual exposure of the nexus between past and present. Thus, the

establishing shot of Hotel Luxor emphasizes its smooth facade, and its luxurious interior

indicates the smoothing over of the Nazi period in the willful obliviousness of a thriving

capitalist society. Another long shot of the hotel’s facade closes the anti-detective

narrative in the final sequence—this time, however, the process of unmasking has left

traces of violence in Luxor’s exterior, which is now punched with bullet holes, as the

insidious connection between history and mystery is laid bare.

References to the Nazi past are, however, less frequent in1000 Augen compared

to Epilog orNachts. Whereas Kautner’s and Siodmak’s films gained their anti-detective

impulse from a continuation of the political level of super-vision beyond its initial

whodunit mystery, 1000 Augen eventually tones down its political allusions and

substitutes them with the personal concerns of its detectives. Indeed, the primacy of the

detectives’ personal fates over the film’s political statement is exemplified in the happy

conclusion to1000 Augen's romantic subplot. The film’s return to history is less

grounded in Germany’s past than in Lang’s own cinematic past in Weimar. Lang’s nested

narratives create a nexus between history and anti-detection by recycling images from the

133

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Mabuse film’s own (Weimar) past, re-configured in the postwar present. The film

promises to become not only another “Bildnis der Zeit,” but to engage cinematic history

with shock effects and moments of narrative incoherence carried from a Weimar past to a

postwar present. Held against the foil of its own filmic past, the postwar Mabuse film’s

self-reflexive distantiation underlines its conviction that an image is never identical with

what it represents. This conviction constitutes its chief anti-detective moment, and a

means by which Lang mediates his return to a West German film industry that is flooded

with formulaic thrillers and faces competition from the new medium of television.

Lang’s bold mixture of formulaic and anti-detective elements in 1000 Augen with

the legacy of his first two Mabuse films is an instance of his anxiousness to expose the

precariousness of conventional, formulaic representation. Incorporating both the popular

formula and its parody, both adopting and undermining generic conventions, 1000 Augen

extends the unresolved tension of 1950s West German anti-detective film into a new

decade, as if Lang were anxious to make visible the disjunction between on-screen

harmony or closure and the volatility of postwar existence. The dead end that earlier

formed a requiem to the epistemo logical project of detection is replaced in1000 Augen

with the false bottom of a sutured conclusion that, nevertheless, exposes the continuity

between technologies of surveillance from the Nazi past to the postwar present.1000

Augen's open ending and its emphasis on interchangeable criminal and detective

identities are revisited in anti-detective films such as Messer im ATop/(Hauff 1978) made

in the aftermath of the student movement, when individual and state-supported crimes

can no longer be distinguished.

134

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 5

NEW GERMAN CINEMA AND ANTI-DETECTION: MESSER IM KOPF (HAUFF 1978)

“[Der deutsche Film] ist schlecht. Es geht ihm schlecht. Er macht uns schlecbt. Er

wird schlecht behandelt. Er will auch weiterhin schlecht bleiben” (Fischer/ Hembus 61).

This oft-quoted remark by Joe Hembus captures the widespread pessimism about West

German film in the 1960s. Indeed, between 1957 and 1968, West German cinema lost

about three-fourths of its viewership: the number of film spectators reduced drastically

from 800 million to only 180 million in a decade (Grob 1993,221). The sad state of the

West German film industry is reflected by the rapid shutdowns of major film studios,

including Ufa in 1962. The first counterpoint to this downhill trend, however, came in the

same year with the famous Oberhausen manifesto and the growing prominence of a New

German Cinema (NGC).1

My aim in this chapter is to reconsider the complexity of NGC through the unique

lens of my broader project on West German anti-detective film. I begin with a brief

overview of the political/ social context of the 1960s and 1970s, and then focus on film

history. Inquiries into the NGC have dealt with various issues like national and

international trends, constructs of individual and collective identity, the subsidy system

and Autorenfilm, and questions of genre. My chapter points to the anti-detective

135

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. motivations of several New German films. The self-reflexivity and the connection

between the personal and the political that my previous chapter foregrounded in 1000

Augen constitutes a line of descent for New German anti-detective film. Further, given

the parallels between the post-1968 developments in West Germany, France, and the

USA, I also refer to filmic examples from the Frenchnouvelle vague and Hollywood and

examine their effect on NGC. Finally, my chapter concentrates on Reinhard Hauffs 1978

film Messer im K opfw the light of my discussion on New German anti-detective cinema.

5.1 “Die Nach-Nachkriegszeit ” and the New German Cinema

A study of West German Film history in the 1960s and 70s must be inextricably

linked to the history of the Federal Republic, punctuated by the student movement, the

end of the Adenauer era, the turn to terrorism and the Radikalenerlafi , and finally, the

“German Autumn” of 1977. Richard McCormick has described three stages of the

student movement, one of the central events of these two decades: (1) 1966-1968, or the

period of political activism following the Vietnam war, when politicization led to

expectations of opposition and protest from the cinema. (2) 1968-69, or the dogmatic

phase, when the student movement had become international in scope, fuelled by student

revolts in Berkeley, Paris, and West Berlin, and during the “Prague Spring” of 1968. In

May 1968, in the aftermath of the attempt on Rudi Dutschke’s life in April, progressive

hopes were dashed when a majority of SPD delegates voted with conservatives to pass

the emergency laws. (3) 1971-74, or theTendenzwende, during which the passage of the

Radikalenerlafi in 1972 and the end of active US involvement in Vietnam in 1973

dampened the fervor of the student movement (32 ff.). Willy Brandt’s resignation as

chancellor, followed by the election of a more conservative Helmut Schmidt in his place,

136

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. marked the West German state’s gradual shift to the right. Despite its waning, the

Aufierparlamentarische Opposition (APO) provided a significant backdrop to the NGC:

the parallels between Messer im Kopf and the Dutschke/ Ohnesorg incidents or Die

bleierne Zeit and the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) are obvious. In addition, both the

student movement and the NGC foregrounded a generational conflict, especially by

making a clean break from the past.

The first postwar generation grew up in the 1960s, harboring an inherent

suspicion about the rapid transition from postwar malaise to the Economic Miracle during

the Adenauer years, and questioning the repressive mechanisms practiced by the elder

generation. Enno Patalas uses the termNach-Nachkriegszeit to describe the eventful

1960s and 70s as the end of the postwar era in West German culture:

Sie ging 1966 zu Ende. Es begann ein neuer Abschnitt unserer Geschichte, fur den ein Name noch gefunden werden muss, die “Nach- Nachkriegszeit.” Sie begann mit Kanzler Kiesinger und Vize Brandt, mit Autor Kluge und Autor Reitz. Denn die Nachkriegszeit ist zu Ende auch fiir den deutschen Film, das Jahr Null der grossen Koalition ist zugleich das Jahr des neuen, des jungen deutschen Filins. (1967, 26)

Patalas’ claim at once aligns West German film history with the sociopolitical conditions

of the post- Economic Miracle era. He equates the new beginning ortabula rasa of West

German society with the Oberhausen filmmakers’ break from the cinematic legacy of the

1950s, most famously in their dictum: “Papas Kino ist tot. Wir glauben an dem neuen”

(Grob 1993, 221). The generational conflict expressed in the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s

also found an expression in the revolt of a new group offilmmakers. Directors like

137

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fleischmann, Herzog, Kluge, Kristi, Reitz, Schaaf, and Straub, many of whom had won

recognition at international film festivals with their shorts, now became the successors of

Lang, Kautner, Staudte, Jugert, and Thiele.2

Already in 1969, Alfred Brustellin refuses to consider NGC as a homogeneous

category, and talks of a transition within the NGC from art cinema to commercial cinema

(Film Nr. 4, 1969). Formally, Alexander Kluge’s Abschied von Gestem (1966) clearly

espoused the search for a new film language, and an alternative to the conventional

narrative of Hollywood especially by means of montage. However, directors emerging

after Oberhausen such as Nestler, Zihlmann/ Thome and Lemke perceived a continuity in

Kluge or Reitz’s projects and 1950s West German film and saw “in der Forderung nach

einem gesellschaftlich relevanten Film nur einen modischen AufguB des alten deutschen

Problemfilms” (Thome 1973, 7). The beginning of a new decade thus witnessed a

revision to the Oberhausen manifesto. A new agenda for NGC called for formal

innovations and a move away from abstuse theorizing: “ein Kino, das so aussah wie die

Filme von Hawks und von Godard. Ein Kino, das SpaB macht” (ibid.).3 The connection to

Hollywood and the nouvelle vague, particularly the obsession with appearance or film

form, becomes a key feature in NGC’s treatment of anti-detection. The next section

focuses on the formal shifts from the 1960s to the 1970s within West German anti

detective film The alignment between film history and West German political history

becomes particularly relevant for my examination.

138

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5.2 NGC and Anti-Detection

Two common elements hold together the following list of films:Mord und

Totschlag (Schlondorff 1967), Detektive (Thome 1968), Gotter der Pest (Fassbinder

1969), Ein grofier, graublauer Vogel (Schamoni 1971),Die Angst des Tormanns beim

Elfmeter (Wenders 1972), Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Schlondorff/ Trotta

1975), Despair: Eine Reise ins Licht (Fassbinder 1978), and Die bleieme Zeit (Trotta

1981). They all belong to that widely discussed category of the NGC, and each film

thematizes crime and its investigation in varying degrees. Although these films do not

always have clear-cut detective figures, they share the motivation to investigate and bring

to light mysterious events that propel their narratives. Another common element is their

lack of closure and reversal of formal expectations.4 Wim Wenders has acknowledged the

centrality of detective narratives in his films:

[Der] Mythos des Detektivs, dieser Mann, der sucht, der sich in anderer Leute Geschichte eingrabt..., ist fur mich irgendwie mitten im Zentrum vom Kino, vom Filmemachen auch. [...] Ich hab’, seitdem ich Filme mach, immer ’ne Detektiv-Geschichte machen wollen. (Adler 681)

Wenders’ identification of detective film with digging up (histories and investigating

film form constitutes a break from other formulaic detective films of the same period, and

becomes significant for my treatment of NGC.

Detective narratives within the NGC clearly differ from the formulaic post-Lang

Mabuse films, and the Johannes Mario Simmel or the Jerry Cotton series.5 Alfred Vohrer,

the successful director of eighteen Edgar-Wallace films between 1960 and 1968, also

directed Simmel films like Und Jimmy ging zum Regenbogen, and several episodes of the

detective TV series Derrick and Der Alte. Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse (May 1963) sets

139

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. forth the Mabuse series after Fritz Lang’s death. However, subsequent Mabuse films lose

the Langian genre-subversive touch, and become virtually indistinguishable from the

Edgar Wallace series. Both sets of films follow the fight of a positive detective-hero

against a larger evil (on the level of world politics in the Mabuse, and on the domestic

level of family feuds in the Wallace films), culminating in the hero’s triumph. Bryan

Edgar Wallace, Edgar Wallace’s son, often provided the screenplays for both series. An

undisturbed continuity across generations thus manifests itself in the Mabuse and

Wallace series from the 1950s to the 1970s. Both series make no efforts to rethink the

conventional tropes of the detective genre:Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse and Der

Monch mit der Peitsche (Vohrer 1968) would not have looked much different had they

been made a decade or two earlier. In contrast, the NGC projects I investigate play

against conventions, and question the film techniques of traditional detective narratives.

The revision of generic codes in NGC is, of course, reminiscent of the genre-

transgressive tendency in Epilog, Nachts, and 1000 Augen, and I posit that the genre-

questioning continues to create an anti-detective effect during the 1960s and 1970s. The

clear presence of anti-detection in the NGC points to another sort of continuity, namely,

from postwar German anti-detective film to the New German anti-detective film. Open

endings and mises-en-abimes recur in NGC, yet new elements also modify the on-screen

appearance of anti-detection, e.g., narrative intransitivity and rarely interrupted long

takes, or a parodic quotation of conventions. Further, anti-detective film in the 1960s and

1970s revitalizes the notion ofKrimi als Zeitbild from its predecessors in 1950s West

Germany and continues the intersections between the personal and political that mark

Epilog or Nachts. Thus, two intersecting axes isolate the territory in which my reading of

140

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. New German anti-detective film of the 1960s and 1970s develops: (1) the issue of genre

and genre-transgression, or commercial and art cinematic codes; and (2) the oscillation

within the NGC between political and psychological moments (Lenssen 270), or between

“contentism” and “sensibilism” (McCormick 71).

5.2.1 Art and Commercial Cinema

More often than in later film scholarship, contemporary film reviews highlight

NGC’s use of detective narratives and their reliance on parody and self-reflexivity. For

instance, Siegfried Schober’s comments on Wenders’ Die Angst des Tormanns beim

Elfmeter indicate that its mystery plot questions modes of perception: “Die Qualitat des

Films besteht einfach darin, dafi er einen standig auf die eigenen Wahmehmungserfahren

zuriickftihrt, diese... verandernd, emeuemd” (1972, 69). This remark echoes the chief

features of postwar West German anti-detective film, in that it foregrounds a sense of

“mehr-als-Kriminalfilm” that Epilog, Nachts, and lOOOAugen evoke. The fascination

with camera perspective and the dichotomy between guilt and innocence, the connection

between detective narratives and a larger sociopolitical context leads to a revitalization of

anti-detection in the NGC. Further, NGC’s aggression against generic conventions is

evident in this review of Schamoni’s Ein grosser grau-blauer Vogel: “Dieser Film [ist]

unheimlich identisch mit sich (und sonst nichts; er parodiert sogar nur sich selbst),

deshalb geht die selbstzerstorerische Rechnung unheimlich glatt auf: Kamera gleich

Revolver, Schneidetisch gleich Maschinengewehr” (Filmkritik 176, August 1971). The

self-referentiality of such films recalls intra-diegetic moments in Epilog or 1000 Augen's

mises-en-abimes.

141

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Scholars have most frequently focused on the newHeimat film in considering the

NGC’s self-reflexive play with generic conventions.6 I posit that an equal attention needs

to be devoted to the citing and deconstructing of popular detective conventions by many

NGC directors. The revival of the detective genre however becomes, in the NGC, the

imitation of an imitation of an imitation—Hollywood narratives read through the French

nouvelle vague, in turn quoted in the West German context. One of the most telling

examples of this “mutually reinforcing self-referentiality” (Davidson 21) is Fassbinder’s

first film Gotter der Pest (1969). Fassbinder borrows liberally from the American

gangster film and the French nouvelle vague. In addition, the film refers to the German

Krimi tradition (the protagonist Harry registers in a hotel as “Franz Biberkopf’), as well

as to the NGC itself: the nameplate outside Harry’s brother’s apartment says

“Schlondorff,” and Fassbinder’s treatment of crime is reminiscent of Schlondorff s Mord

und Totschlag (1968).

In Gotter der Pest, the protagonist Harry Bar is released from prison, passes

through life and relationships in Munich pubs, apartments, and subways. The film

unfolds without exposition, and follows Harry’s plans to rob a grocery store. It turns out

that Harry’s Black friend “Gorilla” killed Harry’s brother and slept with his girlfriend

(Hanna Schygulla as a flashy nightclub singer resembling Marlene Dietrich). The

criminal plan is foiled when Harry’s girlfriend betrays him to a beefy cop, who seduces

her, and then heaps a shower of bullets on Harry and Gorilla High contrast black-and-

white shots appear in filming both criminal as well as police figures. The film depicts

both as sullen, aimless, ruthless youths, and the despondent final shot of Harry’s funeral

recaptures the harsh and alienated sterility that characterizes the preceding action.

142

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A similar ambivalence about criminals and detectives marks Thomas Schamoni’s

Ein grofier, graublauer Vogel (1971). In this film, the writer Tom X approaches

Giovanni, a journalist, with a sensational story: the old beggar Belotti has been found

murdered, but has revealed to Tom before dying that he was a famous scientist who

shared the secret of a dangerous invention with tour colleagues. The formula is encrypted

in a poem, of which Belotti knew only the first stanza, and he has entrusted this verse to

Tom. Giovanni tries to search for the other four scientists with Tom’s help. They go to

Italy, where Tom meets his girlfriend Diana. Tom’s actions increasingly raise the

suspicion that he is concealing his knowledge about the scientists’ whereabouts, while

Giovanni and his cameramen secretly agree to work for the master-criminal Cinque, who

is also hunting for the secret formula. Schamoni intersperses the competing groups’

feverish search for clues with film clips of Giovanni’s interviews with various Italians.

The film-within-a-film structure complicates the plot, and makes viewers completely

uncertain about the criminal or detective function of the numerous characters. The film

finally reveals the entire Belotti story as being a product of Tom’s imagination, and

thereby reveals the unraveling of the mystery by on-screen detectives and viewers to be a

futile exercise.

Rudolf Thome’s first film, Detektive, is about two friends, Schubert and West,

who decide to open a detective firm “weil man morgens dann lange schlafen kann.” The

film opens with their investigation of two love relationships that have turned sour: in both

cases, they offer to switch sides and to double-cross their original clients for more money.

The unscrupulous deception practiced by the two detectives, their assistant, Mickey, and

143

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the various criminals, clients, and victims of this film is revealed at the end to be part of a

grand plan by one of Schubert and West’s clients, Kruger, who has been aided by Mickey

all along.

Kruger, der archetypische Vater,... ist auch Autor der Geschichte, die Detektive—nein, nicht erzahlt, sondera deren Aufdeckung und Zerstdrung der Film zeigt. Was den Figuren des Films und dem Zuschauer lange Zeit als ein Drama erscheint,... ist von ihm vorgeplant und kalkuliert. Worauf es ankommt, ist das Erkennen der Prozesse, in die man selbst eingespannt ist, ohne dafi man es merkt. (Patalas 1970, 15-16)

Like postwar West German anti-detective film, Detektive constantly challenges its

viewers to become cautious and alert interpreters of clues. The film seems to move

toward a successful resolution of the criminal intrigue at first, thereby misleading viewers

to expect a conventional outcome. The conclusion thus catches both viewers and

detectives off guard, revealing the observers to be the observed, in the footsteps of 1000

Augen.

Undoubtedly, the New German films I have summarized so far evince a

problematic relationship to genre, consistently resisting classical Hollywood codes of

storytelling. Wim Wenders commented on NGC’s conflicted attitude to American

cinema: “Wir haben uns vielleicht auf das amerikanische... Kino bezogen, namlich in der

Ablehnung der Geschichten, die es erzahlt, aber auch in der Ubemahme seiner

Sprachfbrm, [oder] umgekehrt” (Adler 681). References to Hollywood generic codes

abound in NGC. It would be hard to imagine New German anti-detective film without

film noir and Humphrey Bogart. Most New German anti-detective films are, in fact,

“Krimi und Krimi-Parodie zugleich” (Berliner Morgenpost, March 12, 1971).7 For

instance, Schubert and West in Detektive act as they think detectives should act, and their

144

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. expectations are clearly derived from on-screen predecessors from Hollywood But

instead of naively re-appropriating stereotypical patterns, the film makes fun of the

protagonists’ conceited aspirations.

Interestingly, the revision of Hollywood codes is also characteristic of 1970s

genre film in Hollywood. One only has to think of genre-transgressive films such asThe

French Connection (Friedkin 1971), The Parallax View (Pakula 1974), Chinatown

(Polanski 1974), Three Days of the Condor (Pollack 1975), or Taxi Driver (Scorsese

1976) to trace parallels between NGC and the violation of Hollywood tradition. It would

be equally hard to imagine the NGC’s use of anti-detection without the nouvelle vague

and Jean-Paul Belmondo. A bout de souffle (Godard 1959), Tirez sur le pianiste (Truffaut

1960), and Alphaville (Godard 1965) are clearly the precursors of NGC’s self-reflexive

anti-conventionalism. Replete with visual puns, allusions to the Hollywood B-film, a

mixture or “explosion” of genres, and a disjointed narrative style, they audaciously utilize

and then subvert viewer expectations about conventions.

One might almost expect to see this reaction to genre in the 1960s, when the

student movement in West Germany “developed a media consciousness alongside a

political consciousness” (Elsaesser 1989, 155). Concentration on the West German

market had led producers to stay with the tried and proven formulae such as melodramas,

Krimis, and Heimat films. Further, audiences were increasingly watching television, and

supplementing their intake of generic detective narratives through popular crime series

such as Derrick. Above all, the NGC was both a product of, and created, audiences and

filmmakers with a critical knowledge of film traditions.8 Similarly, the emergence of an

145

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “amphibian” film or TV-film co-productions made the TV a medium of transport for

many NGC features.9 In any event, filmmakers could use their films to comment on or

exploit cinematic history, including the history of anti-detective film.

The final sequence of Detektive shows its foolhardy detectives, Schubert and

West, foiling the elderly and successful businessman Kruger’s plans. “Jugend siegt. Das

gehort sich auch so fur einen Film, der 1968 gedreht wurde” (Berliner Morgenpost,

March 12, 1971). The film ends with the detectives driving away in their flashy

convertibles, abandoning Kruger’s corpse in front of his villa. Detektive's> point about

generational strife extends, I believe, over both filmic and political history, and

commingles in the NGC’s use of anti-detection. The chiaroscuro inGotter, mises-en-

abimes in Vogel, and the foibles of detective figures exposed in Detektive are all

techniques that refer back to postwar West German anti-detective film, and its

problematization of traditional detective narratives. As Robert Siodmak’s guest

appearance in Vogel suggests, NGC acknowledges its debt to postwar West German anti

detective film (although the reference remains an inside joke for those initiated in film

history).10 However, Schamoni also distances his film from the 1950s by casting Siodmak

in the role of one of the scientists whose shady past the younger detectives investigate.

The “secret formula” of anti-detective film borrowed from an elder generation of

filmmakers thus becomes a wellspring from which the NGC hopes to profit, but which it

also redefines. Wim Wenders’ dictum about “process, not progress” (Adler 681), which

describes the attention to pace as well as the anti-narrative, alienating impulse in his

films, also signals NGC’s departure from postwar West German anti-detective film. New

German anti-detective films continue to use shifting camera perspectives and

146

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. discontinuous editing like Epilog, Nachts, or 1000 Augen. They also add new elements to

the anti-detective genre: a static camera with much of the action taking place in the off-

spaces, a hovering third-person POV with random, but equal attention to clues and to

insignificant details like supermarket signs, and finally, an excessive use of masking and

framing announces the unique signature of New German anti-detective film in the

1960s.11

Todd Berliner has developed the two categories “genre-breakers” and “genre-

benders” to discuss Hollywood’s subversion of film conventions in the 1970s. A genre

breaker, in his view, overtly violates tradition, and “invit[es] audiences to join in the

film’s efforts to expose, and often mock, genre conventions” (25). Further, genre breakers

defy convention in order to comment ironically on genre or to give audiences mastery

over the genre. In contrast, a genre bender relies on “viewers’ habitual responses to

generic codes, thereby misleading them to expect a conventional outcome” (ibid.), but

then violates this expectation. Moreover, a genre bender makes the audiences uneasy and

takes away any feelings of sovereignty that the “inside jokes” of genre-breakers might

inspire.

A similar distinction can be seen in two variations of the NGC’s formal reaction

to genre, especially to detective filmic traditions, in the 1960s and 1970s. Films such as

Detektive are prevalent in the 1960s and early 1970s, and function like genre-breakers.

Their long, slow pans and a static camera that leaves most of the action off-screen

function as visual puns, alluding negatively to suspense, narrative, and closure. On the

other hand, a more differentiated take on genre can be found in the NGC of the late

1970s. Films like Messer im Kopf, Despair or Der amerikanische Freund are similar to

147

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. genre-benders in that they exploit typical Hollywood scenarios and elicit conventional

responses, but finally highlight the inadequacy of both the scenarios and the responses.

Rather than elaborately commenting on genre through imitation and ironic debunking and

loudly announcing their mockery of tradition like 1960s West German anti-detective

cinema, these films rely on conventional techniques like continuity editing, but “[use] our

expectations against themselves, and, in the process, reveal to us... assumptions we never

thought we had” (Braudy 110).12

The eventual violation of audience expectations in the New German anti-detective

cinema of the late 1970s becomes particularly hard to digest due to its vacillation

between art and commercial cinematic codes. This latter aspect becomes the subject of

many film reviews. For instance, Hans Christian Blumenberg writes about Einer von uns

beiden (Petersen 1979):

[Petersens] erste Arbeit fur das Kino ist entwaffhend kommerziell, sollte nicht an der extrem kiinstlichen Kalte von Rudolf Thome gemessen werden, aber auch nicht an den billigen, gedankenlosen Rauber-und- Gendarm-Spielen der schlampigen Routiniers von Harald Re ini iiber Alfred Vohrer bis hin zu Jurgen Roland. [Der] Film bleibt irgendwo in der Mitte (Die Zeit, July 28, 1979).

