Arthouse Cinema - Alexander Kluge
Der starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand): After Dark Comes the Terror

In the middle of the night, a man crawls through the grass and enters a courtyard. He breaks a window to get into the house. Gunshots are heard shortly after and the man runs back outside.

The crime results in the death of a person. Police officer Ferdinand Rieche (Heinz Schubert) is furious with his boss because he wouldn’t let Rieche catch the culprit before the crime. He confronts his boss, who argues that an arrest can only be made after a crime is committed.
 

The 50-year-old Rieche, the main character in Der starke Ferdinand (Strongman Ferdinand, 1976), takes the issue of safety very seriously. The film was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and shows him as a character who considers safety the main motivation in his life. He divides his priorities into things that need to be protected the most: first “himself”, second “where he lives”, third “where he works”, fourth “police work in its entirety”, and finally “everything else in its entirety”.

Addressing a Historical Subject from a Contemporary Perspective

The director Alexander Kluge, who was one of the initiators of the New German Cinema (1962–1982), often described his films as subtle critiques of the impact of World War II on the social and economic life of German society. Anton Kaes in his article “In Search of Germany: Alexander Kluge’s The Patriot” wrote that Kluge’s films “addressed the subject of history from a contemporary perspective [in the context of film]”. His films seek not only to reveal the past but also to position the present in the historical dimension. Consequently, Kluge doesn’t talk openly about the Nazi regime, the events of the Holocaust, or the effects of the Cold War in the film. He does, however, refer to these events by addressing how they still affect the lives of his characters today.
 
In Strongman Ferdinand, Rieche’s life in the 1970s is portrayed as if he had not fully escaped the war. First a police officer and eventually head of security at a factory, he trains his employees as if they were on a battlefield. He trains them how to protect themselves from enemies and how to interrogate opponents. Security drills escalate from initial theory to simulation in a factory to continuing physical training in the middle of winter to spying on and terrorizing rival factories.

In the Name of Safety

Interestingly, Strongman Ferdinand shows how Rieche’s principles and way of enforcing safety endanger himself and others—in the name of safety. Throughout the film, we see how Rieche protects himself and feels constantly threatened. His biggest concern is losing his new job; he sees his six-month probationary period as a threat. For this reason, he tries to impress his boss by maximizing the safety of the factory. Kluge employs irony to show that Rieche’s behavior has the opposite effect than he expects.
 
The irony is scathing and clothed in dry humor. Once Rieche tries to save himself by submitting false urine tests, and his doctor later comments on the lab results indifferently: “The urine is very fresh,” and “If you aren’t a man, I suspect you’re three months pregnant.” Rieche’s composed expression says that he doesn’t see his behavior as problematic. He has maintained from the beginning that he “knows everything and doesn’t understand why other people around him don’t”.
 
Rieche has a strong attachment to his personal items, but Kluge intentionally removes them, or Rieche has no personal relationship to them. The bedroom, the most private room, is cluttered with things. But he has no personal photos or decorations other than the clock that hangs on the wall next to his bed; it’s for practical reasons so he can quickly check the time when he wakes up.

A Life without Emotional Ties

Rieche’s life is revealed to be free of emotional ties. Yes, he has a private life, and he has a girlfriend who is also an employee at the factory and lives with him, but the relationship is boring. They perform a series of rituals together, as couples typically do, such as celebrating birthdays and taking vacations together. Yet these are merely formalities: Rieche recites a poem better described as a grocery list (“Use Pebeko for your teeth, Nivea for your skin, Hermeta for your feet, Jawohl to comb your hair, Aspirin for fevers...”), and then refers to Christmas as a threat that requires a holiday simulation to be conducted long in advance.
 
Instead of bringing warmth to his life, the presence of other people is constricting. Rieche’s bedroom is a case in point: he has only a single bed. The couple have difficulty finding a comfortable sleeping position on the narrow mattress.
 
On several occasions Rieche tries to cover up his insecurity by becoming aggressive toward others. He is like a blind man for whom everything is a threat, from the Communist Party and the unions to the GDR and his own boss.
 
Just as a war aimed at ensuring the security of a country produces people like Rieche who feel constantly threatened, Rieche’s character becomes the terror itself. He goes too far in cracking down on crime, which then culminates in endangering his own factory by secretly causing smoke, setting off the fire alarm, and him shooting a ministry official to prove there is a gap in the security system.
 
Alexander Kluge reveals this phenomenon in Strongman Ferdinand to be an ever-repeating loop as long as the paranoid attitude is not decoded: he opens the film with Rieche being expelled from the police force for his unlawful attitude and ends with Rieche harming others to “prevent terror”.

While terror harms others, it also harms the instigator on a personal level. Kluge makes this plain by depicting Rieche as a person who has no emotional ties or personal relationships that could have made him human. In a more subtle form, Kluge also attempts to soften this impression of him by having the police apprehend the pitiable security-obsessed Rieche.
 
Why did he do all this in the end? “For nothing,” says Rieche himself. “Life is meaningless,” he sums up at the end of the film. Kluge offers no way out, he reveals only the consequences. And they are paid for dearly.