“Nun bist du dran”
“Nun bist du dran:” The Inscription of the Viewer in Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin
Anna Schreier
Abstract
Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin inscribes the viewer as an ethical and active subject through his use of cinematographic styles such as shot-reverse-shot sequences, the use of a free-floating camera, and a monochrome colour palette. This essay engages in filmic analysis of scenes in order to demonstrate how the viewer is continually implicated throughout the film. Key is the emergence of narrative via a confessional relationship of the characters to the viewers. The act of witnessing is evoked on multiple levels throughout the film, culminating in the witnessing of the viewer. Wenders invites an active acknowledgement of the mimetic quality of the film via the viewer’s awareness of their witnessing. This film is an artifact of its pre-Mauerfall time, dealing with the uncomfortable German past in the physical context of Berlin. This essay draws on many different theorists, creating an interdisciplinary engagement rooted in German Studies.
Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter
Lebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Strömung
reißt durch beide Bereiche alle Alter
immer mit sich und übertönt sie in beiden.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, “Die Erste Elegie,” Duineser Elegien
The camera gazes upward at a ceiling covered in bulbous light fixtures. The air is filled with whispers as the quiet voices of unseen people blend into a single sound. As the camera slowly pans down to eye level, the inside of a library is revealed: people sit at individual desks, stand by themselves in the stacks, all reading and thinking. As the camera tracks forward between the stacks, one voice occasionally rises above the others for a few seconds, and then fades back into the chorus of voices. It is not unlike the comfortable hubbub of a busy restaurant but in an entirely serious and eerie tone. The camera pauses as a woman, an angel, turns around and nods in recognition at the camera, signalling that the camera is acting as the eyes of another angel, for only an angel can see another angel. Wim Wenders uses cinematography and editing techniques to inscribe the viewer as an ethical subject and participant of the film. The film will culminate in a moral imperative, “nun bist du dran,” that appeals to the viewer themselves. Wenders thus incites a participatory viewing, in which the inscription of an active subject allows the viewer to be an active participant. The fragmentary nature of the cinematography necessitates a viewer who can fill in the blanks and further sketch out the evoked but unseen aspects of the film.
Wim Wenders situates Berlin as a narrative space by choosing it as the place where angels observe and collect human stories. Co-written by author and poet Peter Handke, the film combines Wenders’s visual artistry with Handke’s literary skill, demonstrating that individually, both of these abilities are limited in their capacity to see and express meaning. Working in a delicate dance, neither the visual nor the written are ascribed ascendancy over the other (Caldwell 51). The fragmentary nature of the film reinforces this by showing the particulates of urban life through the thoughts and images of various individual Berliners. While remaining unheard and unseen, the angels’ role is to bear witness to and record the lives of humans. Though they belong to a non-visible realm, the angels “are completely immersed in acts of representation: it is their task to transform the invisible into the visible” by writing down what they witness in their little notebooks (Casarino 176).
In the first half of the film, Wenders implicates the viewer by using a free-floating camera and a monochrome colour palette. An innovation of cinematographer Henri Alekan, the free-floating camera is a handheld camera which follows the action without a fixed orientation. It differs from traditional cinematographic practices because the camera movement is not limited to panning, tilting, and tracking, but rather combines them all in a fluid movement untethered from the grounding principles of traditional cinematographic grammar. The use of this technique/camera allows the freedom to move around at will, which gives scenes the feeling of looking through an angel’s eyes. Since angels are not limited by spatial enclosures, their lack of corporeality allows their perspective to drift and move in an unrestrained manner. In the scene in the Staatsbibliothek, Wenders solidifies that perspective by using the free-floating camera to demonstrate the overwhelming quantity of thoughts that the angels are tasked with listening to. The hushed voices evolve into haunting choral music, indicating the otherworldly ability of the angels to hear the Gedankenstimmen (inner monologues).
