Alphabetical list of Bedfordshire inventories published in this volume and in BHRS volumes 20 and 32

Queer German cinema in the aftermath of the 1960s and 70s cultural revolutions espoused what Alice A. Kuzniar describes as a cinematic “counterpolitics,” variously deployed against what today might be called cisheterocapitalist violence burdening queer life. Queer filmmakers of this era practiced a type of political cinema that turned to the documentation of structural violence against queer people and the expression of various forms of queer life in order to challenge dominant narratives about how to be in the world. On the basis of interviews with Stefanie Jordan, Bärbel Neubauer, and Matthias Müller, among others, Kuzniar established how the work of these filmmakers pursued a type of transformative spectatorship. Their queer cinematic practices position viewers to “reframe [their] desires and transform [themselves].” Kuzniar turns to Jörg Fockele to expound this claim. Fockele, expressing a dislike of queer feel-good romances with a low threshold for political transformation, calls for a cinema featuring “outrageously queer characters who do totally abnormal things and make the audience wonder.” Such cinematic techniques of excess would stimulate among viewers reflection about their investment in the status quo and prompt them to consider other ways of being in the world.

Nils Bökamp’s You & I (2014) and Monika Treut’s Von Mädchen und Pferden (Of Girls and Horses, 2014) might at first sight appear to be restrained rearticulations of the earlier counterpolitical queer German cinema. The aesthetic-political principle underpinning their films is indeed less characterized by queer suffering and audience provocation than by rest and repose. The queer characters in these films turn away from their daily lives in the city to embrace the countryside, where they overcome obstacles that burden queer relations. This is not to say, however, that Bökamp’s and Treut’s films are devoid of political transformation. Rather, they turn to a different configuration of political commitment than that familiar to the queer German cinema of the postwar generations. Favoring relational bonds that emerge from an opting out of normative rhythms of daily life, Bökamp and Treut pursue a cinematic mediation tactic that acknowledges queer struggle while also generating new strategies to overcome the burdens endemic to queer life under neoliberalism.

In recent years, themes of racist violence and far-right terrorism have become prominent in German narrative film and television. Fatih Akın’s political drama Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade, 2017) is the most internationally showcased and prize-winning example of such works, which also include Burhan Qurbani’s Wir sind jung. Wir sind stark (We Are Young, We Are Strong, 2014) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020), Christian Schwochow’s Je suis Karl (2021), as well as Christian Alvart’s Netflix series Dogs of Berlin (2016), ARD Das Erste’s three-part miniseries Mitten in Deutschland: NSU (NSU: German History X, 2016), and several episodes of ARD’s Tatort (Crime Scene, since 1970). Many of these films and series directly or indirectly reference the murders committed by the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground) across Germany between 1998 and 2011, and the subsequent investigations and trials of the case, which concluded in July 2018. In so doing, they pose a range of ethical and political questions pertaining to the issue of racist violence in Germany today; and yet because they largely lack resolution, these films and series refuse to offer reconciliation and thereby ultimately convey a sense of political pessimism. However, the politics of pessimism found in many of these works is far from nihilism, and it is distinct from a pessimistic outlook for a future politics. Instead, it promotes withdrawal, negativity, and a refusal of reconciliation as positive political pursuits: not pessimistic prognoses for politics, but pessimism as politics.

In this chapter, I examine the politics of pessimism in Aus dem Nichts, situating the film within the context of Fatih Akın’s filmography. I identify a darker turn in his experimentations with the aesthetics of abjection, which Akın has already deployed to various degrees in his earlier films, culminating in his subsequent film, the Fassbinder-inspired, serial-killer biopic Der goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove, 2019). Aus dem Nichts saturates its cinematic world with negative affect, evoking Germany’s recent political past with nonliteral references to the NSU investigations and the ensuing trial. My focus is on the political potentials of this radical pessimism. Adapting the concept of “futurability” from the Italian autonomist philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, I argue that Aus dem Nichts posits its vision of negative futurability through its protagonist Katja in her search for justice, ultimately ending in murder- suicide.