NGC directors of the late 1970s are not solely responsible for inventing this

oscillation between “Cineast und Filmverbraucher” (ibid). As my foregoing chapter

explains, Fritz Lang’s Mabuse films pioneer this switching of codes between avant-

gardism and formulaic filmmaking, and so do films such as Touch of Evil (Welles 1958).

Further, the changing agenda of 1970s anti-detective cinema echoes a broader shift

within the NGC, from the inaccessible radicalism and minimalism of Kluge, Reitz, or

Straub/ Huillet’s films to the works of more accessible peers such as Schlondorff, who

148

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. placed genre-subversive elements within well-crafted films and attractive commercial

patterns. Schlondorff s Mord und Totschlag might take apart Krimi conventions, but the

director also advertised it as a trendy film “fur 15 bis 17-jahrige” (Rentschler 1984, 45).

What is special about New German anti-detective films in the 1970s is a sense of

having come a full circle, of having passed through the customary progression of a genre

from classicism to exhaustion to parody. Having tolled the death knell for classical

conventions inEpilog and Nachts, West German anti-detective film recovers from this

exhaustion by increasingly paring down the conflict: 1000 Augen offers a reconciliatory

outcome replete with positive heroes and a romantic subplot. The late 1960s hold up a

distorting mirror to anti-detection, for instance, in Fassbinder’s Krimis. In the NGC of the

late 1970s, such as in Messer, anti-detective film gradually comes out of its insularity,

redefining itself such that it merges conventional and subversive elements, not forsaking

genre-questioning, yet keeping a larger audience and attractive packaging in mind.

Messer employs this mixture to compound feelings of uncertainty and discomfort for

viewers, in the footsteps of earlier anti-detective film, and to drive home its political

import in the guise of its personal story.

5.2.2 Contentism and Sensibilism

The engagement with genre is not the only distinctive feature of NGC’s use of

anti-detection. Several scholars have relied on the personal-political split in describing

the transition within NGC from the 1960s to the 1970s, and I will now examine the

efficacy of this dichotomy for the genre of anti-detective film Claudia Lenssen describes

the shift between the 1960s and 70s as a “Ubergang vom politischen zum

psycho logischen Diskurs. Nicht die Unterdruckung in den politischen Verhaltnissen steht

149

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. im Mittelpunkt, sondem die in den privaten Verhaltnissen, die die Filme jedocb stets auf

ihre sozialen und historischen Bedingungen zuriickfuhren” (270). Richard McCormick

similarly argues for a transition from the “political” 1960s film to the “subjective” 1970s:

“the personal became again the basis for political commitment, in keeping with the idea

that the “personal is political”” (71). Both McCormick and Elsaesser refer to Michael

Rutschky’s essay on West Germany in the 1970s, “Erfahrungshunger,” to describe a

change from “contentism” to “sensibilism” In Rutschky’s description, the contentist

faction, who “were more convinced than ever of the urgency of analytical categories and

conceptual generalizations, [and] expected film to validate their views of social problems

and of a political perspective” (Elsaesser 56) is contrasted to “the sensibilist faction,

disappointed by the failure of the protest movement and their... political courses, [who]

had sought a refuge from dejection and melancholia in the cinema” (ibid). Sensibilism is

further characterized as a turn to inwardness, privileging subjectivity over social analysis.

Is the shift from contentism to sensibilism helpful in understanding the changes

within New German anti-detective film from the 1960s to the 1970s? A glance at the use

of anti-detection and genre suggests, in fact, an opposite movement. Films likeDetektive

and Gotter der Pest loudly broadcast their self-absorption and constantly lose track of

their investigative narrative to indulge in interruptions like sexual relationships

(.Detektive, 48 Stunden), and to meander through emotions like hatred (Cardillac ),

jealousy (Gotter der Pest), or extreme self-doubt (Angst des Tormanns).13 On the other

hand, the late 1970s increasingly see anti-detective films overtly thematizing their socio

political context. InDespair, the protagonist’s mad descent into himself and his double is

150

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cast against the vicissitudes of a German society witnessing the rise of National

Socialism, while Katharina Blum, Messer, or Die bleieme Zeit directly refer to current

political debates about terrorism, state violence, and the failed student movement.

The notion that NGC’s use of anti-detection reverses the expectation about a shift

horn the psychological 1960s to the political 1970s seems attractive at the first glance.

Indeed, if one considers the use of intrigue and investigation in Fassbinder’s 1979 film

Die dritte Generation, the film’s ending reveals that its supposed “victim,” an

industrialist kidnapped by terrorists, is actually in cohorts with the terrorist group. It turns

out that the industrialist has staged the kidnapping because he anticipates that the threat

of terrorist violence will cause the police force to buy his electronic equipment. The twist

at the end that undermines the conclusions (almost) reached by the preceding narrative is

reminiscent ofDetektive and Ein grofier, graublauer Vogel, and so is the film’s genre

commentary in the form of actor Eddie Constantin.14 Fassbinder’s thesis about the

complicity between criminals, investigators, and victims is couched in a narrative that

challenges its viewers’ perception much in the footsteps of 1950s and 1960s West

German anti-detective film. Above all, it is Fassbinder’s outspoken commentary on

undemocratic state practices, on capitalism, as well as on terrorism that underlines the

film’s contentism as well as its departure from the subjective agenda of anti-detective

film in the 1960s.

Yet a distinction between the psychological 1960s and the political 1970s is too

simplistic and reductive to account for NGC’s use of anti-detection. What New German

anti-detective films reflect, directly or indirectly, is West German life from the Adenauer

years to Stammheim, a society caught between repression and confrontation of the past,

151

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between democratic and oppressive practices. Even Rudolf Thome, who announced his

disinterest in representing social issues, acknowledged the covert political agenda of a

film like Detektive:

Ein ffanzosischer Kritiker hat mich im November wahrend der Fertigstellung des Films interviewt und fragte mich, ob ich nicht mal einen politischen Film machen wo lie, und da habe ich gesagt, nein, das mochte ich nicht. Aber jetzt merke ich, dafi [Detektive] wahrscheinlich ohne die ganzen Ereignisse im April und Mai, die Studentenrevolution und diese Sachen, dafi er so, wie er ist, gar nicht gedreht worden ware. Das ist alles drin irgendwie [weil] die Leute [im Film] einfach das tun, was sie gerade fur richtig halten, was ihneu gerade so einfallt, ohne Rucksicht. (Schober 1969, 22-23)

At the same time, in the overtly political anti-detective film of the 1970s, personal

moments intermittently rupture the narrative, e.g. in the form of love relationships in

Katharina Blum and Die bleieme Zeit, or dysfunctional marriages in Despair or Messer.

Thomas Elsaesser’s study of Despair and Katharina Blum convincingly maps out another

aspect of the films’ inward turn, namely their tension between murder and suicide, or an

ambivalent hovering between aggression against others and aggression against the self

(1989, 217-18). Elsaesser further recognizes this configuration of doubling or mirroring

as a structure that triggers an examination of postwar German history through the NGC. I

suggest that the use of doubling within the anti-detective format, as it occurs in Messer,

also points toward its mixing of psychological “inwardness” and political commentary.

Formally, Messer replicates this fusion by striking a middle ground between art and

commercial film.

152

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5.3 Open Ending: Messer im Kopf

Set in contemporary West Germany,Messer im Kopf had the effect of a precisely

aimed piece that went straight to the heart of West Germany’s political situation and

directly addressed the student movement, Mogadischu and Stammheim. Although many

reviewers interpreted the film as Hauff s independent contribution to Deutschland im

Herbst (the collective filmic project of 1978),Messer clearly sets itself apart by

privileging a suspenseful narrative over the fragmentary documentary style and the

abstraction that marked much of that venture, as this film review remarks: “Hauff ist ein

Thriller gegliickt, der frei von Jungfilmermarotten ein Stuck Deutschland im Herbst

wiedergibt—aktuell,... spannend, und im besten Sinne politisch” (Stem, November 9,

1978).15 What makes this commercially oriented film that blatantly borrows from an

identifiable formula (the Hollywood investigative thriller) nonetheless part of the NGC is

its penchant for politics, for social commentary.

Hauff s success at mixing entertainment and political agenda is evident in the

tremendous box office performance of the film. Hans Christian Blumenberg reported that

150,000 spectators had seen it between its release in June 1978 and the end of December

(Die Zeit, January 19, 1979). In fact, the Filmverlag der Autoren had to respond to the

incessant demand for the film even in the inclement winter season by making fifteen

copies in addition to the ten it had originally distributed. Messer's anecdotal success was

also amplified by the international prizes it won (for instance, at the Paris Film Festival),

and it was touted as the “Film des Jahres” by most critics. The film was repeatedly

153

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. compared to other radical films that responded to contemporary social/ political

conditions, such as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), Francesco Rosi’sCadaveri

eccellenti (1976), and Robert Aldrich’s The Choirboys (1977).

Most reviews treated the film as a Politkrimi, only peripherally mentioning its

formal achievements. Others painstakingly distinguished Messer from the Hollywood-

obsession, and particularly from the genre-breaking plots, of 1960s West German anti

detective film: “Reinhard Hauff hat sich der Amenkanisierung stets widersetzt. Dazu ist

er vielzusehr an dem interessiert, was rings um ihn geschieht” ( Deutsche Volkszeitung,

January 11, 1979). However, my analysis will show thatMesser im Kopf is actually

“mehr als Politfilm.” I will expand on its contribution to the intersections between NGC

and anti-detection in the late 1970s, most importantly, to its role as a “common

denominator” between proto-generic and genre-transgressive cinema, and between the

personal and the political.

Throughout the film, Hauff capitalizes on the suspense and intrigue generated in a

formulaic thriller. At the beginning of Messer, the 35-year old biogenetic scientist Dr.

Berthold Hoffmann, who researches the aging of cells in the Traut Institute, leaves the

laboratory to meet his estranged wife Ann at the youth center where she works. Although

largely shot from a third person perspective, the opening sequence ofMesser is clearly

colored by Hoffmann’s distraught frame of mind. The shots are submerged in darkness;

the camera follows Hoffmann’s restless pacing in his laboratory and his frenzied run

through the city streets with a traveling shot. The garish neon lights in the shop windows

and the blaring music in the pub that Hoffmann briefly enters are mixed with his

frustrated exclamations (“Luge... alles Luge”). The only time the camera remains static

154

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. during this disorienting opening sequence is during Hoffmann’s telephone call to his wife

Ann. A long shot then shows him entering the cavernous mouth of a subway station, and

emerging at the youth center.16 As Hoffmann arrives there, police are raiding the center,

which doubles as a Leftist enclave.

The next few shots create the illusion of continuity editing, yet a rapid change in

POVs creates unease. Long shots of Anne and her lover, Volker, being handcuffed, of

Hoffmann entering the building, of police inspector Scholz are all taken from different

camera positions and from differing distances: Ann is captured in a medium shot, while

Hoffmann is seen in a long shot. Further, while Ann’s medium shot calling out for

Hoffmann appears first to be a POV shot from Hoffmann’s perspective, the following

long shot of Hoffmann entering the center looking for Ann makes viewers aware that

they have been tricked by the apparently seamless continuity editing. The camera cuts

away from the street with a series of medium shots of inspector Scholz shouting the

order, “Gehen Sie ihm nach,” and of Hoffmann being followed by plainclothes detectives

as he enters the center to look for Ann. The camera frames him in a still shot, looking

over his shoulder, while the soundtrack plays a pistol shot.

Reinhard Hauffs film uses this intriguing opening sequence to introduce the

mystery of the Hoffmann shooting. The film’s investigative plot develops thus: while

Hoffmann is in critical condition at the hospital, his injury becomes a sensational news-

story, researched simultaneously by the police and by Hoffmann’s Leftist sympathizers,

including Volker and Ann. The two investigations yield completely contradictory

versions of Hoffmann’s life and of the fatal night. The police consider Hoffmann to be a

dangerous, knife-wielding terrorist, whose attack on police detective Schurig led to the

155

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. latter’s self-defense by shooting, and to Hoffmann's head injury. In this version, Schurig

becomes a “Opfer des Terrors.” But, according to Hoffmann’s friends from the youth

center, Hoffmann is the real victim, having become the target of state terror and political

conspiracy.

Hauff chooses to make the police detectives of his film marginal and

unsympathetic figures, callous in their methods and more interested in protecting the

sanctity of the state rather than in finding the truth.17 Hoffmann, who is recovering from

his head injury and loss of memory and speech, must start life from scratch. Caught

between conflicting stories about his past, he becomes the real detective figure of Messer.

In order to defend himself against a criminal charge, Hoffmann interrogates witnesses,

gathers clues, and reconstructs the crime like a detective. In his search for truth about the

present, Hoffmann must turn, ironically, to his past, and follow the maxim that had led

him to answers in his genetic research: “Wahrheit muli bewiesen werden.” The act of

detection is aligned to a scientific experiment through Hoffmann’s adoption of the

method of forming a hypothesis, gathering evidence, testing the hypothesis, and

establishing truth. The final part of the film shows Hoffmann at the end of his quest, but

destabilizes evidentiary tiuth. The scientist-detective reenacts the night of his injury, and

finds himself face to face with Schurig. However, the roles are now reversed, and

Hoffmann points the revolver, while Schurig lies on the floor with a knife in his

outstretched hand. Hoffmann hovers on the precarious boundary between detection and

crime, guilt and innocence as the film breaks off its narrative. The refusal to provide

definite answers and the use of an ambivalent protagonist makes Messer a powerful

successor to postwar and New German anti-detective film.

156

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Critics acknowledged that the film’s gripping plot did not necessarily aid in

comprehension and clarity: “Den Film einmal zu sehen, geniigt... bei weitem nicht, es sei

denn, es gelange, sich beim ersten Mai mit gleicher Starke auf Dialog, Regie und

Dialektik der Konzeption zu konzentrieren und sich alles zu verarbeiten” ( Sonntag,

February 8, 1981). Messer's subversion of generic expectations clearly places it in the

tradition of West German anti-detective film, a genre marked by ambiguity in its dense

plot with interlocking scenarios, as well as in its chiaroscuro images. The multiple levels

at which the film challenges its viewers— in its form and content—suggests that Hauff s

film might be continuing the formal complexities of the anti-detective films made in

postwar West Germany. Yet Messer evinces neither the confusing inter-cutting and

parallel editing of Epilog or 1000 Augen, nor the shifting camera perspective that creates

much of the anti-detective effect in Nachts. While much of the atmosphere of malaise in

the anti-detective film of the 1950s and 1960s is created through the use of gray tones,

the richly colored world ofMesser seems at first to be in complete disjunction to any kind

of genre-subversive effects. Additionally, its favoring of deep blue tones to signal a POV

sympathetic to Hoffmann (e.g., in the opening scene or in the hospital) makes the

audience identify with a single protagonist’s fate.

Nevertheless, Hauff s film emphasizes its circularity by making the end sequence

echo its opening, and leaves viewers with the feeling that neither they nor the film can

ever reach a conclusion about Hoffmann’s fate or his motivation. The open ending is

different from the responses ofEpilog or Nachts, where the detective’s death irrefutably

concluded the investigative narrative, or from 1000 Augen’s conclusion that distinguished

between criminals and detectives in spite of aligning them initially. Messer’s use of anti-

157

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. detection shifts from an either-or dichotomy to the co-existence of a both-and. Perhaps

Messer posits the necessity of a new kind ofNullpunkt in the politically volatile

atmosphere of 1970s West Germany, a society caught between fear and hysteria, between

state and terrorist violence. Reinhard Hauff claims in an interview: “Das

Rausgeschossenwerden aus einem eingefahrenen Gedankensystem [ist] eine Chance zu

neuen Wahrnehmungen, neuen Fragen und neuen Taten. An der Geschichte Hoffmanns

erlebe ich die Faszination dieser alten Sehnsucht, noch einmal bei Null anfangen zu

konnen” (Marie 39). Indeed, the idea of a formal Nullpunkt would be entirely appropriate

to the film’s concentration on its protagonist’stabula rasa state, and refers back to “one

of the most favored topics of postwar German cinema: that of the new start, whether

literally as the zero hour of 1945, or metaphorically, as the new generation’s

unwillingness to see their work in a continuity with the 1950s and the commercial

cinema” (Elsaesser 1989, 91). In Chapter Three, I located the detective genre’s Nullpunkt

in postwar Germany within Epilog's use of anti-detection and its questioning of the past.

After 28 years, Messer also confronts the past, and engages— but also breaks away from—

the tradition of (German/ American) anti-detective film In particular, Messer employs

three interrelated anti-detective strategies: (1) subversion of the clue-suspicion-

confirmation paradigm; (2) doubling, culminating in an open ending; (3) the personal-

political configuration.

5.3.1 Clue-Suspicion-Confirmation

As we have seen, the clue-suspicion-confirmation pattern is widely used in

traditional detective film to elucidate the detective’s reasoning methods. Anti-detective

film employs it to privilege viewers with information unknown to the detectives.18

158

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Messer radically reverses the clue-suspicion-confirmation pattern for a staggered anti

detective effect. Clues re-emerge like refrains at various points in its deliberate

composition. However, the repetition does not allude to1000 Augen’s clue-suspicion-

confirmation paradigm. Instead of adding to meaning or bringing viewers closer to the

truth, the refrains undermine and finally annihilate all possibility of pinning down

meaning, thereby destroying the act of signification that is central to the detective

process. A fairly established fact is cast into suspicion and reduced by means of further

unsettling into a red herring, only to be finally exposed as being inconclusive and

therefore unacceptable in the chain of evidence. For instance, the film uses a freeze frame

to present Hoffmann’s status as innocent victim in the opening sequence, a fact that

seems to be established beyond doubt when the audience sees the image of Hoffmann at

the door and listens to a pistol shot on the soundtrack. However, the film’s revisiting of

the event gradually dispels the initial certainty until, in the final sequence, Hoffmann is

presented as the possible perpetrator of the crime.

Hauff s film follows a strategy of repeating close-ups of its central clues at

various points in the film For example, viewers see frequent close-ups of Hoffmann’s

bandaged head, and of his wounds or an outline of his body at the scene of crime, or they

are presented with several gestures to the crime weapon: sketches of a knife, Hoffmann

brandishing a kitchen knife, and verbal references to knives (especially to the “Messer im

Kopf’). Yet, each successive reference to the clue destabilizes it by making its

interpretation completely dependent on its context, and by using ellipsis or cross-cutting

to rapidly change this context. For example, a close-up of Hoffmann’s battered body is

shortly followed by a close-up of a newspaper headline saying, “Opfer des Terrors”— yet

159

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the victim referred to here is police detective Schurig, and not Hoffmann. In the next

sequence, the close-up of the headline recurs, but a zoom-out reveals a completely

different setting, and shows Volker and his friends using the same headline in their

Leftist newspaper to talk about Hoffmann. Finally, towards the end of the film, a medium

shot of Hoffmann with a clipping of Volker’s article is followed by Hoffmann’s

vehement protest against his victimization: “.. .das Wort Opfer, immer in Zusammenhang

mit wehrlos, im Sinne von idiotisch.” Combined with his warning to Volker and Ann,

“Auf die Sprache achte ich mehr, seit ich da bin,” the sequence seems to warn viewers

about interpreting the Filmsprache , and questions its representation of guilt and

innocence.

The inversion of the clue-suspicion-confirmation pattern continues this emphasis

on language and objective truths. A newspaper account of the incident indicates that

Hoffmann had attacked police detective Schurig with a knife, but in the next sequence,

Volker reveals that the police have refused to give proof of Schurig’s “life-threatening”

stab wounds. The knife motif continues when Hoffmann’s lawyer, Antleitner, asks him to

draw the picture of a knife while teaching him new vocabulary. However, Hoffmann

sketches a file. A zoom in to his drawing and to the picture card of the knife cuts to a

frontal close-up of Hoffmann musing, “Der [Polizist] sagt, ich habe ein Messer. Volker

sagt, ich habe kein Messer. Mit oder ohne, das ist die Frage.” Indeed, the film gains much

of its anti-detective impulse from such Hamletesque self-questioning, and more

specifically, from a split consciousness that presents two diametrically opposite

possibilities without discounting or affirming either of them

160

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The film complicates the reconstruction motif by reduplicating its clues as

simulacrae—images for which, however, originals do not necessarily exist. To return to

the example of the knife, the film presents several different knives in the course of its

narrative: the knife sketch, the kitchen knife in Anne's apartment, and multiple references

to the “knife in the head.” But, it closes the possibility of ever accessing the original knife

from the youth center scene, by refusing to return to the elided opening sequence. Mirror

images and replicas abound throughout the film, and the composition often presents

Hoffmann in the foreground and his images (photos in the newspaper, television images,

reflections in mirroring surfaces) in deep focus. The divorce between the biological entity

Berthold Hoffmann and his various personae— research scientist, terrorist, criminal,

detective, victim— is thus visualized by Hauff s film Ironically, as Messer uses this

mirroring to reveal more and more about Hoffmann and the incident, it makes viewers

less and less certain about his identity.

5.3.2 Doubling and Open Ending

Until its final sequence, Messer works formally as a straightforward genre film

The audience is led to empathize with Hoffmann, to follow his POV in investigations,

and to expect a fitting conclusion that will clarify his past, particularly the youth center

incident. Yet the open ending indicates that the audience’s sympathy with Hoffmann

might be misplaced. A mirroring effect between the film’s opening and concluding

sequences characterizes this ambivalence. The film starts with Berthold Hoffmann’s

voice-over saying, “Ein Amerikaner an meiner Stelle wiirde vermutlich blind aus dem

Fenster schiessen.” The concluding medium shot of Hoffmann aiming a gun at the

camera—out of the “window” of the film screen— links back to the opening statement.

161

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Especially because Hoffmann does not shoot before the film’s conclusion, the

subjunctive mood still remains valid. The use of an open ending has an anti-detective

effect, because it casts into doubt not just the efficacy of detection, but also its very

difference from crime. However, the surprise ending has been carefully orchestrated in

the film through its use of doubling.

Messer adds to anti-detective film’s collusion of detective and criminal

perspectives, not so much through a diffused POV, as in earlier anti-detective film, as

through its use of doubling between the criminal and the detective. The notion of

detective-criminal doubling has a fairly long history in literature and film Critics like

Dennis Porter have argued that in order to outplay the competitor, the detective and

criminal must gradually acquaint themselves with the mind of the other to such an extent

that they become the other (112). The pairing of this set of doubles is traditionally

characterized by conceptual oppositions, such as hunter and quarry, or reason and

emotion, and is often captured on screen through the distinct use of light for detectives,

and shadows for criminals. In contrast, Hauff employs similar mise-en-scene and

composition to portray Hoffmann and Schurig. Especially in the confrontation sequences

between the two, Messer's use of shot- reverse angle shots destabilizes each figure’s

identity as either criminal or detective.

In the interrogation scene, set in Hoffmann’s hospital room, Hoffmann is shown

in a high angle shot in his wheelchair, while a low angle shot of inspector Scholz visually

echoes his brutal handling of Hoffmann.19 Schurig then enters the room The viewers see:

162

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1. In a shot- reverse angle shot composition, extreme close-ups of Schurig and Hoffmann, CUT TO 2. Medium shot of inspector Scholz (to the left) dominating the frame and bending over Hoffmann’s wheelchair to ask, “Was wollen Sie sagen?,” CUT TO 3. Close-up of Hoffmann saying, “Hoffmann istnicht.. CUT TO 4. Frontal close-up of Schurig looking left offscreen at Hoffmann, CUT TO 5. Close-up of Hoffmann completing sentence, “Hoffmann,” CUT TO 6. Medium shot of Hoffmann’s wheelchair pushed toward Schurig; Scholz’s voice-over saying, “Das ist alles Verstellung.” [to Schurig] ‘1st das der Mann, der auf Sie eingestochen hat?,” CUT TO 7. Close-up of Schurig hesitating, looking left offscreen at Hoffmann, then looking down and whispering, “Ja.” CUT TO S. Scholz’ exit; shot- reverse angle shot composition between a frontal close- up of Hoffmann squinting at camera, and a close-up of Schurig looking extremely uncomfortable and sweating, CUT TO 9. Medium shot of Hoffmann suffering an epileptic attack, CUT TO 10. Tracking shot (through blue filter) of Hoffmann furiously pushing his wheelchair along the corridor, Ann follows and catches up with him, CUT TO 11. Close-up of Hoffmann breaking down, screaming “Angst. Ich habe Angst.”

