The first cut leads from early 1980s Berlin to a post-war rubble landscape. The change of perspective from the canteen of the Technical University over Reuterplatz to historical aerial footage of the destroyed city does not come across as ruthless as it might seem in the description. In neither image is there any colour. Contemporary Berlin lies in the haze of the time, cars, industry, coal heating; the historical footage is of a similar grey but somewhat richer in contrast. The cut, quickly and in an uncomplicated manner, establishes what the film student Raoul Peck is clearly interested in. Where am I right now? What kind of place is this? What links it to history—and how? How do I find links between this place where I am standing now and the world around me? Peck locates all these connections in the form of Helmut Kohl, who can more often be heard off-screen than seen and is not named explicitly, instead described as “German chancellor, year XX”.
His affected words: “We have learned the lessons of history”, his summary in the last Bundestag debate about NATO’s Double-Track Decision in November 1983, reverberate at the film's end, as applause for this sentence echoes audibly while Peck stands on Reuterplatz with his camera. Contemporary Berlin again, the Berlin of the Bonn Republic, this West Berlin is still in a haze. Nothing has become clear to the filmmaker, nothing has been cleared up, the search led to a circular movement. The reverberation over the last images asks the question of whether this can all have happened. Can the images of Berlin in rubble in 1945 trace a path to the sentences of Kohl, which are cited along with the refrain from his first government declaration of 1982: “Achieving peace with ever fewer weapons.” Is that all, asks Raoul Peck as he looks at West Germany and its peace. Road traffic, moving pavements, off-screen daily voices. What remains? What do they know? Or: What do they want to know? Peck has already charged these pictures with a slightly shortened version of a Clausewitz quote, which comments on images of the destruction of war. Peck’s version: “Wars between educated nations are less cruel.”
The eighties were the decade, in which nobody in the West, certainly not in West Germany, doubted that “we”—and I think this is what Peck is seeking here, a kind of West German “we”—would win, or had already won a long time ago.
Peck, who as a child and young man experienced the transformation of colonial Belgian Congo to Mobuto’s Congo, to Zaire, controlled once again by the West in different circumstances, allows himself a modicum of mockery, which lingers in each of the film’s images and sounds. His title must also be understood as a mockery: MERRY CHRISTMAS DEUTSCHLAND ODER VORLESUNGEN ZUR GESCHICHTSTHEORIE II could announce a five-hour film essay instead of a short, which lasts 19 minutes and shrinks to a miniature something that in the country itself is readily perceived as big and significant. How often did the worldly Peck have the world explained to him in West Germany after just a few semesters of study? The eighties were the decade in which nobody in the West, certainly not in West Germany, doubted that “we”—and I think this is what Peck is seeking here, a kind of West German “we”—would win or had already won a long time ago. Clausewitz here comes across as ambiguous. A new we or perhaps a multiple we had long established itself in the new post-war logic, which remains partly in place today. We: Namely, the West.
In any case, the educated nations had a real interest in making sure that the post-colonial order of greater Congo, regardless of whether the state created after the end of Belgian Congo was called Republic of Congo or Democratic Republic of Congo or Zaire, did not advance beyond a post-colonial disorder. The educated nations ensured that this did not happen. Did Raoul Peck, who also stood behind the camera looking from above at the moving pavement shown several times, quickly ask people in their static movement whether they knew what had happened in Central Africa in their name, and what was still happening? Or did those who turned around and wondered who was standing behind the camera see him as nothing more than someone who did not belong? Quite simply conforming to the logic of the time?
Chancellor Kohl knew the answer to these questions and to many others. “We Germans,” he says off-screen, as members of the Green Party faction in the Bundestag are shown carrying large-format war pictures through the plenary chamber in protest, “we want this peace in freedom”. The film student Raoul Peck found neither peace nor freedom in West Berlin of the 1980s. That is what this short film is about.
Max Annas is a writer who lives in Berlin.
Translation: Anne Thomas