The ‘strange procedures’ of Schubert's creativity that the publisher detected in 1826, or the critic's mention of ‘bizarre, grotesque things’ in his early songs, quoted in the Introduction and chapter 1, re-emerge through this book as part of the lexicon of gothic necropoetics that captivated the imagination of the time. Strangeness, whether through sonic signifiers or poetic subject matter, weaves its way in and out of the case studies. Pieces that reflect the dreamworlds of ‘Nacht und Träume’, such as the Adagio of the String Quintet, give way to extreme disjuncture characteristic of the grotesque. Funereal music undergoes doubling and distortion, as in the Andante of the Piano Trio in E flat and the C minor Impromptu, discussed in chapter 2. And music that is eerie one moment turns sublime in another, as suggested in relation to the dialectics of pain and pleasure in ‘Bertas Lied in der Nacht’ and ‘Der Unglückliche’, in chapter 3. The recurrence of tropes (musical and poetic) highlights the fluidity of a vocabulary that is doubled, warped, defamiliarized, and left unreconciled across generic and chronological boundaries.

Prominent amid this continuity of gothic tropes are the ways in which their associations, and the contexts in which they appear, change over time. One such example is the octave doubling present in much of the music discussed here, from the opening stanzas of ‘Leichenfantasie’, the first case study of chapter 1, to the return of split lefthand octaves in the opening of the Andantino of the A major Piano Sonata, D 959, the final case study of chapter 4. Their recurrence suggests implicit dialogues across the case studies, with blurred boundaries among the contrasting iterations: the latter example, while devoid of the supernatural associations of the former, carries traces of death through its distant echoes of the earlier songs, and is now tinged with the weight of what has come before. Musical material undergoes change, returning in altered contexts, as highlighted by the fusions of funereal and French overture style, or the ways in which themes are distorted in the C minor Impromptu and the Adagio of the E flat Trio. Funereal imagery, as in the wider range of case studies in chapter 2, is devoid of its connotations in Schubert's graveyard settings, while containing echoes of their soundworlds.

Wittgenstein's verificationism

As described in the previous chapter, Wittgenstein's discussion of aesthetics and ethics in his lectures in May Term 1933 is prefaced and informed by his new account of meaning as use, which, applied to declarative sentences or propositions, leads to verificationism: ‘If you want to know the meaning of a sentence ask for its verification’ (AL 29). For any predicate ‘F’, you have to consider the language-game and see how it is used, that is, how a claim that something is F could be verified. For what characterises the use of a predicate is that its declarative application can be judged true or false, and that such a judgement can be vindicated or rejected on suitable grounds. Hence, the meaning of such a truth-apt predication is determined by the way its truth or falsity can be ascertained. For example, ‘to explain what is meant by “6 yards” we must shew a man how we measure it’ (M 311). Accordingly, the meaning of the proposition ‘The shed is 6 yards long’ is given by its possible methods of verification (or falsification).

It is worth noting that this core idea of verificationism – that to know the meaning of a predicate is to know how it is used, that is, amongst other things, on what grounds its application can be judged true or false – is indeed just an aspect of the view that meaning is use. Wittgenstein espoused it not only in the early 1930s but to the end of his life. What distinguishes his mature view from the scientistic verificationism of the Vienna Circle is that he came to realise that although there must be grounds for judging the application of a predicate as correct or incorrect, there need not always be methods of objective verification. And yet, in order to clarify the meaning of a predicate, it is always useful to ask if and how its application could be verified. In conversation, he explained that by a simile:

Boulez Was Brought Up in Montbrison, a small town near Lyon, where he received his first musical education. There was no public concert life in the town, but he was part of a church choir – he described being in a choir as ‘a very good educational experience’ – and in 1991 he recalled that there were local chamber music groups that rehearsed weekly. While studying a mathematics-based curriculum at secondary school in Lyon, he took private lessons in piano and harmony with Lionel de Pachmann, son of the celebrated pianist Vladimir de Pachmann. These lessons were based on the standard repertoire and classical musical language. Opportunities for Boulez to hear contemporary music while he was at school were very limited; in discussion with François Meïmoun he remembered hearing the violinist Jacques Thibaud playing Szymanowski's Mythes (1915) and being ‘especially struck’ by the first piece, ‘La Fontaine d’Aréthuse’, because ‘its sonic universe cut across that of modern music of the time, when Honegger was the acme of modernity’.

