SOURCE: Berman, Russell. “A Solidarity of Repression: Pabst and the Proletariat.” In Cultural Studies of Modern Germany: History, Representation, and Nationhood, pp. 123-33. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.

[In the following essay, Berman contends that Pabst's allegedly left-wing film Kameradschaft is actually ambivalent on the issue of proletarian liberties.]

The lesson of Nolde's vicissitudes in Nazi Germany involves the limits of intentionality: the painter's desire to identify with the fascist state was unable to influence the state's rejection of the painter. A similar disjunction operates in the case of Pabst's Kameradschaft (1931), one of the most explicitly political films of the late Weimar Republic. For the ostensibly leftist celebration of proletarian solidarity betrays, under scrutiny, a much more ambivalent agenda. True, the final sequence of the film seems to demonstrate unambiguously the establishment of the solidarity promised by the title. The last of the German mine workers, who volunteered to rescue their French comrades trapped in an underground disaster, return to the border after the successful conclusion of the operation. The thronging mass that greets them is in a festive mood, explained by a French worker who leaps onto a platform and, framed by the French and German flags, delivers a rousing speech proclaiming proletarian unity, pacifism, and internationalism. With appropriate symmetry, the German worker who initiated the rescue movement, Wittkopp (Ernst Busch), responds with a parallel address in German: workers are the same everywhere—“Kumpel ist Kumpel”—and will refuse to be pushed into war; even if “the people on top” are caught in disputes, the miners have learned the importance of solidarity and Kameradschaft.

Yet despite the uplifting assertions of an international working-class community of interest, what appears to be unambiguously conclusive at the end of the film is in fact open to some considerable doubt. An epilogue (which is missing in the versions generally available in the United States) shows German and French guards in the mine shaft reconstructing the border barrier that had been broken through during the rescue efforts. Several explanations for the omission of this sequence have been offered, ranging from the “derisive howls and hisses from audiences” when it was first screened in Berlin, to objections from German censors. According to Siegfried Kracauer, Pabst intended the coda as a critique of nationalism, but it was misunderstood as an attack on the Treaty of Versailles (as the document which established the postwar boundaries) and therefore very much part of the nationalist agenda.¹

Whatever the significance of this sequence and its excision, the ideals announced in the double speeches are in fact undermined by more than the epilogue's fiction of a reerected fence. As the epigraph proudly asserts, Kameradschaft is “founded on fact,” in particular on the factual past of the mine disaster at Courrières in 1906, when German workers did indeed rush to the aid of the trapped French miners. While maintaining a camera style designed to evoke the realist authenticity of a documentary, Pabst shifts the event to the postwar era and to Lorraine—the border runs right through the mine—in order better to stage the issue of national divisions and working-class internationalism. The film is consequently able to produce the message of the final speeches and their optimistic ring. Yet that message rings hollow, as soon as the source of the ostensibly documentary material is taken into account: if the solidarity of 1906 could not prevent 1914, why should the viewer in 1931 trust an unreflected repetition of that solidarity to prevent a new war?² Therefore the ambiguity of Kameradschaft is by no means dependent on a subversive epilogue, missing or not, but is rather a consequence of the historical construction of the foregrounded message of solidarity. The concluding ideals turn out to have little plausibility on their own merit, which is to say that Kameradschaft has less value as a vehicle of internationalism than as evidence with which to study the failure of internationalisms and the weakness of working-class solidarity on the eve of National Socialism.

In fact, the very manner with which the film attempts to assert its message of solidarity turns out to demonstrate its instability. The lengthy encounter in the mines, so profoundly intense, intimate, and, as will be discussed in a moment, full of sexual and mythic undertones, is seemingly summed up in two sloganeering speeches, as if the public language of political leaders were adequate to articulate a collective identity or a socialist hegemony.³ The concluding sequence enacts, one might say, a linguistic turn in the much richer analysis carried out by the text, privileging the speech of the cadre over both the preceding material experience, the substance of the extended narrative, and the concrete multiplicity of the assembled workers. Yet speech, to which the film ascribes the power to assert the identity of comradeship, turns out to be inadequate, as Wittkopp is forced to announce at the commencement of his address: “What the French comrade said, I could not understand; what he meant, we could all understand.” Thus even in the context of this political speech, which announces the self-evident socialist message of the film, speech itself is presented as insufficient and relegated to a secondary status vis-à-vis a more effective mode of expression—meinen rather than sagen—and the construction of the collective is thereby shifted from rational communication into an irrational domain of opinion and a nonverbal semiosis.

