Michael Haneke: A Historical Analysis of a West German Urban Guerilla

There's an interesting sentence in the introduction of Roy Grundmann's recent article Auteur de Force: Michael Haneke's "Cinema of Glaciation", which appears in the Spring 2007 issue of film magazine Cineaste:

"[Haneke's] aim is to debunk the desirably normal as the oppressively normative that gives rise to violence and dysfunction in the first place."

The phrase that especially struck me was "oppressively normative". It sent me searching through my memory; I had read something similar before. And, after some digging, I proved myself right.

From a section of Tony Judt's Postwar about 1960s West European radicals and intellectuals:

"The complaints of an early-nineteenth-century Romantic like Marx against capitalist modernity and the dehumanizing impact of industrial society were well adapted to contemporary protests against the 'repressive tolerance' of post-industrial Western Europe. The prosperous, liberal West's apparently infinite flexibility, its sponge-like capacity to absorb passions and differences, infuriated its critics. Repression, they insisted, was endemic in bourgeoisie society. It could not just evaporate. The repression that was missing on the streets must perforce have gone somewhere: it had moved into people's very souls—and, above all, their bodies."

The problem facing West European intellectuals in the 1960s was two-fold. First, the official brand of Communism emanating from the Soviet Union, which many Western intellectuals had thus far championed, was, by 1956 (the Soviet invasion of Hungary) and then by 1968 (the Soviet invasion of Prague) all-but debunked. Only the most hardened West European Communists could, at the end of the 1960s, still defend the Soviet Union or blame its "excesses" strictly on Stalin. Second, Western Europe's remarkable recovery after WWII had given most West Europeans very little to feel angry or dispirited about: their economies were doing very well, their welfare states were giving them unprecedented levels of social support and services, and programs put into place to help along underdeveloped parts of the continent, such as southern Italy, made sure that everyone's life was improving. This was all famously summed up by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan when, in 1957, he told a conservative rally: "Most of our people have never had it so good."

In other words, West Europeans unsatisfied with capitalism and with the new, post-WWII way of life could hardly bring up any tangible faults in the capitalist system: it, quite simply and openly, provided well. Furthermore, there was no real physical repression and much less exploitation than was to be encountered on the other side of the "iron curtain". Hence, no longer could the example of the Soviet Union be used as a more desirable ideological counterpoint.

As a result, the intellectual left turned back time and and set to re-reading Marx, the core ideologue of their beliefs; and, as Judt points out, especially his youthful, early writings. In these, they found what they were seeking: a new way to attack and criticize the capitalist countries in which they lived: "repressive tolerance". Since any Marxist worldview holds that bourgeoisie society must be repressive, if one didn't look the part, you just weren't looking hard enough. If everything on the outside was rosy, then it's the inside that must be rotting away.

I'm linking these ideas of "oppressive normativity" and "repressive tolerance" not only because they are ideologically-similar, but also because they're battle calls for the same type of revolution: a revolution of the inner person. Your happiness, say the 1960s Marxists, is your repression—not whips and chains and guns. Also important is that both ideas are counter-popular, meaning that their proponents have to convince society of its own mistaken view of itself before they can convince it to take up arms in support of its own destruction. These are not views that tap into societal undercurrents, but seek to create them.

Now, to tie this historical background into Michael Haneke:

Michael Haneke was born in 1942. This would place him at age 18 when the 1960s began and 28 when they ended. He, therefore, came of maturity and was educated in exactly this political and ideological climate (and partook of its economic prosperity). His first theatrical film, however, was not released until 1989—an entirely different historical moment: coming after a wave of West European conservatism and coinciding with the crumbling of the Soviet Union and its empire. Unlike Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) or Rainer Werner Fassbinder (b. 1945), who were making films about "repressive tolerance" in the moment of its blossoming, Haneke is, so to speak, participating in the discussion via tape delay. Many of his films, however contemporary they seem on the surface, are ideologically time-displaced by +30 years.

And there is more. Not only is Haneke of the time when intellectuals were embracing the idea of "repressive tolerance", but he is also of a place where that idea was expressed in its most extreme and violent form: Germany.

As Judt explains:

"Thus for Rudi Dutschke (born 1940), Peter Schneider (1940), Gudrun Ensslin (1940) or the slightly younger Andreas Baader (1943) and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945), West Germany's post-war democracy was not the solution; it was the problem. The apolitical, consumerist, American-protected cocoon of the Bundesrepublik was not just imperfect and amnesiac; it had actively conspired with its Western masters to deny the German past, to bury it in material gods and anti-communist propaganda."

