Helga Reidemeister's Von wegen 'Schicksal' (Is This Fate?) screens this Saturday, September 10, as part of Open City Documentary Festival in London. Starting September 16, it will be available to stream on Another Screen along with Reidemeister's Der gekaufte Traum and Cristina Perincioli's Für Frauen. 1. Kapitel.
Von wegen 'Schicksal' (Is This Fate?) (1979).
Helga Reidemeister’s Von wegen ‘Schicksal’ (Is this Fate?) (1979) begins in a space of near total darkness. At the center of the frame is 48-year-old Irene Rakowitz, whose tumultuous family life at the social housing estate Märkisches Viertel constitutes the heart of this unblinking documentary. Divorced, disabled, and surviving on benefits, Irene lived with her two youngest children in a small apartment five floors above her ex-husband Richard’s. Her two older daughters had left—or rather fled—the claustrophobic environment. Facing a row of monitors, Rakowitz gazes upon playbacks of an interview between Reidemeister and her daughters where the young women candidly question the intention of the whole endeavor. “This film is silly,” they declare, before going on to say that the process of airing out one’s dirty laundry is frankly absurd. Bouncing off the flickering screens, these piercing words spring on Rakowitz—now visible in a tight close-up—like a net, as she calmly reaffirms the purpose of documenting their daily existence on film. For Rakowitz, their problems were not an isolated, private affair, but a symptom of larger socioeconomic struggles in postwar Germany.
Simple yet powerful, the opening exemplifies Reidemeister’s dialogical approach to documentary filmmaking, where verbal confrontations not only reveal the conflicts within a given family dynamic but also the tension between a filmmaker and their subjects. Such a collaborative ethos brings to mind other documentary works that emerged around the same period, such as the films of the defiant Les Insoumuses. Counting Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos among its founding members, this feminist French video collective engaged with community activism both on- and off-screen, tackling thorny subjects such as the gender gap, abortion, and sex workers’ rights. Reflecting this wave of feminist filmmaking, Reidemeister aims to place women’s stories front and center, especially the lived experiences of social-housing dwellers.
Situated in the northern outskirts of West Berlin, the Märkisches Viertel and its constellation of concrete slabs and towers were a site of political contradictions, economic precarity, and social marginality. Built in 1963 as a part of the government’s First Urban Renewal Programme, the Märkisches Viertel was conceptualized as a modernist haven to ease the mounting housing shortage for working-class citizens. Ostracized for their overcrowdedness and supposed lack of hygiene, the city’s tenement homes were torn down on a large scale, their residents forcibly relocated to newer apartment complexes like the Märkisches Viertel; as many as ten percent of West Berliners were resettled as a result of the rehousing project. Enthusiastically received by the press at first, the estate soon became a symbol for the failed optimism of functionalist architecture. Plucked from the everyday familiarity of neighborhood shops and utilities, the incoming residents of Märkisches Viertel were initially promised that the complex would be equipped with schools, parks, and easy access to public transportation, most of which were either scrapped or left unfinished well into the 1970s. The demolition of tenement houses might have been conceived as a solution to rent speculation, yet a slot at state-owned estates like the Märkisches Viertel also came with much higher rents, followed by the constant fear of eviction. What started out as a welfare utopia gradually threatened to further disenfranchise its inhabitants.
Reidemeister’s filmmaking career arose from this very whirlpool of paradoxes. After studying painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Reidemeister briefly worked as an art restorer before an interest in social work brought her to the Märkisches Viertel in 1968. The existence of the estate was already a hotly debated issue among the student crowd who were organizing working-groups and exhibitions as a form of activism against what they considered to be urban totalitarianism from the state. In contrast to some of her fellow student leftists who viewed the Märkisches Viertel residents through a theoretical, clinical lens, Reidemeister sought a more collaborative, holistic relationship with the community. In an interview with Jump Cut, Reidemeister talked about how she came to know a working class family who derided the practice of filmmakers such as Max Willutzki and Christian Ziewer, two exponents of the Berlin School of Workers' Films. “They are always making films about us, but never with us,” they confided in Reidemeister. “They never show us the way we really want to be shown.”