This contradiction—Wittkopp's speech insisting on the limits of speech—obviously undermines the plausibility of the solidarity which is the central message of his own speech, i.e., Pabst's proletarian community is stillborn. To the extent that this failure has to do with the structure of language and, in particular, the hierarchical relationship between cadre and collective, the final sequence of Kameradschaft could well be contrasted with another document of Franco-German peacemaking, the Strassburg Oath of 842; in the latter case, both the Carolingian leaders and their military followers participate in speech, producing presumably a more complex network of loyalties and collective identities. In contrast, the modern film silences the collectives and permits only the leaders to speak. By presenting two separate speeches, one in French and one in German, it effectively reproduces the national division that the speakers themselves want to deny.

However, the ambiguity of politics in Kameradschaft and the failure of Pabst's ideals are not solely a result of this distorted communicative structure at the end of the film. From its very outset, the film presents a critique of nationalism that never thoroughly measures up to the values of pacifism and socialism that are so urgently underscored. Kameradschaft begins with a game between two boys, one German and one French; the opening shot shows a marble rolling across the ground. Through a montage of editing, the boys, who quickly begin to quarrel, are set in relation to tensions between France and Germany along the border in the context of the growing German unemployment. The point of the gaming commencement is, however, not simply that adults are behaving like children but, more important, the suggestion that the wrong game is being played since the aleatory moment of free play, the rolling marble, has been displaced by an inappropriate game of agonistic embattlement.

The gaming that follows in the film is exclusively agonistic: the muted class struggle between workers and management; the heroic struggle with nature; and, especially, the reminiscence of the wartime struggle in the single flash-back of the movie. Even aspects of the celebrated solidarity are tied closely to images of combat: the procession of the German rescuers leaving their town recalls soldiers leaving for war, they have to smash through the border and survive a volley of shots, and when they arrive at the gates of the French mine they are initially mistaken for troops. The images of comity depend ultimately on an iconography of enmity, since the body of the film presents no alternative to a confrontational agonistics, i.e., the struggle with the national enemy—which is ostensibly rejected—is preserved in the militarization of the vocabulary of solidarity and is displaced into another terrain of struggle: interestingly, less the struggle with another class than the struggle to master a threatening nature.

None of these permutations returns to the utopian moment of aleatory play with which the film opened, the rolling marble; nothing has retracted the fall into agonistics, and the film's initial problem, the need to return to a nonrepressive homo ludens, is never solved.⁴ Clearly the solidarity envisioned by the film is not a solution, since it is very much implicated in processes of struggle and mastery, despite the rosy rhetoric of the concluding speeches. Given this discrepancy between the end of the cinematic text with its message of socialist harmony and the opening assertion of an ontology of struggle and repression, it is crucial to pay close attention to the nature of the social bonds represented in the course of the film and not only to the terms of the social contract announced at its conclusion. Is the comradeship of Kameradschaft a matter less of a pacifist internationalism than a comradeship-in-arms of men conquering nature? What are the grounds for the collective identity of the workers? If it is true that the proletariat has no fatherland and, as Wittkopp puts it, all the workers are the same—“Kumpel ist Kumpel”—then one has to ask what force holds the community of comrades together.

A likely answer is some considerable homosocial attraction: the decision to launch the rescue expedition is made as part of a spectacular shower room sequence replete with glistening nude male bodies, and a fight with a delirious French miner (who has succumbed to the haunting memories of the war) concludes when the victorious German affectionately strokes the cheek of his now unconscious and prostrate opponent. Yet more important than these examples of an ostensible male eroticism, extensive evidence points to the exclusion of women as a crucial aspect of the construction of the male collective.⁵

The point is not that there are no women working in the mines (that, presumably, is a moment of verisimilitude in the film) but that both the German and French miners, all men, are constructed as groups from whom women have been emphatically separated. Phrased another way, the separation which has been caused by women can be healed only when the women are separated away and the men come together in the dark, deep inside the earth. The origin of this problematic is the dance-hall scene which follows immediately on the initial exposition. Three German miners enter the music-filled Kursaal on the French side of the border. The film cuts to an attractive young couple, Emile and Françoise, dancing with obvious affection for each other. When one of the Germans asks her for a dance, she refuses, which is taken for a nationalist affront, and a melee is only narrowly avoided when the German withdraws from the woman.

