HESTER BAER

University of Oklahoma

Das Boot and the German Cinema of Neoliberalism1

I. The Crystal-Image of Das Boot In the second volume of his magisterial account of film history (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image), Gilles Deleuze suggests that World War II brought about a break in narrative cinema, such that time is no longer subordinated to movement, but rather movement to time (Time-Image xi). According to Deleuze, postwar cinema makes images of time directly visible through so-called chronosigns, among them the crystal-image, a figure bearing two distinct sides, by nature double. Deleuze conceives of the crystal-image via a series of pairs (actual/virtual; real/imaginary; present/ past; limpid/opaque; seed/environment), emphasizing that this crystalimage, whose emblem is the mirror, is the site of a reversal or exchange. Among the crystal-images discussed by Deleuze is the ship:
Seed impregnating the sea, the ship is caught between its two crystalline faces: a limpid face which is the ship from above, where everything should be visible, according to order; an opaque face which is the ship from below, and which occurs underwater, the black face of the engine-room stokers. But it is as if the limpid face actualizes a kind of theatre or dramaturgy which takes hold of the passengers themselves, whilst the virtual passes into the opaque face, and is actualized in turn in the settling of scores between engineers, in the demonic perversity of a boatswain, in a captains obsession, in the secret revenge of insurgent blacks. This is the circuit of two virtual images which continually become actual in relation to each other, and are continually revived. (Time-Image 7273)

As a cinematic time-image, the ship is characterized by the quality of splitting, a power which is part of the ship (Time-Image 72), and which is figured by the ships double presence above and below the water, by its simultaneous visibility and invisibility. Hinging on this double or split quality of the ship, its cinematic representation initiates a circuit of exchange between the visible and the invisible, the performative and the hidden, suggesting the possibility of a simultaneity of presents in different worlds (Time-Image 103).

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A film constructed from its opening sequence onward around the central tropes of invisibility and performativity (a making visible), the international blockbuster, Das Boot (1981), reflects the doubling and splitting analyzed by Deleuze. On a formal and diegetic level, Das Boot made a virtue of the financial limitations of German film production in the 1980s, ingeniously employing a shipthe submarine U-96to mobilize the gaze of the spectator not through spectacular special effects, but by transforming the (normally invisible) circumscribed internal spaces and technological dynamics of the submarine into a cinematic spectacle. An ideologically promiscuous film, Das Boot marshals viewer identifications in order to achieve sympathy for its protagonists, German soldiers and Nazis, thereby offering an affirmative vision of World War II and contributing to the normalization of history.2 Producer Gnter Rohrbach notes that in Das Boot auer einer Gesangsnummer - nicht eine einzige Frau vorkommt! (216). Yet in appealing to both male and female spectators, the film mobilizes a range of gender performances and identifications, which foreground its double-edged politics. Pivoting on the crystal-image of the ship, Das Boot can ultimately be viewed as the site of virtual exchange between one form of German cinema (the art cinema or Autorenkino of the 1970s) and a new form of dominant, commercial cinema with international market value. A watershed of affirmative culture, Das Boot became both a lever for and a symptom of the neoliberal turn that took hold of German film culture (along with the economy, politics, and society) in the early 1980s, laying the groundwork for a new producers cinema that aimed to make a virtue of the tyranny of the market. Emphasizing the idea that the market can and should serve as the guiding principle of all human activity, neoliberalism seeks to create a new world order in which corporate profits are enhanced at the expense of socioeconomic policies that characterized the welfare state. Some of the effects of this project include a focus on privatization and the collapse of distinctions between public and private, driven by new technologies; an emphasis on personal responsibility and self-fashioning; the demise of collective social movements; the end of policies seeking to redistribute wealth and resources downward in favor of measures that redirect wealth upward; and, as a result, the consolidation of wealth in the hands of the few.3 Lisa Duggan has suggested that the central cultural project of neoliberalism is to transform cultures across the globe into market cultures (12). By offering a new model of German cinema as popular cinema with transnational appeal, producer-driven genre films like Das Boot supplanted German art cinema by masquerading as art films in the context of their international distribution, while also promoting conservative aesthetic and political agendas at home and abroad. To be sure, popular cinema has always been the predominant tradition within the history of German film. While different iterations of art cinema have achieved varying degrees of domestic and/or international success during key periods, popular genres always held the favor of cinema audiences,

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comprised the largest market share, and made up the dominant portion of Germanys film output, as scholars have documented.4 To the extent that art cinema existed historically, then, it typically occupied a niche market alongside entertainment cinema. However, I contend that a fundamentally new form of popular, commercial filmmaking came into being in Germany starting around 1980, inaugurated in no small measure by Das Boot. Characterized by its origins in and responses to the New Economy and the social, political, economic, and ideological changes occasioned by neoliberalism, this new commercial entertainment cinema is characterized by formal-aesthetic hybridity; cannibalization of the aesthetics and politics of art cinema in the service of consumer-driven market culture; and a fundamentally affirmative stance. Thus, rather than countering the difference and oppositional qualities represented by art cinema, the cinema of neoliberalism co-opts these elements, thereby making art cinema impossible, unnecessary, and obsolete. John Davidson has shown how the New German Cinema emerged via the efforts of politicians, filmmakers, and (largely foreign) audiences in the postwar period to achieve the renewal of an internationally accepted (West) German cinema. Although these groups were by no means unified, and indeed they pursued disparate goals, nonetheless their efforts ultimately created
space in the market for a cultural product that [would] serve two distinct functions: first, this new cinema should be a site of cultural resistance, both a sanctioned and contained space, yet one in which serious aesthetic and political opposition to dominant policy could be expressed and processed; second, this new cinema should act as a kind of filmic Olympic team, winning international recognition for individual filmmakers and the nation. The popular and critical international reception that began in the early 1970s, particularly in the United States, shows that these functions indeed [became] embodied in NGC. (3)

