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"When, on April 1 st, 1933,1 travelled for the last time on a sleeper to Paris, my sister and brother-in-law awaited me at the station. It was like an April-fool's joke. My brother-in-law said to me, 'You've really come here to take a vacation ...' And I said to him, 'Oh, Gene, this will be a long vacation!' For I knew that Germany was for me the Fatherland I had once had.
... Actually, with Germany in Autumn, l understood what new German Cinema meant. I had written in my book, The Haunted Screen, quite pessimistically about the German film, and ended with the sentence: hopefully Germany will recall its past film culture Some years later, I saw films by Schlondorff, Herzog and Wenders, and I wrote to Fritz Lang in America: there are good German films again. But the eternally disappointed Lang, whose
last films in Germany failed to find a good echo, wrote back to me: I can't believe it But it's true. I also saw films by Fleichmann, Hauff, and others — and with Germany in Autumn I understood that New German Cinema was born. What they tried to show in this film — on one side, the nation's laying-to-rest of Hanns Martin Schleyer; on the other side, the burial of the terrorists, to which young people thronged. The filmmakers couldn't say everything — but they were able to show it through their despair. The Germans need this despair. Exactly as in Buchner's time Buchner had to flee because he was a revolutionary. During the years of the Economic Miracle there weren't many important films made, because people were too materialistic. Things should not go too well for Germany — otherwise, 'Kleinburgertum' steps to the fore, and not creativity..."
— Lotte Eisner