In an interview with Ira Paneth, Wenders said that this is meant to give the effect of the library as a cathedral, a religious space where people might more commonly expect angels to be. The angels choose which voices to listen to and listen with care. Their body language is attentive to the chosen person, either standing next to them or leaning over them with a hand gently placed on their shoulder in an act of comforting (Der Himmel über Berlin 16:32 - 22:23). The angels listen alone, exemplified by Damiel and Cassiel parting ways to go about their work. If situated in a cathedral-like context, the one-on-one nature of the angel paired with a human lends itself to the imagery and sensibility of a confessional. Albeit unaware of this, the human is heard and acknowledged: they are witnessed. Dori Laub, in his exploration of witnessing and what he terms “the vicissitudes of listening,” writes that
The emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the “knowing” of the event is given birth to. The listener, therefore, is a party to the creation of knowledge de novo. The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time. By extension, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience the trauma in himself. (Felman and Laub 57)
While Laub’s work was initially with Holocaust survivors and their traumatic experiences, we can apply this logic to the angels and the humans that they listen to. The first concept we can apply is that the listener—in this case, the angel—is party to the creation of knowledge of this narrative. By externalizing this knowledge, it is historicized and recorded by the angel. Second, the listener is a space of inscription: by listening, they allow for the narrative to be inscribed in them. Finally, as a participant and co-owner of the narrative, the angel partially experiences the narrative, a detached vicarious experience which allows them to have empathy and compassion for the human. Ultimately, the listener—i.e. the angel—helps to create and historicize the thoughts that they hear, in part by allowing those thoughts to be inscribed on them.
The location of this scene is important as it shows where the angels go most often. Libraries are sites of physical memory. In an interview, Wenders said that part of the value of this space was that “there is also the whole memory and knowledge of mankind united there” (Paneth 6). They are spaces which contain archives of the written word, recording and preserving human history and thought. It is thus fitting that this is the space that the angels choose as a main site for the intimate and individual connection to each human being that they practice. What are the angels doing, if not collecting and writing down human history in the form of the fragmented thoughts and moments of human lives? Cassiel explicitly expresses their angelic role in a dutiful and somewhat determined tone, saying “Nichts weiter tun als anschauen, sammeln, bezeugen, beglaubigen, wahren! Geist bleiben! Im Abstand bleiben! Im Wort bleiben!” (“Do nothing more than look, collect, witness, authenticate, preserve! Keep the spirit! Keep your distance! Stay in the word!”; translation mine; Der Himmel über Berlin 10:50 - 16:12).Their role lies in observing human beings and committing the fragments of their life to memory without interfering with or altering the physical world.
At the end of the library scene, the film introduces a character called Homer, a frail old man who represents the storyteller of human life. Played by actor Curt Bois, this character’s name references the Greek poet and writer of epics and histories. Imogen Sara Smith writes that as “a Jewish actor who had fled Germany for Hollywood during the Nazi era but returned in 1950,” Bois is a “submerged reference” to the history of World War II. Homer’s appearance in the library is a key way in which Wenders implicates the viewer. Homer first appears in a high-angle shot coming up the stairs of the library just as Damiel is going down. They both pause for a moment, Damiel to listen to Homer’s Gedankenstimme, Homer to rest and rub his face as he climbs the stairs. There follows a shot-reverse-shot sequence, first a shot of Homer, then a shot of Damiel, then one where the camera looks up at Cassiel through Damiel’s eyes, then another of Damiel refocusing on Homer, and finally one of Homer. The camera then returns to its prior vantage point to show Damiel leaving and then in a continuous free-moving shot, the camera watches Homer climb the stairs, and sit down in a chair on the landing. The camera stays on him as part of the same shot as we listen to his inner monologue. The continuous and free-moving nature of the shot transfers the angelic eyes of the camera from Damiel’s to the viewer, who is—using Laub’s earlier logic—thus inscribed as a subject that is listening and bearing witness to Homer. A character who bears witness to the city and history of Berlin, Homer is witnessed himself.