The cinema of neoliberalism preserves the latter function of German cinema while dispensing wholesale with the former, instead characterizing itself via an illusion of political neutrality for which it appropriates the aesthetic legacies of the past.5 Das Boot floats on multiple planes, enacting multiple histories, always appearing to be one thing while simultaneously embodying another. The diegetic, formal, and ideological strategies of producer Rohrbach, director Wolfgang Petersen, and distributor Bernd Eichinger facilitated the unparalleled domestic and international success of Das Boot and of its filmmakers, who, largely on this one films merits, went on to pursue international careers. Rohrbach, who became CEO of Bavaria Studios in 1979, quickly made his name there with his first two big-budget productions, Fassbinders 14-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) and Das Boot. Rohrbach later became a pioneer of the German heritage film, producing international prestige movies like Stalingrad (1992), Aime und Jaguar (1998), and Anonyma eine Frau in Ber-

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lin (2008). Petersen is sometimes referred to as Germanys greatest cinematic exporthe went on to become the director of a series of immensely successful blockbusters that reinvent the formula of Das Boot within the confines of Hollywood spaces, among them Air Force One (1997), A Perfect Storm (2000), and Poseidon (2006). Eichinger, who in 1979 became the CEO of the production and distribution company Neue Constantin, invested DM 2 million in Das Boot in exchange for its German distribution rights. His canny investment was an early step in his long career (until his untimely death in 2011) as the most successful contemporary German film producer, and one who had played a crucial role in the transformation of German cinema into a commercially successful enterprise since the 1980s.6 Georg Seelen has referred to Eichinger as a prophet of neoliberalism: Durch ihn kam ein neuer Ton in die kulturpolitische Szene, die sich nach Krften bemhte, ihre Erbschaft aus den siebziger Jahren zwangslos ber Bord gehen zu lassen. Eichinger das hiess ein System der Abhngigkeiten und der Konkurrenzen an die Stelle der zugegeben naiven Vorstellungen von Solidaritt. For Eichinger, developing a formula for success meant tailoring his films to the demands of international audiences, while simultaneously creating new expectations at home for a highly commercialized cinema that could compete with the best global film industries have to offer. As Tim Bergfelder points out, in Germany the multimedia diversifications that have occurred since the 1970s have been motivated by explicitly global or transnational economic ambitions, and sustained by international modes of reception (International 246). Nonetheless, even within a globalizing media industry, audience preferences still tend to differ from country to country (245). Indeed, I argue that the success of Das Boot derived not least from the filmmakers nuanced appeal to diverse audience segments, as well as their deft navigation of changing technologies for film exhibition and reception.7 My analysis of Das Boot thus responds to Bergfelders call for transnational film studies to focus precisely on the strategies and practices by which filmic texts travel and become transformed according to the specific requirements of different cultural contexts and audiences (National 326). In 1981, Das Boot was the most expensive German film ever made; now celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, it remains the most commercially successful foreign-language film ever released in North America.8 Yet, as Brad Prager has pointed out, the lack of close readings of this enormously successful film underscores the need for protracted discussions of popular film (236). A blind spot within German film studies, the example of Das Boot suggests that the economic, political, and cultural forces of globalization are inexorably linked and that cultural formations have played a crucial role in the process of neoliberalization in Germany. In what follows, I read Das Boot through the lens of Deleuzes film theory. As critics have noted, Deleuze offers a teleological version of film history that

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relies on a canon of auteur films defined by Parisian cineastes, thus appearing to exclude industrial entertainment films from further consideration within the paradigm of Cinema. What is more, Deleuze generally turns a blind eye to political and social concerns when writing about film history, even as he argues for the critical potential of modern cinemas aesthetic practices. However, by focusing on several significant ways in which Deleuzes analysis connects to Das Boot, I hope to demonstrate how Cinema can open up productive standpoints for the analysis of popular, commercial filmmaking. By the same token, my analysis of Das Boot suggests that the disappearance of politics in Deleuzes Cinema is symptomatic of the era of neoliberalism, whose hegemonic mode of discourse works precisely to erase politics from view. The first connection I make is historical: Deleuze wrote Cinema in the early 1980s, the same period that saw the rise of neoliberalism and globalization, and the worldwide success of Das Boot. As he suggests in the concluding chapter of the second volume, in Cinema Deleuze was thinking throughand writing againstthe implications of the demise of art cinema, the so-called death of cinema, along with the rise of television and digital culture, developments that must be understood in relation to global capitalism. Yet in the way it co-opts elements of art cinema, Das Boot suggests some unforeseen consequences of Deleuzes characterization of film history. As Fredric Jameson has written of Deleuze in a different context, his writing is prophetic of tendencies latent within capitalism itself (711), inasmuch as the elements he identifies as critical forces of art cinema are ultimately appropriated for the cinema of neoliberalism. Second, Deleuzes account of cinema, although almost wholly lacking in social-historical context, nonetheless looks back to World War II as the crucial event in the history of film, one that initiated a much more important change [] than the one which happened with the talkie (Movement-Image ixx). As Deleuze writes in the preface to the English edition of The Time-Image, The fact is that, in Europe, the post-war period has greatly increased the situations which we no longer know how to react to, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe (xi). As a result, the action-image that characterized classical cinema is replaced in modern cinema with pure optical-sound situations: This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent (Time-Image 2). While Deleuze points out that most commercial films throughout the postwar period continue to rely on the action-image along with a narrative structured by a conflict, or duel, and its resolution, [t]he soul of cinema demands increasing thought, even if thought begins by undoing the system of actions, perceptions, and affections on which the cinema had fed up to that point (Movement-Image 206). A film about World War II that very specifically thematizes the crisis of action and changing modes of perception, especially regarding time, that were initiated by the war, Das Boot can be productively understood as a cinema of the seer (and the listener) rather than the agent,

