Mr. Bachmann and His Class (Maria Speth, 2021) (Patreon)

At least as far back as Frederick Wiseman's High School (1968), documentary filmmakers have consistently been compelled by the inner workings and personal dynamics of the classroom. A pretty wonderful screening series could easily be programmed around this topic, one that would feature such vastly different works as Nicolas Philibert's To Be and To Have (2002), Amanda Rose Wilder's Approaching the Elephant (2014), and more recent entries like Frederic Da's doc/fiction hybrid Teenage Emotions (2021) and Éric Baudelaire's Un Film Dramatique (2019). Although it's about a group home for troubled kids, and not a school per se, Allan King's Warrendale (1967) would also be an instructive inclusion. If you'll pardon the pun. 

However, Mr. Bachmann and His Class, the epic new film from Berlin Schooler Maria Speth, may well have raised the bar for this subgenre of documentary. Partly because of her subject(s), and partly because she exhibited the daring to make a nearly four-hour film about a single group of German seventh-graders, Mr. Bachmann is a major achievement. It's sometimes frustrating, occasionally confusing, but always enlightening. And perhaps most notably, it demonstrates that the Berlin School aesthetic, which itself was partly derived from nonfiction cinema, can be applied to the real world without losing its formal acumen. 

Mr. Bachmann is a collaboration between Speth and ubiquitous Berlin School cinematographer Reinhold Vorschneider. Together they have generated a deceptively simple formal approach that often suggests transparency but then pivots toward an subtle but overt acknowledgement of a deep structural principle. While many of us will recognize Bachmann and his students from our own experiences with the educational system (as pupils, teachers, or as parents), Speth insists on specificity, which is one of the intellectual bywords of Berlin School filmmaking. Although there is ample warmth and humanism on display here, we are never expected to regard these people abstractly or derive some general concept of "youth."

That's partly because Dieter Bachmann's class at the Georg Büchner School in Stadtallendorf reflects the cultural and demographic realities of that industrial town, and the shifting population of Germany more broadly. Almost all of Bachmann's students are first- or second-generation immigrants. The majority are Turkish (as is one of Bachmann's colleagues, Ms. Bal), but there are also Bulgarians, Moroccans, Kazakhstanis, Romanians, and Sardinians, and a large part of Bachmann's job is to help these students learn German through writing exercises. 

He does this, and we can see that it sometimes causes him some discomfort. More than once, he has to explain to some of his best overall students that their German is not up to scratch, and so he has to flunk them. "This does not reflect you, who you are. This is just a snapshot," he explains, and at other points he makes it obvious that he'd prefer not the be grading these students at all. He is much more concerned with giving them a sense of community and belonging. He wants these kids to share their own cultures with each other, and so he constantly asks them questions about their original languages, their social attitudes, and their struggles to form a conception of Heimat within their pocket of Germany.

And then there's music. Bachmann frequently has a guitar in his hand, and a lot of classtime is spent coaching them all in a makeshift in-class band. There's a touch of The School of Rock in Mr. Bachmann, but this is what Dewey Finn might become after decades in the classroom. Music is a means of expression, collectivity, and discipline, and in his off-hours Bachmann admits that his music lessons may not make them better students, and will certainly not improve their German. But Bachmann's commitment to these students does something that is arguably more important. 

Bachmann is producing citizens, of both Germany and the world. There are conflicts and misunderstandings. One student, Ferhan, is shy, but also seems to be a stricter-observing Muslim than most of the other kids, and she sometimes feels judged. Bachmann is careful to give her space to deal with her feelings, while also gently working to bring her back into the larger culture of the class. At another point, Bachmann performs a guitar ballad for the class, about two men who fall in love and who are punished. He uses this to start a discussion about homophobia, which is clearly uncomfortable for many of these young people. When several students -- boys and girls -- claim that same-sex attraction is "gross," Bachmann pushes them to explain exactly why. Finally one girl, Stefi, admits "I don't know." "That's the best answer you can give," the teacher replies.

And in case anyone required evidence that European education is a vast improvement over its American variety, Speth shows the students on a field trip to a municipal museum, where the class is told in no uncertain terms that Stadtallendorf played a pivotal role in the Third Reich, manufacturing munitions and piloting a form of rooftop-foliage camouflage that remains on many homes to this day. Likewise, during a lesson in which the students explain what their surnames mean in their native languages, Bachmann explains that his family was from Poland and were originally named Kowalski. At the start of 1933, Polish families were forced to assume German names, and his parents were assigned "Bachmann." 

This reminds us (in case we needed the reminder) that the purpose of a public education is not to instill patriotism, national chauvinism, or to whitewash conflict in the name of hegemonic power. Education can in fact be a space for enlightened debate, for reckoning, and for negotiating the demographic changes that any healthy nation experiences. Not every teacher will be as committed as Dieter Bachmann, but then, if we hamstring professional educators with short-sighted partisan nonsense, why should they be?