9 Breaking Borders

Niklaus Schilling’s Critical Spy Drama Der Willi-Busch-Report

Lisa Haegele

A lesser-known figure in the New German Cinema (NGC), the internationally acclaimed art cinema movement in West Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s, Swiss-born filmmaker Niklaus Schilling directed six feature films between 1971 and 1982. His films garnered critical praise upon their premieres, including both spy dramas, Der Willi-Busch-Report (The Willi Busch report, 1979) and Der Westen leuchtet! (The West glows, 1982, released in English as The Lite Trap). Der Willi-Busch-Report received the first Max Ophüls Award at the eponymous film festival in Saarbrücken, Germany in 1980, and The Lite Trap earned the prestigious German Film Award in Silver for Wolfgang Dickmann’s camerawork in 1982 (Jansen 1980; Blumenberg 1982). Despite their achievements Schilling’s films—and the director’s oeuvre at large—have received little scholarly attention compared to the works of the more celebrated NGC auteurs, including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Alexander Kluge, and Werner Herzog.

Like other films in the NGC—Wenders’s road movies and Fassbinder’s melodramas, for example—Schilling’s spy films reappropriate genre conventions in offering critical portrayals of contemporary German society and politics. Der Willi-Busch-Report, Schilling’s first spy film, addresses the topic of espionage at the inner German border, an issue largely unaddressed in the NGC.1 Set in a rural West German border town, Schilling’s tragicomedic film adapts a genre popularized in Cold War Europe by the phenomenally successful James Bond films and their numerous spin-offs. While the Bond films offer riveting stories of espionage between real and fictitious world powers, Der Willi-Busch-Report represents spying and surveillance in ways that bring into relief nationally specific problems rooted in the historical reality of West Germany in the late 1970s. By linking surveillance—and the climate of paranoia that it generates—to issues in West German media politics, Schilling’s film challenges the Cold War borders and binaries that the Bond films tend to reify through their extravagant tales of international conspiracy and intrigue. The film uses irony to demystify Bondian spy fantasies, foregrounding instead the sociopolitical and lived reality of the border in West Germany. I suggest that the film therefore does political work by breaking down the ideological clout of Cold War boundaries and allegiances that popular spy films of the era reinforce.

Ironizing “Popular Geopolitics”

Der Willi-Busch-Report centers on Willi Busch (Tilo Prückner), a reporter named after the famous German poet and satirist Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), whose rhymes Willi recites to himself throughout the film.2 Shot in Wanfried, a border town in Hessen, the film is set in a fictitious provincial village named Friedheim on the inner German border. There Willi works for the Werra-Post, a local newspaper company that he inherited from his late father and shares with his sister, Adelheid. Since Germany’s division the Werra-Post has struggled financially, having lost the majority of its readership to the East. Once located at the center of Germany, Friedheim is now a remote, sleepy village on the outermost perimeter of the new West Germany. To sell more copies of his newspaper, Willi devises, stages, and publishes stories that might attract readers. For example he steals telephones from telephone booths and warns readers about a “telephone vandal.” After overhearing a little girl recite fairy tales to a flock of sheep, he concocts the story that she is a “miracle child” who has prophesized the reunification of Germany. Later, when his old school friend Arno Rösler dies of a presumed heart attack, he deposits his body at the border, claiming in an article that he was a spy. Soon thereafter two more mysterious deaths occur in Friedheim: the corpse of an Austrian man named Baumbauer washes up ashore, and Sir Henry, Willi’s elderly friend and a veteran of the Second World War, dies at a bus station of what appears to be a gunshot wound to the chest. Willi then becomes paranoid, convinced that Friedheim is indeed home to a nest of spies. When he finds that Munzel, his pet rabbit, has gone missing, Willi panics and takes off to the border to find him. Once there he threatens to shoot the helicopters and police who have come to detain him. Despite the attempts of Adelheid and his girlfriend, Rose-Marie, to placate him, he faints, and paramedics load him onto a stretcher and carry him off to an ambulance. In the final shot of the film, a border patrol helicopter flies off into the distance.

In one of the few scholarly treatments of Der Willi-Busch-Report, Inga Scharf convincingly analyzes the film’s “critical geopolitics,” a term that she borrows from Gearóid Ó. Tuathail in his book Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. The “critical geopolitics” of Schilling’s film, Scharf argues, foreground the “constructedness” and shifting nature of geopolitical boundaries (2007, 182). By publishing sensationalist border narratives in the local press, Willi recenters Friedheim from the national periphery by drawing in tourists and facilitating a “new sense of place” in a newly vibrant town (189). In an attempt to counter Friedheim’s “sealed geopolitical fate” on the outermost margins of West Germany, Willi shifts Friedheim back to the center by manipulating its image in popular media, portraying it as an important national site full of wonder and intrigue (189). Willi’s newspaper thus represents a potentially subversive force in its ability to renegotiate and reset the official political boundaries mapped out by global leaders immediately after the Second World War.

But even though Willi uses sensationalist stories to relocate Friedheim from the nation’s margins back to the heart of Germany, his spy stories nevertheless exploit the border between East and West Germany as a site of danger and conspiracy, through which he paradoxically reinforces its power in the public imagination rather than undermines it. In an opposite move to its titular protagonist, Schilling’s film critiques Cold War popular spy fictions, demonstrating how they reify political borders and binaries by instigating the fear and paranoia to which Willi ultimately succumbs. Adding to Scharf’s reading of the film, I argue that the film’s “critical geopolitics” therefore are based not only on its staging of the complex shifts and negotiations of political boundaries but also on its ironic commentary on and subversion of “popular geopolitics”—a term I explore below in the context of the James Bond films—in the spy stories circulating in mainstream media. Schilling’s film, therefore, demonstrates how the NGC is as much concerned with German national politics, as Scharf notes, as it is with the politics of representation, particularly in the mainstream press and cinema.