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even while it cannibalizes many of the laudatory elements of the New German Cinema, which Deleuze holds up as the paradigm of the time-image.9 Finally, the connections between Deleuzes account of cinema and Das Boot also come into focus through the films gender politics. Jaimey Fisher has suggested a model for linking Deleuzes film theory to gender in the context of German cinema, arguing that a gendered social crisis contributed to the emergence of what Deleuze calls the time-image (Ruins 27). The postwar period in Europe was characterized by a crisis of masculine agency and a disruption of conventional family and gender roles, nowhere more so than in Germany (see Baer). As Fisher demonstrates, this crisis of hegemonic masculinity closely parallels the collapse of classical cinema traced by Deleuze: postwar films depict the breakdown of the action-image via the failure of traditional masculinity (Deleuze 56). Writing about German rubble films, Fisher points out that even though these films strive toward a reconstruction of the action-image along with a rehabilitation of male subjectivity, they often end up privileging the male subject who has embraced lack over the male subject who simply disavows it, that is, over the male subject who would normally play the hero in the conventional action-image (Deleuze 56). Similarly, Das Boot strives to reassert masculine agencyat another moment of historical transition for both cinema and genderbut the film ends up privileging male lack once again. In this sense, Das Boot participates in a long postwar trajectory of popular German genre films that foreground destabilized gender roles. Featuring decentered male protagonists who are noteworthy for their immersion in the pure optical-sound situations of the submarine, and who turn out to be heroes although, for the most part, they lack agency, Das Boot portrays the loss of faith in patriarchy, ideological fatigue, and general male defeat that emblematize the cinema of the time-image. Paradoxically, however, as we shall see, Das Boot recuperates precisely these elements of Deleuzes modern cinema to promote a normalized vision of German history and a market-driven form of globally popular cinema. II. Time Is Money It is no accident that, only a few pages after describing the crystal-image of the ship, Deleuze turns to a discussion of money as a central facet of filmmaking for the very first time in the two volumes of Cinema:
The cinema as art itself lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot, an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money: what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money. (Time-Image 77)

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Equating the double-sided crystal-image with time (the transparent side) and money (the opaque side), Deleuze emphasizes here that in the postwar period the cinema confronts its most internal presupposition, money, and the movement-image makes way for the time-image in one and the same operation (TimeImage 78). Das Boot does not bear the same diegetic traces of this confrontation with money as the metacinematic films Deleuze discusses.10 Nonetheless, its narrative and aesthetic structures are thoroughly overdetermined by the producers and distributors efforts to create a financially viable German film, or to put it in different terms, to transform the German film into a privately financed market commodity. Produced during the three-year period (197880) that David Harvey has termed a revolutionary turning-point in the worlds social and economic history (1), Das Boot is strongly implicated in Germanys neoliberal turn. Pierre Bourdieu has emphasized, among the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neo-liberal utopia, the growth in income disparity and the rise in poverty and suffering in Western democracies, as well as the progressive disappearance of the autonomous worlds of cultural production, cinema, publishing, etc., and therefore, ultimately, of cultural products themselves, because of the growing intrusion of commercial considerations (102). This erosion of autonomous spheres of cultural production helps to explain the utter transformation of the German film landscape over the past thirty years, including production and reception contexts, aesthetic and formal language, stories and genres, and ideological affinities and political agendas. A key event in this transformation was Interior Minister Friedrich Zimmermanns move, beginning in 1983, to dismantle the federal subvention schemes that had fostered New German Cinema and to implement market-driven cultural policies emphasizing commercial appeal and profitability. Other important factors include the demise of DEFA; the consolidation of media conglomerates including Bertelsmann and Kirch; and the increasing reliance on international co-production schemes, public and commercial television support, and/or regional media boards to secure film financing and maximize revenue.11 Within this context, the most successful German films have been those which, following the strategies of Eichinger and Neue Constantin, do double duty as blockbusters in the domestic market and art cinema hits abroad. Two of the most influential accounts of the films produced by these changes are Eric Rentschlers formulation the cinema of consensus, which provides a label for the affirmative vision of post-Autorenkino films, and Randall Halles more recent investigation of German Film After Germany, which posits transnationalism as the affiliative and ideational network that characterizes culture in the era of globalization. While Rentschler and Halle provide useful frameworks, neither wholly accounts for the political agendas of German films from the 1980s onward. Rentschler emphasizes generational

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discourses to explain German cinemas shift toward commercialism, surface aesthetics, and affirmation. While Halle acknowledges that the field of film production is increasingly defined by global capitalism, he is skeptical of scholarly critiques of both globalization and recent cinema; instead he remains optimistic about the vibrancy of cultural production that globalization and transnationalism bring forward (15), arguing, for example, that transnational films evidence a heightened awareness of and accept a responsibility towards cultural difference (86). I am more pessimistic about the political investments of recent German cinema, which the context of neoliberalism (as opposed to the more vague transnationalism) helps bring into focus, and I am particularly wary of a trajectory of filmmaking that emerged in the wake, as it were, of the popular success of Das Boot. Titles like Mnner (1985), Stalingrad (1992), Der bewegte Mann (1994), Aime und Jaguar (1998), Lola rennt (1998), Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), Der Untergang (2004), and Das Leben der Anderen (2006) capitalized on Germanys reputation as a producer of quality films while also scoring at the box office worldwide. The agendas of neoliberalism are supported by these producerdriven films, which not only transform national culture into market culture, but also co-opt the aesthetics and the politics of art cinema, including feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, gay rights, and class-based struggle. In their representation of German history and society, they exemplify a rhetorical commitment to diversity, and to a narrow, formal, nonredistributive form of equality politics for the new millennium (Duggan 44). These highly profitable films helped shift discourses about and expectations of German cinema, which was now no longer seen as dark, incomprehensible, or economically moribund. As Halles discussion of transnational ensembles suggests, they did this in part via new formal and aesthetic effects, which shifting production conditions helped to bring about. These include a renewed emphasis on stars; stylistic developments unusual for German cinema, such as shooting coverage12; and visual and narrative innovations designed to increase global competitiveness despite factors like low budgets and the unfamiliarity of the German language to foreign audiencesall strategies pioneered by Das Boot. Citing Marcel LHerbier, Deleuze writes: space and time becoming more and more expensive in the modern world, art had to make itself international industrial art, that is, cinema, in order to buy space and time as imaginary warrants of human capital (Time-Image 78). Deleuze indicates a direct link here among market forces, internationalization, and the shift from the movement-image to the time-image. A central facet of the time-image, embodied for Deleuze by the crystal, is the function of splitting: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at each moment as present and past [,] it has to split the present into two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched towards the future while the other falls

