7 - Marking Time after Utopia

Summary

When freelance journalist and film dramaturge Lars Meyer coined “New German Discourse Comedy” in his 2019 assessment of emergent sensibilities among young German filmmakers, he clearly found inspiration in another widely embraced German neologism: “discourse theater.” Regarding the “discourse” in “discourse theater,” cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen argued some fifteen years earlier for “a new genre” in German theater, spearheaded above all by Berlin dramaturge René Pollesch, in which the highly “artificial language of academic texts” acquires everyday use value. Tallying the kinds of inscrutable texts in play for Pollesch, Miriam Dreysse went farther by pointing out in detail that it’s not just any theory but rather “sociological theories of neoliberal late-capitalist societies,” in particular “critical urbanism, postcolonial studies, gender and queer theory,” that serve to help Pollesch’s actors scrutinize their lives caught within the matrices of heteronormativity and neoliberal labor relations. Far from wanting to intimidate or indoctrinate audiences with such highfalutin discourse, the grounds for taking recourse to theory, Pollesch himself once explained, has to do with the fact “dass wir Sehhilfen bekommen für die Wirklichkeit” (that we acquire visual aids for reality) otherwise disorienting and impenetrable for actors and audiences alike.

At first glance, Meyer’s nascent catalogue of films exemplary of his new rubric “New German Discourse Comedy” does recall Pollesch’s theater by dint of its films’ explicit inclusion of theory. With its gratuitous recitations from theoretical tracts, Meyer’s corpus makes no secret of the importance it places on academic discourse. Take, for example, Max Linz’s debut Ich will mich nicht künstlich aufregen (Asta Upset, 2014), which has its heroine reading aloud from Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Or consider the nameless heroine suffering from writer’s block in Susanne Heinrich’s debut Das melancholische Mädchen (Aren’t You Happy?, 2016–2018) who reads from the German translation of Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999) on an exercise bike. And then there is Irene von Alberti’s Der lange Sommer der Theorie (The Long Summer of Theory, 2017), which not only lifts its title from cultural historian Philipp Felsch’s 2015 history of Berlin theory clearinghouse Merve Verlag but also features characters reading from his book. Most recently, Julian Radlmaier’s Blutsauger (Bloodsuckers, 2021) includes readings and discussions of volume one of Marx’s Capital (1867), from which the film takes its inspiration.