America's Function in the Imagination of a (Re

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An Obsolete Hegemon? America’s Function in the Imagination of a (Re-)unified German Nation

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Simon Losch, M.A. Graduate Program in Germanic Languages and Literatures

The Ohio State University 2017

Dissertation Committee: John E. Davidson, Adviser Nina Berman Robert C. Holub Paul Reitter

Abstract

German cultural artifacts after 1990 use the representation of America in an attempt to come to terms with and construct a German nation after the fall of the Wall. America has long been a reference point for discourses of German nationhood, often in very dichotomic terms of utopia and dystopia. The (re-)unification provided a unique historical situation in which modes of German communal identification had to be (re-)negotiated, as it brought together two different forms of social, political, and economic organization.

Postmodern multiplicity and the German historic guilt seem to make modern modes such as nation impossible to hold up. This dissertation, however, looks at the persistence of

German national tropes in representations of Amerika in (Eastern) German literature and film. Next to nation, the term obsoleteness grants this dissertation its specific perspective, as it unites the concept of nation in large parts of the German erudite discourse with the historical situation of the dissolution of the GDR, and the resulting personal, political, and economic situation of the former citizens of East-Germany. In the chapters divided by the two forms of media and subdivided into narratives of America as refuge and as adventure, as well as Americanization, it examines the media-specific constructions of America and how they reflect on discourses of German nationhood post-Wende.

The image of America portrayed in these texts and films actually suggests the systemic unwillingness or even impossibility of a communal construction that transcends the borders of the nation. America’s position in its paradigm of the Self and the Other, however, has been shifting. Due to its medial overdetermination, it can no longer fulfill the

nineteenth-century fantasy of the absolute Other, despite the persistence of those fantasy of adventure and refuge. Instead, I argue, it works in the dialectic incarnation of the Other that endangers the Self and as a model for the inclusion of difference and hybridity. No matter how the cultural products evaluate America and the German nation, they appear as interdependent in the formation of personal and communal identities.

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Dedication

Dedicated to Sharon

Acknowledgements

The completion of this dissertation would not have been possible without the participation and assistance of so many people whose names may not all be enumerated.

All their contributions are sincerely appreciated and gratefully acknowledged. However, I would like to express my appreciation particularly to the following people, to whom I am deeply indebted professionally and personally.

I would like to sincerely thank Professor John Davidson for a sometimes bumpy but always enlightening ride through the production of this dissertation. In addition, I would like to express gratitude to my committee, Professor Nina Berman, Professor Robert

Holub, and Professor Paul Reitter for their fruitful feedback and guidance along the way.

Some special thanks also to the Professors Bernhard Malkmus and May Mergenthaler for their insights, ideas, and thorough critiques of my work. I want to thank Barbara Heck and

Dr. Kevin Richards for their help with the dissertation’s language and content, Harrison

Baldwin for his help as proxy, as well as Natascha Miller for the prompt assistance and good talks. Further, I would like to extend my gratitude to the Department of Germanic

Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University for all the opportunities for personal and professional growth.

Finally, I want to thank all the friends and family that kept me sane and grounded during the inspiring but tasking times. I want to especially single out Sharon Gardner-Losch for her patience and unending moral support, Jonas Hariri and Katharina Kuhr for the open ear and the distractions, Marcus Breyer for the inspiration and the heated discussions, as well as Ruth Gräf-Lösch and Klaus Lösch for their care.

Vita

July 2004 ...……………………...... Bertolt-Brecht-Schule

2010 ………………………………… M.A. German Studies, The University of Alabama

2011 ………………………………… M.A. Areastudies North-America, Friedrich

Alexander University Erlangen – Nuremberg

2015 to 2015 ……………………….. Fellow, Technical University Dresden

2011 to 2017………………………… Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of

Germanic Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Germanic Languages and Literatures

Minor Field: Film Studies

Table of Contents

Abstract ………………………………………………………………...... ii

Dedication …………………………………………………………………………...… iv

Acknowledgemets …………………………………………………………………...... v

Vita …………………………………………………………………………………...... vi

Chapter 1: Introduction ………………………………………………………...... …… 1

1.1. America, Amerika, and the United States ………………………………...... 4

1.2. Objects of research and analytical horizons……………………………...... 8

1.3. Literature overview …………………………………………...... 11

1.4. Nation as construct of communal identification ...……………………….... 18

Chapter 2: The Obsoleteness of the Nation …...…....………………………………….. 25

2.1. Origins, differentiations, and effects of obsolescence …………...……….. 30

2.2. History and obsoleteness ...…………….…………………………...... ….. 34

2.3. Nation and the subject of a lack ………………………………………...... 45

2.4. The cultural specificity of the Nation-Thing: America and Germany ...... 59

2.5. Amerika as Ersatz for the obsolete Nation-Thing ………………………..... 72

Chapter 3: Amerika as a Refuge – The Quest for a Lost Fantasy …….....………………...99

3.1. Stadt der Engel ………………………………………………………….... 107

3.1.1. The theme of memory and obsoleteness ……………………………...... 112

3.1.2. Refuge and confrontation: Amerika’s initial role for the protagonist ...... 127

3.1.3. Solutions: hybridity, acceptance, and the global in the local …………... 136

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3.2. Schultze gets the blues …………………………………………………..... 159

3.2.1. Schultze as Heimatfilm ………………………………………………..... 163

3.2.2. Ubiquitous Amerika …………………………………………………...... 167

3.2.3. Amerika and the power of disruption ....……………………………...... 171

3.2.4. Amerika as path into hybridity .....……………………………………..... 173

3.2.5. Music between Heimat, disruptive force,

and connective semiotic system ……………………………………...... 176

3.2.6. Amerika as refuge ……………………………………………………... 181

3.2.7. Obsoleteness and change - Amerika as possibility in Germany …...... 191

3.3. Chapter conclusion ……………………………………………………...... 194

Chapter 4: Amerika as an Adventure …………………….………………………….... 201

4.1. Berlin–New York –

the discovery of the Other and the nation in the everyday ……….……...... 218

4.2. Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam –

in search for an Other and a stable concept of the German nation ...…..... 238

4.3. Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens –

adventure into Amerikanization ……………………………………...... 251

4.4. Friendship! – or the German fantasy of Amerika as a Global Village …... 264

4.5. Chapter conclusion ……………………………………………………...... 279

Chapter 5: Amerika in Germany ……………………………………………………..... 287

5.1. The history of Amerikanization

between Amerikanism and Anti-Amerikanism ………………………...... 289

5.1.1. Amerikanization and West-Germany ………………………………….. 290

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5.1.2. Amerikanization and East-Germany …………………………………... 297

5.1.3. Amerikanization after the Wende ...... 302

5.2. Amerika/Amerikanization in cultural products -

Ostalgie and the romantic Amerika …………………………………...... 304

5.3. Vergiss Amerika – the catastrophes of Amerikanization ……………...... 310

5.4. Die Atlantische Mauer and the failed emigration ……………………….. 332

5.5. Chapter conclusion ……………………………………………………..... 352

Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Discourse on Amerika and

the Problematic Constitution of a (Re-)unified German Nation ...………... 357

References …………………………………………………………………………...... 377

Chapter 1: Introduction

“Amerika,” as totum pro parte for the United States of America, has been an important discursive figure in Germany for the last 200 years, as it went from the new land of opportunity to the world’s military, economic, and cultural hegemon; West Germany’s occupying authority, important ally, and trade partner; and East Germany’s identity- forming political enemy. After the collapse of the Soviet system and German (re-