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into the past (Time-Image 81). This splitting, or forking of time entails paradoxical notions such as contingent futures, incompossible presents, and not-necessarily true pasts that lead to a fundamental questioning of truth and ultimately give rise to a new form of narrative: narration ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying (Time-Image 131). In contrast to conventional fictions, which posit their own veracity and conform to common-sense conceptions of space and time, falsifying narratives subvert truth by abandoning those conceptions. Certainty about past, present, and future, and how these moments in time exist in relation to each other, is cast into doubt. In the case of cinema, this doubt is created, for example, through a deliberate confounding of continuity editing; rather than exhibiting clear connections across space and time, editing choices link noncontiguous spaces and unrelated times, causing viewers to question space-time relationships, to deliberate upon the constructed nature of truth, and to consider the role of their own subjective perception. However, as Claire Colebrook argues, The importance of Deleuzes definition of modern cinema does not lie in the standard post-modern line that everything is unreal and that we are not sure what reality is any more. Cinema of the time-image, for Deleuze, is a transcendental analysis of the real; it explores all those virtual planes and differences from which actual worlds are possible (160). Ultimately, this analysis of the real emerges from the transformative power of the false, which is seen in art cinema: Only the creative artist takes the power of the false to a degree which is realized, not in form, but in transformation. [] What the artist is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created (Time-Image 146). The productive problematization of truth in falsifying narratives, which allow cinema to represent both the labyrinthine quality of time and the subjective nature of perception, are exemplified for Deleuze by the classics of the European New Wave, particularly Alain Resnaiss Last Year at Marienbad (1961), but also in the New German Cinema. For Deleuze, falsifying narration is a primary facet of modern art cinemas formal-aesthetic structure, but also of its political valence. As D. N. Rodowick explains, Chronosigns and falsifying narration augment our powers of life by affirming change and creating images of thought that put us in direct contact with change and becoming as fundamental forces (137). At its best, cinema will literally make us see and think differently, bearing transformative potential for the individual viewer, for the film form, and for the system of late capitalism. Yet, beginning with Das Boot, a kind of falsifying narration also comes to dominate the German cinema of neoliberalism, which co-opts this critical force. This tendency reaches its apex with the global hit Lola rennt, a film that encapsulates the time-image by focusing on the splitting of time into simultaneous presents, all of which notably coalesce around money. Falsifying narra-

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tion also characterizes many of the Ostalgie films of the 2000s, most paradigmatically Good Bye, Lenin!, which relies on the device of the not necessarily true past in rethinking GDR history in consumerist terms. The notion of falsifying narration, finally, may be productively employed in connection with the German heritage film which, as Lutz Koepnick has suggested, reframes the Holocaust to enact forms of German-Jewish solidarity that surpass public history (Reframing 48). Koepnick adapts the notion of the heritage film from British film theorists, who coined the term to describe a new, loosely affiliated group of historical costume dramas, mostly based on literary texts, which first arose in the Thatcher era (see Higson; Vincendeau). Reflecting a postmodern awareness of their own constructedness and an emphasis on setting, heritage films are a primary genre of the cinema of neoliberalism. Koepnick argues that, beginning in the late 1990s, this subset of popular, commercial films looked to the past to reclaim sites of multicultural consensus from a history of intolerance and persecution, reconstructing an affirmative vision of German history that flies in the face of the Nazi past and elicits consensus for the Berlin Republic (Reframing 57). My reading of Das Boot resonates with Koepnicks discussion of heritage films on many levels; although the film does not reimagine German-Jewish relationships, it does present Nazi political elites as the enemies of Germanys true national community (represented by the common soldiers on board the submarine), and it also mobilizes popular culture and tradition, especially music, as sites of authenticity, identification, and common ground. However, Koepnick appears to downplay the ideological impetus of the heritage film genre, and to set its (national-)political agenda in opposition to its status as an avatar of transnational filmmaking and a symptomatic and theoretically challenging expression of postmodern globalization (Amerika 194). At the same time, his reading of multiculturalism suggests that the heritage film reconstructs a pluralistic vision of the German past that reflects, at least to some extent, more progressive understandings of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality in the present. Yet if we read the heritage film as part of the German cinema of neoliberalism, it is clear that its economic, political, and cultural strategies work in concert to achieve an agenda of normalization, which Stuart Taberner has described as a means of safeguarding German business interests, while fully integrating the FRG into the international economic, political and diplomatic order (8). In brief, the heritage film reimagines Germany as a multicultural society comprised of individual consumers, whose identities are defined by self-fashioning, and whose life trajectories are typically unmoored from social structures such as family, employment, or religion, to be redefined via discourses of personal freedom and responsibility. In the heritage films, we witness individual Jews, who notably do not belong to a collective, but are typically isolated from larger communities;

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their isolation ends only when they enter into new relationships, most often love relationships with non-Jews, which exemplify their individual freedom to choose. By reimagining Germany as a diverse and at heart tolerant society predicated on individual freedoms enacted even in spite of Nazi strictures and thus by marketing differencethese kinds of narratives work to manufacture consent for neoliberal reforms, which actively dismantle the social welfare state under the sign of economic globalization, thereby putting an end to the sociopolitical model that enabled multicultural Germany to emerge in the first place. In Das Boot, we find a film that deploys notions of individual freedom and personal responsibility so compellingly (even in the context of a wartime submarine staffed by young men shipped out to die by the Nazis) that, as James Clarke writes, You dont feel as if you are watching a film about the enemy (11213). This pioneering form of falsifying narration, which enables a future trajectory of blockbusters to emerge, offers an early example of what Koepnick calls heritage identity, an objectified, eminently consumable form of self-representation that appeals to global tourists and local inhabitants alike by placing the nations subjects outside of their own culture, asking them to look at their own lives like tourists who typify different cultures as sites of radicaland, hence, pleasurablealterity (Amerika 199). III. Das Boot and Transnationalism Das Boot tells the story of the doomed submarine U-96, which sets sail from the French harbor of La Rochelle, travels around the Atlantic, stops in Spanish waters to take on supplies, then proceeds through the Strait of Gibraltar, sinks many leagues under the sea, and finally moors ever so briefly in Italy before it is destroyed in an Allied air raid that maims or kills the boats entire crew, including its beloved captain, known as Herr Kaleun (Jrgen Prochnow). The only unharmed survivor of the bombing is Leutnant Werner (Herbert Grnemeyer), the journalist who has been assigned to the submarine as a war correspondent, and who is thus notably the only outsider on board the ship. While on the surface, Das Boot appears to embody a traditionally suspenseful, action-driven plot, in fact we see very little action, and to the extent that the crew does engage in duels, these do not bring about conventional resolutions. While the submarine is ostensibly deployed on a combat mission, its journey around the Atlantic seems largely aimless, as the crews hopes for engagement, which are deferred again and again, rely on flawed information or chance encounters. In place of action, the film offers pure optical-sound situations in the form of lengthy sequences in which Herr Kaleun and his crew search the seas for British convoys, using a variety of audiovisual prosthetics, including sonar, headphones, radar screens, gauges, periscope, and binoculars.

