The Body Keeps the Source: Adaptation and Embodiment in the New German Cinema 1980-1993

This dissertation contributes to adaptation studies and German film studies by examining how filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema mobilize adaptation to render perceptible the relationships between historically distant texts and contemporary experience in film. While adaptation studies has increasingly moved beyond questions of fidelity and textual equivalence, comparatively little attention has been paid to the formal means through which adaptations render those relationships visible on screen. I argue that adaptation establishes relationships among texts, bodies, aesthetic traditions, and historical moments, and that these relationships become perceptible through cinematic form, embodied performance, and the materiality of production design. Focusing on German cinematic works that were produced between 1980 and 1993, the dissertation examines how filmmakers turned to adaptation to confront unresolved histories of fascism, colonialism, marginalized violence and discrimination, and shifting national identities by bringing an array of older texts into encounters with the German present. The dissertation develops this argument across three case studies: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), Ulrike Ottinger’s Freak Orlando (1981) and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (1984), and Michael Stock’s Prinz in Hölleland (1993). Across these films, I identify three adaptive-embodied modes: seriality, accumulation, and doubling. Rather than constituting a fixed taxonomy for reading adaptations, the modes I identify describe distinct formal styles through which each filmmaker’s adaptation establishes specific relationships between the historical materials it adapts and the present. The first chapter argues that Fassbinder transforms Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz into a serialized encounter with the nation’s unresolved historical trauma of German fascism. This chapter argues that Fassbinder adapts Döblin serially. That is, he adapts the novel into a television serial structured upon several layers of repetition: narrative, cinematic devices, and embodied performances. The repetition of female bodies, visually recurring acts of violence, formal patterns of return, and the rhythms of the television serial together establish an adaptive mode through which the historical repetition of German fascism becomes perceptible in the present. The second chapter argues that Ottinger’s adaptations operate through the adaptive-embodied mode of accumulation. In her films, she assembles adaptations by accumulating an anachronistic array of literary texts, theatrical traditions, colonial archives, painting, fashion, and technology within densely layered cinematic worlds. There, Ottinger’s actors’ bodies become the sites where these heterogeneous materials accumulate, bringing otherwise disparate histories and aesthetic traditions into relation while preserving their tensions and contradictions. Her adaptations are highly critical of history and mainstream media, and these critiques largely surface in her treatment of bodies and surfaces. The third chapter examines the adaptive-embodied mode of doubling in Michael Stock’s Prinz in Hölleland. The film adapts through doubling, pairing characters, bodies, and parallel narrative worlds that continually mirror one another without ever fully coinciding. By placing Grimm fairy tales, Baroque Trauerspiel, and realist depictions of post-reunification Berlin into continuous dialogue through doubling, Stock’s film attempts to register AIDS-era melancholy and queer grief. Together, these chapters argue that adaptation establishes formal relationships through which historically distant texts, traditions, and histories become materially perceptible within the filmmaker’s present. Across these films, bodies consistently serve as a primary site where those relationships that adaptation creates take cinematic form, making adaptation itself perceptible as a mode of generating historical critique.