In comparison to such alienating vantage points, Reidemeister’s documentaries strive to march along with their subjects. Completed during her time at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB), her first film Der gekaufte Traum (The Bought Dream) (1977) was made, as the credits stated, “in collaboration with the Bruder family,” a detail that points to the authorial partnership between the filmmaker and the subjects. In 1969, as an intervention to the detached, anthropological tendency of documenting the Märkisches Viertel on film, Reidemeister lent the Bruders a Super 8 camera with which they could visually archive their daily experience at the estate. In other words, the family was supplied with a tool to meaningfully insert their own voice in a public conversation dominated by student activists. When the years-long shooting process proved too overwhelming for the parents, Reidemeister returned to film additional footage on 16mm. The final film is an amalgamation of materials from both the Bruders and Reidemeister, situating anecdotal self-testimonials within greater socioeconomic contexts. Intimate moments of quarrels between adults, monotonous house chores, or the Bruders tucking their five children into one small bedroom are paired with still photographs of the Märkisches Viertel’s concrete facades, on which startling statistics about the living condition at the estate damningly unscrolled.
Reidemeister came to lament how these statistics were visualized, which was inventicized out of necessity, since the director could not acquire a permit to shoot outside of the building.She was concerned that such stylistic choices might come off as too pedestrian, thus dampening their political commentary. Nevertheless, by drawing a link between census data and the Bruders’ interior lives, the film not only contextualizes the family’s economic struggles but also lends a humanity to their existence, which was far messier and more complicated than any numerical calculations. Erasing the divide between filmmaker and subject, the footage shot by the Bruders and Reidemester is not explicitly labeled or separated, resulting in a collective look at the family’s day-to-day activities. The specter of life in the tenement homes lurks among the bright walls of the Märkisches Viertel as Irene, the matriarch of the Bruder family, complains about her husband’s obsession with hygiene. She even accuses him of spending more time wiping down tabletops than engaging with the children. Looming over working-class households like the Bruders’ is the pristine dream of economic prosperity, which was understood in terms of material acquisitions. After all, the construction industry and the retail trade of household goods were fundamental to the economic growth of Germany during the 1970s. And yet, as the opening sweeps through the shiny modern vehicles on the streets and new building blocks, only to rest on the eerie sight of a car dumpster where metallic carcasses laid atop one another in an immobile heap, Der gekaufte Traum suggests that, for certain sectors of society, economic progress can leave people more disposable than ever before.
Der gekaufte Traum (The Bought Dream) (Helga Reidemeister, 1977).
Von wegen ‘Schicksal’, Reidemeister’s graduation film from DFFB, elides the world outside of the Märkisches Viertel almost entirely, eschewing figures and numbers to focus on the architecture of feelings within the daily interactions of the Rakowitzes. Under Reidemeister’s direction, the camera does not gawk at their material living conditions. Instead, its trajectory through their apartment is intimately guided by the movements of the family members. For instance, in an early sequence where Irene and her son Konstantin prepare dumplings for dinner, the camera at times stoops to meet the eye level of the eight-year-old boy before swinging back up to his mother’s height. The moment Irene’s teenage daughter Astrid walks in, the camera swiftly pans from the stovetop to catch her at the doorway, as if greeting the teenager after a long school day. Dynamic and instinctive, this shooting style also incisively maps out the spatial relationship the family had to their cramped surroundings and to each other, one that cannot be simply expressed through mere census data.
This filmic sensitivity is also present in the tense dinner that follows. A question from Reidemeister on whether Astrid would like to live with her father ignites a fiery stream of arguments around the table. Accusations of physical punishments are spewn from all sides, and as Irene harshly reprimands Konstantin for frequently visiting his father, who takes a macho delight in dangerous weapons, the young boy breaks down in tears. Throughout this cacophony of resentful utterances, the camera swings like a pendulum from close-up to close-up, locking the family members in individual frames. Mother and children might have been sitting in the same room, yet an ocean of differences existed between them. Amid this vortex of emotions, Reidemeister’s off-screen presence occupies a curious threshold between an observer and a kind of family therapist. Her interjecting questions simultaneously shed light on the Rakowitzes' background while urging them to reconsider their own biases towards one another. In allowing these confrontations to occur—not only within the Rakowitzes—but also between the family and Reidemeister herself, the film emphasizes the agency of its subjects. Additionally, this approach thrusts viewers into an organic, highly-charged atmosphere of intimacy, as if we too are trapped in these never-ending loops of arguments.
