American Madness: Concepts of Culture and Sanity in The American Friend and Stroszek.

This article was originally published in Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 40 (1992), 59-74. I have made some minor revisions.

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            In 1977, at the very height of the phenomenon of the New German Cinema, two of its “star” filmmakers, Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog, released films on a similar subject: the impact of American culture on Germans as seen in the lives of individual German protagonists coming into contact with America or what one might call American values. I would like here to examine these two films, Wenders’ The American Friend and Herzog’s Stroszek, in the light of their different but in some ways very complementary notions of the relationship between European (German) and New World (American) culture.

            In The American Friend a Hamburg frame-maker and art connoisseur receives a bizarre and devastating visitation from an expatriate American who conducts shady dealings in the art market. In the construction of the film, each character comes to symbolize—almost to caricature—his culture of origin, and their association takes on the qualities of an intercultural relation. Their “friendship” is allegorical particularly of the impact of American popular culture in the postwar era, but also of a larger symbolism of Germanness and Americanness. “Germanness” is presented in terms of order, decency and craftsmanship; but also of sickness and historical extinction. “Americanness” is presented in terms of vitality and directness; but also of anarchy, violent melodrama and megalomania. The German protagonist of the film, a neurotic subject from an impeccable tradition of neurosis, finds his own narrative of anxiety invaded and overpowered by the American’s boundary-destroying movie-like excesses of action.

            In Stroszek the process is reversed, as a naive German street musician flees an oppressive urban society in his homeland to seek the idealized tabula rasa of the New World. The protagonist is played by Bruno S., the “pure” Herzogian subject, and in this film an expression of the greater authenticity of the European human in relation to his debased American counterpart. The America in which he ultimately arrives is a godforsaken patch of dust sparsely sprinkled with mobile homes, railroad sidings, truckstops, and cultural emblems of a demented banality. The noble savage Stroszek, attempting to live in this soulless environment with a degree of natural wisdom, is “naturally” doomed to social and psychological disjunction ending in suicide amidst a cornucopian symbolic array of “American madnesses.”

            Both films manifest profoundly distrustful views of American culture, and to a degree rather kindly, even sentimental, ones of German culture—somewhat surprising in view of the stances occupied by the filmmakers’ other works. In their codification of national cultural values in moral and psychological terms, and in their oddly similar analyses, the films make a matched pair. They are of course merely fragments of a much larger discourse on the impact of American culture on Germany in the postwar period, and also more particularly of the post-1968 phase of a distinctly soured German attitude towards America. There is also the separate question of the relation of the New German Cinema with commercial and particularly American models of filmmaking and the audience they construct and expect for themselves. But it will not be my purpose to place The American Friend and Stroszek in any great detail within those larger contexts. Rather, I wish to look closely at each film in turn: in relation to their authors’ characteristic concerns as found elsewhere in their work; to estimate what the notions “American” and “German” mean in these films to Wenders and Herzog; and to try to place both films within an external dialogue which associates America and Germany with diametrically opposing states of mind and cultural/historical moments.

The American Friend

            The American Friend was Wenders’ first step away from the fold of German low-budget art-film production: its cost was as much as the total of Wenders’ three previous films, it featured an American star (Dennis Hopper), was adapted from an English-language thriller (Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game), and had a narrative strongly dosed with suspense and genre elements and containing a good deal of “plot.” In a word, it was half-way to being an American film itself, despite its German origins and production and its many marks of an art-film sensitivity. And indeed it turned out to be Wenders’ last German film before his foray to Hollywood to direct Hammett for Francis Coppola and ultimately to collaborate with Sam Shepard on Paris, Texas. But despite the heavy flirtation in The American Friend with mainstream narrative structures and the Hollywood aesthetic in particular, it is in many respects a strongly anti-American film and indeed thematizes the destructive effects of American culture on a European—and specifically a German—sensibility.

            In this latter respect it contributes another chapter to the filmmaker’s ongoing neurotic relationship with American popular culture. In a 1978 article in Time Magazine, Wenders is quoted as saying, “All of my films have as their underlying current the Americanization of Germany” —perhaps an exaggerated statement, but symptomatic. Both in Wenders’s reading of German society and in his own personal experience, American rock music, pinball machines and chewing gum filled for the younger generation a twenty-year “hole” in German history caused by the willful amnesia of the postwar years. The protagonists of Wenders’s films earlier in the 1970s (The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick, Alice in the Cities, Wrong Movement, and Kings of the Road) are inevitably suffering to a paradigmatic degree from the solitude, rootlessness and existential anomie so typical of characters in the New German Cinema. But they are accompanied in their alienated wanderings by emblems of American culture, symbols of a condition of emotional displacement and a yearning for what is absent or lost. Thomas Elsaesser has talked of the characteristic and often fruitless search for origins, authority and legitimacy throughout New German Cinema. In the case of Wenders he has suggested that this oedipal drama of sons in search of absent and probably guilty fathers is displaced into open-ended quasi-sibling relationships and a fetishization of American popular culture and the idea of America. The locus classicus of this syndrome is Kings of the Road (1976), with its two repressed, anxious, and virtually uncommunicative males driving endlessly around the German countryside in a projector-repair van listening to American rock and country music, and finishing up in an abandoned U.S. Army post on the East German border, where one of the men utters the most famous line in all of Wenders’ work: “the Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”

            America for Wenders, in the first, beneficent instance, is an imagined place where there is freedom, emotional openness, a blanket permission to exist without history or legitimation and to travel endlessly across every boundary without incurring the guilt of transgression. It is the Other of Germany, where none of these things exist or are possible. This America describes an arc of development that runs across all of Wenders’s films of this period. It is being subjected to a disappointed revisionism as early as Alice in the Cities (1974), at the beginning of which the solitary German protagonist visits America and discovers the horrors of homogenization and omni-commodification as seen in the hundreds of identical towns, motels, and gas stations scattered across the countryside, and above all in American television, described as “sickening” and “inhuman.” The hero wanders across America taking polaroid photographs of everything in an existential attempt to affirm his own existence in these surroundings, but complains that the photographs never looked like the places themselves. Later he wanders around Germany with a nine-year-old girl, but at least they are looking for something (her grandmother, her “home”), even though they have only the most inadequate idea of where to find it. If the American wandering uncovers a despair and a loss of self in the protagonist, to a real extent the German wandering heals the wound. And in Kings of the Road there is Wenders’ most extended meditation on the damage American distributors and their appalling product (typified by porno films) are doing to German audiences, German cinema and moviegoing as a social and an aesthetic activity. In The American Friend this arc of increasingly divided and incompatible feelings about America and American culture arrives at a kind of apocalypse.

            One might describe The American Friend very roughly indeed as a project to put the alienated Wenders hero, here one Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), into an American narrative, and to witness the kinds of incongruities, conflicting pulls of feeling, and ultimate disasters which such a configuration would bring about. But one must note that in modifying his usual protagonist for such a juxtaposition Wenders has aligned him much more clearly with certain “German” values which have been pointedly excluded from earlier Wenders heroes: namely a home, a wife and child, a stable and traditional craft as a restorer and framer of old prints and paintings. He has also given him an incurable blood disease, which carries its own symbolic weight as a commentary on Europe and Germany at this point in history. The “American friend,” Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper), is not only the first actual American in a Wenders film, but is also, with his cowboy hat and boots and jeans, almost a caricature of Americanism. In addition his criminal connections and his affinity for a world of violence and intrigue are felt as American not least because of their associations with Hollywood genre narrative. He behaves like an American, and moreover like an American out of an American movie. (Or: he takes an American movie with him wherever he goes; wherever he goes an American movie happens.) At the same time Ripley has inherited some of the most distinctive traits of earlier Wenders protagonists: the rootlessness and homelessness, the endless travelling, the polaroid photographs, even the Angst. And he presents himself in the guise of—and to a real degree actually is—a friend.

