“Körperwelten”: Horror Film and the Historical Uncanny

The New Germany in Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomie / Anatomy (2000)

One of the two most successful exhibitions travelling Germany in recent years has been the so-called "Wehrmachtsausstellung." It displays records documenting the degree to which the German army, the Wehrmacht, was involved in atrocities committed against civilian populations during WWII. Causing an outcry of indignation from certain parts of the public, first and foremost from veterans associations, the exhibition violated the hitherto largely unchallenged consensus that such atrocities were committed either by special units operating separately from the regular army, such as the Waffen SS, or by exceptional individuals. If these individuals happened to be members of the Wehrmacht, their actions would be pathological or criminal, but never reflect the behavior of ordinary soldiers or official military policy. The belief in this ethical separation within the Nazi bureaucracy ensured that genocidal acts could be attributed to a relatively small number of Germans. The vast numbers of those conscripted into the army, and returning to civilian life in post-WWII Germany, were exempt from suspicion, almost by default. Supporters of the Wehrmachtsausstellung point out that this assumption was highly conducive to social peace and to the accelerated pace of denazification, primarily in West Germany. Intricate as some of the political and historical debates surrounding the exhibitions might be, they nonetheless illustrate that contemporary German society still operates under the shadow of the Third Reich. Even a prolific public debate has not brought resolution to this historical trauma.

The second exhibition, drawing numbers of visitors equal to those of the Wehrmachtsausstellung, is called "Körperwelten," body worlds. It opened first in Austria in 1997, where six million people saw it, a number of visitors increasing by about 50000 a week ("Skinless Wonders"). With over 6.5 million visitors worldwide, and over 100000 visitors in Germany, the web site of the exhibition boasts that it is "the most successful special exhibition of all times" ("Körperwelten"). It features 25 complete displays of human bodies, as well as approximately 200 further items, preserved through "plastination," a

revolutionary preservation technique that replaces the water inside the cell with special forms of plastic. Single cells and their unique surface features remain preserved in their original condition, down to the microscopic level. The result is a dry and non-smelling exhibit that permits entirely new forms of display. ("Körperwelten")

The web site for "Körperwelten" operates under the scientific tutelage of Heidelberg professor Gunther von Hagen, the inventor of the plastination technique and organizer of the exhibition. At first glance, its topic has little to do with Germany's past. Rather, it seems to embody a forward-looking, enlightened spirit of scientific enquiry, capable of providing "interested members of the general public with a comprehensive understanding of the human body, the inner organs, nervous system, blood circulation--in short, of the entire human anatomy" (Henning). If you listen to its detractors, however, it succumbs to "gimmicky and marketing ploy" instead of "honest artistic effort. The exhibition’s “obvious intention is to give the observers a touch of horror for their money, employing the same voyeuristic effects carnival showmen have used in their curiosity and "freak" shows for centuries" (Henning). The criticism against the exhibition for playing to the universal human impulse of voyeurism, and the long-standing tradition of exploiting this impulse ("for centuries"), in effect, dehistorizises the subject of the exhibition and its ability to scandalize. Unlike the Wehrmachtsausstellung, the horror of plastinated bodies is ahistorical. In this regard, the two exhibitions could not be more different.

And yet, upon closer inspection, the attraction of both exhibitions to such large numbers of visitors goes back to the same origins. As the public controversy illustrates, German audiences seem to respond negatively to the "Körperwelten" exhibition for specifically historical reasons, and yet they still go, and in droves. Hence, one segment of the exhibition's lavishly designed web site, entitled "Körperwelten in der Kritik," features an interview, originally published in the newspaper Welt am Sonntag on March 11, 2001, with the representative of the Jewish community in Berlin, Andreas Nachama. "I find it questionable on general principle," Nachama is quoted as saying,

that human beings who have died are made into objects of artistic refashioning [Verfremdung] and awe. Something is wrong in a society that considers this exhibition a suitable destination for a Sunday trip. With the "Köeperwelten" exhibition, a final boundary has been crossed, the boundary safeguarding the respect we owe others. I am stunned that such an exhibition can take place. It may be the logical consequence of things that have happened in the 20th century. There was no stopping when the bodies of millions of living human beings were burnt to ashes, turned into soap, and their skins were made into lampshades. Primo Levi was right--'what happened here, can happen again.'

Despite a lengthy response by exhibition organizer von Hagen that follows this statement, Nachama has made an impressive, lasting discursive connection. It is a connection between the gaze of science and the body as a sublime object; between the discourse of progress and enlightenment, and the atrocities of the Holocaust. Nachama's reproach to the organizers of the exhibition will ring true for many Germans, no matter if they have actually visited the exhibition or only read about it, because the horrors of human experimentation are a more vivid, vital part of the cultural memory in Germany than anywhere else. As a result of a historical self-awareness that ranges from school curricula to freedom of speech legislation, the Holocaust is always already in place for most Germans, providing a powerful and pervasive frame of reference.

Yet while the "Wehrmachtsausstellung" requires no explanation about its connection to the Holocaust, the "Körperwelten" exhibition does. Though Nachama may be pointing out something that strikes most of his readers as reasonable, he himself must act as the interpreter, uncovering the true but hidden significance of the exhibition. If the audience of the "Körperwelten" exhibition responds with fascination and horror, it is not only the horror of seeing the dead put on display as objects that are commonly deemed invisible by social taboo. It is also because the exhibits puts a historical period on display, albeit in an oblique manner, that requires a mediating act of interpretation, which carries the same emotional resonance for most Germans--fascination mixed with horror.