Berlin, unquestionably historicized by the sheer visual physicality of its history, adds its own complication to the film by lending it an ethical perspective. The historical and philosophical contexts of the space of Berlin empower and give weight to the images that Wenders strings together with Alekan’s stylized camera work (Caldwell 51). The angels of Berlin act as the links to “the most uncomfortable and unexplored of German pasts…the historical oblivion of post-war Germany” (Casarino 176). This applies in particular to Berlin as the capital of the Nazi government and the site of near-incessant bombing. The layers of physical destruction and change that have occurred in the geographic space of this city are simultaneously physically present and absent. Brigitta Wagner, in her book Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era, writes that in Homer’s search for Potsdamer Platz “the square’s geographical location does not add up to the bygone place, architecture, and atmosphere of memory” (170). Its place in Berlin, at the time of filming in 1986–87, does not encapsulate its physical history, the way that “Potsdamer Platz” was once embodied. Homer seeks to see his memory’s image of Potsdamer Platz again, with Café Josty and its other long-gone attributes, but the constraints of time and space do not allow him to do so. Yet, as Wagner astutely brings up, Wenders inserts the archival footage of the ruins of 1940s Berlin in order to “bear witness to a third temporality, one that must remain ‘in the picture’” (168). The first two temporalities are Homer’s oral history and the actual filmic space of 1986-87. This third temporality is the “nondiegetic insert” of real historical events, which serves to provoke a spatial urban history. Even though the physical reality of the historical events is gone, Cassiel, as the representative angel—and “the angel of solitudes and tears who ‘shews forth the unity of the eternal kingdom’” (Luprecht 48)—bears witness to it and so it lives on in the liminal space of angelic memory. The way the archival footage is presented acts to entangle the viewer in Berlin’s history, giving an ethical perspective by showing the horrors of wartime imagery.
Additionally, the film’s aerial sequences, made possible by Alekan, offer “a perspective which has its own historical and traditional precedents inscribed onto itself” (Casarino 174). The aerial perspective in Berlin is inseparable from the historical events of World War II: it is the “uncanny echo” of the aerial perspective of the bombers that destroyed the city. Casarino further argues that “the aerial views of the city in Wings of Desire resonate also with these events in the making of post-war Berlin into a new socio-political space” (175). What he means by this is that layered on top of the bombing of Berlin, the aerial perspective also evokes the Berlin Airlift of 1948, during which the city was only accessible by air. Both of these historicized perspectives are built into the socio-political space of 1986-87 Berlin, the time and place of filming.
Marion’s scene in the trailer further inscribes the viewer as an ethical subject (Der Himmel über Berlin 30:57 - 35:17). Marion is a French trapeze artist that will capture Damiel’s heart, allowing him to act on the already present discontentedness he feels as a result of his angelic status. We are introduced to Marion’s character through Damiel’s eyes. He watches from a perch in the circus tent as she flies through the air on a trapeze bar, adorned with chicken feather wings. Köster writes that
Durch ihre Flügel und ihre scheinbare Fähigkeit, die Schwerkraft zu überwinden, werden Marion Attribute der Engel zugeteilt…Daß es sich bei ihr um einen weltlichen Engel handelt, wird besonders deutlich daran, daß es die “erste Farbeinstellung des Films” ist, die Marion am Trapez hängend, als fliegenden Engel zeigt. Die Bedeutung des Farbeeinsatzes wiederum hängt eng mit dem Gleiten der Kamera zwischen einer subjektiven und einer lediglich subjektiv fokalisierten Perspective zusammen. (268)
(Through her wings and her apparent ability to overcome gravity, Marion is given the attributes of an angel…The fact that she is a worldly angel is made particularly clear by the fact that it is the "first colour shot of the film " that shows Marion hanging from the trapeze as a flying angel. The significance of the use of colour, in turn, is closely linked to the camera's gliding between a subjective and a merely subjectively focalized perspective.)
