14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Staking One’s Life: Images of Holger Meins 85
I am glad that I can remember one other detail concerning this scene: because
of the lighting conditions we shot outside on the street. Without this superfluous
detail, my memory would seem false to me, freely invented so as to
prove that Holger Meins mistrusted the political rhetoric we employed at the
time. Invented to show that we ourselves had been exploiting Vietnam, by
making it our thing – although the images of the Vietnamese Anti-Madonna
whose child is already dead at Christmas refer back to the Passion images of
Holger Meins. The war the United States waged against Vietnam was outrageous,
first and foremost in its extreme cruelty. It assumed that civil society
would regard it without interest or passion. The right to resistance against this
war was evident, even according to an extensive interpretation. The protests
against the US war unleashed far more energy than did the support for it. The
protest was a flash in the pan, however, and the war had already been forgotten
before it ended. The Vietnam War didn’t serve to justify any theories – unlike
World War I whose outbreak seemed to confirm the theory of imperialist
competition – nor was it handed down as a tale of resistance like the Spanish
Civil War. A shrug of the shoulders was all that remained – much in the same
way as one takes the news that an unremarkable neighbour once tortured a
man to death for no reason and then resumed his everyday life.
My earliest memory of Holger Meins is from the summer of 1966, when we
were both among about sixty, mostly male, applicants taking the entrance examination
for the film academy – it was in a villa in Berlin-Wannsee. Several
hundred had applied, and about sixty were chosen to take the examination.
They had already had enough experience of what it means to be rejected – or
worse still, to be ‘almost accepted’: to have almost sold a script to a broadcaster,
almost had a piece produced on a studio stage, almost managed to
make a short film. Some of the examinees were around forty years old, and the
youngest were just over twenty; they too felt that an eternity had passed since
they had heard the call to become artists. An eternity since a sunny afternoon
in the attic, spent reading Brecht, an eternity since a starry winter’s night after
a Cocteau film, and so forth. They had been holding on to their vocation for so
long that it already seemed worn out and lacking any glamour. The new film
academy offered a happy, unbelievable opportunity. After a thousand unheard
prayers, God suddenly responded. Acceptance meant qualifying as a
person of culture, and much more conclusively than through any actual cultural
production, which would have involved some laborious proof. Three
more years beckoned in which to savour one’s raised self-expectations. On
that day in the villa in Wannsee we had to shoot an examination film on Super-
8, and I watched Holger Meins trying to usher out of the room two fellow applicants
who had failed to stick to the schedule. He seemed to be speaking
carelessly with a northern German accent; grinning and making faces, but he