Gerd Kroske is probably best known for his East German documentary about the anti-regime protests in Leipzig in the weeks leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leipzig im Herbst (Leipzig in the Fall, 1989), co-directed with Andreas Voigt. This historically important film was made on the streets, contemporaneous to the movement. Maintaining a commitment to radical political and social topics in his documentary filmmaking, Kroske has more recently turned to West German activist history and the anti-psychiatric Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK). His film titled SPK Komplex (2018) documents the collective’s emergence in the early 1970s in Heidelberg through the experimental therapeutic practices of Wolfgang Huber, its politicization of the stigmatized perception of illness, and its subsequent dissolution with the imprisonment of Huber and other members.

Influenced by both the historically parallel student and anti-psychiatry movements of the 1960s, the SPK challenged the practice and philosophy of psychiatric determination of mental illness as an individual problem. Such a diagnosis not only stigmatized and institutionalized patients but also criminalized them. In the West German context, the SPK also confronted the practices of the Nazis and their T4 Aktion, which prompted the euthanasia of tens of thousands of people deemed intellectually and physically unfit for life. But the anti-psychiatry movement stretched well beyond national borders. From the publication of Michel Foucault’s groundbreaking critique of psychiatry, Madness and Civilization, in 1961 to the wide-spread theories and practices of the likes of psychiatrists Franco Basaglia and David Cooper, the SPK contributed to a broad international discourse. Taking a Marxist approach, the collective understood mental illness as the consequence of capitalist society and its unequal power relations of production. Brief but significant, the history of this collective has long been overshadowed by that of the Red Army Faction (RAF). Even the film’s title evokes this connection. We are immediately reminded of Uli Edel’s 2008 fiction film Der Baader Meinhof Komplex.

What does it mean in our neoliberal present to bring such a radical history at long last to the screen through documentary? First, the politics of the SPK clash with the reality of our ever-diminishing public sphere, the increased relegation of feelings and affective life to the confines of the private realm and the family, and the cultural attack on nurture, human dependency, and care.