Von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane

208 WILLIAM GIRALDI In Love with the Vanishing: von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane BY WILLIAM GIRALDI In a recent interview, Margarethe von Trotta alludes to “the angel of history,” referring to Walter Benjamin’s influential essay “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin’s angel, based on a drawing by Paul Klee, is described as an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. Benjamin goes on to explain why this angel cannot remain to rectify the tremendous wrongs of the past: a strong storm is coming to sweep the angel into a future he cannot see. This storm has a name: progress. As Benjamin saw all too clearly — he witnessed firsthand the hell of two World Wars — entire populations have been annihilated at the behest of progress. He knew that the concept of Hegelian historical progress toward ever-greater human freedom was a laughable sham. Hegel crowned In Love with the Vanishing 209 reason the mighty “sovereign of the world” and so believed that world history “presents us with a rational process.” Had he lived to witness the mountains of dead at Auschwitz, Hegel might have replaced “reason” with “madness.” Benjamin, a Jewish Berliner, lived just long enough to witness Nazism’s idea of progress: he committed suicide in France in 1940 after having failed to flee to America. Von Trotta calls Benjamin’s angel of history “an important inspiration and guide,” especially during the creation of her 2003 film Rosenstrasse, a commanding depiction of the wives who dissented against the unlawful arrests of their Jewish husbands in the winter of 1943. An admiration for Benjamin is not surprising in a filmmaker who over the length of her career has had to contend with the various labels foisted upon her: feminist, socialist, political activist. Benjamin himself had no particular political affiliations; he did not consider himself a politically motivated thinker but a critical theorist, one who dealt with the chain that fettered human freedom to culture and ideology. Both Benjamin and von Trotta were young adults during crucial periods of German history, periods in which so-called lost generations became severely disheartened by the political and cultural credos of the previous generations: Benjamin in the 1920s, von Trotta in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Benjamin writes that “there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one,” by which he means that the past always pervades the present, and mostly for ill. Of course this was Freud’s starting point for psychoanalysis: an individual is never free of his family history. William Faulkner put it more succinctly: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Benjamin might not have taken to the streets to rail against the past’s infiltration of the present, as do many of the heroines of von Trotta’s films, but the sociopolitical upheavals in Germany that followed the First World War and preceded the Second informed his thinking on history to the extent that von Trotta can call him an ideological comrade. Benjamin and von Trotta deliberately demolish the wall between the political and the private: von Trotta’s most famous film,Rosa Luxemburg (1985), a biopic about a radical leader of European socialism, and her most important film,Marianne and Juliane (1981), are ideal examples of this. Benjamin and von Trotta are also by turns captivated and horrified by that angel of history who wishes to mitigate the anguish of the past but cannot break 210 WILLIAM GIRALDI free of the wind in its wings, those “winds of change” that we first call progress and then call slaughter. Still, neither Benjamin nor von Trotta contends that all historical progress must end in the grip of lunacy. Not all of von Trotta’s films come to optimistic conclusions, but Rosenstrasse, the film most influenced by Benjamin’s angel of history, offers, as one character puts it, “a ray of hope in a sea of darkness.” The women whose husbands have been arrested and deported to camps do what the angel of history is incapable of doing: they act, they intercede, they incite justice. Von Trotta demonstrates — à la Marx (“Men make their own history”) — that the past, and by extension the present, is not an inevitability, but rather a choice put into action by human will. In that same recent interview, von Trotta makes this assertion: “Not all of my films deal with historical questions . I have a reputation of being a political, historical and feminist filmmaker, but half of my pictures have been psychoanalytical examinations of personal relationships.” History for von Trotta does not mean only the collective history of nations and epochs but also the personal history of individuals (usually women) who simultaneously rage against and openly embrace that history. Marianne and Juliane is von Trotta’s masterpiece precisely because it is her most incisive psychological examination of personal relationships, in this case between the two title characters, sisters who share the ideology of change but not the means of realizing it. The film takes place during the “German Autumn” of 1977 when an ultra-leftist terrorist organization called the RAF (Rote Armee Frak- tion) perpetrated a series of violent acts — bank robberies, bombings, kidnappings — in their sedition against a corrupt German state whose capitalist enterprises betrayed the lessons of the past and the promise of the new generation. Juliane (played by the impeccable Jutta Lampe) is a journalist who edits a feminist magazine and holds demonstrations in favor of women’s reproductive rights, while Marianne (played by von Trotta’s muse, the angelic Barbara Sukowa) has forsaken her husband and child to join a terrorist cell and retreat underground: one sister has chosen a pen, the other a sword. Marianne’s husband commits suicide because he cannot care for their young boy, and Juliane — who also has no interest in In Love with the Vanishing 211 being a mother and wife — dumps the child in the care of a foster family. Apprehended for her part in a bombing, Marianne is sentenced to prison along with her fellow RAF members. Juliane takes to visiting her sister as often as possible, and slowly but irretrievably comes to identify with her, at significant cost to her relationship with her loving companion of ten years, the quality of her work, and, ultimately, her soundness of mind. Von Trotta employs a series of perfectly placed flashbacks to chronicle the sisters’ childhood and adolescence. These flashbacks simultaneously help to explain the sisters’ different adulthoods while demonstrating — contrary to Marx and Freud — that much of human motivation remains a puzzle always beyond our total grasp. The girls’ father is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, at once rigid and distant. A grue- some painting of the crucified Christ hangs tauntingly in their home. As children, the sisters enjoy a closeness, a deep compassion for one another, but once they reach adolescence a shift occurs: Marianne, the younger, has become her father’s obedient pet, while Juliane is the iconoclastic questioner who misbehaves in the classroom, refuses to wear dresses, does the Viennese waltz by herself at a school dance (much to her sister’s astonishment), and reads Sartre before bed at night. Von Trotta’s choice of reading material for Juliane is not arbitrary: Sartre had been a key member of the Resistance, founded the political journal Les Temps Modernes in 1945, and then became an independent socialist. Sartre is the rebel (and writer and editor) Juliane wants to be. If the girls have developed different temperaments by this time, they still share a revulsion towards their country’s recent past. During a screening of Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956) — an unforgettable documentary about Nazi killing camps — the sisters watch in disbelief as the mounds of cadavers are bulldozed into pits. Both are sickened and rush to the restroom to vomit. In her analysis of this scene, the scholar Cecilia Sjöholm writes: “I am not guilty. Who is guilty?” asks the voice of the documentary, leaving its viewers to answer. The sisters leave the salon, throwing up as a result not only of the scenes of dead bodies but also as if accused by that very question. Later the question will return, when Juliane accuses her imprisoned sister Marianne 212 WILLIAM GIRALDI of being as extreme and fanatical as the Nazis. “Ich bin nicht schuldig, wer ist schuldig?” (I am not guilty, who is guilty? shouts Marianne.) Guilt and the problem of capitulation was (and still is) a soul-shattering reality for Germans, a reality that few other cultures can fully compre- hend. Günter Grass, Germany’s preeminent man of letters and the moral conscience of an entire generation, recently released a memoir called Peeling the Onion in which he admits to having been a soldier in Hitler’s SS. The admission was world news, a resounding reminder that for the two oldest living generations in Germany — Nobel Prize winners and laymen alike — the past is very much alive. In Marianne and Juliane, as in so many of her films, von Trotta wonders what can be done about the legacy of the past. The sisters come to different conclusions.

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