            These modifications to the central characters make the film into an overt conflict of German and American cultural values in a far more polarised way than is the case in Wenders’s earlier films, with their radical displacements and interminglings of American culture and German anomie and Angst. The odd couples thrown together by chance in Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road are now joined by another pairing: the staid Swiss-German frame-maker and the wild American “cowboy in Hamburg.” But instead of drifting along together in a kind of endless journey without a destination while random and banal things happen slowly and at great length, these characters inhabit an action movie complete with plots and deceptions, gangsters and payoffs, suspense sequences and murders. And instead of each friend helping the other to feel better and to live better, here the American friend represents for the German friend a fatal temptation and a recipe for destruction. Eric Rentschler has presciently remarked that in Alice in the Cities, when the Wenders hero joins the child in search of a home “he walks into a narrative trajectory” which has the effect of saving him from his anxieties; in The American Friend, Jonathan walks into Ripley’s American narrative, but the act annihilates him.

            Wenders has said that throughout the long gestation of the project he “always felt very close to the Jonathan character,” and very early in the film the protagonist is showing some characteristic qualities: above all a brooding interiority, an unspoken anxiety and sorrow, which are the symptoms of a particular neurotic condition. The solitude (even, or especially, in the bosom of his family), the anxiety for his life he constantly suffers, identifies him with the lonely, anxious subject of Wenders’ earlier films. Like those heroes, he finds a emotional correlative in rock music; its emotional directness and warmth is like a life-preserver for these men who are quietly drowning in alienation and anxiety. At moments of particular worry, Jonathan sings to himself the lines of a pop song: “There is too much on my mind and there is nothing I can say / There is too much on my mind and there is nothing I can do / About it....” In Wrong Movement, one of the characters (an industrialist who later hangs himself) delivers a long set-speech about “loneliness in Germany,” in which he suggests that fear, the repression of fear and the resulting state of numbness and denial are the most characteristic states of people in Germany, and that those suffering invisibly from it really should be thought of as “the dead souls of Germany.” It might therefore be said that Jonathan’s state is, in this context, also a German one.

            Other “German” or “European” (and specifically “not-American”) attributes are his work and his home. As an art-restorer and frame-maker, he practices a craft of long standing requiring the exercise of good taste and painstaking care, and is concerned with the preservation and display of traditional high art. His workshop is a traditional craftsman’s locale: small and enclosed, with dark wood and window-frames, manual tools, traditional materials. It is virtually a pre-industrial place, as much an expression of historic culture as Hans Sachs’ cobbler’s shop in Wagner’s Meistersinger, dedicated to the preservation of heilige Deutsche Kunst, too. Jonathan’s house is also dark and enclosed, and filled with handmade or backward-looking objects. These things, and also his nuclear family, signify stability, history, the enclosure of boundaries and customs. But in fact much of the art going through Jonathan’s shop is either American high art (the painting by the supposedly deceased Derwatt which is the occasion for all the trouble in the film) or middlebrow-or-lower items for popular consumption (like the old print entitled “The Emigrant’s Yearning” which Ripley brings to Jonathan for framing which is the occasion for their friendship). The implication here is that the traditions of European high art for which all this stands are moribund and scarcely worth devoting one’s life to. Jonathan’s craft, too, has evidently deteriorated: formerly he was a restorer, but the gallery owner confides that Jonathan “is not much good for restoring any more,” only for framing. And frames are themselves symbolically loaded in the film. Jonathan is constantly seen among them, bangs his head on some, thrusts his head into one particular one, and finally smashes it violently to pieces (just as Ripley walks into his shop). Frames are borders, rules, containing boundaries, the aspects of Jonathan’s life which are most “European” or “German” and the ones which are most different from the anarchic freedom pertaining in Ripley’s “American” life.

            But the nature of Jonathan’s anxiety is of special importance in “placing” him. His blood disease, sometimes described in commentaries as leukemia but never, I believe, actually named in the film, is incurable and dormant. As a disease of the blood, it is amenable to a national symbolic reading, and it also takes on associations of innateness and essentiality. In its dormancy, it is also quite invisible and intangible; at the same time it is irreversible and will surely kill Jonathan at some point. The psychological corollary of this diesease is a permanent state of diffuse fear, a profound sense of hopelessness and defeat. “No one can say how long you will live, Herr Zimmermann—six months, a year, two years...,” is his doctor’s description of a condition of well-nigh intolerable uncertainty and anxiety for its subject. His situation is more or less stable, but also terminal; his dilemma is how to find some meaning in a life which will end soon no matter what he does. Thus the home- and craft-centred stabilities and boundaries of his life, his German heimlichkeit and decency, are associated also with a gradual invisible rotting death, within a constricting frame of necessity.

            This is the context in which Ripley and the things springing from Ripley enter Jonathan’s life. In response to Jonathan’s snobbish and disapproving refusal to shake his hand at an auction, Ripley gives Jonathan’s name to a Parisian gangster named Minot (Gérard Blain) who is looking for an “outsider,” someone completely unrelated to the underworld, to carry out some professional murders for him. He also reveals to Minot the basic facts of Jonathan’s medical conditon (which he has chanced to overhear), suggesting that as someone with no future Jonathan will be amenable to an offer of money for a risky task. Minot is thus in a position to suggest to Jonathan that his disease is in a more immediately dangerous stage than it actually is, to play directly on Jonathan’s everpresent anxiety in order to win his agreement. This Ripley/Minot plot, described by Elsaesser as “a calculated anxiety machine,” is the means used to convert Jonathan from an Anxious German into a Crazy American. By raising the anxiety pressure until it is no longer containable, this strategy propels Jonathan past his boundaries, out of his home, his family, his frame, and into the world of travel (to Paris, to Munich), violent melodramatic action (stalking victims, killing them, disposing of the bodies), and finally quick—rather than lingering—death. But the incipient paranoia of Jonathan’s condition is revealed in the process. Jonathan is the victim of a conspiracy, but it is a conspiracy which bases itself on his willingness to believe in conspiracy:

                Minot: Maybe your doctor doesn’t tell you everything.

                Jonathan: I am fully informed about my sickness.

                Minot: You are not fully informed.

The seed of doubt thus planted flowers alarmingly in the fertile soil of Jonathan’s underlying belief that the worst will happen. He keeps rushing back to his own doctor for reassurance, more tests (extremely painful sternal punctures), more up-to-date results. After Jonathan has urgently asked him for the latest results, before they could possibly be ready, the doctor says, “It’s as though you wanted them to be worse!” In Paris (at the American Hospital) Jonathan is treated to an elaborately forged medical report which extensively and authoritatively documents his worst fears; his is unable to detect this forgery—just as he has incorrectly identified the Derwatt as a forgery—despite the “good eye” attributed to him.