Honegger was the most prominent contemporary composer in France in the early 1940s, and in Lyon, Boulez remembered hearing André Cluytens, then musical director of the Opéra National de Lyon, conduct works by him. Boulez particularly recalled Honegger's La Danse des morts, which seemed to him ‘fabulous, completely different from the [musical] universe with which I was familiar’. La Danse des morts (1938), an oratorio inspired by Holbein's Dance of Death, features a melange of material including French revolutionary songs, the Dies irae plainsong and a preachy text by Paul Claudel which draws on Biblical extracts. Its punchy opening, graphically depicting fire and brimstone with multiple trombones and percussion instruments, is more reminiscent of Varèse than of most of Honegger's work, and its scoring for narrator, soloists, chorus and orchestra shows Honegger and Claudel grappling with a ‘total theatre’ concept, as in their earlier Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher (1935).

Only a few years later, Boulez would himself be performing work by Honegger and by Claudel in his role as musical director of the Renaud– Barrault theatre company. Boulez did not experiment with composition until 1942, when he was 17 years old: one of his first surviving attempts was a setting of Baudelaire, Recueillement, which he may not have known at the time had been set by Debussy fifty years earlier.

Introduction

During the 1950s, the United States would begin to promote a unidirectionality of history, geared toward enabling the United States to prevail in the geopolitical confrontation against the Soviet Union. In order to project the geopolitical power of the United States, there was a need to ensure that the countries affected by the confrontation that emerged in the 1950s would be persuaded about the good intentions of the United States, particularly when it came to promoting the economic and social rehabilitation of vast areas of the world. The 1950s saw the beginning of the idea of a “global commonwealth” of nations, initially restricted to the areas of the world that had a cultural affinity with America, aligned with the geostrategic interests of the United States, and willing to accept the political and economic principles projected from Washington.

Exerting Power and Shaping the Future—A Look at America's Role in the 1950s

The United States played a significant role in the world during the 1950s. After World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two superpowers, along with the Soviet Union. The United States played a leading role in establishing and leading the Western alliance, which was a military alliance between North American and European countries that was formed to counter the Soviet Union's influence in Europe. The United States also played a major role in the Korean War, which took place from 1950 to 1953, and in the Vietnam War, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s. During the 1950s, the United States experienced a time of economic prosperity and cultural conformity known as the “American Dream” or the “Affluent Society.” The 1950s also saw the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as African Americans and other minority groups in the US began to agitate for equal rights and treatment under the law. In addition to its role on the world stage and its domestic developments, the US also played a major role in shaping popular culture during the 1950s. The decade saw the emergence of rock and roll music, and many iconic cultural figures, such as Elvis Presley, emerged during this time.

ON NOVEMBER 20, 1951, while BGS units fought the coffee wars, Adenauer travelled to Paris to sign a draft of the European Defense Community (EDC) Treaty. French Premier René Pleven and the archi-tect of the Schuman Coal and Steel Plan, Jean Monnet, outlined the terms of the new treaty. If ratified, the EDC would have given the Federal Republic its first chance to have armed forces since the end of the war, but only as part of a larger supranational European army. Rearming under a French plan, however, proved unpopular among West Germany's veteran soldiers, who had recently proposed their own plan calling for twenty-five divisions led by German officers. But for Adenauer, establishing a new army in any form was a chance to gain more sovereignty. The day he initialed the draft of the proposed treaty, he confided in his memoirs that: “On this day the Federal Government was beginning to speak with its own authority in association with the Western World.”

These proceedings should have had no immediate effect on border policing. Article 11 of the treaty exempted the police forces of signatory nations from its terms. But now that the rearmament of West Germany appeared inevitable, members of the BGS believed the government would call upon them to staff the new army. Since the majority of its personnel and their leaders had come from the Wehrmacht, it seemed like the logical next step. Some of the men claimed that the government had promised to make them soldiers once the new army was formed. For Interior Minister Robert Lehr and his successor Gerhard Schröder, the creation of German armed forces caused an existential crisis. What did the future hold for the BGS now that West Germany had a new army?

Although members of the BGS assumed they would be instrumental in founding the army, military veterans in Adenauer's proto-defense ministry, the Blank Office (Amt Blank) had other ideas. These veteran offi-cers intended to build an army free of the burdens and traditions of the recent past. Many of those in the Blank Office considered the BGS to be a force of reactionaries that might reject the new beginning they had envisioned.