Another possible translation of “Abschied Von Gestern” might be Farewell From Yesterday perhaps more useful to assist the viewer understanding this sixty-year-old film restored to a 4K format from its original 35 mm format.
Anita G. (Alexandra Kluge) was born in 1937 to Jewish parents living in Leipzig, escaping communist East Germany (GDR) to West Germany (DDR) in 1957 feeling unsafe as her family had owned factories making her stained by capitalism.
The film chronicles her time in the DDR. Shortly after arrival in the DDR, she is sentenced for theft of a colleague’s jacket and its contents and sentenced to a prison term. Ironical escaping the communist “prison” of the GDR she is placed in an actual prison in the DDR!
Anita G. fails to integrate into DDR’s society jumping from one disaster to another quite clearly a liar, thief, swindler, shoplifter and adulteress. Perhaps it started back in the GDR being expelled from her school in 1945.
She is unlucky in love. In fact, she is so maladjusted she fails at everything.
“Abschied Von Gestern” is an extraordinary, complicated film to watch if you are searching for its “deep meaning” which after two viewings I am struggling with. Countless abstractions and intellectual meanderings are thrown the viewers way but perhaps it is advisable not to “look for trouble” saddled with the knowledge the film was regarded as a groundbreaking milestone of New German Cinema.
Setting aside intellectual baggage the film chronicles the bumpy ride through DDR’s society by a bad seed. There is some talk about this film that her upbring in the GDR left her ill equipped to transition into DDR society, but I do not accept that. As George Thorogood sings, she is “bad to the bone” and the badness is in action wherever Anita G rests her head.
“Abschied Von Gestern” has stood the test of time and remains fresh and in many respects largely incomprehensible if one is fixated on interpreting “intellectual tidbits” laid throughout the film like breadcrumbs in Hansel and Gretel. Lighten up I say and enjoy the understandable and the “ununderstandable”. That scene with the university professor is hilarious; highly intellectual man painfully unable to answer a simple practical question!
Anita G. is a prisoner not of yesterday but of today. Is that what the final pictorial montage is attempting to convey that the memories of concentration camps and the Berlin Wall imprison much of the German psyche or have I stepped on an intellectual landmine of an overactive imagination.
Pursuing this further is Anita G. and the entire film to be compared to the SS Molly Aida in Werner Herzog’s 1982 “Fitzcarraldo”?
Love the quasi-silent film and documentary influences here.
Directed by Alexander Kluge.
RKS German Film Rating 94/100