            In any case the operation that is conducted upon Jonathan is possible only because of Jonathan’s already-existing condition: not just his illness, but his interiority, repression, unexpressed frustration with everything which is supposed to be meaningful and reassuring in his life. Wenders describes him as having “something like a permanent and persistent longing for death.” Jonathan is lured into the “American narrative” not merely because he succumbs to a fiendish plot, but also because he strikes a sort of Faustian bargain with the American devil, damning his (German) soul in exchange for a liberated (American) life. And this perspective in turn suggests the degree to which the Jonathan/Ripley or German/American dichotomy of characters, styles and themes corresponds also to an internal split within the sensibility of Wenders’ films between the tug of German heimlichkeit—associated also with the honest practice of art in film—and the lure of American emotional openness and freedom of action, which at the same time is corrupted with predatory materialism and violence and has no moral basis whatever. In this respect the battle in The American Friend is taking place within the filmmaker’s soul. In a way that is conspicuously absent in his previous work, Wenders’ turns to face his troubled relationship to Germany, his familial father, his Fatherland, his national culture. All of these are epitomised in the situation of echt-Deutscher craftsman Jonathan, with his nuclear family and his snug solid home—a situation which at the same time tortures Jonathan with its deficiencies, and its inability to still his anxieties. The way in which Wenders has, in his own history, tried to escape from this world to an American substitute is deconstructed in The American Friend, in which the impact of the American, however charismatic, is finally rendered as destructive and “strange.”

            The central drama of the film is Jonathan’s emergence from his cocoon into a world of nightmarish action. At no point can he really grasp that he is doing what he is doing. Even his preliminary moves in this unthinkable course—flying to Paris, booking into an aggressively modernist white-slabbed hotel, meeting Minot in his hotel—are accompanied by alarming symptoms of psychic disorientation. At the airport there is a shocking, false eyeline-match in which Jonathan is in effect made to walk up to a figure slumped on a bench which is then revealed, in the purest doppelgänger manner, to be himself. Falling asleep on his hotel-room bed, he awakens to see a giant construction crane looming towards him through the naked window pane. In Minot’s hotel room, he listens to Minot calmly outlining the steps to be taken in murdering a man on the Métro, while Minot’s bagman idly strokes modernist note-clusters on the grand piano. Then he is having the man pointed out to him at a Métro station and then is trying to shadow him. Hitchcockian accidents of awkwardness sprout everywhere—strangest of all the fact that he actually falls asleep at one point during the tail. And then after the murder there is the euphoria—he can’t stop smiling. The pattern is varied for the second murder, on the train. Here Jonathan is truly out of his depth, the task of garrotting a thug in the tiny washroom of a moving train while his companions look suspiciously around revealing with ever greater clarity the lunacy of this entire scheme and most of all of Jonathan’s involvement with it. Yet after the deed is amazingly accomplished (through the virtually divine intervention of Ripley), there is an even greater rush of released tension: Jonathan sticks his head through an open window into the rushing air and screams.

            These moments of intense drama, of overwhelming nervous tension and release, of the consciousness of having committed violent acts, are the basis of his relationship with Ripley. For a few moments he is able to breathe the pungent air of existential freedom and gratuitous action. But while Ripley is right at home in this world—or at least no more not at home than anywhere else—they are altogether too much for Jonathan. He cannot survive in this American action movie. “American action” may be all right in a movie; in a life it is insane (its failure to distinguish between the imaginary and the real is indeed one of its principle features). Jonathan needs to be in a nice German art-movie, full of long dead spaces and a lowering cloud of indefinable unhappiness. His quasi-adolescent friendship with Ripley (they giggle at nude pictures and do naughty homicidal things together) reaches its climax during the night-watch at Ripley’s mansion. Here Jonathan parades up and down in the rain gutter in the freezing cold while Ripley muses that he’d like to shoot the expected interlopers but daren’t because of the neighbours, brings Jonathan little snacks and says, “I’m thinking about you all the time.” The nightmarish events of the gangster attack pass over the line into horrific farce in such scenes as the mortal descent of the character played by Samuel Fuller rolling down flight after flight of stairs, and the muffled struggle between the badly-beaten Minot and a man completely wrapped in bandages like a mummy. The farce culminates in Ripley’s cockeyed plan to drive the ambulance to the sea and set it on fire on an open beach. Jonathan’s American-movie adventures, capped by an overexposure to this particular brand of insanity, is literally too strong for his blood: he suffers a mental breakdown, grinning and gibbering; he says to his wife that he wants to “go home”; then he dies.

            As for Ripley’s Americanness, it is partly a matter of specific attributes and partly a matter of contrast with Jonathan. Ripley’s urban-cowboy dress is the most obvious visual cue, but his entire environment is marked in a similar way. He drives a white Thunderbird which sticks out garishly on the narrow streets of Hamburg, and lives with theatrical incongruity in what looks like a Palladian villa. The interior of this dwelling is assaulted with truly Ripleyan décor: a pool table, a juke box, a giant Canada Dry sign, a television (all of which are at one stage wrapped in clear plastic in a frightening image of alienation), red satin bedsheets; virtually nothing else. His anxiety attacks (as distinct from Jonathan’s) are “American,” too. They are full of obsessive self-dramatization and futile existential self-documentation: he talks to his own tape recorder (“I know less and less about who I am,” “The only thing to fear is fear itself”) and later plays his monologues back to himself; he lies on the plastic-coated pool table in tears, taking polaroid after polaroid of himself. As mentioned before, these are clear echoes of the earlier Wenders ur-protagonist—each of them repeats or paraphrases an action of one of the Rüdiger Vogler characters. Clearly the America from which these things spring is precisely the America of Wenders’ personal imagination, and Ripley’s drama is in some sense the drama of Wenders-the-American.

            However, what distinguishes Ripley’s neurosis not only from Jonathan’s but ultimately from those of earlier Wenders characters’ (and from that of the authorial imagination itself) is the absence in it of any sense of unnaturalness, transgression or guilt. Jonathan’s predicament makes him secretive, his actions drive him further and further away from his family; he is essentially overwhelmed by the strangeness (unheimlichkeit) of what he is doing. For Ripley this kind of action is quite natural—or rather, because nothing is natural for Ripley, as natural as any other. There may be too much on his mind but he does know what to do. His reaction to existential pain and fear—and it is his endemic condition too—is to act out. He does so automatically and without reflection: hence the “incongruity,” or sheer craziness, of his behaviour. Nor are acting-out and self-dramatization very different from each other, as may be seen in the last section of the film, where the lunacy of the drive to the sea, Ripley’s cheerful conversation with the corpse in the back seat of his vehicle en route (“you can’t win ‘em all, shoulda kept your seatbelt on”), and the final exploding-ambulance funeral-pyre whose supposed purpose is to dispose of the evidence untraceably. With the greatest possible understatement it might be said of Ripley that he “lacks judgement,” judgement being also exactly that quality so cultivated by Jonathan in his pre-Ripley days of craftsmanship and good taste. And indeed the lure which Jonathan takes under Ripley’s aegis is that of acting out blindly, of abandoning judgement compulsively. But Jonathan is not an “American”; he cannot act like one.

            In the end The American Friend offers the following allegory: Jonathan (= Germany, = Europe), a devoted husband and father, a quiet honorable craftsman in a long tradition, is slowly dying of an invisible blood disease. His decency and virtue avail him not. He is at a personal/historical dead end. His anxiety is internalized and dwelt upon in a hallowed tradition of German Romantic loneliness-and-death-obsession. This traditional method of handling internalized fear is no longer adequate, and anyway the subject really is virtually dead already. But the situation is utterly transformed by the entry of Ripley (= America). Under the influence of Ripley, Jonathan is enticed: from the German-Romantic contemplative sphere into the American-Existential active sphere; from the neurotic into the psychotic; from the enclosed home across borders into foreign parts; from a slow death from festering internal causes into a quick death from violent external causes; from careful craftsmanlike frame-making into ad libitum clumsy murder. Jonathan’s first situation is very bad, but in the end it seems clearly preferable to the second. At the same time, history has passed him, and Germany, by; the world is now American. It does no good to prefer “Germany” to “America.”

