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Majestät brauchen Sonne (2000)
His Majesty need sun, and history needs such documentaries
This documentary provides a trenchant analysis of German history before WW1 by focusing on the life and media persona of Kaiser Wilhelm II. I found it both extremely interesting and extremely entertaining, and I rather hope that a subtitled English version exists somewhere or will exist some day - the movie is highly recommendable for everybody actually interested in early 20th century history.
In a pleasantly minimalistic fashion, Schamoni provides a montage of authentic footage from the Wilhelminian period 1890-1914, as preserved by German (and other) archives, with a few bits of additional material from nowadays. The silent footage is explained by an almost continuous voice-over commentary (beautifully spoken by Mario Adorf). This commentary is solidly researched and actually manages to make at least one point of considerable historical relevance, previously rather understated in the literature on the period: the film material demonstrates amply how very much the Kaiser relied on the new media photography and film in order to create an impression of omnipresence and to impose himself (or rather, a media persona that better suited his fairly advanced vanity) on the minds of his subjects. The media multiplied the images of a ruler who hardly ceased traveling his country anyway, presumably in a somewhat desperate effort to suppress the slow erosion of monarchical values - of which he must have been dimly aware and which was ironically furthered substantially by his great talent to mess up national and international politics with his appalling political incompetence. The movie title - "His majesty need sun" - alludes to Wilhelm's incessant pursuit of sunshine for making public appearances - and to Germany's pursuit of "a place in the sun", a euphemism used to justify the heated quest for a colonial empire since the 1880s, a quest that helped set the stage for WW1 more than anything else.
While the movie has no share in the banality and intellectual barrenness so characteristic of history documentaries, it still manages to be extremely entertaining. Schamoni opts for a specific analytical standpoint, and he never conceals this decision from the viewer. The movie is a type of documentary aiming at analysis. Everything Schamoni does in order to drive his analysis further supports the documentary character of the movie. "Everything" here means two things, in particular: the use of satire, and the use of emotionalization.
As for satire, the combination of footage and the very choice of certain clips (particularly memorable for me: the Kaiser entertaining German notables with extraordinarily childish games on his yacht) often aim at ridicule. In addition, Otto Sander provides Kaiser imitations, absurd little soliloquies, which make the pictures come to their ridiculous lives. But all this remains in the framework of Schamoni's analysis of a society that was willing to tolerate sheer folly out of booming nationalism and increasingly outdated ideals of masculinity and adherence to a system of social hierarchization based on the presence of the monarch.
As for emotionalization, Schamoni provides occasional glimpses of the Kaiser's rather unhappy existence, for instance with respect to his childhood as a disabled heir-apparent (his left arm was paralyzed since birth), rather despised by his parents and subject to torturous discipline meant to enable him to hide his disability from the public. Occasionally, one feels sorry for Wilhelm when he loses control of his media images. And the pictures from his exile in Doorn (Netherlands) where he died in 1944, only, and where his most important pastime was to oversee the cutting down of most of the trees in the park, are actually somewhat heart-breaking. They reveal the near-autistic quality of Wilhelm's interactions with the world, and they arouse an ambivalent sort of pity - for the unhappy monarch and for the world he helped come to pieces. This device of emotionalization remains intimately bound up with the satirical side of the film, however, and always remains a tool of analysis, if a suggestive one, pointing at the likely tensions between Wilhelm's private and public personae, and keeping the movie off the dangerous track of interpreting history in a personalized fashion. Schamoni never forgets, it seems, that the Kaiser is just one part of a social system. All in all, I really do not know what else to ask of a historical documentary.
Black Box BRD (2001)
The BRD is all gone...
This movie attempts to turn something into history. By treating both sides of the intense conflict between the leftist terrorists and the political elite of postwar West Germany in the 70s and 80s with equal respect, its main message is, perhaps, this: it's all over. The movie shrugs off the ideologies involved and turns its focus on the two biographies of Grams and Herrhausen instead.
Some of the previous comments have remarked that those two really didn't have much in common. Even their involvement with terrorism wasn't particularly similar - Herrhausen, the banker, was simply a victim. He had known, of course, that he was a likely target, but only his death, not his life was molded by the RAF terrorist movement. Grams, on the other hand, was a terrorist for roughly two decades, and died, most probably by suicide, during a shootout with the police. I believe that the only way in which these two biographies could be linked (without a tremondous, and strained, analytic effort) was by representing them both as parts of an historical phenomenon. The movie doesn't really need a clear connection between its two protagonists other than this: they're part of the same historical constellation. It doesn't aim at explaining this constellation. It aims at telling us that it IS historical.
How could this be of interest to German audiences? While I don't want to reduce the movie's appeal to this - there's a lot of intriguing material in it - I think the explanation lies in the German present, not in the past. Mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by the more severe transformations in the Eastern part of the country, the old West has changed quite thoroughly as well. And the changes are accompanied by certain tendencies of framing recent history in collective memory, as it were. We now like to regard all the political conflicts of the years before 1989 as finished and done with. Germany, we want to believe, is totally different from what it was back then. This urge for discontinuity is rather questionable, actually... Anyway, that's where both the fascination and the problems and perhaps the ultimate failure of the film lie. Or so I think.