Melting Ink Review: Dominik Graf’s Essay Film Is a Heady Reiteration of Settled History

Following up his willfully anachronistic adaptation of Erich Kästner’s 1931 novel Fabian: Going to the Dogs, German filmmaker Dominik Graf continues his allusive confrontation with German history in Melting Ink. It’s a cinematic bricolage of the German 20th century that’s as dismissive of the boundaries between essay film and documentary as it is of those between past and present. Somehow both staid and restless, reiterating settled history and opening new questions, Melting Ink is a film that one can imagine being equally at home at an arthouse cinema and as afternoon programming on German public television.

Although its discussion of writers who stayed in Nazi Germany—delivered in world-weary monotones by several narrators, including Graf himself—waxes a bit dry at points over the course of a near-three-hour running time, Melting Ink is by and large a ceaseless, almost feverish sprint through the decades. Like the animated inkblot images that serve as its central metaphor for the unknowability of other minds, this polyphonic essay film is perpetually shifting in form, lap-dissolving and moving images around within the frame.

Drawing from interviews with literary scholars and historians, archival images, camcorder footage, and what might well be Google image thumbnails (given their low resolution), Melting Ink spreads its tendrils through branching historical paths like the billowing ink that Graf overlays on footage of the Nuremberg war trials. As detailed at the beginning of the film and picked up again in its coda, Douglas M. Kelley, chief psychiatrist during the trials, conducted a series of Rorschach tests on the accused at the trials, the results of which were never released. Graf’s documentary, too, performs a kind of self-reflexive Rorschach test on more than just its audience, asking what the (cinematic) image can reveal of a person’s interiority.

The crucial question to put to the writers who declined to flee the repressive Nazi regime is the same one that Kelley put to the defendants at the Nuremberg war trials: When they looked at the world, what did they see? Graf follows the lead of Anatol Regnier, whose book on writers during the Nazi regime inspired Melting Ink, making it at once a documentary and a nonfiction adaptation. Regnier anchors the film as he guides the camera through archives and recounts his research on figures like Kästner, Gottfried Benn, Ina Seidel, and Will Vesper.

The septuagenarian Rengier has a convivial bearing, which can turn serious but never imposing when he discusses the darker contextual implications of, say, Seidel’s Norse-themed adventure stories. While his evident enthusiasm for the archive initially encourages viewers to feel their own sense of wonder at the preserved letters of these historical figures, the rather placid interviews with Rengier also give stretches of Melting Ink a tepid, informative quality. There’s nothing wrong with an expository rendition of history, of course, but here it clashes somewhat with the rest of Graf’s project, which by comparison is a heady rush of imagery.

Dividing Melting Ink into distinct but overlapping chapters on each of the writers, Graf dives deep into the biographies of these writers whose place in German culture is so ambivalent. The most well-known of these in the English-speaking world may be Hans Fallada, the social realist who retreated to the countryside and continued writing successful books during most of the 12 years of national socialism. Midway through his film, Graf brings us to Fallada’s rural home in Carwitz, Germany, where he waited out the Nazi years, and has Rengier read contradictory letters from the writer’s Nazi-era papers: one in which he obsequiously denounces Judaism to a Nazi propaganda official, and one in which he rails against the cruelty of the Nazis.

In contrast to Fallada, writers like Thomas Mann, Salka Viertel, and innumerable others sought refuge in the U.S. or elsewhere, and these more internationally famous exiles hang around the margins of Melting Ink like the bad conscience of those who stayed. The film’s German title, and that of Regnier’s book—Jeder schreibt für sich allein (Every Man Writes for Himself)—is a play on the name of Fallada’s postwar novel Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies for Himself). Both titles speak to the retreat inward, the “inner exile” that novelist Frank Thiess coined as either an explanation or excuse for tolerating Nazi rule rather than fleeing the country.

One senses a certain affinity between Fallada, an acute observer of the profound stakes of the everyday, and Graf, who fills Melting Ink to the brim with footage at once banal and resonant. In contrast to Fallada, Graf’s aesthetic is undoubtedly postmodern, his use of the frame in Melting Ink most directly comparable to the windows on a desktop computer. Conversations with Rengier and other experts migrate across surface of the image, toggling back and forth with archival footage, evocative visits to archives, and, at one point, test footage from Graf’s Fabian.

And yet, the sober New Objectivity of interwar Germany, the style that Fallada is most identified with, clearly looms large in Graf’s approach to montage as a way of collating the detritus of history that one might observe on a simple walk along the street. Digital camcorder footage, redolent of the work of Agnès Varda and apparently taken in present-day Berlin, frequently interrupts our excurses through the writers’ lives. From the shadow of a distinctly ’30s-esque silhouette in motion cast on Berlin’s cobblestone sidewalks, to a still image of a discarded shoe, the film includes images that on their own may mean little, but through montage they not only take on meanings but invoke the phantasmic presence of the fascist past.

That presence comes to play a particularly important role in Melting Ink. About halfway through his film, Graf introduces a visual idea that speaks to the contradictions of this documentary that contains the esoteric and the obvious in equal measure. Actors playing the writers, garbed in period-appropriate clothing, appear in a contemporary Berlin bookstore, morosely mulling around its shelves. There’s an almost childlike simplicity to this what-if device, but whereas some documentarians might be tempted to endow these fantastical reenactments with personality, Graf keeps them veiled behind shadows and impassive expressions. They offer no clear answers to the questions that occupy Graf and Rengier.

For Graf, Kästner represents a particularly vexing case, as he probably does for Germans more broadly. A famous figure who authored a number of children’s books that are beloved to this day, such as Emil and the Detectives, Kästner prevaricated about his conciliatory stance during the Nazi regime. Immediately after the war, he promised to write a definitive book on “inner exile,” but by his death in 1974, after a decade in which Germany really opened itself to confronting the horrors of fascism, he appears to have never even begun such a project.

Graf seizes upon a photo snapped of Kästner smiling alongside a bust of his own head, and conjectures about the author as doppelgänger: the artist under fascism as an ego divided and impenetrable, perhaps even to themselves. Invoking this classic figure of German romanticism, Graf reminds us that both individuals and societies have a dark underside that, unobserved, can spread like a virus—or like the “melting ink” of a Rorschach blot. The true meaning of Melting Ink’s abstract image of the past, then, is in the present, where the currents of history converge.