Building Borders: “Popular Geopolitics” and the Cold War James Bond Films

At the time the NGC was emerging in the mid-1960s, the spy thriller had become one of the most prominent film genres in Europe and the United States, resulting in the phenomenon known as “Spy Mania” (Classen 2011).3 More specifically “Bondmania,” referring to the James Bond media franchise, quickly spread from the United Kingdom to other parts of the world (Bennett and Woollacott 2003, 20). Dr. No (Young 1962), the first British-American film adaptation of Ian Fleming’s spy novels, was an immediate and surprising international success, leading to a series of lucrative Bond films and spin-offs in the 1960s and 1970s (Bennett and Woollacott 2003, 20). The James Bond–inspired Kommissar X (Commissioner X) and Jerry Cotton series in West Germany—two strands of the European “Eurospy” Bond knockoffs—attracted millions of cinemagoers in the 1960s and continued to enjoy television reruns through the 1970s (Osteried 2016). In East Germany, too, Bond-styled spy heroes worked in the service of their governments in popular films and television productions, such as János Veiczi’s film For Eyes Only—streng geheim (For eyes only—strictly confidential, 1963, released in English as For Eyes Only) and the television series Das unsichtbare Visier (The invisible visor; Hagen 1973–79).4 The James Bond films, as Martin Rubin argues, dominated the spy genre at the time both commercially and conceptually (1999, 132). Bond functioned as the standard by which other cinematic and television spy heroes were defined, whether as his imitations, “mock-Bonds,” or “anti-Bonds” (Bennett and Woollacott 2003, 26).

While the spy thriller genre has enjoyed popularity since the late nineteenth century, it witnessed a boom during the Cold War, an era in which secret agents on both sides of the Iron Curtain infiltrated the enemy state to become the subject of media attention and widespread public speculation (Classen 2011). After a spate of relatively unsuccessful and stylistically muted “anti-Communist” spy films in the 1950s, the British-American Bond series embedded its Cold War ideologies in cinematic spectacles that foregrounded action, sexual innuendo, and technological thrills (Rubin 1999, 127). While Fleming’s early novels are distinctly anti-Communist—the primary villains are Communists working for SMERSH, a dangerous Soviet counterintelligence agency—the films take a more ambivalent political stance. Following the producers’ suggestion that the screen adaptations be “depoliticized” in order to increase their financial viability worldwide, the Bond films “marginalize” the topic of the Cold War, giving it, according to Rubin, a “friendlier, less threatening aspect” (Bennett and Woollacott 2003, 23; Rubin 1999, 130). Replacing the Communists in the novels, Bond’s enemies are megalomaniacs driven by a more abstract desire to rule the world. In addition the films take place not in the hot spots of the Cold War but in the exotic and more peripheral locations, such as Jamaica, Switzerland, Venice, the Bahamas, and Japan (Rubin 1999, 130). For Christoph Classen the Cold War functions as a “shadowy backdrop” to the action in the largely “depoliticized” Bond action thrillers (2011).

But the politics of the Cold War crucially shape the narratives of the early Bond films, even if the films refrain from addressing contemporary politics directly. The dualistic conflict between a “good” and an “evil” foreign power, for example, clearly evokes the binary between East and West at the height of the Cold War, an observation that Umberto Eco (2003) made in his famous analysis of the Manichean world order in Bond. The Bond adventures were always, as Klaus Dodds remarks, “sensitive and sensitized by the prevailing Cold War conflict,” despite the producers’ alleged intentions to “depoliticize” the series (2007, 77). The early Bond films “helped define the Cold War zeitgeist” by introducing various “geographies of danger” that “reflected and anticipated Cold War political allegiances” and adversaries (Hughes 2016, 78). Far more than mere exotic “backdrops” to action, the locations in the Bond films—though set on the peripheries of the Cold War conflict—“actively contribute to the geo-graphing of the Cold War as a series of Manichean struggles between good and evil” (Dodds 2007, 77). Contributing to and reinforcing the “ideological formation of the two blocs” (Nikitin and Baumgarten 2011), the Bond films engage a form of “popular geopolitics,” a term used by Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton to describe films that “provide a way of solving (geo)political uncertainty . . . through building moral geographies and making clear the lines of division between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (2007, 6). The Bond films reinforce Cold War ideologies precisely by encoding their battles between “good” and “evil” within geopolitical terms. “Good” and “evil,” in other words, are divided along geographical boundaries that Agent 007 traverses in his missions to protect an “innocent community functioning in a Manichean world” (Lawrence 2011, 339).

Indeed, the early Bond films convey procapitalist and anti-Communist ideologies that would be difficult to overlook in retrospect. Though politically ambiguous Bond’s villains nevertheless retain some affiliation to the Eastern Bloc. Hollywood, as Rachel Hughes asserts, rarely passed up opportunities to capitalize on popular perceptions of the Soviet “Evil Empire” (2016, 78). In Dr. No, for example, the German Chinese supervillain attempts to sabotage the American space program by disrupting missile launches, recalling in some respects the Cuban missile crisis conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1962. In You Only Live Twice (Gilbert 1967), SPECTRE, an unnamed Asian government evocative of “Red China,” leads an underground organization modeled after the Soviet SMERSH in Fleming’s novels (Rubin 1999, 130). In From Russia with Love (Young 1963), the Soviets reprise their role as the primary villains. Never failing to realize his ambitious goals, Bond represents the strength in individualism that lies at the heart of capitalist ideology, while the films promote consumerism by boasting an ever-more riveting display of technological advancements over the course of the decade, from faster cars to more impressive gadgets and weapons. The Bond films reveal Cold War tensions in their heroic portrayal of a Western counterintelligence agent who consistently saves the world from a threat posed by a powerful and ideologically opposing foreign enemy. Emphasizing borders, boundaries, and polar opposites, the Bond films in the 1960s represent and reaffirm Cold War ideologies, even if only implicitly.

