Page 210 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

past, Germans preferred to bury it'.10 The purpose of Buttgereit's Nekromantik movies was, like the
New German Cinema before it, to dig into the place of burial and engage passionately with the rotting
fruits of the past, which we the audience are forced also to embrace visually through the technological
mechanisms of cinematic production.
NATIONAL BOUNDARIES AND BODY MARKERS

Fittingly for a Berliner, and hence one who had grown up in an island city bisected by the Wall
and its attendant ideologies, Buttgereit frequently adopts the metaphor of the border, or boundary,
as means of articulating the sense of existential isolation, and cultutal confusion experienced by his
characters. Great emphasis is placed, for example, on the ways in which the most innocuous-looking
of apartments, shot from the sanitised safety of the street, can nonetheless house the most grotesque,
and historically redolent, realities. Focusing on the interiors of such apartments, Buttgereit not only
participates in the New German Cinema's quasi-documentary focus on the real-life spaces inhabited by
ordinary people, but points to the essentially unheimlich nature of the German home. The apartment
inhabited by Rob, and initially Betty, is one such space. Their bed, for example, is swathed in chicken
wire, becoming a highly culturally resonant space of physical, emotional and historical entrapment.
Here, erotic shenanigans with the bony corpse inescapably evoke the cadaverous figures staring out
from behind the concentration camp wire in films such as Alain Resnais' 1955 production Nuit et
Brouillard (Night and Fog). (This image itself being famously quoted as a commentary on the German
present by director Margarethe von Trotta in the closing sequence of her 1981 film Die bleierne Zeit
(The German Sisters.) A bed is never a bed in Buttgereit's films, just as a corpse is never simply a corpse.
For sexual desire, the world of dreams, the horrors of the past and death itself are all self-consciously
entwined in a cinematic spectacle that may shock, but shocks in a way that is intimately involved with
the German past and encoded by German representational practices.
Subtly encoded Nazi semiology is apparent, for example, across both movies. Both Rob of
Nekromantik and Monika of Nekromantik II possess a highly distinctive and highly nationally-specific
ornament - a miniature version of The Glass Man. Originally created by Franz Tschackert of the
German Hygiene Museum in Dresden in 1930, this was a life-size model of a male figure whose
transparent skin allowed the observer to see the skeleton within, and some of the internal organs. One
of Hitler's favourite contemporary artefacts (there are pictures of him posing proudly alongside it),
the model was assiduously promoted as an embodiment of Aryan racial perfection, its organs echoing
the master race's purity of line and perfection of form, its transparency signalling the eugenic purity
of the breed." In possessing such an artefact, in playing with it and re-assembling its body parts with
loving care, necrophiliacs like Rob and Monika do seem to be engaging with a particulat model of
historically-grounded subjectivity that is overtly linked to the discourses of racial supremacism that
underscored National Socialism.
But such discourses, Buttgereit again intimates through his mise-en-scene, were not the invention
of the Nazis, simply appropriated by them. Rob's flat, after all, also contains a large collection of
specimen jars holding an eyeball, a foetus, a hand and various unidentifiable organs. These roo are
highly reminiscent of the discourses of racial supremacy promulgated by Nazi science and explicitly

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