What makes Nachama's reminder of the exhibition's subtext so striking is that it fits into the cognitive pattern Freud associates with the uncanny. The uncanny, according to Freud's eponymous essay, is "in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression" (241). The uncanny makes its appearance in the "compulsion to repeat," which "is lending to certain aspects of the mind their daemonic character" (238), and force "upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable when otherwise we should have spoken only of 'chance'" (237). Freud links the belief in what he calls "the omnipotence of thoughts," which turns chance into fate and coincidence into direct wish-fulfillment, to primal narcissism, "a very early mental stage" (236), either of individual or collective development, during which the boundaries between self and other are not yet permanently drawn. Since Freud maintains that "every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety," notwithstanding the question "whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect" (241), the uncanny return of the repressed produces exactly the type of affect the two exhibitions are after.

While Freud maintains that the anxiety accompanying the uncanny is primarily the effect of the repressive mechanism, he does not explicitly rule out that the content of the uncanny may in fact have been frightening and terrible. This would certainly be true for the structural or thematic similarities Nachama recognizes between the "Körperwelten" exhibition and the most egregious Nazi atrocities. For the uncanny imagination, both events fall into the same category of "things that have happened in the 20th century," calling for an interpretive agent to articulate analogies that are all the more haunting for being only present as latent self-awareness. But to call German historical memory "uncanny," haunted by an unacknowledged past that continues to erupt into the present as a destructive, destabilizing force, would mean misrepresenting a crucial feature of German culture after 1945. It is a culture perfectly willing to discuss its fascist past, confronting it in academic and public discourse, and reliving it with great alarm in its occasional contemporary flirtation with right wing politics. However the past functions in contemporary Germany, it can hardly be called an object of repression.

Though German popular culture is permeated with images of the Third Reich, as the "Wehrmachtsausstellung" and its popularity illustrate, the transfer of the subject matter into public discourse is never smooth. Controversy is always close at hand. Critics of Germany's "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," i.e. its coming to terms with its fascist past, may focus on exactly this ambivalence. To talk constantly about the past may just as well be a mechanism of avoidance and repression, as it may be one of coming to terms with it. A sense of compulsive repetition, an inability or unwilligness to abandon a topic, and a deep psychological investment in the process of repetition may indicate that the trauma is reinscribed and reaffirmed with every repetition rather than surmounted. Critics as diverse as Michael Foucault, who uses the term "incitement to discourse," or Herbert Marcuse, who talks about "repressive desublimation," have tried to account for the fact that Freudian mechanisms of articulating trauma can be channeled back into the larger social and ideological mechanisms of repression they are supposed to overcome. In other words, little can happen when much is said. In order to account for these ambiguities and paradoxes, which arise when a public discussion gains a high degree of depth and complexity, a framework of complex discursive rules is in place, regulating what can be said and how it can be said. Speaking publicly about this subject is possible as long as these discursive rules are accounted for.

While the two exhibitions come with the seal of approval most spectators are willing to grant to all events they can label as "educational," horror films occupy a far more problematic position on the scale of discursive authenticity, gravity, and legitimacy. Making a horror film that utilizes the Third Reich as a source of cinematic thrills would appear to many a dubious proposition. This seems even more paradoxical because horror films represent the one cinematic genre devoted primarily to the sensation with which most regard the Holocaust. But horrors on the screen and horrors in history occur on different ontological levels, a difference that translates into profound ethical differences. The title of the web site for the "Körperwelten" exhibition, for example--"Die Faszination des Echten," the fascination of the Real"--works with the trope of the "Real" as a category exempt from the potentially troubling implications of fiction. Following the maxim that whatever is, is good, the title suggests that whatever can be labeled as “real” cannot be frivolous To look at the real is an ethical and social obligation, while to look at fiction is a choice. Even worse, it is a choice that presupposes that we first avert our eyes from what is real. Whatever has been imagined, and been imagined as a form of commercial popular entertainment, must live up to a different standard of ethics. While the sight of a “real” on-camera atrocity commands fascination, a staged atrocity requires skepticism. Is there not something frivolous about imagining the tropes of horror film and memories of the Third Reich operating side by side? Are there not moral reservations that go even beyond the realization that there are horrors far worse than those imagined by special effects experts, script writers, and directors? Is not the idea itself, to use the Holocaust as a source of cinematic horror, frivolous and tasteless at best, morally reprehensible at worst?

One response to these concerns comes directly from Freud, who suggests that understanding the psychological mechanism underlying the uncanny destroys the effect as much as being exposed to uncanny phenomena on a regular basis. Intellectual demystification and emotional desensitization may be the reason why Freud, speaking of himself in the third person, claims that "it is long that he has experienced or heard anything which has given him an uncanny impression" (220). However, since the uncanny in real life is subject to such attenuation, the burden of keeping the uncanny alive falls onto fiction; "there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life" (249). Since the uncanny is an effect based on the simultaneous or comparative perception of divergent phenomena, writers of fiction are in the privileged position of having complete control over all circumstances. While real life must rely on serendipity, they produce the uncanny at will. Still, this ability to exercise poetic license, according to Freud, is compromised by the degree to which fictional representation complies with genre convention. As soon as the uncanny is produced by rote, the audience's experience is dulled or even erased by overfamiliarity and overexposure.