Marion occupies a liminal space between angel and human by being, as Köster puts it, “einen weltlichen Engel” who can see the colour that other angels cannot. The viewer is privy to this space by virtue of the fact that they too can see colour but are seeing from an angelic perspective through the use of the free-floating camera. After the scene of her acrobatics and the unfortunate news that the circus, now broke, is shutting down, she returns to her trailer alone as Damiel shadows her. Damiel watches and listens as she lays on her bed in her trailer, listening to music and thinking about her life. He sits down on her bed as the camera pushes in on them both, the frame around them becoming close and intimate. This scene is a key example of the way that “die Sequenzen, die Marion und Damiel zusammen zeigen, fokalisieren die Perspektiven der beiden Personen auf den jeweils anderen Partner” (“The sequences that show Marion and Damiel together focus the perspectives of the two people on the other partner.”; Köster 268). As Köster writes: “Diese gegenseitige Fokalisierung wird durch das Perspektivensystem der Sequenzen im Ganzen erreicht” (“This mutual focalization is achieved through the perspective system of the sequences as a whole.”; 268). Köster’s point will be demonstrated by the following analysis. This focalization will also concentrate the viewer’s attention on Marion and Damiel both as individuals and as a unit. The following shot is a close-up of Marion’s face from the side, implying that we are seeing her through Damiel’s eyes as he sits next to her. This is confirmed by the reverse shot of Damiel watching her. The next shot is of her, now lying on her back. Her head falls to the side and she stares directly into the camera as her thoughts fill the audio. Her gaze compels the viewer to look back at her, her eyes wide and curious, a Mona Lisa-esque smile on her lips. Since the camera has been situated as Damiel’s eyes, it is as though Marion is looking into Damiel’s eyes. The next shot is of Damiel, who smiles because he feels like he’s being seen, whose face then falls as he remembers that he is not, that it is a coincidence that her eyes are looking right at the place he occupies. The next series of shots that implicate the viewer begin with a wide shot of both Damiel and Marion, Damiel facing away from her, examining the rock he has picked up, and Marion beginning to unzip her leotard. The following shot is of Damiel’s face looking back over at her, shaken by the intimacy of what he sees: the next shot will be of Marion’s shoulder as she slowly pulls off the sleeve of her leotard down her arm, sensually. The camera pushes in slowly, and suddenly Damiel’s hand enters the shot, reaching out to touch her bare shoulder, and barely, if not at all, grazing her neck and brushing down across her shoulder before pulling back. The tension is palpable in the length of the shot. The viewer sees the first emergence of desire in the shot of Damiel’s face. This is the moment that Damiel truly realizes that “to have angelic powers…but not to have love is meaningless” (Helmetag 252). The viewer is then entangled in his perspective in the last shot given that since the viewer has already been identified with the perspective of Damiel, his hand becomes the viewer’s own. The desire that is thus imposed and enmeshed in the viewer causes them to care, which is to have empathy and compassion for Damiel and Marion. Intimate connection makes the ethical task of witnessing matter.
Before now, the imperative to care had been missing in the viewer: the fragments of human thought we have heard throughout the first half are just that, fragments that do not touch the angels too deeply, even if they are compassionate towards the humans they listen to. We had not heard enough from any one person to develop an intimate and emotional connection. The shot following that of the outstretched hand is of Damiel, who walks out of the shot. The camera returns to Marion, sitting naked on the bed. The scene gradually shifts from black and white to colour footage “to indicate the difference between the world of the angels and ‘reality’” (Reimer 236). In the film, “reality” means the world of history, of embodiment, of finitude, of desire. The desire indicated by colour is rich and bodily, a world of the senses and sensuality. Colour signals a falling into the world of time: there is impermanence, but there is lived experience. The shift implies that Damiel has truly gone, as the gaze of the angel is in black and white, and we now look through the human viewer’s eyes into the real, colourized world. The viewer is no longer separated from the real world the way that the angels were in their black-and-white world. This brings the viewer even closer to Marion, even as we lose access to her thoughts, since we see her in her colourized finite embodiment, which Damiel cannot do. The intimacy and care generated in the viewer for Marion and Damiel are a function of the use of shot-reverse-shot sequences and colour.
