The Defiant Ironies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation

Features—

Apr 29, 2026

You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what does that mean, exactly, and what is this crazy, goofy, pugnacious movie-movie really up to? This particular late RWF is, in its appetite for farcical social critique and artfully canned melodrama, typical of its manically prolific filmmaker. (Let’s recall the deluge: over forty projects in fourteen years, not including the scripts he didn’t direct or the theater productions he didn’t record.) The tone is characteristically arch, but at the time the topic was new and raw. The subject at hand is the revolutionary pretensions of the Red Army Faction, the anti-imperialist guerrilla-terrorist outfit that terrorized Germany with bombings and assassinations throughout and beyond the seventies.

We usually get a hold of political movies by determining whether they are pro or con, progressive or conservative, but this film begs to be scanned as something else, something distinctly unserious but also dead serious about its lack of seriousness. In other words, what we have is the rampant flowering of the Ironic Film—an impertinent New Wave spawn of which Fassbinder was a committed practitioner. Coming between the less brazenly ironic but still ironically seasoned The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), The Third Generation is a full-on siege of hyper-irony, snarking and cosplaying and mocking its own diegetic constructions. Violent political reality is merely meat into the grinder.

What we usually think about when we consider “irony in film” is merely irony expressed or manifested in a narrative twist or a performance moment or a doubled meaning in a bit of dialogue. In the sixties, the Ironic Film became an entire genre, composed of works that were conscientiously ironic in their essential identity, fiber, and visual makeup. Broadly speaking, this phenomenon could include the overt metafilm as solidified by Godard and Rivette (inhabited by people who seem to know they’re in a movie) as well as the films of their many successors (Dušan Makavejev, Věra Chytilová, Nagisa Oshima, Kira Muratova, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, etc.) and contemporary filmmakers working in disparate modes, from Quentin Tarantino and Radu Jude to Joel and Ethan Coen, Roy Andersson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Charlie Kaufman, and Wes Anderson. You could say that the Ironic Film is a realm in which the distance between the viewer and the characters on-screen is doubled, while the distance between the viewer and the filmmaker is halved. “Realism” is sometimes present, but often in cracked-mirror form. It would seem, surveying the field, that a sense of spirited irreverence—toward classical earnest storytelling and the world in general—is required.

Fassbinder was a card-carrying Ironist; though a few of his films (such as 1974’s Effi Briest) seem sincere top to bottom, the bulk of his mountainous oeuvre is chin-deep in reflexivity, anti-nostalgic nostalgia, bitter camp, and satirical archness. The Third Generation, in fact, barrels closer to the edge of outright farce than many. Immediately, we’re hit with a contextual title scroll explaining that this film about domestic terrorism is “a comedy about parlor games . . . full of suspense, excitement, logic, cruelty, and madness, just like the fairy tales we tell children to help them prepare for death through the changes of life.” Well now—knives out. Of course, it was hardly as though Fassbinder didn’t see that making a German film in 1979 riffing on the Baader-Meinhof atrocities (which involved bombing corporate buildings and kidnapping politicians) was playing with a loaded gun. (You didn’t see Herzog or Wenders signing up for that kind of risk.) He had actually put off addressing the topic for years—his initial launch into filmmaking, in 1969, came a year after the RAF’s first major bombing, of an empty department store. A full decade and nearly thirty Fassbinder films and TV projects later, the man finally decided to tackle the scenario on the big screen, exposing it as a circus of opportunism, hypocrisy, and foolishness.