Stroszek

            Stroszek meanwhile might also be described, though in a different sense, as a movie which places its filmmaker’s characteristic protagonist in an “American movie.” The film carries on Werner Herzog’s Romantic project to find the essential and most authentic form of humanity in a presocialized, imperfectly-socialized, or antisocial individual. Certainly in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), arguably Herzog’s most important and influential film and a totem of the New German Cinema, the filmmaker had crystallized one major facet of his protean hero in the person of the youth found standing in a Nürnberg square one day in 1828, who had lived his entire life chained in a root cellar without language or knowledge of the world, and whose entry into European Enlightenment civilization is depicted as a “hard fall” from a state of natural grace. Crucial to the film are the characteristics of its principal actor, Bruno S., a man who had spent most of his life in orphanages, mental institutions and jails. Herzog discovered Bruno S. working as a washroom attendant and decided to transport him more or less intact to the screen, where his special qualities of innocence and unique subjectivity could be the centrepiece of a Herzogian drama of the inadequacies of human culture and its loss of the ineffable glories of natural, or at least precultural, existence. Bruno S. returns in Stroszek again more or less in his own character, and indeed the film recapitulates the narrative of Kaspar Hauser in its depiction of this uniquely “natural” man released from a literal prison, but finding the wide world (in its colonisation and transformation by human society) a worse and more stifling prison, one that finally destroys him. But in Stroszek the setting is the contemporary world, and the progress of the protagonist is from a German prison to a German city to the wide open spaces of the American west; and with each movement to supposedly greater freedom and openness the sense of oppression and constriction increases. Stroszek starts out for America with the expectation of finding the clean slate of a new life and a bounteous material fortune—in short with the same banal (or “innocent”) expectations which an idealized America has always presented to the European imagination. What he finds is a debasement equally of nature and culture, a physical and spiritual desolation, far surpassing any experienced in Germany.

            Bruno Stroszek (the forename that of the actor, the family name the same as Herzog’s first fictional hero’s) is introduced to us as he is undergoing the ritual of release from prison. Like all rituals of “advanced” society in Herzog’s films, this one is presented as meaningless and perverse: a prison official who has known Stroszek for years is asking him to state his name. Upon presentation of the belongings he had in his possession at his incarceration, Bruno takes up his railway signalhorn and blows a blast, announcing: “Bruno is going into freedom!” A floating, smeared, lucent image is presented to us without explanation, to the haunting accompaniment of a celeste playing an adagio section of Beethoven’s A-flat major piano sonata op. 110: another of Herzog’s highly characteristic obscured or abstracted images of compelling beauty. It turns out to be the street outside Stroszek’s prison cell, obliquely reflected in a clear glass ball hanging near the window inside the cell. Here is a figure for the outside world as it is conceived within the enclosure of the mind, an image of the same general type as those making up the dreams and visions of the unsocialized Kaspar Hauser. In Herzog’s terms, this “purely” imagined world, the world of something outside as seen in the imagination of an uncorrupted soul, represents the most highly-prized state of apprehension. And just as Kaspar’s miserable lonely dirt cellar is the best place from which to contemplate existence, so Bruno’s prison cell is a better place than any he will subsequently inhabit, and the indecipherable image in the crystal ball more beautiful and meaningful than any he will see. His two cellmates are true friends and soulmates: a Turk who makes paper boats and presents Bruno with “the smallest ship in the world” as a farewell present, and a big boisterous German who wears a cowboy hat and has a poster from the TV show Bonanza over his cot (already prefiguring the “America of the imagination” which will play an important part in the film), and who lights his fart with a torch as his gift of parting. Bruno says, “I don’t want to go.”

            The world into which he does go is that of a somewhat seedy district of Berlin. It contains welcoming enclosed spaces, like the bar he immediately heads for and the apartment which has been kept for him by his elderly friend Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz), which houses his “friends”—his musical instruments (piano, celeste, accordion) and his talking mynah-bird Beo. When the prostitute Eva (Eva Mattes) is cast off by her pimps, Bruno persuades her to move in with him. He is so happy to have a woman that he gives a concert with accordion in the steep-walled tenement courtyard. But the pimps unleash a humiliating violence on both Eva and Bruno, and they, together with Scheitz, decide to flee these oppressions of civilization and “make a new start.” The idea to go to America is first Scheitz’s—he has a highly unlikely nephew who owns a garage in Wisconsin—but it is powerfully seconded by Eva. Bruno is rather reluctant, but looking over the atlas Eva is star-struck by the Idea of America: “Look, here is Chicago, and New York, and California. Everyone makes money there. Let’s go!” She raises the travel fare by marketing her body at a Turkish-manned construction site.

            The actual transition to the American scene takes place in stages. The first, brief, one shows glorious dawn or sunset skies as seen from the airplane, and later from the top of a Manhattan skyscraper: heroic images of rebirth and new promise. There are warning signs—the American immigration authorities confiscate Bruno’s bird (he laments: “What kind of a country is it that takes away Bruno’s Beo?”), and while the camera ranges across the New York skyline we hear on the soundtrack melancholy strains of the celeste playing more Beethoven, this time a sad little motif from the Les adieux sonata op. 81a. (This sonata programmatically depicts a journey, and the phrase heard in the film is the principal motif of the slow movement that Beethoven labelled l'Absence. For Herzog and Stroszek, it must be an absence of Germany, an absence from Germany, and there will be no homecoming.) The journey across country to Wisconsin by car is accompanied, however, by the strains of warm country-and-western music and a montage of open spaces and the road streaming by. It is impossible not to recall Wenders when viewing these scenes—and the similar ones near the end of the film—and it seems evident to me that Herzog is making specific reference to the work of his compatriot, and especially to the idea of America contained in Wenders’ striking sequences of “road + rock/country music.” Thomas Elsaesser says that in the Berlin sections of Stroszek, with their “stark statement of sadism and masochism, Herzog seems closest to Fassbinder, both in his depiction of a milieu and of a situation of more or less sexual violation and violence among males.” If this is true, then the film progresses so to speak from Fassbinder to Wenders, since, apart from the striking similarity just mentioned, the disillusionment with America expressed in Stroszek is generally of the same kind as that found in the early scenes of Alice in the Cities, though far more corrosive and cataclysmic.

            Wisconsin, when it is actually reached, turns out to be a shocking letdown. Scheitz’s nephew Clayton has laid on a welcome celebration for them, but it is pathetic (it includes a decorated dog), and cannot begin to counter the dismal impression created by the landscape. Here indeed is the openness of the American frontier, but it is not a horizon of infinite opportunity. It is a wasteland with little vegetation and no pictorial value, almost completely drained of colour and dotted only with defoliated bushes and the dire marks of man’s presence. In this latter category are the miserable, attenuated and entirely ugly emblems Herzog has chosen to represent America: mobile homes, powerlines, gas stations, railroad tracks, machine shops, dirt roads, frozen sloughs, truckstop restaurants, endless scrubland and highways. Eric Rentschler speaks of the movement in Stroszek from “the fierce verticals of Berlin’s cold lanes...to the horizontal emptiness of the American Midwest.” I would prefer to speak of the contrast between the enclosure, warmth, and nurturing sufficiency of the German locations (albeit of a diminishing nature as Bruno moves from prison to society) and the frank hostility of the agoraphobically open environment in Wisconsin—this movement also corresponding to the movement from Innigkeit and imagination to an experience of the real concrete world, especially the world as marked by human society.