This separation of a male collective from a female sphere is repeated on the French side as well. On their way home, the couple overhears an engineer commenting on the fire in the mine; Françoise insists that Emile give up his job, and when he refuses, she decides to leave. The following morning, we see Emile enter the mine, and Françoise departs on a train just as the disaster strikes. By now, however, a network of sexual imagery has become apparent: Emile chooses the fire in the phallic mine shaft over Françoise's female sexuality, just as the three Germans retreat from Françoise into the conviviality of an infantile eroticism (one of his companions pleads with the rejected suitor to “leave the women alone and come back to the rabbit,” a reference to the pet they have inexplicably brought with them: an indication of both childishness and genital renunciation, since the alternative to the woman is the genderless neuter of the Kaninchen). Furthermore Françoise's path back to the mining town is marked first by her abandonment of her suitcase—a sign perhaps of her renunciation of an independent life but certainly for Freud a standard symbol of female genitalia.⁶ This latter association is confirmed by the fact that Françoise proceeds back to the mine by taking a ride with a nun, an incontrovertible indication of the denial of female sexuality.

The underlying sexual economy turns out to be one in which male solidarity is produced in response to a threat by women (the encounter in the dance hall) and is preserved through the negation and subordination of women (Emile prefers the mine to Françoise). Precisely this logic is played out outside the gates of the mine. In the belief that the mine management has prematurely given up the search for the buried workers, the crowd, composed mainly of women and led by Françoise, tries to storm the gates. Françoise is in the front of the surging mass and is shot in a slightly elevated position, calling to those behind her, not unlike the famous iconography of the figure of the revolutionary Liberté. Yet just at this moment of radical confrontation, the German rescue company arrives with all its military demeanor. This unexpected turn of events quiets the crowd and bewilders Françoise, who can only mutter, “Les Allemands, c'est pas possible.”

Even the moment of rescue, therefore, is constructed through the ostentatious displacement of women: instead of the radical crowd led by the female allegory of liberty, the heroic role is reserved for the uniformed German volunteers, fresh from the showers. The price of the male bonding turns out to be a simultaneous displacement of a radical alternative—the impassioned crowd led by Françoise—by a more disciplined and hierarchical group. Excluded from the male discipline of the socialist organization, the anarchic energy of the unruly mass presumably could eventually be occupied by antisocialist, especially fascist movements that more effectively articulated values of spontaneity and a populist antipatriarchy.⁷ It follows then that the apparent shallowness of the ideals of Kameradschaft and the weakness of working-class solidarity had to do with the implicit misogyny in the symbolism and political practice of the working-class movement. To the extent that the collective of proletarian solidarity was de facto a matter of male bonding, it could not be a radical one. On the contrary, this reading of the film should show how, despite the rhetoric of socialist revolution, such male bonding was implicated in an establishmentarian defense of the status quo from a putative female threat—the threat at the borders, the imminence of separation and castration—and the need to sublate the wound in the healing collective of a male whole.

These sexual politics of the community are explored in the overriding iconographic concern: the construction of identity through the establishment of division and the anxiety over an impending disruption of the border. At the outset, the borders are of course treated as evidence of unnecessary enmity and belligerence: the border drawn between the two children or blocking the passage of the unemployed workers. These images are obviously fully compatible with the message of internationalism illustrated by the German miners' breaking through the underground wall marking the 1919 border. Yet the miners are not the only force to break through walls: the catastrophe first appears as the eruption of a flaming explosion tearing through the brick containment wall and setting off the collapse of the sides of a mine shaft. Masses of stones, flooding water, and impenetrable smoke pour into various frames, obscuring the images of the figures and threatening their lives. So despite the different evaluations of a positive socialist internationalism and a murderously brute force of nature, both appear on the screen as the activity of masses challenging borders. Kameradschaft's judgment of the mass is therefore intriguingly ambivalent. Proletarian solidarity is applauded as an alternative to the divisiveness of national borders, but the homologous power of the elements, breaking down the divisions erected by technology, is portrayed as the ultimate danger.

