Pwerk, No Diggity

[Keith McMullen]

> 
> When I moved to London in the summer of 1978, it wasn’t just the bright constellation of Krautrock that was in the air, but a whole extraordinary flowering of German creativity: films, books, music, art. I remember my first sight of a huge canvas by Anselm Kiefer, hung high up in the old Tate, and seeing films by Fassbinder, Wenders and Herzog for the first time. (I recently rewatched Fassbinder’s The Third Generation, from 1979, and its jangled montage of competing images and sounds still looks unnervingly bold.) I vaguely recall one all-night event at (I think) Screen on the Green, which mixed rad new post-punk bands with Herzog films. (Memo to my younger self: really not a good idea to take amphetamines before going to see 16-rpm directors like Herzog and Tarkovsky.) Artists like Fassbinder and Kiefer also aimed for something like Schütte’s beloved Gesamtkunstwerk, but theirs was a far messier business; it manifested no fear of the epic, the self-flagellating, the forbidden. Kiefer photographed himself giving a Nazi salute, and invoked dark myths slumbering in the German psyche; Fassbinder, in his manic cinéma vérité contribution to the omnibus protest film Germany in Autumn (1978), snorts drugs, is stricken by paranoia, strips completely naked, tyrannises his partner, ridicules his mother’s political naivety. He was cravenly attracted to popular culture, but with a knowing twist: ‘I want to be ugly on the cover of Time,’ he proclaimed, not long before his pore-clogged death aged 37. You’d think Fassbinder would be a big fan of Can or Faust, but it’s the cold white shimmer of Kraftwerk which occasionally appears on his dolorous soundtracks; not, though, to signify some fresh new outward-bound national spirit, but as a marker of numb hedonism, affectless passivity, defeated psyches on the edge of self-willed extinction.