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We hardly see the men act; the films suspense is constituted for the viewer not through spectacular battle scenes (of which the film exhibits only a very few), but rather through the process of listening and viewing, making the inaudible audible and the invisible visible. The creation of optical-sound situations is accentuated on a formal level by the use of handheld cameras; unique lighting schemes (with red, blue, and green filters); and audio tracks that foreground the ping of the submarines sonar, the constant ticking of clocks, the clicks of gauges measuring the submarines depth and weight, and the gurgling sounds of the ocean. In an early sequence, the U-96 chases a British naval convoy that has been traced by another German submarine. As the sequence unfolds over many minutes, the crew of the U-96 uses every mechanism in their power to track the invisible convoy; as they race over the ocean in a raging storm, Herr Kaleun curses the weather as he tries in vain to spot a ship with binoculars and telescopes. Finally, he orders the submarine to dive. Leutnant Werner, who is still learning the ropes of naval life, asks why the boat is submerging; the second officer (Martin Semmelrogge) explains to him, Bei dem Wetter kann man hier unten mehr hren als man oben sehen kann. With Werner, the films viewers experience the eerie underwater quiet that replaces the roar of the stormy seas above; with the radioman Hinrich (Heinz Hoenig), we strain to hear the mechanical sounds of engines or underwater bombs that might indicate the proximity of a naval fleet. Again and again, the films editing emphasizes the concentrated gazes of the crew as they look or listen, intercut with extreme close-ups of measuring gauges, a stopwatch, or the view through a periscope. Despite the lack of action, it is no accident that German producers seeking a new strategy for creating a market-driven cinema turned first to the genre of the war film, whose ideology dovetails with the ideology of neoliberalism. As Halle points out, the war genre, the genre once singularly most important for the public production and consumption of national narratives and symbols, proves to have a great deal of resiliency for the transnational aesthetic (98). Transnationalism is inherent to the war film genre, which is typically a site of multilingualism and cultural contact, and which often serves as a mouthpiece for humanitarianism and world peace, while at the same time paradoxically mobilizing the violent pleasures and antagonistic mentalities of the battlefield. The paradigmatic film here is Lewis Milestones Hollywood adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), prior to Das Boot the premiere film to humanize the German soldier for international audiences, and the first film to win an Oscar for best picture. Central to the affirmative vision of Das Boot are several important conventions of the mainstream war film: war is conceived of as an end in itself, utterly divorced from its historical or ideological context, which helps foster identification with the plight of the soldiers. The soldiers, in turn, are portrayed as individuals, who are vested with personal responsibility to ensure their own

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survival and that of their compatriots, a mission that is again cut off from any larger ideological struggle or sense of cause-and-effect. In the case of Das Boot, the sailors in the submarine are quite literally separated off spatially from the larger battlefield for the majority of the film, which aids the films historical amnesia, since the markers of warand not least, of Nazi ideology, nationalism, and anti-Semitismwould be much more obvious above ground. Already from the title sequence, which tells us that 40,000 German sailors served on U-boats in World War II/ 30,000 never returned, the crew of Das Boot are cast as underdogs, indeed as victims. These men are not portrayed as German soldiers or Nazis; first and foremost, they are individuals. They dont wear uniforms but rather fashionable sweaters, and we hardly see a swastika for the entire 150 minutes (209 for the Directors Cut) of the film. In fact, the one soldier who does wear a uniform and who overtly performs Nazism is the first officer (Hubertus Bengsch), an ethnic German who grew up in Mexico and volunteered for naval service, and who is taunted, even castigated for his devotion to Nazi ideology by all the men on board, not least the captain. Das Boot purports to create a space of differencethe films gripping plot revolves around the men on board overcoming personality conflicts to work together, and one of the films central appeals is the way the camera dwells on and relishes different physiognomiesall the while falsifying the fact that the mission of the German navy during World War II not only presumes a fundamental sameness among the sailors, but also relies on radical exclusions. The brilliant innovation here is the use of a small, separate space, which demarcates very narrow thresholds of visibility. The submarine never comes near to German soil; the only sense that the sailors are Germans comes from a few cherished photos of the Heimat that they display in sentimental moments. Since the film was shot silent and dubbed after the fact, and since it is regularly watched in international release in dubbed versions, not even the German language plays an integral role in establishing national culture in the film. This is heightened by the fact that the captain inspires the affection and loyalty of his crew by regularly turning off droning Nazi radio speeches to play popular phonograph records, many of them non-German, such as Its a Long Way to Tipperary. In terms of language, story, and form, this is literally a deterritorialized German cinema, a strategy integral to the twofold goal of Das Boot to promote agendas of normalization and globalization as part and parcel of an internationally profitable, market-driven cinema. With the dual leads of Prochnow and Grnemeyer, the film not only decenters its male protagonist, but in fact splits him in two, creating a crystal-image of masculinity. This strategy is significant for both the inverted specular relations and for the historical agenda of Das Boot. As a film without women and one much concerned with masculinity in crisis, Das Boot makes its male characters both objects of the gaze and voyeurs, who look rather than

