'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

(Deutschland im Herbst n. pag.). 14 Hence Fassbinder uses his mother as a mouthpiece
for a memory of Hitler common for Germans of the war generation: that Hitler was a
benefactor who at one point went insane. Through the discussion of mother and son, as
well as through Fassbinder‟s relationship with his lover, the viewer is confronted with the
legacy of fascist modes of thinking and behaviour in the Federal Republic of the late
1970s.
Deutschland im Herbst inspired several individual projects that addressed
Germany‟s fascist past (Kaes 27). The heroine of Kluge‟s episode of the collective film
is Gabi Teichert, a Hessian school teacher who attempts to excavate Germany‟s fascist
past. Teichert reappears as the heroine of Kluge‟s film Die Patriotin (The Patriot, 1979)
where digging for Germany‟s buried history serves as the film‟s central metaphor.
Fassbinder used his conversation with his mother in his segment of Deutschland im
Herbst as the impetus to reflect on the Federal Republic of the 1940s and 1950s in his
BRD-Trilogie (FRG-Trilogy), which includes Die Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of
Maria Braun, 1979), Lola (1981), and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (The Longing of
Veronika Voss, 1981). Edgar Reitz, in his episode of Deutschland im Herbst, had shown
a border guard, speaking in dialect, aspiring to one day become an aviator. Reitz later
took up these themes in his filmic saga Heimat (1979).
14 In this instance I quoted the English subtitle of the film as I did not have access to the original German
script.
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