Consumerism, American international influence, and cultural amnesia are all themes that appear and re-appear in Haneke's films. In Haneke's lastest work, Caché, for example, we see all three: money-driven class distinctions that make it easy for rich Georges to forget poor Majid, but difficult for them to relate; shots of the Iraq war on television; and, the film's main interest, the French "national forgetting" of its Algerian past. Haneke, in 1989 as much as now, is continuing to explore ideoligical fascinations born and firmly-rooted in the very specific time and place of his youth.

Back to Judt, and the history of German political terrorism:

"In most of Western Europe, the airy radical theorems of the 1960s dissipated harmlessly enough. But in two countries in particular [Germany and Italy] they metamorphosed into a psychosis of self-justifying aggression. A small minority of erstwhile student radicals, intoxicated by their own adaptation of Marxist dialectics, set about 'revealing' the 'true face' of repressive tolerance in Western democracies."

Considering that Haneke's films so often rely on violence, and especially shock violence, to argue his points, it's uncanny how close in form (and not only content) Haneke mirrors Germany's urban terrorists; and especially Andreas Baader's own Red Army Fraction (RAF). Notice, for instance, even Baader's choice of the acronym, an intentional reference to Britain's Royal Air Force, which bombed Germany during WWII, and which Baader took as a symbolic model: showing that he would bomb Germany again, but this time out of submission. This corresponds to Haneke's choice of genre—and even his use of genre at all. By fitting his films and their messages into packages resembling generic thrillers, Haneke, like Baader, uses the outward appearance of an enemy (the generic thriller propagates "oppressive normativity") for opposite ends. Haneke's plan to re-make his film Funny Games in Hollywood is yet another step forward in realizing the same idea.

The link between political terrorism and Haneke's aggressive cinema, however, goes further. For, just as Baader justified RAF's violence via his own interpretation of Marxism, so Haneke justifies the often-brutal violence in his films with ideology.

In an interview with Haneke conducted by Karin Badt for Bright Lights Film Journal, Haneke responds to the question of violence in his films:

"The society we live in is drenched in violence. I represent it on the screen because I am afraid of it, and I think it is important that we should reflect on it... My films are also a protest against the mainstream cinema, a response to the films screened in theaters today. If mainstream films were different, my films would be different as well."

(source)

Haneke's films, then, are not the violent spectacle of actual thrillers; but, instead, they are a response to violence, both as it exists in those films and in society at large.

Compare this justification with the following excerpt from The Urban Guerilla Concept, the 1971 manifesto of the RAF:

"The Urban Guerilla Concept should be seen as an armed struggle taking place in the light of police shoot-to-kill methods and the class justice that managed to free Kurras. The system would bury our comrades alive if we didn’t stop it. We will not be demoralised by the violence of the system."

(source)

The RAF, too, in its own opinion, is a reaction, and a reactionary violence. If police methods and German society were different, the RAF could have added, our reaction would be different as well. And anyone who believes that Haneke's comic qualities—the sarcasm of his films—negate any parallels between his cinema and the acts of Germany's urban terrorists need only read Michael "Bommi" Baumann's memoir How It All Began: The Personal Account of a West German Urban Guerilla or take a look at some of the RAF's own communiques to understand that a very distinct brand of comedy was very much a part of "urban guerilla" identity.

A final point of comparison between Haneke and the German political terrorists of his generation is how each was treated by their corresponding intellectual elite. And, here, once again via Tony Judt, we find a striking similarity:

"Much more worrying was the extent to which the Baader-Meinhof Group in particular was able to tap into a fund of generalized sympathy for its ideas among otherwise law-abiding intellectuals and academics."

I liken this to the elevated status Haneke has achieved among a range of film critics and arthouse film fans—many of whom actively criticize both similar ideological positions (such as in the films of Lars von Trier) and violence (300 is a good, recent example) in non-Haneke films. How either the RAF or Haneke manage to gain this support, I'm not sure. What is certain, however, is that while the RAF ran out of political steam when its leaders were captured and killed in the 1970s (and officially disbanded in 1998 after a long stretch of irrelevance), Michael Haneke is still making films and still being lauded for them.

As I recall someone once saying, Haneke's is a cinema of cruelty—cruel towards its characters and cruel towards its audience. To this, I'd add that it's also an ideologically anachronistic cinema, a great cinematic flashback to Western Europe in the late 1960s by means of a transplanted, displaced West German urban guerilla.