The imperative to care is reiterated by Peter Falk in Damiel’s encounter with him at the Imbiss (snack stand) (1:27:36 - 1:29:26). Peter Falk proclaims the beauty of life in a series of sensual gestures, not unlike the scene with Marion. However, Falk purposefully displays and expresses the gestures as feeling good, with the knowledge that he is being seen and heard. This effect on the viewer is accomplished more with dialogue and gestures than with the filmic details in the Marion scene. Damiel stands in front of Falk next to the Imbiss, watching kindly as Falk scribbles something in his notebook. In the following shot, we see Falk look up for a brief moment and then, continuing his scribbling, start to speak aloud without looking up. Having acknowledged Damiel’s presence—much to Damiel’s surprise—Falk says to Damiel, “I wish I could see your face, just to look into your eyes and tell you how good it is to be here. Just to touch something!” Falk goes on to describe what it feels like to rub one’s hands together in the cold, what it feels like to smoke, to have coffee, to have them together, to draw. The actors’ physical chemistry works to make us see that Falk can’t see Damiel with his eyes, but can sense his proximity. The viewer is pulled into the inside joke of Damiel being invisible to Falk, while also confirming Falk’s message as a human themself as they engage with Falk’s enthusiasm and kindness. This monologue by Falk repeats the earlier implicit messaging that to be human is a sensual and physical experience, which any viewer as a human being knows to be true. Additionally, this scene is another example of Dori Laub’s theory in which “the emergence of the narrative which is being listened to—and heard—is, therefore, the process and the place wherein the cognizance, the ‘knowing’ of the event is given birth to” (Felman and Laub 57). To reiterate, the listener becomes a space of inscription by allowing for the narrative to be inscribed in them via the listening process. By listening to Falk describe the pleasures of life, Damiel partially experiences Falk’s narrative as a participant in its formation. Moreover, by becoming a participant in a narrative, Damiel gets a taste of what human life could be like. In his monologue, Falk inscribes an ethic of care into the viewer while simultaneously allowing Damiel the space to inscribe in himself a possible human identity.
In the climactic scene of the film, the viewer is fully inscribed as an ethical subject in a shot-reverse-shot sequence that allows Marion to directly address the viewer. The scene takes place in a bar room next to a Nick Cave concert (1:54:27 - 2:02:01). Three shots before the climax scene begins, a handheld camera moves freely through the concert crowd, held at chest level, making the viewer feel crowded in, almost suffocatingly so, among all of the people. The energy of the scene is potently human: the colours are vibrant and the sound of the concert is abrasive and intense, plunging the viewer into what Nick Cave scholar Christopher Hartney calls the “drug-addled bohemian scene in West Berlin” (269). The crowdedness and the cacophony of the music overwhelm the viewer, setting up the following bar room scene to juxtapose it, as we will get to in a moment. The sensory experience of the scene evokes what it feels like to be human, setting the scene for Damiel and Marion’s first human encounter. As the camera moves through the crowd, we see that each person is isolated in the throng: they all stare with empty expression up at the stage, not speaking to or dancing with each other. It is as though they are entranced. The following shot shifts back into black and white, as we follow Cassiel as he moves around on the stage. Looking desolate and deeply alone, Cassiel leans against the wall. He is still, but the lights from the show make him have three shadows which dance behind him as they flash to the rhythm of the music. He turns to face the wall, as if he too is overwhelmed by the situation.
Once more in colour, Marion enters the bar, the camera lingering on her as she enters from the other room. The next shot we see through her eyes, a wide shot of the bar, where we spot Damiel sitting, facing away. Marion enters the shot in her garishly red dress which pops against the yellow hue of the set, implicitly referencing the colour that makes her part of the human world. She walks confidently toward Damiel and stands next to him, not yet acknowledging him. Up until now, they are individuals. The next shot centers itself behind them, and slowly pushes in as they turn toward each other. He carefully offers her a glass of wine. Köster suggests that “Die auffällige Geste aktiviert noch einmal die religiöse Isotopie. In der Eucharistiefeier ist der Wein ein Symbol für das Blut des ‘Fleisch’ gewordenen Gottessohnes.” (“The striking gesture once again activates the religious isotope. In the celebration of the Eucharist, wine is a symbol of the blood of the Son of God made ‘flesh’.”; 285). In the Christian tradition from whence angels come, Damiel recreates the ritual which confirms him as fleshly human. They hold eye contact as she accepts the glass and drinks, a spiritual communion through a physical ritual which joins them. Now they are bonded individuals in their humanity. The closeness of the camera to the pair makes the viewer privy to the most intimate moment of the film, the most intimate conversation between two people. This scene stands as a powerful emblem of one of the main themes of the film: “solitude within union…moments of the greatest communion are also moments of the greatest emptiness” (Ehrlich 242). It is a moment of intense duality toward which the film has been working since its beginning.
Marion begins her soliloquy, a speech which expresses the way she has felt and feels now about the relationships of her life and the seriousness of this moment. As Ehrlich has remarked, the core theme is loneliness and solitude, overlapping though they may be. She asserts to Damiel,
Einsamkeit heißt: ich bin endlich ganz.
