'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

„make a clean break‟ and to „build a new life.‟ A more literal translation of the film‟s
ironic title, “Taking Leave of Yesterday,” refers to Anita‟s illusion that the past can be
separated from the present. However, as Sandford explains, “past and present are
inseparable, for the past is the precondition of the present, and its weight is by definition
inescapable” (21). The film suggests that Anita‟s family was persecuted by the National
Socialists because they were Jews and by the Communists because they were capitalists.
Anita‟s past is that of an unwanted outsider, and that is what she remains in the present of
the film.
Kluge develops this theme of indivisibility of past and present at the individual
level, through photographs of Anita‟s childhood and her memories of childhood holiday
celebrations, images of children‟s books and stories, and nostalgic tango music which
sentimentally echoes days past. However, the director also presents this theme at the
national level, with the suggestion that individual history and national history are also
inextricably connected. Hence Abschied von gestern is also a film about West Germany,
a society that, in the 1960s, had not taken leave of its past as much as it would have liked.
The film contains many sequences that comment ironically on West Germany‟s
relationship to its past. Some are grotesque, such as the dreamlike sequence in which two
men ask a mother which of her two children is to have its brain removed and then tell her,
“Dieses System hier ist mit keinem der vorangegangenen totalitären Systeme zu
vergleichen. Das ist das Neue daran” (Kluge and Patalas, Abschied von gestern.
Protokoll 57). 11 Other sequences are more subtle, such as the one in which a trainer at a
dog show explains to Anita the authoritarian philosophy of his profession: the dogs will
11 “This system here cannot be compared to any previous totalitarian system. That is what is new about it”
(Kluge and Patalas, Abschied von gestern. Protokoll 57). All translations of quotations are my own unless
otherwise indicated.
15