Minority View: The Third Generation by RW Fassbinder blog

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder is evidently the greatest filmmaker to have emerged from Germany after the War but responses to his work has often been ambivalent - primarily because of their strange politics. No film demonstrates this more clearly than The Third Generation, one of his most complex films. It can be demonstrated that the ‘˜big three' of New German Cinema produced work that consistently responded to the notion of ‘˜post-war guilt'. Wim Wenders is known for his road movies (Alice in the Cities, 1974, Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976). Wenders' road movies are often about people with no big ambitions, people who are simply drifters. The emblem of the wanderer employed in the road movie can be linked to distaste with the nation state. When the social identity conferred upon the individual by the nation becomes distasteful, a search for one's roots outside those circumscribed by the national identity may become necessary. Wandering takes a different shape in Herzog's films because it is not the characters but the filmmaker himself who embarks for strange places and chooses to make films in them, often putting himself to great hardship and risk. Especially well-known are his excursions into the Amazon jungle for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarrraldo (1982). The central motifs in Herzog's work pertain to the domination of the weak by the strong and this cannot be unrelated to Hitler and the German people. As the flipside of films like Aguirre and (in a sense) Nosferatu the Vampyre which are about psychological domination and/ or the abuse of power, Herzog lavishes concern on the marginalised and socially outcast, and films like Stroszek (1977), Woyzeck (1979) and Kaspar Hauser (1974) are instances.

Fassbinder himself is often taken up with the propensities of the lumpenproletariat (Katzelmacher, 1969, Fox, 1975, Wildweschel, 1973) and this is perhaps the outcome of the German working class having collaborated with the Nazis. Fassbinder regarded himself as a man of the left but he was so afflicted by lack of political faith that not only was he misunderstood but he also didn't chose to clarify his position so that he would be understood. His Fear Eats the Soul (1974) is widely described as a poignant film about the ‘˜forbidden' love between an elderly German working class woman and a young black migrant. But critics inevitably miss a detail: the woman was a member of the Nazi party and her first husband, Polish. She was too stupid to see the contradiction between loving a Pole and collaborating with the political party that destroyed Poland. Now, she doesn't see the contradiction between loving a black man and sharing all the prejudices against blacks in general. "Unlike other blacks," she assures her friends "he washes himself every day".

The Third Generation, a film about a bungling terrorist group, was made two years after the death of the leaders of the Baader-Meinhof group, who had been widely regarded with sympathy. This film bears some resemblance to Godard's La Chinoise (1968) about a terrorist group that botches an assassination attempt. But while Godard's viewpoint is apparently that even misguided action is better than no action Fassbinder's film is more ambivalent. The Third Generation has a number of characters; apart from the members of the group there is the businessman Lurz who regrets early in the film that he has not been selling computers - apparently to the security service - because there have been few terrorist attacks. The film proceeds on the basis of Lurz's formulation that ‘˜terrorism is a creation of capitalism, intended to force the state to take extreme measures to protect it'. Not aware that their group is funded by Lurz, the film concludes with the group kidnapping him and making a video of the businessman announcing the radical purpose in his abduction.

The plot of the film has all the makings of satire but Fassbinder takes the film to another level through his portrayal of the group. The members of the group are as assorted a bunch as one might imagine, each one with his/her own preoccupations with only a general notion of the subversive ends they hope to attain. Hilde spends her time listening to poetry recordings of a 17-year-old girl who killed herself, Ilse is a drug addict perpetually in a haze, Gerhard Gast is the mild-mannered son of a hardnosed policeman named Edgar Gast while his wife is Lurz's secretary. Edgar is aware of his son's links with the group and also that that his own father's sympathies are with his grandson. Paul, a late entrant from Africa, is brutally masculine and conscious of his own irresistibility to women. Into this group come two other men - Franz and Bernhard, who have just been discharged from the military. Franz is Ilse's friend and the two are admitted after they are pronounced harmless. The two have little interest in the activities of the group although its members act mysteriously, flash guns and repeat passwords to each other. Bernhard is preoccupied with underlining passages from the anarchist thinker Bakunin's writing while Franz watches television.

There is a huge amount of ‘˜noise' in the film in as much as persons are talking at cross-purposes and reciting literature at each other. The television is always playing and people are perpetually moving in and out of the space of the action. All this may appear very confusing but we soon recognize what Fassbinder is about - if we try not to become distracted. My own sense is that Fassbinder chooses a terrorist group as his subject because, living with danger and death, such a group should be united by a single powerful objective. We would expect such a group to exemplify individuals driven by purpose. When Fassbinder shows such a group run on the lines of a standard non-government organization - is he calling into question the notion of ‘˜purpose'- can like-minded radicals undermine the structure of the State without being perpetually distracted as individuals?  Fassbinder makes it evident that the State is not similarly afflicted by ‘˜cross-purpose' because of the prompt way in which Paul and Fritz are riddled with bullets.

About The Third Generation Vincent Canby (in the New York Times) observed that although Fassbinder considered himself a man of the left, it would not be surprising - after seeing the film - if the filmmaker had ended up with the political right. While it must be admitted that Fassbinder is an eccentric ‘˜man of the left', there is no evidence in The Third Generation that the filmmaker is celebrating state structure - as someone from the political right wing might be expected to. In fact there is a more conspicuous celebration of structure in the early German cinema of directors like Fritz Lang (as in M, 1931).

RW Fassbinder was an extraordinary filmmaker but, after all this has been said, one wonders if his films can be understood without reference to the political context of post-war Germany. The pessimism inherent in The Third Generation can perhaps not be extended to other political contexts where it might even be deeply reactionary. But given the specificity of Germany after the War, it gives us as complex (and honest) a reflection on the possibility of radical action as any.