The frequent shot- countershot volleys between Hoffmann and Schurig, especially the

insert shots of the other while the camera focuses on one person’s reaction, the similar

use of framing in showing them, and their close emotional states (i.e., fear) create a

mirroring effect, and present them as doubles. Just as Hoffmann metamorphoses from the

quasi-detective in search of truth to the criminal by the end of the film, the sequence

strengthens the suspicion that Schurig is not interested in uncovering the truth despite his

status as the police detective. Rather, he is gradually revealed to be complicit in the

state’s lies about the shooting. Although the film employs a third person perspective to

present the mirroring, this section— placed halfway through the film - clearly empathizes

with Hoffmann, especially in the final shot of Hoffmann’s breakdown, which is captured

through a blue filter.

163

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The blue filter recurs in the second half of the film, during Hoffmann’s

reconfinement in the hospital. In fact, the film leaves behind the POV of police detectives

midway through the film (in keeping with the police’s loss of interest in the Hoffmann

case, which makes their surveillance lax), and focuses instead on Hoffmann’s escape

from the hospital, his confrontation with Ann, and his activities as an investigator of the

youth center incident. Simultaneously, the film ironizes the state’s blindness by showing

police detectives who keep a watch on Hoffmann every minute, but who are incapable of

seeing through his very flimsy disguise when he finally escapes from the hospital. Thus,

the detective who has watched Hoffmann whiten his shoes with toothpaste barely looks

up when Hoffmann passes him wearing the same shoes during the escape sequence,

limping noticeably. Whereas the shot- countershot construction of the escape heightens

the suspense, the increasing laxity and blindness of the police’s attitude to Hoffmann

anticipates their complete disinterest in him by the end of the film.20 The police’s

paranoid and omnipresent vigilance over purported “super-terrorists” only has one

purpose: to pin down guilt and establish its difference from the self. Yet Messer clearly

reveals parallels between criminal and detective mechanisms in contemporary West

Germany.

In addition to the detective-criminal correspondence, the film uses other visual

references to evoke the trope of doubling. For instance, Hoffmann’sSehstdrung consists

of seeing double images. Viewers see frequent medium shots or close-ups of Hoffmann

squinting or closing one eye to correct his vision. During Hoffmann’s recovery, the film

shows him shuffling two cards, each with an image of a man holding a knife. At the same

time, the film continues to present its viewers with both versions of the Hoffmann

164

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. incident, as if to emphasize its own inability to join the two contradictory images into

one. For example, the doctor diagnoses Hoffmann’s visual impairment as the result of a

skull fracture, and alleges that he might have been knocked unconscious with a police

club first and then shot in the head. This sequence cuts to a frontal medium shot of

inspector Scholz asserting that Hoffmann is a dangerous terrorist, and generalizing: “[Die

Terroristen] leben in einer Vorstellungswelt, wo das eigene wie das ffemde Leben nichts

wert ist [...]. Fur sie sind alle Polizisten Schweine, und Schweine miissen geschlachtet

werden.” However, the film can offer no resolution to the contradiction at this point.

By the end of the film, the close-up of Hoffmann’s hands slowly joining the two

cards into one image suggests a possible answer to this split, and an imminent solution to

the mystery. In keeping with audience expectations, the film’s climax presents a second

confrontation between Hoffmann and Schurig. The sequence mirrors the film’s opening

by using a tracking shot of Hoffmann traversing city streets and running past neon-lit

windows, to finally enter a subway station. In addition, the second confrontation

sequence repeats the shot- reverse angle shot combination of the first one, however, it

ends up reversing the balance of power. Unlike the hospital sequence, Hoffmann is now

captured in a low angle shot and dominates the screen, while Schurig lies prostrate on the

floor of his apartment. This time the film does not elide their confrontation. The dialogue

indicates that their roles are reversed: Hoffmann now has Schurig’s revolver, while

Schurig wields a knife. The fact that Schurig’s knife looks very much like Hoffmann’s

knife-sketch earlier in the film indicates that the dissonance between words and images,

165

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between simulacrae and originals, between the self and the other is finally about to be

resolved. The film’s ending seems to close the circle of investigation by providing

viewers with a re-enactment of the elided piece from the film’s first sequence.

The shot- reverse angle shot composition in the final sequence once again

emphasizes the mirroring between detective and criminal, and blurs any distinctions

between the two figures. Thus, a close-up of Hoffmann showing his head wound to

Schurig cuts to a close-up of Schurig’s stomach wound. Similarly, the dialogue

underlines the mirroring effect. Hoffmann asks, “Du hattest vielleicht nur Angst, wie

ich?” and Schurig, looking relieved, answers, “Ja!” The switching of roles finally ends

the investigation by clarifying the mystery: Hoffmann threatens, “Lass das Ding los, oder

ich schiesse,” and Schurig confirms, “Es war genauso. Man hat mich nie danach gefragt.”

In a surprise twist, however, the film reverses the detective-criminal roles for yet another

time, and turns its police detective Schurig into a victim at the mercy of Hoffmann,

himself a detective-criminal. The last sequence unfolds thus:

1. Close-up of Hoffmann aiming revolver, CUT TO 2. Close-up of Schurig saying, “1st doch egal jetzt. Wen kummert es noch?,” with Hoffmann’s revolver pointing at him from lower right hand comer of the frame. CUT TO 3. Frontal medium shot of Hoffmann saying, “Mich.” CUT TO 4. Intercutting between close-ups of Schurig, gradually looking scared, and medium shots of Hoffmann steadying his revolver with both hands. CUT TO 5. Close-up of Schurig, saying, “Du bist verriickt,” CUT TO 6. Medium shot of Hoffmann, saying, “Kann sein. Kann nicht sein.” CUT TO 7. Medium shot of Schurig trembling, CUT TO 8. Medium shot of Hoffmann pointing the revolver at the camera, looking straight ahead. Fade to black.

166

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The film rapidly destabilizes the connection between the truth shown to viewers

in the opening sequence, and the truth gradually exposed in this closing sequence. In the

opening sequence, a dimly lit setting and rapidly shifting POVs makes it impossible for

viewers to register— let alone to decipher— important details. Thus, the fact that Schurig,

Hoffmann’s purported victim, is not seen among the detectives who follow him into the

youth center goes completely unnoticed. At the film’s conclusion, viewers are made

aware that the reconstruction of the youth-center scene can only hypothetically approach

the truth that Messer's freeze frame has successfully elided. Given the formal similarities

between the opening and the ending, it is logical that a similar deliberate intrusion cuts

off this narrative at the end, when the film breaks off without clarifying “whodunit,” that

is, without solving the mystery of the youth-center violence. Since events can only be

reconstructed and truth can only be conjectured, the only possible “solution” to Messer’s

mystery is a plurality of solutions: “Versionen werden wichtiger als die Wahrheit,” as

screenwriter Peter Schneider explains (Marie 10).

The film surreptitiously prepares us for the final twist through its alignment of

Schurig and Hoffmann throughout the film, and by sustaining two plausible versions of

the incident until the very end, as the film’s advertisement indicates: “Hoffmann—Opfer

oder Terrorist?” Viewers must countenance not only a reversal of identities in the final

sequence, but also their complete collapse into each other. As detection and guilt

gradually become indistinguishable in this sequence, the pistol Hoffmann aims at Schurig

becomes the pistol aimed at his own self. Murder and suicide coincide. Moreover, the

167

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pistol pointed at the camera in the film’s final shot suggests that its viewers, too, are not

immune to this reduction of dichotomies, and must locate both extremes within

themselves.

The film has, in fact, prepared its audience for its open ending through its use of

doubling. The conclusion comes merely as the high point of all the clues that the

audience is expected to interpret. In the end, the peripheral clues spread throughout the

film’s anti-detective narrative clearly foreshadow the outcome, and because this happens

only in retrospect, viewers are made to reevaluate the complete narrative, and to clearly

recognize the contradiction in their responses. Even the very fact that the title is not

“Kugel im Kopf’ can be interpreted in hindsight as the film’s signal about its free mixing

of detective and criminal identities. To recognize oneself as the other, to equate detection

and crime, creates a structure that allows “sensibilist” self-questioning as well as

“contentist” probings into the West German situation in the aftermath of terrorist and

state violence, achieved in a fusion of the personal and the political.

5.3.3 The Personal-Political Configuration

Epilog and Nachts reduplicate images to reveal the continuation of a political

mystery within a personal mystery. In 1000 Augen, the mise-en-abime is visualized as a

film-within-a-film structure that underlines the incongruity between the spectator’s,

detective’s, and criminal’s looks, and provokes reflection on the relation between vision

and authority. Messer also uses a ftlm-within-a-ftlm structure in its close-ups of

surveillance cameras used by the police to closely follow every move made by purported

terrorists. The link between vision and authority, particularly the peremptory attitude of

the state, becomes evident in its reckless investigation and politicization of minutiae, and

168

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. an equally reckless abandonment of the extreme surveillance as soon as it does not suit

the state’s interest. HaufFclearly depicts Hoffmann’s relentless persecution by police

detectives, and their abandonment of him in favor of his “successor,” Volker, by the end

of the film.

The mises-en-abimes in Messer, notably the use of film-within-a-film structures

to highlight the omnipresence of the police system suggest the following: in the face of a

maniacal urge for recording, even “truths” can be misinterpreted if taken out of context—

or if they are overinterpreted. The film issues a warning against this extreme, for example

in an exchange between Volker and Antleitner, in which the lawyer claims, “Tatsachen

sind eine Sache, Beweise sind eine andere,” thereby underlining the constructed and

fickle nature of evidentiary truths. Through its Kaspar Hauser- like detective figure, who

must learn to see, speak, and think again, and who must fight for a new beginning and

simultaneously come to terms with the past, Hauff s film admonishes its viewers to be

discerning and skeptical detectives themselves: “Die unmissverstandliche Aufforderung

des Films— lemt noch einmal Sprechen, Horen, Fiihlen und Denken, ehe ihr Position

bezieht!—wirkt so beklemmend, weil sie, simpel wie sie ist, tatsachlich notig scheint”

(Fischer/ Hembus 155). The knife in the head refers both to the function of the film form

as a reminder to viewers about the inadequacy of binary oppositions, and to a pressing

need to reflect on the political situation in the spirit of postwar anti-detective film.

Messer also employsdouble entendre and recurring motifs or images for a mise-

en-abime effect. For instance, the central question guiding Hoffmann’s research on the

aging of cells— “Irrtumskatastrophe oder Selbstmordprogramm?”— is an importantleit

motif in the film’s investigative plot: this reduplication is also in keeping withMesser's

169

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. alignment of scientific experimentation and detection. The dilemma can allegorically be

read as the film’s reference to a rapidly aging West German democracy, caught between

catastrophic errors and self-destruction, e.g., through its response to the 1968 student

movement."*7 1 Hoffmann suggests a way out of this dilemma during his visit to the

laboratory after escaping from the hospital. Replying to a co-worker’s question about

which theory his project validated, Hoffmann calmly replies, “Mordprogramm.”

Researching the political milieu of state violence simultaneously yields findings about the

West German government’s programmatic snuffing out of opposition. In addition, the

response also foreshadows the film’s ultimate revelation of Hoffmann as a potential

murderer.

Like Epilog, Nachts and 1000 Augen, Hauff s film uses the genre of anti-detection

to reflect radically on its time. Both scriptwriter Peter Schneider and director Reinhard

Hauff, as well as other members of the film crew repeatedly confirmed the connection of

Messer to the political situation in West Germany.

Wir fragten uns, wie es nach 1968 zu einer so individuellen Politik des Terrorismus... kommen konnte. Wir liaben uns eine Figur wie diesen Hoffmann ausgedacht: ein Wissenschaftler, ein ehemaliger 68er, ein Frustierter, der seiner Arbeit nachgeht, aber die Ideale verloren hat. (Marie 39)

Richard McCormick notes that the year 1977 marked for West Germany the ten

year anniversary of Benno Ohnesorg’s murder (one of the most important mobilizing

moments of the student movement), and of a 1967 speech given by Gudrun Ensslin after

Ohnesorg’s death, a speech that marked the beginning of the process that led to the

formation of the RAF (178). RAF’s founders had been in prison since 1972; in May

1976, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her prison cell. The new escalation of terrorist

170

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. violence in the FRG (the killing of federal prosecutor Siegfried Buback in April,

Dresdener Bank head JUrgen Ponto in July, and the kidnapping and subsequent death of

leading industrialist Hans Martin Schleyer in September/ October) culminated in the

hijacking of a Lufthansa jet to Mogadishu, Somalia. While the last act was meant to force

the West German state to release RAF activists Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe, the hijacking

failed, and the three Stammheim prisoners were found dead in their cells the next

morning. The hysteria with which the West German society reacted to these events was

great; the atmosphere of national emergency that put a severe strain on the postwar

democracy is captured in HaufPs film.

The need for reluctance in defining guilt and innocence makes sense in the

contemporary context of state and terrorist violence, where these boundaries have

become fluid. This irreconcilable conflict that also haunts much of the Vdterliteratur and

NGC in the 1970s opens up questions about the continuities between past and present.

Berthold Hoffmann becomes representative of a new generation that is free from the

burden of history, but one which must nevertheless confront the nightmarish present.

Messer can also be read as a reaction to the repressive 1950s. The film’s journey of self-

discovery is a movement from aNullpunkt to an identity split between perpetration and

innocence. Thematizing amnesia becomes a means to cut a passage from Germany’s past

to the present, yet liberation from this loss of memory comes only at the price of realizing

the coexistence of guilt and innocence. The complex and narcissistic act of self-reflection

and doubling thus has a coherent historical side to it. By revisiting the past, Messer

voices a struggle for political emancipation similar to a weaving together of the Nazi past

and terrorist present, for instance, in Deutschland im Herbst. Yet its turn to subjectivity

171

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and to inwardness as a viable reaction to political crisis echoes the sentiment of other

films from the 1970s: Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, Das zweite Erwachen der

Christa Klages, and Despair: Eine Reise ins Licht.

Indeed, the film repeatedly interrupts its commentary on the sociopolitical

situation through its “Wendung zum Privaten,” whether it is through Hoffmann’s

epileptic fits, his act of masturbation in reaction to police brutality, or his emotional

breakdown as a result of his estrangement from Ann. Hauff explains that Hoffmann’s

statement, “Ein Amerikaner an meiner Stelle wiirde vermutlich blind aus dem Fenster

schiessen,” is inspired by Paul Schrader, the scriptwriter of Taxi Driver. Schrader

claimed that in a European version ofTaxi Driver, the protagonist would not externalize

his frustration through a public display of violence, but would rather internalize it (Marie

30). The movement of the film from (political) crime to detection to (personal) crime

signals West German anti-detective film’s response to the external/ internal split.

Hoffmann’s resounding answer to Schurig’s question, “Wen kiimmert’s noch?”--

“Mich!”—privileges the personal motivation behind detection in a way that is clearly

different from Zabel or Kersten’s abstract search for truth and justice in Epilog and

Nachts, or Krass’ equation of detection with a “routine” in1000 Augen.

“Wen kiimmert es noch?,” or, who cares whodunit? By asking this question,

Messer turns an inquiring glance on itself, and raises the question about the function of

anti-detection in West German society on the threshold of the 1980s. LikeEpilog and

Nachts, the emblematic shot ofMesser completely subverts the meaningful, constructed

ending of traditional detective film. However, Messer’ s open ending is not necessarily an

“inside joke,” or a play with film form in the footsteps of genre-breaking New German

172

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anti-detective film. Nor is the open ending a dead end or a requiem lamenting the loss of

detective agency. Messer closes not with the defeat and death of its detective figure, as in

postwar anti-detective film, but rather with an exposure of a complete correspondence

between detectives and criminals. The lack of closure characteristic of 1950s West

German anti-detective film, then, gets transformed into the perfect circularity of Messer.

Messer anticipates by almost one year the Hamburger Erkliirung of September

1979, signed by sixty NGC filmmakers including Hauff himself.22 Seventeen years after

Oberhausen, the new manifesto echoes the NGC’s revised agenda from the beginning of

the 1970s that called for a move away from abstuse theorizing and toward “ein Kino, das

SpaB macht” (Thome 1973, 7). The Hamburg document summarizes three important

ways in which the NGC can make way to its new extension: by eschewing the division of

experienced filmmakers from newcomers, feature film from documentary film, and films

that reflect on the medium from narrative and commercial film (Rentschler 1984, 56).

The last point is taken up competently in Messer's merging of formal experimentation,

political commentary, and commercialism. My analysis has shown that this mixture

suggests a means to bridge the gap between Kunst and Kommerz for NGC, but—more

importantly— for anti-detection. Entering the eighties, West German anti-detective film

remains viable and multi-faceted, clashing with history, but breaking out of the

despondency of the first two postwar decades. As my next chapter on Doris Dome’s film

Happy Birthday, Ttirke! (1991) will show,Messer's open and optimistic conclusion

provides a fresh lease of life on German anti-detective cinema.

173

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 6

ANTI-DETECTION AND ETHNIC NOIR IN POSTWALL GERMANY: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TURKE! (DORRIE 1991)

At the Frankfurt book fair in 1985, Fred Beinersdorfer and Peter Schmidt decided

to organize an annual meeting in Mosbach for all authors writing detective fiction in

German. The Criminate began in 1986 with almost a dozen active Krimi writers. At the

2001 meeting of the Criminate, the count had risen to almost 300 members; the syndicate

could boast of a newsletter, “Secret Service,” and web page that published critical essays

in addition to the latest news in the detective fiction scene. There is no doubt that German

detective fiction witnessed a boom in the last decade of the twentieth century: more than

200 new detective novels have been published each year since 1990 (Feldtkamp 2). The

greater attention paid in the culture pages of major newspapers to phenomena such as the

Frauenkrimi is just one indication that literary criticism has finally caught up with the

huge popularity of the genre in Germany.1 The detective fiction explosion in post-Wall

Germany raises the question, what fate have the 1990s brought for German detective

film, and particularly for anti-detection? In this chapter I will show, using the example of

Doris Dome’sHappy Birthday, Tiirke! (1991), that anti-detection has been reinvented in

and by German cinema. The old paradigm of anti-detection has collapsed; the moments

174

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of crisis symptomatically registering a failure of the epistemological project of detection

from the 1950s to the 1970s have passed because a fresh, upbeat paradigm has emerged

at the onset of the 1980s, as my previous chapter has shown.

“A bold and completely successful intrusion... by a subversive filmmaker into a

mainstream genre and style” (Angier 57)2—this example of the positive reception

awarded to Tiirke points to a new development in German detective film. The 4 million

DM production costs, which had been shared by Cobra Film, ZDF, FFA, and the

Hessische Filmforderung, were quickly made up by the film’s excellent box office

performance (Neues Deutschland, January 10, 1992). Evoking the motto of “cult Figures

don’t die,” the reviews stress that the film revolves around the investigative adventures of

P. I. Kemal Kayankaya, a “deutsch-tiirkischer Doppelganger von Phil Marlowe” (Neue

ZurcherZeitung, January 9, 1992).

Kayankaya is a 26-year old ‘Turk with a German passport,” whose identity

becomes remarkable in two ways: not only is he German film’s first “ethnic detective,”

he is also one of the first private investigators solving mysteries on the German screen.3

This P.I. is hired at the beginning of the film to solve the mystery involving the

disappearance and death of his Turkish client liter’s husband, Ahmed Hamul, and her

father, Wasif Ergiin. Armed with his trusty Parabellum and an irreverent sense of humor,

Kayankaya, much like his hardboiled predecessors from the US, works his way through

Frankfurt’s seedy streets and its ostensibly peaceful suburbs to uncover the murky

connections between guest workers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and highly regarded

members of the Frankfurt police force. With the help of Margarethe, a prostitute, and

retired chief inspector Ebert, Kayankaya traces the crimes to Kripo Commissioner Futt,

175

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and his assistants Eiler and Hosch. As in much of American film noir, Dome’s detective

becomes a master interpreter who reads the signs of malaise in a corrupt society.

However, Ttirke drifts away from the conventions of Hollywoodfilm noir by

foregrounding the more intriguing mystery of ethnicity and identity. Halfway through the

film, Kayankaya’s personal quest for identity, developed in romantic relationships with

liter and Margarethe, takes precedence over the conventional question of “whodunit,”

and over the film’s critique of the social malaise. The last scene ofTiirke thus shows

Kayankaya on his way to see Margarethe, carrying a bunch of flowers, albeit only after

having successfully solved the murder mystery.

Tiirke's open ending is reminiscent ofMesser im Kopfs refusal to provide

closure. Unlike Hauff, however, Dome’s film does clarify whodunit, and employs a

“happy end.” Yet new issues jeopardize Tiirke's upbeat mood, namely conflicts between

natives and immigrants within a post-unification German society seeking to negotiate

these identities.4 Not surprisingly, Doris Dome’s on-screen adaptation of Jakob Aijouni’s

hard boiled novel re-visits several aspects offilm noir, in order to set it within her

dystopic vision of multicultural Germany. Tiirke thus completes a circle that began with

Epilog, both by continuing Kaumer’s borrowing fromfilm noir (in turn a genre developed

by German directors in exile), as well as by furthering German anti-detective film’s

engagement with both mystery and history.5

My chapter first examines new developments in German detective narratives in

the late 1980s and early 1990s, such as the growing popularity of television series based

on crime and detection, and detective film’s increasing attention to Germany as the

setting for investigations. Second, while most examinations ofTiirke have investigated

176

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. either its comic aspects or its Turkish-German detective figure, my chapter explores

Dome’s reappropriation offilm noir. I demonstrate that Tiirke moves freely between

serious and tongue-in-cheek quotations fromnoir, thereby evoking the neutrality of

pastiche.6 A second focus is the move from the dead ends of postwar West German anti

detective film to the happy ends of post-Wall German Krimis. Postwar West German

anti-detective film’s questioning of certainties like knowledge or truth, and its exploration

of the detective figure as an existential outsider has shifted to the examination of

foreigners as outsiders as a social issue, an economic exigency, and a politically poignant

conundrum, but has also located some hope within a “community of outsiders.” I attempt

to answer the following questions: (1) How can Dome’s reappropriationnoir of be

connected with an optimistic ending, and to what extent is the film’s optimism qualified

or jeopardized? (2) Does the interweaving of deception with crime and detection create

both Tiirke's happy end, and its anti-detective effect? After all, Dome’s detective does

create the happy end by skillfully deceiving and dodging the official letter of the law, and

by meting out his own sense of justice and privileging his subjective version of truth over

the authority exercised by flawed democratic institutions.

Lastly, Tiirke subverts the investigative process by ultimately directing it at the

body of the detective himself, and becomes a Krimi representative of Germany’s hybrid

culture. The film establishes a connection between its Turkish-German protagonist,

Kemal Kayankaya, and a new spate of ethnic detectives in fiction and film, especially in

American ethnic noir. “Ethnic minority crime writing” has steadily become a mainstream

phenomenon in the US in the 1980s and 1990s (Bertens/ D’haen 5), with many ethnic

detective writers winning recognition and awards, e.g., Dale Furutani’s Death in Little

177

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tokyo (1996); Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1990); Terris McMaham Grimes’

Somebody Else's Child (1996). In American film noir, the first black hardboiled

detectives, e.g. Shaft, were supermen, perhaps in response to decades of nearly invisible

black people on the screen. In contrast, in Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, the

protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is both a private eye and knight errant, yet his motives are

more realistic than Shaft’s, and his life is placed in greater jeopardy.

A black detective’s identity is directly connected to community. [...] Second, black detectives... operate from a typical double-consciousness background. This involves role-playing, the adopting of masks and disguises, and the assumption of a trickster identity. Then, there is... ‘blackground’ ; the interweaving into the text of references to a number of black vernaculars, such as music/ dance, black language, and black cuisine. (Bertens/ D’haen 179)

All these characteristics are evident in ethnic detective fiction, and my analysis of Tiirke

focuses on Kayankaya’s roleplaying, as well as the film’s references to Turkish language

and cuisine. Indeed, stock attributes of hardboiled narratives—the weather, drinking,

smoking, music, cars, clothes, quotations—continue to play a role in ethnic detective

stories, and these elements are often used tongue-in-cheek to reflect on the genre itself,

but the issue of immigration and ethnicity heavily impinges on the private worlds of these

stories. The interweaving of ethnicity and detection, I posit, signals a future direction for

German anti-detective cinema after the 1990s, and into the new century. Yet, this

combination remained absent from the West German screen through much of the 1980s.