Relying heavily on the uncanny, the recent German horror film Anatomie, directed by Austrian Stefan Ruzowitzky, goes out on this particular artistic and political limb. The film attempts to formulate a position from which Germany's troublesome past can be articulated as uncanny; it is something that takes place, simultaneously, at a distance and in uncomfortable proximity. Anatomie's advertising and marketing strategies are closely connected to those used by the promoters of the "Körperwelten" exhibition. The controversy surrounding "Körperwelten" also extends to Anatomie, because the film prominently features a number of items from the exhibition as props. For viewers who have missed the public debate surrounding the exhibition itself, or who leave the theater before the closing credits have rolled, the film's web site features a link to the "Körperwelten" site, making a direct connection and integrating both sites as mutual media-tie ins and advertisement. As with so many artifacts in postmodern culture, the textual boundaries of the film and the exhibition respectively must be extended to include each other; information circulates freely from one to the other. The Anatomie site features an interview clip with the film's producer, Andrea Willson, in which she states that "for ethical reasons . . . because the film is ironic and tongue-in-cheek, we decided that we did not want to work with any authentic props." Ruzowitzky himself, on the commentary track of the DVD edition of Anatomie, mentions that what we see in the scenes showing the plastinated bodies of the fictitious Heidelberg University collection are merely latex models. “That was just a little too macabre,” Ruzowitzky continues, “to put real human bodies into the film.” Nonetheless, to Ruzowitzky the first scene in which we see the plastinate bodies constitutes a “high point in terms of props,” showing “what the film is of course all about,” and pointing us back to the “’Korperwelten” exhibition which is so successful at the moment” (Commentary Track). Like Andrea Willson's statement, Ruzowitzky’s commentary cuts both ways. It simultaneously distances the film from the exhibition, and yet reinforces the connection between them. By insisting on their own difference (difference from what? recognizable to whom?) from the items in the exhibition, the copies in the film serve as profitable reminders of their originals in the exhibition.

The plot of Anatomie is easily summarized. Paula Henning, a medical student, receives an invitation to an exclusive surgical program in Heidelberg, one of Germany's oldest universities. While she spends her summer months in the company of eccentric professors and select students, a series of murders and disappearances leads her to discover that the program serves as a front for recruiting and training new members for a secret society calling itself the Anti-Hyppocratics. Part student fraternity, part freemasonry lodge, the group represents a secret history of medicine, a dark double of the Enlightenment, in which research and its imperatives override the ethical priority of easing human suffering. Paula's grim discoveries appear to be the work of the secret society. First, a young man she meets on the train to Heidelberg turns up on her dissection table a few days later. Then her roommate Gretchen is killed, only to resurface in the final scene as a plastinated exhibit. Paula's attempts to uncover the conspiracy meet with incredulity and ridicule from her peers. Gradually, however, she finds out that one of the group's recent initiates, a student named Hein, has embarked on a mad killing spree, which costs Gretchen her life. The Anti-Hyppocratics, who are uncomfortable with seeing themselves exposed to public scrutiny, are appalled by the young man's murders, yet unable to prevent him from killing again, this time one of their own leaders. The film ends with Paula being pursued by Hein through the dark caverns of the pathology building, a chase that ends with Paula killing Hein in self-defense and the disbanding of the Heidelberg chapter of the Anti-Hyppocratics.

The film's setting allows for a play on German history. Heidelberg appears as an idyllic medieval townscape where church bells ring on Sunday mornings. Ruzowitzky himself points out that the scenery is deliberately chosen for its kitschy picturesque charms and photographed in warm red tones throughout (Commentary Track). He has also conveniently eliminated the masses of Japanese and American tourists who would ordinarily appear in the background of each shot in order to de-emphasize the modernity of Heidelberg. This is a town where the student protest of the 1960s did not register, and where social diversity, which may be a characteristic of newer German universities, still has a difficult stand against the conservative elitism of academic culture. Unlike newer German universities (the rough equivalent of the British red brick universities), it is places like Heidelberg in which traditional student fraternities still flourish. They appear in the background of several scenes in the form of heavy-drinking young men wearing traditional fraternity colors and insignia. In a scene that takes place in a traditional student pub, photographs of fraternities adorn the walls. But it is the fictional secret society of the Anti-Hyppocratics that establishes a link between the film's contemporary setting and Germany's dark past. Though the group looks back to a long and distinguished history, it is during the Nazi era that it assumes its definitive shape in the 20th century.

Despite their historical roots, Heidelberg and the Anti-Hyppocratics are anything but ancient history. Inserted into the "gemütlich" Heidelberg townscape are the medical facilities where Paula Henning’s summer seminar takes place. Ruzowitzky chose the postmodern fortress architecture of the Munich Technical University as a location. Its steel and concrete signal aggressive rationality and belligerent global competitiveness, as well as social and economic privilege. Proto-fascist ideology also survives in the structure of the summer program itself, which is based on strict Darwinian selection "to guarantee high standards," as the professor who teaches the seminar, Grombek, puts it. After some participants have been eliminated by rigorous testing, Grombek explains, the remaining students will no longer have to share the available cadavers with quite as many of their fellow students. The dialogue for Grombek plays heavily on the pun inherent in the German idiom of “über Leichen gehen,” to step over bodies, which is usually applied to particularly brutal competition (similar perhaps to the English idiom of a “cutthroat competition”). In another conversation, Grombek lectures Paula about the ethical standards impeding the progress of medical research. He asks her if she knows when "we have won the last Nobel Prize." Though not clearly identified, the "we" in this sentence most likely stands for "we Germans," identifying the nation with its scientific and technocratic elite. Grombek states his critique of national decline by pointing out the cost of the egalitarian public health system in postwar (West) Germany:

Everybody wants to be healed, but nobody wants to pay the price . . . the crimes of the Anti-Hyppocratics: my God, Mengele, the bad judgement ["Entgleisungen," literally "derailments"] of a few Nazi doctors. Of course, they are to be rejected. But the accomplishments of that time are never mentioned, especially in the field of pathology.

Paula's realizes that her own family is entangled in this secret history of Germany when she discovers that one of the plastinated bodies in the Heidelberg collection has been prepared by her own grandfather. Grombek subsequently tells her that her grandfather has been a leading member of the Anti-Hyppocratics. His major accomplishment is the invention of a drug called Promidal, which, injected into a living body, will preserve it perfectly while slowly killing the patient. According to Grombek, this links Paula's grandfather with the Nazis: " . . . your grandfather . . . there were only a few prisoners, fatal cases, inferior life ["unwertes Leben," a term coined by the Nazis] . . . fantastic specimen, prepared while still alive." A role model for his granddaughter, he dies before she has an opportunity to confront him.

