SUMARIO. Introduction: strategies of remembrance / Historical predecessors: melodrama and modernism. Mourning, melancholia, and new German melodrama / Modernism’s aftershocks: Peer Raben’s film music for Fassbinder / Music and the materials of history : Alexander Kluge. Kluge’s assault on history: trauma, testimony, and difference in the patriot / Undoing act 5: history, bodies, and operatic remains: Kluge’s the power of emotion / Queering history through camp and kitsch. Restaging history with fantasy: body, camp, and sound in the films of Treut, Ottinger, and Von Praunheim / Introjecting kitsch: Werner Schroeter, music, and alterity / Coda: working the pieces.