            Wisconsin—and America in general as it is seen through the rest of the film—is a place profoundly deficient both naturally and culturally. Nature in Herzog is an ambiguous thing. True, it is often associated with an authenticity denied to human society, and the Promethean Herzog hero (like the would-be Promethean Herzog himself) often conducts his doomed search for the ultimate in the context of an exotic environment as far as possible from (European) civilization and hence somehow closer to truth. But this nature is only analogous to this truth, analogous because it is not subject to the destructive force of human conceptualization and “ordering.” The thing itself, ideal apprehension, actually can only reside in the human mind—but of course only in an exceptional human who is not a part of this process of homogenation and socialization. Elsaesser remarks that “both Kaspar Hauser and Aguirre seek salvation in a society which no longer (or not yet) imposes its norms,” and the same can be said of Bruno in Stroszek, though he discovers that America does not in fact fit that description. And nature can be as inimical as the worst society. Herzog’s famous denunciation of the Amazon jungle while making Fitzcarraldo, itself a deliberately mad and heroic filmmaking project, is the most forceful expression of this idea:

Nature is vile and base, I woudn’t see anything erotic here. I see fornication, and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival, growing and just rotting away. The trees here are in misery, the birds are in misery: they don’t sing, they just screech in pain. We have to get acquainted with idea that there is no harmony in the universe, no real harmony as we conceive it. There is some harmony in the jungle: a harmony of overwhelming, collective murder. In comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we only sound and look like badly pronounced, half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel. We don’t belong here.

Nature in Wisconsin has none of these hyperdramatic qualities, but it shares with the jungle the attribute of being unsynchronized with and destructive of human visions of ideality. The images of Kaspar Hauser’s dreams, the floating image in the crystal ball at the beginning of Stroszek—these are utterly contradicted and obliterated by the meaningless, precise and concrete desolation of Railroad Flats, Wisconsin. Also annihilated are the archetypal ideal images of the American frontier, as presented to the German imagination by a tradition of representation stretching from Fenimore Cooper through Karl May to John Ford.

            Often associated with nature in its benign aspect are animals and “primitive” peoples. The native peoples in Aguirre, La Soufrière, Fitzcarraldo and Where the Green Ants Dream are all in some sense closer to the centre of the mystery by virtue of their impenetrable otherness and impermeability to Western structures of “understanding.” This is a quality they share, of course, with Herzog’s heroes, whether they be megalomaniacs (as in Signs of Life or Aguirre) or people whose difference is in their distance from “normal” appearance or behaviour (as in Even Dwarfs Started Small, Land of Silence and Darkness or the characters played by Bruno S.) In the America presented in Stroszek, animals and Indians are completely traduced, devoured and assimilated into the surrounding, horrifying, culture. America confiscates Beo, decorates dogs, casually slaughters wild game (in one scene we see a dead elk tied across the hood of a car by two hunters), and forces animals into an utterly unnatural imitation of human activities (the Dancing Chicken et al. of the final scenes). Herzog has never been one to sentimentalize animals, but at the same time the treatment they receive in America in this film is a clear case of human social behaviour which is ugly and wrong. Clayton’s partner in the garage is an Indian, Eli, whose “noble savage” crafts of legend are reduced to such activities as correctly measuring by eye lengths of wood to be added to the TV set and kicking the beer machine just right. Indians are the proprietors of the film’s final and most powerful images of American madness, the chairlift/performing menagerie/souvenir shop/restaurant (“No Pets Allowed”) roadside complex where Bruno meets his end. To be sure, Indians have been co-opted by the sickening materialism of the culture around them; but there is no indication—certainly not in Wisconsin, the primary American locale of the film—that there is a fruitful nature here which has been despoiled or overrun. The human presence is vile enough, but underneath it lies a nature without beauty, grandeur or mystery, or any other quality analogous to the interior vision of a Bruno. And indeed Bruno (and to a lesser extent the equally strange Scheitz) are the only sources of true vision. In contrast to many Herzog films (including Kaspar Hauser) that vision has in Stroszek emphatically no objective correlative in nature, and least of all in American nature.

            As for culture in America, it receives the full brunt of a broadside of embittered, nauseated sarcasm that is hardly paralleled even in Herzog’s frequently caustic cinema. The first impression created by the miserable fag-ends of human culture in Wisconsin has already been mentioned. It is quickly followed by a succession of blows that discourage the viewer far sooner than they do the party of expatriate Germans. Clayton’s machine shop, a rural machine shop in winter, replicates the dirtiness and empty disorder of the landscape in an interior setting. Clayton takes the Germans on a tour of Railroad Flats in his battered and discoloured towtruck, pointing out all the (non) attractions, especially the dismal railroad junction (“there are lots of railroad tracks down that way, that’s why the place got so famous as to be called Railroad Flats”). He eagerly tells them that there have been four unsolved murders in the district, perhaps five since a farmer has disappeared complete with his tractor. On winter Sundays Clayton’s favourite hobby is to take a metal detector out onto the frozen surfaces of local ponds to see if he can find the sunken tractor. Bruno is warned to stay clear of a disputed patch of land on the border between two farms, where the farmers spend hour after hour patrolling back and forth on their tractors holding shotguns: an emblem of territorial barbarism. Clayton himself—the most prominent American in the film—is, not to put too fine a point upon it, a hick redneck. It is astonishing to find set down beside Bruno S., so to speak, a character who is then judged harshly on account of his ignoble savagery, of his distance from any form of culture or human refinement. In the machine shop, Clayton pulls out one of his own teeth with a pair of pliers, then hollers for Eli to get him a beer. He leers and ogles at Eva, and sings dirty songs while performing a quasi-obscene bump-and-grind on a beer break in the shop. Similarly, the trucker “cowboys” who frequent the restaurant where Eva works have an equally debased culture: one of them invites Eva to come out to the truck and listen to the CB radio (eventually Eva will leave with this man). Higher up the social scale comes the bank representative who supervises the loan taken Bruno and Eva so they can buy a mobile home and furnish it with furniture and appliances. This character, decked out with a leisure suit, hornrimmed glasses and a briefcase, speaks in a sickeningly commercialized tone of voice, and employs the most euphemistic manner imaginable to threaten the couple with, and finally to announce, repossession of goods for nonpayment. He illustrates Bruno’s complaint that in America they don’t beat you up physically, but rather oppress you politely and with kind words.

            But the sins of all these characters, even the bank representative, may ultimately be described as “tastelessness”; they affront through their crassness and tackiness rather than through unkindness or even insensitivity. It is true that Clayton’s sexual sniggering and the truck driver’s insulting behaviour towards Bruno may be regarded as insensitive or offensive. But both fall well short of the violent oppression practised by the Berlin pimps, and Clayton is actually very hospitable in his behaviour towards the Germans. Rather, Herzog seems to be appalled at them in the same way that one might be when confronted with a spectacle of slovenly eating habits or public nose-picking. Again it is necessary to repeat how odd this is in the context of Herzog’s cinema. Herzog the enemy of civilization, the attacker of all forms of social and cultural pretension, the seeker for higher life in the most “savage” parts of the earth, appears to find America wanting because it pursues base appetites and lacks a Beethoven.