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transact, a fact which was also crucial to the films appeal to (female) viewers. By emphasizing Leutnant Werners witnessing gaze, the film foregrounds Herr Kaleuns specularity, his status as an object to be looked at, thereby dispersing his authority. At the same time, Das Boot relies on the heartthrob appeal of the pop singer Grnemeyer, who plays Leutnant Werner as an exemplar of vulnerable, modern masculinity. While making the perilous journey through the Strait of Gibraltar, the U-96 sustains damage in a raid and sinks to the bottom of the Mediterranean, where it springs a number of leaks. Once again, the action is deferred through recourse to a cinema of the seer and listener. A group of officers collects around the depth gauge as the boat sinks, gritting their teeth and sweating. Herr Kaleun calls out orders to the crew, but all his attempts to raise the sinking ship are in vain. A sailor has been injured in the blast; he writhes in pain, bleeding and suffocating, a metonym for the damaged, airless boat. As the boat sinks into the ocean, the camera zooms in on the depth gauge, whose needle slowly inches into the red. The men begin to groan and shake; some exhibit wide-eyed resignation. Leutnant Werner, still a submarine novice, looks horrified. The chief engineer (Klaus Wennemann) calls out, Das Boot ist nicht zu halten!, and we watch the needle inch downward, 230 hindurch 240 Meter 250 260 Meter! The needle passes by the highest number on the gauge, pointing perilously downward, and we hear glass shatter and plugs pop, before the U-96 crashes to a standstill on the ocean floor, 280 meters below the surface. Throughout this sequence, which foregrounds pure optical-sound situations, the fluid shot/reverse-shot editing emphasizes the mens emotional reaction to the compression of time and space in the grounded submarine, as the water encroaches and available oxygen diminishes. Exhibiting men sweating, shaking, and weeping, the scene places traumatized masculinity on display. While the films narrative logic relies on the crew successfully fixing the boat, it is notable that, for the most part, we dont witness the action that leads to this resolution. Instead, we see Werner as he watches the clock (an omnipresent pocket watch that dangles into the frame); having fallen asleep, he awakes with a start to look at the clock again. Believing themselves about to die, Werner and Herr Kaleun weep together, only to see the chief engineer emerge from the nether regions of the boat to announce meekly that he has thoroughly repaired it. Mal herhren, shouts Herr Kaleun, Wir werden jetzt anblasen und sehen, ob wir vom Hintern hochkommen! The boat does in fact rise to the surface one last time, but for Herr Kaleun, death is only deferred. As Prager has argued, the past is given meaning and rendered comprehensible for its broad audience through the depiction of the death of the submarine captain [] whose death stands in for the fate of the fighting nation (247). By killing off its hero, a death eye-witnessedand subsequently born witness to in proseby Leutnant Werner (a stand-in for Lothar-Gnther Buchheim, the

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author of the book on which the film was based), Das Boot ultimately recoups male defeat, so that privileging male lack becomes an affirmative strategy in representing World War II and the Nazi war machine. Das Boot corresponds closely to Deleuzes cinema of the time-image, which it co-opts for commercial entertainment. Not only are the dispersive situation, chance as guiding principle, and the form of the aimless and labyrinthine voyage used to create a hybrid narrative which capitalized on globally appealing elements of modern cinema, but Das Boot also operates with plot and clichs in ways characteristic of the time-image. Rodowick summarizes Deleuzes discussion of the consciousness of clichs that preceded the emergence of the time-image: without the context of a global ideology and a belief in real connections, the action-image is replaced by clichs. The double sense of the French use of the term should be maintained: both tired images and snapshots of random impressions (76). Building on modern art cinemas conscious use of clichs, the cinema of neoliberalism once more repackages clichsalong with audiovisual attractions, generic plot forms, and historical signifiersfor pleasurable consumption. As Koepnick points out, this double-edged gesture works along multiple registers in the heritage film to create market appeal at home and abroad, a point echoed by Halle in his reading of Petersens films. Halle suggests that successful transnational films employ national-cultural clichs to signify a double valence that is crucial to their appeal. For example, Petersens Hollywood blockbuster Air Force One, in many ways a direct adaptation of Das Boot, appealed to U.S. audiences with highly patriotic images, while audiences abroad often interpreted these as satire (41). Writing about the transnational aesthetic, Halle concludes, Globalization establishes an expanded trade in images and in doing so opens up the possibilities of representation, enriches the articulations of visual language, and develops a more sophisticated spectator (88). For Halle, the emphasis on profit and self-sustainability in the film industry produces a filmmaking practice that foregrounds entertainment while also heightening awareness of cultural difference and revealing openness to experimentation with film form. Yet both the political affinities of Petersens films and the double-edged play with clichs upon which they rely appear problematic for Halles argument that just as the transnational aesthetic accelerates the global trade in images, it expands the possibilities of cultural production (88). Petersens use of national-cultural clichs in Air Force One simply inverted the strategies he used in Das Boot, which capitalized on the worldwide interest in Nazism and World War II, achieving a normalized representation of the enemy as heroic soldiers and eliciting sympathy for Germans as war victims through its representation of the sailors valor even in the face of their death mission. The films ending, in which these war heroes are then killed in an Allied air raid, underscores its purportedly antiwar message. Emphasizing

