Towards
an Event-Based History:
Chronik
der Wende, Die Leere Mitte, and Good Bye Lenin
Christian Buss
For Deleuze, the event is an
event of the senses that arises from a particular state of affairs in the
world. This sense is located, as Gottlob Frege described sense, between
subjects and objects, resisting origin and particularity. The sense of the
event breaks apart upon on the surface of the split between subjects and
objects: it is as Deleuze says, located between words and objects (LS 22). As
such, its indeterminacy prevents fixity resisting structure, analysis and
meaning. The event’s temporality also resists teleologies of
past-present-future. It exists in a time which has always just past and is
always about to come. As such, the event is always expressed in the infinitive,
'to die,' 'to be sick.' Without movement, becoming, the event is inconceivable,
temporally resisting specificity as it resists spatial location.
With respect to our recent history, Deleuze argues, the development
of cinema provides a privileged site for comprehending a decisive shift in
strategies of signification, understanding, and belief. This shift concerns the
question of time, because it provides a complex moving-picture of duration,
arising as it does from the basis of the filmic interval. As Rodowick argues, since
the interval functions as an irreducible limit of the cinema, “the flow of images or sequences bifurcate and develop serially,
rather than continuing a line or integrating into a whole. The time-image
produces a serial rather than organic form of composition. Rather than
differentiation and integration, there is only relinking by irrational
divisions.” (Rodowick 1997 p112). This relinking
describes a way of mapping the images in a non-rational manner:
In the first palace, the cinematographic image becomes a direct
presentation of time, according to non-commensurable relations and irrational
cuts. In the second place, this time-image puts thought into contact with an
unthought, the unsummonable, the inexplicable, the
undecidable. (Deleuze, The Time Image,
214;)”
The cinematographic image is
thereby privileged as a primary device of time analysis. With regard to
history, the cinematographic engages three series, the series of events, the series of states of affairs and the words or
propositions that express events.[1] In
memory, the past exists virtually as a collection of past instants or percepts
in a state of 'relaxation,' i.e., in a condition in which these precepts are
not organized in any particular way with relation to each other. They exist as
a dissociated set of singularities. That is, they are virtual.
Furthermore, this past is not something apart from the present but something
that is contained in the present.[2] As
figured by the cinematographic image the entire past (as memory) is part of
each present. This cinema of time produces an image of thought as a
nontotalizable process and a sense of history as unpredictable change.
However, ever-changingness of the past-as-present-as-future of the
Deleuzian event is complicated by traditional narrative strategies. Narrativity
is a process of resistance, resistance against the ambiguity of unmasked codes.
Barthes exposes the semiotician's mission of unmasking the codes of the
natural. Taking a James Bond story as the tutor text, Barthes analyses the
elements which are structurally necessary (the language, function, actions,
narration, of narrative) if narrative is to unfold as though it were not the
result of codes of convention. Characteristically, bourgeois society denies the
presence of the code; it wants 'signs which do not look like signs'. Although
we impose temporal and generic structures onto the polysemy of codes (and
traditional, "readerly" texts actively invite us to impose such
structures), any text is, in fact, marked by the multiple meanings suggested by
the Barthesian codes.
Semiotic deconstructions of texts by academicians serve as the
primary tool to engage in an exposure on this fabrication of “reality” and of
monolithic meanings onto texts: that which Deleuze calls the actual as a
transformation of the virtual. As opposed to cinematic attempts at narrative
unity Deleuzian historicity brings into question the very possibility of such
unity, not through problematizing linguistic signification, but within the very
status of the film image’s serialization, its flickering movement. The analysis
of film, then, depends upon the exposure of these breaches. However, within such a logos, Deleuze posits a totalizing effect of
the cinema within such a destabilization that, I argue, cannot be maintained. For
Deleuze this destabilizing is the inevitability signaled in Logique du sens: "meaning is never
a principle or origin; it is produced.... It is to be produced by new
machineries."[3] This always to be produced, but never already
produced is called into question by narrativity. Narrativizing is thereby a
resistance, resistance against the ambiguity of unmasked codes, implying processual
interrogation that is always in flux. Instead of what Deleuze takes as the
final moment of film, the exposure of breach, the act of cinematic viewing induces
instead a process of oscillation at the borderline of totality and its
negation: multiplicity. Returning to the site of the Deleuzian assertion of the
breach, the cinematic image, the purposes of film analysis become clear: to
explore the borderlines, examining moments of the rupture of unity in order to
more completely develop a “chronic” of contestation between narrative totality
on the one hand and its impossibility on the other.
