“How can someone with your past live the way you do?” a handsome kidnapper asks incredulously while keeping vigil of his hostage, who soaks a shirt in a porcelain basin. The Swiss Alps frame the men, taming a criminal scene into a pastoral one. Jan, the kidnapper and anti-capitalist, vandal protagonist in Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators (2004), twirls a stem of grass between his finger and thumb while Hardenberg, the hostage, a middle-aged executive, scrubs his collared polo.
Answering the kidnapper’s question, Hardenberg explains in material, linear terms how one comes to shirk youthful idealism for staunch conservatism. “You get married, raise a family, buy a house,” he explains. “The kids need a good education. That costs money. Security. So, you do like they do. Then one day, to your surprise at the polls,” the hostage pauses his washing and looks at his kidnapper, “you vote conservative.” Elizabeth Freeman, who coined “chrononormative”—the “use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity”—is somewhere out there knowingly nodding her head.1
The “past” to which Jan alludes is Hardenberg’s erstwhile leadership in the Socialist German Student Union, “another time,” Hardenberg calls it, when he was “a true rebel,” comrades with Rudi Dutschke, and when he smoked a lot of dope and slept with a lot of women, women who also slept with a lot of women. But then, Hardenberg explains, enticed by the promise of futural security, he changed. We change. (Or do we?) The joint is snubbed; the high-yield bank account opened; Socialist, revolutionary ideals are left behind. “It happened gradually, slowly, you hardly notice it,” Hardenberg tells Jan. “Under 30 and not liberal, no heart,” he says. “Over 30 and liberal, no brains.”
The Edukators, released at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, follows Peter (Stipe Erceg), his girlfriend Jule (Julia Jentsch), and their friend Jan (Daniel Brühl) through the fallout of a botched Berlin villa break-in. Peter and Jan are the Edukators, activist vandals who trespass onto fancy estates, placing furniture and material belongings in absurd arrangements, then leaving behind sharpied threats on cardstock: “Your days of plenty are numbered,” or “You have too much money.” Enraged by income disparities, inhumane working conditions across the world, and gratuitous displays of wealth, the Edukators eschew petty criminality for pedagogical alarm. They want to disrupt the security to which the wealthy cling, white-knuckled.
By juxtaposing a lapsed revolutionary with three anti-capitalist activists, Weingartner proffers two doses of pessimism: first, resignation—Hardenberg’s if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em mentality; and second, the Edukators’ disillusionment—they know capitalism subsumes all political effort into its profit streams. “What was considered revolutionary then,” Jan laments, “you can now buy in a shop.” But if we cannot escape the systems that harm us, how might the comrade see us through failure and into a future we have agency in creating?
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I was 22 when I first saw The Edukators, sitting on a legless, musty couch with a not-quite-but-almost boyfriend. George Dubya was president and Senator Barack Obama’s change we could believe in was two years out. The U.S. economy was blissfully peaking like a naïve perennial in February; my bank account was anemic, but I shared a cheap apartment with two roommates and a family of plucky rats. We made do.
That boy I almost or barely dated: he pushed pink chicken doused in Italian dressing around my thrift store frying pan, my two roommates casting side-eyes. It was his idea, to bring me dinner and a movie. It was he who brought The Edukators into my life, renting it from our local Blockbuster (which liquidated at a slower pace than our relationship). We sat on opposite ends of my couch, mugs of cheap wine cradled in our hands, then promised one another we’d never forfeit our ideals to placate the unease of unknown futures. And then we never saw one another again.
Because here’s the thing about him. And all the boys before and after. It was never going to work out. I’m gay and, because knowledge is time and time is queer, I had no idea.2 We had no future. Rather, with rats running the baseboards, I curled into my roommates’ beds where we talked late into the night the way you do in your early twenties, about our families, about the war, about consumerism, Tori Amos, climate, and books. My connection to women, when the flint hit, was immediate, kinetic, intimate. But these were feelings and ephemera, temporally bonded, never actualizing into anything as concrete as language or, god forbid, fucking. But I wouldn’t be here today—the unforecasted future of my past—without them. My comrades. They were the feelings before knowledge; they were feelings that forged knowledge.
Comrade comes from the Spanish, camarada.
And camarada stems from its root camara, which is a noun meaning a shared bunk, barrack, or chamber.
A comrade, then, is a roommate.
In The Edukators, the comrades Jan, Jule, and Peter become roommates when they flee with their hostage to a cabin in the Swiss Alps. The cabin becomes a commune. The foursome sits at the dinner table, passing around pinched joints while exchanging political barbs about the depraved privatization of a globalized world. “What do you do with all that money,” Jule asks, before quickly answering her own question, “You amass things. . . A lot of stuff to indicate ‘I’m an Alpha Male.’” As reviewers have noted, the criticisms the Edukators launch at Hardenberg are hardly new. “I play the game but I didn’t make up the rules,” opines Hardenberg, to which Peter responds, “It’s not who invented the gun, man. It’s who pulls the trigger.”
