German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer

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Reviewed by: German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism by Hester Baer Leila Mukhida German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism. By Hester Baer. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth €117.00. ISBN 978-9463727334. The iconic, red-haired protagonist of one of Germany's biggest international box-office successes of all time, Tom Tykwer's Lola rennt (1998), is an exemplary neoliberal subject according to Hester Baer. Not only is Lola flexible, entrepreneurial, and able to effectively self-optimize, carrying over skills she learns in one of her video-gamelike frenzied excursions through Berlin from one life to the next, she is also literally driven by her quest for money. Thus, the film, Baer argues in her new book German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, embodies German state-funded cinema under neoliberalism on an intra- and extradiegetic level, whereby profit is the key motive of both the film industry as well as human activity. In Tykwer's film, Lola's efforts are futile as it is her boyfriend Manni who ultimately triumphs by delivering the money he owes to its recipient; Baer wryly observes that "Manni—a homophone for money and a metonym for man—prevails" (107). While Lola is indeed the ideal self-optimizing citizen, then, her behavior does not result in fulfillment, which Baer considers to reveal a specifically gendered kind of cruel optimism (via Berlant). I highlight this argument because it illustrates a key tenet of the book's thesis as well as its methodological approach: the films Baer considers explore how cinema can archive the neoliberal turn, exposing its cultural logic on the level of narrative, aesthetics, and production; at the same time, Baer employs a feminist lens in order to expose the representational politics at stake. A number of scholars have explored what constitutes political filmmaking in relation to recent German and European cinema. However, Hester Baer is unique in her insistence on analyzing films primarily through the lens of their conditions of production. Baer convincingly argues that the financialization of the state under neoliberalism has had wide-ranging effects which do not simply permeate the realm of cinema but rather which fundamentally reconfigure the relationship between politics and aesthetics. She turns to Christian Petzold to articulate what is at stake: "economic conditions are trying to annihilate films" (22). Petzold's polemic statement [End Page 390] underpins Baer's claim that Germany offers a particularly interesting case study for assessing filmmaking since the neoliberal turn, which she claims began around 1980. Crucially, a key conceit of the book is that while the effects of neoliberalism on the film industry can be observed all over the world, Germany has a "cinema of neoliberalism par excellence" on account of its history of division and unification (20). In postwar West Germany, neoliberalism offered an escape route out of postwar economic depression, with the Wirtschaftswunder representing a cornerstone in the neoliberal project. This was bolstered further by Helmut Kohl's widespread changes to economic policy that promoted, among other things, Leistung, mobility, and competitiveness. Baer also emphasizes the role of neoliberalism in shaping East Germany too, contributing indirectly to its demise through a build-up of external pressure on the state by market-driven forces, and directly after the fall of the wall, when the new German states were forced to rapidly adapt to a socioeconomic order. Indeed, the economic tabula rasa in East Germany meant that the neoliberal project was implemented in a more accelerated manner than in West Germany. Baer cogently charts these economic and political changes and links them to cinema—a key site of interrogating such changes due to its "dual nature as an industrial and aesthetic form" in order to make the well-founded and somewhat devastating argument that in Germany, a film's value is determined solely by its capacity to make a profit (30–31). So where does this leave German cinema? Baer argues that filmmakers who wish to comment on the machinations of the neoliberal present must necessarily navigate the fact that their mode of production is linked to representational choices, and search for new pictures and new stories to represent advanced capitalism. The films that she...