)unification, American hegemony appeared to be the new world order and many already speculated about “the end of history,” in which the world would eternally live in a neoliberal capitalist system under the control of the United States. But soon enough the system revealed its weaknesses and inhumanities and the United States actually began to lose influence around the world. In the last twenty years, the continuous global reign of the

United States and the continuation of the “pax Americana” have been thrown into increasing doubt over an insecurity about the United State’s future and its shifting role in the world that has reached its climax with the election of Donald Trump and its subsequent erratic behavior (cf. Kupchan 40-41; Clarkson “End of Pax Americana”). Trump’s election, however, simultaneously is a direct result of the diminishing role of America and the discourse surrounding it. He used the American fear of losing its grip on the world for his advantage by employing highly nationalistic rhetoric. Despite all the turmoil the US was still Germany’s most important trade partner in 2015 (Mohr), and American music and film have an exceptionally large market share compared to other European countries - it consistently remained around 75% (Maaß; Hasebrink et. al 34; Scheimann). The economic

and cultural role is reflected in the importance German media concedes to America. It is, however, conspicuous how the public discourse portrays America either in a very positive or a very negative light.1 The multifaceted discursive formation of the US can be usefully separated under the headings of global dystopia and local utopia. The former depicts

America as a dystopian space that has neither Geschichte nor Kultur; often it is but the concentration of market power and exploitation. In this discourse, America is the power that both corrupts the immigrants who arrive in the US and the worlds into which it expands

– depicted in works like Ferdinand Kürnberger’s Der Amerikamüde, Franz Kafka’s Der

Verschollene, Werner Herzog’s Stroszek, and Wim Wender’s The American Friend, just to name a few. On the other hand, it is shaped as a local utopia connected to the myth of the land of possibility, and its political constitution centered on equality. In essence, it is depicted as rich and plentiful and allowing for personal freedom. This strand is prominent among others in Gottfried Duden’s Missouri, Wilhelm von Polenz’s Das Land der Zukunft, and Michael Schorr’s Schulze Gets the Blues. One must, however, be aware that such a categorization can only be a tool to understand historical currents and not a truth that withstands close scrutiny. Even single works rarely exclusively represent one of these

1 Following Foucault’s definition, discourses enable the constitution of knowledge, social practices, forms of subjectivity and objectivity, and relations between knowledges. Chris Weedon summarizes Foucault’s definition: “[Discourses] constitute the ‘nature’ of the body, unconscious and conscious mind, and emotional life of the subjects they seek to govern” (108). Discourse, therefore, is based on the assumption that what is generally perceived as real is actually shaped by language. I will argue with Jameson that describing languages as shaping realities is accurate; this, however, does not mean that there is no reality beyond language (Jameson on Jameson 2). I comprehend languages as visual, audible, and legible symbolic systems shaped to communicate.

broadly defined deep currents, as the tension between the deep currents manifests itself in individual cultural products as well.

Noticeably, these opposing images have often been the divider between the position of the state and the populace.2 The student movement in West Germany showed remarkable anti-Americanism, while the West German state promoted a positive image; the East

German state, on the other hand, depicted America as proto-fascist, while America and

American products were widely received positively by the population. The contrast between the official and popular images of America in West and East Germany is the historical foundation of this study. Both Germanies had a special relationship with

America, and it has been a central term in the German construction of communal identity, during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Often it was used in the context of or opposition to a German nation that has been a problematic form of group identification from its beginning but became even more problematic after the atrocities committed in its name during the Third Reich. Consequently, many have even deemed the concept of a

German nation obsolete in the latter half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the nation became central to discourses of re-unification after the fall of the Wall, as it promised vindication for the proposed necessity of “again” forming one state.

2 Image, as I will use the term in this dissertation, describes more than only visual representations. W. J. T. Mitchell describes them in five semantic categories: graphic (pictures, statues, designs), optical (mirrors, projections), perceptual (sense data, ‘species’, appearances), mental (dreams, memories, ideas, phantasmata), verbal (metaphors, description)” (10). As Mitchell suggests like other theorists of late capitalism, these images become imperative for our perception of an object as the image is put in front of what actually is. An image is an image a conglomerate of different influences that make up the imagination of the object in the person or the culture.

This dissertation argues that in light of globalization and the European integration, constructions of the US occupied a dual role in the post-Wende German identity construction. On the one hand, it remained in competition with the German nation as locus of identification, on the other hand, it took the role of an Other that stabilized an imaginary of the German national Self. As an Other, it has the appropriate distance to the Self to fulfill the role of threat and intrigue a nation needs for self-construction. My dissertation, hence, traces the importance of “Amerika” as a discursive site in the cultural production of the reunified Germany and investigates its role in the discourses surrounding Germany as a

(re-)unified nation. I study specifically works by and about those raised in the GDR because the loss of the GDR as negative or positive identification site compels them to confront the issues surrounding a German Nation.

1.1. Amerika, America, and the United States

To even begin a discussion about the topic, an initial clarification of the central locus of my dissertation – Amerika (or is it America?)– is necessary. First, one must understand that the object of this dissertation is probably the most overdetermined space in the West today. Cultural products by and about America are ubiquitous and so are analyses of those products, and those about America’s political, economic, and cultural role in the world and in Germany are equally numerous. Hence, I will not give an overview of all the different definitions, but will instead give a short working definition which I will extend in the following chapters. I will use three different terms to describe what seems like the same

space “Amerika,” “America,” and “the United States of America.” All three signify a different aspect of the same construct. At the center of my studies is Amerika. I use the

German spelling to mark a particular German image of America, which is comprised of tropes and myths of American and German origin and contextualized in specifically

German discourses. Robert McFarland and Michelle Stoot argue the same in Sophie

Discovers Amerika: “

We consciously left the ‘k’ in ‘Amerika’ because the land that German-speaking

women writers discover, explore, and imagine is not always the same America – or

Americas – that can be found in other writings about the New World. In many ways,

it is a land of their own invention, given shape by profound influences from the

German language, history, literature, and culture. (3-4)

Many scholars have argued that in German representation of America, the focus is not on the object itself, but on a German fantasy of the object (cf. Rentschler 605, Gabriele

Mueller 14). Oliver Simons follows the phenomenon in detail in “’Amerika gibt es nicht:’

On the Semiotics of Literary America in the Twentieth Century,” using Franz Kafka’s

Amerika and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Amerikafahrt. He argues that instead of describing the object or the seen and experienced, the two travelogues’ signs refer to other signs, which the authors have read somewhere else. Amerika therefore is only loosely linked to America and the United States, as it relies on representations rather than experiences of America.

The representations have sources in the United States and Germany but are formed and contextualized by German discourses and histories. Amerika becomes a space in which to

negotiate the role of signification and a sign that says less about the object than about the speaker, her education, her politics, her origin, etc. One can extend this idea of the interreferentiality of the construction of Amerika to other cultural products and general public discourses. Amerika, therefore, is the label for a German image of America, which arises from the history of German representations of America, as well as appropriations of

American representations of itself. This image is so strong that it can overlie America even when confronted with it, a mechanism Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping.” The growing dissemination of discursive figures through media increasingly fills our cognitive map with images produced by mass culture and thus with dominant ideologemes. Cognitive mapping is in turn responsible for the pervasiveness of some images, as the cognitive map, once set, is resistant to change and makes the individual blind to information that does not fit its map or is contradictory to the maps information (cf. Freundschuh/Kitchen 1-8). The presence of Amerika, however, does not imply that America and the United States are entirely absent in the German public discourse or in the cultural products that I analyze.

