Gabi Teichert, a history teacher in Hessen as well as an amateur archaeologist and alchemist, has a problem: German history is not "positive enough" and cannot be taught in a patriotic version. Germany's history also has caused difficulties for the surviving knee of the late Corporal Wieland whose shattered remains now lie in a bunker near Stalingrad. As a result of the war, it tells us, it is now only a vestigial part of a much smaller country. By introducing these eccentric mediating figures at the very beginning of the film, Kluge signals its theme: a meditation about the possibility of a history of Germany "from the bottom up," one that records the singularity of events and avoids the idealizing, falsely totalizing perspective of histories written "from above." Gabi Teichert's investigations transform contemporary Germany into an archaeological site whose ruins are sifted for the marginal, the idiosyncratic, the forgotten and the repressed... The fissured text of Die Patriotin itself becomes a construction site-one of Kluge's favorite metaphors-on which spectators are provocatively invited to build their own counter-histories. Stuart Liebman