Gabi Teichert, history teacher, digs a hole: "She either digs a hole as dugout for the 3rd World War, or she is searching for the German history." And she is digging deeper and deeper. In her research she deals with bombings, the SPD party convention, the science of the human body. She examines the connection between a the history of love and history, etc. All this she does very thoroughly. She tests tools and instruments. It is known how motor cars are handled, but how does one handle history? A. Kluge lets German history pass in review. A humorous collage, leaving room for dreams and imagination.

The history teacher Gabi Teichert had already set out, spade in hand, during one of the episodes in DEUTSCHLAND IM HERBST. We now learn more about what she is actually looking for. She starts digging again, deeper this time, determined to uncover German history at last. She is fed up with simply feeding her pupils German historical events in chronological order, from the crusades to Stalingrad, as directed by the curriculum. "German history was so moving that it cannot be propagated in a positive sense" in her opinion. She feels compelled to improve the basic material available for history classes, such as by experting a direct influence on the spot at a SPD party conference. She is a practical person, curious and incredulous, looking for concrete evidence and not afraid of dirtying her hands during her private archaeological digs, carrying out alchemistic experiments in her "witches' kitchen" or using tools to attack fat volumes of history; her research of the present day is supplemented with local investigation of police action against demonstrators or pursuing the solitary nighttime activities of the men and women who protect the constitution. Gabi Teichert's inexhaustible activities become more and more widespread without leading to any clear and useful results. She attracts the attention of other teachers in the school and is hauled to account for her activities.

The valiant teacher is supported by a witness of the past, an eloquent victim of history, a solitary knee, a fragment of lance corporal Wieland who died in the battle of Stalingrad and to whom Kluge lends his quit voice with its penetrating commentary. More or less as a trio, they set out to prove that the history of a country encompasses "not one history, but many histories". They include the dead buried under piles of rubble, as well as fairy tales as witnesses of the people's centuries of working on their wishes. It is a broad field, for "the more closely we examine a word, the more distantly it looks back", according to an insert and it refers to more than just the word "Germany" which appears shortly after.

"Gabi Teichert is confused most of the time. It is a question of context." The viewer initially suffers the same fate as the images and commentaries rain down on him incessantly. DIE PATRIOTIN is Kluge's most perfect demonstration of his theories and a film which totally refuses to bow to narrative cinema with its linearity and causality, even refusing a stringent account of its contents. Instead, it presents different perspectives, attitudes, opinions and actions in order to encircle Kluge's central theme: the development of a new awareness of history. He is not concerned with reconstructing history, known as the settled, common, retrospective view from history lessons; history is something to be grasped, "hard matter, nothing soft or pliant". Kluge and Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus have devoted their entire assembly skills to breaking it open, uncovering what has been buried, letting what has been suppressed rise to the surface again and letting the dead be revived.

"Film is a 'rich totality' of many aspects and relationships" and it is dependent upon the viewer's productive cooperation, for his selective vision is required in order to convert reception into production, sympathy and cooperation, an experience challenged by Kluge and wrested from the "resistance of the senses". It is a dialectic interchange and applies equally for the "protest energy" inherent in Kluge's understanding of realism: "Realism is not a state of Nature. ideology and dreams are a state of Nature. When I protest against the principle of realism and what reality does to me, then I am being realistic. In other words, I am being realistic for anti-realistic reasons. And this dialect means that I may shatter all realistic methods while I try to be realistic. " The porous surface, fragmentary nature and jigsaw puzzle of plot, citations, reflections, the reconciliation between documentation and fiction, all join together to fight against the reinstatement of a realistic view of reality.

It is comforting to have Gabi Teichert in this plethora of images, this conglomeration of material. Although she is designed as an artificial figure, she is nevertheless a living and tangible representative of the present, the woman who gave the film its title, a kind of accidental promise of a red thread which she repeatedly cuts with the absurdity of her interventions and investigations, thus also repeating a view of femininity according to typically Klugean ideas. Her patriotism is defined immediately: "She sympathizes with all the dead people of the Reich." She never meets the knee, as a freely floating remnant, a reliquary from the past for which she is searching. The joint between past and present, the establishment of this positive totality, remains an aim. What remains is a yearning for it, for history, cannot be summarized in a "positive patriotic version", not even on the cinema screen. It is and will remain a heap of rubble. The knee, its nature symbolizing both the link and the break, once again visualizes the montage concept, but is also a vagabond idea playing a joke "from below" on the resistance against pressure "from above". It only seems to be an unobtrusive education concept.

Marli Feldvoß

Production Country

Germany (DE)

Production Period

1977-1979

Production Year

1979

color

color

Aspect Ratio

1:1,37

Duration

Feature-Length Film (61+ Min.)

Type

Feature Film, Experimental Film

Topic

Social Engagement, School, Film History

Target Group

Youth film (12-17)

Available Media

DVD

Original Version

German (de)

DVD

Subtitles

English (en), French (fr), Russian (ru), Spanish (es), Chinese (zh)