Page 208 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

the home and Fascism in the family unit',6 was here transmuted into a punkish mockery of the father
as legitimate familial embodiment of totalitarian authority and law.
It was a mockery echoed the following year, in Bloody Excesses in the Leaders Bunker, a six-minute
Super-8 short set in the final days of the Reich. Here, Hitler was depicted by a performer bettet
known for his obscene parodies of the much-loved folk musician Heino, while Buttgereit played his
assistant. Whilst the Heino impersonator went down very well with contemporary audiences, it is
nonetheless notable that Buttgereit's onetime inclusion of genuine concentration camp footage in the
film proved too strong even for the punk denizens of the Berlin music scene. It underscored, however,
Buttgereit's own decidedly inventive take on his nation's past, and the connection of that past to the
politically divided and culturally confused present - a concern that would, most certainly, feed into
the Nekromantik films.
In 1985 came Hot Love, a self-consciously absurd tale of sexual infidelity, rape, suicide and
the slaughter of the transgressive mother by a murderously mutant newborn: the present born of
parental sin, the past avenged, the body bloodied and broken, dark humour inescapable. Finally,
with the Buttgereit-ditected crucifixion sequence in Michael Brynntup's Jesus - The Film (1985-86)
in which Christ (in vampire teeth) is simultaneously nailed to the cross and staked through the heart,
the director's thematic machinery and collection of collaborators was complete. Buttgereit, like
Syberberg, evidently recognised that strand of Romantic irrationalism that had lain at the heart of
German culture long before the originary unification of the nation in the 1870s. This irrationalism
had manifested itself in Goethe's rendering of the Faust legend, Hoffman's tales of the unheimlich in
prose and later still the horror tales of Weimar cinema - such as Robert Weine's The Cabinet ofDr
Caligari (1919) or F. W. Murneau's Nosferatu (1922).
Like Syberberg before him, Buttgereir also recognised 'the emotional deadness of German
society'.7 This was engendered by the Nazi appropriation of that Romantic tradition and focused
in his films on Germany's subsequent repression both of the memory of the Nazi past and the
irrationalism that underscored it, leaving Germany 'spiritually disinherited and dispossessed ... a
country without a homeland, without Heimat'." For if Syberberg had the quintessentially irrational
Germanic unconscious rise from the grave in the guise of the Fuhrer in Hitler: A Film From Germany
(1977), then in the Nekromantik movies Buttgereit would undertake a considerably more visceral, but
no less politically serious, act of resurrection.

CENSORING THE DEAD

In terms of his productions, Buttgereit operates in a variety of roles and works with a small team,
including Manfred Jelinski as producer, Franz Rodenkirchen as co-writer and co-director and actors
such as Daktari Lorenz, Mark Reeder and Monika M. amongst many others. Although this group
works to insanely unpredictable shooting schedules and on ridiculously low budgets, it seems that
Buttgereit had picked up the torch of the Oberhausen Manifesto's signatories in his attempt to make
something new out of the legacy of the past and the uncertainties of the present. Buttgereit's graphic
depictions of sexual encounters with the dead (as well as the mutilation of people and animals),
alongside his decidedly idiosyncratic re-animation of the German Romantic tradition (through his

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