Although the Bond films tend to support dominant ideologies, they also incorporate ample scenes of irony and self-mocking quips, which in many genre parodies work to destabilize and break apart the ideological prowess of the original text. Unlike many genre parodies, however, Bond’s irony serves to fix rather than upset or call into question the cultural purchase of the Bond franchise, as Kevin Hagopian (2009) argues. Referring to Dan Harries’s notion of the “canonization of parody,” Hagopian makes the claim that the “Eurospy” Bond parodies of the 1960s—and the Bond films themselves, which parody the novels—provide contrastive settings to the originals in ways that bring Cold War geopolitics into sharp relief. In this way the films, unlike subversive parodies, reinforce the ideological “stability of the original” (Hagopian 2009, 23). That is, the Bond parodies are “characterized by ironic inversion” but significantly “not at the expense of the parodied text” (26). Hagopian argues that the “self-conscious recruitment of humor [in Bond] . . . opened a space into which parody could insert itself without undercutting what the film denominates as its ‘serious’ material, that is, its espionage plot, which, however improbable, still obeys rules of causality, norms of character construction, and patterns of suspenseful plotting characteristic of the realistic film narrative” (29). In an ironic twist, irony in the Bond films and their parodies works to secure rather than unsettle the cultural authority of Bond; the films function ultimately as a conservator of the very consumer-capitalist values and Manichean worldview that they mock.

By the time Schilling’s Der Willi-Busch-Report premiered in West Germany in 1979, the spy film popularized by the James Bond series was a well-established genre. In 1966 Alfred Hitchcock lamented that the espionage genre had already become cliché (Hagopian 2009, 25). Featuring more special effects, impressive technologies, and humorous gags, the Bond films remained popular in the 1970s and early 1980s. In West Germany Moonraker (Gilbert 1979) and Octopussy (Glen 1983) won Golden Screen awards for attracting at least three million viewers (“Moonraker” n.d.; “Octopussy” n.d.). While Cold War politics inform the narratives of the Bond films in the 1960s, they take center stage in the Bond blockbusters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, reflecting in part an increased hostility in Cold War relations and the reemergence of anti-Communist rhetoric under the right-wing governments of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (Chapman 2000, 203).

In an interview published in the press book to his later espionage drama The Lite Trap, Schilling stressed: “For today’s German absurdities one needs a lot of irony” (Sprengel n.d., “Sein und Scheinen”). Unlike the irony in Bond, Der Willi-Busch-Report challenges the Manichean worldview propagated by its Bond contemporaries through its use of irony. By creating narrative ambiguities and subverting spy film tropes in the mise-en-scène, the film draws attention to the issues of surveillance, hysteria, and paranoia in West Germany shortly after the German Autumn in late 1977, when the Red Army Faction (RAF) conducted a series of terrorist attacks that culminated in the murder of business executive and former SS officer Hanns Martin Schleyer. Schilling’s film relocates the conflict from the international to the (West German) national; the problem is not “them” but “us.” Indeed, as I argue below, the film frames Cold War “popular geopolitics” as a problem itself within the precarious political climate of late 1970s West Germany. A spy story about spy stories, Der Willi-Busch-Report reinterprets a genre that it deems grossly at odds with contemporary West German reality.

Spy Fantasies? Narrative Ambiguities in Der Willi-Busch-Report

Although Willi’s spy stories are fictional, the opening sequence of the film establishes a sense that Willi is in fact being surveilled, which never completely erodes through the course of the film. While Willi dozes in front of the border, a narrator in voice-over introduces us to him, citing his full name, current location, and the day’s date. As the narrator lists other important dates and events in Willi’s personal and family history, the camera slowly tracks toward and behind Willi as though not to awaken him. The narrator accordingly reduces his voice to a whisper when the camera circles around to face Willi. Concluding his story of how Willi had come to inherit the family business, the narrator explains that Willi’s parents died in the early 1960s, leaving behind the “burdensome inheritance with their children, Adelheid and Wilhelm Busch.” The moment he utters the word “Busch,” Willi, startled, sits up and looks around him as though he has heard his name. Finding nothing, he lies back down and looks into the sky, where the opening credits appear.

While the presence of the border already invokes an atmosphere of surveillance, the opening sequence enhances this atmosphere through its use of voice-over and camerawork. From specific dates, names, and places to details about Willi’s family history, we realize that the narrator is knowledgeable about Willi and his background, sharing this information with us while observing his “subject.” Aligned with the perspective of the narrator, who remarks, “That is Wilhelm Busch,” the camera slowly approaches Willi from behind in one long take, creating the effect that the narrator—and by extension, the viewer—is spying on Willi. Narrating Willi’s history from offscreen, the voice-over is omnipresent and omniscient, qualities that Mary Ann Doane has attributed to the voice-over technique (2004, 379). Disembodied and not locatable, the voice-over bears authority over the image, thereby enhancing the sense that Willi is being surveilled by an unidentifiable but powerful entity.

Approaching Willi in one smooth shot, the Steadicam camera—at the time a new cinema technology that steadies the camera mounted to the body of its operator—is both embodied and disembodied at once. While it moves freely toward Willi like a body in the diegesis, its movements are conspicuously smooth, as though hovering in air. In this way the Steadicam evokes a drone-like technology. As though operated by the narrator at a different location, the mobile camera enters Willi’s nearest proximity but remains unseen by Willi. Playing on popular associations of espionage with technological advancements, the camerawork in the sequence reinforces the impression that Willi’s surveillant is an all-seeing authority with a limitless purview. Willi’s disembodied “spy” can see everything without being seen. When he thinks he hears his name, Willi immediately looks forward toward the border, a gesture suggesting his intimation that a spy from across the border is watching him.