            And indeed the presence of Beethoven, played both on the soundtrack and by Bruno and Scheitz on the keyboard, points to the related question of Herzog’s seemingly contradictory attitudes towards high culture and of his habit in Stroszek of using it as a stick with which to beat American cultural deficiencies. On the one hand sonata-form, for example, is hardly less an example of the cultural attempt to order the world than the philosophical systems derided in Kaspar Hauser; and yet Beethoven and Mozart (like, in a different sphere, Lang and Murnau) are somehow exempted from the taint of the cultural conventions of which they are not only the exemplars but even perhaps the definers. More than this: in Stroszek, the A-flat sonata adagio, as at once one of the most idealized and most inwardly “personal” of Beethoven’s utterances, is held forth by Herzog as an apt aural equivalent of the obscure ideality of the reflection in the glass ball. Bruno S., in both his roles for Herzog, combines the unlettered naivety of an enfant sauvage with a taste for classical German music (Beethoven and Mozart), and thus can function simultaneously as a repository of precultural “truth” and as a filter to isolate and hold the visionary authenticity of a Beethoven while throwing out the superfluous cultural institutionalization to which such figures are subjected. In Herzog’s eyes, German culture, “seen” properly, can offer this kind of sustenance; American culture never. America has no high culture, and if its popular culture sometimes seems promising, it is a false promise. The country music accompanying the road trip to Wisconsin, apparently a mark of human warmth and the harbinger of a better life, has these associations stripped from it when it reappears during Eva’s flight with the truckers. The welcoming human prospect it presents is a false one, and it embodies the lying promise of America as a whole.

            The way in which America is depicted as a perverter of human instincts and “natural” human needs is exemplified almost continuously for the last half of the film. Most pointed of the examples, perhaps, is Bruno and Eva’s mobile home. This device (one must call it that) is for Herzog a contradiction in terms. A home is something which by definition cannot be mobile. Its absurdity is underlined by the mock-heroism of its grand arrival into an empty frame (and an empty lot) to the accompaniment of a ludicrous ancient arrangement of “Home Sweet Home” on the soundtrack. Then follows the festival of kitsch which is its interior decoration: orange shag carpets, chipboard faux-mahogany furniture and fixtures, garishly flowered bedspread on a actively-springed mattress (“good for rockin’ and rollin’,” says Clayton). A grand console television set eventually occupies the place of honour, and it is while lolling on the bed in a pink quilted housecoat eating cheezies and watching it that Eva eventually conceives her desire to move on. This domicile is subjected to merciless ridicule without cease: the man from the bank says with deep false-sincerity “what a lovely home you’ve chosen”; both of his visits to it are accompanied by sarcastic commentary from Bruno (“when will you be visiting our lovely home again?” his final one as the man leaves after announcing that the home will be repossessed); finally it is sold off by an auctioneer whose eldritch auction-calling seems to epitomise the utter unnaturalness of the object and the society that produced it; when the wretched item exits the screen for the last time it produces an empty frame which exactly repeats the one it arrived in (“Home Sweet Home” heard once again on the soundtrack). The dual blow of losing his girlfriend to a trucker and watching his home driven away is what impels Bruno, and Scheitz with him, to do something appropriate to their environment (i.e., mad) themselves by staging a robbery. Once again, however, it is difficult to escape the sensation that Herzog’s ultimate objection to all this “oppression” is its tastelessness, its insubstantiality, its lack of legitimacy. And the corollary always remains a recollection of the solidity and sufficiency, in effect the cultural authenticity, of the German locations left behind.

            Bruno has reacted to Wisconsin by engaging in parallel real and parodied attempts to assimilate to the culture. He is soon seen wearing a cowboy hat (perched on top of a scarf wound around his head to keep his ears warm) and a rural-style plaid jacket. His inability to learn the language keeps him a stranger to the oppressive verbal contributions of Clayton or the man from the bank; he feels excluded even if we are aware he is actually lucky not to be able to understand. His “differentness,” already marked in Germany, is of grotesque existential proportions in this environment. He had celebrated a kind of entry into normal human society when Eva agreed to move in with him. But Eva—the pilot and financier of the move to America, the one who likes it and adjusts to it well, the one who can instantly understand the fact that all commerce is a form of prostitution and simply literalize it—is in this fashion the cause of his destruction, the Eve to his Adam in Paradise (and Bruno certainly has qualities befitting the “first man”). Bruno’s attempt to assimilate is of course doomed, and its final failure is signalled by his dual loss of woman and home.

            Bruno’s reaction to this massive defeat is to embark upon a series of acts expressive of his feelings, just as earlier he had fashioned a sculpture out of old car-engine parts to show Eva what his emotions looked like. A “natural” artist, he constructs a kind of mad, phantasmagoric piece of performance art in response to the mad American world surrounding him. Together with Scheitz, now himself fallen into a caricature of paranoia, Bruno decides to rob a bank. But the bank is closed, so they rob the tiny barber shop next door. The barber has to help them open the till, and the take is around $25. Then, after throwing the gun into the car, they walk across the street to a store and start buying groceries. As Scheitz is deciding which brand of taco chips offers better value, the police rush in and seize him. Bruno is unnoticed and escapes, not forgetting to bring his frozen turkey with him. He takes the old towtruck and heads down the highway amid whirls of snow: Wenders is again evoked. Now the landscape begins to show features, to manifest a degree of that beauty and sublimity which so often make it a correlative to the aspirations of the Herzog hero. Perhaps it is because Bruno is himself again, through this act of parody and self-expression, that the landscape may develop these qualities. However, this development is also a signal and a byproduct of the fact that Bruno is in a terminal phase.

            Bruno apparently drives all the way to North Carolina. Fortuitously, the truck overheats and quits just next to a particular roadside tourist attraction. A man in full Indian headdress is standing in the middle of the parking lot. Bruno goes into the Indian-operated restaurant, where we see him sitting with a man who says (half in English and half in German), “You say your girl ran off to Vancouver and your house was driven away? Don’t worry about it!” “That’s what I say,” agrees Bruno. He walks outside, starts the truck, and jams the steering wheel so that it will circle continuously. The engine compartment is now billowing smoke. He carries the gun and the turkey across the road to the chair-lift. In the antechamber he finds a menagerie of coin-operated trained animals, each in a glass case with a little “scene” and props: there is the Dancing Chicken, the Rabbit Fire Chief, the Piano-Playing Chicken and the Drummer Duck. Bruno sets each of these going in turn, and Herzog gazes in horrified fascination at their performances. A chicken kicks out its heels and bobs its head while on the soundtrack we hear a country tune featuring a harmonica and a kind of screech-yodel. Another chicken rushes out and pecks spastically at a tiny piano keyboard—in truth a final perversion of Bruno’s keyboards, and Beethoven’s. Meanwhile in the parking lot the truck is circling endlessly, now engulfed in flames. Bruno discovers the master-switch and turns on the chair-lift, then climbs into one of the chairs and heads up the mountain side, still clutching shotgun and turkey. The lift-supports are decorated to look like totem poles. On the back of Bruno’s chair is written the legend “Is This Really Me?” The final montage consists of an extended crosscutting from Bruno to the performing animals to the arrival of State Police (their sirens blending with that of the Rabbit Fire Chief). Bruno heads up the mountain a second time, the camera leaves him and tilts up to the summit, and a shot rings out. A policeman radios his helplessness to turn off the chair-lift or stop the Dancing Chicken. The last images are of the Dancing Chicken, who continues to scratch and sway ceaselessly, to the accompaniment of the screeches and harmonica blasts.