In the commentary track to the DVD of Anatomie, Ruzowitzky acknowledges that the inclusion of the Nazi theme caused some controversy. Some people took offense that people like Mengele and the medical experiments during the Third Reich were included into a film intended to entertain. This is something I always found a little strange. I myself would have found it objectionable if they had not been included. If you make a film about medical ethics, and if that film takes place in Germany, and if you don’t refer to the medical experiments during the Nazi era, then it shows a grave misconception around here, demanding that a film meant to entertain must not make reference to anything that has social relevance and is only allowed to entertain. You are only allowed to mention the Nazis in a film that is deeply serious.

At the same time that Ruzowitzky is demanding a cinema that is simultaneously political and entertaining, he also acknowledges that his role model is thoroughly American. In order to express the idea that once “you scratch the surface of this modern technocratic medicine, the sins of the fathers start showing,” a German film can operate comfortably within the parameters of US horror film. Even more, it must operate within these parameters, eschewing the leaden gravity of many German problem films, if it wants to reach a large audience. Though Ruzowitzky claims that he himself takes creative liberties with the genre formula (“The whole film is a mixture: on the one hand, you have to work with the familiar elements of the horror film, . . . on the other hand, you have to try to imagine something new as well . . . ”), he also admits that he has “learned from the Americans. “When it comes to pleasing an audience, for example, Ruzowitzky prides himself on imitating American film in creating the right kind of narrative closure (Commentary Track).

Anatomie shows traces of this ambivalence between the imported genre formula and the local thematic core. While Ruzowitzky’s concern with the uncanny side of German history is written into the film’s narrative with great complexity, the film’s gender politics, for example, are handled according to formula. Anatomie associates the elitism of the Anti-Hyppocratics with the rule of patriarchy, which allows the film to fall back on the genre conventions of the American slasher film of the 1980s. Paula plays the role of the film's "final girl," to borrow Carol Clover's by-now famous term. Having advanced beyond the first stage of the slasher genre, in which the final girl still needs to be rescued by a man (her boyfriend Caspar, actually, ends up being rescued by her when he is prepped by Hein for the plastination procedure), Paula fits Clover's profile. She is "the Girl Scout, the bookworm, the mechanic, . . . not sexually active . . . watchful to the point of paranoia . . . intelligent and resourceful in a pinch" (39). She is, as Clover puts it, "boyish . . . Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine" (40). And she is the one woman who makes it to the end of the film, the one who is granted at least partial triumph over patriarchy. She represses her femininity and emulates the male gender role, which the film associates with scientific rationality, in order to be accepted into the patriarchic professional environment. Sexually inexperienced and reticent, she is defined by her relationships to men--her father and grandfather, her male professors, her male fellow students. Still, it is her fearless investigation that exposes the Anti-Hyppocratics, forcing at least the local chapter of this "disgusting men's club" into disbanding. She kills Hein, a representative of misogyny so extreme that even his fellow members of the "men's club" grow uncomfortable.

The female character who plays the complementary role to Paula is Gretchen, her fellow student and roommate. Gretchen embraces a hyperfeminine role that allows her to manipulate the men around her for her own ends (e.g. she opens the top button of her blouse before she enters the office of one of the male professors assigning students to the summer program). Only in conversation with Paula does Gretchen admit that she is in fact the one person scoring higher on the exams for the Robert Koch Awards than Paula. She keeps this fact from the men around her in order not to intimidate them sexually. In her interactions with these men, however, she displays a degree of aggressiveness that is just as emasculating as her intelligence. In a seduction scene with a fellow student, which ends on one of the tables at the morgue, Gretchen makes a remark about a "burst prostate" she had just been examining on this very table earlier that day. This comment promptly makes her partner lose his erection. "You're my fifth failed attempt," she sighs. Later on, as her partner regains his prowess, she states, "You are all a disgusting men's club, and I am God's revenge!" This is a role of power she clearly cherishes.

Since sexually aggressive women violate male prerogatives, the slasher film tends to dispatch them sooner or later. Consequently, Gretchen becomes a victim of the serial killer Hein, who leaves little doubt as to the pervasive logic of gender relations within which he operates: "Such a beautiful body," he muses, "and such a dirty little whore's mind." Hein turns out to be the revenge of patriarchy upon women who stray from the conservative image of femininity. As long as the patriarchal order is still in place, a woman like Gretchen is bound to fail. Though the film dismisses Hein's misogyny as a sign of his personal pathology and a social agenda in historical decline, and thus exonerates Gretchen from moral condemnation on the part of the audience, she still ends up dead--a plot twist that speaks for itself.

It is only after the patriarchal order has been removed that female self-realization becomes possible. Toward the end of the film, after Paula has dispatched all three male authority figures--the serial killer in her own generation, the unquestioned role model of her grandfather, and the weak role model of her father--she is granted full self-realization. In the film's closing scene she is visiting her boyfriend in the hospital, who is recovering from injuries inflicted by the serial killer Hein. In this scene, Paula displays a sexually aggressive behavior worthy of Gretchen. It is significant that this happens in a hospital room because the seduction scene that leads up to Gretchen's death takes place at the morgue. Both rooms are coded, via their association with science, as spaces of male dominance. While Gretchen's reach for male power fails, Paula has her way with her boyfriend. She is obviously entitled to this behavior, now that she has rid herself of the burdens of the past. Gretchen now serves as a kind of martyr to the cause of social transformation. She is a victim of misreading the historical conditions whose change she brings about through her death.

All of these issues are played out with a degree of heavy-handedness that is surprising, coming from a director as capable as Ruzowitzky. Throughout the film, it seems as if no sexual harassment policies exist in the narrative universe. There are no female professors at all, and all male professors are constantly touching their female students, doling out sexually suggestive comments, and dropping sexist remarks with impunity. Among the male students, there are only a few whose behavior reflects the changes in the sociopolitical climate of at least the last twenty years, whereas female students are represented by the likes of Gretchen or Paula. The flatness and lack of subtlety of the film suggests that Ruzowitzky is working with a part of the formula that does not really interest him. Obviously, his heart is not in this aspect of the film.