Appearing on-screen at the end of the opening sequence, the title of the film, Der Willi-Busch-Report, implicitly refers either to a surveillance “report” about Willi that the film represents or to Willi’s own journalistic “reports” about Friedheim. The title thus reflects the ambiguity that lies at the heart of the film, namely, whether spies are pursuing Willi. Flying off into the distance, the border-patrol helicopter at the end of the sequence serves as a reminder that even if Willi is not being surveilled, the inhabitants of Friedheim are immersed in a climate of surveillance that the border generates. With the constant presence of patrol officers surveying the border both on and aboveground, the border town appears to be a hotspot for espionage activity, whether real or perceived.

Once Willi begins to publish his spy stories, several moments in the film suggest that his spies are not merely imaginary. For example he finds that someone has slashed the tires of his Messerschmitt bubble car; later a driver runs him off the road in a blue Mercedes, a car that he recognizes from an earlier moment in the film. Although the film does not offer a clear motive explaining why either the East or the West German secret service would surveil him, one might surmise that the Friedheim police are observing him to determine whether he is indeed the “telephone vandal” or if he is staging corpses—and perhaps even killing people—for his stories. The film also leaves open several possible explanations for the mysterious deaths of Arno Rösler, Baumbauer, and Sir Henry. Were they really spies? Or are Willi’s sensationalist stories creating a climate of fear that is leading to violence? As more tourists come to Friedheim—whose name ironically alludes to peace—to see the “miracle child,” is more violence an inevitable result of more people in the town? Or is Willi chalking up mere coincidences as acts of espionage? By refusing to explain whether Willi’s spies are simply fantasy, Schilling’s film sustains the “(geo)political uncertainty” that the Bond films typically seek to solve. Foregrounding ambiguity over clarity, Der Willi-Busch-Report undermines the rigid binaries that undergird the central conflicts in popular Cold War spy films. The film breaks down the border further by drawing attention to the climate of surveillance that invokes Willi’s fears in the West, thus connecting lived experiences in East and West Germany.

Schilling’s film uses ambiguity to critique the exploitation of spy narratives in popular media during the Cold War. These stories, the film suggests, skew the public’s perception of reality, fostering the illusion that one is under threat by a foreign enemy, however vaguely conceived. Like the financially motivated Bond franchise, Willi invents spy stories in order to keep his business running. Soon, though, he is seduced by his own stories, leading him to take up arms against his imaginary enemies at the end of the film. In this respect one might read the final scene as an allegory for the Cold War. Influenced by his fantasies of espionage, Willi prepares to defend himself against an imagined danger, just as the powers of the Cold War—“a war in the mind” (Classen 2011)—waged the war with fictions in the form of propaganda and speculation, leading both sides to prepare for a “hot” war that remained only a threat. Spy stories in popular media, in other words, functioned as ideological warfare, inciting the fears and antagonisms that motivated the Cold War conflict. Initially a purely economic venture, Willi’s stories begin to filter his reality as one that is full of imminent dangers, so that he is prepared to use violence against a threat that may or may not actually exist.

Although Der Willi-Busch-Report clearly taps into the stories circulating in the West German press about spies from the East, it also evokes the fear and mistrust that characterized the political climate in West Germany at the time of the German Autumn. Released just two years after the national crisis, the film conveys the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that arose with the increased presence of police and military forces during the nationwide search for the RAF terrorists. The headline of one of Willi’s earlier stories, “Telefonterror” (Telephone terror), implicitly links terrorism to the mood of hysteria that ultimately incapacitates Willi. Easily swayed by his stories within this precarious environment, Willi succumbs to a nervous breakdown at the end of the film. Like Fassbinder in his contribution to the omnibus film Deutschland im Herbst (Brustellin et al. 1978, released in English as Germany in Autumn), Willi becomes paranoid and fearful to the extent that he becomes physically ill. Just as Fassbinder trembles, cries, sweats, and vomits when he hears the news and police sirens outside his apartment, Willi struggles to catch his breath and stay standing shortly after he reads the latest news. When police cars rush by him in the center of town with their screaming sirens, Willi, on the verge of collapse, leans against his car for support. In both NGC films, the politics of terror pervade the most intimate space of one’s body, debilitating it from within (Rentschler 1984).

Der Willi-Busch-Report reiterates the criticisms that the left leveled against yellow journalism in the mid-1970s. Volker Schlöndorff’s 1975 film adaptation of Heinrich Böll’s controversial novel Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (1974, translated as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead) starkly criticizes the invasive methods of the press—the Axel Springer publishing company and its widely read Bild-Zeitung in particular—and its manipulation of facts for the sake of a good story. Indeed, the logo for the Tag, Willi’s primary competitor, looks remarkably similar to the Bild-Zeitung logo with its white block letters on a red square background. In both Schlöndorff’s and Schilling’s films, tabloid journalism leads to violence: while Katharina murders the reporter who has violated her personhood with his false and exploitative representations of her, Willi is consumed by his own stories and prepares to defend himself with violence against people he now believes are spies plotting to kill him. Willi becomes a victim of hysteria created by his own sensationalist reportages.

