1 - Peter Zadek’s Ich bin ein Elefant, Madame: Discussing “1968” by Means of “1968 Thinking”

Summary

I still consider Elefant my best film work: it’s subjective, committed, about human beings—artificial—and it represents a historical moment. And it is enjoyable. Entertaining. It’s Entertainment.

—Zadek, Das wilde Ufer, 106

As a result of its anniversaries, “1968” is no longer an “event” but has become a “subject matter of history.”This change has increased the awareness of the complexity and intricacy of the student protests in the “old” Federal Republic of Germany as well as their entanglement with the complex, multi-layered, transnational, and globalizing modernization processes of societies in the postwar periodand their “specifically West German features.”“1968” has become a “shibboleth” and an “icon”—not only an event of real history but also a (disputed) event of public discourse.For this reason, “the historical place of ‘1968’ within the social history of the Federal Republic of Germany will remain suspended a while longer.”1968 has proved to be open to highly contradictory attributions ever since. Some consider it a battle for the “freedom of the oppressed,” for the “social participation of all citizens,” for “more democracy”;others see in it a “rage for change,” a “desire for creating a tabula rasa and … for violence.”Against this background, it proves worthwhile to consider interpretations that focus precisely on this “double nature”of 1968, such as those by literary scholars Karl Heinz Bohrer and Klaus Briegleb.Both trace the perceived contradiction back to 1968 itself, to the “subversiveaesthetic origin of the revolt,”to that kind of surrealism, more precisely, that had engendered the slogan of “bringing imagination to power”in France and that, in West Germany, was recognizable in the actions of the Kommune I.Bohrer pinpoints the inherent ambiguity of 1968 in the attempt of some of the protests’ exponents—referred to as “Phantasiefraktion,” (fantasy group)—to bring to power the surrealistic imagination and its impetus to unhinge reality.Briegleb follows a similar line of argument, albeit in reverse.His reconstruction of 1968 centers on the conflict between, on the one hand, the emancipatory, anti-authoritarian, and literary discourse mainly represented by the Kommune I and, on the other hand, the repressive, schematic discourse of the so-called “rational leftists.”The latter, according to Briegleb, were not only incapable of or unwilling to understand the situationist-surrealist approach pursued by the anti-authoritarian Bohemia but also more than ready to marginalize this “fun guerrilla,”with whom the author clearly sympathizes.