A film I saw last week (German Sons) illustrated well where memory in contemporary Western society has arrived. It presented the recollections of two men whose fathers were on different sides during World War II. One was a German soldier, the other a Jewish resistance fighter. A friendship has now developed between the two sons and their shared exploring of the past is at the heart of the film. This has become a well-tested formula over the last twenty years or so but it contains dangers for our understanding of the twentieth century.

This kind of highly personalised memory has developed unprecedented validity. As I sat watching this film I wondered what motivates audiences to watch such films. I had a disquieting feel that it is somehow voyeuristic, something like memory-porn. In such films history and memory have become the subject of the voyeuristic gaze that lies at the heart of the pornographic. World history is reduced to the microcosmic individual and we watch people doing remembering as cinematic entertainment.

The West's understanding of the conflicts that dominated the first half of the twentieth century has reached a post-memory stage. The number of people who were older than children during the two world wars is now so small that our social knowledge of these momentous and world-shaping events is almost entirely mediated. Hardly any of us were there. What we know we learned from books, films, TV, museums or recollections of individuals. This makes the role of storyteller or in this case documentary-maker that much more freighted with responsibility.

But filmmakers are generally not trained historians. In the case of German Sons the two subjects were insignificant figures in the global conflict. The film was a loose pastiche of platitudes with the historical accuracy and authority of a home-movie. That seems to be where historical narrative has arrived. Our preference for anecdote over analysis, our postmodern inability to see the wood for the trees and our desire to reduce the complexities of the world to individual personal narratives leaves us ill-equipped to grasp and comprehend the really large forces that have shaped our world.

Franco-German cultural kerfuffle

An exhibition of German art between 1800 and 1939 at the Louvre in Paris is causing ripples between the two neighbours. A series of articles, responses and letters in the German weekly Die Zeit offer an interesting case study in cultural diplomacy. 

The controversy began when German journalists felt that the Paris exhibition was seeking to reheat arguments and historiography that portray German nineteenth-century culture as proto-fascist and as the seed-bed of Nazism. The French side has denied this and emphasized the co-operative nature of the exhibition planning process. 

The whole debate shows just how delicate international cultural sensibilities remain. The economics and politics of the Euro crisis seems to have given German cultural diplomacy an added challenge just as, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, Germany had begun to enjoy a more "normal" standing in the international community. Europe is beginning to fear German hegemony in ways that it did not while the country was divided. 

As the Euro crisis has gradually brought many of Germany's European Union partners to their economic knees, Europe's biggest economy has remained comparatively strong. This has brought Angela Merkel's government increasing power and this is breeding resentment across Europe. 

Nineteenth-century Germany made great contributions to European and Western culture but their interpretation remains controversial especially at times when culture, politics and opinion are so closely interwoven.

The White Ribbon

Don't miss Michael Haneke's new film The White Ribbon. I don't normally do reviews or straight recommendations here, but this film is a must.

It has the power to restore your faith in film as a medium. Shot in black and white and with almost no music, the film's austerity is a great antidote to the many contemporary films that are overburdened by effects, flashy sets and locations. Its claustrophobic intensity means that the 144 minutes pass with 'ease'.

Like any great film, The White Ribbon leaves you with more questions than it answers. Some commentators see it as a study of prototypical National Socialism. But that is too simple. The strict social hierarchies, deep-seated deference to authority and willingness to "turn a blind eye" are all features of the village Haneke depicts. They are also prerequisites for fascism. But they were, in 1913, not exclusive to Germany. They could also describe life for many people in countries such as Britain, France, Sweden, the USA and Australia. And yet these countries did not adopt Fascism in the 1920s and 30s.

That said, it is fascinating to watch the film and think that the children who were around the age of ten in 1913 would become members of the generation that were the leaders and decision makers of the Third Reich. The real perpetrators, Hitler's Willing Executioners, to borrow the title of Daniel Goldhagen's book, were on average in their late thirties and early forties during the Third Reich, most having been born around 1905. Haneke's film is a thought provoking study of their collective childhood.

It is also very welcome to have a film about a period of European history - the last days before World War I - that has been overshadowed by films about events during and surrounding World War II. In many ways the latter conflict cannot be understood without having familiarity with the earlier war. Haneke's film is a wonderful contribution to establishing that familiarity.

Do more channels make for better TV?

You can never have too many TV stations, can you. More broadcasters mean greater variety and there should be "something for everyone". At least that is the theory. After watching - or not-watching as a result of acute boredom - German and Austrian television for the last six weeks I am beginning to wonder about the wisdom of this thinking.

There is no shortage of free-to-air channels - although you have to pay TV licence fees in Austria, so nothing is truly "free"-to- air. But what strikes me the most when channel surfing in Germany or Austria is the propensity of low-budget programs. (You find the same in Italy.) These are usually live-audience talkshows in the comedy or music genres. What there does not seem to be much of is better-quality, larger-budget in-house drama productions.

This got me wondering. Maybe the large number of TV stations has split the marketplace into too many small companies that do not have the financial clout to venture into serious in-house production. There are, of course, exceptions. Germany's ARD and ZDF do produce some quality TV, but most of the small, commercial operations seem content to run the standard Hollywood fare combined with "cheap and cheerful" studio junk.

In economic terms there are too many small players who have divided the market too thinly between themselves. Maybe there is afterall something to be said for fewer stations producing better quality. More is not always better.

Barbed wire and cuckoo clocks

In November 2009 it will be twenty years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain that separated West and East Germany for forty years. Germany is gearing up for various commemorative events to remember the victims of the Communist regime in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany.

One of the most ambitious projects is an exhibition called Art of the Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Kunst und Kalter Krieg / Deutsche Positionen 1945 - 1989). Curated by Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACMA and Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, the touring show started at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and next opens on 5 October in Berlin at the Deutsches Historisches Musuem.

For most of the Cold War and the twenty years since its end it has been customary to see the ultimate failure of East Germany as an indictment of its political and economic systems. It was also widely assumed that this failure could be directly transferred to the culture of East Germany. Surely the work of artists living under a Communist dictatorship would be inferior to that of their colleagues who enjoyed the artistic freedoms that existed in liberal democracies. For most of the last two decades since the West got unfettered access to the art of East Germany that certainly seemed to be the assumption. The Art of Two Germanys exhibition now goes some way to reassessing such crude assumptions. The interplay between political systems and artists is rarely straight forward. Orson Welles in the film The Third Man (see last blog) put it nicely if a little cynically:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

p.s. Those lines are not the work of Graham Greene, who wrote the story of the Third Man. Orson Welles added them while shooting the film.

© Brian Long 2009

Melbourne International Arts Festival 2009

The program for the 2009 Melbourne International Arts Festival has hit the streets and immediately set itself apart from the programs of the last Artistic Director.

Brett Sheehy is the new Artistic Director following on from stints as festival director in Sydney and Adelaide. His first Melbourne festival has all the hallmarks of a nicely rounded, if perhaps somewhat "safe", contemporary festival.

The London Philharmonic will play two concerts from the heart of the orchestral repertoire and the local symphony orchestra also features. The theatre and and dance components seem, however, curiously dominated by performers from Germany. Sasha Waltz and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg are the headline acts with the latter performing Sebastian Nuebling's production of Simon Stephens' play Pornography. It does seem a little curious to invite a German company to perform a contemporary English play in Australia in German! It is a pity there will not be an opportunity to see some of the work of Germany's young writers in Melbourne. Even some Georg Büchner or Heiner Müller (both in the repertoire in Hamburg) might do more for the expansion of the horizons of Melbourne audiences than a British play in German.

© Brian Long 2009