The radical crowd storming the gates of the mine can arguably be associated with a position of class struggle: the enemy is the owner or, at least, the manager. The genuine lesson of the film, however, is a different one: workers of the world unite, not in a struggle with the bourgeoisie but in a struggle to control nature. The ambivalent portrayals of the sublime mass—never-ending solidarity and the infinite elements—are resolved to the extent that the film sets the two against each other: proletarian solidarity of the masses overcoming the threat of the masses of the elements. The pacifist theme provides an excuse to redirect an initial aggression pointed at a foreign enemy (across the national border) toward nature in the form of technological mastery.

Yet this redirection of aggression is also an introversion; the mass (of workers) is turned against the mass (of nature), and one is forced to ask to what extent it is in effect turned against itself. Is the conquest of nature, which the film portrays as a struggle with external nature, in fact a displacement of a repression of an internal nature? Kameradschaft explores the viability of mechanisms to control the masses, who appear in their full spontaneity at the moment of catastrophe. As the train carrying Françoise pulls out of the station, the alarm whistle sounds at the mine, and suddenly, in a series of shots, the otherwise placid pedestrians of the city break into a frantic run. This sudden transformation is the genuine crisis of the film: the crowd is born, perhaps the only convincing echo of the aleatory chaos of the game of marbles, and the film suggests several competing analyses of this origin—the moment of terror that disrupts the petit bourgeois routine of everyday life as well as the undeniable concern and compassion for the endangered workers.

However, one shot in particular is crucial, showing the panicked crowd rushing off but reflected in a store window displaying a series of indistinguishable caps. If there is a radical moment in Kameradschaft, this is it, although it is not the moral intended by Pabst. The shot sets up a relationship between, on the one hand, a commodified culture—the exhibition of wares—whose ultimate product, however, is the spectacle, the reflection in the window, and, on the other, the emergence of the crowd. Yet this crowd of consumers, flaneurs, and dislocated individuals has the propensity to explode in the spontaneous combustion of a Luxemburgian anarchy, culminating in the riot at the mine gate.⁸ This radical threat to the society of commodities is averted by the discipline of a male socialism that arrives in the nick of time to save the capitalist organization. Proletarian solidarity appears to be a version of crowd control. The mass is turned against the mass, and this self-negation unfolds in two different ways: the sequences within the mine, representing an effort to master nature, are both a metaphor for the repression of the masses outside the gates and a displacement of the control of an internal nature necessary for the establishment of the promised comradeship.

While the displacement of the radical crowd is an important indication of the political underbelly of socialist solidarity, the film ultimately places greater emphasis on the second trajectory of self-negation, the instinctual archeology of the male bond. The workers conquer nature and thereby conquer themselves. This dialectic of technological progress is staged in a primitive setting, with man pitted against elementary forces of fire and water gushing through elongated shafts. Kameradschaft therefore seems to display some remarkable similarity with Freud's reading of the myth of Prometheus. Both explore the libidinal economy of technology, and both pose the problem in terms of male collectives mastering fire (both, by the way, are works of 1931). Most important, however, is the shared recognition of a homoerotic or homosocial foundation for the technological community of men.

Freud begins his comments on the myth with a consideration of the hollow stick in which Prometheus transports the fire; he interprets it as a penis symbol with reference to the oneiric rhetoric of inversion: “What a man harbours in his penis-tube is not fire. On the contrary, it is the means of quenching fire; it is the water of his stream of urine.” By associating fire furthermore with the heat of erotic desire, Freud can suggest “that to primal man the attempt to quench fire with his own water had the meaning of a pleasurable struggle with another phallus.”⁹ The elementary ambivalence of fire and water is clearly present in the iconography of the catastrophe in Kameradschaft: both push through the shaft, presumably a threatening resurgence of libidinal energy which it is the labor of the film to master in the interest of civilization and technological progress.

As for Freud, the film too suggests that this progress requires a reorganization of homoeroticism, i.e., a renunciation of the pleasurable play with another phallus and the consequent establishment of a homosocial community: the handclasp of the German and French rescuers in the darkness of the mine. Simultaneously this male community of self-repression can itself function as a mechanism of repression vis-à-vis the threat of the female crowd. Yet in Freud's reading the myth also preserves a knowledge of the costs of progress and the suffering caused by repression: Prometheus' deed is a crime for which he is punished, that is, the crime against nature inherent in any denial of libido. On this point, the film diverges markedly: the conquest of nature, internal and external, is presented as unambiguously positive, and suffering is relegated to a past characterized as lacking adequate control. This refusal to identify and critique the experience of repression means that, for all its progressive self-presentation, Kameradschaft boils down to a lesson in discipline and self-control. This conservative apology for civilizational repression belies the socialist aspirations of the film's conclusion and is an important symptom of the sort of weakness that prevented the working-class movement from mounting a plausible response to the challenge of an antirationalist fascism.

