208 william giraldi

In Love with the Vanishing: von Trotta’s

by William Giraldi

in a recent interview, 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 to- ward 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 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, (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 relation- ships.” 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 ) 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 ) 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 documen- tary, 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. Sjöholm believes that “Marianne is the sister who is bound to the past in her vehement rejection of it,” who early iden- tifies with the father because she has a need of strength and order. The sisters are both bound to the past — Benjamin contends that everyone is — and Juliane rejects it as well, except that her rejection does not issue in bloodshed. Benjamin’s angel of history might indeed be paralyzed, but Marianne, like Rosa Luxemburg and the wives in Rosenstrasse, will not accept paralysis. But since Marianne cannot undo the past, she finds it compelling to murder those who, in her view, are tied irrevocably to the ways (the crimes) of the past. “There is no document of culture,” Benjamin contends, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” When Juliane accuses her sister of behaving like a fascist — “A generation ago you’d have been a Hitler fan” — Marianne slaps her face. To Marianne, being lumped together with the criminals of the previous generation is the ultimate insult; after all, she believes that her own terrorist campaign was designed in defiance of that generation. In her feminist reading of the film, Sjöholm suggests that Mari- anne turned violent because she identified with the father, whereas Juliane did not because she was influenced by the (female) reason of her mother. The warrior sky god — the god that has built our Western and Near East civilizations — is contrasted to the wiser earth goddess, a far saner model of governance. Scholars such as Sjöholm and E. Ann Kaplan will have us In Love with the Vanishing 213 believe that Marianne’s recourse to violent Hobbesian revolt is explicable only in the light of feminist theory, as a necessary sedition against a patri- archal state. But that package is a little too neatly tied; human behavior is never that reductive. In one of the flashbacks to adolescence, Marianne tells her sister that she wants to do something important with her life, to be remembered, and unfortunately the RAF becomes her idea of important. Marianne’s violence is not the result of her identifying with masculinity in order to overthrow the reign of testosterone. Rather, her anger at the injustice and inequality propagated by capitalism is all too human and not at all gender specific. Her lawlessness has no necessary causal connection to her having been her father’s pet. She cannot at once identify with the father and mutiny against the very law and order he represents. because she is bitter that Juliane thought better than to join the RAF and incite change through violence, Marianne refuses to see Ju- liane during the latter’s attempted first visit to the prison. When Juliane returns home she complains to her boyfriend, Wolfgang, who responds, “If you live her way, there’s no place for sentiment.” And yet a self- serving sentimentality is what propels every romantic, artist, martyr, or revolutionary. Benjamin believes that “for the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation,” and this is certainly true of Marianne’s fervor: failed politics created the predicament against which she rebels. Marianne, however, is not a revolutionary thinker in the spirit of Luxemburg, but rather a revolutionary reactor whose reactions are quite divorced from careful thought. If von Trotta indeed dismantles the wall between the political and the personal, then Marianne’s struggle against socioeconomic oppression is really a narcissistic glorification of her own ego. She behaves rather like an insolent bully on a playground, lighting firecrackers in order to be praised for her rebellion. marianne’s sense of entitlement and superiority — so amply dem- onstrated when, before her arrest, she barges in on Juliane and Wolfgang in the middle of the night with two goons in tow — predisposes her to the brand of sentimentality that certainly allows her reservoirs of feeling, but for nobody except herself. How else to explain her cruel abandonment of her young child and her indifference to her husband’s suicide, a death she helped bring about? Her prideful sense of revolutionary mission comes 214 william giraldi at the expense of those who should mean the most to her. The faceless, numberless children starving in the Third World clearly matter more to Marianne than her own child. Her idealism, as with other militancies, is worn like a badge of compassion and enlightenment for all to see. Marianne wishes to be extolled by her sister — by all of society — but the older Juliane is too sensible to honor an activism that damages human lives. She harbors the compassion that Marianne only pretends to. Jung’s famous contention that “every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism,” captures perfectly the true target of Marianne’s crusade, which is her own image of herself. How did the sisters come to develop such different identities? How did Juliane morph from an iconoclastic and trouble-making teenager into a rational adult, and Marianne from a docile daddy’s girl into a bomb- thrower? Did the gruesome painting of the crucified Christ that hung in their home inspire Marianne to martyrdom? Perhaps the father’s religious absolutism prompted Marianne to become an absolutist herself. If so, then why not Juliane? Clearly, our identities are the accumulation of every day of our lives, the product of everything that has and has not happened to us. The complexities of human character are born of confluence; our way in the world cannot be pinned down to any one impetus. This might seem defeatist as an explanation but the alternative is too cartoonish: Marianne throws bombs because her father was a bizarre figure, or Juliane wants gender equality because she read Sartre in her sixteenth year. when Juliane is dismayed by her sister’s physical condition in prison, Marianne says, “They’ll never get us down, for they have no power over our souls.” Insofar as Marianne can separate herself from the Christianity that constructed the West, her lust for martyrdom is not a Christian lust, and yet her words to Juliane make her sound rather like Joan of Arc. Her identity and her motives, then, become the same; they merge to animate her every terrorist act. She must declare herself a revolutionary the same way some others declare themselves evangelicals or vegetarians. This insistent announcement of identity is really an attempt to convince oneself of worth, of purpose. For Juliane, who operates with a secure sense of purpose and self, the word is a worthy instrument, but for Marianne the word is inadequate. After Juliane writes an editorial about her sister, Marianne lashes out, “It’s reality that matters, not words.” She then hurls In Love with the Vanishing 215 the decisive insult at Juliane: “bourgeois,” as if only the middle classes are naïve enough to believe in the tonic of language, as if the bourgeoisie has neither the imagination nor the proper political consciousness to bring about the revolution that needs to happen. Only the self-identified martyr can accomplish that. and yet, in spite of the fundamental opposition von Trotta develops, the merging of the sisters’ identities becomes a major motif in the film, an important statement about how each sister views herself in relation to the other. With every visit to the prison Juliane sees her sister’s health deteriorate steadily, and even though this deterioration is largely the result of Marianne’s hunger strike, Juliane comes to see the prison (i.e. the state) as corrupt, unkind, and worth fighting against. Her anger over Marianne’s violence evolves into sympathy and then acceptance. The sisters’ identities have shifted once already — Juliane from rebellious to responsible, Marianne from docile to barbarous — and they will shift yet again as Juliane gradually assumes responsibility for her sister. One of the most striking scenes in the film is also one of the quickest: at the end of a prison visit, the women rapidly exchange sweaters and embrace urgently. If the wearing of someone else’s clothes is a small step in understanding how that person walks through the world, then the sisters’ exchange of sweaters is a reminder that they used to be equal: girls who could fit into one another’s wardrobe, girls who shared necessities. It is also a mutual offering: take my scent, take my skin, know who I am. The scene loses no power once Juliane discovers that Marianne has hidden a note in her sweater; Marianne cannot speak openly during her sister’s visits because the women are flanked by guards and a stenographer recording their conversation. another striking scene occurs when the women are forced to conduct their visits in booths, speaking through telephones with a thick pane of glass between them. The frame holds the back of Juliane’s head on the left and Marianne’s face on the right. Slowly the camera moves so that Juliane’s reflection is superimposed onto her sister’s face on the other side of the glass, their features lined up almost perfectly. The ghostly image shows not only the convergence of identities but the diaphanous, vulnerable selves of both women. As Leibniz has it, “Two things are identical if one can be substituted for the other without affecting the truth,” 216 william giraldi