6.1 German Detective Film in the 1980s and 1990s

A survey of German cinema reveals that detective films form 10% of the West

German film production between 1985-1990 (Helt/ Helt 1992), clearly a decline after the

first postwar decade, when detective films formed 15% of the total German film

178

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. production, and from the prevalence of detective films, formulaic or otherwise, in the

1960s and 1970s. Evidently, the tremendous upsurge in detective fiction did not carry

over to West German detective film NGC directors such as Reinhard Hauff, Rudolf

Thome and Niklaus Schilling continued to make detective films in the 1980s,7 and the

decade also saw new directors enter the scene, among them Reinhard Munster, Nina

Gross, Use Hoffmann, and Jiri Menzel. In spite of these developments, serial detective

films— a norm from Weimar and postwar West German cinema—virtuaUy disappeared

from screen in the 1980s, while TV detective series quickly became a chief object of

audience popularity. Stahlnetz started the trend of TV detective series in West Germany,

which was continued by productions like Der Kommissar, Tatort, Der Alte, and Derrick

(Briick 4).

The Tatort series debuted in November 1970 with the episode Taxi nach Leipzig,

and has since grown with circa 150 mystery writers and 50 detectives (Netenjakob 45).

The formula, to which most feature-film length episodes adhere, consists of a murder

investigated by the police force of a German city, followed mainly through the POV of a

chief inspector, and solved at the end of the episode. The style is most often dry and

factual. Inevitably, critics resorted to ccomparisons with the ubiquitous police detectives

of Tatort as a measure for the Tiirke's success or failure, as the foUowing excerpts from

contemporary reviews show: “Mit einem strengen Farbkonzept in kiihlem Blau wollte

Dome jeden Taforr-Realismus vermeiden. Doch gerade perfekte Ausstattung und

typisierende Uberzeichnung der Figuren bis hin zum Klischee gehen an keiner SteUe iiber

den festgesteckten Genre-Rahmen hinaus” ( Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, January 11, 1992),

laments one review, while another piece makes the exact opposite claim: Happy“

179

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Birthday, Tiirke! ist ein spannender GroBstadt-Krimi, der das Genre jenseits der Tatort-

Femsehprovenienz fur die Leinwand neu beleben konnte” ( Film-Echo, March 1, 1992).

Part of my formal examination ofTiirke later in the chapter will draw also on the

comparison toTatort, particularly in my discussion of expressionistic and realistic noir.

Interestingly, the Tatort detective with whom most critics compared Dome’s

investigator is the Duisburg inspector Horst Schimanski, played by Gotz George. Horst

Schimanski, the creation of director Hajo Gies, was conceived in Munich in 1978 as a

counterpart of the typical father-figure detective of German television, epitomized in the

Kommissar on ZDF. Police commissioner Keller, played by Erik Ode, represented

detective figures from a generation who tended to repress their emotions and “die es

gelernt haben, sich zu beherrschen. Die auch etwas zu verbergen haben” (Netenjakob 46).

The new detective figure of the 1970s, at the tail end of the “fatherless society,”

represents a younger generation that is not haunted by ghosts of the Nazi past. In many

respects, this new detective is similar to his predecessors from the NGC, who believe that

“der Marsch nicht mehr mit bewusster Strategie durch die Institutionen [geht], sondem

improvisierend in die personlichen Interessen” (ibid.). Accordingly, the detective has

newly started this career, revolts against the set ways of his superiors, and reacts

spontaneously to the present, hoping to carve a new path for the future. Like Hoffmann

(Messer im Kopf) or Schubert and West ( Detektive), Schimanski privileges personal

feelings and interests over the investigation at hand, much to the irritation of his

superiors. Gotz Georg describes his character thus:

Der Schimanski ist ja auch kein Nullachtfunfzehn-Kommissar, sondem ein sensibler Mensch, der extrem denkt, extrem handelt, kein Klischee, wie man ilin in anderen deutschen Krimis findet. Aggressiv ist die Welt,

180

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. aggressiv ist die Situation, in der wir leben, und aggressiv muss er reagieren. [Aber] aggressiv zu sein ist kein Vergniigen mehr, weil es oft nur Gegenwehr ist. Die Gewalt von aufien hat sich verstarkt. (ARD Femsehspiel April-June 1981)

Aggression and violence actually formed a staple of 1980s West German cinema.

Much like the Edgar Wallace, Crippen or Mabuse series from the 1950s and 1960s, the

German Krimis from the last two decades of the twentieth century capitalize on thrill and

suspense, depicting urban spaces as alienating, terrifying environments in Der gldseme

Himmel (Grosse 1987) orDer Joker (Patzak 1986). At least one-third of the films

thematize the connection between technology and crime/ detection, for instance, the gene

manipulators in Der achte Tag (Munster 1990), or the on-screen competition between the

videogame obsessed detective-criminal pair in High Score (Ehmck 1989). Notable in the

thrillers is the refusal to project local (West German) anxieties on foreign territories.8

Although one of the most remarkable detective films of the 1980s,The Name o f the Rose

(Annaud 1985), was a German-ltalian-French co-production, West German detective

films in the 1980s increasingly focus onTatort Deutschland. In other words, the film

plots become increasingly independent of Anglo-American texts (barring the fascination

with Patricia Highsmith, or occasional films based on Poe, likeDer entwendete Brief

(Bender 1988)). In most films, the setting is clearly and recognizably a West German

city, for instance, in Kaminsky (Lahn 1985), Zweikampf (Steinheimer 1986), or Cafe

Europa (Bogner 1990).

Although Arlene Teraoka has convincingly demonstrated that the connection

between foreigners and crime was a large part of the journalistic discourse in the late

1980s and early 1990s (272), Germany’s status as a multiethnic Tatort forms the theme

181

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of very few detective films—e.g., Schattenboxer (Becker 1992), and only occasionally

features in TV series, for instance, in the following episodes ofLiebling Kreuzberg:

Berlin ist ein D orf (Masten, January 1994), orAusldndersachen (Loebner, December

1997). However, Teraoka rightly interprets Jakob Aijouni’s novel,Happy Birthday,

Tiirke! and the debate surrounding the author’s (German) identity as one of the central

moments in coming to terms with the constellation of outsiders, criminality, and justice

through the medium of detective fiction. Jakob Aijouni’s novel and Doris Dorrie’s film

both use the model of detection to sharpen an awareness regarding the imbricated

constructs of race and ethnicity, and to comment on the political structures in Germany’s

postcolonial, post-Wall era that circumscribe detective novels and films. Critics were

quick to compare the film with the novel, and to tout both the director and the author as

belonging to a new, “postmodern” generation:

Obwohl Domes Filmographie Mitte der siebziger Jahre, rund ein Jahrzehnt vor Arjounis erster Buchveroffentlichung , beginnt,- zehn Jahre macht auch ihr Altersunterschied aus—, sind sie offensichtlich beide Kinder desselben Zeitgeistes und ihre Produkte Verkorperungen jenes „postmodemen“ Eklektizismus, der auf alien Hochzeiten tanzt, ohne sich in eigener Substanz zu hinden. [...] Was [Dorrie] hat, ist eine Nase fur das „Dazwischen“: zwischen... den Generationen, zwischenden Moralvorstellungen, zwischen den Genres findet sie die Stories, die Formen und die Normen“ (Neue Zurcher Zeitung, January 9, 1992)

As suggested by Peter Buchka’s review, both Dorrie and Aijouni’s works were

labeled as being “postmodern” in their use of detective paradigms. Indeed, noir features

importantly in the image bank of postmodern cinematic styles, as a favored object of

quotation and imitation, characterized by “historicism and eclecticism, which plunders

the image-bank... for the material of parody, pastiche, and, in extreme cases, plagiarism”

(Naremore 196).9 Buchka proposes that it is Dome's aptitude for sitting on the wall, for

182

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. successfully combining several categories without committing to any single one, that

garners her the “postmodern” label. To determine whether Dome's exploitation of the

noir image-bank could be termed parody, pastiche, or plagiarism, I will begin by

examining her complex relationship to the NGC.

Although the name Doris Dorrie appears in many volumes about the NGC,

particularly those dealing with the contributions of female directors, she is

simultaneously considered (among others, by herself) to be part of the post-1968

generation, one that has moved past high-seriousGesellschaftskritik .10 Instead, she insists

on the entertainment value of her film: “[Ich] wollte ich einen Krimi erzahlen, der

spannend ist und unterhalt. Kino an sich ist fur mich keine Lehranstalt,... sondem ein

Ort, wo man lacht oder weint oder beides tut. Daruber hinaus mochte ich, dass ich ein

bisschen irgendetwas leme” (Berliner Zeitung, January 11, 1992). In an interview with

Klaus Phillips, Dorrie observes that her influences—Scorsese, Altman, Cassavates, or

directors of the New American Cinema—belong to a later generation than directors such

as John Ford or Howard Hawks, to whom the NGC paid homage. According to Phillips,

Dorrie encourages critics’ perception of her as “a non-conformist outsider who has little

in common with the generation represented by Wim Wenders” (Phillips 75). Her distance

from NGC is also evident when she speaks of the “coolness” of her generation as a

defense mechanism against the “Generation, die alles diskutiert hat” (Fischetti 252). Do

some of these differences, then, carry over toTiirke'?

Strikingly few detective films were, in fact, made in the NGC tradition or

followed anti-detective impulses during the 1980s. Two exceptions were Kamikaze 89

(Gremm 1982), and Tausend Augen (Blumenberg 1985). Both films parody detective

183

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. film formulae in the playful style replete with insider jokes and self-reflexivity that is

characteristic of NGC. In Kamikaze 89, Fassbinder, the director of several New German

anti-detective films, plays detective Jansen in a high-speed, high-tension trip into the

future. The nightmarish cityscape, peppered with multiple TV screens constantly

broadcasting a laughing contest, in which the mysterious criminal Krystopompas creates

a reign of terror, carries echoes of the Mabuse films. But Gremm’s irreverent treatment of

stereotypical motifs turns any trace of nostalgia on its head. For instance, the suspenseful

use of timing and overlapping that marks Lang's films is distorted into a race against time

(and a time bomb) that Jansen easily wins, in spite of the fact that all odds are against his

victory.

Tausend Augen's title suggests that it is intended as a homage to Fritz Lang: the

title sequence’s multiple pairs of watchful eyes as well as its font are exactly copied from

the title sequence of 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse. Armin Miiller-Stahl’s character is

directly based on Mabuse, but the lack of a detective figure comparable to Wenk,

Lohmann, or Krass takes away an important part of the quoted equation. Some big names

are ironically cast: Wim Wenders as a shoplifter in a video store, Jean-Marie Straub as

lecturer of marine biology, Hannelore Hoger, Gudrun Landgrebe, and Vera Tschechowa,

are all typecast in stylized roles that are tongue-in-cheek references to their own past in

the West German film industry.11 Furthermore, the film is a comment on the power of

images, and its intrigue revolves around pirated film videos, peepshows projected on big

screens, and inserts from the video-camera memories of the main female character from

her stay in Australia. Aptly, the film is directed by Hans Christian Blumenberg, who was

himself a renowned film critic before turning to filmmaking. This kind of self-reflexivity

184

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seems to be directly borrowed from NGC films like Cardillac (Reitz 1969), and is

particularly conspicuous in Blumenberg’s next film, Rotwang mufi weg (1995), which

experiments with an intermittent disruption of the film plot through the director’s

comments in voice-over, through conversations with characters where he is clearly

addressed as “Hans,” and finally, in the film’s closing shots, which seem to be lifted from

Cardillac, showing the cast commenting on their film roles after introducing themselves.

Dorrie’s move from comedy Manner( ) to noir retains some of the NGC’s parodic

impulse and its ironic, self-reflexive humor, particularly in Tiirke's opening and closing

sequences. At the same time, her film constitutes a rethinking of— by now— mainstream

NGC elements in much the same way as her approach to comedy. Tiirke moves beyond

the genre-blinds that NGC has set on anti-detective film’s eyes, by exploiting its “Nase

fur Dazwischen” in the film’s central investigative sequences. My next section

demonstrates that the film uses parody in moderation and chiefly relies on pastiche, i.e.,

on a collage of quotations that avoids the sentimentality of nostalgia.

6.2 Revisiting Noir

James Naremore lists two approaches to revisitingnoir (274). First, he mentions

the parodic quotation of archetypal images in Godard or Scorcese’s films, and second, the

use of allusion and quotation to maintain a sense of continuity in retro-stylednoir films,

such as Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). Both modes of quoting fromfilm noir are found in

German cinema. The NGC’s parody of American hardboiled conventions creates some of

the most innovative films of the 1960s and 1970s. Thome’sDetektive, for example, starts

out with the typical noir set-up of two detectives and a female secretary in a office

furnished with a writing table and telephone set against a large window. Yet the gradual

185

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. emptying out of the office as the story progresses hints at its detectives’ ineptitude (since

they must sell their belongings to make ends meet), as well as at the film’s

disemboweling of generic conventions. Dorrie’s resuscitation ofnoir in Tiirke could,

possibly, have extended NGC’s use of parody by eviscerating genre norms. The result

would be a relentlessly cynical demystification of, for instance, the idealism of noir

detective figures.

Retro-styled noir films have rarely appeared in German adaptations of the genre,

yet films such as Fedora (Wilder 1978), or Hammett (Wenders 1982) are marked by a

strong reliance on nostalgia.12 For instance,Hammett is a lavishly produced picture, in

spite of its troubled production history in Hollywood. With truly nostalgic fervor, the film

returns wholeheartedly to the past, and recreates 1930s Los Angeles in meticulous detail.

Further, Wenders acknowledges his indebtedness to classical noir by shooting a studio

film. Dorrie could have relied similarly on a nostalgic, pandering homage to thenoir past,

by quoting without criticism and not obviously subverting our expectations, i.e., by

making her film suffer from a surfeit of clues, a shortage of solutions, and a distinct lack

of narrative closure. Instead, Tiirke adapts noir to the new decade, although its framing is

tight and restrictive in most scenes, and the color scheme is relatively muted and

monochromatic. The different connection thatTiirke achieves tofilm noir results from the

fact that Dorrie creates a film whose meta-representational strategies are no longer anti-

representational. Frederic Jameson’s definition of pastiche seems particularly appropriate

in describing Tiirke's sense for the middle ground between parodic and pandering

quotation: “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic

style... But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior

186

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter” (17). Although she

simultaneously filches and undermines conventional forms, Dorrie’s latter-day noir film

has a quality of neutral, casual allusiveness, openly borrowing from a large and diverse

body of movies, yet making no special attempt to reproduce earlier stylistic conventions.

A review fromDie Zeit argues that the in-betweenness is a feature of the collage that

pastiche achieves, and simultaneously suggestive of a typically German reality at the end

of the twentieth century:

Und nun kommt HBT: keine Komodie, kein Krimi, und ein Film, der manchmal uberhaupt keiner sein will. Der sich mal bemUht sozialkritisch gibt und mal mit dick aufgetragener cineastischer Farbdramaturgie protzt. Dieser Film will alles mogliche richtig machen und alles mogliche vermeiden: Dabei geht ihm alle Leichtigkeit floten. Er bleibt unentschlossen in der Wahl seiner Mittel—man konnte auch sagen: Er hat keine Identitat. Ein Film aus Deutschland. (Die Zeit, January 10, 1992)

In a press conference after the premiere of her film at the Hof film festival, Dorrie

dramatized yet another conflict, borrowed from German reality at the end of the twentieth

century, which nagged her re-appropriation offilm noir. “Es ist schwer, gegen diesen

Tatort-Realismus zu arbeiten,” she complained (Filmdienst 26, 1991). As if to depart

from sterile, TV-series realism, a few sequences in Tiirke are shot through blue filters.

However, when it employs eye-level camera angles, conventional continuity editing, and

a well-lit visual arena in a majority of the scenes, the film lapses into the very TV-realism

it evidently eschews. J.P. Telotte has differentiated between realistic and expressionistic

modes in his discussion of the “airless studio city” and “real city” backdrops of noir. The

main distinction he posits between the two forms is “between noir’s private and public

modes, between closed-form stories of festering neurosis on the one hand and the more

187

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. open-form stories that connect in some way to contemporary social realities on the other”

(180). Telotte terms the latter form, which is generally set in “real city” milieus, realistic

noir.

In spite of wanting to escape from a particular brand of TV realism, Tiirke does

prefer a more realistic style, by departing from noir conventions of convoluted flashback

narration, or unusual camera angles, and resorting to continuity editing, shot- reverse shot

sequences, and third person POV, as it sets about making truth both dramatically

effective and comfortably acceptable. Its lurid world of sex shops and dance bars is

illuminated with neon, steam, and smoke, creates a very different effect from noir’s use

of chaste black and white, which is also heightened through the absence of typical rain-

on-asphalt imagery. Lighting in various institutional settings is unremittingly flat, and in

most of the intimate sequences, close-ups reduce the background to a blur as opposed to

the characteristic deep focus of noir. At the same time, with its striking and effective use

of slow motion and blue filters that threaten an otherwise controlled POV, Dorrie’s film

strikes middle ground between Tatort realism and expressionistic noir, between the

former’s high-profile social issues and the latter’s private neuroses.

6.3 Anti-Detection in Happy Birthday, Tiirke!

Tiirke opens with the close up of a cigarette butt. The camera zooms out to a

medium shot of a dark passage, and shows a long-haired housekeeper lumbering forward

toward the camera, which then cuts back to the cigarette stub. In a tracking shot, the

camera follows the man’s movements as he takes out a piece of chalk and traces a line

from the cigarette stub to the nameplate on Kemal Kayankaya’s apartment. The only

sound that breaks the silence of the entire sequence is the squeak of chalk. The film’s title

188

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sequence subverts expectations about film noir and starts off by presenting incriminating

“evidence” against its detective figure, Kayankaya, while also visually emphasizing the

correlations between detection, identity, and ethnicity. The close-up of the cigarette

immediately evokes connections with garbage and its disposal, as well as with drug

dealing. Since the remainder of this film revolves around drugs and the image of Turks in

German society, the opening image of the cigarette, which recurs through the film’s main

body, embodies the most important clue of the film’s mystery—and, ultimately, its

solution. Further, the closing shot of the title sequence, a traveling shot of a garbage truck

with two foreign-looking workers riding on the back bumper, introduces the circular

structure which marks the film by completing the loop which began with the cigarette

image, and with the circle that the landlord draws around the clue. Simultaneously, the

juxtaposition of a medium shot of Kayankaya and a long shot of the garbage workers

fuses a connection between Kayankaya’s personal story and the collective existence of an

immigrant community in Germany, particularly highlighting their dismal economic status

at the bottom of a prospering capitalist society.

After incriminating Kayankaya with the evidence of the cigarette stub, the title

sequence continues with tracking, waist-down shots of a woman getting dressed inside

his apartment, and eventually pauses on the close-up of a revolver lying at her feet. An

inserted close-up of Kayankaya looking off-screen from his bed, and then pretending to

sleep, indicates that she is shot from his POV. The woman’s hands then enter the

previous frame to pick up the weapon, and the camera tilts up to capture her in a waist-up

medium shot, pans left to follow her into the bathroom, and finally cuts to a close-up of

her face, filled with hatred and resentment. A long shot finally shows the woman

189

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. throwing the revolver in a laundry basket, taking her belongings, pausing at the door and

slamming it. A close-up of Kayankaya smiling reveals his relief at her exit, but the

camera cuts to a long shot of the woman waiting by the door, and then crisply saying,

“Alles Gute noch zum Geburtstag!” The next shot confirms Kayankaya’s vulnerability,

and shows a close up of his startled face. By showing the detective to be an object rather

than the subject of the empowered visual position, the film’s title sequence problematizes

viewer identification with him, and foreshadows future moments in the story when

Kayankaya will be similarly subjugated. The landlord’s indignation and the girlfriend’s

scorn both depart from traditional, heroic conceptions of the detective figure, and instead

serve to alienate viewers from Kayankaya in their very first glimpse of him

The mocking of hardboiled conventions in the title sequence is reminiscent of the

parodic tone struck by NGC films like Detektive (which opens similarly with a sequence

exposing its private eye’s foibles). Like Thome, Dorrie refers to the classicnoir milieu of

a writing table and chairs, bookcases, a large window overlooking the city, and a

telephone, but as the camera continues to cut between different comers of Kayankaya’s

office, beer bottles dispersed in the room and its complete disarray emphasize the

distance from 1940s hardboiled films. In addition, both Peer Raben’s music and the

Frankfurt setting of Dorrie’s piece immediately evoke Fassbinder’s detective films, e.g.,

Gotter der Pest and Liebe ist kdlter als der Tod. The quintessential^ noir close-up of the

detective’s nameplate is another example of the film’s parodic impulse: instead of serving

as an establishing shot that opens the action taking place in a neat office efficiently

managed by a caring secretary, Tiirke's close-up of Kayankaya’s nameplate reveals that

his first name, Kemal, has been scribbled over and replaced with “Kamel.” In addition to

190

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. continuing the derisive tone set by the title sequence, the wordplay on the nameplate has

three anticipatory effects that mark a gradual move away from the film’s initial parodic

impulse into the realm of neutral pastiche. First, the pun on Kayankaya’s name

undermines the detective’s authority, and anticipates his getting outwitted by smarter

opponents. Second, it is typical of Dome's use of associative editing. The close-up of the

word “Kamel” recurs a few shots later on Kayankaya’s box of cigarettes and links it back

to the cigarette stub from the opening sequence, while also carrying the action forward by

capturing liter and Kayankaya in a “bonding” moment as they smoke a cigarette in

silence toward the end of the sequence. The use of soft lighting in this sequence dispels

our initially unfavorable image of Kayankaya, and recurs in future moments when he

seeks intimacy with others, mostly women and children, or when he is presented in a

contemplative mood. Third, the defaced nameplate plays with stereotypes. It seems that a

detective bom in Turkey must, inevitably, smoke a cigarette brand called Kamel.

However, the shift from whiskey to beer as the P.I.’s staple drink seems to point toward

the German context.13 Kayankaya’s office becomes the perfect mise-en-scene for

investigating his hyphenated Turkish-German identity. Tiirke thus shifts out of the title

sequence’s parodic mode and moves into neutral territory in its opening sequence.

Dorrie alludes to the classic opening sequence fromThe Maltese Falcon (Huston

1941) in the sequence depicting the meeting between Kayankaya and his client, liter

Hamul. The use of shot-countershot in Kayankaya and liter’s conversation is in keeping

with noir tradition. Yet the sequence lapses neither into sentimental nostalgia nor into

derisive parody. In their conversation, liter simply provides Kayankaya with details about

the mystery surrounding her father Wasif Ergun’s death three years ago, and her husband

191

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ahmed Hamul’s recent disappearance. At this point, and indeed, through much of the

film, the camera presents Kayankaya’s POV: close-ups of a 1000 DM bill and of liter’s

golden bangles frame Kayankaya’s explanation of his fees.14 By relying on POV shots in

the opening sequence, the camera forges viewer identification with the detective figure,

and revisits the subjective perspective later in his intense preoccupation with clues

(bricks, clocks, photographs) strewn around him. At the same time, Kayankaya is often

the object of the camera’s intense scrutiny. He is frequently shot in extreme close-ups,

with the camera moving 180 or 360 degrees around him, high-key lighting focusing

attention on his eyes, which he often squints in a concentrated effort. Although the film

desists from obsessing with alienation in typical noir style by punctuating its hard-boiled

narrative with softer tones of intimacy, the close-ups also refrain from exalting the

detective figure, creating, instead, a distancing effect that is in keeping with the

intermittently parodic tone of the film. This disturbance is intensified by frequently using

shots and countershots to cut up the shared space between Kayankaya and the others,

whether they are of Turkish or German origin, such as in the conversation between liter

and Kayankaya.

The liter—Kayankaya conversation presents the investigator as a man of

mystery—a mystery that needs to be clarified even before liter can appoint him on the

case. liter quizzes Kayankaya about his unwillingness to speak in Turkish with her, and

seems only partially satisfied by his explanation about his inability to speak the language:

he was adopted at a young age by German parents after his Turkish parents died.