This lack of enthusiasm becomes even more conspicuous when compared to the meticulousness with which Ruzowitzky develops the theme of generational conflict. The troubled relationships Paula has with the two figures of paternal/parental authority is announced early in the film. A sequence of three scenes brings first Paula's grandfather, then her father, and to a lesser degree her mother, into the story. Having just learned about coming in second on the Robert Koch Awards, and thus gaining entry to the prestigious summer seminar in Heidelberg, Paula goes first to see her grandfather in the hospital. The significance of this choice, telling her grandfather before telling her father, is obvious. Ruzowitzky shoots the conversation, with Paula sitting on the edge of her grandfather's hospital bed, predominantly in close-ups. This suggests a greater degree of intimacy between the two characters than between her and her father in the subsequent scene. Their conversation is undisturbed, conducted first in the rhetoric of science as Paula tells him about his own test results. As they speak to each other as fellow scientists, he emphasizes his pride in her, considering her as his "successor," and joking about her pulling the plug on him as a favor. "I have been dead since Christmas," he states, "they're just torturing me with the machines I myself bought when I was still head of the department." As one of the many living dead who populate the film—figures who are simultaneously there and not there--Dr. Henning controls Paula more through his symbolic than his physical presence.

The introduction of Paula's grandfather, whom Ruzowitzky grants a first name, directly precedes the scene introducing her father, who goes without one. This is a relatively short scene, which nonetheless moves quickly from a brief moment of well-organized exposition, through a fast build-up of chaotic noise and action, to an explosive climax in which Paula declares her disdain for her father’s career choice. In this scene, we see Paula helping out in her father's practice as he diagnoses as teenage girl with crabs while simultaneously complaining to her about her going to Heidelberg over the summer instead of helping him out as she had promised. As her father sarcastically accuses her of abandoning Hyppocratic ideals in exchange for a technocratic career ("To bring money and fame to the physician is the reason of all human suffering"), the cuts between reverse-angle shots increase in frequency. As the pace of the scene tightens, first a phone is heard ringing in the background, then a heavyset woman with two children, a young man, and the receptionist in tow comes storming in, interrupting the conversation with her complaint about the treatment she is receiving. As the space of the examining room becomes more crowded, the camera also moves in more closely to the group of characters, increasing the viewer's sense of unease with the overcrowding of the frame. The fast pacing of the cuts, as well as the crescendo of voices, comes to a halt when Paula announces that she "doesn't want to end up like . . ." Though she leaves the sentence unfinished, her intentions are clear.

Just as actor Rüdiger Vogler, who plays Paula's father, portrays his character as a colorless, annoyingly meek man, Paula's mother only appears as an attenuated presence in a brief scene that follows. Reduced to a series of clichés, she tries to mediate between her estranged daughter and husband, reinforcing the conventional gender role for Paula as she urges her to make use of her internship as an opportunity to meet a suitable husband. Ruzowitzky undercuts the bourgeois limitations not so much by showing Paula's halfhearted attempts at resistance, but by cutting abruptly from the warm red tones of Paula's bedroom in her parents' house to the cold sterility of the stainless steel interiors of the morgue. Here, the first nameless victim of the Anti-Hyppocrates has just woken up from his paralyzing injection to discover that he has already been partly dismembered. The brutality of the cut from one scene to another, as well as the content of both scenes, illustrates that the modest, private, womb-like world of Paula's parents is no match for a larger sphere of technocratic power and control, which Paula herself is about to enter and own.

The second passage in the film that plays out the generational conflict comes when Paula discovers that her grandfather has died in the hospital. She confronts her own father in the waiting-room, and then goes back to her grandfather's study, where she will discover evidence of his involvement with the Anti-Hyppocrates. Ruzowitzky points out how he discovered that it would be thematically appropriate to alternate between shots of Paula smashing her grandfather's office and Hein sneaking into Grombek's house and killing him. The cross-cutting suggests that an assassination of the overpowering father figure is taking place, one symbolic, the other literal (Commentary Track). What Ruzowitzky overlooks in this explanation is the conversation Paula has with her father, who appears in the doorway as she breaks down amidst the chaos of the smashed up office. He is shot with soft backlighting. His voice is gentle and quiet, especially compared to the preceding noise. He remains standing, hands in his pockets, while she kneels on the floor. He tries to console her that, even though he himself never had any of her talents, he tried to prove that "you can do things differently," a declaration followed by his reassurance that she is strong and can deal with this crisis. As in the preceding scenes, Ruzowitzky denies Paula any sense of confrontation with her father. Even in a scene as crucial as this one, he remains a presence so lacking in solidity that he never offers a point of resistance.

The death of the patriarch, grandfather Ewald Henning, leaves Paula with the problem of renegotiating her relationship with her father from whom she has been alienated because of his rejection of pure scientific research. Paula's father has chosen a modest career as a country doctor. His choice, as the film eventually reveals, was a form of silent protest against his own father's involvement in the inhuman extremes of pure science. It is a choice the film presents clearly in terms of anxieties about the loss of social prerogative. The scene in her father's practice is dominated by a clutter of disrespectful and demanding patients, clamoring for his attention. Reduced to a mere "service provider" in the medical industry, this physician commands none of the respect, authority, and social power of the "Gods in White" that rule over the clean, serene, high-tech space of the Heidelberg morgue and its adjacent warren of labs. Still wearing the insignia of an elite, Paula's father has been socially emasculated, by his own choice.

