Abstract
This article examines two films about the terrorism experienced by West Germany in the 1970s and its legacy. Released in 1981, Von Trotta's The German Sisters supplies the trauma of the unprocessed Nazi past as the motivational core behind the terrorist aberration. Perhaps the most controversial film on the subject to have emerged from the New German Cinema, The German Sisters does, however, look to the utopian potential of the child as a way to break away from the heavy burden of the past. Belonging to the Berlin Cinema, which in turn is part of the emerging Young German Cinema, Petzold's 2001 film The State I Am In opens a line of dialogue with The German Sisters specifically asking what happened to the utopian potential of the child as proposed by von Trotta and reassessing the meaning of Germany's terrorist legacy from the social perspective of the ‘new’ Federal Republic which is no longer wholly consumed by continuities with the Nazi past.
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