Trauma, Depression and Transgenerational Suicidal Tendency: Psychoanalytical Notes on the Film Die Wand [The Wall] (A, D 2012)

The film adaptation of The Wall (2012) by Austrian director Julian Pölsner, starring Martina Gedeck, is based on the 1963 novel by Marlen Haushofer an author who was underestimated for a long time. Although Julian Pölsler strictly adheres to the original novel, he nevertheless adds his own film plot: A woman, together with a dog, a pregnant cow and a cat, survives a surrealistic catastrophe in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains separated by a wall from the destroyed outside world. Cut off from civilization, the townswoman is forced to learn to survive, to grow fruits and vegetables, shoot wild animals, make firewood and hay. In the second summer they spend on the mountain pasture she comes across a man unknown to her, who has already killed the young bull with an axe and also kills her dog, who attacks him. The woman is beside herself with pain, dispair and rage over the loss of her animal friends. She shoots the man impulsively. In order “not to lose her mind” the woman begins to write down an account of her life in the third year of isolation until all the paper has gone. The writing self-analysis can be understood as an attempt to process the extreme traumatic experience combined with an existential struggle for survival. In the first summer on the alm the woman discovers: “For the first time in my life I was calm, not content or happy, but calm. … But then she experiences another severe trauma: Her still fragile self-healing process collapses. The whole film inexorably moves towards this trauma, in which she herself plays a decisive, active role: the murder of the intruder. After this, the woman is no longer just a victim of fate, of the cold wall that has come between her and the rest of the world, and of the catastrophe that has extinguished all life: She has become a perpetrator herself. Her self disappears in an extreme state of depressive paralysis. The Wall appeared a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), which had brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Marlen Haushofer captures the mood of an entire generation of that decade in her novel. Against this background, the murder of the intruder to the survival utopia, the harmony of man, animals and nature, takes on a profound meaning: The brutal killing of the bull becomes a symbol of a male-dominated destruction of life and nature and thus the eradication of the transgenerational perspective on our planet. The Wall can thus be considered as a roman à clef about the second wave of the women’s movement as well as a pioneering novel of ecofeminism and be assigned to the third wave of feminism.