Judging by Kluge's films, the early 1980s has little different atmosphere from the previous decade. The problems of the “lead” years have gone into the shadow, but the problems have not gone anywhere. They're even more global. This film is all about the nuclear threat, but it’s not about it at all. If two decades earlier Kurosawa filmed about the fear of nuclear winter in general, the fear driving mad by its inconcretion and ubiquity, then Kluge is completely specific. The film explores the role of West Germany in the confrontation between the two superpowers.
And the conclusions are inconsolable. Germany is nothing more than a bargaining chip. Germany is nothing more than a convenient territory, a landfill where the last world war will begin. Living in the USSR, everyone somehow thought that if it starts, then immediately with the “overpooling” between the Soviets and the States, so you quite suddenly realize, watching this film, that everything may not be quite so.
And Kluge is right. Superpowers deserve such a prefix not only because of their military power but also because of their vast territory. Germans do not have to wait for such luxury. You can roll their native country into a radioactive rink more than once, or even twice. Paradoxically, the film is politically left-wing and confirms an idea popularized by the far right in the 1920s: that the country has no real independence. The rattling American contingent does not submit to its authorities, and neither the visiting pacifist nor the German chancellor traveling on a tour of the Bundeswehr himself will wander to the land on which American military bases are located. This is not the land of the Germans, this is the land of the Americans.
In his revision of the international and domestic situation, Kluge is consistent and consistent. But the recipe that worked perfectly in Germany in the fall doesn’t work as convincingly. Keep in mind that both films are the result of teamwork, and War and Peace lacks decent material. Moreover, game exhibitions about the post-nuclear fate of the fatherland look frankly ridiculous and very unsuccessfully shade the signature sarcasm of the father of the new German cinema.
But the film is instructive historically. Of course, artists never really influence politics. This is nothing more than an illusion of media presence. However, it is interesting to observe not the boringly tendentious Soviet version of anti-war art (the solar world - Dada, Dada, nuclear explosion - Fet, Fet, Fet), but the living developing aesthetics. Kluge is one of the best documentaries in history with his ability to capture the “spirit of the times” and leave it to posterity.