Within this project, I argue
that specific externalities and the complicated status of history in German
debates on the fall of the
Without belaboring the obvious, the
narrative of the Chronik der Wende develops the period from October to December
as the end of a European era and the return to a myth of German unity that is
figured as inevitable: “They were days that changed global dynamics forever.
The two separate German states ceased to exist and the Iron curtain came down,
ending the war which had pitted this country against itself.” This formulation,
in which the legitimacy of two countries, East and West Germany is rejected in
favor of a narrative that posits the entire period from 1945 to 1989 instead as
the battleground and the fall of 1989 as the eruption of the “true”, a priori
unity of the German nation is symptomatic of populist documentaries of the fall
of the wall. This trope is repeated with mildly variant blueprints, some
positing their narratives as “protocols of a [unitary] German revolution”
others narrowing in on the developments of the 48-odd hours just preceding the
opening of the wall, claiming them as the period that changed the world
forever. But always the narrative is repeated in terms of unification and
transformation located in a discrete temporal space between October and
December of 1989. Within these narratives, and the Chronik der Wende in
particular, the shock of the temporal is always evident, with talking heads alternately
amazed or excited at “how quickly the world has changed.” This “how quickly”
signals not only an anticipation of how much can happen in a short period,
figured in days and hours, but also serves to foreclose questions of before and
after. October through November are not symptomatic of
external factors but instead remain a closed set, containing within their temporal
boundaries all causative and explanatory markers of “unification.” Narratively,
the film operates by moving from “major moment” to “major moment”, barreling
from initial protests to nightly news reports of the days
occurrences. Interviews of those present are used to highlight the singularity
of the moments: “That day changed my attitude and that of all of the others
there. It was a day of total disillusionment, the credibility of the system
fell like humpty dumpty.” (13:30) Interviews like this are often followed by a
black-screen which chronicles occurrences for which there are no visual images.
Instead the screen reveals text-telex style, with a relentless ticker-tape
pitter patter accompanying each day’s revelations: “
“Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you that
The hermetically sealed narrative
of the Chronik der Wende thereby circumvents the deeply problematic questions
of German identity formation that characterize alternate media and literary
engagements in the fall of the wall and German unification. As Jarausch states alternative
readings of the fall of the wall:
“the unforeseen return of the nation-state through
unification blocked these escape routes and forced Germans once again to confront
themselves as a people. The subsequent crisis of ideological beliefs has initiated
another round of redefinitions of what it could or should mean to be German at
the end of the twentieth century.”
The narrative and historical unity implied by this film forecloses
such a debate to, as its status as Chronik represses categorical indeterminacy.
However, later filmic engagements in the fall of the
“The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased
in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural politics become
the closed circle of interpretation. The Other loses
its power to signify to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish
its own institutional and oppositional discourse” (Bhaba, The Commitment To
Theory p.31).
As such, narrativity devoices and builds over otherness, asking it
to hold itself as silent to unified meaning, exerting its discursive control.
Critical here is that Bhaba establishes this silencing historically, locking
the loss of the other in terms of its inability to “ initiate
its historic desire,” a silencing that has exists beyond the cultural “here and
now” but rather within historical movement. Heterogeneity is opposed historically,
the direct implication of which is that Others are
figured a-historically, without the ability to build narrative history, and
hence outside of time. The alternative posited by Bhaba is based upon the
enunciation of “cultural difference” which:
“problematizes the binary division of past and
present, tradition and modernity at the level of cultural representation and
its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present,
something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of
tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign
of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the
artifice of the archaic.”
