Cynical Securities in Fassbinder’s <i>Third Generation</i>

Rainer Werner Fassbinder uses melodrama to critique both its romanticized roots as a genre and to upset the ideal of bourgeois postwar West Germany, the milieu depicted in films such as Martha (1974), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), and many others. This direction in his work culminated in The Third Generation (1979), often described as a farce. Recent scholarship has reappraised Fassbinder’s “terrorist” film, and this essay argues that its unique melding of private and public spheres serves as Fassbinder’s critique of the position in which the Red Army Faction (RAF) found itself, especially after October 1977, and that The Third Generation functions as an analysis of the many complicities between terrorism and capitalism, particularly as such complicities have been articulated in the field of critical security studies. In this sense, Fassbinder’s film satirizes petit bourgeois attempts at revolution while also demonstrating Western liberal democracies’ enduring dependence on terrorist threats.