THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
1 (2001): 57-63
© 2001 National Communication Association 

The Evolution of the Queer German Film

Jeffrey A. Nelson

Alice A. Kuzniar.  The Queer German Cinema.  Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  x + 314 pages.  Notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). 

The German chanteuse Zarah Leander, the most venerated film idol of the Third Reich, also proved to be a gay icon.  That the diva could hold such great appeal for Nazi sympathizers, and at the same time have an enthusiastic following among a people whom key Nazi leaders wished to exterminate, certainly seems strange.  But the case of Leander, described in detail by Alice A. Kuzniar in her volume The Queer German Cinema, seems an appropriate subject for a text whose author claims it to be all about strangeness, or queerness.

At the outset Kuzniar cautions readers that if they are expecting a work that offers an overview of lesbian, gay, and bisexual German cinema, they have picked up the wrong book.  She shows little interest in films attempting to accurately portray the lives of what might be termed mainstream bisexual-homosexual persons.  Conventional individuals conforming to a kind of bourgeois model of living receive practically no attention from her.  For Kuzniar, “‘queer’ marks an eccentricity common to [some] gays, lesbians, bi- and transexuals, a common protest against the hegemony and legitimacy of the normal” (6).  Readers taking a tour a Kuzniar’s text will encounter films dealing with topics such as transgender individuals, cross-dressing, dominant-submissive behavior, pedophilia, pornography, and sadomasochism.

Since, Kuzniar claims, the concept “queer” does not allow any easy or lucid interpretation of trans-, bi-, and homosexuals, she contends that theories of allegory represent the ideal way for explaining the significance of the films discussed.  Because allegorical discourse holds hidden meanings, she notes, it serves as a superior vehicle for demonstrating the mystery, enigma, and complexity associated with the queer sensibility.  Allegory then forms the basis for analysis of the films examined.

Kuzniar’s work holds interest not only for those concerned with the German cinema.  The American culture and to an extent the American film industry have influenced German filmmaking, and readers of The Queer German Cinema will find considerable comment on how the United States extends its vision into the scene of another nation.

For the most part the author takes a chronological approach to her study, beginning with the Weimar Republic years 1919-1933 and continuing to the end of the century.  Before her detailed comment on the films begins she offers a concise but entirely satisfactory overview of the attitudes expressed toward homosexuality by prominent German physiologists, psychologists, and sociologists around the time of the Republic.  These authorities did not necessarily praise the homosexual condition as a wholesome one, she states, but they did in a number of cases refuse to treat it as a pathology.

Indeed the content of the first film Kuzniar analyzes, Anders als die Andern (Different From the Rest), produced in 1919, seems to indicate that a somewhat tolerant mood existed in Germany at the time.  This educational film directed by Richard Oswald defended homosexuals as decent human beings, worthy of the respect of others.  Anders proved extremely popular, Kuzniar observes, screening to sold-out audiences.  Apparently some in the audience, though, were scandalized by the film’s frankness, especially the scenes depicting men dancing and carrying on in Berlin nightlife.  The complaints became widespread, as Kuzniar tells it, ultimately effecting from government authorities increased film censorship and keeping any homosexual-related film as realistic as Anders from being screened in Germany for decades.

Nonetheless, the author continues, a number of Weimar-era films subsequently did get produced which blurred the rigid sexual boundaries favored by much of the public.  Several of these pictures featured cross-dressing, including Reinhold Schunzel’s 1933 production Viktor und Viktoria, the work known to so many Americans because of a relatively recent popular U.S. remake.  Kuzniar contends that the stories told in these films may contribute to liberating the viewer due to their favorable portrayal of characters ignoring society’s gender and sexual prescripts.