Kayankaya’s personal identity is, therefore, shown to be as important as the case he is

about to be assigned. The next shot, a close-up of liter’s blue headdress, will function as

192

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the film’s central marker of Turkishness, and the headdress’ recurrence in the

investigation will suggest the continued emphasis placed on the detective’s identity even

as he tries to solve the mystery. The final POV shot of the sequence of liter walking on

the street, seen from Kayankaya’s office window, is remarkable for its isolation of the

sound of her heels clicking on the pavement. Having drawn attention to itself, Dorrie’s

soundtrack then anticipates the action of the next sequence in keeping with the

overlapping sound effects of Fritz Lang’s anti-detective films.

The dislocations and relocations between image and sound, or the non

synchronization of visual and aural effects becomes a prominent feature of the film’s

investigation sequences, and lends them a slick pace, while allowing the viewers a

privileged glimpse into the subsequent action before the detective. Whereas Lang exposes

several discrepancies in his use of continuity editing and overlapping for a genre-

transgressive effect, Dorrie relies on overlapping and continuity editing to present a

smooth and fast-paced progression of the investigation. For example, a medium shot of

Kayankaya driving his car and simultaneously dressing himself in a formal shirt ends by

playing Kayankaya’s voice on the soundtrack, speaking German with a slight Turkish

accent. The aural flashforward enables viewers to anticipate the next sequence in the

police station, in which Kayankaya claims to be a Turkish ambassador investigating

Wasif Ergiin’s death on the soundtrack.

The mise-en-scene in the police office—the well-lit, neatly arranged rooms, the

expensive scotch that Eiler offers Kayankaya, and the exquisite artwork that adorns

Hosch’s office walls—all contrast sharply with the squalor and chaos of Kayankaya’s

office. Kayankaya’s initial success at detection is evident from the information that Eiler

193

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. willingly provides him, finally directing him to chief inspector Futt. A close-up of

Kayankaya’s startled look upon hearing Futt’s name, however, immediately destroys the

pretense. Throughout Tiirke, the camera intermittently shows close-ups of Kayankaya’s

startled face, particularly when he gets caught deceiving others or when he is outsmarted,

e.g., in Hannah’s apartment, when he is surprised by her boyfriend. On each occasion, his

wide-open eyes seem to allow him to see less than his normal vision permits, impair his

ability to penetrate the surfaces, and bring him a step farther from the investigation.

Deception, not detection, seems to be Kayankaya’s trade and certainly his trademark.

What, however, is the impetus behind this masquerade? Apart from wanting to get

information while avoiding the consequent feeling of vulnerability, his obsession with

role-playing suggests an unwillingness to be equated with a single, rigid category,

coupled with an introspective glance at the self.

Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of detective fiction might help us understand this

unwillingness. His essay on detective fiction distinguishes between a whodunit and a

thriller based on the temporal sequencing of crime and detection: a whodunit begins with

crime and is based on retrospection, while the thriller no longer contains “a crime anterior

to the moment of the narrative... Prospection takes the place of retrospection” (47).Tiirke

reveals an interesting tension between prospection and retrospection. The action is only

partly based on a crime that happens before the film starts, namely W asifs death. The

investigation begins in full earnest only after another crime has occurred within the film’s

narrative in the form of Ahmed’s murder, a crime which also endangers Kayankaya’s

life. In keeping with Todorov’s characterization, the dominant model inTiirke seems to

be prospection, or the threat of imminent danger even as Kayankaya investigates the

194

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. crimes. The soundtrack, which often precedes the visual beginning of a sequence, also

echoes the film’s relationship to prospection. The most significant aspect of this tension,

however, is that it introduces a new element. The impetus for Tiirke ’s action results from

neither retrospection nor prospection, but rather fromintrospection. The film form

emphasizes introspection by interrupting its objective perspective in two ways: first, by

breaking the film’s fast-paced detective narrative with four sequences shot in slow

motion through Kayankaya’s subjective perspective; and second, through its uniquely

non-realistic and non-diegetic use of colors. Through both means, the film draws

attention to its parallel investigative narrative, namely to Kayankaya’s grappling with his

hybridity as a contested and problematic, but viable form of identity.

Blue tones predominate the film after liter leaves her blue headdress behind in

Kayankaya’s office: “Everybody is dressed in blue, grey, or purple clothes; we painted

every wall, every detail... in special colors, we created lipsticks in special colors,” said

Dorrie (Angier 57). In addition to her technical motivation for the striking vocabulary of

colors— to help her film escape “TV realism”—Dorrie claimed that she wanted to shock

viewers. Angier correctly observes, “[Dorrie] wants to make sure that whenever red flares

out, we notice. And we do” (ibid.). Angier’s list of scenes that stand out due to the

sudden flare of red color include the love scene between liter and Kayankaya, scenes in

the red light district bars, and, perhaps most strikingly, in the group garbage workers, in

bright orange uniforms. But she errs in making the unequivocal connection between

Turks and red, the color of love and emotions: “This is what Germans think, Dorrie is

saying: Turks are garbage. And when the dustmen blaze out in red, we see her dissenting

view: Turks are love” (ibid.). In fact, blue is the color that is most frequently presented as

195

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a marker of Turkishness. liter’s coy refusal to take her blue headdress back from

Kayankaya on several occasions results in its recurrence during every investigative

sequence. The blue piece of clothing seems to motivate Kayankaya to continue his efforts

at solving the murder mystery, but also hints at liter and Kayankaya’s desire to prolong

their relationship. Even the love scene between liter and Kayankaya, which is punctuated

with red tones, e.g., through the image of lighted cigarette tips glowing in a dark room

(hearkening back to Bogart), returns to the blue headdress as its final image. In addition

to its central role in the detective narrative, then, the color blue momentarily disengages

Kayankaya from the murder mystery, and marks his meditative glance at personal

themes. The four slow motion sequences fulfill a similar function.

“What the film noir does so effectively is to recognize that we “couldn’t see”

normally, and then shift focus to that which is, disconcertingly, too close to be seen, too

much a part of our personal and cultural lives for us to view and assess clearly” (Telotte

217). Dorrie’s reliance on slow motion in key scenes shot through Kayankaya’s POV

seems to suggest a heightened potential for the processing of information, which can be

perceived and absorbed more easily, and greater capacity for detection in these moments.

Ironically, only one of the four slow motion shots has any bearing on the murder

investigation. With their relaxed pace, these slow motion shots interrupt the hectic pace

of the film—and, related as most of them are to moments of Turkish community life—

provide an oasis of comfort in its desolate cityscape. They also provide an antidote to the

restless traveling shots that dominate the film’s investigative sequences, which often

begin with a long shot of an S-Bahn moving from left to right across the screen, and

suggest that the film is catching its breath before it embarks on a hot pursuit of the

196

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. criminals. Above all, the slow motion shots strengthen the link to introspection, and

subtly mark a shift from Kayankaya’s interest in liter’s money to his involvement in the

case, from his nonchalance toward his hybridity to a deepened reflection on his Turkish

origins and on the reliability of his vision as a detective.

Two sequences in slow motion bracket Kayankaya’s first encounter with liter’s

family. Set in the open wilderness surrounding the bare concrete buildings that house

only immigrants, the first slow motion sequence is triggered by a panning shot following

two men carrying a deep blue Oriental painting across the road. The camera inter-cuts

between extreme close-ups of Kayankaya’s face and various members of the Turkish

community, revisiting the color blue in a frontal medium shot of a little girl in a blue

coat. A boy on a tricycle appears in a long shot and moves from right to left across the

screen, even as a garbage truck crosses from left to right. The film then cuts to a still shot

of an empty patch of grass, exaggerated in its isolation due to the contrast with the

activity in the preceding frame. As if in cognizance of this contrast, the Turkish music

playing on the soundtrack breaks off abruptly, and the camera rests on a close-up of

Kayankaya’s profile, with a boy’s voice asking, “Sind Sie Herr Kayankaya?” on the

soundtrack. Having been introduced in slow motion, the motifs of Turkishness now take

center stage in the Ergiin apartment sequence. The camera’s tracking motion in the

apartment recalls the similar motion in Kayankaya’s office, but also reveals a striking

contrast to the office-space that was littered with paper, machines and beer, most notably

through its nearness (captured in the warning given to Kayankaya to take off his shoes:

“Sonst schimpft meine Oma”). A few slow pans present fluid images of space as they

linger over the apartment walls between rooms, which are visualized as connecting rather

197

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. than dividing space in direct contrast to Kayankaya’s office. For example, a shot of

Kayankaya and Yilmas in the living room with liter’s little daughter in the background

pans to a shot of them moving to the hallway: the little girl enters the frame a few

seconds later, at the same distance as in the earlier shot. However, the sequence gradually

creates a claustrophobic effect by repeatedly focusing on the cluttered, ornate furniture,

subdued lighting (no windows are revealed in any of the tracking shots of the apartment),

and above all, by extreme close-ups of the intricate, web-like design on the wallpaper and

carpet.

The composition, which presents the Ergiins and Kayankaya in diagonally

opposing comers of the frame, emphasizes the huge metaphorical distance between them.

The sequence highlights Kayankaya’s outsider status suggested by the opening slow

motion shot. The action in the apartment, although not shot in slow motion, is drawn out

in time. The uncomfortably long silence that dominates the soundtrack, and the prolonged

still shots of Kayankaya and the Ergiin family seem to extend the slow movement of

time, without making the atmosphere peaceful. For example, a frontal medium shot of

Kayankaya framed against the intricate honeycomb design of the wallpaper, with a huge

picture of the Ergiin family looming in the background, ironically suggests his

entrapment and increasing personal involvement in the case. The second slow motion

shot, which concludes the Ergiin apartment sequence, begins abruptly and appears to be

presented from an objective perspective. A close-up of Ahmed’s picture cuts to a high

angle shot of a garbage dump, with the tentacles of a crane releasing metal pieces into a

pit in slow motion. The blue filter used in this frame makes the slow motion almost

idyllic and surreal, and also connects the garbage with the sanitation workers from the

198

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. film’s opening sequence and the blue Oriental painting from the earlier slow motion

sequence. The camera then tracks to a long shot of Kayankaya standing at the edge of the

pit, and situates the slow motion shots in his POV.

Significantly, in both of the slow motion shots that frame the Ergiin sequence, the

ostensibly relaxed pace is undermined by an element of violence lurking within the

frame: the violent visual illusion created by the camera, i.e„ the little boy disappearing

behind the truck in the first sequence, is echoed by an equally disturbing discrepancy

revealed between the aestheticized, blue-tinted image of garbage and the abject reality of

the garbage workers’ poor social status and living conditions. In both cases, the violence

erupts in subsequent shots: in the first instance, through the altercation between liter and

her family about Ahmed’s involvement in drug-dealing, and in the second, through

Kayankaya’s violent exchange with the sanitation workers he tries to interrogate. The

fistfight highlights both Kayankaya’s scathing wit that instigates the confrontation, and

also his loss of immunity as he gets beaten up. The “trouble-is-my-middle-name” pose

struck by Kayankaya directly connects him to his hardboiled American predecessors.

Further, the violence causes the film to shake off its slow motion tranquility momentarily,

and to erupt into fast-paced action sequences that carry the investigation forward to the

red-light district. The birthday motif from the title sequence abruptly recurs in

Kayankaya’s conversation with the prostitute, Margarethe. A close-up of his ID card,

with his birth-date, leads to her playful wish, “Happy Birthday, Tiirke.” The very next

shot, however, transfigures this birthday into a death-day, after Kayankaya finally

succeeds in locating Ahmed.

199

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In its third slow-motion sequence, Tiirke presents a medium shot of liter’s

husband, Ahmed Hamul, inter-cut with a medium shot of Kayankaya shadowing him

Kayankaya is again shown to be vulnerable and is tripped over by a group of hooligans.

The next medium shot, captured from Kayankaya’s low angle perspective, briefly shows

Ahmed, who immediately disappears behind a cloud of smoke. The Aim’s intrusive use

of smoke in the murder sequence elides an on-screen crime and conceals the murderer’s

identity. In addition, the use of smoke also points to a clouding over of Kayankaya’s

vision at a critical moment. The slow motion of the murder sequence is, ironically,

pointed out as a filmic device that does not necessarily help the detective in his

investigation. Tiirke thus thematizes the detective’s vulnerability, and fuses guilt and

investigation within its sleuth in the footsteps of postwar German anti-detective cinema.

A long shot of a corpse surrounded by police detectives, among them Eiler and Futt, cuts

to a shot from Kayankaya’s perspective of a close-up of Ahmed’s face. Occurring almost

halfway through the film, the crime scene makes the film’s investigation more pressing

by shifting focus from Ahmed’s disappearance to his murder. A sense of culpability and

responsibility motivates Kayankaya’s detective pursuit in the remainder of the film.

Tiirke now reveals a soft side to its tough sleuth: the morgue sequence, where liter

identifies her husband’s corpse, contrasts Kayankaya’s humaneness against Eiler’s casual

indifference.

Once Kayankaya stops relying on disguises and deception as tools of detection,

the whodunit shifts parameters to play itself out in the mystery of the self, questioning

ethnic identity, but also the categories of guilt and innocence as they relate to the self.

The only conclusion that can be reached with any certainty is the fact that identity is

200

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. neither as stable nor natural as it seems to be. During the second half of the film,

Kayankaya emerges as a Bogart-like, or- in more contemporary terms— as a Cole-like

figure, the tough man whose exterior disguises compassion and an outraged sense of

justice.15 Like both these American counterparts, Dome’s P.I. believes that the law has

little to do with right or wrong, and that only individuals can give justice.

Another change occurs in the detective’s characterization during the second half

ofTiirke. He gets closer to exploring the Turkish heritage that he has thus far merely

exploited. The second Ergiin apartment sequence presents his first genuine attempt to

communicate with liter’s mother, Melike Ergiin, with the help of his broken Turkish

plastered together from a dictionary that liter has given him as a birthday gift. The

sequence culminates in an unexpected result. In flawless German, the mother confirms

Kayankaya’s suspicion that the mystery is linked to drug-dealing, and expresses her

frustration: “Wasif war der einzige Mann in dieser Familie. Und jetzt ist er tot. Wer

beschiitzt uns? ... Meine Familie stirbt.” As the camera focuses on Kayankaya’s startled

face in reaction to Melike’s fluent German, she cautions him about his flawed vision:

“Sie sind nicht sehr klug. Sie sehen nur mit Ihren Augen.” The admonition serves to

foreshadow the film’s solution by warning Kayankaya not to trust appearances, and

triggers his intense investigative efforts in the next few sequences. This shift is visually

reinforced by the film’s departure from slow motion to a rapid cutting between shots: the

last slow motion scene occurs after the morgue sequence, when Kayankaya looks into a

cafe at a group of Turkish men conversing over drinks. The film simultaneously shifts its

attention from Kayankaya’s problematic identity to a concentrated chase of clues.

201

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prior to Melike’s warning, Kayankaya proceeds like an individual who is

uncertain of how to read the signs he sees, and uncertain of what they might mean. Clues

like Hannah’s clock and Yilmas’ knife appear flagrantly on the surface, yet Kayankaya

fails to read them while he strives to uncover depths by tearing open surfaces (e.g., in

Hannah’s apartment), until Melike’s counsel to “not see only with his eyes” leads him to

doubt his microscopic vision. Kayankaya now begins to rely more on communicating

with others, on speech, while following leads. For example, his examination of the site of

Wasif s car accident yields two clues: a broken side mirror, and an x-ray of the cracked

skull of a little girl from a settlement near the highway, who died accidentally a few days

after Wasif s mishap. Kayankaya interrogates the girl’s father and the doctor who signed

the postmortem report. The latter agrees that the head injury, believed to have been

caused by a loose roof tile, could have been caused by a policeman’s baton, thereby

providing an important lead. Similarly, during his questioning of Hannah, whom he

considers to be Ahmed's girlfriend, Kayankaya successfully gathers important clues in

her apartment: cut up magazines, needle marks on Hannah’s forearm which indicate her

dependence on drugs, and most surprisingly, her romantic involvement with liter’s father

Wasif, who supplied drugs both to her and to his own daughter Ayse.

The investigation sequence closes by strengthening Kayankaya’s suspicion

against the police detectives. Retired commissioner Ebert helps Kayankaya to trace both

accident reports involving Wasif toKripo Commissioner Futt, and his assistants, Eiler

and Hosch. However, the successful detection is soon undermined. Tiirke presents a

detective whose life is constantly jeopardized by the mystery he investigates. Even during

the investigation sequence, violence seeps into the film, for instance, in the dream

202

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sequence that shows a smashed up toy car, followed by a shot of Kayankaya’s damaged

office. An extreme close-up of the girl’s x-ray cuts to a close-up of a car’s side mirror, in

which Kayankaya can be seen walking down the road. The intercutting between the side

mirror, with a blurred profile of a man’s face, and Kayankaya’s face heightens the

suspense, which reaches its climax as the car suddenly lurches to a start and almost runs

Kayankaya over. In the next sequence, unknown assailants attack Kayankaya while he

lies in the bathtub listening to Turkish tapes.16 The violence inflicted on Dorrie’s private

eye follows thenoir tradition of the vulnerable protagonist, and also connects him to

predecessors from German anti-detective film, like Kersten or Krass.

The final showdown begins with a beat-up Kayankaya limping into the police

records office to fetch accident reports involving Wasif. The reports, signed by Futt,

Eiler, and Hosch outside of their jurisdiction, provide incriminating evidence against

them The next few shots cut between two different spaces: first, Futt’s apartment, where

Kayankaya, accompanied by ex-commissioner Ebert and the public prosecutor he in wait

for Futt; second, Hannah’s apartment, where Eiler and Hosch are torturing Hannah for

sending threatening letters to Futt. The sequence ties all the loose ends of the film

together. Kayankaya correctly deduces the link between the ransom notes cut out of

printed material from Futt’s apartment and the cut up magazines from Hannah’s

apartment, and rushes back to her apartment to rescue her in the nick of time. Eiler and

Hosch’s confessions reveal the deals they have struck, under Futt’s directions, with

Turkish immigrants like Wasif. Eiler confirms that Wasif was coerced into the drug trade

after being arrested under false charges on account of a car accident, for which the other

car driver had actually accepted responsibility. In spite of the rapid cross-cutting between

203

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. two spaces, time passes with excruciating slowness in the final sequence, thereby

returning to the pre-detection sequences’ effect of slow motion. The camera pans

repeatedly around Futt’s living room, past the bored and stony-eyed faces of Frau Futt,

her lover, ex-commissioner Ebert, and the public prosecutor, occasionally pausing on

extreme close-ups of the platters of food that Frau Futt ceaselessly serves.

After drawing attention to seeing through its slow pace, the sequence returns to

the theme of a faulty vision that fails to see through facades. Frau Futt comments, “Man

darf seinen Augen nie glauben, wissen Sie... man darf nie glauben, was man sieht.’’

Since Kayankaya has come a long way since Frau Ergiin’s similar warning about “not

seeing only with one’s eyes,” it turns out that the statement is directed at commissioner

Futt himself. Frau Futt continues, “Mein Mann glaubt nur, was er sieht,” revealing the

error behind Futt’s smug confidence, and also foreshadowing his defeat by Kayankaya.

Particularly striking is contrast between the commissioner’s belief in his wife’s blind love

and subservience toward him, and the reality of her extramarital affair and her decision to

expose his secret guilt. Although Kayankaya is able to successfully prove Futt, Eiler and

Hosch’s guilt to the public prosecutor on the basis of the evidence he has gathered, it is

Frau Futt who provides the ultimate evidence that seals the criminals’ guilt. Adhering to

her own maxim about not trusting appearances, Frau Futt kicks and shatters open the

giant TV set in her living room to reveal a gleaming stack of gold bricks and heaps of

narco tics-filled plastic bags, thereby leading Kayankaya’s investigation to its successful

conclusion.17

204

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Positioned near the end of the film, the act serves to privilege the P.I.’s authority

over the police by undermining the credibility of its most powerful representative, Futt,

and by providing the ultimate substantiation of the fact that appearances are not always

commensurate with reality. Followingnoir tradition, the decaying urban landscape in

Tiirke articulates a set of moral equivalencies: the streets may be the locus of crime, and

may be run-down and shabby, but are neither more nor less corrupt than the elegant

houses of the well-to-do. Some of the most striking panorama shots of the city are

through the Futt apartment’s windows, and it is no surprise that the crowning clue in the

chain of evidence in the murder mystery is hidden within that apartment.

Although Kayankaya has extorted Eiler’s confession about Ahmed’s murder, the

torture sequence in Hannah’s apartment has made it clear that the Futt-Eiler-Hosch trio

did not have any hand in the son-in-law’s death. The final sequence of Dorrie’s film

reveals that Kayankaya has deliberately incriminated the three police detectives, although

he is aware that Ahmed’s real murderer is still on the loose. Kayankaya’s confrontation

with liter’s brother, Yilmas, and his observation, “Nur ein Amateur benutzt ein Messer,”

is followed by Yilmas’ acknowledgment of his guilt. Kayankaya’s decision to not report

this finding to the investigating magistrate reveals the subtle distinction he makes

between hard-core, professional murderers and criminals like the police officers, and

amateur murderers driven by the desire to protect their family like Yilmas. Although it

punishes one set of criminals, the film nevertheless lets another criminal go scot-free.

Ironically, the modern-day Marlowe follows in the footsteps of hisnoir predecessor,

helping out the innocent and the weak—but the innocent turn out to be not so harmless in

the end. This brings us to the question: does Kayankaya not punish the real criminal out

205

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of consideration for his client, liter, who has paid him to find Ahmed’s murderer, but who

would not be able to bear the reality of Yilmas’ guilt? Or does he, in fact, not care

whodunit?

6.4 Ethnic noir

Dome’s film certainly offers a post-1968 perspective onfilm noir, a genre that

dominated the NGC. More than as parody or as pastiche, Tiirke is memorable as a tough

movie about urban corruption, the depravity of legal institutions, and about the status of

immigrants in contemporary German society, as this review rightly points out:

Kayankaya ist ein Held, dem... das sympathische Mantelchen des Antihelden uberzogen ist: als... ein Aussenseiter und ein ewiger Verlierer. Unter der harten Schale versteckt sich scheinbar sensible Mannlichkeit— das Pendant zur Hure mit dem goldenen Herzen... konnte sich leicht als Parodie sehen (und lesen) lassen, tate der Imitator nicht so, wie wenn er seine Figur mit scharfem Blick mitten ins pralle Leben der urbanen BRD schickte, um ihr einen gnadenlosen Spiegel vorzuhalten. (Neue Ziircher Zeitung, January 9, 1992)

Along with its nods to thefilm noir tradition, Tiirke1 s foregrounding of German history

sets it firmly in the tradition of postwar West German anti-detective cinema. The

connection between ethnicity and noir forges the new point at which the film connects to

German (anti-detective) cinematic history. In the best anti-detective tradition, then, Tiirke

is more than a noir parody. Perhaps it is the mixture offilm noir- innovations in the

context of Germany’s social situation that creates the new formula for anti-detection at a

time when Germany is entering a new phase with the demise of West Germany as a

separate political entity.

206

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tiirke presents the hollowness and ineptitude of institutions like the police and the

family, or the fickleness of concepts like ethnicity in 1990s German society.18

Paradoxically, the removal of borders between East and West Germany seems to

reinforce differences that emerge in daily encounters. At the same time, as Deniz Goktiirk

observes, there is a shift in the representation of migrants, who are no longer presented as

dwelling worlds apart from modernity, but depicted as moving right at its center: “No

matter whether we regard it as loss or gain, in an increasingly urban, multicultural world

of traveling cultures and conflicting voices, identity and difference can no longer be

defined as fixed, stable and confined within one coherent culture or language. Routes/

roots are subject to constant negotiation, home and belonging become difficult to

determine” (65-66). In her film, Dorrie is presented with the challenge of visually

representing a hybrid detective in various contact zones within Frankfurt. Following

Arjouni’s novel, Dorrie creates a character who is both an immigrant in Germany and an

emigrant from Turkish culture: “Kayankaya wird von Deutschen als Tiirke behandelt,

von den Tttrken als Deutscher” {TAZ, March 16, 1991). More than the novel, however,

the film emphasizes the fact that Kayankaya is also emigrating back into the Turkish

culture that he has long since forgotten and disclaimed. After witnessing the police

detectives’ exploitation of Germany’s multicultural society to establish relations of

domination and subordination, Kayankaya’s unease with his own hyphenated identity

slowly gives way to his feeling of rootedness precisely within his hybridity.