On a macro level, all these works are involved in the discourse of Amerika, as they are

German-speaking products for German audiences, but on a micro level, they do portray

America and the United States when they describe or show it. I will use “America” when speaking of the space and its mythically charged function as nation from a perspective of the production of self-images; the “United States of America” [USA] will be reserved for the (geo-) political entity determined by politics and its actual geographical territory. In the

individual case, more often than not the lines between Amerika, America, and USA often remain blurry.3

The concepts of Amerika and America get further complicated by the fact that they have been employed as a synecdoches of many other phenomena, primarily modernization, globalization, and late capitalism. According to Jameson in Globalization and Political

Strategy, the association of America and the neo-liberal globalization is fundamental for the social system of late capitalism (59). In both Germanies as well as the (re-)unified

Germany this connotation has intensified the perceived threat Amerika poses for the local and the communal. In the context of my dissertation, this association necessitates the consideration of these aspects of Amerika and a differentiation between the contrasting functions it takes as representative of a capitalist system, globalization, consumer culture, and modernization, as well as concrete space, political actor, and producer of goods, myths, and images.

In this dissertation, I will analyze the discourses on Amerika in eastern Germany’s cultural production after reunification and argue that the discourse on Amerika can enhance the understanding of the ideological change and the struggles there of constructing the reunified Germany as an imagined community. As indicated above, the national in

Germany at the end the twentieth century is only conceivable in relation to the fields of tension of Americanization and Germanness, socialism and the market economy, consumer

3 One has to acknowledge the problematic nature of the terms “America” and “Amerika.” Both terms are commonly used as synecdoches for the USA, but with the appropriation of the name of a double continent to signify a singular country arise a multitude of issues of power relations that parallel the behavior of the US on the continent in the last century (cf. Gutmann et al 3).

society and sustainability, and the local and the global. In the context of the discourses on

Amerika, these dichotomies gain even greater importance as they promote the dichotomic separation of the images on Amerika. Amerika can be read as a threat to the national as well as a promise for a better future and as a model for a German national self. Jameson writes, amongst others, that the USA is the source of the neoliberal globalization today, associated with the necessity of historical, social, and technological “progress;” an unquestioned belief in markets; and the increasing pervasiveness of information systems

(Postmodernism 5) – East German’s concepts of Amerika are interconnected and in large parts inseparable from the neo-liberal ideology yet it must also be inflected by the ideologies left behind. The proposed dissertation will attend to discourses on Amerika intertwined with discourses on the above-mentioned fields of tension, all of which Jameson attributes in their neoliberal manifestation to postmodernity or late capitalism. This form of capitalism first fully permeated the society of eastern Germany after the fall of the wall.

East Germany, as it was part of a different political, social system and mode of production, had been largely barred from the direct effects of late capitalism.

1.2. Objects of research and analytical horizons

To analyze the discourses on Amerika after the fall of the wall and their role in the negotiation of the concepts of the German nation, I will be using novel-length books and feature length films. The focus will be on media that have a looser claim to topicality than newspaper articles or to utility than travel guides, therefore allowing for greater symbolic

freedom and an increased complexity of narrative. Often, these forms of media, because of their long production time, participate in the discourses on Amerika more diachronically than, for example, newspapers and magazines. Not being as strongly rooted in the immediately current social and political discourse, combined with their particular forms of materiality, makes for a longer half-life as media of cultural memory (cf. Alaida Assmann

“Zur Medengeschichte des kulturellen Gedächtnis” 45). As I examine specifically eastern

German perspectives on the subject of the study, I rely on the marking of the protagonist as eastern German; thereby, I assume that the socialization of the protagonists in the GDR makes them exemplary for an eastern German perspective on reunification and Amerika.

My analyses of the representations of Amerika and reunification are strongly informed by the understanding that those representations develop as part of greater discourses. This means for me concretely that literature and film do not only refer and incorporate other literature and film, but other sources of opinion and image formation, which have to be included in the analysis. Individual texts or films are what Jochen Busse calls “utterances,” surface structures of these symbolic systems, and are influenced by the discourse in its synchronic and diachronic dimension (16). According to Busse, these discourses exhibit foundational epistemic elements – “epistemische Tiefenströmungen, welche die Verortung eines Textes oder Textversatzstücks in einem Netz von diskurshistorischen Bedeutungsverleihungen bewirken [...]” (18). The metaphor of deep currents illustrates the constant change and struggle between different underlying concepts.

Literature and film, I understand as surface structures of underlying discourses, which will be reflected in my analyses following Jameson’s model. In this context, I will use discourse

analysis to examine how images and tropes of Amerika are shaped in literature and film and how these constructs interact with the formation of the national Self in a reunified

Germany. In the dissertation, I will focus on the discursive analysis of the cultural products and how concepts interact historically, socially, and politically - to inform and be informed by discourses on Amerika. These discourses draw on and change the cultural memory of

Germans with roots in the East in contrast to Germans with roots in the West.

Jameson expands on the notion of underlying currents and differentiates between three levels, the political, the social and the historical horizon. These horizons represent

“distinct moments of the process of interpretation” in the progressive widening of the semantic horizon (Jameson Political 61). Jameson’s spatial and temporal metaphor indicates a limitation and includes a consecutiveness of each stage of interpretation, which he claims to be a process of “rewriting” a cultural product. The interpreter unearths contradictions, ideologemes, and modes of production – hidden underneath the surface structure of the cultural product, a task Jameson prescribes to cultural studies. Ultimately, criticism must understand the shaping determinism of history and its particular social and political circumstances. The first of the horizons is the political, which Jameson also calls

“political history,” because it is the horizon of narrative and therefore of punctual events put together in a “chronicle-like sequence of happenings in time” (Jameson Political 60).

The object of Jameson’s theory is the individual cultural product or utterance, which is read as a symbolic act. Such an act is, according to Jameson, the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction and the political is the symbolic synthesis of a dialectic in narrative (Political

85-90). The first expansion of the semantic horizon in the process of analysis, from the

political horizon’s individual work to discourse, is what Jameson calls the social. Cultural objects are therein dialectically transformed and reconstituted as part of a greater system.

The single cultural artifact is a mere utterance in a vaster system of discourse. Jameson uses the structuralist metaphor of artifact as “parole” in a “langue.” The object of study will therefore no longer be the text itself, but the ideologeme, which Jameson defines as

“smallest intelligible unit [common to] fundamentally antagonistic collective discourses”

(Political 61). The historical horizon is where the most basic structure comes into play, which is the history of modes of production and the sequence of human social formations,

“from prehistoric life to whatever far future history has in store for us” (Political 60).

History must be understood here not as linear, but as imperative of all dialectical thought, a Benjaminian constellation of fragment, disruption, and presence in the contemporary moment. I will not follow Jameson’s ideas true to form, but they inform my understanding of the object of study. The individual work, for example, might present a story set in the

United States, but as an utterance, it participates in the discourse of Amerika, which in turn is part of situating the German individual in a late capitalist system and its mode of production of surface structures.

