Page 61 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

father, but sentenced to death for desiring her brother, Barbara's fantasy implicates the entire family.
The girlfriend, the outsider who stands wrongly accused, is eliminated.
The violent nature of the military execution suggests that the sins of the parents run deeper and
mingle in Barbara's dreamscape with the primal scene of German history - here figured as a melange
of World War One and World War Two symbolism. Barbara's dream of sex is more complicated than
simply losing her innocence: to know forbidden desire is to access a violent historical imaginary and to
participate in the drama of guilt, shame and victimisation. Sexual awakenings always threaten to arouse
the history that might otherwise sleep. In her dream, Barbara makes those acts of history her own.
Barbara's own execution in the dream jolts her back to consciousness and to a view of her brother
in the shower. She lures him to bed and they make love against the backdrop of his 'why war?' poster
which again links incest to military brutality. After the most satisfying sex, Wolfgang vows that this
is the first and last time. The narrator confirms that Barbara will soon meet and fall in love with the
man of her dreams and lead a perfectly normal life. Because Barbara is never caught with her brother,
there is neither an opportunity for her to confess nor a mandate that she remember. Even Wolfgang
suggests that they forget the entire ordeal. Our final image of Barbara, naked and distraught after her
real and imagined incestuous sex, undercuts the possibility of a rapid rehabilitation to normalcy. Or,
if Barbara goes on to lead a normal sex life, it will be forever tainted by her traumatic initiation into
womanhood.
The connections between desire and criminality, confessing and forgetting, and between self
knowledge and historical knowledge in these films resonated with contemporary discourses on
how Germany could begin to cope with its monstrous past. Following Alexander and Margarete
Mitscherlich's influential 1967 study, The Inability to Mourn, the West German psychotherapeutic
community was beginning to consolidate its research on the psychic tolls of National Socialism.
Applying the principles of psychoanalysis to the German collective unconscious, the Mitscherlichs
charged that the adult population, surprisingly untroubled by feelings of guilt, remorse and shame
for the atrocities committed in their name during the wat, was living in an acute state of historical
denial. Unable to confront their complicity with the final solution or process their grief at losing the
father-figure Hitler, into whom they had collapsed their individual ego-ideals, most Germans had
now broken off all affective bridges with the immediate past'. As a result Germans were incapable of
mourning the victims of the war:

If memory was ever admitted, it was only in order to balance one's own guilt against that of
the other. Many horrors had been unavoidable, it was claimed, because they had been dictated
by crimes committed by the adversary. Thus, any particular guilt attaching to oneself ends
by disappearing completely. ... If somehow, somewhere, one finds an object deserving of

sympathy, it usually turns out to be none other than oneself.16

Unchecked, this cycle of dissolution would doom Germans to repeat their history - to project the
surplus aggression that Hitler had harnessed onto other others. Rather than face the self-devaluation
that accompanies melancholia, Germans, the study argued, choose instead to invest vast energy into
forgetting.

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