The fact that “Germany right now... is multicultural, but nobody seems to want to

acknowledge it,” is Dome’s chief complaint (Phillips 177).Tiirke subverts traditional

hegemonies and power structures, in the case of present-day Germany, the relationship

207

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between the natives and the outsiders, through a character who is himself always

conceived as an outsider: the detective. For instance, in a key sequence, we see

Kayankaya moving his body in profile to the rhythms of an African drummer. With a

sudden move of his head, Kayankaya looks at the camera, which loses focus for a second

and cuts to the close up of Futt’s hand beckoning from the window of a classy bar. The

next shot finds him at the bar, surrounded by Futt, Eiler and Hosch, united with them

through the ritual of drinking. The scene ends with Futt’s remark about Kayankaya’s fake

gold watch, echoing Kayankaya’s admiration of Futt’s real gold one at the beginning of

the film. The gesture toward the fake gold watch that Kayankaya has bought from the

prostitute, Hannah, underlines his solidarity with the margins of society, and thereby

becomes a mute response to Futt’s high pathos as he laments about his loss of faith in

humanity as a result of the policing profession. Leaving Kayankaya in their space, Futt

and his assistants now proceed to occupy Kayankaya’s space on the street, as Eiler

literally replaces Kayankaya by moving to the rhythms of the drummer—however, with

money jingling in his hand. In the next shot, the waiter presents Kayankaya with the

collective bill. The P.I.’s swapping of positions, from the margins to the center, appears

to have a hefty price attached to it.

The relations between the detective, the outcasts, and die police are further

complicated by a sense of ambivalence. Having thwarted the expectations of his parents

and become a shady detective, Kayankaya nevertheless seeks some form of affirmation

from Ebert, a retired police officer with humanity and principles. Moreover, Ebert

acknowledges Futt’s corruption, yet grudgingly admits that Futt is a “good policeman.”

Kayankaya’s strong disagreement with Ebert’s sentiment foreshadows the film’s eventual

208

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. de-centering of the police, in order to focus on its outsiders. While the most basic

convention of the hard-boiled tradition is to question the legitimacy of the community

itself, Tiirke destabilizes this impulse: hovering on the margins of urban society, it seeks a

new community of foreigners, drug peddlers, prostitutes and middlemen, represented by

the “Hure mit dem goldenen Herzen,” Margarethe. This is different from the responses of

noir films, which present crime as endemic and therefore intractable, and force the exit

(through departure or death) of the detective from the scene of crime, realizing that one

can run, but not hide. Tiirke, however, creates a sense of solidarity among the margins

and also binds them inextricably with the P.I.’s identity: Kayankaya is repeatedly helped

out by outcasts. Throughout, the German world is a dangerously alien territory; at the

same time, poor areas that were never represented in studio noir films are given an aura

of peace and dignity. The dance clubs and the prostitutes’ apartments are sometimes

violent, but they seem more accommodating than the polished surfaces of the Homicide

Bureau and Futt’s apartment. The film’s closing sequence conclusively displaces the

boundaries of the “native” community by pushing the marginalized members of society

to the core of its happy ending.

Tiirke's multivalent ending shows an androgynous Kayankaya wearing liter’s

blue headdress and a mustache (both markers of “Turkishness” in the film), as he drives

to consummate his desire for his German love, Margarethe. Instead of anoirish sense of

unease, the film leaves its viewers with a sense of productive hybridity. The different

birthday presents Kayankaya gets throughout the film—the piece of cake he buys

himself, the Turkish-German dictionary liter brings, the smashed toy car in the mail, the

false mustache which liter’s daughter gives him— mark, in my opinion, his shift from

209

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. isolation into community, and simultaneously blur the distinction between the detection

of crime and the uncovering of identity. The film visualizes this mixture by inter-cutting

between images of detective work and shots, in slow motion, of Kayankaya’s various

associations of Turkish identity marking a progression (e.g. shots of the tricycle, garbage

and garbage trucks, and finally, of members of the Turkish community).

Although it reveals the corruption beneath the sleek facade of Frankfurt in the

manner offilm noir, Tiirke celebrates the resilience and tenacity of an underrepresented

culture. Even after confronting sobering social inequity and imbalance, Kayankaya is not

tragically defeated. In fact, the closing shots show him being far from sober, striking a

relaxed pose quite different from the crushed protagonists of postwar German anti

detective film and from angry ethnic detectives. Tiirke's joyless conclusion is softened by

a qualified attempt to assert some kind of justice or return to social equilibrium. The

smile on Kayankaya’s face that accompanies his startled expression indicates some sense

of achievement and happiness despite the nagging feeling of futility and doubt. The

exhaustion of anti-detection seems to have given way to a departure from inadequacy and

destruction, suggesting that postwar German anti-detective film’s pessimistic message

might, finally, have become defunct.

Tiirke's happy ending proves to be a non sequitur, a solution that does not

necessarily follow from the on-screen investigation. Dorrie’s film concludes not with a

classic shoot-out, as both the preceding action ornoir conventions might have suggested,

but with a hint at the imminent fulfillment of Kayankaya’s romantic relationship with

Margarethe.

210

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. [Es] wird Ddrrie iibelgenommen, dafi sie oicht radikal genug ist, daB ihre Filme den Status quo gutheiCen. [...] Das meint Doris Dorrie ironisch; ihre Geschichten sind nicht wortlich gemeint, obwohl sie sehr gut Geschichten erzahlen kann” (Fischetti 247)

In her interview with Fischetti, Dorrie insists that she strives not to make her movies “so

konsumierbar und accessible wie moglich” (255). It could be, therefore, that the epiphany

at the end of Tiirke is affirmative, yet ironic. Along with the detective, the viewers of

Tiirke are warned not to trust what they see, and to reflect on images in order to catch

discrepancies, particularly within the stereotypes that the film flagrantly exposes.

Ironically, this also makes viewers suspicious of the film’s happy end and its espousal of

positive ideals like the detective’s heroism or romantic fulfillment. The absence of an

emblematic shot of the romantic couple together on screen suggests that the ending’s

imminent happiness might be an empty illusion, an impression which also tinges the

successful solution of the mystery with despair and doubt.19 Instead of providing closure,

the film’s happy ending perpetuates the deception that has overwhelmed its investigative

plot (e.g., through its detective’s role-playing), and that has made the positive conclusion

possible in the first place. The happy ending, in fact, constitutes the film’s anti-detective

effect by revealing itself as being doubly deceptive. First, it leaves liter and her family in

the dark about the true solution to Ahmed’s murder mystery. Second, the final shot of

Kayankaya shows him draping liter’s blue veil and adorning a moustache, ensconced in

precisely those stereotypes of Turkish appearance that he has exploited, but also

struggled to combat during the film’s narrative. Above all, the film’s final shot—an

extreme close-up of Kayankaya’s startled eyes following a little boy on a tricycle—

211

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. connects back to the little boy from the first slow motion sequence and to Kayankaya’s

startled expression in the title sequence, thereby suggesting that neither the private eye

nor the film’s plot has progressed any further than at Tiirke's beginning.

Kayankaya unravels the mystery, implicates police officers, rescues the Ergiin

family and manages to stay alive and happy at the end. And yet, the “ethnic divide’’

remains in force in post-Wall Germany. The coexistence of cultures has also heightened a

sense of distance: a German prostitute refuses the advances of a Turkish customer on the

grounds of “principle,” while in a startling shot toward the end of the film the presence of

two burkha-clad women in the red-light district seems strangely out of place. The bar

owner’s remark about Kayankaya’s ‘Turkish” appearance in the closing sequence,

“Hatten Sie nicht immer so einen Schnurrbart?” can thus be read symptomatically as

infinitely perpetuating stereotypical images of ethnicity, thereby negating the film’s

action. Even though Dorrie goes to extreme lengths to focus on Kayankaya’s Turkish-

German identity in a way that Arjouni’s novel does not necessarily foreground (and the

fact that there is a gap of six years between the novel and film might account tor this

difference), the film does not bear any overt echoes of a post-Wall Germany. One

reviewer scathingly observes: “Vom Thema Auslanderfeindlichkeit bleibt der Film

ziemlich unberiihrt. Das Projekt sei ein paar Jahre alt, sagt Dorrie entschuldigend. Ja,

aber warum denn iiberhaupt?” (Filmdienst 26, 1991). In concluding this chapter, I want to

address the question of “why ethnic detective film?” and connect it to the efficacy of the

anti-detective model for 1990s German cinema.

212

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Partly as a result of its neutrality, Tiirke can be variously read as a straight

Literaturverfilmung, as a pastiche ofnoir conventions, and in the footsteps of West

German anti-detective cinema, as a continued allegory about Germany’s new post

unification, post-NGC historical situation. Questions of identity and constructions of

difference and ethnicity, as they are explored in Tiirke, are germane to anti-detective

film’s exploration of German identity through the fate of its detective figures. Like

Messer im Kopf, the film initiates a paradigmatic shift away ftom the desolate corpses of

defeated detectives toward representing the detective’s body as the site of contested and

conflicted identities. In an interview, Dorrie clarifies her representation of cultural

relationships in Tiirke-.

[Tiirke ist kein Film,] wo es in jeder Szene nur darum geht, wie schlecht Auslander hier und anderswo behandelt werden. Ich mochte, dass selbstverstandlich auch ein Tiirke mal ein dummer Hund sein kann, ohne dass damit irgendein Vorurteil verbunden wird. Schliesslich ist jeder im Leben eben mal nett und mal blod. Das ist meine Utopie vom Ende des Rassismus: dass endlich jeder einfach sein kann, was er eben ist! ( Berliner Zeitung, January 11, 1992)

Underneath its satirical humor and frolicking, Tiirke carefully and systematically

overhauls all stereotypes, including jaded expectations about the noir and ethnic detective

genres, and rediscovers the boundaries of anti-detection for German cinema. In spite of

its more conventional style,Tiirke' s story eventually opens onto a complex and unsettling

vantage that clearly echoes the films that my earlier chapters have examined. The

inscription of anti-detective motifs, such as the detective’s vulnerability and the

intertwining of political and personal aspects, within the film’s recuperative strategies

and its ostensibly happy ending suggest an important development. The happy ending, as

213

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I have demonstrated, powerfully calls attention to the paradoxical and deceptive nature of

closure. Tiirke could, in fact, be the film up to which this genre has been winding, casting

a hopeful, and yet revealing light on the darkness of the anti-detective world.

214

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CONCLUSION

Slightly more than four decades separate Kautner’s Epilog from Dorrie’sTiirke.

Both films use anti-detection in combination with the paradigm of Americanfilm noir.

both evoke angst-ridden urban milieus, where corruption and decadence abound; both

constantly undermine the detective’s authority by exposing his lack of immunity; and,

both conflate detection and romance. In each film the detective’s investigation of crimes

uncovers a larger social evil. Yet, the two films could hardly be more dissimilar. While

Peter Zabel’s German identity and social polish enable him to move with relative ease

through every level of society, Kemal Kayankaya faces barriers and danger

everywhere—whether he is inside his apartment or office, in downtown Frankfurt or in

the suburbs, he often narrowly escapes being beaten or killed, and is sadistically

roughened up by gangsters or brutally assaulted by the police. Most importantly, in place

of Zabel, the joumalist-turned-detective caught in a relentless pursuit of the truth that

costs him his life, Dorrie gives us a private investigator who always keeps one eye fixed

on the monetary reward that his case brings, who is not just alive at the end of the film

but can drive off into the night to consummate his romantic relationship.

The four decades separating Epilog and Tiirke also mark the successive phases of

anti-detective cinema in West Germany. As we have noted, anti-detection had a prolific

vogue in West German cinema, where it symptomatically registered the crises affecting a

215

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. postwar society. A sense of exhaustion regarding the detective genre’s efficacy clusters

largely around the 1950s. Anti-detective cinema’s inability to generate enlightenment and

justice is linked to its persistent questioning of the Nazi past, which flies in the face of

contemporary tendencies to resist such acts of memory. A parodic reappropriation of

investigative narratives characterizes the New German Cinema’s contribution to anti

detection, and marks a new generation’s break away from its cinematic legacy and the

questionable legacy of the Third Reich. By the end of the 1970s, anti-detective film shifts

out of art-cinematic techniques and is couched in a commercially more viable packaging,

although its intermittent genre-transgressions still remain compelling. The combination of

genre-questioning and an inquiry into contemporary sociopolitical conditions continues

to resurface in the 1980s and 1990s. An examination of relevant issues such as

multiculturalism or unification ultimately provides an edge with which German anti

detective cinema moves beyond a sense of deja-vu, deja-lu, dejd-entendu (Bertens/

D’haen 114), or the feeling of telling the same anti-detective story over and over again,

having traversed a range of responses to genre, from exhaustion to parody to pastiche.

The popularity of West German detective cinema has long since been challenged

by television, starting with the first TV detective series, Stahlnetz. Since the late 1970s,

attention to big-screen Krimis has been overshadowed by viewers’ unflagging enthusiasm

for the trendy narratives of Tatort. In fact, television’s transition from the old-world

detective, Der Kommissar, to the iconoclastic outsider, Horst Schimanski, is comparable

to the shift from traditional detective film’s straight-laced and luminous detectives to the

fatigued and cynical anti-detectives. However, TV series have exhibited virtually no

affinity for questioning generic conventions like closure, and have continually

216

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transmitted their detectives’ ultimate success in solving crimes. During the 1990s,

German TV-detectives found new homes with the mushrooming of private channels and

cable television. The TW-Krimi was rediscovered in creative new ways through fresh

types of detectives: S ATI’s Schwarz greift ein features a priest; ZDF highlights the

investigative adventures of its pensioner duo, Lutz und Hardy, as well as its exceptionally

corpulent sleuth, Sperling.

“Wie konnte er aussehen, der [taugliche] Krimi-Held 2000?” asked Ingrid Brtick

in 1999, in her essay surveying German TV detectives (4). If present trends are any

indication, Germany’s new investigative protagonist would be a woman. The

astronomical explosion of theFrauenkrimi that we have noted in detective literature has

also made a breakthrough in visual media. ARD’s Die Gerichtsreporterin is one of

Germany’s successful female detectives, as is the extremely popular Hamburg police

officer Bella Block. Based on Doris Gercke’s novels, the Block films offer a gendered

perspective on crime and detection. Block’s skepticism regarding her male co-workers’

modus operandi or her sarcastic commentary on hollow and ostentatious rituals such as

weekly Criminal Division meetings to discuss world politics certainly questions the

traditions established by generations of venerated male detectives. Yet Block’s own

investigative abilities are never cast in doubt, much like her male counterparts from the

past.

Tatort has also started featuring competent women detectives as regulars on its

cast. Interestingly, the TV-series giant continues to pioneer new ways of approaching the

genre, for instance, through its monthly Internet competition (www.das-erste.de/krimi).

where viewers can follow clues along with detective figures through downloadable video

217

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. material, and win prizes for correctly solving the mystery. Genre boundaries have

certainly opened up further with new technology, and video and computer-generated

images are a regular feature of the new German Krimi. Intemet-ATn'/nw such as Badcop

Cwww.badcop.de') or Barbel Neubauer’s Frauenintemetkrimis Chttp://intemetfrauen.net)

carry the idea of serial detective stories to a new level, promising to be constantly “on,”

and doing away with the anxious waiting for the next installment of one’s favorite

detective story. Both of these Internet-detective series mix computer animation, film,

text, music, and occasionally rely on Powerpoint presentations. Readers can follow links

to clues, and subscribe to a listserve in order to get notifications of updates. Yet most of

the excitement about bringing innovative technical advances into the genre has not

carried over to significantly questioning the genre itself. Writing about TV detective

series, Briick complains of an excess of special effects and standard investigative

scenarios with neither solid content nor significant political and social statements (10).

The new media do not hold much promise for the future of anti-detection, and neither

does the film medium.

Only a few post-Wall German films can qualify for anti-detection’s sense of being

“more than detective films.” Adamski (Becker 1994), set in the former East and featuring

a shopping mall investigator, is one example. InAdamski, the detective begins his career

after the Wende, leaving his job as a trumpeter with the Volksarmee. The film portrays a

resigned, apathetic detective, and comments on the restructuring of urban space through

new means of surveillance like the videocamera. Hans Christian Blumenberg continues

his formal experiments with detective film and relies on parodic quotations much in the

style o f NGC (e.g., Rotwang mufi weg (1995)), but his work lacks the political edge of the

218

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anti-detective films I have examined. Both Schattenboxer (Becker 1992) and Berlin in

Berlin (Cetin 1993) continue Tiirke's engagement with a multicultural, post-unification

Germany, but do not contain significant detective figures.

Detective film director Hajo Gies lamented the current state of German detective

cinema at the Afrwm'-symposium held in June 1998 at the Berliner Akademie der Kiinste,

pleading not to let the genre become a “Hohlform” (Briick 10). In other words, Gies

made an argument for anti-detective cinema’s future in Germany, by suggesting that in

times where box office figures and popularity ratings paralyze film production, it is up to

the creators to resort to provocation, and to swim against the current in their use of genre.

It remains to be seen how anti-detection’s future on the post-Wall German screen will

transpire. During West Germany’s turbulent existence, the sub-genre’s recurring

appearance on screen certainly forged strong connections between mystery, memory and

history. This examination of anti-detective films made in postwar West Germany has

revealed much about their patterns of narrative frustration, and their attempts at

communicating failure and the fragility of the human situation.

219

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1 Stuart Webbs films started with Die geheimnisvolle Villa (May 1914). By 1926, fifty films had been made, all of them with Erast Reicher in the leading role; in fact, in most of them, with Reicher as leading actor, scriptwriter and producer rolled into one. Harry Piel continued this tradition of versatility in the 1930s.

2 Further, the presentation of detection on screen is usually tied up with a subplot, such as the appeal of modem technology (robots inRivalen (Piel 1922)), the detective as master of disguises in Wo ist Coletti? (Mack 1913), exotic locales inDasAuge des Gotzen (Piel 1918), or an addition of comic or love interest, e.g., inDer Mann, der seinen Mbrder sucht (Siodmak 1931).

3 The use of technology in Harry Piel films offers an interesting comparison. InDie Welt ohne Maske (Piel 1934), for example, the detective figure assists a scientist to create and protect a sensational invention from competitors: a television which, with its signals, is also able to penetrate surfaces and transmit “live” action, so to speak, from homes, offices and other closed spaces. However, the connection between technology, communication and (economic and political) power, which forms the basis of Lang’s Mabuse films, remains far from Reicher’s interpretation, which is satisfied with touching upon the scientific value of the invention, with a passing reference to the profit motive.

4 At the end of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Mabuse lets himself be taken away to a madhouse. However, as Paul M. Jensen has argued, the sudden reference to Gotz von Berlichingen toward the end of the film (written by Mabuse’s chauffeur Georg on a prison wall) hints at a possible single-handed rebellion and the birth (or continuation) of a new world order, albeit one of crime (45). By the time ofDas Testament des Dr. Mabuse (1933), Lang has invented a brilliant formula to ensure the return of Mabuse . This second Mabuse film ends with the revelation that Dr. Baum, Mabuse’s psychiatrist, has become obsessed with- and turned into- Mabuse. Dr. Mabuse has thus become immortal.

s This number is not insignificant when compared to production rates of other genres of the time. According to Andrea Schuster, Abenteuerfilme form 10% of total West German

220

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. film production during the period, “dramatische Filme” such as Trummer- or Halbstarken- films account for ca 30%, whereas “heitere Filme” account for 45% of total film production. (133)

6 Film Echo Verleih Katalog 1960/61.

7 Similar sentiments are expressed in: Der Kurier, September 8, 1950; Die Rheinpfalz, December 17, 1957; Filmblatter, December 5, 1959.

8 While it has often been contended (especially by West German critics like Kaemmel) that detective narratives can only thrive in capitalist societies (64), there has, ironically, been a strong academic tradition of analyzing postwar detective film in the GDR (Geisler, Kind), with no comparable equivalents in the West.

9 Although I restrict my examination to West Germany, I also believe that references to detective cinema from other traditions are indispensable. In particular, I look at French and Hollywood cinema in comparison to German film.

CHAPTER 2

1 One can see a historical development in the transition from detection to anti-detection. In the eighteenth century, detection replaced the medieval procedure of confession through the criminal’s torture. Perhaps one could construe anti-detection as a replacement for the rational procedure of guilt through evidence, whereby the efficacy of evidence is now cast into doubt.

2 Other theoretical works on detective fiction published in German include Hans Christoph Buch’s “James Bond oder der Kleinbiirger in Waffen” (1965), and Helmut Heissenbiittel’s “Spielregeln des Kriminalromans” (1971). I stop my examination with Friedrich DUrrenmatt’s essay, which marks the theoretical onset of anti-detection in the German context after the watershed of World War II and the Holocaust.

3 Gertrud Koch cites Leo Lowenthal’s description of Kracauer’s understanding of the intellectual as “thorn [or] debunker”: “As a critic he always maintained... an attitude of extreme commitment and, at the same time, an absolute unwillingness to surrender to absolutes; he always retained his critical attitude” (9).

4 Like Georg Luka^s’ work on the classical novel, Kracauer highlights the “transcendental homelessness” (59) that characterizes an atomized world robbed of a genuine community of human beings, a world estranged from meaning, and connects his analysis to detective texts.

5 The other science is history, exploring individual occurrences and their irreversible temporal sequence.

221

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 The comparison with science is continued in another piece from 1938/39, “Uber den Kriminalroman”: “Der Verfolgte [...] stort das Experiment bewufit” (511).

7 The need to incorporate history becomes endemic in a whole new generation of anti detective stories after World War II. Frederic Jameson coins the term “social detective” to explain that s/he is the protagonist of “perhaps the last contemporary narrative type in which the lone intellectual can still win historical dimensions” (1991, 37). Jameson points out that whether generically still a policeman or private investigator, a reporter or archeologist, the social detective will either be an intellectual in the formal sense from the outset, or will gradually find himself/ herself occupying the intellectual’s structural position by virtue of the premium placed on knowledge.

8 Leonhardt emphasizes the political content of the StuderKrimis. In the 1936 novel Matto regiert, Glauser offers a picture of a megalomaniac, the evil incorporate, who reigns supreme in his territory, the home of murder and madness, the Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Randlingen. Investigating Matto’s web-like reach, Studer claims that the threads of the web cover the entire earth. Military music, transmitted through the radio, forms the background of this conversation between Studer and the doctor, and a voice from the radio obliterates Studer’s: “Zweihundert Manner und Frauen sind versammelt und jubeln mir zu. Zweihundert Manner und Frauen haben sich eingefunden als Vertreter des ganzen Volkes, das hinter mit steht.” Glauser avoided naming the devil by his name, but it was obviously a reference to Hitler, and when the second edition of Matto regiert was published in 1943, these sentences had been edited without explanation. German readers today do not necessarily recognize Glauser’s name in the award for German detective fiction named after him (recent winners include Hansjorg Martin and Bernhard Schlink).

9 Buchloh and Becker offer a typology of detective figures, ranging from the Great Detective, a thinking machine; the police officer or team, relying on stodgy patience and routine legwork; the lonely and tough private eye, who is also the modem knight in a corrupt world; and finally, the average person as detective, usually in a situation where she cannot seek police help, and when detection becomes a question of existence (Kastner’s Emil und die Detektive).

10 An extensive discussion of anti-detection has blossomed in Anglo-American criticism, especially since the 1990s, started by critics such as John Irwin, Stefano Tani, Louise Dallenbach, and Patricia Merivale, and revolving around authors such as Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, George Simenon, and Friedrich Durrenmatt.

11 William V. Spanos, Dennis Porter, and Stefano Tanihave used the terms anti-detective, metaphysical, and philosophical detective stories interchangeably. John T. Irwin’s category of analytic detective fiction and Elana Gomel’s coinage ontological detective story both reflect the genre’s metafictional, self-reflexive involvement with their own

222

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. search for meaning. Regardless of fine nuances in their usage, all these terms share a common concern with examining detective-story conventions, and my study treats them as synonyms.

12 “Der Super-Western ist ein Western, dem es nicht geniigt, nur er selbst zu sein, und der versucht, seine Existenz durch ein zusatzliches Interesse zu rechtfertigen: ein asthetisches, soziologisches, morahsches, psychologisches, erotisches Interesse—kurz gesagt, durch irgendeine aufiere Qualitat, die eine Bereicherung des Genres bedeuten wiirde” (Andrd Bazin, qtd. in Grob 1993, 215).