Jetzt kann ich das sagen, denn ich bin heute endlich einsam.
Mit dem Zufall muß es nun aufhören! Neumond der Entscheidung! Ich weiß nicht, ob es eine Bestimmung gibt, aber es gibt eine Entscheidung! Entscheide dich! Wir sind jetzt die Zeit!
(Loneliness means: I am finally whole.
Now I can say that, because today I am finally lonely.
With coincidence it now must stop! New moon of decision! I don't know if there is a destiny, but there is a decision! Decide! We are now Time!; Wenders, Filmbuch 161, italics mine)
Solitude makes her whole, but it is not just any solitude: she is alone with him. She is allowing him to safeguard her solitude with the implicit promise that she will safeguard his. She exhorts him to decide. This sets up how momentarily the viewer will be exhorted. Her final sentence of this shot uses “wir” (we), grouping the viewer in the statement. As the shot shifts to an extreme close-up of Marion’s face, she proclaims that “die ganze Welt nimmt gerade teil an unserer Entscheidung.” (“The whole world is currently taking part in our decision.”) At first, she is looking past the camera, but then, as she says “Wir zwei sind mehr als nur zwei” (“We two are more than only two”), she turns her gaze to the camera, directly addressing Damiel/the viewer. Vila and Kuzniar, in their article “Witnessing Narration in ‘Wings of Desire,’” assert that the becoming of the self “requires a witness, the gaze of another person who would both delimit and ratify the self” (56). In looking directly at the viewer, Marion affirms the viewer’s selfhood, thus fully inscribing them as a subject. She is returning our gaze. She recognizes the viewer as an ethical subject in telling them it’s their turn, by entreating them to take action with urgency, now or never. She joins the viewer to herself with the use of the repeated “we.”
Her next lines are a call to action which culminates in the statement: “Nun bist du dran. Du hast das Spiel in der Hand. Jetzt oder nie.” (“Now it's your turn. The game is in your hands. It's now or never.”) This is the culmination of the movie’s inscription of the viewer; the viewer is directly addressed in that moment. The “now or never” statement joins the film’s temporality to the viewer’s, aligning their stories for a brief moment. Marion urges the viewer to make their own decision–to do what? Köster uses Kierkegaard to examine this moment, citing Kierkegaard’s analysis of the word “Entscheidung.”
Kierkegaard „bestreitet die Objektivität und behauptet die Subjektivität von Wahrheit.” Verstanden als ein existentieller Lebenssinn, ist Wahrheit demnach eine Setzung der Subjektivität, keine Entsprechung zu einer objektiven Ordnung. Sie verlangt eine je individuell zu leistende „Entscheidung", einen Sprung „über den Graben zwischen zufälliger Geschichtswahrheit und ewiger Vernunft-wahrheit"... die Individuen bei Kierkegaard [behalten] eine die bloße Profanität transzendierende quasi-sakrale Qualität durch ihre ambivalente Lage zwischen der leibgebun-denen Endlichkeit und der Teilhabe an einer geistigen Unendlichkeit.
(Kierkegaard “denies objectivity and asserts the subjectivity of truth.” Understood as an existential meaning of life, truth is therefore a positing of subjectivity, not a correspondence to an objective order. It requires a "decision" to be made individually, a leap “across the chasm between accidental historical truth and eternal truth of reason.”... individuals retain a quasi-sacred quality in Kierkegaard that transcends mere profanity through their ambivalent position between bodily finitude and participation in a spiritual infinity.)
The ambivalent position described here seems to be exactly that of Damiel, who has descended from heaven and is now finite, and yet because of his angelic memory, participates in a spiritual infinity. The decision described is Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith,” a choice which decides the truth of what will be. Following this logic, Marion asserts the subjectivity of truth by asking for a decision that circumvents the accidental. Marion puts the viewer on the spot: they must decide whether or not to safeguard their own solitude, to follow their desires, to become time itself! The viewer must decide whether or not to take control of their narrative; now that they are, after all that they have witnessed, aware of the meaning-making function of narrative. For Roger Cook, narrative provides a foothold for the viewer, “a lifeline to authentic needs and desires” (35). Anchored in the context of the filmic narrative, the viewer is able to make their decision.
