Johannes Schaaf’s Tätowierung (Tattoo, 1967), West German Cinema around 1968, and the Joys of Violence; or, The Forgotten Case of the “Aesthetic Left”

Focusing on Johannes Schaaf’s neglected film Tätowierung (Tattoo, 1967), this essay revisits a film-theoretical and film-political debate in West Germany around 1968 that involved a conflict between the so-called political Left and the aesthetic Left. Attending to the kinds of violence around which the film is structured, the essay hypothesizes that the film, which was well received on its release, diagnosed emerging political developments in remarkably prescient ways that nevertheless remained opaque to the political Left but that, ironically, the allegedly apolitical aesthetic Left affectively sensed and gave expression to at the level of both film criticism and filmmaking. Attending more closely to this film, largely ignored by German film historiography, might be useful for addressing the question of what left politics—and filmmaking—was, and what it is today.