Hitler and his aides in the National Socialist party, having ended the Weimar era with their takeover of power in 1933, knew well the influence film could exert in the German people’s minds.  Kuzniar writes that the actress Zarah Leander had become a huge success in a musical in Vienna, and the Reich’s Film Board saw her as a potential star who could reach the hearts of the country’s motion picture fans.  In fact Leander did become the biggest film star of the Third Reich, an enormous box-office success.  She virtually always played the same basic role, that of an independent, strong woman who nevertheless stood loyal to her man even under trying circumstances.  This kind of heroic character, Kuzniar comments, appealed not only to the general audience but also to gay persons who could empathize with a stalwart individual undergoing suffering.  Moreover, Leander’s masculine baritone voice along with her large, broad-shouldered body made her attractive to gay viewers.

Despite Leander’s working for the Reich studios, the German people did not identify her as a Nazi sympathizer, according to Kuzniar, thus allowing her to remain a popular German entertainer even after World War II’s end.  She remained especially appreciated by gay men who flocked to her club performances. 

 The legendary director Rainier Werner Fassbinder used Leander as a model for some key parts in his 1970s and 1980s films.  Kuzniar offers ample evidence of this claim, alluding to characters in Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1980) and Querelle (1982) among other works.  Fassbinder frequently preferred to portray gender-ambiguous figures who could easily act in a feminine or masculine manner with no feeling of timidity about doing so.  He dealt bluntly, the reader finds, with topics no well known filmmaker in Germany and possibly other nations had handled up to that point, for instance anal sex, the pleasure of sexually motivated violence, and the role played by the size of a man’s penis in sexual acts.  Regardless, Kuzniar says, the major legacy of Fassbinder lies in his unwillingness to set any limits on the sexual role of anyone including the gay male, whether in relation to acts or fantasies.

A contemporary of Fassbinder, Rosa von Praunheim, is hailed by Kuzniar not only as Germany’s most prolific maker of queer films but as the country’s leading gay activist in the last quarter of the 20^th century.  The author maintains that his 1971 work Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (It’s Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Situation in Which He Lives) was the film that launched his career as well as the German gay-rights movement.  A major part of Pronheim’s success stands in his production of a number of documentaries, some dealing with gay activism and others with the AIDS crisis.  Kuzniar offers several examples, including Pronheim’s 1996 work Vor Transsexuellen wird gewarnt (Transexual Menace), dealing with transgender activism, as illustrations of his interest in treating issues and personalities out of the norm.

If public acclaim were a criterion for including films in The Queer German Cinema, Werner Schroeter’s works would have never made the cut.  But Kuzniar feels justified in giving him attention because of the admiration shown for his productions by other German filmmakers, among them Fassbinder and Pronheim.  She concentrates on two pictures, the 1971 piece Der Tod der Maria Malibran (The Death of Maria Malibran), which Schroeter thought to be his best, and a 1986 work Der Rosenkönig (The King of the Roses), his most explicit depiction of male-to-male attraction.  The two works demonstrate Schroeter’s varied interests, the first one offering a story of anxiety and suffering of women in love with each other, the second telling the tale of violence and death arising from the erotic relationship between a man and a boy.

The fascination with androgyny shown by so many German filmmakers, Kuzniar writes, emerges in Ulrike Ottinger’s creations.  In making the point the author uses as her major exemplar Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press), released in 1986.  Gray, though played by a woman, appears masculine on the screen but seems impassive through most of the narrative even when he views truly strange events such as a masochistic retired government worker lounging in a bathtub in public, pleading to be insulted as someone urinates on him.  While Gray acts as merely a puppet of media executives through most of the film, carrying out their every command as they use him for a publicity stunt, in the end he abruptly turns on them and kills them all, taking control of the media himself and demonstrating the power androgynous figures can wield.

German queer films’ connection with the United States, Kuzniar attests, becomes highlighted in the works of Monika Treut as much as any other filmmaker’s productions.  In fact, the reader discovers, apart from Treut’s first piece, all of her films have been produced in an American context.  Kuzniar chooses for special attention the 1991 release My Father Is Coming, in which a young female German immigrant to New York comes to appreciate the rich cultural diversity in the metropolis as well as the sexual diversity.  At different times she becomes attracted to another female, a female-to-male transexual, and a gay man.  Her conservative father, on a visit from Germany, eventually becomes accepting of his daughter’s out-of-the-norm interests and himself explores new sexual avenues.

