In/Audibility and Climate Crisis in <i>Roter Himmel</i>

“Ich höre nichts” (“I don't hear anything”) is the telltale first line of the main protagonist, Leon (Thomas Schubert), in Christian Petzold's Roter Himmel (Afire). But for someone who purportedly hears nothing, Leon is remarkably plagued by noise, especially the nocturnal admixture of music and moans issuing from the bedroom of the mysterious guest, Nadja (Paula Beer), at the seaside cottage where the film is set. Petzold delights in playing with sound and (in)audibility. In his films, extradiegetic and diegetic sounds become indistinguishable, and sounds often have no visible source. Several scholars have examined Petzold's penchant for acousmatic sound and its uncanny effect in film (Löffler; Nguyen and Greenhill; Landry). Up to his old tricks in Roter Himmel, Petzold again urges us to prick up our ears, this time with a film driven by looming disaster and climate crisis, which nobody seems to hear. On the face of it, the film is about the young writer Leon, who travels with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) to a cottage on the Baltic Sea coast in order to dedicate time to writing his second novel. He becomes fascinated with and then enamored of Nadja. Insecure about his manuscript and his growing affections, which only seem to distract him from his work, he becomes increasingly bitter and self-loathing. Eventually, the wildfires encroach, bringing this brief summer sojourn to a tragic end. But Roter Himmel’s real drama plays out over its soundtrack. Regarding sound, Petzold implicitly poses two questions with his film: what does climate crisis sound like and, paraphrasing Marina L. Peterson and Vicki L. Brennan, how do people listen to and with climate crisis (371)? The first question evokes R. Murray Schafer's notion of the “soundscape” (3–4), which objectively and prescriptively encompasses the sonic environment, and calls forth several patent examples in the film. To wit: the distressed growling and grunting of wild boars in the forest; the low-flying jets; the sirens warning people to evacuate the area because of the advancing wildfires; and, finally, the booming and crackling rush of the raging blaze. Petzold's second question is about attunement to such a soundscape. It goes beyond Schafer's ethnographic approach and engages what Steven Feld conceptualizes as “acoustemology.” Combining acoustics and epistemology, acoustemology understands sound as listening and more specifically as a process and way of knowing through reflection and participation with sound. Drawing on the assumption that “life is shared with others-in-relation,” acoustemology is a relational epistemology that entreats us to attend and attune to different sources of sound, both human and nonhuman, living and nonliving (15). Sound does not simply exist as an object of perception; rather, it is part of an unfolding world that is, in Feld's words, “always experiential, contextual, fallible, changeable, contingent, emergent, opportune, subjective, constructed, selective” (14). In Roter Himmel this is the unfolding world of climate change and ongoing crisis. The trouble is that the characters in the diegetic world of the film rarely engage in acoustemology. They seem unable to attune themselves to the sounds around them and to attend to the emergent knowledge these sounds can activate. This becomes a source of their disenchantment and ultimate demise. Early in the film, Leon awaits Felix's return after their car breaks down on the way to the cottage. Alone in the woods, he first hears the agitated squeals of wild boars and then a jet roaring overhead. Yet unable to see the sources of these sounds, he does not register them as a threat or even as distant signals of distress. From the beginning, Leon perceives sound as illegible absence that merely disturbs. David Toop discusses sound as absence, or as an absent presence—“out of sight, out of reach,” what he calls “sinister resonance” (vii). But, similar to Feld, he understands listening to this apparent absence as a process that involves “discerning and engaging with what lies beyond the world of forms” (vii). Even if sound eludes our senses, or disturbs us, we must still attend to it and open ourselves up to its possibilities. Only on occasion do the characters in Roter Himmel attune their ears and contemplate what lies beyond the world of forms—that is, beyond what is immediately visible. In such instances, acoustemology seeps into the narrative of the film as a topic of attention, discussion, and even materiality. One such moment is Nadja's recitation of Heinrich Heine's love poem “Der Asra” (“The Asra”) which she repeats twice at the urging of the dinner guests. For Nadja, the rhythm of the poem evokes a sonic vibration, or “Beben,” akin to the catastrophic reverberations in Heinrich von Kleist's novella Das Erdbeben in Chili (The Earthquake in Chile). The latter has similarly invited readings with disaster and the Anthropocene. Heather Sullivan characterizes this literature as the “dark pastoral” (33–35). Heine's poem and its repetition beckon listeners to experience sound as vibration—not with the ear but with the body. Sound as vibration, Deborah Kapchan expounds, “permeates everything, unloosening thereby the knotted dualisms of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, body/mind” (42). For a moment, sound reverberates with meaning and poetry in the diegetic world of the film. The knowledge it yields takes shape in Heine's poem as a story about love and death. It furthermore heralds the tragic fate of Felix and his lover Devid (Enno Trebs), who will later be consumed by the wildfire and whose corpses will be discovered entangled in a lover's embrace. This moment of attunement and relationality is salient but ultimately brief. Crisis peaks soon after, and sirens begin to blare with appellative urgency. Yet the characters still do not evacuate the area. Instead, Felix and Devid heedlessly venture out into the woods to retrieve the broken-down car, and Leon remains vapidly wrapped up in the fate of his book manuscript. Notwithstanding its thematic link to Petzold's film Undine (2020)—also part of a so-called trilogy of elements—the close of Roter Himmel is more reminiscent of Petzold's slightly earlier feature Transit (2018), which is similarly, mutatis mutandis, a film narrative of impending doom. Recalling Transit, the details of Felix's and Devid's deaths in Roter Himmel unspool with striking lyricism through the voiceover narration of Matthias Brandt (likewise the narrator in Transit), who plays Leon's editor Helmut. Months have passed, perhaps even a year or more; Helmut reads aloud from the final pages of Leon's new book manuscript. Then, in the final scene of the film, there is a spontaneous reencounter between Leon and Nadja. Here too sounds of Transit ring out. Nadja's return is announced acoustically by the clicking of her heels, her familiar whistle, and even the swelling organ music to the tune of the earlier film's thematic “Abendlied” (“Evening Song”) by Hans-Dieter Hünsch. We can only speculate as to why Petzold so demonstrably harks back to Transit. Perhaps he seeks to draw a connection between two ominous (and no doubt intertwined) threats: fascism (in Transit) and the climate crisis (in Roter Himmel).1 With the film's final cut to black, there is another return, this time to the beginning of the film with the resounding of the opening song, the 2020 dream pop “In My Mind” by the Austrian Indie band Wallners. Petzold's atypical decision to bookend Roter Himmel with the same song (something he does not do in his earlier films) might propose a resonating sense of closure. However, I read it here as a condemning repetition and circularity that issues a warning: We still fail to hear; we remain unattuned to the world around us and to the imminent climate catastrophe.