marianne and juliane and so the truth ends up being the reason why the sisters’ identity swap cannot be total. No amount of convergence will ever convince Juliane that her sister’s truth is valid, that terrorism is the most efficient means of accomplishing positive change. in her book-length study of von Trotta, subtitled “Filmmaking as Liberation,” Renate Hehr claims that the identity swap in the prison “shifts the conflict from one sister to the other,” and yet the conflict has all along in different ways belonged to both sisters. In fact, despite the romantic emphasis on Marianne, this film belongs to Juliane, the even-headed sister whose screen time is nearly double that of Marianne’s. So the conflict is not shifted as much as it is born anew: Juliane does not inherit her sister’s struggle — she will not adopt the philosophy of terrorism — but rather she takes on a new emotional struggle that stems from her sister’s quest. After the prison notifies Juliane that they have found her sister hanged in her cell, von Trotta allows Juliane, at least briefly, to take on the physical posture of Marianne. The family travels to the prison to view Marianne’s corpse lying in repose, and the very next scene reveals Juliane in the exact position: on an ambulance gurney receiving a sedative for her In Love with the Vanishing 217 nerves, utterly distraught over Marianne’s death, her face exhibiting the same pallor as her dead sister’s. Hehr sees “the reincarnation of the dead woman in the living one,” and this is right except that the reincarnation must be incomplete: the truth remains a wall between Marianne’s spirit and Juliane’s will. Juliane cannot adopt her sister’s fanaticism but she will adopt her penchant for obsession, and the target of her obsession will be Marianne herself. Believing the prison officials to be dishonest components of a cor- rupt state, Juliane convinces herself that Marianne’s death was not suicide but murder. She commences a fevered investigation into Marianne’s death, an investigation that rips her away from her work and, more important, from Wolfgang. They quarrel bitterly, and when Wolfgang stresses his wish to marry and begin a family, Juliane dismisses him and his dull idea, choosing the memory of her sister over the only force that has the poten- tial to save her now: the love of a benevolent mate. According to Hehr, von Trotta’s heroines “protest against meeting the expectations of their partners and conforming to the pressures of male-dominated society.” If this is true, Juliane’s nonconformity comes at enormous cost to herself, for her leaving Wolfgang — a partner who loves and respects her the way her sister never did — is not an admirable feminist determination but rather a foolhardy entrance into a house of unhappiness. Just as Marianne deserted her husband and child to pursue an impossible goal, so Juliane deserts Wolfgang to pursue a goal equally impossible: the exoneration and veneration of an individual who does not deserve to be honored. Ironically, Juliane’s final act of becoming her sister is the act that most separates her from Marianne: she retrieves Marianne’s son from the care of a foster family, the very boy whose early banishment and absence hang ominously over this film. Juliane will raise the boy now, a mission her sister neither wanted nor was capable of executing responsibly. The boy has been horribly burned by thugs who had discovered that his birth mother was a terrorist; he arrives traumatized at Juliane’s flat. Juliane’s retrieval of the boy does not vindicate the monumental harm she caused him by refusing to adopt him after his father’s suicide. This boy is the reason why both sisters are, in the end, morally destitute: one of the few criteria for fairly judging individuals is how they treat a child; almost nothing else they say or do is as powerful or accurate an indicator of their 218 william giraldi character. The film ends with this boy demanding to know his mother’s story. Juliane replies, “Your mother was an extraordinary woman,” and when the boy presses for more, Juliane becomes frozen there, hesitant to tell it. But hesitant why? Because she suspects that her sister was extraordinary only in the literal sense, without the positive connotations: not ordinary, not normal, since most mothers don’t abandon their tiny children to join a cohort of hooligans. If so, a viewer will get the feeling that the suspicion can not last, that Juliane will indeed go on to lionize her sister, to deify her as Marianne had wanted. This mythmaking by her sister for the sake of her son is Marianne’s apotheosis. In this respect, then, her terrorism was all too successful.

