Waiting to Be Human: The Cruel Optimism of Christian Petzold’s Transit

Abstract

Christian Petzold’s Transit confronts viewers with a series of traditional binaries: individual and social, past and present, image and word, local and global, waiting and acting, and subjection and sovereignty. Its audiovisual and narrational strategies for negotiating these polar categories and relating them to the characters’ narratives introduce questions of what it means to be human within the hierarchies of deservingness that constitute not only international politics but also our intimate, personal interactions. Exploring Georg’s varied responses to the suffering of others, the film implicitly intervenes in debates about the politics of compassion and juggles questions such as those posed by Judith Butler as to how we might create a world that is inhabitable for everyone. The film asks what it means to exist in relation to others at both micro (social, interpersonal, ethical) and macro (political, governmental, legal) levels and what it means to lose those others. Ultimately, I argue, Transit is an elegy that functions as a kind of literal Trauerarbeit, an affective labour in which viewers remember the past but are afforded no reassurance that the present is better.