New German Cinema - Is Germany Running Away From its Past?

Post WWII Germany was occupied by the allied forces under two opposing systems, the west and the East. Due to cinema being used as propaganda by The Third Reich, there was a huge mistrust with film. It was quoted; (Wenders, 1977 cited in Kaes, 1997, p.614) ‘Never before and in no other country have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here …Nowhere else have people suffered such a loss of confidence in images of their own, their own stories and myths, as we have’.

Pre-New German Cinema, film was used to educate and inform, however, as new cinema became popular, commercial cinema started to decline. This was seen as one of two phases in ‘Autrorenfilm’, the other being Post-Wall film. Autorenfilm was seen as a more stylistic opponent to Hollywood and Directors took more control and more artistic approaches to filmmaking.

In 1962, 26 directors who argued for more subsidies in non-commercial film signed the Oberhausen Manifesto. This would see film differentiate from mainstream to a more art cinema aesthetic. 1970s cinema started to deal with nationally specific themes; several films were produced along side the idea of Vergangenheitsbewältigung - which meant to come to terms with the past.

The key filmmakers of this time were Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wimp Wender, each influenced by early Hollywood and the popular style it contained. Despite this, each had their own styles and vision on film, which led them to be the forefront of non-commercial cinema. In spite of this, films such as Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987) and Fitzcarraldo (Herzog, 1982) were not commercially popular and critics called for subsidies to be frozen.

New German Cinema did focus on attempting to highlight Germanys past and deal with Hitler and The Third Reich, through films such as, BRD Trilogy (Fassbinder) and Our Hitler (Hans-Jürgen Syderberg, 1977).  It can be suggested that new cinema looked to confront the truths of the past but be that as it may, Post-Wall cinema looked to study a less artisanal aesthetic.


Post-Wall film neglected the expressionist perspective of New German Cinema, and it focused on the unification of East and West. Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany (Boyer, p.370) states Pre-Wall film was depicted as a ‘better Germany’, which poses the motion of cinema now becoming more about  ‘fairy-tale’ story telling, rather than high art cinema.

An example of a possible German ‘fairy-tale’ is Run Lola Run (Tykwer, 1998). Tykwer gives the film a set genre of crime, however it can be depicted as a fairy-tale, with the main character, Lola, having what could be described as a ‘superpower’. As well as sharing attributed of Post-Wall film, it also shares that of New German Cinema, with the film showing a slight notion of Autorenfilm and experimentation.

In conclusion, it can be argued that Germany didn’t run away from it’s past because the New German Cinema phase of Autorenfilm did focus on the past and dealt with coming to terms what the country had been through. Nonetheless, post 1990, German cinema focused on a unified Germany with no acknowledgement of non-commercial film or the great periods. Overall it seems that German Cinema is running away from its propaganda past due to the transition from its artisanal aesthetic to genre based filmmaking.