1.3. Literature overview

As point of departure for my analyses and references for illuminating diachronic and synchronic discursive patterns, I will make use of a variety of film and literature, scholarly and primary. What I am calling “Amerika” has been a widely researched topic as

discursive figuration, concept, and image in German literary and cultural scholarship and other disciplines for more than a hundred years. Very broadly scholarship and reports about

Amerika can be categorized into three categories: German expatriates in the United States;

Amerika in German language literature; and cultural studies approaches on American cultures, ideologies, and tropes in Germany.

The strand that deals with Germans and German culture in the United States is primarily comprised of historiographies like Frederick C. Luebke’s Germans in the New

World, which is a historical overview of German emigrants arguing for the recognition of

German as the “most important and arguably the largest of ethnic groups in the United

States” (xiii). Other publications in this category focus on the role of Germans in connection with specific historical events like the American revolution or discuss German- speaking newspapers in the United States and other cultural influences of Germans on the

United States. A lot of the scholarship on these topics was published between the beginning and the middle of the twentieth century, but is still of some importance to my dissertation, as émigrés profoundly influenced the image and discourse on Amerika through their accounts – especially in the nineteenth century, when many of the images and tropes still persistent today were created and perpetuated. Among the images that they propagated during that time are the critical utopian and dystopian discursive figuration of Amerika. In the utopian discourse, Amerika has been portrayed as the land of freedom, which works on two levels. On the one hand, it is about political freedom, which was vital for the revolutionary forces in Germany during the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is about the individual’s freedom: the freedom of travel and work and the right to take land

and cultivate it. This image relates closely to the idea of the United States as a place of almost endless spaces and unspoiled nature. Some scholarship around the turn of the twentieth century then concentrated in the course of nationalism on the so-called “German virtues.” These books, like Aus Deutsch-Amerika by Hugo Münsterberg, who emigrated to the US, celebrate German supremacy over the Anglo-Saxons in the cultivation of the land and the improvement of the living conditions in the United States and chastised the

American culture as acquisitive and insignificant. One source of these ideas are travelogues from the nineteenth century like Ferdinand Kürnberger’s Der Amerikamüde. Post-Wende emigration narrations like Andreas Lehmann’s Go West! Ostdeutsche in Amerika perpetuate images that originate in these early books, like Amerika as the land of endless opportunity and personal fulfillment in the stories “Was ich hier mache, ist real life” by

Ingor Griese, or “’Hallo Berlin’ – ich bin die Nummer 1” by Rolf Babiel, a sausage salesman and a musician, who celebrate the personal freedom and the opportunity of economic success; or images of the lack of culture and ruthless capitalism in order to explain their frustration, like “Mir kann keiner was erzählen, ich wohne im Ghetto” by

Anne-Sophie Briest. The experience of emigration is mostly described in positive terms and formed into a personal success story.

The second broad critical strand of interest for this dissertation, is scholarship about the German literature on Amerika, by authors who did not write (primarily) from an émigré perspective. It can be usefully subdivided by the genre upon which they concentrate: fictional literature, travelogues, and news. All these subdivisions use a form of imagology to approach their object of study, either taking an author and her products or typologies

and timeframes as limiting factors. Scholarly literature on travelogues is important for my project because it works out images of Amerika concerning a mode of experiencing the country that has historically proven to be very influential on German discourses on

Amerika. Many of these fictional representations formulate the experiences as a confrontation between the German nation and an absolute naive Other. Noticeably, however, this Other is often not the Native Americans or nature, as is the case in most

American adventure fantasies, but the Anglo-Saxons and their greed. The German association with the wild and natural is part of their foundational myths as Herfried

Münkler explains in Die Deutschen und ihre Mythen. As Peter Brenner writes in an exemplary monograph, Reisen in die Neue Welt, these travelogues are heavily influenced by the culture of the writer and its images of the country described: “[Das Bild vom anderen

Land] ist immer auch abhängig vom und wirkt zurück auf das Bild vom eigenen Land oder

[...] es steht in Bezug zur Ausgangskultur des Reisenden” (3). Scholarship like Brenner’s attempts to reconstruct the images of Amerika prevalent in travelogues. At the same time, they try to restore the influence these images had on the understanding of America, as well as on the culture of Germany and social and political relations between different groups.

This makes their theoretical point of departure comparable to mine, however, with a larger time frame and limited primarily by genre instead of the social construct of a national self and a concentration on a particular historical event. Therefore, this kind of scholarly work is of great value for my dissertation, as it exposes the historicity of the images that are to be found in post-Wende cultural products. Brenner’s monograph, for example, illuminates

a shift from the land of “untouched wilderness” to the land of exploding modernization and industrial production in the course of the nineteenth century.

Other studies in this strand limit themselves primarily to fictional literature and often revolve around the oeuvre of a single author. Many are combined in anthologies like

Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan’s Das Amerika der Autoren or Sigrid Bauschinger,

Horst Denkler and Wilfried Malsch’s book Amerika in der deutschen Literatur. It features chapters such as „Goethes Amerikabild. Wirklichkeit und Vision“ and „Auf andere Art so große Hoffnung. Heine und die USA.” The strength of scholarly works like these is that they focus on intertextual and biographical connections and continuities within the oeuvre of one author. Author-centered accounts tend to assume that a consistent image of Amerika can be found throughout the work of a producer of cultural goods. Often, these accounts analyze the difference between what is perceived as historical fact and the images used by the authors in order to align or distance them from historical positions. Similar considerations apply to studies like Melanie Breunlein’s Das Nationenbild der USA in

Deutschen Tageszeitungen, which analyze the image of Amerika in non-literary texts. Both these forms of studies are only successful when they acknowledge the incongruities and paradoxes in the images they attempt to construct. Nonetheless, all secondary works analyzing German publications on Amerika before and after the Wende are of great importance for this project because they synthesize images from texts that are in discourse with the primary utopian and dystopian discursive strains to be scrutinized in my dissertation. They, therefore, aid my attempt of uncovering the historicity of the images on

Amerika after the fall of the wall in literature and film.

The third strand, scholarship about the American cultural influence on Germany that is often called Americanization, stretches across different fields of study and approaches, most notably cultural studies, literary studies, political science, history, sociology, media studies, and gender studies. The scientific discourse of Americanization, in general and as part of the meta-discourse about Amerika, is itself part of a meta-discourse about the correct name for the phenomenon, and therein the direction of the discourse.

Some terms and concepts other than Americanization that have been suggested are

Globalization, McDonaldization, or Westernization. They all focus on different aspects of the social, political, and economic change but have in common the rejection of the assumed direct connection between these developments and America. This meta-discourse, however, is largely irrelevant for my dissertation because instead of analyzing the historical correctness of the attribution of certain developments to America or the German fantasy of

Amerika, I look at how Amerika is used in public discourses and in cultural utterances.

Arguments about the direct correlations between aspects of modernization and Amerika are largely alien to the German public discourse. Essays like those in Alexander Stephan’s anthology America on my mind indicate how discursive figures connected to Amerika developed diachronically in the German public discourse and what political and social implications they have. Werner Faulstich’s “’Amerikanisierung’ als kultureller Mehrwert,” for example, reconstructs the positive discourse on American popular culture in Germany.

