The german economy is primarily export-driven and in some important respects, the country’s film industry follows suit. Since the millennium, the most successful German films for international audiences have neatly repackaged the most troubled episodes of the national past for external consumption. While the domestic box office is dominated by multicultural feel-good comedies like Fack Ju Göhte (2013), international awards have been showered on films about Nazism, the Stasi, the fall of the gdr or the Red Army Faction—Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004), Sophie Scholl (2005), Das Leben der Anderen (Lives of Others, 2006), Baader Meinhof Complex (2009), 13 Minutes (2015), Der Staat gegen Fritz Bauer (The People vs Fritz Bauer, 2015)—all represented by conventional, Hollywood-style cinematographical narratives which confirm standard perceptions of German history and show that, as a mature member of the ‘international community’, the country has come to terms with its past.

This ‘heritage’ cinema has been caustically received by the more trenchant film writers. Harvard Germanist Eric Rentschler classified it as a continuation of the ‘cinema of consensus’ that dominated the Kohl era, ‘agreeable fantasies that allow for a sense of closure’.footnote¹ Yet though films such as Das Leben der Anderen and Der Untergang take their formal cues from Hollywood, their production and distribution are dependent on a different kind of apparatus. Though designed for international box-office success, they are in large part state funded, not least through the public tv channels.footnote² This funding structure has shaped German film culture in ways that have barely been registered by critics outside the country. Yet internally, the mechanics and trajectory of the state-funding system––and its representations of history—have been the subject of heated debate. Mainstream film critics have charged that the boom in historical drama has gone hand-in-hand with a shift towards commercialized productions, and away from risky or challenging films. Funding has increasingly gone to films that ‘stay inside a corset of conventional narrative’, wrote taz film critic Cristina Nord. ‘The subjects can be controversial, not the form.’ The result, claimed veteran cultural commentator Georg Seeßlen in Die Zeit, was ‘cineastic low-fat quark’.footnote³

This was not always the case. In 1962, a group of twenty-six young filmmakers at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival launched a manifesto calling for the freedoms to create a new German cinema: ‘Freedom from industry conventions. Freedom from the influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the paternalism of interest groups.’footnote⁴ Three years after the Oberhausen Manifesto, the Erhard government, learning from France, set up a fund for films of ‘cultural value’. In 1967, the Film Funding Act established a framework for state funding, which included a levy from tv channels, distributors and cinemas.footnote⁵ Public broadcasters—the national zdf and the regional-state network, ard—provided backing for early films by Fassbinder, Reitz, Kluge, Farocki and others. In the 1970s and early 80s, experimental work enjoyed stable if relatively small-scale funding and a ready-built system of distribution.

Over the years, however, while the amount of money grew, the determinants of the funding system began to change. With the advent of commercial television, which exploded in the 1990s after German unification, the zdf and regional ard bureaucracies grew more averse to any risk of alienating the audience; instead of aiming for cultural prestige, they were now competing for viewing figures. At the same time, their position within the film-funding system grew more salient; regional-state funds now often required a tv channel as co-producer before they would agree to contribute. This gave tv executives a great deal of power over the films that were produced, militating against more experimental or challenging work that was deemed ‘unsuitable’ for television audiences. Importantly, the Filmfördergesetz guidelines stipulate that, in addition to cultural and aesthetic criteria, potential commercial success and promoting the ‘positive development of the industry’ should be key factors in the allocation of funds, without defining the relation between these dimensions.footnote⁶ At the same time, state-television channels are mandated by the Interstate Broadcasting Agreement to provide ‘education, information, advice and entertainment’, the latter complying with einem öffentlich-rechtlichen Angebotsprofil—a public-interest service remit.footnote⁷

The upshot has been a film-funding mechanism largely designed to produce a palatable cinema for a mainstream audience, which inherently excludes the freedoms of the Oberhausen Manifesto, even as it keeps German cinema alive. Usually, in the financing of a German film with a modest budget of between 1 and 2 million euros, there are two national funding institutions and three to four regional funding institutions involved, as well as two television entities. If it is an international co-production, the number of institutions increases. That makes for a lot of people who all want to have a say about what the film should look like. As a result, screenplays may languish between different committees for six or seven years and, while there is rarely overt political interference, the regional bodies impose certain territorial considerations; as Seeßlen puts it, your film has a better chance of getting a grant from Kleinkleckersdorf if you include a scene shot in front of Kleinkleckersdorf’s medieval clocktower, a local tourist attraction. At the ideological level, the system had grown into a ‘truth machine’ that not only prohibits certain kinds of claims, but generates an entire cinematic grammar, shaping narratives and aesthetics.footnote⁸ It has become, in Angela Merkel’s famous coinage, a ‘market-conforming’ bureaucracy. There is a sense that films often secure funding because they appeal to the lowest common denominator—a ‘dictatorship of mediocrity’, according to Lars Henrik Gass, current director of the Oberhausen Festival.footnote⁹ These conditions also help to explain why German film-funding institutions and public tv channels are drawn to historical narratives, which offer an ideal combination of their two otherwise often contradictory goals: on the one hand, to educate their audience, on the other, to increase their market share through commercially successful entertainment.

‘State cultural-promotion bodies love films that “wrap” political enlightenment in history’, director Ulrich Köhler complained.footnote¹⁰ Television series like Babylon Berlin (2017), set in the Weimar Republic just before the Nazis’ seizure of power, or Deutschland 83/86/89 (2015–20), on the last years of the gdr, serve up this menu for an international audience. On national tv as well, mini-series after mini-series has been eagerly consumed. The end result of this mining of German history is on display in Eldorado KaDeWe: Jetzt ist unsere Zeit (2021), a six-part series directed by Julia von Heinz which tells the heavily fictionalized story of Germany’s most prestigious department store, founded and run by a Jewish family until the Nazis came to power. Like many of these series, Eldorado KaDeWe is in fact rather uninterested in the era it is depicting; its narratives of sexual liberation, deprivation and excess might as well be set in the here and now. But projecting these images onto the past provides the comforting feeling that, despite everything, we are better off now than people used to be.

But these made-for-export genres have never exhausted the possibilities of contemporary German cinema. Just as the work of Fassbinder, Kluge, Reitz or von Trotta—‘overtly political, stylistically radical and experimental, mindful of developments in other arts and other countries, at times, unabashedly intellectual’footnote¹¹—challenged the self-image of the German economic miracle in the 1970s and 80s, so the Berlin School has been invoked as a counter example to the ‘corseted’ narratives of the 1990s and early 2000s. After a dry spell for independent German cinema, critics were all too eager to identify a movement when films by Angela Schanelec, Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan began to make waves on the festival circuit. They had studied together at the dffb film school in Berlin in the early 90s, making it easier to see parallels between them. In 2001 Die Zeit’s film critic introduced the ‘Berlin School’ label in a review of Schanelec’s Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer, 2001), noting its similarities to Petzold’s Die innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In, 2000) and Arslan’s Der schöne Tag (A Fine Day, 2001): a liking for ellipsis and for keeping a distance; a similar way of dealing with space and time; the same diffuse bright light. Most important, ‘all assertion has gone, replaced by observation’; in a country whose filmmakers were ‘diligently learning streamlined storyboarding’, this was a blessing.footnote¹²