Comments on: “Dallas with Nazis”

By: Lauren

Lauren — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:09:52 +0000

Jumping in to comment because I can’t make the screening tonight and am sad in advance, but I keep thinking about Franz Biberkopf’s language. Suzanne’s observation about Franz’s poetic and oratorical outbursts mixed in my head with thoughts from Stephen, Cynthia, and others about F.B. as one without a stable subject position. Now I’m having all these questions about his language use – how, before Franz re-integrates himself through violence, he’s bubbling over with snatches of songs and language bits. And how he seems to get dragged under by words, into phrase whirlpools. (Like the encounter with Eva where he jams up repeating “I don’t want it to be like it was before.”)

It interests me that, If I’m not misremembering, certain phrases or rhymes come up in both FB’s disassociated moments and his more fluent moments. i think “Die Wacht Am Rhein” is one – first rattling around in Franz’s head, then emerging in the bar confrontation. It makes him seem like the object of his own language, that he’s carrying these overpowering language-pieces around until he finds a situation in which he can try to utter them as master. And that made me wonder if F.B.’s language (or his violence), are meant to originate with his psyche, seeing how shifty and shaky he is, or if he is partly a conduit for language/violence from elsewhere.

I don’t mean to diminish the impact of the acts of sexual violence that F.B. is author of – but I’m wondering if there is a pre-history or source for F.B.’s bits of language, in the context of these questions of agency/power that keep coming up, and related to the shifts in the character from babbling to oratory to self-hypnosis.

For some moments of language audience-hypnosis, I was entranced/dazed by all the conversations involving flat catchphrases or gnomic altered catchphrases (”Even the most sensible man will one day come to his senses”). And the overwhelming repetition of “Shoelaces!” in over-excited voices in the shoelaces scene, and the calm controlled affect of the Fassbinder voice-over narration, and the language of the 1929 form of Viagra.

I’m curious about how all these different levels of language come up in the novel -

By: BB

BB — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 18:52:31 +0000

I loved these responses, for all their variousness in tone and content, their perspectives. Just some notes off the cuff:

It’s interesting that two strong forms of analysis seemed to emerge, one pertaining to Franz’s desires as they pertain to National Socialism, and one pertaining to his, as Cynthia put it so aptly, “infantile, perverse” sexual desires. What I want to wonder about is the connection between them. It seems to me that Franz’s desire for order/peace could reflect a response to the trauma he experienced fighting in war, but which he (hysterically) finds himself overturning whenever such “fetishized glimmers of hope” (as Stephen put it) actually obtain as possibilities.

In some way then, Lina provides exactly this sort of stabilizing force. Quick to conflict when she needs to defend her man (the terrific scene where she batters the pornographer comes to mind), in general she “turns away” from violence (as when her uncle is battered by Meck), including the neck-suck gesture. Is this, then, where Franz’s perversity emerges? His inability to cohabitate with one who more or less provides little-conditional love?

I wonder with Cynthia whether or not Franz can take up any position. It’s also interesting to me that perhaps National Socialism might seem to provide Franz with another stabilizing subject position to assume, that is, is it a chance for Franz to be “German” at least? But even the relative stability of this position is rejected—Lina (a Pole) might be willing to toast to Germany for the Germans, but Franz can never wholeheartedly do so.

Finally, I’m having trouble condensing these associations—but Suzanne’s point that Franz achieves subjecthood after committing acts of (sexual) violence on women is strong and haunting. Is this a way of “mastering” the trauma of violence Franz experienced in wartime, or a form of ressentiment deriving from Franz’s feeling inadequate in the market economy? How is Fassbinder’s interpretation of Doblin dealing with this violence? Normalizing it through psychoanalytic or economic discourse (lol)? Making it parodic, even in the discourse of the women who are subject to Franz’s violence (when he grabs the neck of the widow, she thanks him)?

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 14:02:02 +0000

It’s interesting maybe to make the comparison between Lina and Eva. Stephen/Dominic suggest that Eva wafts in and out of Franz’s life in a soft-focus cloud of “unsullied sexuality”—except we understand that in fact Eva’s a high-class call girl—and I keep thinking it’s that Franz was her pimp/lover in his former pre-incarcerated life. And she’s more like a mother figure at this stage of the film than anything else, buying tie-clips when Franz is hawking them unsuccessfully on the street, and offering to purchase shoelaces from him when he turns up accidentally at the expensive apartment of one of her johns. I don’t know that I’d describe her influence as calming, I think it seems more demoralizing or emasculating. Lina on the other hand’s portrayed as the non-innocent innocent, tongue-in-the-cognac is totally kittenish! and then cradling a madonna statuette in her arms like a doll when she’s moving into Franz’s apartment. Lina’s kind of the hooker-with-the-heart-of-gold/gives it away for free/love junkie; the men come and the men go (the last one stayed three weeks)(but left behind his bottle of whatever the 1929 version of Viagra is).

By: Stephanie

Stephanie — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:42:56 +0000

In the same vein, I loved the increasing fuzz of Lina’s fuzz-halo-hair as things (control, stability, the relationship) really began to fall apart. Someone mentioned at the bar afterwards (I can’t remember who now) how uncompelling they found Lina, finally: as character, image, actress. I’m ambivalent about Lina, although her mute devotion at the end of the third episode, lying on the abandoned lower bunk where Franz went when he left, occupying the space of his loss, was totally compelling.

Ditto the sexual encounter between the widow and Franz: mysteriously compelling. I’m not sure if that move, the fetishistic neck-grabbing, had already become parodic, ridiculous, at that point in the serial (the way episode two ends with Franz clutching Lena’s neck and episode three lurches open with her release), but in the context of that encounter, between the grief-stricken, isolated upper-class widow and the ex-con, shoelace-peddling doppelganger of her dead husband, Franz’s incisive, violent and service-oriented action of desire felt, well, hot.

Lots to be said here about Franz stepping into a position of class and other sorts of power and virility in that moment, and how there is also a certain safety or performance in a gesture for which he will be paid, finally, in a roundabout sort of way. The perversity of the pimp playing the prostitute.

By: Julian

Julian — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 20:10:03 +0000

We’ve focused on the protagonist here, but for me much of the fun of Alexanderplatz is in the co-stars and bit parts. I was transfixed Lina, Franz’s girlfriend, played by Elisabeth Trissenaar and her fuzz-halo of hair. She was brilliantly odd. Remember her lapping at her cognac like a cat in her first scene! I also loved Hark Bohm as Otto Lüders, Lina’s uncle, a door-to-door shoelace salesman (who knew people used to do this?). His Arto Lindsayish looks pegged him as a geek, which rendered his hissing misogyny all the more worrisome and delicious.