Of utmost importance for the creation of a historical background for my analysis are particularly texts that are concerned with the different images of Amerika in West Germany and East Germany. Among those are Therese Hörnigk and Alexander Stephan’s anthology

Jeans, Rock und Vietnam and Michael Dörfel’s Jazz und Literatur in der DDR. Both include articles about the images of Amerika in authors’ works like Günther Kunert’s, on the influence of American culture on East Germany like music and jeans, and discursive figures that developed like the image of the Native Americans. These scholarly works argue for differentiating between the images of Amerika in West and East Germany despite similarities in exposure to German products about Amerika and American cultural products in both countries (Jeans, Rock 8). They reveal a multitude of different images of Amerika on both sides. Specifically, for the discourses on Amerika in East Germany, however, one has to distinguish between two major currents. On the one hand, there are the official policies of Anti-Amerikanism, which condemned culture considered Amerikan as

“Frontalangriff auf humanistisches Denken” and the United States as the aggressor (Jeans,

Rock 7). On the other hand, the SED could not prevent the consumption of Amerikan and

(West) German cultural products about Amerika in East Germany. The combination of condemnation and consumption with the impossibility of travel to the west constructed

Amerika for many as the land of longing; made it even synonymous with the western world, uninhibited capitalism, the ability to consume, and youth culture, as Stephan argues (Jeans,

Rock 10). Michael Dörfel shows that American cultural products had a significant influence on artistic life in the GDR. However, when Amerika was depicted in East German productions, it had to be close to the party’s doctrine to be published. Therefore, the images of Amerika in the GDR clashed with each other. The tensions within the GDR-discourses on Amerika differ from the tensions in the FRG, in which the state primarily maintains a positive view on the United States but large groups of society and artistic production

develop a form of Anti-Amerikanism. The works on images of Amerika and the American influence on the cultural production of the GDR are foundational to my work, as they enable me to understand the political and social horizon of the discourses on Amerika in the GDR. Studies about the developments after the fall of the Wall considering eastern

German fantasies are largely missing, apart from analyses of singular cultural products. 4

This dissertation aims to fill that void by considering multiple primary works to formulate an idea of the constitution of the discourse surrounding Amerika after (re-)unification.

1.4. Nation as construct of communal identification

By using Amerika as a heuristic device to pursue a constructed sense of Germany that unveils itself through artistic works by and about East Germans, I presuppose that: (1) there is a form of shared group identification beyond the identification with a political entity at work in (national-)cultural artifacts, which I call the national self. Literature and film that are concerned with transnational topics like the cultural contact between Germany and the United States deal with differing constructions of the Self. In the case of my objects of study, the “national” as the basic unit of differentiation and identification is central to these constructions. Discursive appeals to a sense of national identity were also central to the official reasoning for the (re-)unification. The slogan of the “Montagsdemonstrationen”

4 Some important articles that analyze the use of Amerika in the context of the discourses of German (re- )unification are Andrea Payk-Heitmann’s “Zwischenstation auf dem Weg ins wiedervereinigte Deutschland: Die USA aus ostdeutscher Perspektive bei Jakob Hein,“ Christine Cosentino’s article on the portrayal of Amerika in Reinhard Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer, or Stuart Taberner’s “Memory, Cosmopolitanism and Nation: Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel (2010) and J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999).”

– “wir sind ein Volk” is among the most famous. Politicians’ repeatedly stated their goal was “die Einheit unserer Nation” (in König 243). Other slogans such as “die Mauer in den

Köpfen,” which bemoaned the differences and distance between western and eastern

Germans, elucidates that the fact that the concept of a reunited nation remained at the center the constitution of Germany long after the reunification.

In cultural theory, the concept of nation has been justly criticized many times. The accusations run from it being obsolete in a globalized world in which groups and identities form and change fluidly, i.e. Arjun Appadurai’s “postnational”, to the critique of the nation as cultural determinism, i.e. Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation,” to being an impediment to cultural hybridity and transnational identities, i.e. Stuart Hall’s “Culture, Community,

Nation.” This, however, does not mean that the term is rendered obsolete or useless, as recent scholarship has attempted to show. In a study of “postcolonial literature in a global moment,” Weihsin Gui reestablishes the importance of the “national” as a persistent influence on the social formation. He argues for acknowledging the “national” because it is persistent in “tropes and figures of national consciousness in literary texts” (2). The emergence of an increasing amount of successful nationalist movements over the last decade further illustrates the persistence of nation in the fundamental constitution of modern democratic states, also called nation-states.5 The nation, hence, occupies a paradoxical position between its presence in public and literary discourses as opposed to

5 As I will explore below in more detail with the help of Liah Greenfeld, the United States and Germany are distinct cases in the development of nation-states, the overlapping of the territory of political influence and the locale of a nation. As Inga Scharf summarizes: “[T]he nation-state, is a modern phenomenon, which can be seen as a condition for, as well as a consequence of, capitalism and liberal forms of political organisation […] Furthermore, it represents a specific notion or imagination of space, time, and community” (83-84)

its declared functional obsoleteness. This paradox, with which most of this dissertation’s primary works struggle, as well as the historical obsoleteness of the GDR and the resulting economic and personal obsoleteness of many former citizens of the GDR have steered me towards the consideration of obsoleteness as a function itself in the center of my dissertation.

Following the introduction, this dissertation’s second chapter, hence, addresses obsoleteness as a discursive function in late capitalism with a particular focus on the affect it produces, of which shame is the central term for my analyses. Then I analyze the persistence of nation as a concept because of the human need for something with which

(and an Other against which) it can construct a communal identity and can be convinced to give up her own longings. The foundation of my approach is the idea that nation is not concrete, but a fantasy, an overdetermined symbolic system (cf. Benedict Anderson, Homi

Bhabha). Initially however, I turn to the anthropological (in Kluge/Negt) and psychoanalytic (in Slavoj Žižek) idea of the auxotrophic being or the human as a being constituted through lack. Both approaches theorize that humans are born with a lack that they compensate for by becoming part of a social group. A social group, however, needs to be stabilized by identification with a “master signifier” (Žižek Invisible Remainder 142), which requires a common symbolic system, a set of rituals, and the creation of a usable past in the form of myth. The nation became the dominant form of legitimization for large social groups in modernity and remains influential, even in times of escalating globalization and cultural differentiation, because it is ingrained in the Western political system, institutions, cultural memory, and cultural products. Additionally, it provides the

illusion of a fixity of social relations in times of increasing change. At the end of the next chapter, I describe the problematic relationship between Germany and its nation after the

Third Reich and argue that Amerika has become a problematic substitute for it.

The following three chapters follow the function of Amerika for the German nation in three different modes in which the German fantasy of Amerika has operated historically, namely as a space of refuge from the dystopia of the German condition, as a space for adventure in opposition to a Germany that is either felt to be underappreciated or that does not provide opportunity to test and affirm the self, and as an intruder into the German space as (a mostly threatening) Amerikanization (I use Amerikanization because it marks the importance of the German imagination in determening what ideology or cultural artifact belongs to Amerika). In order to display different attitudes toward and images of Amerika, as well as at the same time concede the appropriate amount of writing to the analysis of the cultural products, I concentrate on two to four films and novels per chapter.