Moments before his nervous breakdown, Willi quickly drives past a crowd of reporters recording him on video. Like Schlöndorff’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (released in English as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), Schilling’s film criticizes the press by implicitly comparing the invasive methods of reporters to espionage. In his “report” on Willi, the spy-narrator in the opening sequence recounts Willi’s history in a manner that is stylistically evocative of journalism, using long, complex sentences and the simple past. Arno Rösler, Willi’s friend and chief reporter for the popular national magazine Ring, is also a journalist-spy. Before Willi decides to frame him as a spy, he learns that Rösler has intended to steal his story about the prophetic little girl. Posthumously, the Ring publishes Rösler’s article on the Friedheim “miracle child.” Like a spy Rösler refuses to disclose his true motives for visiting Friedheim, claiming that he simply wants to stop by his hometown while on his return trip to Munich. His girlfriend, an attractive and elegant woman who—like the women in Bond—sits on his lap and flatters him, knows Rösler only by his pseudonym Wolf-Dieter Schönborn, or his “cover.” Willi’s friend is not the person he projects himself to be but rather is “infiltrating” a location under camouflage for the purpose of gathering information and material for his work.

But Willi, too, spies throughout the film in the hopes of discovering a good story. When the teacher Rose-Marie first comes to Friedheim, Willi uses binoculars to observe her from afar as she arrives at work. Later Rose-Marie asks Willi to leave her alone after he surprises her outside her school, circling and snapping photographs of her. In the scene in which they sleep together, Willi pauses to take notes, prompting Rose-Marie to ask him whether he is using her for a “sex report.” Disappointed, she hastily gets dressed and looks out the window toward the border with Willi’s binoculars. In a binocular shot from her point of view, two guards chuckle and move closer to the border behind a small hill, where they look back at her with their binoculars. The scene implies that both Willi and the border guards alike are “spies” who invade Rose-Marie’s personal space to exploit her sexually. While Willi, Rose-Marie assumes, intends to write a “sex report” about her, the border guards spy on her having sex with Willi and then getting dressed. She is caught between the crosshairs of “spies” in the East and the reporter “spies” in the West. The reporter, in other words, is just as invasive as the “spies” across the border, a notion that the mutual spying between Willi and the border guards emphasizes. Looking through their binoculars, Willi and the guards look back at each other in shots/reverse shots throughout the film. Although they have different motives, Willi and the guards spy on each other in mirrorlike images that imply an equivocal relationship between them and their surveilling gazes. Willi is the reporter who acts as a spy, trespassing spaces and violating personal boundaries for the sake of his “reports.” Reporters, the film suggests, are the spies who invent the spies.

In comparing reporters to spies, Schilling’s film ironizes spy film tropes in the mise-en-scène, in particular the radio cassette player/recorder. As transmitters of secret codes and information, radios and recorders appear frequently in the Bond spy thrillers, where they serve important narrative functions.5 Though a radio is not a surprising find on a reporter, Willi decides to frame Rösler as a spy upon discovering Rösler’s radio cassette recorder, exploiting the trope for his own spy stories. Contrary to the trope, Willi finds nothing remarkable in Rösler’s recordings, and lacking the finesse with which Bond handles technological devices, he fumbles with the recorder as it repeatedly ejects the cassette he tries to insert. While Willi is excited by his “discovery,” Rose-Marie and Rösler’s girlfriend fall asleep in the background, an ironic jab at Willi’s exaggerated inventions. Soon, however, Willi is seduced by the trope he initially exploits. When the same radio model he finds on Rösler washes up ashore with Baumbauer, he becomes increasingly suspicious that Friedheim actually does host a nest of spies. He later discovers the same radio model on the corpse of Sir Henry, which leads him to believe that Sir Henry was also a spy and that Friedheim is teeming with spies. In a close-up shot, Sir Henry’s radio drips blood onto a copy of the Werra-Post, a visual metaphor for the transformation of what was originally Willi’s discursive fiction into—at least for Willi—a violent reality. Discovered by Willi with the radio on and newspapers strewn about him, Sir Henry appears to be a murder victim of the stories themselves, which seem to have taken on a life of their own with real and dangerous consequences.

The scene leading to Rösler’s death amplifies the ironic undertones of the radio. As Willi leaves his class reunion in a local party hall to check on Rösler, he walks by a poster for The Green Hornet, a popular American television show in the 1960s. Originally a radio series, The Green Hornet starred the martial arts icon Bruce Lee as the vigilante Kato, who fights crime undercover with his partner, the “Green Hornet.” The Green Hornet is Britt Reid (Van Williams), owner and publisher of the Daily Sentinel newspaper. Though not spies per se, Kato and the Green Hornet infiltrate crime rings in disguise, working beyond the aegis of the police to ensure the security of their community. In the pilot for The Green Hornet (Peerce 1966), the discovery of a radio transmitter leads the vigilantes to the criminal. The tongue-in-cheek reference to the television series implies that on-screen tropes have conditioned Willi’s spy fantasies. Willi imagines that Rösler, like the Green Hornet, leads a dual life of a journalist for a successful newspaper and a spy, a secret that Rösler’s radio reveals. The Green Hornet poster emphasizes the discrepancy between global media culture and Willi’s local reality in provincial West Germany. Willi’s Green Hornet–inspired spy fantasies—and the poster itself, which boasts action and the international film star Bruce Lee—contrast sharply with the sleepy class reunion in which traditional folk music is the entertainment highlight of the event. The film ironically demonstrates how global stories of espionage influence local realities—which in actuality look very different—where they instigate violence, both imagined and real.