If the major portion of The Queer German Cinema acts to inform the reader about notable developments in queer filmmaking, the final third of the text has a persuasive and informative end.  Here the author deals with little-known filmmakers, little known largely because of their youth and certainly not because of any lack of quality connected with their works, Kuzniar insists.  Therefore, she implies, the reader should want to stay with her to book’s end.

One of these young filmmakers to whom Kuzniar gives considerable attention is Michael Stock.  She concentrates primarily on Prinz in Hölleland (Prince in Hell), made in 1993 when he was just 25 years old.  A jester acts as narrator for the film’s story about a handsome young German man, a kind of gay prince, whose life with his friends evolves into a hellish existence.  The youths’ lives come to revolve around drug dependence, indiscriminate and apparently unsatisfying sex, street living since they have no home, and ultimately violence with the hero meeting a tragic death.  For Kuzniar, Prinz in Hölleland tells a sad tale of the vulnerabilities of youth.

Experimental films receive considerable space in The Queer German Cinema.  This genre, the author explains, does not depend on the usual linear narrative but indulges “in the visual enjoyment of suspended, unhinged, transient images which resist translation” (187).  She gives special consideration to the filmmakers Michael Brynntrup, Matthias Müller, Claudia Schillinger, Hans A. Scheirl, and Ursula Pürrer.  One of the films given extensive coverage is Schillinger’s 1995 Hermes, subtitled Begegung mit einem Mann, der Jungen liebt (Encounter With a Man Who Loves Boys).  The subtitle suggests the frankness of the subject matter considered in recent German experimental films.

Hermes, the reader learns, tells of an informal meeting of Schillinger with a man, Hermes, who believes he is helping boys by assisting them in living out their sexuality.  The film’s explicit nature is exemplified by the display of photographs of nude boys taken by Hermes himself, and in another case by super-8, black and white scenes of a naked mother and three-year old son playing with each other, the boy with an erect penis.  A repeatedly inserted scene shows a boy on a unicycle, cycling round the actor playing Hermes, watching but not getting near.  The scene, Kuzniar asserts, signifies viewers, their potential fascination with the film’s subject matter, and their concern about becoming closely connected to such a controversial theme.

Kuzniar expresses indignation that Hermes has screened less than a handful of times in public, never in the United States.  She submits that potential exhibitors who have rejected the work should show more openness to radical points of view displayed in film.  What Kuzniar does not note is that individuals exhibiting the film, at least in the States, almost certainly would expose themselves to social ostracism and might well be prosecuted under child endangerment laws.

The exaggeration and caricature of animated films present a unique opportunity for spoofing staid, socially acceptable behavior, thus Kuzniar’s introduction of the reader to a group of contemporary lesbians working in this area.  The group includes among others Nathalie Persillier, Lily Besilly, Claudia Zoller, and Stefanie Jordan.  In one of the works, Persillier’s 1994 piece Bloody Well Done, the heroine hurls herself from her skyscraper window, diving several stories to street level into the arms of her female chauffeur whom she passionately kisses before they drive off.  Once she arrives at her intended location, the heroine pulls out a Mixmaster beater that propels her above the city, a green spout taken from her purse serving as a gun with which she picks off unsuspecting men and eliminates them on the spot.  The feminine role has switched places with the masculine as the powerful one.

In addition to a comprehensive index and extensive bibliography, The Queer German Cinema offers a listing of sources from which many of the films discussed in the text can be obtained.  Further, a number of photographs placed strategically throughout the volume offer visual insights to various works treated.

With Kuzniar’s book the reader gets a well written, well documented account of queer filmmaking in a major European nation. The writer effectively describes the daring, creative approaches to sexuality taken by key German figures. 

Jeffrey A. Nelson is associate professor of communication studies at Kent State University.