On one level, the film approves of this choice, because it constitutes a gesture of resistance toward his own father’s generation and the complicity of pure science with Nazi atrocities. On another level, though, the film indicts the effectiveness of this self-abnegation as a silent gesture of protest. The film argues that Paula is only falling back upon her grandfather as a professional and social role model because her own father fails to provide her with the necessary degree of resistance; he is not sufficiently present to serve as a point of reference in her development. In a manner of speaking, Ruzowitzly indicts him for his failure as a patriarch and his voluntary removal from the patriarchic order. Operating self-sufficiently and somewhat self-righteously outside of this social order, he does not command the language in which Paula and her peers communicate. Consequently, his symbolic act of protest fails to register. His life looks like a failure to Paula: a failure of nerves, of ambition, and self-confidence.

The marginal position that Paula's father imposes upon himself represents genuine impotence. Yet it remains questionable whether he silent out of resignation and tacit complicity, or out of despair and outrage. Still, Ruzowitzky leaves no doubt that the rule of old men over the younger generation is still unchallenged in this generation. The Anti-Hyppocratics stand for everything that is wrong with a past that refuses to relinquish its hold on the present. If the generation of Paula's father cannot yet achieve the degree of freedom, diversity, and heterodoxy that Paula will eventually claim for herself, it is because of this ominous silence. It is the silence of repression that makes Freud's uncanny possible. The grandchildren's generation is susceptible to the proto- or crypto-fascist stance of the Anti-Hyppocratics because the previous generation has failed to break this silence. Neither does Paula know that her grandfather is a member of the Anti-Hyppocratics, nor does her father ever tell her why he chose to turn away from pure research. These facts of the family's history only come to light after the grandfather's death, when Paula finally confronts her father in the hospital. After Paula attacks her own father for his silence, he sums up the uncanny recurrence of generational conflict by commenting on his own father, "You hate and love him at the same time. I know the feeling--for the last fifty years."
Paula's attempts to determine the proper narrative history, and her role in it, provide the metaphor for the writing of history. Through her detective work, she writes the history of Germany from the perspective of a generation at a second remove, fifty-five years after the collapse of the Third Reich. Those who know nothing about history, or those who have been misled into a false account of this history, the film seems to suggest, are doomed to repeat it. But the film levels this reproach not only against the grandparents' generation, a generation keeping its fascist tendencies secret within the context of postwar Germany. The target of its critique is primarily the intermediate generation of the parents. Members of this generation are too young to have been directly implicated in the Third Reich. Rather, their role is associated with the reconstruction of Germany after 1945, the “Wirtschaftswunder,” Germany’s economic miracle of bouncing back from its military defeat in 1945. In this manner, the film's portrait of historical change, in skipping a generation, reflects a sense how Germany--West Germany, and subsequently the newly "reunited" Germany--confronts its status as the industrial juggernaut it is today. A highly developed nation, member of the G8, and perhaps the strongest economy in a Europe headed for unprecedented economic integration and consolidation at the end of the 20th century, Germany might realize that it can lay claim to the status of a global elite. For a culture inclined to experience this elite status as an uncanny repetition of its darkest historical period, this moment of recognition is most likely a problematic, ambivalent, and conflicted one.
The conflict, as it appears in Anatomie, centers on Paula's father, perhaps all the more so because, unlike her grandfather, he is the one who survives into the present. He will be around, a constant reminder for Paula of her own family history. Consequently the film identifies him as a member of a specific generation, the student protest movement in the late 1960's. Comparable to the American baby-boomers, the so-called "68ger" have reached middle age by the end of the 20th century. In the process of generational change, they now occupy the same positions of economic, political, and social power they used to challenge. Their generation prides itself, even defines itself to some extent, on having begun the arduous process of critically interrogating self-congratulatory postwar Germany about its Nazi past after the reconstruction fueled by the Marshall Plan during the 1950s. If fascist ideology survives in present-day Germany, Ruzowitzky's film suggests, it is not so much the fault of the last surviving "incorrigibles" (often referred to in German as "Unbelehrbare," those who cannot be taught) within the grandparents' generation. They will die out eventually, making room for a generation that has had time to learn from the catastrophic mistakes of the past. Rather, the failure to eradicate fascist tendencies in the general population, and the resurgence of the neo-Nazi movement, or rather its tenacity and longevity, must be that of the 68ger. Not that they themselves have undergone a secret political conversion over the years; but their claim to be the political and historical “conscience” of postwar Germany flies in the face of a persistent return to extreme right wing positions in German politics. From the perspective of the present it looks as if one generation's self-congratulatory complacency for having rebuilt postwar Germany into a global contender has given way to the subsequent generation's self-congratulatory complacency for having exposed the moral compromises that were made in exchange for economic recovery.
The heated public debate about the past of German foreign minister Joschka Fischer illustrates how deep this rancor against the political self-aggrandizement of the 68ger goes. Starting his political career in the student movement of the late 60s, Fischer moved into political legitimacy with the rise of the Green Party during the 80s. He finally ended up in a ministerial position with the electorial defeat of the conservative Kohl government by the coalition of Social Democrats and Green Party, headed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, in 1998. An elected representative of the State, Fischer came under scrutiny for radical political positions and allegedly violent actions he had advocated during his days in the countercultural environment of the extra-parliamentary opposition. To what degree Fischer was in fact involved in the activities the right-wing press accused him of in 2000 is a question too complex to be addressed here. What is, however, striking about these scandalous accusations is the fact that the subsequent public discussion unequivocally cast Fischer as a generational icon of the 68ger. "Once upon a time," journalist Louis Gerber writes, "the 68ers went on a mission to expose the schizophrenic attitude that their fathers and grandfathers had toward the past, as well as their selective abilities of recollection. Today, similar criticism is being leveled against this politician, who started as a sneaker-wearing yippie ["vom Sponti über den Turnschuh"] and rose to be the elegant foreign minister of the republic" (Cosmopolis). The claims about Fischer's compromised integrity reflect the generational change during and after the 1960s, and the transformation of oppositional political forces into pillars of the State, especially under the neoliberal policies of the current Social Democrat government.

