Encountering the Post-Wall Suture:* The Unfulfilled Ethos of New German Cinema as Depicted in Michael Verhoeven's Films after Reunification

As a representative of the first wave of New German Cinema,25) Michael Verhoeven inherited a set of political and ethical attitudes towards conventions and cultural taboos. While New German Cinema rarely explored the dark history of the Nazi past directly, Verhoeven brought the movement's ethos to a filmic investigation of that past, especially regarding how Gentiles remembered the Third Reich. In this essay, I examine two of Verhoeven's films, The Nasty Girl and The Unknown Soldier, which explore Gentile postwar memory. The Nasty Girl, filmed before the 1990 German Reunification, differs aesthetically and thematically from The Unknown Solider, a documentary that was released when Germany was fully immersed in post-Wall, third-generation memory. In addition, while The Nasty Girl utilizes Brechtian irony and a comic style to shed light on cultural prohibitions related to the Nazi past, The Unknown Soldier explores social secrets about the Wehrmacht through cine-montage in documentary mode. While acknowledging aesthetic differences between these two films, this essay examines how they target distinct cultural obstacles as well as generational issues during successive postwar historical periods. I also examine how the films carve out space for revealing the hidden truth of the Nazi past, thus inheriting New German Cinema's effort to violate preexisting cultural taboos. In this light, I argue that Verhoeven's films, inheriting a distinct aesthetic style from New German Cinema, reflect the movement's political ethos in their exploration of untouched themes, thereby fulfilling one of its unmet desires.