Johannes von Moltke

Theory of the Novel: The Literary Imagination of Classical Film Theory*

OCTOBER 144, Spring 2013, pp. 49–72.

Bingeing on Heimat: Notes from the Berlinale

This article presents a brief review of selected aspects of the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, with a particular focus on the Edgar Reitzs Die andere Heimat. Reading the latter for echoes of the original Heimat series, the article focuses on the shared spatial aesthetics of home and away, Heimat and Ferne.

Far Away So Close: Loving to Hate Hitler

‘The fellow is a catastrophe.’1 Such was Thomas Mann’s pithy assessment of Hitler in 1938. As a ‘miserable, if also portentous phenomenon’, Mann asserts, Hitler should by all accounts draw hatred as ‘the only right reaction from those to whom our civilization is anyhow dear’. But Mann goes on to probe other ways of engaging with Hitler: more distanced, if no less emotional, forms reacting to the phenomenon. If the phrasing of the seemingly straightforward statement about Hitler as a catastrophic fellow isn’t enough, the title of the article in which it appears quickly reveals Mann’s layered, ironic approach. The essay initially appeared in Esquire under the title ‘That man is my brother’; the subsequent German version in the Paris-based Dutch emigre journal Das neue Tage-Buch apostrophizes the dictator as ‘Bruder Hitler’.2 Both versions consider Hitler’s manifestly catastrophic impact as the flipside of his personality, which galvanizes not only hatred but also the ironic attitude — or, in Mann’s terms, the ‘emotion’ (Affekt) — of interest. Deliberately moving Hitler into uncomfortable intimacy through appellations such as ‘brother’ (Bruder) and ‘fellow’ (Bursche), Mann fixes upon the fascination that emanates from the ‘deplorable spectacle’ of the Fuhrer. Neither his frightful psychological effects on the masses nor the ‘ever-widening circle of desolation’ around Hitler, he insists, provide a reason ‘why we should not find him interesting as a character and as an event’. Psychoanalyzing Hitler and considering him as a genius — not just a fellow, but a fellow artist, an ‘artist-phenomenon’ —, Mann ultimately grants this phenomenon ‘the need of a certain shuddering admiration’.