Roland Vegso and Marco Abel call the scenes at the commune “a classic sequence of political re-education.”3 But no one’s mind is getting radicalized (leftward or right). Rather, the mood is pessimistic, pedantic even. The Edukators realize the past revolution failed and theirs will, too. They thus turn inwards, thinking about what is possible not with revolution but with each other: Jan and Jule’s attraction to one another grows during their time in the Alps. And when Peter discovers this, that Jan and Jule are sleeping together, he takes off—“Fuck it. This is your shit”—storming down the mountain with red-rimmed eyes and fiery absolution.
We could reduce this to a hetero love triangle, but we would miss all that gets made in the margins. No explicit sexual connection occurs between Jan and Peter, to be clear, but the pair exudes excess and alterity. Their fidelity to one another is at once familial and not. As they hug, kiss, touch, hit, inspire, scold, protect, and care for one another, their relationship reveals many layers. When the relationship is tested, it suffers but does not break. They adapt.
After imbibing lagers with locals at the town pub, Peter returns to the cabin in the middle of the night, flopping down on the family bed between Jan and Jule, long arms across their bodies. Indeed, the three adapt to one another throughout the film: the bond between Peter and Jan expands to include Jule, a platonic partnership between Jule and Peter is enlivened and given direction by Jan, and the loneliness embodied by Jan is solaced by two other souls equally uneasy in the world. The three prove the rewards of comradeship as one must constantly adapt within a hetero-capitalist system. And it is through the porous, illegible relationship among these three characters that we see the comrade’s queer political and material potentialities—that it strengthens one’s temporal attunements and, thereby, eschews capitalism’s claims on futurity and signals other ways forward.
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We lived on Prospect Street (with the rats) our first year out of college. We played chess on the front porch and drank ourselves stupid with shitty beer. In summer, we taped tin foil to the windows to block summer heat waves. In winter, we balanced trays of water on our radiators to humidify the cracked air. One of my roommates split from her long-term boyfriend. “I need to break my own heart,” she said. The other’s father died. We circled the drain of what pained us, witness to one another without solutions.
Adrienne Rich said our relationships with women need not be sexual to be revolutionary. She delineated this capacious form of intimacy as “the lesbian continuum,” explaining that our communes—chosen and nurtured through our existential, social, and political entanglements—will get us where we need to be, whether or not we’re fucking.4 Rich’s personal lesbian continuum included Audre Lorde, who famously equated the erotic with the mind’s desire to know, feel, and make. Having been “raised to fear the yes within ourselves,”5 she says, which is a form of self-negation, the commitment to political consciousness requires rendering visible what is invisible, to make a thought thinkable. Stoked by the heat of our comrade collective, fueled by the slippage between erotic and epistemological desire, the future is ours.
That first apartment sat lopsided on the south end of Prospect Street, too sweet a poetic flourish to neglect. Despite our pessimisms wrought by feelings of impossibility and disempowerment—patriarchy is, of course, another system of which there is no exit or escape—the comrade reveals prospects. Jodi Dean writes, “The comrade relation remakes the place from which one sees what it is possible to see, and what possibilities can appear.”6 She goes on to explain that even under severe conditions of constraint, imagining self-transformation is always possible: “we can work on ourselves.”7
The comrade walks us through the false dichotomies that structure capitalist futures (is change possible or not, are we hopeful or not, are our protests meaningful or not), rejecting the walls on both sides.
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The Edukators return Hardenberg to his villa under seemingly amicable terms—they bonded over joints and spaghetti, after all. And Hardenberg offers Jule a signed dissolution of her debt. But Jan is exhausted; he questions what it’s all about, ready to toss Edukator blueprints into a dumpster, ready to give up or give in. The strongest of the triad has fallen, but Peter and Jule intercede, not with optimistic rhetoric about the efficacies of activism, but by drawing him back into their relationships. “It’s about us. I actually believe in it, man,” Peter says, with Jule adding, “The best ideas survive.” They are the idea. They are surviving.
José Esteban Muñoz tells us, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”8 Like the Edukators, my comrades—my friendships with women that never manifested through skin—were luminaries, lighting the way toward a dark horizon. We passed out in bed together, our bodies alive but not touching. We smoked rollies around a campfire. We stumbled home from the bar, safe and clutched by the elbows. When one said to me, all that energy that never gets to naked is the best stuff, I knew exactly what she meant, in real time. We weren’t breaking into villas or kidnapping executives. This is not the analogy. We might have decried gratuitous consumerism around the campfire, but we weren’t revolutionaries. But when the future is unimaginable, and capital stands ready to consume you whole, a comrade, a roommate can offer shelter.
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Endnotes
- Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
- See, especially, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures (NYU Press, 2019). Keeling understands queer temporality as that which produces “risk,” without hammering valuation onto that risk. Rather, our embrace of the unknowable, unpredictable, and non-scalable provides a blueprint for navigating capital time, the chrononormative without selling out.
- Roland Vegso and Marco Abel, “Biopolitical Education: The Edukators and the Politics of the Immanent Outside,” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 40, no. (2016): 1-26.
- Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 631–660.
- Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Sister Outsider (Ten Speed Press, 1984), 57.
- Jodi Dean, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019), 8.
- Dean, Comrade, 8.
- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), 1.
CE Mackenzie