The article takes issue with Sara Lennox’s reading of the significance of the famous film noir classic The Third Man in Bachmann’s 1971 novel Malina . While Lennox uses the film’s inscription into Malina to prove her overarching thesis that the novel must be understood—like the film—as historically specific to the Cold War era, I argue that it is a much broader, metahistorical level that Bachmann emphasizes by naming her much-discussed dream chapter “Der dritte Mann” after the film. It is, in other words, the sublation of the film’s historical specificity into a type of collective unconscious, resulting in a much more universally fluid view of the how fascist tendencies permeate society and have continued into the postwar era.