Art and politics in the Fourth Reich? Towards reading postwar European film as a search of a concrete "other" or "after"

Great ideas and artworks should either be as exciting as fuck or, if bland, exciting to fuck with. 

Art is the Eros of a society so repressive and boring and horrible that the only ethics credible within it is a politics. Finding no reliable foothold in that society, a credible ethical stance is poised between critical thinking and visionary imagination, which is to say, since politics now requires transgression, its usual and accepted place is art. Certainly, it is a contradiction built into the institution of art (spaces and times of exhibition and critical discourse) that it figures or presents images of revolt that would carry mortal risks in 'normal' social spaces (places and times of work and business, and their reproduction through forms of entertainment and thought) otherwise. 

In this state of affairs, which is that of the world today and for one or two centuries now at least, religion would do better to maintain its relevance and chances for survival if it allowed its surpassing by art and social theory. Philosophy itself has become an aesthetics based on a social theory, even if its resources of thinking are most strongly articulated in the philosophical tradition. In my opinion, that's really where it's at today. 

Certainly, religion like ethics will never ground politics and cannot; it will always serve the state, simply because it is both normative and pedagogical, meaning ideological. That doesn't mean we can't learn from it. The world is a single civilization now, increasingly, a mixture of capitalism, bureaucratic or libertarian, or both, and a network of local hybrid cultural forms that are only predominantly and not exclusively European. The creation of the state of Israel, the rise of first Japan and then China, and the eventual rise of African societies, does not seem at all poised to change that. With recognition of this, it's important to do the math. Everything that is object of a defensible claim to be worth understanding will find its place in the global discourse; there are no longer alternative traditions, except as semantic and hermeneutical accents; it would be pointless and silly, not just reactionary, to pretend that some such alternative exists and should be claimed in and as a walled city. There are many ways of doing that, from Hasidism to every false Orientalist New Age; they are all equally boring. To say that each particular tradition provides a more or less universal set of ethics and morals with suitable local rituals as distinctive as ethnic foods, is to advocate self-relegation to inconsequentiality, which may be sold as nostalgia. When all identities are romanticist nostalgias, they will find their place in the imaginary museum, and as in America today, they will be the object of a great deal of talk that is inverse proportion to their significance. And this too is so American: a good Bürger or bourgeois citizen should "have a religion" to keep up his moral hygeine, as well as having an occupation, a family, and other normal pursuits. 

Sometimes I think the form of capitalist society with petty bourgeois values triumphed most spectacularly for a dozen years in Germany. It insisted on its health, its purity, its normality, its (yes, sometimes ) righteousness, as keys to happiness, and that happiness would prove chimerical. Fascism is the culture of work, family, religion, and "religious" ideas of citizenship of which patriotism forms a part, at their most insistent, petty, normalizing, moralistic, and morally and ethically blind. "This is a happy house...Don't say no or you'll have to go." That, written 35 years later (sounds like California, no?), pretty much says it. The sign on its gates was both a false promise and the ugliest of obvious lies. Those travails made no one freer. And death and suffering do not justify anything. The only moral privilege there is learning how to avoid inflicting it or succumbing to it. That's something else.

Fascism exploits the emotional tenor of social conflicts and contradictions that the society of its present moment cannot solve, and in ways that condemn every revolt to repeat what it would oppose or resist. If the Freudian Oedipus is the figure (as much societal as individual) of a latently incestuous familialism that is always doomed because familial figures of identification and opposition cannot consistently be either affirmed or negated, fascism in its essence is a way of living personal relationships that heightens the tensions and blocks every exit.

In film history, this fact began to be seriously and intensely grappled with especially by directors in the formerly Axis nations of Germany, Italy, and Japan. This was perhaps the most important tendency in cinema in these countries in the 1960s and 1970s. It has been argued (e.g., by Frederic Jameson) that post-colonial nations gave rise to artworks that dealt with the Family/State mapping differently, because it was the state more than the family itself that could be questioned. I plan to discuss this topic on this site in relation to certain Italian (especially Visconti and Bertolucci) directors, and to German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. I have learned this lesson most deeply fro him. His filmography, a damned comedy of the German society of his time, is more than anything about fascism. American capitalist society, eagerly introduced in the nation’s western half, morphed this without changing it, and German culture at the time had changed it even less. This is less true of Germany today, and that fact is visible in its film culture also, but in Fassbinder films and plays from their beginning in 1966 to his death in 1982, this theme heavily marks and defines each work. The feminist slogan “the personal is the political” is nowhere more or better exemplified than in his films. To Antonioni’s remark that “eros is sick” in our time, must be added that when relationships are more about success and personal gain, or propriety and normality (and these seem to go together), it is very sick indeed.  

(p.s.: That the fate of, and attitudes towards, Jews (blatantly figured in the few films that present any as objects of a German projective imagination) were a consequence of this and not its cause explains their absence other than as caricatured in the work of Germany’s greatest postwar is a truth that in a cinematic oeuvre that had not concern to admire and not criticize any formation of identity, insults only those whose folly is to think an ethically tenable position exists in such a world. In a way that has been steadily gaining steam for about 400 years, artists have been making art about the world because they cannot live in their society).