Like in Der gekaufte Traum, the inability to communicate between generations is central to the film’s concerns. In a heated conversation with Reidemeister, Irene’s seventeen-year-old daughter Carmen attributes her mother’s job insecurity to her “laziness,” refusing to take into account that she was severely disabled from the beatings inflicted by Richard. Moreover, unlike her daughters, Irene had never advanced past fifth grade, and consequently could only pick up odd jobs as a housemaid or a seamstress. The concept of social determinism, however, was not a part of Carmen’s ideological repertoire. While the older Irene was active in grassroots organizing, young Carmen possessed a strikingly conservative streak, for she went as far as exclaiming that prisons had become too comfortable for the convicted. These shocking revelations are juxtaposed with Irene’s torrents of passionate defense to Reidemeister, to the camera, and subsequently to us as viewers. While admitting her shortcomings as a parent, Irene also brings up the emotional distantness of her own mother. Consequently, beside the claustrophobia of social housing and the relentless cycle of poverty, the rocky relationship between Irene and her children was also bound up in unresolved intergenerational trauma.
By occupying the position of an off-screen confidant whose questions and rebukes can be heard in interactions with the subjects, Reidemeister approaches her documentary portrait of the Rakowitzes not as an anthropological study, but as a constant stream of collaborative dialogues. With Von wegen ‘Schicksal’, Reidemeister granted Irene full control of the final cut, allowing her to take out any footage that she would not like to be shown. This practice directly countered the aforementioned research-focused method of filmmaking, where the experiences of participants were erased of their individuality and agency, their existence systematically relegated to an anecdotal example of larger social issues. While Von wegen ‘Schicksal’ won the 1979 Federal Film Prize for best documentary direction, Reidemeister’s decision to linger extensively on moments of disturbing cruelty was criticized in some quarters as voyeuristic. Nevertheless, one can also read Reidemeister’s inclusion of Irene’s less sympathetic characteristics as a means to dismantle the popular image of the noble, quietly suffering working-class; a marginalized woman is worthy of our sympathy and attention regardless of her likability.
Beyond their compassion toward working-class women, the two films also emphasize the damage that financial precarity, along with state and parental neglect, inflict on children. Both Der gekaufte Traum and Von wegen ‘Schicksal’ feature photographs and footage of school-age youngsters loitering among the unfinished green spaces of the Märkisches Viertel. Here, mental and concrete scraps doubled as playthings. In the case of the Bruders, their oldest son Michael was sent to a series of tyrannical residential children’s homes due to his behavioral and learning issues, many of which stemmed from the lack of affection in his childhood; the Bruder couple were too busy working to fulfill their duty of care. In this sense, the Märkisches Viertel diptych not only bears witness to a contemporary crisis, but also hints at the uncertainties awaiting the children who were raised on these concrete rounds.
Reidemeister’s Märkisches Viertel films were only one aspect of her on-site organizing efforts. Between 1968 and 1974, the director transcribed countless hours of conversations between student activists and the residents. More than a thousand pages long, the transcript is a vital document of the socioeconomic turmoil that plagued the estate, their dialogues serving as a basis for Reidemeister’s own filmmaking approach. Consequently, Reidemeister’s documentaries demonstrate how political filmmaking is not alienated from grassroots community activism. The two practices could, and should, culminate in more collaborative, community-oriented works that meaningfully advocate for a collective good rather than merely checking off political brownie points. Similar to how the uglier side of Irene Rakowitz’s life is juxtaposed with her blissful routine of painting little flowers while listening to classical music, Reidemeister’s films are no fetishistic poverty porn. They are, in the director’s own words, “about the capacity to love, about violence, dreams, and hope.” They confront the darkness under the cold concrete to search for a warmer tomorrow.
NOTES
1. Florian Urban, “The Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin,” in Architecture and the Welfare State, ed. Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermaete, Dirk van den Heuvel (London: Routledge, 2014), 177-198.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Alexander Vasudevan, “Tenant Trouble: Resisting Precarity in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, 1968–1974,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers (112, 2022): 1544, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.1990008.
5. Marc Silberman, “Interview with Helga Reidemeister,” Jump Cut (27, 1982).
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Fabien Tietke, “A Laboratory for Political Film: The Formative Years of the German Film and Television Academy and Participatory Filmmaking from Workerism to Feminism,” Celluloid Revolt: German Screen Cultures and the Long 1968, ed. Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2019), 105-121.
10. Alexander Vasudevan, “Tenant Trouble: Resisting Precarity in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, 1968–1974,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers (112, 2022): 1544, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2021.1990008.