The third chapter, Amerika as refuge, describes the historical role of the United

States as a space of refuge from economic and political crisis in Germany and the fantasies it produced – I use Amerika here, because I am dealing with German representations of

Amerika. However, these representations do entail the United States as setting and the confrontation with America as corrective to the German fantasies. Historically, representations of Amerika by émigrés depicted it mostly as a utopia in contrast to a

German dystopia, to legitimize their emigration. Today, however, in times of the overdetermination of Amerika and within that overdetermination the centrality of its negative aspects, a purely utopian depiction appears to be impossible. Hence, the question

of the feasibility of the German fantasy of Amerika as refuge is central to the comparative analysis of Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel: Oder the Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010) and

Michael Schorr’s Schulze gets the blues (2003). In this chapter, I first shortly outline the historic genre of German narratives that center on the representation of Amerika as refuge, focusing on the relationship between the United States and Germany as well as economic and ideological push factors that motivated German émigrés. Then I analyze the primary works with a focus on obsoleteness as decisive factor of their protagonists’ journey to

Amerika and their struggles with aspects of America in relation to their struggles with the

German nation. Finally, I outline how both products find their refuge in the exotic Other, in the case of Stadt der Engel Native Americans and in Schultze the hybrid culture of the

Bayou in the American South. They both use this exotic Other to imagine a Germany that allows for the presence of greater diversity to the benefit of its effect on its individuals.

For the fourth chapter, Amerika as a space of adventure, I compare Alexander

Osang’s Berlin-New York: Alle Kolumnen aus der neuen Welt (2006), Jakob Hein’s

Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens (2003), Bernd Wagner’s Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam (2003), and Markus Goller’s Friendship! (2010). The question of how to deal with today’s Amerika and its overdetermination persists here as well. I am interested in how the texts and films seek adventure in a space so overdetermined by tropes of Wild West romanticism, which it is simultaneously associated with a modern and global world that is highly present in contemporary German cultures. The protagonists’ longings that they portray onto Amerika differ greatly from the first chapter. Instead of refuge from a German nation that generates obsoleteness, these protagonists want to find an Other, against which

they can affirm their selves. The central question here is if the protagonists are still able to find an Other in the United States, which is persistently present in Germany through its media products and important for the constitutions of German communal identities. The findings in this chapter are diverse. Osang’s protagonist finds the Other in the everyday

American rituals and myths and sees his association with the (re-)unified German nation unwillingly confirmed. Wagner’s protagonist is longing for a stable Other in the United

States to confirm his fantasy of a stable definition of the (re-)unified German nation. He is only able to find this in Mexiko, not the United States, which he describes as a space too overdetermined by Hollywood and too close to the German self to function as its affirmation. Jakob Hein’s protagonist does find an Other to the GDR in the United States, but is not his utopian image, but the dystopian incarnation of late capitalist values, economics, and society. In the end, he finds himself caught in a world determined by the

American culture and economy. Goller manages to preserve the fantasy of Amerika as space for adventure by limiting his setting to the time immediately after the fall of the Wall and proclaiming the validity of Hollywood tropes as new basis for a post-national identity construction.

In the last chapter, Amerika in Germany, I contrast Vanessa Jopp’s Vergiss

Amerika (2000) and Reinhard Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer (2000) with the romanticized

Amerikanization in “Ostalgie” films and novels like Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir

(1995) or Leander Hausmann’s Sonnenallee (1999). Initially, I again examine the history of the discourses of Amerikanization in both Germanies. The main research question I follow in this chapter is of the function of the presence of Amerika in the cultural product’s

evaluation of the condition and usability of the German nation as means of identity formation. Therefore, I analyze Jopp’s film in contrasts to the “Ostalgie” cultural product’s display of a utopian Amerika in the GDR, which Vergiss Amerika completely rejects for its setting after the Wende. In the movie, tropes of Amerika absolutely fail to create lasting identities or enjoyment in its eastern German protagonists. Amerika and its consumer culture is the source of the dystopian obsoleteness of the eastern German province. In the form of the Amerikan Dream, which in the film’s German imagination is only focused on material gains and individual recognition, Amerika simultaneously provides the fantasy of the remedy to obsoleteness it creates. The film then follows the unraveling of the Amerikan

Dream in its protagonists and instead positions a romantic notion of the German nation as alternative. Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer, on the other hand, affirms Amerika as fantasy in

Germany as alternative to the (bourgeois) German nation that the text depicts as riddled by the reenactment of trauma, shame, and obsoleteness. Jirgl’s narrator, however, makes the distinction between the fantasy of a utopian Amerika, which he constructs as refuge from the German nation, and the enactment of that utopian image, which appears to be bound to fail. In the end, the depiction of America/Amerika is highly dependent on the narrator’s political attitude towards the German nation, but in her discussion of America/Amerika and the difference to Germany that the texts and films implicitly and explicitly assume, all the cultural products reflect back on the problematic makeup of the German nation and its inevitable presence in the identity construction of the individuals.

Chapter 2: The Obsoleteness of the Nation

“Der Begriff ‘Nation‘ hat nichts mehr mit unserer Realität zu tun. Wir sollten

stattdessen lernen, Gesellschaft als virtuelle Gemeinschaften zu denken:

wandelbar“ (Shibli „Nation: Immer noch Grenzen im Kopf“)

In my introduction, it became evident that obsoleteness, the status of being (or being declared) obsolete, is of major significance to my dissertation, as it pertains to all its major categories – the nation, the United States as hegemon, the GDR, and many former citizens of that state. In the beginning of this chapter, I concentrate on the concept of obsoleteness and explain why the nation is specifically resistant to obsoleteness. In the second part, I then give a short history of the German attitudes toward Amerika and its position in the struggle with the assumed obsoleteness of the German nation. Adania Shibli’s quote is a good example for common tropes of the discourse of the obsoleteness of the nation. She claims that the construct is inflexible and outmoded, which indicates it has no longer anything to do with current realities, with the lifeworld of at least the German people or even all of humanity. Instead, she suggests that one should rethink society as a virtual community, a changeable and inherently changing construct which produces community instantaneously and reconfigures itself the next moment. The remark condenses German mainstream attitudes toward the nation, which have held a prominent position in both

Germany’s public discourse for the majority of the twentieth and twenty-first century, especially in the realm of the educated class and the left political spectrum. In West

Germany, beginning with the rubble literature and films, through the student movement of

the 1960s and 1970s, up to discourses of (re-)unification, parts of the public and arts discourse have always voiced their dissatisfaction with the historically charged concept of a German nation and either claimed its outdatedness or its impossibility. In East Germany, the state predefined a discourse which distanced itself from former incarnations of the

German nation and in the form of the state linked to international communism presented identities different from the nation. As I will show below, the nation nevertheless remained an important ideology in the political and public discourse of the GDR. Shibli’s argument also is prevalent in many intellectual currents, such as post-Marxist, post-structuralist, and post-colonialist theories.6 This kind of dismissal of the nation, often summarized as post- nationalism, also appears at the center of economic narratives and practices of globalization, in which trade transcends nations in a form less focused on identity and community and more on the free flow of money, consumer goods, and services. For these market theories, the concept of a post-national world is beneficial because it allows for a maximum of freedom for the companies and the flow of goods and currencies. Most of the theories concerned with identity in a post-national world claim that it is possible to drop the concept of national belonging without losing a sense of community, especially because of new means of communication and flexible models of identity formation and self-

6 Cultural researchers from around the world in the late twentieth century have studied phenomena that transcend the national like the global (cf. Roland Robertson Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture), multiculturalism (cf. James Trotman Multiculturalism; Charles Taylor Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition; Cynthia Willett Theorizing Multiculturalism; and Irmela Schneider and Christian W. Thomsen’s Hybridkultur: Medien, Netze, Künste), transnational (cf. Basch et al. Nations Unbound; Steven Vertovec Transnationalism), the postnational (cf. Saskia Sassen “Toward Post-National and Denationalized Citizenship;” Klaus Eder and Bernhard Giesen European Citizenship: Between National Legacies and Postnational Projects; or Michael Zürn and Christian Joerges Law and Governance in Postnational Europe), the multitude (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Empire and Commonwealth), cultural hybridity (cf. Stuart Hall “New Ethnicities;” or Robert Young Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race), liquid modernity (cf. Zygmunt Bauman Liquid Modernity), and others.