            I have described this last section in detail because it represents the telos and resting-place of the film. This setting and its objects are not only “chosen” by Bruno to express his final sense of defeat at the incomprehensible and unmanageable world around him, but they finally give full vent to Herzog’s disgust and anger at the American world. His attention is drawn to the most banal, quasi-surreal dregs of American culture, bordering on the demented landscape of The National Enquirer, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon or the early films of John Waters. Bruno’s (and Herzog’s) method is to push the already-parodic elements of this American cultural environment over the edge into hysteria and madness. By introducing armed robbery, flight from the scene of the crime, and police pursuit, Herzog has made his film into an American narrative. It is of course a derisory one, marked by its “inappropriate” juxtapositions (the barber-shop holdup, the turkey) expressive of Bruno’s experience of America as a meaningless social machine, if not a sadistic one for driving people mad. The final and most poisonous images of this cruel meaninglessness are the performing animals, the (under the circumstances) frightening soundtrack song, and the endlessly circling truck and dead Bruno—this circling a frequent Herzog figure for ultimate failure, madness and death. The unstoppable gyrations of the Dancing Chicken hold a particular horror.

            At a workshop in Chicago shortly after the release of the film, Herzog told Roger Ebert: “For me, it was particularly important to define my position about this country and its culture. And that’s one of the major reasons I made Stroszek.” Herzog’s position, evidently, is that America is a hellish spiritual and physical wasteland, a place where the sensitive soul can only react appropriately to the surroundings by turning to madness and suicide. The fact that this depiction is to some extent motivated by a wish to show a different America from the one portrayed in Hollywood movies, and to defend the Romantic vision of a Bruno—above all of a Herzog—from the casual materialism and lack of higher purpose in American culture, is only a partial explanation of the bitterness shown in the film. Behind all this one may discern also a kind of disappointment at America for failing in its utopian promise. Herzog, unlike some other Germans of his generation or younger, is not of the party which renounced America in the wake of the Vietnam War and the events of 1968. His reasons—and in this at least he resembles Wenders—include an awareness of the destructive effects of American “cinematic imperialism.” But they may also be traced to an older tradition of German Romantic idealizations of America that are found wanting in the light of experience. In short, Herzog’s America proves a double disappointment: it fails to be a properly exotic wilderness (as in Fata Morgana, Aguirre or La Soufrière) and it fails to be the America of new hope and boundless opportunity.

American Madness

            Both Jonathan and Bruno move from German to American narratives. In both cases the German narrative is characterized by relative order and by positive qualities of “home.” There are severe problems with both of these “Germanies” which cause the characters to pursue an “American” course of action. In the end, though, it is clear that “Germany” is to be preferred to “America.” “American” behaviour shares a number of traits in both films. It is associated with an acting out rather than a passive or inward response to life. Moreover the patterns of this acting out conform broadly, and sometimes precisely, to the patterns of event in American genre narratives. Crime and violence, getaways, and finally sudden death, are the principal major components of resemblance. Equally important, however, is the sense of incongruity that arises from the juxtaposition of these German protagonists and the American acts they perform.

            Often this incongruity takes the form of comedy, as both the films and the protagonists themselves show a constant and growing self-consciousness about the ridiculousness of their situation and their new behaviour. As much as his actions themselves, it is Jonathan’s sense of how unthinkable his criminality is, how absurd and even funny is his relation with Ripley and his assent to Ripley’s will to action, which creates that atmosphere of unreality in which his disease is finally unleashed to kill him. Other feelings are present in the course of “American action” too, such as terror, excitement, liberation, self-empowerment; but in the end it is the overwhelming sense of incongruity which appears basic, both to the character and to the sensibility of the film. In Stroszek, Bruno’s awareness of the distance between himself and the outside world is present right from the beginning, but it takes a quantum leap after he moves to America. To some extent he always looks at the world as a puzzle and his own existence in it as an incongruity, and moreover it is his habit to express this feeling through ironic gestures and humourous self-dramatizations. After the prison warden has asked him for a solemn promise that he will never go into a bar again, Bruno gives a boy-scout salute and says “grosses Ungarisches Ehrenwort!” (“my Great Hungarian Word of Honour!”); his first act upon release is to head into a bar. This instinct for parody is seen throughout the American portions of the film, but never anywhere so strongly as in the final scenes. The robbery, the turkey, the highway escape, and the “staging” of the suicide are all forms of joke, though now matters have become intolerably serious, too. It is an attitude entirely shared by the filmmaker: one need not look past the shots of the arrival and departure of the mobile home to understand Herzog’s utter complicity in this simultaneously funny and bitter perspective of incongruity.

            But in both films this sense of irony and absurdity is merely a prelude to a final destination in the presentation of “America” as a form of chaotic disjunction so extreme that it must be called mad. In The American Friend acting out is at the beginning only an imaginary activity. That is, Jonathan is a passive, inward-looking person whose actions do not stray from the narrow traditional path of his family and his profession. His method of dealing with anxiety is traditional, too. Overt expressions of feeling are only available in the secondary (imaginary) form of American popular music. It would never occur to him to act out as a response to his giant problems (fatal blood disease, feeling of entrapment, existential malaise). His condition is an internal (“German”) one. Only when he begins to be caught up in the acted-out “American” scenarios of Ripley and Minot does he begin to understand how action can serve as a response to psychological pain. It is a characteristic of these actions that they are gratuitous, or nearly gratuitous. Ripley’s decision to give Jonathan’s name to Minot is taken rather lightly and reveals a large gap between cause (Ripley felt himself casually insulted by Jonathan) and effect (Jonathan’s life is knocked to pieces). Similar gaps appear in the very nature of Minot’s scheme as we gradually discover it: it is not merely ill-conceived, it is impossible, ridiculous, lunatic. Its preposterousness is a fitting quality given the massive incongruity of Jonathan’s role as a gangster’s hit-man. And so is constructed a situation which finds Jonathan looking at an elaborately forged medical report in Paris, trailing a man through the Paris Métro system with a gun in his pocket and finally shooting him, receiving large sums of money in payment, plunging further down the path of irrational action in agreeing to the second murder on the train, re-encountering Ripley as an action-hero-saviour, and engaging in the final siege of the villa and drive to the sea. In all these events it is the sheer, unbelievable fact that Jonathan is doing them, that they are palpable and actual rather than—as they “ought” to be—imaginary or fictional (Hollywood-movie-like) which is the cause of radical incongruity and finally madness. As Jonathan contemplates a pistol-with-silencer in his Paris hotel room, or a steel-cable professional garotte in the swaying washroom of a train, he is overcome with an ever-renewed sense of disbelief. The sign on Bruno’s lift chair, “Is This Really Me?,” might well be Jonathan’s motto at these moments.

            In both of these scenes Jonathan “tries out” the weapons on himself, rehearsing a suicide with the gun and pulling the garotte tight around his own neck while watching himself in the mirror. Elsaesser has noted how many German New Cinema heroes seem unable to decide between internalizing the violent impulses created by their unhappiness (into self-hatred, suicide) and turning it outward (into rebellion, the desire to kill others), and he particularly points to Jonathan as a character who is suspended between suicide and murder. One is reminded also of Paul Schrader’s celebrated dictum, originally advanced in partial explanation of the hero’s murderous actions in Taxi Driver, that whereas despairing Europeans kill themselves, despairing Americans kill other people. In one of his formulations of this idea, Schrader says that Taxi Driver is:

...about a man who realizes the void in his own life, and knows that life has no meaning, but he doesn’t understand that he can kill himself, so he tries to kill the President, thinking that he will be killed in return.