After Willi discovers the third radio on Baumbauer, we, the viewers, also begin to suspect that there is something amiss in Friedheim. But when Willi flips through Rösler’s story in the Ring, he pauses briefly at an advertisement for a shiny silver radio cassette recorder, reminding us of its consumerist function as media image. Despite our temptation to interpret the radios of Rösler, Baumbauer, and Sir Henry as signs of espionage, the advertisement brings back into relief how the press and popular media exploit visual tropes linked to spies and spying for commercial profit. The image of the radio—twice removed as an image in print that the camera captures on film—calls our attention to our own suspicions and expectations that spy stories in the media have created. Der Willi-Busch-Report not only emphasizes the dangerous effects of sensationalism in the charged political climate of 1970s West Germany but also debunks fantastical tales of espionage by bringing into focus the seemingly arbitrary relationship between spying and its tropes.

Subverting Border Tropes: Reimagining the Inner German Border

Der Willi-Busch-Report extends its critique of “popular geopolitics” to its representation of borders and the inner German border in particular. While it demonstrates the arbitrariness of geopolitical divisions, the film also emphasizes the discrepancy between the global ideological—that is, imagined—binaries in Bond and the local reality of the border in the heartland of Germany. In the West German border town, the abstract ideological differences of the global Cold War conflict fade into insignificance. By demystifying popular border fantasies, Schilling’s film challenges and contests the authority of the “Iron Curtain,” whose divisive violence had particularly injurious effects in the country it ruptured.

Mimicking the imagined geopolitical borders between rivals in popular spy fictions, Willi creates his own imaginary borders throughout the film, which separate him from his perceived “spies” and adversaries. Whenever he buys the Tag at the local convenience store, he reads it while standing in the middle of the street, crumples it up, and tosses it into a trash can on the sidewalk across from him. The camera focuses on Willi’s feet as he lines himself up precisely on the edge of the painted border dividing street traffic. Annoyed when he realizes the Tag is stealing his stories, Willi erects an imaginary border in the space of his daily lived experience, tossing his competition over and away onto the other side. In an ironic gesture, the camera reinforces this border by using shots/countershots that do not reflect Willi’s point of view. Instead, the camera cuts from a medium shot of Willi to a medium shot of the trash can on the other side. Willi and the receptacle thus appear to be in separate spaces that are too distant from each other to be captured in one shot, even though they are only a few meters from each other.

Before Willi tosses the Tag over his “border” for a second time, he notices a well-dressed man on the other side reading the same paper and facing his direction. The soundtrack evokes an air of suspicion, and when Willi returns to the sidewalk, he observes two similarly dressed men in dark sunglasses swiftly cross the street and drive off in a blue Mercedes, the vehicle that drives him off the road later in the film. As soon as the men cross the “border,” Willi links them to spies, remarking to a man nearby, “Oh, yes, our BND friends are already here,” referring to the West German secret service (Bundesnachrichtendienst). In the following shot, Willi scribbles on a scratch pad the words “Stasi” and “BND,” as though trying to determine whether he should frame his new “spies” as either East or West German. He speculates that the men could be Stasi agents rather than BND; after all, they cross the “border” back to the other side. Tellingly, Willi appears to consider these options while sitting in a movie theater, a tongue-in-cheek reminder that moving images have created the “spies” of Willi’s imagination. At the same time, the film that Willi is about to watch—an East German propaganda film—indicates the fluidity of the boundary between East and West in the border town, while Willi’s consideration of both national secret services implies an equivocal relationship between them, as though they are interchangeable. In the streets of the border town—the very heart of the Cold War—ideological borders and binaries become redundant. The closer one approaches the Iron Curtain, the more muddled it becomes.

Just as Willi perceives “spies” and antagonists across his imagined borders, so, too, does the inner German border stimulate spy fantasies that reinforce its presence and power in the West German national imaginary. In Schilling’s film, however, the border town is not a site of action, violence, and intrigue, but rather it is a boring, plain, and uneventful place, a blank slate that Willi must discursively reinvent in order to sell his newspaper. Friedheim is seemingly stuck in time. The inebriated Sir Henry continues to mumble Nazi rhetoric to the annoyance of the barkeeper, and when Willi interviews an elderly couple for advice to share with his readers, they recommend ingesting “Thorn,” a product with which Willi and Rose-Marie are unfamiliar. Visitors to Friedheim are sparse: when a small caboose rolls in, Willi and his auto mechanic immediately look up, as though its arrival were a special event for the untraversed town. Ironically, the border has transformed Friedheim into a dull and sluggish village, now at the remote outskirts of the country rather than at its heart and center.

The wire itself dividing East from West is uninteresting, so much so that Willi is able to sleep directly in front of it in the opening scene of the film. A daily sight for the villagers, the “fence” is a mere eyesore, as Rose-Marie remarks: “Darn fence! I can’t look at it anymore.” Hardly a source of excitement, the border is an everyday object, a “fence” that is more annoying and inconvenient than it is threatening. On an acoustic level, too, the border is unremarkable, as Willi and the other inhabitants of Friedheim do not notice the sounds of flares, gunfire, and grenades that we hear throughout the film. Willi becomes startled at the sound of a flare only toward the end of the film when he believes that he is surrounded by spies. In a scene tinged with moderate black humor, Willi exploits the very lifelessness of the border zone for the sake of his stories when he deposits Rösler’s corpse at the border at dusk with no one—not even a border-patrol officer—around to notice.

Der Willi-Busch-Report portrays the inner German border as drab and mundane on a visual level as well. In the opening credits, aerial shots of the border underscore the flatness of the region. While images of the Berlin Wall circulating in West German mainstream media tend to emphasize the verticality of the border as a rigid and formidable divider between two distinct spaces, the images in Schilling’s film flatten out the border by drawing attention to the almost mirrorlike reflection of the green forested areas on both sides. The uniformity in landscape and color merge the two areas, whose monochrome hues of greenish-brown impart a dull, lackluster quality to the border zone. Ironically, the border town—in contrast to Willi’s spy stories—is nothing other than a no-man’s-land with an unsightly “fence” embedded in greenery.

