New German Cinema: The Sons Who Buried Papa's Films

On February 28, 1962, at a short-film festival in the industrial Ruhr town of Oberhausen, twenty-six young German filmmakers signed a single page and detonated a national cinema. The German film industry of the postwar years was a machine for comfort: Heimatfilme full of alpine meadows, chaste romances and forgetting. The signatories — among them Alexander Kluge and Edgar Reitz — announced that this cinema was finished.

The old film is dead. We believe in the new.

In the years that followed, the slogan hardened into something blunter and more famous on the streets and in the press: Opas Kino ist tot — Grandpa's cinema is dead. The generational charge in that phrase was the whole point. The men and women of Oberhausen were the children of the Third Reich, raised in the rubble and the amnesia of the Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle that rebuilt German prosperity while burying German guilt. Their films would become a two-decade interrogation of the fathers who had stayed silent.

The Manifesto and the Machinery

A manifesto is easy; an industry is not. What made New German Cinema more than a gesture was that its founders also built the plumbing. In 1965 the Kuratorium junger deutscher Film was established to fund first features, and the movement's decisive alliance came with public television. Networks like WDR and ZDF co-produced films with real artistic latitude, handing directors budgets without the commercial demands of the box office. This was the Autorenfilm — the author's film — an explicitly German cousin of the French politique des auteurs, and it produced a cinema of ferocious individual voices rather than a house style.

The first wave, the Young German Film of the mid-sixties, was cerebral and Brechtian. Kluge's Yesterday Girl (1966) won the Silver Lion at Venice and put the movement on the international map. But the films that would define New German Cinema for the world arrived in the 1970s, and they belonged above all to four men.

Four Directors, Four Temperaments

Rainer Werner Fassbinder was the movement's furious engine. In little more than a decade he directed some forty films for cinema and television — an inhuman pace fueled by theater discipline, a loyal repertory company and, eventually, drugs. His great subject was tenderness crushed by social machinery. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) transposes the plush Hollywood melodramas of Douglas Sirk, whom Fassbinder revered, into gray postwar Germany: Emmi, an aging cleaning woman, and Ali, a younger Moroccan guest worker, fall in love and are punished for it by every neighbor, shopkeeper and relative around them. The film's cruelty is Sirk's; its stripped, watchful style is entirely Fassbinder's. He went on to anatomize the whole Federal Republic in The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and the fifteen-and-a-half-hour television epic Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). He died in June 1982, at thirty-seven — a date historians often take as the symbolic end of the movement itself.

Werner Herzog went the opposite direction: away from society entirely, toward jungles, deserts and men consumed by impossible dreams. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) sends a doomed Spanish conquistador down the Amazon on a raft, and in Klaus Kinski's bulging-eyed madness Herzog found his ideal instrument and lifelong antagonist. A decade later, Fitzcarraldo (1982) staged its central obsession for real — Herzog actually hauled a full-sized steamship over a muddy Peruvian mountain, refusing special effects, courting catastrophe. Herzog's cinema treats nature as indifferent and grandeur as a form of insanity, and no one has ever shot it more hypnotically.

Wim Wenders was the movement's melancholic, its poet of highways and homesickness. His seventies road movies — Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976) — drift through a Germany saturated with American music, jukeboxes and Coca-Cola, quietly asking what a national identity means once it has been culturally colonized. That obsession with the American image culminated later in Paris, Texas (1984), which won the Palme d'Or, and in Wings of Desire (1987), his aching hymn to a divided Berlin watched over by angels. Both arrived after the movement's conventional endpoint, but they are unthinkable without it.

Volker Schlöndorff was its most literary talent, and the man who carried it to the Academy. His adaptation of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum (1979) — the story of a boy who refuses to grow, screaming through the rise of Nazism — shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and became the first German film to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Earlier, with The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), co-directed with Margarethe von Trotta, he indicted the tabloid press and the paranoid security state. Von Trotta soon emerged as a major director in her own right; her Marianne and Juliane (1981) confronted the era's political violence through two sisters split by radicalism.

A Reckoning With the Past

What binds these wildly different sensibilities is a shared refusal to look away. Where Papa's cinema had drawn a curtain over the war, the sons and daughters yanked it back. Sometimes the reckoning was historical, as in The Tin Drum. Sometimes it was contemporary and raw: the collective film Germany in Autumn (1978), assembled by Fassbinder, Kluge, Schlöndorff and others in the immediate wake of the Baader-Meinhof terror crisis, is a jagged real-time document of a democracy frightened by its own children and haunted by its parents' example. New German Cinema understood that the Nazi past was not a closed chapter but a pressure warping the present — in the family, the police, the press, the marriage bed.

Formally, the movement had no single grammar, and that was its strength. Fassbinder's mirrors and doorframes, Herzog's ecstatic landscapes, Wenders's long dissolving roads — each director invented a style to fit a private obsession, held together only by the funding structures and the moral seriousness they shared.

Legacy

By 1982 the wave had crested. Fassbinder was dead, subsidy politics were tightening, and the surviving directors scattered into international careers. But New German Cinema had already done its work. It restored Germany to the map of serious world cinema for the first time since Weimar, and it proved a durable model: public and television money defending the personal film against the market — a template later cinemas across Europe would borrow.

Its descendants are everywhere. Herzog became a globe-trotting documentarian and an unlikely pop icon; Wenders kept making films on three continents. And the movement's deepest lesson outlived all of them: that a country's cinema can be the place it goes to confront what it would rather forget. When Grandpa's cinema died at Oberhausen, something braver was born to bury it.