The enunciation of cultural difference thereby intervenes in
narrativity by challenging our sense of the historical identity of culture, and
as such displaces what Benedict Anderson has described as culture written in
homogeneous, serial time. Not only is culture thus rewritten, but the very
foundations of culture in Historicity. With the explosion of heterogeneity it
becomes impossible to maintain unity of intent that is so critical to a chronic
history. Eruptions of the other thereby destabilize History’s status as part
and parcel of reconfigurations of cultural status. The question then remains,
what alternative is posited with this rejection of historical unity? Does the
historicity enacted within the enunciation of cultural difference coincide with
the event-based history of Deleuze, in which past-present-future
coincide?
In Die Leere Mitte, a film essay that re-views the
events of 1989 and 1990 not within the hopeful matrix of “together” but instead
from the perspective of marginalized “other” just such a reconfiguration occurs.
Ultimately, the inability to resolve the status of otherness within narratives
of unification leads to the direct confrontation with the inability to impose
temporal and generic structures onto the polysemy of codes. Hito Steyerl’s
historical glance in Die Leere Mitte instead refashions
The film begins with an ellipsis; the film’s framing shot is a
black background onto which a seraph typewriter font is blended revealing a
mere segment of a quotation from Sigfrid Kracauer’s From Caligari To Hitler: “…To establish a tradition of lost
processes; giving names to the hitherto nameless”. The film then cuts to an
image of the
Visually, this branching is not accomplished sequentially, as with
the rapid cuts from present to historical object of Chronik der Wende. Instead,
the video relies heavily on a layering effect in which two or more cuts of
video footage are streamed simultaneously, one image moving from an initial
transparency to greater opacity until it fully replaces the other. The effect
is ghost-like, we see a person standing in a field, but are also able to see
through him. Similarly the audio track resists a single voice,
Mendelssohn’s music is at times a focus of the voice-over, the tones of which
remain present long after a shift to a different thematic center. As such it
becomes impossible to establish the moment of transition between time periods
and scenes in the film: a
Discussion of this film is inherently problematic however, as it
centrally asserts heterogeneity, instantiating it both visually and thematically,
thereby resisting interpretation and analytical specificity. While hesitant to
lock down the film, and not wanting to catalogue the varied themes of the video,
a loose structuring is necessary to get at the implicit project of the film.
Reductively, eight thematic strains are presented, repeated and revisited
throughout the film. They are as follows: The question of the borderlines that
have been enacted at the Potsdamer place. Felix Mendelssohn’s status as a Jew
in
Within the film, each of these foci engage in
questions of inside vs. outside, from the borders of Berlin as dramatic spatial
enactment of this break between those who belong and those excluded, to deeply
personal investigations of Husseyn, the African soldier who fights for Germany
in the first World War, but is ultimately stripped of his citizenship because
of the rise of National Socialism. Centrally these themes are not deployed
sequentially, but as with the visual and auditory blending of the film, are
often merged within a single segment of the film.
One four minute sequence of
the film enacts this multiplicity of perspectives powerfully: The section
begins with a voice-over describing late Weimar employment quotas which
prohibited black skinned people from working in the Cabarets, while showing
images of Friedrich Hollaender at a cabaret. The camera cuts to A close up of a
model for the new “house fatherland” that is to be built in Potsdamer place
while the voiceover quotes Sigfried Kracauer’s description of the “rosy pink
morality” that is central to the hiring practices of a retail shop. The camera
cuts to a group of Trabis and several couples in traditional German dress
parading by spectators during the day of unification in 1991, before cutting to
a long shot of the photographs of white Germans working in a poster for a new
office building, as the voice-over continues the narrative of racially
determined work quotas in 1931. The film blends to an image of squatters homes
in the former death zone marking the border between East and
“At first, they first were happy after the fall of the wall,
but now outsiders are at fault. Financially they don’t feel they are well off,
the east Berliners and then the east Germans as a
whole, so they look for the guilty, for someone to take the blame.”
