Cultures of Violence in the New German Street by Simpson Patricia Anne;

Author:Simpson, Patricia Anne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611474565
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Published: 2014-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Redings unpack the complex story through snapshots, flashbacks, a whistled tune, and other subtle visual and audio clues that calibrate the experience of nomadic work and emotional wandering for the audience. The camera work of Axel Henschel reflects this range with painterly frames, from the panoramic landscape that underscores isolation to the smallest detail of intimacy. Bastian’s journey, from guilty flight to admission of guilt—he realizes eventually that his victim was Festus’s friend—installs him in the guild ethics that ground him. In a scene that takes place after Festus and Bastian forge a friendship, the two men meet up with Leila at an open-air concert. Festus wants to see if there is anything left of their relationship while she serves beer. Bastian enters the tent accompanied by two young women; their looks mirror each other, with blond pigtails, dark shirts, ties, and dark red lipstick. They perk up when the journeymen and former journeywoman address each other as comrade. One blond insists: “You’re just like us,” and they define themselves as patriotic and national. Festus distances himself, repulsed by their chatter, and identifies them as members of a trade union (they are stone masons). The bonds of skilled labor and the training transcend any national identity represented in this film. The rockers organize around music and motorcycles, the journeymen around their skills. The Reding brothers have succeeded in positing a local identity that is predicated on its isolation from society, yet the wanderers’ code recapitulates a hierarchy based on strict measures of honor, dress, and personal discipline, with a goal defined by the acquisition of skills that harkens back to the fourteenth century. Their revision is remarkable: they took the violent, confrontational politics of the contemporary street and transfigured the ethics of rivalry into a road movie, a street of personal redemption that dissolves fraternal bonds as a means of recuperating some ethical sense of masculinity.

Though this material marks a radical departure from the skin-punk milieu of the debut film Oi!Warning, the plight of the Wandergeselle does share common ground with the homosocial bonds and ethics associated with subcultures. With Für den unbekannten Hund, the Redings have reinvigorated the genre of the road movie even as they resist any generic identification for this film, which has comic moments, an exploding gas station, and monologs of such dramatic intensity they invoke Shakespearean tragedy. A point of continuity exists between Oi!Warning and the later work: masculine maturity, expressed through a learned, acquired code of ethics, is achieved through fraternal bonding within the context of a larger community. With this film, the new heroism takes a step beyond the “immature politics” associated with youth dramas, coming-of-age genre films, and local rivalries. It instead reaches back into centuries of national history to chart an itinerary of ethical agency in a post-violent, post-national context.

This ethos explicitly rejects the purely national as a mark of incomplete, possibly immature, identity. I include the film in the discussion of right-wing culture in order to highlight the problematic nature of even referencing the topic without ideological consistency.

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