13 My argument is guided by D.A. Miller’s thesis about the “monological” narrative perspective of nineteenth century English novels (29). Pointing to Bakhtin, the term monologism suggests the use of a mastervoice, a single interpretive center, which continually exercises its narrative power by qualifying and subsuming other voices it lets speak.

CHAPTER 3

1 For instance, Anton Kaes writes, “The German cinema of the 50s had no one like Heinrich Boll, who in all of his writings made it his mission to confront Germany with its own past” (18).

2 The generational gap and the Nazi past is problematized in similar films made toward the end of the 1950s, such as the father’s Berufsverbot in Am Tag, als der Regen kam (Oswald 1959).

3 For an extensive treatment of Edgar Wallace films, see Klaus Kreimeier’s article “Die Okonomie der Gefuhle. Aspekte des westdeutschen Nachkriegsfilms” in Zwischen gestem und morgen. Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm1946-62, ed. Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1991.

4 In the theorizing of (anti)detection, epistemology, or the theory of the method of knowledge, refers to the model of traditional detective texts, which believe in achieving knowledge or truth by means of questioning sources (reading and interpreting clues). Anti-detective texts are anti-epistemo logical precisely because the acts of reading and interpretation are rendered senseless; the lack of solutions in these narratives stands for the “lack of answers to any question of essence, knowledge, or meaning” (Merivale 102). For a detailed discussion of epistemology and anti-detection, see Jeanne C. Ewert’s essay “A Thousand Other Mysteries. Metaphysical Detection, Ontological Quests” inDetecting Texts. The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan E. Sweeney. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

5 For a detailed discussion of mise-en-abime, see Dallenbach, The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy White & Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

223

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 6 I will use the terms personal/ individual and political/ collective interchangeably. Although the concepts political/ collective are not necessarily synonymous, the context of these anti-detective films justifies their alignment in my view, since both films resonate with postwar German society’s debates about individual and collective responsibility, or about personal involvement in the political discourse of National Socialism.

7 Critics have often resorted to the hermeneutic terminology of key texts and prize texts to discuss mise-en-abtme’s double meaning and its multiple layers. Joel Black defines the key text as “a document that plays a crucial role in the narrative, [to] which the sleuth’s and reader’s interest are directed, [but] which is not the ultimate object of the detective’s quest. The detective uses the information supplied by the key text to achieve his fmal goal, which is to discover or recover a prized object that [is]another text” (79). In the process of investigating crime, Kautner and Siodmak’s detectives try to read newspaper clippings and wanted posters, to validate Epilog's investigative report and Nachts' criminal file on Lildke. Interestingly, both key and prize texts figure as written documents in these films, thereby creating a literal sense in which the terms could be read.

8 Other Krimis included in the film week were Wer fuhr den grauen Ford? (Wernicke/ Diekhout 1949), Der Mann, der sich selber sucht (Cziffra 1950), and Der Fall Rabanser (Hoffmann 1950).

9 The sub-title also hearkens back to the titles of Weimar films such as Das Geheimnis des Affen (May 1914).

10Zabel’s voice-over is distinguished from his diegetic voice through greater clarity and louder volume.

11 Der Spiegel reports in an article on August 24, 1950 that the film’s location shooting was done on a remodeled freighter on the Havel, and in the studio shots, the ship’s movement was recreated by placing the set on a moving metal sphere.

1*5~ Susan Hayward explains that parallel editing refers to the paralleling of two related actions occurring at different times, and is distinct from cross-cutting, which refers to the paralleling of two contiguous actions occurring at the same time, but in different spaces (78). In parallel editing, the viewers are led to expect a single resolution to both sets of action in one time and space, as in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour (1959).

13 The cross-cutting evokes Lang’s use of the device in his detective films.

14 Billy Wilder’s most famous noir films feature a detective figure who is on the verge of death ( Double Indemnity (1944)), or already dead ( Sunset Boulevard (1950)).

224

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 For instance, the mayor of Hamburg declared the entire city to be denazified in 1950 (Bansch 28).

16 Another remarkable work that revisits the Third Reich even prior to Epilog and Nachts is the DEFA film. Die Affaire Blum (Engel 1948). This film sets its detective plot during the Weimar Republic, and traces National Socialism’s anti-Semitic discourse back into Germany’s democratic era. R.A. Stemmle, Epilog's co-author, wrote the film script with director Erich Engel.

17 Kautner’s films from the Third Reich, e.g., Unter den Briicken (released 1945), were censored by Goebbels for a similar aesthetic subversion of Nazi cinematic codes.

18 M is remarkable for using the police procedural to comment on social malaise, and to expose the parallel functioning of the forces of crime and detection, and forms, in my reading, one of the predecessors for Siodmak’s anti-detective film.

19 This “mirroring” between Keun and Hitler is in turn is a continuation of the correspondence set up by the opening sequence of the film, which captures Keun in a long shot against a backdrop of a gigantic portrait of Hitler, delivering a speech. Ironically, this identification will later be undermined as Keun is implicated in a crime he has not committed, and marked as dispensable when he becomes “sand in the Nazi machinery.”

20 Like Der Verlorene, Siodmak’s film creates an analogy between its insane murderer and National Socialism. Lorre’s 1951 film locates most of the action in Dr. Rothe’s POV to create audience identification with and sympathy for the pathological criminal. But in Nachts, viewers can never sympathize with Liidke because of the use of low angle shots and extreme close-ups singling out his grimaces or his fragmented face.

21 Anna occupies an interesting position in the film, as Liidke’s landlord’s daughter, for whom Liidke has a soft spot. She is also the only woman in the film who is unafraid of— and hence safe from- Liidke’s “madness.” For example, when he moves menacingly toward her to prevent her from reporting his stolen purse to the police, she laughs out loud in his face.

22 The emblematic shot, usually positioned at the end of the film, summarizes the film’s action for a final time (e.g., kiss at the end of romantic films), and provides closure (Hayward 81). As I have already pointed out, closure in classical detective film is provided by punishing criminals and rescuing victims, signaling the triumph of detective figures.

Rossdorf s remark is witnessed by the audience, but not by Kersten, suggesting yet again the viewers’ co-conspiratorial status.

225

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 This observation is indebted to Maria Tatar’s excellent analysis of the connection between sexual murder and social discourse in Fritz Lang’s M.

CHAPTER 4

1 Miller uses the term “monological perspective” as a synonym for panopticism, borrowing it from Bakthin.

2 The detective figure, inspector Lohmann, is in turn a borrowing from Lang’sM.

3 See, for instance, Lotte Eisner’s evaluation of the film: “As a thriller Lang’s last film is masterly: elated by his love of whirlwind adventure, Lang produced a film which stands up well against the work of his preceding American period. Yet it is more than a thriller: Lang was concerned with sounding a warning on dependence upon technology, the benefits of science that can turn into a menace in an age when one maniac might press a button and set off a nuclear holocaust” (390).

4 The passive voice of the sentence indicates that the master criminal’s aides are interchangeable, hence expendable.

5 Raymond Bellour remarked, “The token around which the narrative is structured [is] the significant object which Lang always calls attention to with a close-up; [...] the close-up is often followed in the sound films, especially the American ones, by a dolly back from the object abruptly introduced. This short, precise movement, placing the object in its context, disrupts the close-up’s sudden fascination, circumscribing it” (33).

6 However, the viewers are provided with a clue to the ellipsis by means of the missing audio-visual cue, in the Mistelzweig-Coraelius sequence, of rain in the background.

7 Sebastian Hesse notes that the camera served as a means of substantiating and recording evidence in the Stuart Webbs film Der Spuk in Hause des Professors (May 1914): the film’s self-reflexivity, in this instance, supports the detection, instead of being used for anti-detective ends, as in lOOOAugen (159).

8 After the Second World War, Dr Mabuse took a less topical and overly metaphorical turn in the eyes of the critics. Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, ties virtually every significant trend of his diagnostic psychogram of Weimar veering towards totalitarian madness to Mabuse’s evil genius: “He... is an unscrupulous mastermind animated by the lust for unlimited power. [...] The film succeeds in making of Mabuse an omnipresent threat that cannot be localized, and thus reflects society under a tyrannical regime—that kind of society in which one fears everybody because anybody may be the tyrant’s ear or arm” (Kracauer, qtd. in Elsaesser 2000, 157).

226

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 5

1 The Oberhausen Manifesto is a spontaneously drafted document with which a group of 26 filmmakers declared independence from “Papas Kino” in 1962. Film scholars typically use the designation NGC to refer to the “state-supported, but relatively independent film production of the Federal Republic of Germany between 1962 and 1989” (Davidson 1).

2 Norbert Grob emphasizes the conflict between NGC directors and older producers like Artur Brauner, as well as the NGC’s lack of connection to 1950s German filmmakers (1993, 228). Many NGC directors pay homage to American and French directors in their films, but one also finds this gesture with relation to directors like Kautner (Syberberg), Siodmak (Schamoni), and Reinl (Schilling).

3 Other ways of interpreting this shift within the NGC include a distinction between an early phase of Young German film (1962-1974) and the later phase of NGC (1974- 1982), or between the Berlin and Munich practices of filmmaking (Kreimeier 1991, 78).

4 For instance, in a film like Die bleieme Zeit, Juliane's incessant search for truth about the dubious circumstances behind her terrorist sister’s death invests the political statement of the film with a detectivistic impulse. Further, Trotta clearly draws from the detective film tradition in her visual depiction of Juliane’s investigations (e.g., the extreme close-ups of clues, such as Marianne’s possessions). However, the film highlights Juliane’s inability to know the truth and the futility of her investigative act, and thereby follows, in my reading, in the footsteps of postwar German anti-detective film. For example, the meaning of Juliane’s search for truth is severely jeopardized in her conversation with a publisher: “Sie haben sich unendlich Miihe gegeben. Aber Sie haben eins nicht bedacht: Es sind Jahre inzwischen vergangen. Ob Mord oder Selbstmord interessiert keinen Menschen mehr.”

3 1 have discussed the Edgar Wallace and Mabuse series in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. New to the 1960s and 1970s were the Jerry Cotton films that were set in the USA, and pandered to the tough tastes of private eye fans in German-speaking countries, as well as the numerous films based on Simmel novels that took the Cold War and James Bond as their source of inspiration.

6 Thomas Elsaesser’s 1989 study discusses the new Heimat film in detail.

7 In the next chapter, I will return to NGC’s parodic quotation offilm noir while discussing Happy Birthday, Tiirke! (Dorrie 1991) as an ethnicnoir film

8 The role of film clubs and film schools that sprouted in West Germany is often mentioned in this regard (Rentschler 1984, 37). So is the connection to highly perceptive

227

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and engaged film criticism developed through journals such as Filmkritik, which in turn echoes the links between the nouvelle vague and Cahiers du Cinema.

9 At the same time, TV-film co-productions often ran into trouble due to state involvement: Fassbinder’s skirmishes with producers regarding the volatile contemporary references contained in Die dritte Generation (1979) led to the Westdeutsche Rundfunk’s withdrawal from the project for political reasons. It would be interesting to explore elsewhere why or how HaufFsMesser, also a WDR co-production, is able to balance its political statement with state involvement.

10 Of course, Siodmak’s central role in Hollywoodfilm noir is equally relevant here.

11 To introduce a distinction within the NGC and New German anti-detective film, Enno Patalas observes that the playful—almost superficial—self-reflexivity of the latter films and their ironic self-awareness stands in contrast to the high serious tone of the Autorenfilmer. “Auch darin leistet [Detektive] dem Gesetz Widerstand, daB es kein Autorenfilm ist. Zihlmanns Filme streben nicht zuriick hinter die kollektiven Formen kapitalistischer Produktion zu den handwerklichen der autonomen ktinsterlischen Werke. Vielmehr treiben sie die Entwicklung iibemommener Formen ein Stiickchen weiter ihrer selbsttatigen Zerstdrung entgegen“ (Patalas 1970, 15-16).

12 In addition to Leo Braudy and, more recently, Rick Altman and Todd Berliner, Thomas Schatz has also studied the genre film and its subversion in Hollywood. Schatz’s idea of the three stages of genre— classicism, exhaustion and parody— is seminal to genre studies.

13 Consider this comment onDetektive: “Thome kann sich auf das Wesentliche konzentrieren: Geld, Sex, Alkohol, Intrigen, Verrat, Toten“ (TAZ, March 11, 1989).

14 The industrialist is played by Eddie Constantin, famous for his role as the investigator Lemmy Caution in Godard’s Alphaville.

15 Deutschland im Herbst was an independently-produced project of a filmmaker collective, including Kluge, Fassbinder, et al. The film endeavored to understand the public and private ramifications of the traumatic political events of autumn 1977.

16 A close up of the youth center reveals the graffiti, “Danke, Vati!,” possibly an ironic reference to the generational conflict.

17 The unsympathetic portrayal of police detectives is typical of the day, and can also be seen in Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (Schlondorff/ Trotta 1975).

228

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 18 See my analysis of the parallel editing/ cross-cutting in Epilog and 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse. Both elements treat the paradigm ironically by revealing more to viewers than to detectives.

19 HaufPs use of composition and the shot-countershot is reminiscent of the confrontation sequences in Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam.

~ In the second youth center sequence, Volker becomes Hoffmann's successor when he is chased by police detectives (as Hoffmann is in the opening). A cutaway from this action to Hoffmann shows him turning himself in to the police (“Meine Herren, ich stelle mich), and collapsing on the ground. In the next shot, inspector Scholz reacts: “Aber Hoffmann, Sie sind gar nicht aktuell.” While Scholz leaves the frame, a static camera shows Hoffmann suffering another epileptic attack, abandoned on the street. This reference to being “aktuell” is picked up in Die bleieme Zeit (see footnote 4).

21 Consider this review: “Reinhard Hauff zeigt einen Staat, der... selbstzerstorerische Fehler macht” (Miinstersche Zeitung, January 10, 1979).

~~ Hauff was the chief organizer of the Hamburg Filmmaker’s Festival in 1979 (Rentschler 1984, 404).

CHAPTER 6

1 The new sub-genre of women’s detective fiction owes its name to the rise in the number of women writing detective stories, a new phenomena in German-speaking countries, e.g., Sabine Deitmer (police officer Beate Stein), Doris Gercke (police officer Bella Block), Petra Wurth (detective Pia Petry), Monika Amos (Der strahlende Tod, 1990), Lea Beck (Ein Hduflein Asche, 2001), Birgit Utz (Alte Bande, 2001), among others. Bertens and D’haen comment on the “female boom” on the American detective fiction scene since the late 1980s, with writers such as Helen McCloy, Terris McMahan Grimes, Sara Patesky, etal(ll).

‘ Some exceptions were comments like, “Im Grunde wurde recht arrogant insziniert: so, als traue man dem Zuschauer einen anspruchsvolleren Krimi mit Tiefgang gar nicht erst zu, weil dieser ja doch nur Tatort-Routine wolle” (Filmdienst 26, 1991).

3 Arlene Teraoka convincingly establishes this fact in her article. The private detective was not the most popular cinema hero in the postwar period; detection was often assigned to police officers, modeled on theHeftroman hero Kommissar X (films made by Frank Kramer, Rudolf Zehetgruber, and even Harald Reinl). Tiirke starts the trend of private eyes on the big screen.

4 Several recent publications have thematized the issue of immigration in post-Wall Germany, particularly in light of the dual citizenship and Leitkultur debates. Nicola Piper

229

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. observes: “A distinction has to be made between what national identity has meant in West Germany before and after unification. German identity has surely suffered from its past. [...] The process of reunification, however, has brought vast socio-economic and political changes resulting in a widespread feeling of insecurity. [..] Meanwhile, the recruitment of ‘guest-workers’, in particular of Turkish workers, has largely resulted in their permanent settlement, and thus to the establishment of ‘new’ ethnic minorities. Until reunification, German policy toward immigrants consisted of maintaining a legal and political distinction between nationals and foreigners. Even today, German policy has hardly changed, treating second and third generations as much as Ausldnder as the first immigrants. The term Ausldnder and non-recognition as a country of immigration indicate this, as well as the right to nationality... based on ius sanguinis (right of descent)” (101).

5 This glance at the filmic past to reinvigorate noir is a convention that also dominates Hollywood from the 1970s in so-called neo-noir films likeChinatown (Polanski 1974), Blade Runner (Scott 1982),Angel Heart (Parker 1987), LA. Confidential (Hanson 1997), or Palmetto (Schlondorff 1999).

6 Unlike Jameson, my use of the term is not pejorative. He designates pastiche as blank parody, or a statue with blank eyeballs. My use of pastiche is intended to signify a neutrally collated montage of various styles, including parody. 7 Blauaugig (Hauff 1989); DerAtem (Schilling 1989); System ohne Schatten (Thome 1983).

8 The localization of crime and detection in formulaic films contrasts sharply with the tendency of 19S0s and 1960s German cinema to choose foreign settings for their investigative narratives. In Chapter 3 ,1 comment on the choice of London as a backdrop for the Edgar Wallace series.

9 Consider Paul Schrader’s seven ‘‘recurring techniques” which characterize film noir, which form the mainstay of quotable material: the majority of scenes are lit for night; oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal; the actors and setting are given equal lighting emphasis; compositional tension is preferred to physical action; Freudian attachment to water, mirrors, windows, and other reflective surfaces; love of romantic narration; the complex chronological order reinforces the feelings of hopelessness and lost time (Cook 404).

10 Indeed, Manner, her sleeper hit of 1986, created a new German comedy precisely out of a conflict between the new generation of Yuppies and the outdated concept of “Spontis,” and offered the public ‘‘eine deutsche Komddie ganz ohne Didis, Ottos und Supemasen” (Fischetti 253).

11 A similar self-reflexive moment occurs in Rudolf Thome’sSystem ohne Schatten (1984), where Dominique Laffin steps out of her role in the film, in a sequence where she

230

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and Bruno Ganz’s character watch her own film, La femme qui pleure (Doillon 1978)— only to step back into her role again.

12 Although both Fedora and Hammett are international/ Hollywood productions, I will read them as simultaneously being part of the German tradition, and as a continuation of Wenders and Wilder’s fascination with detective narratives.

13 Aijouni’s next novel in the Kayankaya series is titled Mehr Bier (1987).

14 Kayankaya’s “100 DM pro Tag ” is, again, reminiscent of Marlowe’s “25 bucks a day” in The Maltese Falcon.

15 One of the most successful private investigators of the 1990s is Robert Crais’s Elvis Cole, who is in turn a Marlowe of the late twentieth century.

16 The only clue in the sequence, visible to viewers, but not to Kayankaya, is a pair of alligator skin shoes. This instance is typical of anti-detective film’s revelation of clues to viewers, but not to detectives.

17 The TV set that hides the proof to Futt’s guilt also hints at Dorrie’s destruction of Tatort's TV realism through her film. 18 For the former instance, consider Kayankaya’s response to Yilmas’ crime: “Wenn Sie’s fur die Familie getan haben, war es vollkommen sinnlos.”

19 The contrast becomes evident when we think of the final shot of1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse that ends with the detective and his lover kissing on screen. Love can no longer provide an antidote to anti-detection.

231

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adelson, Leslie. Crisis of Subjectivity. Botho Strauss’s Challenge to West German Prose o f the 1970s. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984.

Adler, Walter. “Und der Traum vom Geschichten-Erzahlen.” Filmkritik 24 (December 1978).

Alewyn, Richard. “Anatomie des Detektivromans.” Der Kriminalroman I, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Alpi, Deborah Lazaroff. Robert Siodmak. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Altman, Rick. Film/ Genre. London: BFI, 1999.

Angier, Carole. “Always the Outsider: Interview with Doris Dorrie.”Sight and Sound 1:9 (January 1992): 55-59.

Arjouni, Jakob. Happy Birthday, Tiirke! Zurich: Diogenes, 1987.

—. Mehr Bier. Zurich: Diogenes, 1987.

Arnold, Heinz Ludwig. Friedrich Durrenmatt. Gespriich. Zurich: Peter Schifferli, 1976.

Balazs, Bela. “Der Detektiv-Roman. ” Der Kriminalroman. Texte zur Theorie und Kritik, ed. Jurgen W. Goette and Hartmut Kircher. Frankfurt a.M.: Diesterweg, 1978.

Barthel, Manfred. Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm. Munich: Herbig, 1986.

Bauer, Alfred. Deutscher Spielfilmalmanach Bd. 2:1946-55. Munich: Winterberg, 1981.

Bauer, Ludwig. Authentizitat, Mimesis, Fiktion: Femsehsendung und Integration von Realitat am Beispiel des Kriminalsujets. Munich: Schaudig, 1992.

Becker, Wolfgang, and Norbert Scholl, eds. In jenen Tagen... Wie der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm die Vergangenheit bewaltigte. Opladen: Leske and Budrich, 1995.

Bellour, Raymond. “On Fritz Lang.” Fritz Lang. The Image and the Look, ed. Stephen 232

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Jenkins. London: BFI, 1981.

Benjamin, Walter. “Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus.” Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften I- IV, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972.

—. llluminationen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977.

Berliner, Todd. “The Genre Film as Booby Trap: 1970s Genre Bending and The French Connection." Cinema Journal 40:3 (Spring 2001): 25-46.

Bertens, Hans and Theo D’haen. “Other Detectives: the Emergence of Ethnic Crime Writing.” Contemporary American Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001.

Bien, Gunter. “Abenteuer und verborgene Wahrheit. Gibt es den literarischen Detektivroman?” Der Kriminalroman I, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Blake, Nicholas. “The Detective Story— Why?” The Art o f the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Bloch, Ernst. “Philosophische Ansicht des Detektivromans.”Literarische Aufsdtze. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1965.

Bongartz, Barbara. Von Caligari zu Hitler— von Hitler zu Dr. Mabuse? Eine "psychologische" Geschichte des deutschen Films von 1946 bis I960. MUnster: MakS, 1992.

Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1985.

Brandlmeier, Thomas. “Von Hitler zu Adenauer. Deutsche Triimmerfilme.” Zwischen gestem und morgen. Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946-62, ed. Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1991.

Braudy, Leo. The World in a Frame. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1977.

Brecht, Bertolt. “Glossen iiber den Kriminalroman.” Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Band 21. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993.

—. “ Uber die Popularitat des Kriminalromans.” Bertolt Brecht, Werke, Band 22. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1993.

Brock-Sulzer, Elisabeth. Friedrich Durrenmatt. Stationen seines Werkes. Zurich: Peter Schifferli, 1973.

233

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Briick, Ingrid. “Suche nach dem Krimi-Helden 2000. Ein Streifzug durch die Genregeschichte.” Funkkorrespondenz (February 1999): 2-11.

Brustellin, Alf. “Das Kino, ein Leben.” Film Nr. 4 (1969).

Buch, Hans Christoph. “James Bond, der Kleinburger in Waffen.” Der Kriminalroman. Texte zur Theorie und Kritik, ed. JUrgen W. Goette and Hartmut Kircher. Frankfurt a.M.: Diesterweg, 1978.

Buchloh, Paul, and Jens Becker, eds. Der Detektiverzahlung auf der Spur. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971.

Burghardt, Kirsten. “Moralische Aufhistung im fhihen deutschen Nachkriegsfilm.” Discurs Film 8: Munchener Beitrage zur Filmphilologie (1996): 241-76.

Cargnelli, Christian and Michael Omasta, eds. Schatten-Exit. Europaische Exilanten im Film-Noir. Vienna: PVS, 1997.

Chandler, Raymond. “The Simple Art of Murder.” The Art o f the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze. German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 1981.

Cook, Pam and Philip Dodd, eds. Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.

Copjec, Joan, ed. Shades o f Noir. London: Verso, 1993.

— Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994.

Comelsen, Peter. Helmut Kdutner: Seine Filme— sein Leben. Munich: Heyne, 1980.

Corrigan, Timothy.New German Film: The Displaced Image. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983.

—. A Short Guide to Writing About Film. NY: Harper Collins, 1994.

Dallenbach, Luise. The Mirror in the Text, trans. Jeremy White and Emma Hughes. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.

Daiber, Hans. “Nachahmung der Vorsehung.” Der Kriminalroman I, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

234

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Davidson, John E. Deterritorializing the New German Cinema. Minneapolis, London: U of Minnesota P, 1999.

Davis, Mike. City o f Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, London: Verso, 1990.

Durrenmatt, Friedrich. Der Richter und sein Henker. Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1952.

