“We suggested the historical possibility of conditions in which the aesthetic could become a gesellschaftliche Produktivkraft [socially productive force] and as such could lead to the ‘end’ of art through its realization,” writes Herbert Marcuse in his Essay on Liberation from 1969.Today, the essay reads as a theory after the fact of the student movement of the 1960s. That Marcuse stresses the relevance of art and aesthetics for political change is very much in line with the politics of that period, as is the underlying assumption of this sentence—that art per se is emancipating and progressive and that its utopian potential can be unleashed for the purpose of political change.

The idea of leaving art behind or at least turning it into an agent of social change was a popular concept in the late 1960s, when even Jean-Luc Godard famously declared that there was only one way to become a revolutionary intellectual—by ceasing to be an intellectual. In the late 1960s, for the film students of the d eutsche film- und fernsehakademie berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin, dffb), this statement could be rephrased as follows: There is only one way to be a revolutionary filmmaker—by ceasing to be a filmmaker. Only three years after the dffb had opened in 1966 in the isolated half-city of West Berlin, the first class of students had internalized the hasty radicalization of the West German student movement to such an extent that many of them were considering giving up their film careers in favor of political activism. Holger Meins and Philip Sauber, students from the first and second year’s classes of the dffb respectively, joined two of the left-wing terror groups that emerged in West Germany in early 1970s and that tried to bring about social change with the help of political violence: Meins became a member of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, RAF); Sauber joined the Bewegung 2. Juni (June 2nd Movement). Both were dead less than half a decade later.