Often augmented with obscene and/or cryptic texts copied from public bathroom walls and overheard conversations, The Third Generation’s “action” begins with Eddie Constantine’s double-dealing industrialist manipulating the Schopenhauer-quoting terrorist cell into kidnapping him, it seems, to somehow help his company sell computer technology. The hint of unlikely conspiracy is merely the undernote to the madness, as the cabal otherwise flounces, plays spy games (and Monopoly), dresses in drag, screws, cites Bakunin and Hegel, discusses guerrilla camps while drinking champagne, watches TV, meets covertly in Japanese restaurants, and tries to figure out what to do with a wan junkie in their secret crash pad. It’s an all-star cast running impishly in circles (Hanna Schygulla, Bulle Ogier, Udo Kier, Volker Spengler, Margit Carstensen, Harry Baer, Y Sa Lo as that junkie, and Günther Kaufmann, who is at one point in blackface), and somehow, weirdly, the absurdities build inexplicable tension and the film quickly gets hot to the touch—as if we’re watching chimpanzees having a catch with a hand grenade. (The soundtrack, which gradually accumulates shrill layers of crosstalk, TV, radio reportage, off-screen speechifying, and the sound of a wailing baby, contributes significantly to the mounting stress.) Eventually, shit actually begins to go down, bodies fall, and the cell scrambles into abrupt action, going underground, donning new getups (clown costumes, even), and deciding to knock over a bank—resulting in more chaos and bloodshed.

As raucous and barbed as Fassbinder’s movie is, plenty of critics at the time still suspected that he hadn’t quite figured out how he felt about domestic terrorism. By the midseventies he was on the record as considering the RAF crimes to be “incomprehensible.” Could there, within the golden bad boy of the New German Cinema, have lurked a play-safe bourgeois? Anyway, we certainly know the RAF vexed Fassbinder, because we can see him in the remarkable anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978), exhausted and naked and wrestling melodramatically with, among other things, his yen for pills, his new film about the terrorists, and his moral confusion over the murder of industrialist/ex-SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer the year before, as well as the subsequent suicides of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof renegades. The ultraviolent “German Autumn” of 1977 got its historical name from this film, in fact, not vice versa; assembled without credits by assorted New German filmmakers and artists, including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Heinrich Böll, and Edgar Reitz, it is nothing if not a tissue of uncertainty, an unresolved and spontaneous impression of the agonies of the moment. Germany in Autumn seriously poses the eternal toxic question of all radicalism: when does violent resistance to homicidal authority by way of “unconventional” (read: non-state-funded) means transcend ethical righteousness and become “terrorism”? And who gets to decide?

Fassbinder wouldn’t live long enough to experience the distance in years often needed to sort out the ethical spaghetti of citizen-vs.-state conflict, a task finally attempted by Uli Edel (only two years younger than Fassbinder) decades later, with The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). A missile barrage of protest action and rock-and-roll cool and alarmingly decisive street combat, Edel’s film may not quite heroize its titular guerrillas, but it certainly exults in their crusade, sympathizing perhaps most with the young Europeans in the seventies who took Andreas Baader et al. as messiahs and who were knowingly, innocently appalled by bureaucrats and CEOs staging bloodshed in Vietnam and Iran and elsewhere and getting away scot-free and with pockets bulging. Edel implicitly asks (and so do we): who could blame them?

In contrast, Fassbinder offers no such sympathy to either side of the struggle. His politics were always personal and social and sexual, and most often concerned with autopsying the layers of hypocrisy therein. Hence, while The Third Generation’s few cops and corporate figures are spies and crooks, its RAF warriors are in turn charlatans and rapists and cosplayers, cornered into actual violence by the industrial state itself. But is it a relativist fallacy, to think that just as citizen-on-state violence breaks the social contract, state-on-citizen violence does as well, and so therefore warrants a response? It’s a question that continues to dominate our media dialogue, in a post-9/11 America and a landscape newly injected with stormtroopers and extra-judiciary killings. If The Third Generation is any indication, Fassbinder must’ve thought the whole discussion to be naive, and that to come down solidly on either side of the conflict is to fall victim to idealism or power madness or both. A cynical position, to be sure, particularly for an artist who didn’t seem to want to take a position at all. Outside Germany, the film was hailed by New Wave–loving critics, but at home its theatrical run was tellingly the occasion for violent protests and death threats—presumably at the hands of those pro-RAF young radicals, who had probably longed for a compadre in Fassbinder, and instead found their generation’s most defiant ironist.

The Defiant Ironies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation

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