association. According to them, the postnational would eliminate all the nonsensical othering, which is seemingly so ingrained in nations and, thereby, eliminate much of the violence committed in their name. Shibli imagines a pluralistic social, political, and economic system, in which a sense of shared identity is still possible, and she sees it residing in global, virtual interconnections.7 However, Shibli’s journalistic gloss on the nation, like many of the more erudite discourses, builds on the idea that the concept is outmoded. However, they untimely neglect the power that the nation still holds in many public discourses and is blind to the lifeworld of many people outside the extraordinarily mobile and interconnected young educated class. The declaration that it is obsolete itself influences how the concept of the nation functions politically and socially. Obsoleteness obscures the presence and workings of the nation in discourses surrounding communal identity by only omitting the name, not omitting the concept. It prevents the formation of a broad public discourse around the nation itself and therefore leaves it to the nationalists, who are insistent on preserving it in a form which stands in opposition of modern societies.

Instead of working on reconfiguring the distinct concepts of the nation to fulfill the task of providing a sense of identity for all classes, discourses which declare the nation to be obsolete submit to the hidden workings of the nation without having the discursive power

7 I am using the term identity hesitantly, as it is one of the most overdetermined and therefore hollow terms of today’s humanities. Nevertheless, it seems to be necessary to describe a sense of selfhood as well as a sense of communal belonging. A basic differentiation is necessary between collective and personal identity, even though both are connected. Evidently, collective identity is of greater significance for this dissertation. When I use the term identity, I do not suggest that it represents a fixed structure of references in myths, rituals, and symbols. These and other factors like collective histories, and affective relationships, which I will discuss in more detail below, are malleable and changing fixtures in a highly complex system of positioning and constructing an awareness of the human existence in social, political, economic communal interdependencies (cf. Horatscheck 276-277, Welsch 91-106, Niethammer 11-25).

of change and modulation over it. It has the additional effect that it gives people who understand national (even nationalist) belonging as an integral part of their identity the impression that they are marginalized by the media, politics, and the broader public discourse. Most importantly, as I will outline in more detail below, theories and practices of post-nationalism mask the human necessity of identification with concepts that foment identity and sociality, as Slavoj Žižek explains. The nation is therefore not only a concept handed down from above to create a logic that provides governability, but anecdotal and scholarly arguments point toward it fulfilling a fundamental human need and desire.

Declaring the nation obsolete, I would argue, is both a source and an expression of the often-claimed divide of modern Western societies among interdependent lines of education, global mobility, cultural pluralism, progressivism, and digital competence (cf.

Mau et al. 1192, Ala-Mutka 9-13, Boschken 808).

For this dissertation, I will distinguish between obsolescence and obsoleteness.

Obsolescence is the term for the systemic quality of late-capitalism and positivist’ history that renders concepts, things, identities, ideologies, etc. obsolete. Most goods and concepts in late-capitalism have their (planned) deterioration built in at their construction, in order to fulfill the system’s longing for constant renewal that can be sold as progress.

Obsoleteness is the concrete manifestation of obsolescence in the good, the concept, the ideology, or the person. Hence, I will speak of obsolescence as crucial part of the late- capitalist system but of obsoleteness as a declaration about the nation. As I will illustrate below, some form of obsoleteness is at stake in all of this dissertation’s key categories.

Obsoleteness and Amerika have a multifaceted relationship: Amerika is, for example, often

conceptualized as the locus of the late-capitalist system, which produces goods that immediately become obsolete only to be replaced by newer products. Politically and economically many German, American, and international journalists, particularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century, have declared America’s own obsoleteness imminent. They argue that the United States is at the point of losing its material status as the world’s greatest power and Amerika its ideological status as the world’s imago of capitalist society. Its social structure, its conflicts, its political system, and its communal identity have been declared outmoded (cf. Bierling “Der müde Hegemon;” Ian Buruma

“Das US-Imperium befindet sich in seiner Spätphase,” Steingart “Das Kraftzentrum schwächelt,” Teuffel “In der postamerikanischen Welt”). According to these opinions, the imagined substance of the system of obsolescence falls itself victim to it and becomes obsolete. Something that happened earlier to its advisories, among which was the GDR and socialism, which both became politically obsolete after the German (re-)unification.

I have chosen the temporal framework initiated by the very concrete dissolution of a state, the German Democratic Republic, to ground my investigation of the complex obsoleteness that its former citizens experienced after the fall of the wall, their relationship to the new German nation, and Amerika’s role in that discourse. Former citizens of the

GDR lost their state and simultaneously the political/economic system and the nation that went with it, comprising its history, rituals, narratives, and symbols, which nevertheless remained present in the people’s personal memory. The multifaceted obsoleteness causes tensions and affective reactions, which found their way into the cultural products I will examine in the chapters following these theoretical considerations. Despite their (declared)

obsoleteness, all the named ideologies, systems, ideas, and identities are of importance for this dissertation. To find a beginning and an early footing in critical thought, it is appropriate to begin with a theoretical framing of obsolescence/obsoleteness to make it productive for this dissertation and divest it from a purely colloquial usage.

2.1. Origins, differentiations, and effects of obsolescence

As mentioned above, I propose a differentiation between obsolescence and obsoleteness – a distinction with is missing from the scholarly discourse. Obsolescence, in this division, designates the constant systemic presence of things becoming obsolete and the inherent production of obsoleteness, as in the term of “planned obsolescence.” Many modern consumer goods carry inside an expiration date; they are produced with their imminent obsoleteness in mind. A prime example of this function of late capitalism is modern electronic devices such as cell phones. We buy cell phones with the knowledge that they will be outdated within a couple of years and virtually unusable after 4-5. They become obsolete on more than only the material level, on which screens break and batteries lose their power, but also on the level of software, and importantly in our world of commodity fetishism the level of fashion and status. Many devices do not receive important updates after they exceed the company defined life expectancy - they are made obsolete.

They become equally outdated in their function as a status symbol or symbol of group belonging. This system of obsolescence is not at all new in the twenty-first century. Bernad

London already notes in his 1932 pamphlet Ending the Depression Through Planned

Obsolescence that not following the “law of obsolescence” has severe consequences for the capitalist economy. He suggests that the depression only manifested itself, because people held on to their old consumer goods, instead of investing in the newest model (4-

5). The distinction between obsolescence and obsoleteness is important for this dissertation as it deals with both. On the one hand, it focusses on a time in which late-capitalism and its systems of obsolescence expanded into the space of eastern Germany, surplacing a socialist system that at least on its surface was based on permanence instead of constant progress. On the other hand, the time produced an excess of obsoleteness. The GDR itself, including the utopia of socialism, became obsolete. Furthermore, the takeover by late- capitalist systems and mechanisms created personal, economic, and identitary obsoleteness in many of its former citizens.