—. Der Verdacht. Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1953.

—. Das Versprechen. Zurich: Peter Schifferli, 1958.

—. “Der Schwindel der Kriminalgeschichten.” Der Kriminalroman. Texte zur Theorie und Kritik, ed. Jurgen W. Goette and Hartmut Kircher. Frankfurt a.M.: Diesterweg, 1978.

Diising, Wolfgang, ed. Experimente mit dem Kriminalroman. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1993.

Dumont, Herv6. Robert Siodmak. Le maitre du film noir. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981.

Eco, Umberto, and Thomas A. Sebeok, eds. The Sign o f Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1983.

—. The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Eisner, Lotte H. Fritz Lang. NY: Oxford, 1977.

Elsaesser, Thomas. New German Cinema. A History. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989.

—, ed. A Second Life. German Cinema’s First Decades. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996.

—. Weimar Cinema and After. Germany's Historical Imaginary. London, NY: Routledge, 2000.

Eser, Willibald. Helmut Kdutner: Abblenden. Munich: Moewig, 1981.

Ewert, Jeanne C. “A Thousand Other Mysteries. Metaphysical Detection, Ontological Quests.” Detecting Texts. The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan E. Sweeney. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

Fehrenbach, Heide. Cinema in Democratizing Germany. Reconstructing National Identity After Hitler. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995. 235

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fischer, Peter. “Neue Hauser in der Rue Morgue.” Der wohltemperierte Mord. Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Detektivromans, ed. Viktor 2megac. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenaum, 1971.

Fischer, Robert and Joe Hembus. Der neue deutsche Film 1960-1990. Munich: Goldmann, 1981.

Fischetti, Renate. Das neue Kino: Acht Portrats von deutschen Regisseurinnen. Frankfurt a.M.: tende, 1992.

Film-Echo Verleih-Katalog 1960-61. Wiesbaden: DIF, 1961.

Frank, Nino. “Le roman policier.”L'Ecran Francois 61 (1946).

Frieden, Sandra, et al. Gender and German Cinema I. Oxford: Berg, 1993.

Frisby, David. “Between the Spheres: Siegfried Kracauer and the Detective Novel.” Theory, Culture, and Society 9(1992): 1-21.

Geisler, Ursula. Der DEFA-Kriminalfilm: Untersuchung seiner thematischen und dramaturgischen Gestaltung entsprechend seiner kulturpolitischen Funktionen in der DDR. Potsdam: HFF, 1958.

Ginzburg, Carlo. Myths, Emblems, Clues, transl. John and Anne Tadeschi. London: Hutchinson, 1990.

Gluck, Mary. Georg Lukacs and His Generation 1900-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985.

Gokturk, Deniz. ‘Turkish Women on German Streets: Closure and Exposure in Transnational Cinema.” Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos. Exeter: Intellect, 2000.

Goyke, Franz, and Andreas Schmidt, eds. Horst Schimanski. „Tatort“ mit Gotz George. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, 1997.

Grant, Barry. Film Genre Reader. Austin: U o f Texas P, 1986.

Grefffath, Bettina. Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit. Deutsche Spielfilme 1945-49. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995.

Grob, Norbert. “13 Aspekte zum deutschen Kriminalfilm der 60er Jahre.” Abschied von Gestem. Bundesdeutscher Film der 60er und 70er Jahre, ed. Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt a.M.: Filmverlag der Autoren, 1991.

—. Wenders. Berlin: Edition Filme, 1991. 236

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. —. “Film der sechziger Jahre. Abschied von den Eltem. ” Geschichte des deutschen Films, eds. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993.

—. “'Etwas ist nicht geheuer’: 17 Anmerkungen zum deutschen Kriminalfilm.” Abgrttnde der Phantasie. Berlin: Stifiung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1998.

Hake, Sabine. The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany 1907-33. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993.

Harvey, David. The Condition o f Postmode mity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990.

Haycraft, Howard. “The Whodunit in WWII and After.” The Art o f the Mystery Story. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Hayward, Susan. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London: Routledge, 1996.

Heissenbiittel, Helmut. “Spielregeln des Kriminalromans,” Der Kriminalroman I, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Helt, Richard C. and Marie E. West German Cinema, 1985-1990: A Reference Handbook. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1992.

Hembus, Joe. Der deutsche Film kann gar nicht besser sein. Munich: Rogner and Bernhard, 1961.

Hesse, Sebastian. ‘Ernst Reicher alias Stuart Webbs: King of the German Film Detectives.” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, ed. Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996.

Hickethier, Knut. “Die Zugewinngemeinschaft: Zum Verhaltnis von Film und Fernsehen in den 60er und 70er Jahren.” Abschied von Gestem.Bundesdeutscher Film der 60er und 70er Jahre, ed Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt a.M.: Filmverlag der Autoren, 1991.

Hoffmann, Hilmar, and Walter Schobert, eds. Abschied von Gestem.Bundesdeutscher Film der 60er und 70er Jahre. Frankfurt a.M.: Filmverlag der Autoren, 1991.

—. Zwischen gestem und morgen. Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946-62. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1991.

Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Postwar Fiction,”The Poetics o f Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most, and William W. Stowe. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective 237

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

—. “Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading. Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story.” Detecting Texts: the Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

Jacobsen, Wolfgang, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds. Kdutner. Berlin: Spiess, 1992.

—, et al. Geschichte des deutschen Films. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993.

Jameson, Frederic. “On Raymond Chandler.” The Poetics o f Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

—. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

—. The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992.

Jansen, Peter W. “Zwanzig Jahre danach. Oberhausen und die Folgen.” Jahrbuch Film 82-83, ed. Hans Gunther Pflaum. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1982.

Jenkins, Stephen. “Lang: Fear and Desire.” Fritz Lang. The Image and the Look, ed. Stephen Jenkins. London: BFI, 1981.

Jensen, Paul M. The Cinema o f Fritz Lang. NY: Barnes, 1969.

Jurgan, Hans-Wolfgang. Filmbibliograpisches Jahrbuch derBRD 1971. Wiesbaden: Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Filmdokumentation, 1973.

Kaemmel, Emst. “Literatur unterm Tisch.” Der Kriminalroman. Texte zur Theorie und Kritik, ed. Jurgen W. Goette and Hartmut Kircher. Frankfurt a.M.: Diesterweg, 1978.

Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat. The Return of History as Film. Cambridge, M A: Harvard UP, 1989.

Kind, Steffen. Der Kriminalfilm im DEFA-Filmschaffen. Potsdam: HFF, 1963.

Knight, Julia. Women and the New German Cinema. London: Verso, 1992.

Knops, Tilo. “Cinema from the Writing Desk: Detective Films in Imperial Germany.” A Second Life: German Cinema’s First Decades, ed. Thomas Elsaesser. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996.

238

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Koch, Gertrud. Kracauer zur Einfiihrung, transl. Jeremy Gaines. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000.

Koebner, Thomas, et al. Deutschland nach Hitler. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987.

Konstantarakos, Myrto, ed. Spaces in European Cinema. Exeter: Intellect, 2000.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History o f German Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1947.

—. Das Ornament der Masse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963.

—. Schriften I. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1971.

Kramp, Joachim. Hallo! Hier spricht Edgar Wallace: die Geschichte der deutschen Kriminalfilmserie von 1959-1972. Berlin: Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, 1998.

Kreimeier, Klaus. “Der westdeutsche Film in den fiinfziger Jahren.” Die funfziger Jahre, ed. Dieter Bansch. Tubingen: Narr, 1985.

—. “Die Okonomie der Gefuhle. Aspekte des westdeutschen Nachkriegsfilms.” Zwischen gestem und morgen. Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm 1946-62, ed. Hilmar Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1991.

Kunkel, Klaus. “Ein artiger James Bond. Jerry Cotton und der Bastei-Verlag.” Der Kriminalroman II, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Lange, Peter. “Vor 50 Jahren: der Bundestag pladiert fur den Abschluss der Entnazifizierung.” Deutschland Radio Berlin (December 16, 2000).

Lenssen, Claudia. “Film der siebziger Jahre. Die Macht der Gefuhle,” Geschichte des deutschen Films, eds. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993.

Leonhardt, Ulrike. Mord ist ihr Beruf. Eine Geschichte des Kriminalromans. Munich: Beck, 1988.

Mandel, Ernst. Delightful Murder. A Social History of the Crime Story. London:Pluto, 1984.

Marie, Silvia, ed. Reinhard Hauff. Retrospektive. Cologne: WDR, 1992.

Marsch, Edgar. Die Kriminalerzdhlung. Theorie, Geschichte, Analyse. Munich: Winkler, 1972.

McCormick, Richard W. Politics o f the Self. Feminism and Postmodernism in West 239

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. German Literature and Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991.

Mealand, Richard. “Hollywoodunit.” The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Merivale, Patricia, and Susan E. Sweeney, eds. Detecting Texts. The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.

Metz, Christian. Language and Cinema, trans. Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police, Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Most, Glenn W., and William W. Stowe, eds. The Poetics o f Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1983.

Mtilder-Bach, Inka. Siegfried Kracauer— Grenzgdnger zwischen Theorie und Literatur: Seine frtihen Schriften 1913 bis 1933. Stuttgart, 1985.

Murray, Bruce and Christopher J. Wickham, eds. Framing the Past. The Historiography of German Cinema and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.

Naremore, James. More Than Night. Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Netenjakob, Egon. “Das Vergnugen, aggressiv zu sein. Zum Schimanski-Konzept innerhalb der ‘Tatort”-Reihe der ARD.” Arbeitshefte Bildschirmmedien 10 (1988): 45-50.

Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.

Nusser, Peter. Der Kriminalroman. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1980.

Ott, Frederick W. The Films o f Fritz Lang. Secaucus, NJ: Citadel. 1979.

Ottinger, Ulrike. “Der Zwang zum Genrekino. ” Augenzeugen: 100 Texte neuer deutscher Filmemacher, ed. Hans Helmut Prinzler and Eric Rentschler. Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Autoren, 1998.

Pasche, Wolfgang. Friedrich DUrrenmatts Kriminalromane. Stuttgart: Klett, 1997.

Patalas, Enno. “Nouvelle Vague und neuer deutscher Film.” Der junge deutsche Film. Dokument zu einer Ausstellung. Munich: Constantin-Film, 1967.

240

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. —. “Scheherzade mufi sterben.” Filmkritik Nr 1, 1970.

Pflaum, Hans GUnther. “Innenansichten der Filmforderung,. Abschied von gestern. Bundesdeutscher Film der 60er und 70er Jahre, ed Hilmar. Hoffmann and Walter Schobert. Frankfurt aM.: Filmverlag der Autoren, 1991.

Phillips, Klaus. “Interview with Doris Dorrie.” Triangulated Visions: Women in Recent German Cinema, ed. Ingeborg Majer O’Sickey and Ingeborg von Zadow. Albany: SUNY P, 1998.

Piper, Nicola. “Citizenship and National Identity in Reunified Germany: the Experience of the Turkish Minority.” Political Thought and German Reunification, ed. Howard Williams and Colin Wight. London: Macmillan, 2000.

Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime. Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1981.

Prinzler, Hans Helmut. Chronik des deutschen Films: 1895-1994. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995.

—. “Die bleieme Zeit.” Deutschlandbilder, ed. Gabriela Seidel. Berlin: Kinemathek, 1997.

Pyrhonen, Heta Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1999.

Rentschler, Eric. West German Film in the Course of Time: Reflections on the Twenty Years since Oberhausen. Bedford Hills, NY: Redford, 1984.

—. The Ministry o f Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.

Rodell, Marie F. ‘Clues.” The Art o f the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

Rothman, William. The of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Sandford, John. The New German Cinema. London: Wolff, 1980.

Santner, Eric L. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Postwar Germany. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Sayers, Dorothy. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1946.

241

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1981.

Schober, Siegfried. “Drogen, Filme, Liebe. Gesprach mit Rudolf Thome und Max Zihlmann.” Filmkritik 170 (February 1969).

—. “Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter.” Filmkritik 184 (April 1972).

Schuster, Andrea. Zerfall oder Wandel der Kultur? Eine kultur-soziologische Interpretation des deutschen Films. Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitatsverlag, 1999.

Schwartz, Ronald. Noir, Nowand Then. London: Greenwood, 2001.

SeeBlen, Georg. Zur Geschichte des Kriminalfilms. Berlin: Colloquium, 1987.

—. Mord im Kino: Detektive. Marburg: Schiiren, 1988.

Shandley, Robert. Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2001.

Silberman, Marc. German Cinema: Texts in Context. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1995.

Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,” Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Steinbauer-Grotsch, Barbara. Die lange Nacht der Schatten. Film noir und Filmexil. Berlin: D. Bertz, 1997.

Tannert, Mary W. and Henry Kratz, ed. Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999.

Tatar, Maria. Lustmord. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995.

Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989.

Teraoka, Arlene A. ‘Detecting Ethnicity: Jakob Aijouni and the Case of the Missing German Detective Novel.” German Quarterly 72:3 (Summer 1999): 265-89.

Thome, Rudolf. Retrospektive Karin und Rudolf Thome. Berlin: Kinemathek, 1973.

—. “Uberleben in den Niederlagen.” Ecole et Cinema 46, (1987/88).

242

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Thompson, Jon.Fiction, Crime and Empire. Clues to Modernity and Postmodernism, Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1993.

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.”The Poetics o f Prose, transl. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

Trumpener, Katie. “On the Road: Labor, Ethnicity and the New “New German Cinema” in the Age of the Multinational.” Perspectives on German Cinema, ed. Terri Ginsberg and Kirsten M. Thompson, NY: G.K. Hall, 1996.

Vogt, Jochen, ed. Der Kriminalroman Bd. I & II. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Wager, Jans B. Dangerous Dames: Women and Representation in Weimar Street Films and Film Noir. Athens: Ohio UP, 1999.

Waldmann, Gunther. “Kriminalroman-Anti-Kriminalroman. Durrenmatts Requiem auf den Kriminalroman und die Anti-Aufklarung.” Der Kriminalroman n, ed. Jochen Vogt. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971.

Wendt, Emst. “Was sie filmen.” Der junge deutsche Film. Dokument zu einer Ausstellung. Munich: Constantin-Film, 1967.

Winston, Robert and Nancy Mellerski. The Public Eye. Ideology and the Police Procedural. NY: St. Martin’s, 1992.

Zizek, Slavoj. ‘“The Thing that Thinks’. The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject.” Shades of Noir. A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec. NY: Verso, 1993.

Zmegac, Viktor,ed. Der wohltemperierte Mord. Zur Theorie und Geschichte des Detektivromans. Frankfurt a. M.: Athenaum, 1971.

243

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FILMOGRAPHY

A bout de souffle. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Imperia, 1960.

Abschied von gestem. Dir. Alexander Kluge. Independent Film, 1966.

Abwdrts. Dir. Karl Schenkel. Cinevox, 1984.

Der achte Tag. Dir. Reinhard Munster. Reinhard Munster Filmproduktion, 1990.

48 Stunden bis Acapulco. Dir. Klaus Lemke. Seven Star, 1967.

Adamski , Dir. Jens Becker.Senso Film, 1994.

Die Affaire Blum. Dir. Erich Engel. DEFA, 1948.

Alarm. Dir. Herbert Fredersdorf. Bavaria Filmkunst, 1941.

Alphaville. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Athos, 1965.

Der amerikanische Freund. Dir. Wim Wenders. Filmverlag der Autoren,1977.

Am Tag, als der Regen kam. Dir. Gerd Oswald. Alfa, 1959.

Angel Heart. Dir. Alan Parker. TriStar, 1987.

Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. Dir. Wim Wenders. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1972.

DerAtem. Dir. Niklaus Schilling. Bayerischer Rundfunk, 1989.

Der Bar von Baskerville. Dir. Joe May. Continental, 1914.

Bella Block, die Kommissarin. Dir. Max Farberbock. ZDF, 1993.

Berlin in Berlin. Dir. Sinan Cetin. Plato, 1993.

Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner, 1982.

244

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Blaudugig. Dir. Reinhard Hauff. Bioskop, 1989.

Die bleieme Zeit. Dir. Margarethe von Trotta Bioskop, 1981.

Blowup. Dir. Michelangelo Antonioni. Bridge Films, 1966.

Cadaveri eccellenti. Dir. Francesco Rosi. PEA, 1976.

Cafe Europa. Dir. Franz Xaver Bogner. MagicFX, 1990.

Cardillac. Dir. Edgar Reitz. Edgar Reitz Film, 1969.

Chinatown. Dir. Roman Polanski. Paramount, 1974.

The Choirboys. Dir. Robert Aldrich. Universal, 1977.

Criss Cross. Dir. Robert Siodmak. UI, 1949.

Despair: Eine Reise ins Licht. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978.

Detektive. Dir. Rudolf Thome. Independent Film, 1968.

Deutschland im Herbst. Dir. Alf Brustellin, et al. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1978.

Dr. Crippen an Bord. Dir. Erich Engels. Terra, 1942.

Dr. Crippen lebt. Dir. Erich Engels. Real-Film, 1958.

Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler. Dir. Fritz Lang. UFA, 1922.

Double Indemnity. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount, 1944.

Die dritte Generation. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Filmverlag der Autoren, 1979.

Der dritte Grad. Dir. Peter Fleischmann. Hallelujah, 1975.

Einer von uns beiden. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. Divina, 1973.

Emil und die Detektive. Dir. Gerhart Lamprecht. UFA, 1932.

Epilog: Das Geheimnis der Orplid. Dir. Helmut Kautner. CCC Filmkunst, 1950.

Es geschah am hellichten Tag. Dir. Ladislao Vajda. CCC Filmkunst, 1958.

Der Fall Deruga. Dir. Fritz Peter Buch. Tobis, 1938. 245

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Der Fall Rabanser. Dir. Kurt Hoffmann. Junge-Film Union, 1950.

Fedora. Dir. Billy Wilder. Bavaria, 1978.

La femme qui pleure. Dir. Jacques Doillon. Lola-Films, 1978.

Flucht ins Dunkel. Dir. Arthur Maria Rabenalt. Terra, 1942.

The French Connection. Dir. William Friedkin. 20th Century Fox, 1971.

Der Frosch mit derMaske. Dir. Harald Reinl. Rialto, 1959.

Der Geheimagent. Dir. Harry Piel. Ariel, 1932.

Das Geheimnis des Abbe X. Dir. Julius Brandt and Wilhelm Dieterle. Charha-Film, 1927.

Die geheimnisvolle Villa. Dir. Joe May. Continental, 1913.

Gesucht wird Majora. Dir. Hermann Pfeiffer. Euphono. 1949.

Der glaseme Himmel. Dir. NinaGrosse. Marwo, 1987.

Gotter der Pest. Dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Antiteater, 1969.

Ein grofier, grau-blauer Vogel. Dir. Thomas Schamoni. TS-Film, 1971.

Die Hamburger Krankheit. Dir. Peter Fleischmann. Bioskop, 1979.

Hammett. Dir. Wim Wenders. Warner, 1982.

Hangmen Also Die. Dir. Fritz Lang. United Artists, 1943.

Happy Birthday, Tiirke!. Dir. Doris Ddrrie. Cobra, 1991.

High Score. Dir. Gustav Ehmck. Royal, 1989.

Hiroshima, mon amour. Dir. Alain Resnais. Argos, 1959.

Im Namen des Volkes (Autobanditen). Dir. Erich Engels. Terra, 1939.

In jenen Tagen. Dir. Helmut Kautner. Camera, 1947.

Der Joker. Dir. Peter Patzak. Lisa-Film, 1987.

Jonny stiehlt Europa. Dir. Harry Piel. Ariel, 1932.

246

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Kamikaze 89. Dir. Wolf Gremm. Oase, 1982.

Kaminsky. Dir. Michael Lahn. Panorama, 1985.

Die Katze. Dir. Dominik Graf. Bavaria, 1987.

Kiss Me Deadly. Dir. Robert Aldrich. United Artists, 1955.

Kriminalreporter Holm. Dir. Erich Engels. Terra, 1932.

LA. Confidential. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Warner, 1997.

M. Dir. Fritz Lang. Nero-Film, 1931.

Das Madchen Rosemarie. Dir. Rolf Thiele. Roxy, 1959.

The Maltese Falcon. Dir. John Huston. Warner, 1941.

Manner. Dir. Doris Dorrie. Olga-Film, 1985.

Der Mann, der seinen Morder sucht. Dir. Robert Siodmak. UFA, 1931.

Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war. Dir. KarlHartl. UFA, 1937.

Der Mann, der sich selber sucht. Dir. Geza von Cziffra. Allianz, 1950.

Der Mann im Keller. Dir. Joe May. Continental, 1914.

Messer im Kopf. Dir. Reinhard Hauff. Bioskop, 1978.

Der Monch mit der Peitsche. Dir. Alfred Vohrer. Rialto, 1968.

Mordsache Holm. Dir. Erich Engels. Terra, 1938.

Mord und Totschlag. Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Constantin, 1967.

Die Nacht der Zwolf. Dir. Hans Schweikart. Bavaria, 1945.

Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam. Dir. Robert Siodmak. Divina, 1957.

The Name o f the Rose. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. 20th Century Fox, 1985.

Palmetto. Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Columbia, 1999.

The Parallax View. Dir. Alan Pakula. Paramount, 1974.

247

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Persona. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Svensk Filmindustri, 1966.

Die Ratten. Dir. Robert Siodmak. CCC-Filmkunst, 1955.

Razzia. Dir. Werner Klingler. DEFA, 1948.

Rheingold. Dir. Niklaus Schilling. Visual, 1977.

Rivalen. Dir. Harry Piel. Ariel, 1922.

Rote Sonne. Dir. Rudolf Thome. Independent Film, 1969.

Rotwang mufi weg. Dir. Hans Christian Blumenberg. Rotwang, 1995.

Rufan das Gewissen. Dir. Karl Anton. Tobis, 1949.

Schattenboxer. Dir. Lars Becker. Wiiste Filmproduktion, 1992.

Schwarzer Kies. Dir. Helmut Kautner. UFA Film Hansa, 1961.

Scotland Yard jagt Dr Mabuse. Dir. Paul May. CCC Filmkunst, 1963.

Spinnen. Dir. Fritz Lang. Decla-Bioscop, 1919.

Spione. Dir. Fritz Lang. UFA, 1928.

The Spiral Staircase. Dir. Robert Siodmak. RKO, 1946.

Der Spuk im Hause des Professors. Dir. Joe May. Continental, 1914.

Summer in the City. Dir. Wim Wenders. HFF-Munich, 1969.

Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. Paramount, 1950.

Supermarkt. Dir. Roland Klick. Independent Film, 1974.

System ohne Schatten. Dir. Rudolf Thome. Moana, 1983.

Tatort Berlin. Dir. Joachim Kunert. DEFA, 1958.

Tatort: Reifezeugnis. Dir. Wolfgang Petersen. NDR, 1977.

Tausend Augen. Dir. Hans Christian Blumenberg. CineCentrum, 1985.

Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse. Dir. Fritz Lang. CCC Filmkunst, 1960.

248

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Taxi Driver. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Columbia, 1976.

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. Dir. Fritz Lang. Nero-Film, 1933.

Three Days o f the Condor. Dir. Sydney Pollack. Paramount, 1975.

Tirez sur le pianiste. Dir. Francois Truffaut. WinStar, 1960.

Die toten Augen von London. Dir. Alfred Vohrer. Rialto, 1961.

Touch o f Evil. Dir. Orson Welles. Universal, 1958.

Und Jimmy ging zum Regenbogen. Dir. Alfred Vohrer. Roxy, 1971.

Unter den Brucken. Dir. Helmut Kautner. UFA, 1945.

Der Veriorene. Dir. Peter Lorre. Pressburger Films, 1951.

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum. Dir. Volker Schlondorff and Margarethe von Trotta. Bioskop, 1975.

Voruntersuchung. Dir. Robert Siodmak. UFA, 1931.

Die Welt ohne Maske. Dir. Harry Piel. Ariel, 1934.

Wer fuhr den grauen Ford?. Dir. Otto Wernicke and Max Diekhout. Bavaria, 1949.

Wo ist Coletti?. Dir. Erast Mack. Vitascope, 1913.

Die Zdrtlichkeit der Wolfe. Dir. Ulli Lommel. Tango, 1973.

Zweikampf. Dir. Gert Steinheimer. Demos, 1986.

Das zweite Erwachen der Christa Klages. Dir. Margarethe von Trotta. Bioskop, 1978.

Zwischen gestem und morgen. Dir. Harald Braun. NDF, 1947.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.