2025/06/01 by Evan Torner · 1 voice
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #European history and politics #German History and Society #Communism, Protests, Social Movements
paper · doi:10.1111/gequ.70018
openalex publication_date 2025/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/08
In the recently published, sprawling coffee table book Der Deutsche Film (2024) by Ralf Beil and Rainer Rother on behalf of the Deutsche Kinemathek, nearly every corner of German film history seems to get a mention. Yet there are zero references to the Neue Münchner Gruppe or any of its notable creators, Klaus Lemke or Rudolf Thome. Nor can the group be found in the revised German Cinema Book (Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, Deniz Göktürk, and Claudia Sandberg, 2020), and it is mentioned only briefly in Sabine Hake's German National Cinema (2007). As Dominik Graf argues in his film Offene Wunde deutscher Film (2017), whole chapters of brilliant genre filmmaking in Germany have gone neglected and understudied because, above all, they were often made for television or limited consumption and concerned themes and content that were not of interest to apparatuses of German film history: archives, funding bodies, museums, video distribution companies, classrooms, and cinemas. A TV film such as Klaus Lemke's Rocker (1972), for example, combines the street-revenge violence expected of a 1960s St. Pauli crime film with the nonchalance and libido of Easy Rider (1969). In watching the low-budget work, it is quite clear that Lemke had no permission to shoot in many of his locations: his protagonists navigate busy streets, and live sex workers on the Reeperbahn are just part of the scenery. His origins amidst a whole scene in Munich that overtly valued such work are important. What place in German film history does Lemke's tireless genre filmmaking deserve? And how much of our own actions in documenting, preserving, and critiquing German cinema are simply at the mercy of state and commercial film interests? Marco Abel, author and editor of numerous books related to West German cinema and the post-Wende Berlin school, has now chosen to specifically preserve and critique the oeuvre of the Neue Münchner Gruppe, a loose collection of filmmakers that included Lemke, Thome, May Spils, Werner Emke, and Max Zihlmann. The group's most notable films included Spils’ Zur Sache, Schätzchen (1968), a breakout sex comedy that became Germany's top grossing film in the year of its release, and Thome's Rote Sonne (1969), a surreal murder-cult thriller. Whereas the young West German filmmakers associated with the political transformations of 1968—Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Werner Herzog—notably attempt to activate their audiences politically, the Neue Münchner Gruppe and the characters in its films adopt a “Bartleby-esque disposition” (Abel, 2024, pg. 18), in which they practice politics by simply preferring not to engage in the normal rhythms of West German bourgeois life. Their films are unruly, horny, ungovernable, and unswerving in their cynicism regarding the money-obsessed West German society that produced them. In Mit Nonchalance am Abgrund, Abel adopts a disposition not dissimilar to these filmmakers, sometimes simply observing what seem to be the statements and aesthetic outcomes of a film movement that reacted quite visibly to an age of supposed prosperity amidst the Cold War. Abel's book is a collection of photos, interviews, documentation, and analysis for all those of us who seek a counternarrative to the Autorenkino story that is typically told about West German cinema, in which supposedly a few enfants terribles took German taxpayer money and ushered forth an influential “New German Cinema” that critically engaged with the German past through artistic, literary, and pro-filmic devices. The Neue Münchner Gruppe, by contrast, operated on shoestring budgets and brought with it the working-class humor of low expectations and bemusement toward the capitalist present in 1964-1972. In their films, murder is seen as a natural, understandable outcome of a ruthless society. Divorce is a calculated move, but an expensive one. Sex and love are transactional, and everyone cheats. An interview with Enke in the book reveals that the cheating on celluloid wasn't just sexual: after they managed to make Zur Sache, Schätzchen with the backing of Peter Schamoni, every link in the chain cheated others out of the resultant profits. “[Der] Kinobesitzer betrügt den Verleiher, der Verleiher betrügt den Produzenten, und der Produzent betrügt seinen Co-Produzenten,” Enke recalls (Abel, pg. 256). A substantive component of Abel's book is devoted to the fact that these films comment upon the financial and social relations of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the western world moved from an industrial to a post-industrial society. Just as the filmmakers have to engage in bizarre dealings and favors in order to get their marginalized work to various screens, so too do the characters have to continuously hustle in a world mad with money. Their laconic attitude amidst the hustle becomes iconic. Dominik Graf and Christian Petzold, two of modern Germany's most prominent filmmakers, both owe their surveillant filmmaking style and emotionally distant characters to a body of work concerned with just getting by. Graf and Petzold's own critiques of the neoliberal present thus have firm grounding within previous work, albeit films that continue to rest in obscurity. Abel captures the energy and zeitgeist of a film moment that would otherwise be easily forgotten, given that most of its works never appeared on VHS, DVD, or Blu-ray. It is not lost on me that genre filmmaking is frequently absent from our German film syllabi, such that our students are much more likely to watch an art film heartily endorsed by the Goethe Institut of the 1980s than an improvised sex comedy that begins with a drunk photo model waking up in a cab (Lemke's Sylvie, 1973). With a good dose of luck and support, Abel's interviews and analyses have laid a foundation for future researchers to help validate, evaluate, and even rescue all corners of German film history.