14 - Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand

Summary

The critical reception of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand (Under the Pavement Lies the Strand, 1974/75) already categorized the film as a “a delayed debate about the political positions of the student movement and feminism” early on.Such criticism responds primarily to the film’s depiction of the theater performer couple Grischa (Grischa Huber) and Heinrich (Heinrich Giskes) in their struggle to reconcile the two competing impulses informing their daily life. Heinrich’s disenchantment with the failed promises of the broader antiauthoritarian movement, which activates his depression, clashes with an ardent desire to connect to the personal and political work of other women in West Berlin developed by Grischa over the course of the film. While portraying Heinrich as an emblem of the failed masculinist political energies of the 1968 movement, Grischa is shown ardently trying to achieve a livable future by learning from the women around her. The film is not, however, fully celebratory of Grischa. She gives in to the social and personal pressures to have a child in the midst of a self-actualizing mission partly inspired by the Women’s Movement. In this regard, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand advances a criticism against the changing landscape of activist work, as it connects to personal lives structured by pervasive unequal hetero-patriarchal power dynamics in the immediate aftermath of 1968.

Building on Renate Möhrmann’s assessment of Sanders-Brahms’s treatment of post-1968 sentiment in the film as a delayed response to the movement in comparison to her contemporaries, this chapter focuses on the presentness of 1968 energies in the film. Even though it was written and directed in the years 1974/75, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand firmly relates to the intellectual, political, and social histories of the 1968 antiauthoritarian movement. 1968 is captured as a point of reference in the film, whereby the political climate of 1968 continually informs the subject position of those inculcated by the movement’s global reach.In this light, the contested 1968 presentness, as characterized by the private and public political fragmentation regularly cited by Heinrich and critiqued by Grischa, solidifies two impulses in the film: on the one hand, a utopian backwardness fueled by nostalgia and, on the other hand, a “cruel optimism” registered in the potentials of self-liberation at the cost of personal relations.