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the crystalline quality of the films representational strategies, Prager suggests that in this regard Das Boot shares much in common with popular Vietnam war films from the late 1970s and 1980s, films that fostered a collective denial of guilt via empathy with individual soldiers. IV. Gender and Sexuality in Das Boot A central site around which the neoliberal affinities of recent German films condense is their representation of gender and sexuality. Feminist media scholar Rosalind Gill has argued that citizens in the West today inhabit a postfeminist media culture in which women rather than men are constituted as ideal neoliberal subjects (249), a fact that shapes modes of address in the cinema of neoliberalism. But how does a film without women appeal to female viewers? As we have seen, Das Boot inverts conventional modes of specularity; by dispersing masculine agency and privileging male lack, it opens up new viewing positions, mobilizing voyeurism and desire on the part of female spectators. Fisher points out that at historical moments of crisis traumatized masculinity can expose male lack, allowing different masculinities to emerge (Deleuze 58). Das Boot portrays such an historical moment (World War II), while also occupying another at its moment of production, when the gains of second-wave feminism had challenged popular cinemas representation of gender. From the outset of the film, Das Boot is constructed around the central tropes of invisibility and performativity, a crystal-image that comes together in its representation of gender and sexuality. Even before the credit sequence, the film begins with an auditory signal, the ping of the sonar system employed by British destroyers targeting the U-96. This ping reemerges during scenes of heightened suspense throughout the film, encoding the submarines invisibility as it dodges British depth charges. After the credits, the films first shot presents a green screena blank slate reminiscent of studio screens used to produce special effectsbut when we look closely, a very phallic submarine slowly emerges from underwater obscurity. By contrast, the first aboveground sequence immediately establishes a visible performance of masculinity, when we view a group of sailors who stand by the roadside, open their trousers, and, genitals in hand, piss in unison all over the car that is bringing the U-96s commanding officers to the mooring docks. We follow the officers, including Herr Kaleun and Werner, the war correspondent, into a shoreside bordello. Here we see the films only women, French prostitutes who perform cabaret songs, along with naval officers and crewmembers partying before their deployment. Two things are notable about this sequence. First is the grotesque representation of drunken men, exemplars of masculinity in crisis. We see men not only urinating, but bleeding, vomiting, and collapsing in their own excretionsa foregrounding of bodily fluids and physicality, which is

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not conventionally associated with masculinity but which connects the men metonymically with the ocean. Second is this scenes explicit commentary on Nazism and masculinity, in the form of a drunken toast given by the submarine captain Thomsen, who has been awarded the Iron Cross. Thomsens ironic toast Auf unseren herrlichen, abstinenten, und unbeweibten Fhrer verges on insubordination until Thomsen concludes by joking that Hitler has shown Churchill where to stick his cigar. Like Hitler, both the submarine crew and the movie itself are abstinent and womanless, and this aspect of Thomsens toast will be pathetically echoed by Werner later in the movie. Believing himself about to die, Werner cites the Nazi writer Rudolf G. Binding, Einmal vor Unerbittlichem stehen. Wo keines Mutter sich nach uns umsieht, kein Weib unseren Weg kreuzt. Wo nur die Wirklichkeit herrscht, grausam und gross. Ich war ganz besoffen davon. Werners citation invokes a longstanding convention of poetic representations of war (and of the war film genre), emphasizing battle as the only truly authentic experience, and one that is notably womanless. Thomsens toast not only defines the submarine as a homosocial space, but also includes a more explicitly sexual homology between the submarine and Churchills cigar, which will be echoed again and again as the U-96 squeezes into and through tight spaces. Thomsens speech sets up a motif that is replayed in words and images throughout the film: the motif of Arschbacken. Thomsen defines the Quexen, the extremely young recruits being sent off to battle with little preparation, by their clenched butt cheeks and their tightly clamped genitalia: Arschbacken zusammen, Eier einklemmen, und der Glaube an den Fhrer im Blick. The single bathroom on the submarine is lit up by a sign depicting an androgynous ass with an anchor tattoo. And in a scene that condenses Das Boots representation of gender, we encounter numerous bare butts once more. Here, the crew celebrates success in battle with a drag show. A band plays, Yes! We have no bananas, and a soldier performs as Josephine Baker, in blackface with fake breasts and a faux-banana-leaf skirt. Shortly after this remarkable performance of both ethnic drag and crossdressing, we see a close-up of a sailors bare bottom and witness the diagnosis of an outbreak of crabs. While the sailors scream hilariously, Gib dem Luder ordentlich Puder!, at the officers table Herr Kaleun notices crabs visibly crawling in the first officers eyebrows. When he seeks attention at the medics station, the first officer finds a whole line of men naked from the waist down, a sight that the film plays for laughs, since the Nazi first officer is known to be a prude. What are we to make of the foregrounding of gender performances and homoerotic discourse in Das Boot? Prager points out that at various moments in the filmincluding when they listen to foreign sailing songs on the phonographthe crew cross-identify as the enemy (253). A very specific form of the crystal-image, this cross-identification enables the films discourse of nor-

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malization. Something similar takes place in the films representation of gender, where we see men enacting a whole range of masculinitiesboth gender identities and sexualitieswhich are permitted only and precisely because Das Boot is a womanless space. This mobility of gender, enabled by the war film, constitutes an important facet of Das Boots international appeal. By introducing both an explicitly sexualized homoeroticism and a range of masculinities into the film, the filmmakers capitalized on audience expectations of European movies (and in this case of art films associated with the New German Cinema) to provide more frank depictions of sexuality than Hollywood. At the same time, the filmmakers built on familiar representations of masculinity in the internationally successful Vietnam war films that Annette Brauerhoch has described: maskuline, muskulse, schne Mnner [werden] ausgestellt, die einer gefhrlichen, gewaltttigen Aktivitt nachgehen und dennoch keine klassischen Helden sind, da sie nicht wie jene mit Attributen der Macht, berlegenheit und Unversehrtheit ausgestattet sind (85). Brauerhoch argues that female viewers gravitate to war films because they offer a moment of control otherwise unavailable in dominant spectatorial relations; moreover she proposes that war films mobilize for all viewers sexual fantasies in der sexualisierte Macht gewaltsam ausagiert wird, aber auch die Gewaltsamkeit von Sexualitt genossen werden kann (85). Emerging in the era after feminism, war films of the 1980s served a double-edged purpose: on the one hand, they reflected a revisionist history and a conservative world view and sought to rehabilitate masculinity in the face of feminist incursions; on the other hand, they achieved success by mobilizing spectatorial identifications and audiovisual pleasures linked to the representation of male bodies in positions that dominant cinema usually reserves for women. Men in Das Boot occupy a range of feminized, objectified, and/or sexualized roles; they are subjected to sadistic acts; they become one with their bodies; they lose control. As Brauerhoch observes, Die Rolle, die man Frauen zuweist, ist von auerordentlicher Bedeutung fr den Zusammenhalt einer mnnlichen Gesellschaft [] Interessanterweise rckt der Soldat als Ganzes so, im Verhltnis zum Staat und seiner Gewalt, in eine weibliche Position (93). Just as war casts soldiers in a feminized position (they have no control over their own bodies; they must be brought into alignment with norms; they must always be ready to serve; they must exemplify the notion of personal responsibility for the sake of the larger good), neoliberalism casts women as its ideal subjects for all the same reasons. Thus, just as Das Boot appropriates the filmic language of gender performance and frank sexuality developed in the New German Cinema, the atypical, even feminist viewing positions it mobilizes are also coherent with its affirmative ideology. As the context of gender helps to make clear, far from creating images of change suggested by Deleuzes conception of the time-image, the falsifying