In the final scene, Damiel narrates as we watch him anchor Marion in an acrobatic act. He tethers her to the ground, stabilizing her as she spins up in the air. Their positions are reversed: Damiel on the ground looking up, Marion flying in the sky. They “become reciprocals and fuller beings by transcending boundaries” (Caldwell 48). In their joining, both are able to access new parts of themselves. The film ends with Homer’s voice declaring the need for a narrator in this present time: “Nennt mir die Männer und Frauen und Kinder, die mich suchen werden, mich ihren Erzähler, Vorsänger und Tonangeber, weil sie mich brauchen, wie sonst nichts auf der Welt.” (“Tell me of the men, women, and children who will look for me, me, their storyteller, their bard, their choirmaster, because they need me more than anything in the world.”) Now that the viewer has been fully inscribed as an ethical subject and active participant, Homer invites us to search for a new narrative that requires a storyteller. He speaks particularly to the inhabitants of Berlin, who must reconstruct their identity in a scarred city.
When asked how he conceived of the spectator of his films, Wenders answered that he conceives of them as “creative collaborators.” He further said that he “prefers movies that ask [him] to see” (Paneth 7). This confirms in a sense that the film is asking something of the viewers, a participatory viewing that engages them as active subjects. As we saw before, Falk’s monologue to the unseen Damiel breaks the fourth wall in a semantic sense. His monologue is an analogy for what the film is doing: it speaks to the viewer indirectly at all times, and yet in moments like Marion’s monologue, directly addresses them. Wim Wenders invites a self-conscious viewing, a suggested active acknowledgment of the mimetic quality of the film in which the awareness of viewership represents the viewing. Moreover, Der Himmel über Berlin asks the viewer to bring their own experiences to the film, filling in the interpretive gaps of the story. Cesare Casarino, in his writings on the fragmentary nature of Der Himmel über Berlin, senses “the necessity for such a participation or complicity, as it lends to the film part of its nostalgic mode” (168). We cannot forget that this film also works to exhume Berlin’s history, which exists in the nostalgic forms of physical and emotional rubble in and around the city. Wenders used the free-floating camera, shot-reverse-shot sequences, and colour, as well as dialogic rhetorical devices, to inscribe the viewer as an active and ethical subject, a witness of story, rather than a passive subject who absorbs a laid-out narrative without critical thought. To be active and ethical in Der Himmel über Berlin is to pay attention to the fragments of life lived all around you and their implicit intimacy. It is to allow oneself to desire and to be marked by desire. Within desire is the promise of the sensual pleasures of life, which both tether and transcend human experience.
Works Cited
Caldwell, David, and Paul Rea. “Handke’s and Wenders’s Wings of Desire: Transcending Postmodernism.” The German Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 1, 1991, pp. 46–54.
Casarino, Cesare. “Fragments on Wings of Desire (or, Fragmentary Representation As Historical Necessity).” Social Text, vol. 8, no. 2, 1990, pp. 167–181.
Cook, Roger. “Angels, Fiction and History in Berlin: Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire.” The Germanic Review, vol. 66, no. 1, 1991, pp. 34–53.
Ehrlich, Linda C. “Meditations on Wim Wenders’s ‘Wings of Desire.’” Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, 1991, pp. 242–46.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. Taylor & Francis, 1992.
Hartney, Christopher. "REVIEW ESSAY: A Survey of Substantial Scholarship on Nick Cave to 2012." Literature & Aesthetics, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 267–280.
Helmetag, Charles. “`...of Men and of Angels’: Literary Allusions in Wim Wenders’s ‘Wings of Desire.’” Literature Film Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 4, 1990, pp. 251–54.
Der Himmel über Berlin. Dir. Wim Wenders. Road Movies Filmproduktion. 1988.
Paneth, Ira. “Wim and His Wings.” Film Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, 1988, pp. 2–8.
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Anna Schreier is a 2024 graduate from Whitman College with degrees in German Studies and Athropology (focused in Environmental Studies), and now lives in Berlin pursuing environmental writing.
Picture: “Graffiti on the west side of the Berlin Wall offers a glimpse into East Berlin.” Nov. 14, 1989. From Picryl. Source: The U.S. National Archives. Public Domain.