In emphasizing the uneventfulness of the border, the film subverts the Bondian tropes of the binocular shot and the technologically advanced automobile. When Willi observes the border-patrol officers with his binoculars, a binocular mask covers the lens of the camera to mimic Willi’s perspective. While Bond frequently uses binoculars to spy on his enemies—in Goldfinger (Hamilton 1964) and For Your Eyes Only (Glen 1981), to name just two examples—Willi, unlike Bond, does not discover anything of importance with his device. Contrary to our expectations, the binocular shots in Der Willi-Busch-Report pan left and right to follow the guards and trucks, but rather than reveal new and interesting information, they illustrate the monotony and routineness of everyday life on the border. Hardly an indicator of a developing intrigue, the binocular shot of the guards who chuckle as they watch Rose-Marie get dressed merely shows two bored young men taking pleasure in spying on a naked woman.

Willi’s Messerschmitt similarly conveys the stagnancy and temporal standstill of the border town in its ironic appropriation. Unlike Bond’s sexy, high-speed, intricately designed vehicles, Willi’s Messerschmitt, a car that had not been in production since the early 1960s, fails to start in the beginning of the film despite Willi’s efforts (Cruz n.d.). Struggling to start the car, Willi pushes it forward along the road when another car—an Italian Fiat—honks and races past him. He then jumps into his worn and ratty driver’s seat and successfully starts the car after it backfires several times. Willi proceeds to put on his aviator hat, an ironic gesture in relation to his slow, barely functioning vehicle. This irony becomes more pronounced when the auto mechanic—who knows Willi’s “stinky” Messerschmitt well—teasingly refers to the car as Willi’s “airplane.” In her review of the film, Mareike Sprengel wrote with a hint of sarcasm: “One could almost think it [the Messerschmitt] capable of extending wings and flying into the air like in a James Bond film to fool the GDR border patrol” (n.d.).

As he drives along the border in the opening sequence, Willi scowls at the helicopter flying above him when it quickly overtakes him. Replacing the helicopter’s drone, an upbeat synthesized musical score enters the soundtrack when the camera joins Willi in his Messerschmitt, forming an ironic contrast with a vehicle that is hardly as fast as its musical motif implies. Willi conveys his hope that time will speed up with his car in a rhyme: “If you drive a Messerschmitt, time will fly by” (Fährst du auch ‘n Messerschmitt, die Zeit vergeht in Sauseschritt). As the company vehicle—Werra Post is printed on its side—the outdated automobile ironically points to the demise of a newspaper in a town seemingly stuck in time.

While Bond achieves a virtually limitless range of mobility through his vehicles, traversing through land, air, and water all over and even beyond the globe, Willi can hardly move within his small town with his Messerschmitt. Indeed, his dysfunctional car allegorizes the very spatial limits that are imposed—rather than uplifted—by popular spy stories. The “spies” pursuing Willi literally restrict the space in which Willi can move by running his vehicle off the road, after which it must be towed back into town where it originated. Willi’s own narratives of espionage render him immobile at the end of the film when paramedics must transport him to an ambulance. Triggering paranoia spy stories ultimately push Willi up against an otherwise inconspicuous border—to the very “Stop! Border” sign—where he is cornered and vulnerable. Now without a car, Willi stumbles to the border with a visible limp—though we do not see him injure himself—and points his rifle at the people trying to detain him above, in front, and behind him. As the police approach, Willi gestures toward the other side of the border and threatens, “If anyone comes down here I’ll go for a walk in the GDR!” Before he can escape across the border, however, Willi collapses, stuck within the confines of the West. Schilling’s film demonstrates the paradox of Cold War popular spy stories that foster the illusion of mobility but ultimately reaffirm borders between East and West, thus delimiting one’s spatial range, both physically and as imagined.

Der Willi-Busch-Report does not simply subvert tropes in order to expose the covert ideological functions of popular spy fantasies. Rather, by foregrounding its material reality, the film opens the inner German border up to new meanings and imaginings beyond its dominant discourses. Both the opening and the end sequences of the film emphasize the organic quality of the border zone as a living and lived space that contrasts with its representations in global politics and the media. In the first shot of the film, the press snaps photographs of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in documentary footage of the Yalta Conference, where the three global leaders drew the new geopolitical boundaries after the Second World War. The following shot shows a map of Europe held directly in front of the camera. A person behind the map begins to cut with scissors along the Iron Curtain—described by the narrator as an “odd line”—revealing the actual border zone in three-dimensional space behind it. The official discourses on the border are visually flat and removed from lived reality: while the Yalta Conference is represented in grainy black-and-white footage, the map fills the entire frame of the shot, emphasizing its one-dimensionality. By contrast the camera lends a sense of depth and vitality to the third representation of the border in which the film is set, moving easily through the green space in long, smooth sweeps afforded by the Steadicam. Acoustically, too, Schilling’s film re-instills a sense of life to the border: as we watch the Yalta Conference, chirping birds fill the soundtrack rather than the snapping of photographs and voices we might expect. By virtue of their incongruity, the unexpected sounds of birds crack open the official political discourse of the border that is evoked visually. By representing it as a living and lived site, Schilling’s film depicts the border as a place of change and potential, thus breaking the ideological authority that its fixed dominant discourses enforce.