He goes on to repeat a story that he has already told in the
opening sequences of the film about his being beaten by six Germans. As he
tells the story the screen images blend once again to the building model for the
new House Fatherland, while the audio plays a Mendelssohn Concerto as the
voice-over repeats the story of Mendelssohn’s difficulties crossing the customs
gate at the Potsdamer place in 1743. The narrator goes on to describe the
various buildings that have stood in one corner of the Potsdamer place, from
the Palais Mendelssohn to the Reichstag, and then to the rebuilding of the
Reichstag that is being constructed by foreign nationals and is the subject of
a major protest action by the BAU union. The visuals of this sequence close
with shots of these protestors as the narrator reads Kracauer’s description of
the spectators witnessing the burning of the Reichstag in 1933.
In this short sequence, anti-Semitism in 1743,
Narrative Competition
Central to the strategies of Historical undoing of Die Leere Mitte is its formal
radicality, its non-narrativity and its regular use of blending between
sequences, thereby visually and auditorily destabilizing the viewer’s (and
critic’s) attempts to construct unitary, sequential meaning within the text.
This raises the question of whether such formal narrative instability is a
requirement on order to instantiate the historical instability and
heterogeneity of the Deleuzian eventalized History. A recent attempt to
question the fall of the wall in a popular big-screen German film brings the question
of this potential impossibility to the forefront. The film Good Bye Lenin
investigates the status of a Grand Other, a mother who misses the fall of the
wall and reunification due to a heart-attack induced coma. This attack comes
from the shock of witnessing the changes of the fall of 1989. As silent
witness, she sees her son protesting the DDR government and into coma, thereby
missing the events of late 1989. When she finally comes to in spring of 1990,
doctors are clear that her very life depends upon her not being exposed to a
Rather than forcing the mother’s realization in a
moment of shock, in a moment of irreconcilable rupture, however, it is left to
Alex’s girlfriend, Lara, to explain the fall of the wall to the mother. The
camera captures this telling in a long shot taken through the window of a
partially ajar hospital door, with Lara at the mother’s bedside, explaining the
situation to her calmly and coolly claiming: “It Is not such a big change,
there are just no more borders.” This scene is filmed obliquely, the voices are
muffled, our perspective is from far away, and the discussion is ended
prematurely as the camera interrupts the conversation and turns to Alex, who is
left unaware of the change. These filmic strategies shift attention away from
this supposedly disastrous injection of the present into the mothers
life, visually and narratively, what has been figured throughout as the
decisive event to be avoided is instead a mere filmic sidebar, a moment that
almost disappears in its subtlety. The resulting ambiguity of this moment of
telling, and the mother’s very ability
to handle the news of the fall into wall dramatically calls into question for
whom the illusion of the DDR is being maintained. It appears
that the manic need to maintain the DDR in the present is only necessary in
Alex’ mind. Ultimately, in its closing sequence the film discloses how
critical the problematic question of the DDR past, the unification present and
the unclear future is for Alex and not for the Mother. This is accomplished by
initiating and expanding this problematic status of how to come to terms with
transition onto the body of the male lead. In the scene Alex and his family sit
by the hospital bed, watching the news report that he and his friend, an
aspiring filmmaker have created in order to break the news of the open borders
to his mother. They have done this by hiring Alex’s boyhood hero, the first
German in space Sigmund Jähn. In a melodramatic speech, Jähn, refigured as the
new leader of the DDR, explains how the values of the DDR have come to be
recognized as the symbols of the correct world order, and how their exists an
alternative to the opposition between East and West. During this speech, the film cuts from the television image to
Alex sitting at the bedside watching the film, doubling the opening scene of
the film in which we have seen an enraptured Alex as a young boy watching the news
of Jähn’s travels in space. As the speech continues, the camera cuts back to
the television and then to the mother, who, already knowing what has happened,
instead watches her son, witnessing the extremes that he has gone to in order
to rebuild the East German world of his childhood. It is this lingering glance
and the smile that breaks out on her face that advocates for a reading of the
film in which Alex’s attempts to come to terms with the problematic status of
his past in
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