The negativity that adheres to the Promethean myth, which insists on the criminal and even blasphemous character of progress, is preserved in classical psychoanalysis as the notion of a necessary discontent in civilization. Historical development has been paid for with an enormously painful repression and instinctual denial: in particular, Freud discusses the sublimation of homoeroticism in the taming of fire as the initiation of technology.¹⁰ That same process of libidinal repression is staged in Kameradschaft which, however, refuses to treat repression as an object of criticism. Instead repression, denial, discipline, and technological progress are celebrated and presented as unambiguously positive. One consequence of this affirmative stance is the extraordinarily timid character of the political message, a strangely meek socialism without class struggle, as if the excessive repression of nature robbed the movement of any real spunk.

A second consequence is the importance of technology, which overshadows any vestigial romanticism of the worker as producer, and the crucial technology for Kameradschaft is ultimately the film itself. The anxiety about borders which the film thematizes is no doubt a consequence of the relatively new use of the moving camera, which was so central to Pabst's exploration of a realist cinema. Despite the considerable editing and montage in the film, innovative camera movement contributed to a redefinition of the frame of the shot, and, as Noel Carroll has commented, “The feeling engendered is that the cameraman is pursuing an unstaged action, shifting his point of view as the event develops. … Throughout the film, camera movement has the look of following the action rather than delimiting it.”¹¹ This spontaneity and movement, however, like the obliteration of the borders within the film, set off a crisis: the organization of space has gone out of control, and in both cases, the formal construction of the film and the content of its narrative, the answer to the crisis is technological progress, in particular the technology of the sound film.

Sound, and not proletarian solidarity, is arguably the real hero of Kameradschaft. The sound of the factory whistle calls the workers, and the alarm siren announces the disaster. Pabst uses sound to indicate explosions taking place elsewhere than in a particular shot, and Françoise and Emile can overhear, without seeing, a conversation regarding the underground fire. More important, certainly, is the role of sound in the rescue operation, when a stranded French miner attracts the attention of a German volunteer by banging on a metal pipe with his wrench. Finally the intended message of the film is presented in the concluding oratorical performances of the double speeches.

The central role of sound—in 1931 still very much a new technology—is in fact announced in the film itself in a way that indicates its complicity in the network of sexual politics and repression. Renouncing her plans for independence, Françoise rushes back to the site of the mine disaster by hitching a ride with a nun; the imagery of sexual denial has already been mentioned. When asked if she has a relative in the mine, Françoise replies, “my brother,” then pauses, and adds, “son ami,” his friend, i.e., not her own friend or lover, but her brother's colleague. This reply is compatible with the analysis of the construction of the homoerotic collective. Yet the pause in the middle of the phrase draws attention to another ambiguity: the ambiguity not of the relationship but of the phoneme itself, which can be taken either as a possessive adjective or as an independent noun, in which case “son, ami” turns into “sound, friend.” In this version, then, Françoise's cryptic answer identifies the mine less as the locus of male solidarity than as the site of an innovation having to do with the technological reproduction of acoustic phenomena.

This account might well appear plausible if one keeps in mind the uses of sound already enumerated. It turns out to be irresistible if one reexamines the final rescue episode, which can be treated as the climax of the film. The three Germans from the dance-hall sequence did not join the rescue crew, but instead set off on their own to dig their way through from the German side of the mine to the French side, where they eventually end up trapped together with two French men, a young miner and his grandfather. Finding their escape route blocked, they give up all hope, and one of the Germans comments, “Well, we'll take the electric tram to heaven,” at which point a telephone rings; earlier shots have indicated that a telephone operator in the mine office has been trying to determine if and where anyone was still caught below, i.e., the five remaining victims have literally been saved by the bell or, in other words, by friend sound, the electric tram to heaven.