The acerbic tone in Louis Gerber's article, as well as the bitterness of the backlash against the 68ger, stems from a social anxiety triggered by the restructuring of Germany as a the welfare state according to the American model. Privatization and the forces of a, relatively speaking, less regulated market are taking over where the state used to provide essential services. Taking the arena of medicine as its setting, Anatomie articulates these anxieties, and translates them back into the theme of generational change, through its representation of public health care. Again, the film uses as its historical point of reference the Third Reich. When Paula visits her grandfather in the hospital, for example, he asks her facetiously to unplug the machines that keep him alive. For most German viewers, this casual mention of euthanasia, which the film never develops systematically, is sufficient to associate Ewald Henning with the Nazis. Eager to distance itself clearly from its historical predecessor, postwar Germany has always resisted initiatives to introduce euthanasia into public debate. It has justified this resistance by emphasizing the link between mercy killing and Third Reich eugenics. By asking for Paula's help, Ewald Henning identifies himself as a Nazi sympathizer. The same goes for Professor Grombek, who lectures Paula on the "bad judgement" of a few Nazi doctors and the price of scientific progress and global competitiveness.

But instead of developing these references to the Third Reich, the film revels in scenes that show the complete loss of individual agency of patients in their interaction with a highly technological medical establishment. In scenes that feature prominently in the trailers for the film, we see the human guinea pigs of Anti-Hyppocratic experiments wake up on the operating table and discover that their bodies have already been partly dismembered in preparation for the plastination procedure. Ruzowitzky builds scenes in which the patient slowly realizes what fate has in store for him with a primary emphasis on the patient's subjectivity. Though the cold, detached demeanor of the doctors in these scenes may be vaguely reminiscent of the dehumanization of Nazi medicine, Ruzowitzky keeps the focus strictly on the individual body. Instead of working with images of mass murder, which would evoke the Third Reich much more effectively, Anatomie emphasizes the individual’s subjective experience of objectification at the hands of institutionalized medicine. As anaesthicizing muzak plays softly in the background, medical personnel prepare for incomprehensible procedures, joking with each other while ignoring the patient. This is the type of experience most viewers recognize from their own dealings with institutionalized medicine and the health care bureaucracy. The film taps into the unease that stems from being "processed" by an anonymous bureaucracy, from being reduced to a number. Anyone who has gone from being an individual, that supreme bourgeois subject, to becoming "the appendix in bed number six" knows what the film is about.

But even what looks like a general anxiety about the loss of individual agency and self-determination has specific social origins. The film links its critique of social elitism in contemporary German society to the backlash against the 68ger and the social changes championed by their politics. The critique is directed at the slow but systematic dissolution of the welfare state and the inherent ideal of social equality. This process started during the long tenure of Helmut Kohl's conservative Christian Democrat government and continued by the Social Democrats under Gerhard Schröder since taking office in 1998. It has found its most dramatic and contested expression in the changes, all of them touted as “reforms,” of the public health system. These changes revolve largely around the two ideas of limiting access to health services on the one hand, and privatizing health insurance that previously was provided by the state on the other. The official political rhetoric justifying these changes, which plays on the theme of restructuring out of fiscal expediency, fails to acknowledge that access to health services becomes more strongly polarized according to social class. The profit motive of private health insurers favors more rigid screening procedures before signing on customers, denying policies for chronic ailments, and a direct correlation between premiums and services. Though the public health system of West Germany until these deregulations was already granting patients a choice between private and public insurance, the polarization of these two tiers of the system has only accelerated since the 1990s. Not only did health care become more expensive, but the correlation between good health care and the ability to pay its high price has become harder to ignore.

Germans who grew up accustomed to the availability of a well-functioning public health system greeted these changes with a sense of unease. Understandably, they meet the prospect of a higher cost of living, a stronger degree of social polarization, and, consequently, a higher degree of social tension and instability with apprehension. The social polarization taking place within the health care field stands in contradiction to an ideal of social equality, founded upon a numerically and economically strong middle-class, which itself provided the social foundation of West German democracy after the demise of the Third Reich. The dissolution of this middle-class and its prerogatives may not be enough to cause outright panic, or to justify fears that Germany is returning to conditions resembling those of the Third Reich, but it is sufficient cause of a sense of social unease. As long as the link between the economic security of this middle-class and its relationship toward the State remains unexamined--that is to say, as long as it collapses into a vague ideal of "democracy"--the anxieties that are triggered by social change appears equally vague and nebulous.

Anatomie also plays on these social anxieties in its portrayal of higher education. The cutthroat competition in Paula’s summer seminar is a reflection of the same principle of social stratification that is visible in the restructuring of the public health system. During the 1990s, more inroads than ever were made to abandon the traditional German system of tuition-free universities, and move toward the American model of opening the educational market to private universities, of existing state universities starting to level tuition, and of all universities being ranked nationally. As access to health insurance is increasingly contingent on the patient’s personal resources, so higher education is becoming increasingly expensive. It is not so much that competition was never a factor in German higher education before. Similar to the educational systems of other developed nations, German universities have always produced and affirmed social difference. But for the most part, the public discourse on social difference always featured the trope of egalitarianism. What does trigger social anxieties in the 1990s is the fact that the emphasis on exclusionary measures, on hierarchical ranking and social stratification, has become a measure of pride; that the abandonment of egalitarian ideals can be openly articulated.

