Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century

Stefan Ruzowitzky's recent horror film Anatomie explores the fictional premise that underneath the democratic surface of contemporary Germany, and within its technocratic elites, traces of the country's fascist past still linger. However, Anatomie mobilizes this version of the historical uncanny only insofar as the film is marketed to an audience in the global marketplace, predominantly in the U. S. While the film plays to this audience's anxieties stemming from Germany's unsurmounted Nazi past, it articulates anxieties for its German audience that are specific to contemporary processes of socioeconomic restructuring and generational change. Central to these anxieties are the backlash against 1960s oppositional politics and its perceived mainstreaming, and the destabilization of social equality and middle-class prerogatives as a result of market deregulation.