3 - Negative Futurability and the Politics of Pessimism in Fatih Akın’s Aus dem Nichts (2017)

Summary

In recent years, themes of racist violence and far-right terrorism have become prominent in German narrative film and television. Fatih Akın’s political drama Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade, 2017) is the most internationally showcased and prize-winning example of such works, which also include Burhan Qurbani’s Wir sind jung. Wir sind stark (We Are Young, We Are Strong, 2014) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (2020), Christian Schwochow’s Je suis Karl (2021), as well as Christian Alvart’s Netflix series Dogs of Berlin (2016), ARD Das Erste’s three-part miniseries Mitten in Deutschland: NSU (NSU: German History X, 2016), and several episodes of ARD’s Tatort (Crime Scene, since 1970). Many of these films and series directly or indirectly reference the murders committed by the neo-Nazi terrorist organization Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground) across Germany between 1998 and 2011, and the subsequent investigations and trials of the case, which concluded in July 2018. In so doing, they pose a range of ethical and political questions pertaining to the issue of racist violence in Germany today; and yet because they largely lack resolution, these films and series refuse to offer reconciliation and thereby ultimately convey a sense of political pessimism. However, the politics of pessimism found in many of these works is far from nihilism, and it is distinct from a pessimistic outlook for a future politics. Instead, it promotes withdrawal, negativity, and a refusal of reconciliation as positive political pursuits: not pessimistic prognoses for politics, but pessimism as politics.

In this chapter, I examine the politics of pessimism in Aus dem Nichts, situating the film within the context of Fatih Akın’s filmography. I identify a darker turn in his experimentations with the aesthetics of abjection, which Akın has already deployed to various degrees in his earlier films, culminating in his subsequent film, the Fassbinder-inspired, serial-killer biopic Der goldene Handschuh (The Golden Glove, 2019). Aus dem Nichts saturates its cinematic world with negative affect, evoking Germany’s recent political past with nonliteral references to the NSU investigations and the ensuing trial. My focus is on the political potentials of this radical pessimism. Adapting the concept of “futurability” from the Italian autonomist philosopher and media theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, I argue that Aus dem Nichts posits its vision of negative futurability through its protagonist Katja in her search for justice, ultimately ending in murder- suicide.