In April 1990, a few months before reunification, a film came to German cinemas, which perfectly captured the Janus -headedness of the historical situation: “The VW complex” by Hartmut Bitomsky. In essayist form, the question was about what the “car for the broad mass” meant over the decades. And wasn’t it significant that the engineers in the design center described the upcoming models as “Erlkönige” as “mysterious schemes” who wanted to concretize themselves to mythical effect? One of the first few minutes of this great film would also be noted that Bitomsky Hitler expressly cited with a break-he brought the “leader” of 1935, when the VW complex took shape, at least for a second, at least for a second, which could also be used to make a self-image as a democratic state attachment to an almighty auto industry, and is not now noticeable, and is not now generally. For the trained Marxist Bitomsky, there were numerous opportunities for this matter to complement the theory with sensible observations. If there was something that stood even higher than that of the materialistic law, then it was the fascinating detail, the dust grain of the epistemological theory that urges into the clean room of self -assurance. The dust, as a particle, but also as a motif and as a picture, he dedicated one of his later films in 2007. Bitomsky, born in Bremen in 1942, belonged to Harun Farocki, Holger Meiners, GERD Conradt, Irena Vrkljan, Helke Sander or Wolfgang Petersen, for the first year of the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (DFFB) – For historiographies of the Federal Republic, this group is an outstanding amount of observation, and the duo Farocki and Bitomsky is a highly revealing core. The film director Hartmut Bitomsky in 1972picture Alliance1973 made the film together “Once you will love me. On the meaning of booklet novels”, in which a position on the critical theory can already be recognized with the title, as the film wing she saw after 1968, albeit in new and own ways. In the magazine “Film criticism”, but also with the book “The Reds of the Red of Technicolor”, Bitomsky also proved to be a lover of the popular cinema and as an accurate analyst of its production conditions. He always liked Hollywood best when it went into the “hinterland of nihilism” – Bitomsky was also one of the best bonmotists on the left in Germany, the concrete wording comes from his picture essay “Das Kino and Death” (easy to find on the largest video platform). Ingemo Engström), gradually the infrastructure broke out, especially with the third programs, Bitomsky went to California for some time. From 1993 to 2002 he was a dean of the Calart University of Art, School of Film and Video, after his return, he worked as director of the DFFB. More on the topic of political self-image was also clearly on the Maxwell restaurant, which he opened in the 1980s in Berlin-Kreuzberg, from the autonomous ones, which determined the taste, but finally fought as “chic micki” and finally fought for closure Bitomsky, a lifelong smoker, known for his sonorous voice, which gave him a quasi -natural authority, was in the red wine and good cheese, and saw it a sense of life that should be determined by everyone. On Wednesday he died in Munich at the age of 83.
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