has cited Marianne and Juliane as one of the ten films that influenced him the most. The film’s far-reaching authority stems from numerous sources: the careful camera work of von Trotta’s cinematographer, Franz Rath; the first-rate scriptwriting by von Trotta herself; the subtle score by Vladimir Vizner; the unflinching vision of the recklessness of the human heart in society. More important, though, is the film’s relevance, its staying power. During Juliane’s manic inquiry into the death of her sister — several years after Marianne was first impris- oned — she phones a journalist she knows in order to stir up interest in Marianne’s case. The journalist replies: “Your sister, that whole movement belongs to the late 60s and 70s. Today’s news is the Third Word, Islam, the energy crisis.” a viewer in the year 2009 cannot hear those lines without a shudder, for they remind us how little actually changes from decade to decade. Of the several crises currently barking at the heels of mankind, two are poised to bite hard before long: our inability to curb the Islamic fanaticism that leads to terrorism, and our ravenous dependence on oil. Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the female terrorist was an anomaly; now, across the Middle East and Pakistan, women seem just as willing as men to detonate themselves and incinerate strangers in the name of their idealism. Marianne’s spirit howls still. Von Trotta, as with the most pertinent artists in history — think of Orwell — has an uncanny aptitude for capturing, accurately and simultaneously, the past, present, and future. Of all the visionary filmmakers to emerge from the In Love with the Vanishing 219 of the mid-1960s — Wenders, Fassbinder, Herzog, Schlöndorff — von Trotta seems the most pertinent and compelling. Of course the mighty components of the film include Jutta Lampe and Barbara Sukowa, actresses so expert their performances seem like a kind of miracle. Both actresses received their training on the German stage, and both knew von Trotta when she was active in theater. Lampe is an unconventional beauty, all freckles and auburn hair, while Sukowa has a face that could have made Grace Kelly go green with envy. And yet von Trotta plays down their beauty, as if she doesn’t want us to see it. Neither Lampe nor Sukowa appears in the film wearing make-up or revealing garb; and when von Trotta reveals the women’s breasts — in the sweater swapping scene at the prison — the moment comes as a jeer: their tiny breasts are hardly noticeable. Hehr contends that von Trotta searches for “a new image of women,” one opposed to synthetic Hollywood prettification, the quintessentially male notion of beauty that glorifies breasts bouncing on an anorexic frame. Why the revolt against this artificial sheath? For the simple reason that a sheath hides what’s inside, and what is inside these two women is of the utmost importance, the only importance, to von Trotta. in the end, neither Marianne nor Juliane succeeds in stalling Wal- ter Benjamin’s angel of history, in redefining progress as something truly beneficial, truly positive. Two characters in the film suffer Benjamin’s fate of suicide, and one becomes locked into a life of illusion and aloneness. When she was an adolescent schoolgirl, Marianne read in class Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day,” a poem that contains the line, “Whoever is alone will stay alone” – more prescience, more dismantling of the wall between what is and what was. In “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” — a poem as obsessed with history and violence as anything in Benjamin or von Trotta — Yeats writes, “But is there any comfort to be found?/ Man is in love and loves what vanishes,/ What more is there to say?” Plenty more. And von Trotta is here to say it.