What adds to the poignancy of Anatomie is that the model for many of the social reforms conducted by conservative and neoliberal goverments in Germany over the last twenty years is the US. American economic policies are often cited as exemplary responses to the much decried New World Order. Anatomie exploits the social anxieties triggered by the social fallout of such policies, but it does so by using the conventions of American horror film. Moreover, the film is the first product of the German Columbia, a

branch of the huge American studio, which is trying to go a new route here. They no longer want to produce in the US alone, but want to create new locations for production in Hong Kong, Brazil, England, and Germany, in order to tell stories that fit these respective regions, utilizing local stars and appealing to local audiences. (Ruzowitzky Commentary Track)

Skeptics may argue that Ruzowitzky underestimates the degree to which the Hollywood aesthetic can assert itself over the localized agenda. His experimentation with the rules of American horror film operates safely within the parameters of the genre, never challenging its fundamental ideological presuppositions. An American film “made in Germany” is still an American film. To the degree that Ruzowitzky conforms to genre conventions, Anatomie may appear as a double symptom of the Americanization of contemporary Germany, once in regard to its content, and once in regard to the circumstances of its production. The way in which Ruzowitzky’s “final girl” stands triumphant in the end suggests that the film ultimately embraces the brave new world of global technocratic elites, which it conjures up in order to spook its audience (just a little, and just for a little while). Chastened but undeterred, Paula Henning clears out the cobwebs of history (the grandfather’s Nazi past), and does away with the futile leftist pretensions of radical political critique (the father’s anti-establishment stance). Anatomie allows Paula’s generation to feel entitled to the same self-congratulatory complacency for which it condemns its predecessors.

It is important to remember that Paula’s primary accomplishment is the neutralization of Hein, who mistakenly assumes that he acts with the approval of his fellow conspirators. Ultimately, Hein is the monster, not the Anti-Hyppocratics. They come across as a pompous assembly of old men incapable of controlling the extremist fringe within their organization. The local chapter of the Anti-Hyppocratics is only disbanded as a side effect of Hein's murders. Hence, in the final scene, two of Paula's fellow students talk about their plans now that the summer program has ended with the demise of the Anti-Hyppocratics. One mentions rumors that another chapter of the society still operates in Berlin, while the other has decided to take over her father's private practice. Government supervision, she explains, is not quite as strict in the case of private practices, and thus permits some degree of illegal scientific experimentation. The morgue attendant interrupts their conversation. “How’s it going?” he asks. "Same as always," is their answer. This is a wry hint that the ethical problems of professional competitive science are far from resolved, and that the technocratic elite controlling the institution will continue to provide a safe haven for fascist ideology. Paula might have succeeded in exposing the secret machinations of the past in the present, but not much has changed inside a scientific establishment that keeps an eye on profit margins and considers patients primarily as paying consumers of technological goods and services.

A film like Anatomie participates in a critical public discussion to the degree that it discovers the causes of present social anxieties in the effects of present social, economic, and political conditions. Its impact on this discussion is lessened by the extent to which the discussion of the film limits itself to the use of the Third Reich as a device for conjuring up the uncanny. Any analysis of the film that limits itself to the uncanny falls short of the film's complexity because it turns all anxieties Ruzowitzky plays on into one amorphous, nebulous mass. Such analysis would take the risk of mistaking the film's trope for social unease for the actual cause of social unease. The unresolved past might be a category in which Germans experience the restructuring of the state, individually and collectively. As I said before, the Third Reich still constitutes a crucial aspect of Germany's historical identity. But this unresolved past is hardly the cause of these changes. The causes lie in the present.

Employing the trope of the historical uncanny, Anatomie demonstrates that a horror film using the Third Reich does not have to be about the Third Reich. Far from being forgotten, the Third Reich still provides potent metaphors for historical changes and social conflicts. But in itself it no longer commands center stage. Over fifty years after the end of WWII, the sources of anxiety for contemporary German audiences lie elsewhere. Compared to the "Wehrmachtsausstellung," therefore, the "Körperwelten" exhibition appears as the more relevant of the two. It describes the splits and ruptures in Germany's national and cultural identity. To the extent that most attempts to hide the atrocities committed by the German army are actually part of the exhibition itself, maybe even its theme, the Wehrmachtsausstellung presents a historical reality that is obvious and plainly visible. It openly announces its intentions, demanding revisions of official history that would replace falsifications with historical accuracy.

In contrast, the Körperwelten exhibition deals in ambiguities. The connection between Gunther von Hagen's plastinated bodies and the experiments of a Mengele cannot be empirically proven. It rests upon a psychological association triggered by a traumatic history. This distinction between historical facts and subjective experience does not imply that a psychological reality, shared by large groups of people, is subjugated to a more narrow view of historical facts, and thus declared invalid. After all, is it not the psychological impact of the Third Reich on contemporary German society that is far more significant after more than fifty years than its concrete empirically measurable consequences? As time passes, and the generation of those directly involved, either as victims or as perpetrators, passes on, the historical event is transformed into a variety of social practices revolving around memory and intersubjectivity.

How strikingly omnipresent the backlash against the 68ger is becomes clear in some of the conservative contributions to the public debate surrounding it. Not even a topic like the Wehrmachtsausstellung is exempt from it. In the newspaper Die Welt, historian Jörg Friedrich writes,

Around 1968, academically raised youths got their kicks from blaming their professors, judges, generals, government officials, and industrialists for their lives during the Third Reich. To the surprise of the world, these elites had already severed themselves from this past. Only their children could not be convinced. They, in turn, unmasked West Germany as a refuge of old Nazis . . . Their unmasking has, to the present day, remained the profession of their descendants.

Having sounded the by now familiar note of denouncing the 68ger as self-congratulatory posers, Friendrich goes on to explain why the debate about the Wehrmachtasaustellung could become so heated. "Having failed at the leftwing makeover of the future, this aged youth movement is now making over the past. Now it knows how to proceed. In 1989, they knew exactly how a German would have had to behave in 1939." In other words, it is the 68ger yet again who deserve our scorn, and not the former soldiers of the Wehrmacht who are being exposed for their crimes in the exhibition. As much as one might disagree with Friedrich's rhetorical maneuver, he does have a point that is difficult to dismiss. "The united Germany," he concludes, "is a historical subject we do not mentally correspond to." It is this uneasy fit that makes Ruzowitzky's Anatomie an important film for this moment in German history.