Hystericizing Germany

Rainer Werner Fassbinder's fourteen-part ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' broadcast on German television in 1980, is a pivotal work in the artist's oeuvre. The 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin, a subproletarian apocalypse set in the Weimar Republic, provided Fassbinder with material to historicize the avant-garde of the 1920s and redetermine the relationship between utopianism and popular address. While Döblin created his protagonist to be a hysteric, Fassbinder wanted to hystericize the viewer. In this work, along with others from the same period, Fassbinder established a Jewish-German mirror rotating on the axis of the Holocaust. ----- In ''Hystericizing Germany,'' Manfred Hermes provides an excursive analysis of the potential of narration within the paradoxes of cinematic representation, with Fassbinder's miniseries forming both beginning and end point