American madness consists in acting out instead of internalizing. And it is a principle of this “philosophy” that there need not be any rational connection or even vague appropriateness of cause (unhappiness) to effect (specific action). The models for action are taken from popular narrative (especially movies), from the generic conventions in which all forms of action, expressly including violence, are repeatedly presented to the imagination. Such models are “naturalized” through repetition and through an absence of competing models.

            Radical lack of rational connection, an easy inclusion of violence, and an absence of any sense of unnaturalness, are what distinguish Ripley’s life, thought, and deeds. In fact Ripley is a kind of American equivalent of Jonathan: both men are in existential distress. But Ripley’s anxieties are global and rootless, and characterized by the total openness and wild freedom which follows the obliteration of boundaries and differences. Ripley’s cultural crucible (America) is one in which the very idea of “home” is incomprehensible, in which the very idea of appropriately fitting acts to events is lost. All boundaries, differences, codes of conduct, ordering institutions are effaced in the flood of homogenization, technologization, and commodification which is the American way. The impact of this environment is an alienation so profound that it cannot even identify its lost object, or any condition other than alienation. All actions are equally appropriate, for the very notion of appropriateness is meaningless. There is no longer any reason why one should do one thing rather than another, other than reasons of material expediency or transient personal whim—exactly the criteria by which Ripley acts. In this (absence of) context, Ripley’s actions become a kind of theatrical self-expression, a form of psychodrama in which his urges and instincts are the shaping influences in a process not unlike that of artistic creation. His decision to throw Jonathan into Minot’s scheme, for example, has this kind of “artist’s stroke”; so does his “dramatic” appearance on the train as Jonathan’s saviour. This property is most striking of all in the final scenes. Ripley pilots an ambulance containing his victim’s corpse onto an empty beach at dawn, its blue lights flashing, and sets it on fire, whooping and jumping in the air as the gas-tank explodes: he is innocently delighted equally with the success of his endeavour and with the effect of this tableau. Very much like Bruno at the end of Stroszek, Ripley here “Americanly” performs a series of actions full of dramatic overstatement and parodic excess. Unlike Bruno, however, Ripley has no consciousness of how “inappropriate” or “unnatural” these actions are. This perception is left to the German Jonathan, who drives off leaving Ripley on the beach and remarks to his wife, “He’ll never bring the Beatles back to Hamburg”—a metaphorical judgement on the final impossibility of this course for a German, no matter how desperate.

            Jonathan’s perception of Ripley’s madness is also the film’s, even if Wenders remains far more ambivalent and complex on the subject of the evils of Americanness than Herzog. America has replaced Europe in the world, and Ripley’s brand of wild and garish quasi-psychosis has replaced the internal broodings of Germans, for two centuries the most elaborate, concentrated and deeply-considered form of Western neurosis. German Romantic solipsism has thus been surpassed by the chaotic nihilism of American freedom of action, and freedom from meaning. And here Stroszek meets The American Friend. For Herzog’s perception of America also pivots on an identification of American inappropriateness, unnaturalness, flamboyant and tawdry theatricalism, meaninglessness and existential chaos. These qualities are heightened to an almost unbearable degree by their juxtaposition with the pure quest of Herzog’s authentic man, Bruno S. There is an utterly devastating contrast between Bruno’s childlike simplicity, his unerring instinct for correct priorities and meaningful experience, and the blasted spiritual heath of America, its absence of natural well-being, its trivialising mechanization and commodification of every human impulse, its ugliness from every standpoint. Over and again, in different parts of the world, in different periods of history, Herzog has looked at the world of human society and found it wanting. The greater its sense of confidence in its institutions and systems of thought, the further the distance between it and the nonexistent visionary land where the ultimate potentials of human experience may be realized. But in this search for a “new found land,” no place is further from the ideal than Railroad Flats, Wisconsin, none provides such a derisory and enraging picture of worthlessness and perversion. Bruno’s defeat at the hands of America is in some sense predestined: no Herzog hero is ever able to succeed; the world will never be worthy of Bruno S. This accounts, perhaps, for the absence of struggle and the quick arrival at Swiftian satire and sarcastic humour in Stroszek. At the same time the film is deeply bitter.

            Finally both Wenders and Herzog level the same charge at America: it has no sense of fitness and no consciousness of its own sins; indeed it has no awareness of the concept of transgression. In both films Germany, however oppressive or historically obsolete, is represented as having all of these things, as possessing still some connection with meaning and sanity. For the modernist Wenders, American nihilism can only be met with a gloomy sense of resignation: it is the modern condition, there is no escaping it, the old ways are as good as dead. For the almost unreconstructed Romantic Herzog, it is a provocation to rage and savage sarcasm surpassing even that which his other disappointments have occasioned.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

- Earl R. Beck. Germany Rediscovers America (Tallahassee 1968).

- Timothy Corrigan. New German Film: The Displaced Image (Austin, Texas 1983).

- Timothy Corrigan (ed.) The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (New

York 1986).

- Jan Dawson. Wim Wenders (New York 1976).

- Roger Ebert and Gene Walsh (eds.) Images at the Horizon: A Workshop with Werner Herzog (Chicago 1979).

- Thomas Elsaesser. New German Cinema: A History (New Brunswick NJ: 1989).

- Robert Fischer and Joe Hembus. Der Neue Deutsche Film 1960-1980, Munich 1981.

- Kathe Geist. The Cinema of Wim Wenders, 1967 to 1977 (dissertation, University of

Michigan 1981).

- Kathe Geist. The Cinema of Wim Wenders: From Paris, France to Paris, Texas (Ann Arbor 1988).

- John Sandford. The New German Cinema (London 1981).

- Wim Wenders. Emotion Pictures: Reflections on the Cinema (trans. Shaun Whiteside, London 1989)

ARTICLES

- Gideon Bachmann. “Man on the Volcano: Portrait of Werner Herzog,” Film Quarterly,

Vol. 31 No. 3, Fall 1977.

- Carlos Clarens. “King of the Road,” Film Comment, Vol. 13, No. 5 (September-October 1977).

- Timothy Corrigan. “The Realist Gesture in the Films of Wim Wenders: Hollywood and the New German Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Spring 1980.

- Timothy Corrigan. “Cinematic Snuff: German Friends and American Murders,” Cinema Journal, Winter 1985.

- Michael Covino. “Wim Wenders: A Worldwide Homesickness,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 31

 No. 2 (Winter 1977-78).

- Jan Dawson. “Filming Highsmith,” Sight and Sound, Winter 1980-81.

- Jan Dawson. “Herzog’s Magic Mountain,” Sight and Sound, Winter 1980-81.

- Tom Farrell. “Nick Ray’s German Friend, Wim Wenders,” Wide Angle, Vol. 5 No. 4 (1983).

- Michael Goodwin. “Herzog The God of Wrath,” American Film, June 1982.

- Karen Jaehne. “The American Fiend,” Sight and Sound, Spring 1978.

- Marsha Kinder. “The American Friend,” Film Quarterly, Winter 1978-79.

- Eric Rentschler. “American Friends and New German Cinema,” New German Critique,

            Nos. 24-25 (Fall-Winter 1981-82).

- Eric Rentschler. “How American Is It: The U.S. as Image and Imaginary in German

            Film,” Persistence of Vision, Fall, 1985.

- Kaja Silverman. “Kaspar Hauser’s ‘Terrible Fall’ into Narrative,” New German Critique,

            Nos. 24-25 (Winter/Fall 1981-2).