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narrative of Das Boot is thoroughly in line with neoliberalism, which is itself a falsifying narrative par excellence: Neoliberalism [] has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world (Harvey 3). By appropriating for its affirmative vision discourses of transnationalism and gender mobility and by developing innovative and profitable production strategies that co-opted the aesthetics and politics of modern art cinema, Das Boot laid the groundwork for a new, audience-friendly, market-driven filmmaking practice. It was so successful, that thirty years later, the entertaining strategies of Das Boot anchor the German cinema of neoliberalism that prevails today. Notes
1 I thank Ryan Long, Matthias Rudolf, Monica Seger, and the anonymous German Quarterly reviewers for their insightful comments on this essay. 2 Brad Prager notes the representation of soldiers as victims in Das Boot, arguing that the film can be understood as a persistent symptom of the collective denial of the past (242). My reading builds on Pragers analysis, which also emphasizes the films transitional status in the shift from Autorenkino to commercial entertainment cinema. 3 For useful overviews of neoliberalism, see Bourdieu; Duggan; and Harvey. 4 Art cinema has achieved notable success during the Weimar Republic; at DEFA in the GDR; and via the New German Cinema in the FRG. However, even during these periods, commercial genres typically held sway. See for example Rogowski; Garncarz; Berghahn; and Bergfelder, International. 5 My analysis of the cinema of neoliberalism should be construed neither as a valorization of the New German Cinema as the aesthetic-political zenith of German film history, nor as a declaration that oppositional cinema is dead. Rather, I suggest that the function of popular, commercial filmmaking has undergone a subtle shift since around 1980. If popular films historically provided ambivalent sites that opened up possibilities for fantasy, escapism, and/or critical reception, I argue that the cinema of neoliberalism ultimately forecloses on these possibilities by co-opting them for consumer-driven market forces. At the same time, however, within the proliferating media landscape of neoliberal Germany, what could be viewed as a minor cinema has emerged, seeking to open up critical spaces of engagement with the neoliberal turn, not least through a sustained treatment of history, including attention to the effects of political events on private lives, and to the history and culture of aesthetic forms, including genres. Notable here are films by auteur directors like Maren Ade, Thomas Arslan, Andreas Dresen, Christian Petzold, and Angela Schanelec, who have mostly relied on alternative/independent production models, and whose successes include prizewinning, critically acclaimed, and internationally popular films. 6 To name only a few, Eichingers international successes include The Name of the Rose (1985), The House of the Spirits (1993), Nirgendwo in Afrika (2001), and Der Untergang (2004), as well as the Resident Evil films. See Rauch; Bergfelder, International (24347).

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7 Conceived from the outset for a variety of exhibition contexts, Das Boot was screened first in cinemas worldwide and then released as a popular television miniseries in the FRG in 1985. The films afterlife (and ongoing profitability) derives from multiple release versions for the cinema and home video markets over the last thirty years, including both the original theatrical release and the longer miniseries version marketed in various technical formats; a Directors Cut exhibited in cinemas worldwide in 1997 and released on DVD; and, in 2011, Blu-ray DVD versions released to coincide with the films thirtieth anniversary. My analysis relies on the original theatrical release from 1981 as well as the Directors Cut on DVD (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 1997). 8 The production costs of Das Boot ran to at least DM 25 million; the film was co-produced by Bavaria Studios and West German television (WDR and SDR) in collaboration with Neue Constantin and the British, Austrian, and Italian broadcasting networks (BBC, ORF, RAI). In the FRG, 3.6 million viewers saw the film in theatrical release, making it the fifth top-grossing film of the year, and it went on to become a blockbuster abroad. See Clarke for an overview of the films production history, multiple release versions, and commercial success in North America (114). 9 Deleuze argues that the crisis of the action-image originated with neo-realism in Italy: The timing is something like: around 1948, Italy; about 1958 France; about 1968, Germany (Movement-Image 211). He also suggests that elements of the time-image received their fullest realization in the New German Cinema, mentioning in particular the films of Schmid, Wenders, Straub and Huillet, and especially Syberberg. 10 Deleuzes primary filmic example of this confrontation with money is Wenderss Der Stand der Dinge (1982), a metacinematic story about a film production that grinds to a halt when the crew runs out of film stock and the producer who is supposed to finance the film disappears. Produced in the same year as Das Boot, and released one year later, Der Stand der Dinge is in many ways a cinematic double of Petersens film, which also exhibits the circuit of financial and cultural exchange between Europe and Hollywood. 11 Other important events in the neoliberalization of German culture and society include the Tendenzwende of the early 1980s; reunification and the Standortkrise; the third-way politics of the Schrder era; and the adoption of the Hartz IV welfare reform package in 2005. Germany is often cited as an exception to the neoliberalization of the West due to its strong unions and social welfare policies; some critics have argued that only the pressures of reunification opened the door to neoliberalization in the 1990s. Shifting cultural policies, and the rising role of corporate interests in shaping those policies, suggest that the FRG was in fact vulnerable to neoliberal encroachments already in the early 1980s. Nonetheless, reunification certainly speeded the process. See also Callaghan et al.; McFalls; Schui and Blankenburg. 12 Shooting coverage involves taking footage from different angles and distances, giving filmmakers ample choices for dramatic reconstruction during the editing process. Coverage is crucial for continuity editing, since it allows latitude in dealing with problems of acting, setting, or technical error; it also enables filmmakers to create a more panoramic, immediate, and believable cinematic experience. It has not always been common practice in German cinema because of expense.

38 Works Cited

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