Friend sound, “son, ami,” is electrically reproduced sound, itself the technological innovation of Kameradschaft as well as the result of the technological progress which Kameradschaft records: the control of fire. Although the film refuses to explore the dialectic inherent in the mastery of nature, it does in fact draw attention to alternative appropriations of technology. The telephone, which is the actual agent of rescue, has already made a number of appearances in the film: forced to allow his employees to set off on their rescue expedition, the manager of the German mine rings up his French opposite number and suggests that he deserves credit for what was in fact an act of spontaneous solidarity; and when the German workers crash across the French border, the border guards call ahead. That is, in the two earlier cases, the telephone, as a cipher of the new technology of acoustic reproduction, is deeply involved in the structures of control and domination, while in the final sequence it works as a tool of emancipation.

This investigation of the technologically most advanced means of communication is located within a historical theory of the media. Like many texts of the Weimar period, Kameradschaft suggests that a culture of verbal literacy—individual reading in a bourgeois private sphere—belongs to an increasingly distant past. The metaphor for such anachronistic reading, indeed the only text genuinely “read” in the course of the film, is a poster on the wall outside of the dance hall; in addition, a thermometer embedded in a containment wall is read just before the explosion occurs. The location of reading on exterior walls is indicative of the dissolution of traditional bourgeois notions of privacy (a development underscored by the single shot of a domestic interior in the center of which one sees the gaping speaker of a victrola for the reproduction of sound). The insistence on the writing on the wall is moreover evidence of the proximity of an impending catastrophe, since Kameradschaft is so much about the tumbling down of walls and, therefore, the obsolescence of an older media culture.

The catastrophe is the explosion of the masses: the masses of commodities in the shop window, the masses of the crowd, and the masses of a threatening nature. Kameradschaft describes an inadequate response by tracing the journey of the grandfather who sneaks into the mine and searches on his own for his beloved grandson. With little equipment, he signifies a technologically backward mode of operation; with his tiny lamp in the cavernous darkness, all he can do is light up the imagery, take shots, so to speak, but his abilities, a metaphor for the silent film, prove insufficient for the task at hand. Only with the successful and collective repression of nature, the conquest of fire, and its metamorphosis into the electricity of the telephone can the project of retrieval be completed.

The success of that project and the recognition of the potentially progressive use of technology do not fully obscure the simultaneous regressive potential, i.e., the manipulative use of the new technology. Nevertheless Kameradschaft, with its unbroken historical optimism, indisputably emphasizes the positive developments, just as it fully conceals the pain and suffering of the via dolorosa of progress. As an analysis of a profound restructuring of the organization of the media, it therefore too naively insists on the beneficial role of the electric reproduction of sound. The telephone as a tram to heaven does not only anticipate the role of sound in subsequent cinematic realism, including Pabst's own; it also prefigures the use of sound in propaganda and the function of the radio in National Socialist Germany. Kameradschaft, like much of the contemporary workers' movement, fails to understand that a solidarity based on repression cannot be progressive and that technology as a blind domination of nature is bound to prevent solidarity.

Notes

1. “A Mine Disaster,” New York Times, November 9, 1932; Lee Atwell, G. Pabst (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 101; Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) 240.

2. “As the film stands now, to accept the accord which effected the rescue as permanent in proletarian fraternity would be a delusive irony, especially when we recall that the actual event at Courrières did not prevent that war of 1914.” Harry Alan Potamkin, “Pabst and the Social Film,” in Horn and Hounds, January-March, 1933, 303. Cf. “Kameradschaft,” in Deutsche Filmzeitung, no. 51/52 (1931): 14-16, rpt. in Erobert den Film! (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 1977), 171.

3. Cf. the discussion of politics and language in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

4. Cf. Nancy Webb-Kelly, Homo Ludens, Homo Aestheticus: The Transformation of “Free Play” in the Rise of Literary Criticism, Diss., Stanford University, 1988.

5. Cf. Michael Rohrwasser, Saubere Mädel, Starke Genossen: Proletarische Massenliteratur? (Frankfurt: Roter Stern, 1977); Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 5 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 354.

7. Cf. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Peter Brückner et al., “Perspectives on the Fascist Public Sphere,” New German Critique, no. 11 (Spring 1977):94-132.

8. Cf. Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).

9. Sigmund Freud, “The Acquisition and Control of Fire,” Standard Edition, Vol. 22 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 188, 190.

10. “It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flames as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Liliput and Rabelais' Gargantua, still hark back—was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press, 1921), 90.

11. Noel Carroll, “Lang, Pabst, and Sound,” Cine-Tracte 2, no. 1 (1978):22.