Chapter 6: From History’s Rubble: Kluge on Film, History, and Politics

The central figure in Alexander Kluge’s 1979 film The Patriot (Die Patriotin) is Gabi Teichert, a high school history teacher from the German state of Hesse, whose dissatisfaction with the shortcomings of her discipline guides us through the eclectic collection of photographs, drawings, poems, stories, maps, posters, and staged and documentary footage out of which the film is constructed. The fictional character of Gabi Teichert (who is played by Hannelore Hoger) does not only feature in The Patriot, but actually made her film debut some twelve months earlier in Germany in Autumn (Deutschland im Herbst) – a collaborative film project undertaken by Kluge and other prominent members of the New German Cinema including Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff. As Kluge and his co-directors have noted in their brief analysis of the project, the impetus for Germany in Autumn sprang from the perceived extent to which the events that took place in Germany during the Autumn months of 1977 – including the kidnapping and murder of Daimler-Benz board member Hanns-Martin Schleyer by the Red Army Faction (RAF), the highjacking of a Lufthansa plane, and the alleged suicides of terrorists Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim Prison – seemed to pass into the annals of German 1 history without undergoing any rigorous public debate. Constructed out of a series of thematically interrelated episodes (which consist of