Katzelmacher (1969) - film review

A group of disaffected young people hang out in their modern Munich apartment block, struggling to fill their empty days with tedious conversation and meaningless sex.   When a neighbour takes in a Greek lodger, they begin to vent their frustration on this unwelcome foreigner.   Jorgos is a respectable and hardworking guest worker, but to Peter and his friends he is just a filthy cat shagger who has no right being in their country.   Tensions grow when Jorgos begins to go out with an attractive German girl, and his enemies decide that he must now be taught a lesson...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s second feature earned the 23-year-old film director widespread acclaim and set him on his course to become one of the key figures in the New German Cinema.  Shot in nine days on a miniscule budget of 25 thousand dollars, Katzelmacher is an arresting piece of social commentary that was adapted from a stage play which Fassbinder had written and acted in.  Like many of the director’s subsequent films, it is a sour critique of contemporary German society and explores many of the themes with which Fassbinder would become closely associated: youth disaffection, racism, power struggles in relationships and the failings of capitalism.   

Katzelmacher both defines and typifies the kind of film that Fassbinder would make in the early phase of his career.  Inspired by the cold Brechtian stylisation employed by French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, most notably in Vivre sa vie (1962), Fassbinder fashions a universe in which characters live dull, meaningless lives in drab surroundings, unable to communicate properly with one another, and totally contemptuous of everyone outside their close-knit milieu, especially foreigners.  Fassbinder’s use of long static shots, with the characters rigid and emotionless, scarcely looking at one another, underscores the inhumanity of this world, from which all compassion and understanding appear to have been leached. 

The director’s attempt to represent German society in such a bleak Brechtian fashion is both challenging for the spectator and highly revealing of how Fassbinder regarded his own people at a time when the economic miracle of the past few decades was now starting to look like a mirage.  The late 1960s saw a marked upswing in xenophobic sentiment in Germany, as many companies sought to reduce labour costs by employing foreign labour.  Like many German intellectuals of his generation, Fassbinder was mindful of where racial intolerance had led his country in the past, into the welcoming arms of a mindless and brutal Fascist regime.  Katzelmacher is arguably the director’s most powerful anti-racist, anti-Fascist statement, the stark simplicity of its mise-en-scène serving to strengthen its central message.  Fassbinder would tackle the issue of racism from a completely different angle, but with just as much passion, in his subsequent film Fear Eats the Soul (1974).

The fact that Fassbinder himself plays the hated immigrant in this film is perhaps an indication of how important it was to the young director, who would, throughout his career, repeatedly assert a deeply held conviction that Germany must not repeat the errors of the past.  Despite the grimness of the film’s subject matter and the extremely austere way in which Fassbinder presents it to us, Katzelmacher is a film that is both engaging and hopeful.  The characters are young, after all.  They are ignorant, but not monsters.  One day, they will change their views and help to fashion a more tolerant and cohesive society.  Maybe...

© James Travers 2010

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