With its ongoing presentness, the long take in the opening sequence releases the border from the constraints of narrative time, thus granting it an additional charge of political resistance. Summarizing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s claims in his famous 1967 essay “Observations on the Long Take,” Lutz Koepnick points out that the long take for Pasolini “defied the closure and death imposed by the violence of the cut” and in so doing, “ran up against the very possibility of meaning-making, precisely because our ability to generate meaning . . . cannot do without us actively recognizing the finality that is death and that film allegorizes in the form of the cut” (2013, 196). For the postwar European art filmmakers, the long take represented an act of resistance against the cut, a “method of challenging closure, probing presentness, and thus intensifying realism; of allowing spectators to peruse the screen according to their own measure and will” (196). In Schilling’s film the long takes of the border resist the temporal boundaries that give it meaning—and thus its political power—to begin with. In these shots the film asks its viewers to perceive the border beyond the discursive parameters that have framed and thereby legitimized it. Defying the violence of the cut, the long take in Schilling’s film mends the wound that it represents, namely, the division of Germany. Unlike the Bond films with their rapid cuts that allegorically reinforce the films’ ideological demarcations, Der Willi-Busch-Report engages a cinematography of suturing rather than cutting, healing rather than wounding. Schilling’s long take inspires a reimagining of the inner German border that does not—as opposed to “popular geopolitics”—confirm and perpetuate its divisive violence, but rather it resists that violence through its patient, mending gaze.

As Willi’s world becomes increasingly smaller as a result of his growing paranoia, the camera in the final sequence of the film paradoxically lends movement to the border zone, yielding a sense of life and regeneration that contrasts with Willi’s immobility and threat of violence. With the camera following him from behind, Willi stumbles through a defunct and overgrown train tunnel as he escapes to the border. Connecting the spaces on each side of the tunnel, the tracking shot of the camera stages a bridging that is rendered smooth and continuous by the Steadicam. Although the camera does not transcend the inner German border, it conveys through its linking of two spaces an underlying potential for unity and oneness at the divided site, a potential that the camera itself discovers with its new technology.

The very strangeness of Willi’s attempt to find Munzel, his runaway rabbit, at the end of the film imbues the border zone with a sense of the unexpected and unconventional. As Willi searches for his rabbit with a piece of cabbage in hand, we, too, look for it in binocular shots that slowly and silently pan over the border. Rather than surveil the border for spies, escapees, or some act of conspiracy, we are instead called on to look for Willi’s rabbit. These shots thus compel us to read images of the border differently, to remove the filter that has shaped our perception of the border. Although the film admittedly does not ask us to look for rabbit fugitives per se, the cue to a rabbit search pushes the limits of our imagination to conceive of new and unanticipated images of the border, which, in turn, undermine the political authority that its popular representations administer. Unusual and peculiar the search for Munzel prompts us to look for hidden inflections and latent possibilities in the images of the border that might inspire its reimagining. While Willi’s spy stories reinforce the power of the Iron Curtain, Schilling’s film, by contrast, seeks to dismantle that power by presenting it as a site that is not ideologically closed off but rather replete with enigmas and undiscovered potentials, a site that is open to transformation and the prospect of change.

Though relatively unknown among German cinema scholars and cineastes, Der Willi-Busch-Report stands out among its contemporaries as a unique historical record of the inner German border in the West German countryside. Forgoing the action and suspense of the more successful espionage thrillers of its day, the film opts instead to critique “popular geopolitics” in particular and the violence of media sensationalism in general in late 1970s West Germany. The film is not as formally or thematically radical as many other films in the NGC, as it tends to follow the storytelling patterns in classical narrative cinema. Nevertheless, it takes on a political valence not only in its sociopolitical critique but also in encouraging new images and perceptions of the border that are no longer predetermined by dominant—and destructive—ideologies. In this respect the film offers a counter-aesthetic not only to the popular spy films of its time but also to contemporary Hollywood-style productions that represent the Stasi, from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning Das Leben der Anderen (2006, released in English as The Lives of Others) to the RTL television series Deutschland 83 (Berger and Radsi 2015). While many of the Stasi dramas tend to reiterate Cold War dichotomies in their facile representation of East Germany as the morally destitute and evil “other” to the West, more recent East/West spy dramas—Christian Petzold’s Barbara (2012) and Christian Schwochow’s Westen (West, 2013), for example—engage more critically with Germany’s Cold War past, muddling the binaries that still dominate cinematic retellings of the era since the war thawed (Pinfold 2014). Schilling’s film thus represents an important yet overlooked precursor to the more critical German spy films since reunification.

But the political charge to Der Willi-Busch-Report is particularly meaningful within the film’s historical context of a still-divided Germany. Indeed, in deconstructing border tropes, the film predicts Germany’s actual reunification, lending yet another layer of irony to the film that Schilling later takes up in Deutschfieber (German fever, 1992, released in English as Border Frenzy), the postwall sequel to Der Willi-Busch-Report. Demonstrating the subversive power of irony, the film anticipates in some respects the very ironic turn of events on November 9, 1989, when a revision of border regulations in East Berlin led to the full dismantling of the Berlin Wall. Just as “popular geopolitics” reify Cold War borders, so, too, the film suggests, can “critical geopolitics” take them down. Opening East/West German cinematic spy stories back up to inquiry at the time the Berlin Wall still stood, Schilling’s film challenges German Cold War politics long before hindsight afforded us the distance for critical reflection.

Notes

1. Reinhard Hauff’s Der Mann auf der Mauer (The man on the wall, 1982), an adaptation of Peter Schneider’s story Der Mauerspringer (1982, translated as The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story), is one exception.

2. Ironically, like the works of the real Wilhelm Busch, Schilling’s film uses black humor to critique contemporary Germany. See Davidson 2003.

3. Translations here and throughout are mine.

4. See Costabile-Heming’s chapter on For Eyes Only in this volume.

5. For example, in Diamonds Are Forever (Hamilton 1971), Bond attempts to replace the cassette tape that villain Blofeld uses to control his satellite, but his plan fails when Blofeld finds the replacement tape in Bond’s suit.

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