German cinema in this catalog begins after the thing that broke it. The industry that had produced Expressionism was emptied by emigration and then by the Reich, and what returned in the sixties was a generation who refused to inherit any of it: Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Kluge signed a manifesto declaring the old cinema dead and spent twenty years proving it. Since reunification the country's biggest export has been a very precise kind of historical reckoning.