The ubiquity of obsoleteness in post-Wende eastern Germany is a primary cause of the prominence of nationalism after the fall of the Wall. The two main tendencies that govern systems of obsolescence are persistence and supersession, as Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman argue in “Thinking out of Sync” (2). On the one hand, they argue, obsolescence is governed by the persistence of the obsolete: “Ideas, habits, and objects may fall out of fashion and use, but they do not disappear” (2). The persistence is among other things linked to the fact that obsoleteness is often a label, not a necessary fact. As I will argue below, when things or ideas fall out of fashion and become obsolete, they do not lose all their use-value, but some authority or discursive presence, like a specific discourse or a consumer fashion, rather declares them obsolete. Even material things, like the aforementioned cell phone, remain influential in memories and the effect they have on later

designs. This system is driven by the principle of supersession, which designates the assumption that the next idea or product is always believed to be an improvement over the now obsolete. Newer becomes almost synonymous with better in consumer culture, enticing people to, for example, buy the newer model of a cell phone, even though it might have the same or sometimes even less use-value for them.8 Persistence and supersession are guiding principles of all systems of obsolescence.

Obsolescence is part of every aspect of life today, as the consumer culture arguably influences life from constructions of belonging to matters of sustenance. Consumer culture and its underlying system of late-capitalism are based on constant expansion. Its expansion into politics, for example, is evident in the rise of populism, which uses media consumption habits for its promotion, and the general retreat of principles behind quickly interchangeable brandings (cf. Sheingate Building a Business of Politics; and Schaal Die

Ökonomisierung der Politik in Deutschland) - notably, these developments are often being associated with Amerika and labeled “Amerikanization” (cf. Fritz Plasser

“’Amerikanisierung’ der Wahlkommunikation in Europa”). The German discourse of (re-

)unification, as well, has in large parts been shaped by economic considerations, in which belonging has been gaged in possibilities to consume, and many political arguments have centered on the economics of reunification. Most noticeably, consumer culture has colonized the human psyche itself. In its logic, it is not enough to only replace the old with something new, but new markets must be added constantly. As Devin Fore points out in

8 Some of the newest models, for instance, are too big for most consumers to be used with one hand. Nevertheless, they are being bought, because of the presence of the fundamental assumption in systems of obsolescence that newer must be better.

his introduction to Kluge and Negt’s History and Obstinacy, capitalism’s quest for new markets has led it to humans themselves: “Approaching the limits of spatial extension and recognizing the finite number of global markets, capitalism began taking up residence in the inner space of man, establishing new sites of concentration in his body and psyche”

(20). On the one hand, in this expansion into the subject, capitalism is creating needs that it promises to fill. It makes the need to consume and the promise for consumption to fill the void that it itself created central to all narrative and identity practices. On the other hand, it makes the consumer and her self-worth dependent on the mechanisms of market culture beyond actual products. This permeation of all aspects of life by consumer culture results in the production of obsoleteness in all aspects of life. This is crucial for this dissertation, as I am not only looking at the obsoleteness of things, ideas, or concepts but the perceived personal or economic obsoleteness of the protagonists of my primary cultural products and the obsoleteness of Amerika as an Other in the discourse of the German nation as well as a place of refuge, regeneration, and personal identity formation. The historical transition from a socialist culture, which arguably exhibited parts of consumer culture, to its fully developed sometimes even excessive incarnation makes the obsoleteness exponentially more visible compared to societies in which the shift occurs more gradually.

2.2. History and obsoleteness

After capitalism, history is the second system of obsolescence of greater significance for this dissertation. Very few of the items, narratives, ideologies, or cultural artifacts that are obsolete in late-capitalism are actually deemed influential enough to be included in the cultural memory process we call history. As Benjamin already pointed out in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” history, as it is being mainly conceptualized today

– as positivist history, is a process that emphasizes obsoleteness as it creates a linear narrative from the past to the present and declares today to be the logical and necessary result of everything that happened before. It ignores everything that does not fit the narrative of the present as a success and the best possible outcome of all past events, and that today is only one possible outcome of a chaotic interdependent field of historical occurrences. Former citizens of the GDR are, therefore, confronted with the change to a system of historical thought that not only continuously produces obsoleteness but which relegates their history specifically to obsoleteness in the hegemonic West German narrative of history. Reactivating what positivist history deems obsolete, as Adorno points out, therefore offers the opportunity to create a counter-history which suggests divergent paths from the hegemonic narrative (cf. Minima Moralia 268).

As much as history produces obsoleteness, through its analysis and employment, it also offers a different understanding of its subject matter and the role the obsolete has played. Instead of giving the obsolete over to history or the fetish of retro (cf. Thorne 107), one can break open the narrative of positivism, of the winner, and write history of the lost:

“Was die herrschende Gesellschaft transzendiert, ist nicht nur die von dieser entwickelte

Potentialität, sondern ebensowohl das, was nicht recht in die historischen

Bewegungsgesetze hineinpaßte“ (Adorno Minima Moralia 286). To look at history through the obsolete therefore offers a counter-history and a moment to identify the hegemonic ideology as well as an explosive force to open new possibilities. The counter-historical energies in the obsolete can accumulate, as Walter Benjamin, argued, and lead to greater revolutions. Revolutions, here, must be understood in the Marxian sense of the overthrowing of hegemonic structures, not necessarily political revolution, but cultural or social (cf. “Der Surrealismus”).

A closer look at Walter Benjamin’s concept of history, specifically his often-cited passage of the angel of history, exemplifies the interdependence of history and obsoleteness. With this figure as a metaphor, Benjamin illustrates that history is not a linear narrative which logically and objectively connects facts, but a chaotic landscape of rubble from which the hegemonic historiography only pics events that suit its narrative.

Concerning Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus” and Gerhard Scholem’s poem, which he based on Klee’s painting, Benjamin writes:

Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von

Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die

unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße

schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagen

zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen

Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann.

Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt,

während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das was wir den

Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm (Benjamin and Raulet 133).

History is largely a field of the obsolete, of parts that do not fit anymore and have no inherent connection to today. Progress, as a positivist, consumer-culture term, is ultimately the cause of the growing chaos, casting aside obsolete items, narratives, and concepts.

Benjamin calls for critics to become more like the angel to expose the violence of progress and to acknowledge the presence of the obsolete. Only the outmoded enables us to displace ourselves from our present perspective and imagine alternative histories. In this process, obsolescence forms a new temporal connection between the contemporary and the bygone and lost. As Hal Foster argues, based on Adorno’s “Pro domo nostra,” the outmoded gains a new timeliness by their implicit critique of the hegemonic ideology (195). This becomes important for my analyses below, as I, for example, interpret the fetish of nationalism as longing for identification in a late-capitalist system that overtly rejects grand narratives, only to inject the grand narrative of consumerism. Furthermore, the engagement with the loss of the GDR entails a notion of unhappiness with the current circumstances in the (re-

)unified Germany and must be analyzed as an attempt to salvage parts of the obsolete GDR nation, its political, social, or economic system, for the present.

Even without being consciously reactivated and narratively being made into a different possibility, obsoleteness does not equal absence. Often, as Žižek explains, regarding the term ideology itself, it means that an ideology, concept, or idea actually comes into its own after a discourse declares it obsolete (cf. “The Spectre of Ideology” 1-

8). By being relegated to the invisible and undiscussed, ideologies can unfold their full

power as participants of the public or scientific discourses no longer rework them by using them. Ideology, central to Marxist and Post-Marxist theory, has been neglected and occasionally even declared obsolete - a remnant of past times after the dismantling of the

Soviet Union - by critics like Francis Fukuyama in his famous book The End of History and the Last Man, as well as in public discourse (cf. Tony Blair’s speech in Wheatcroft

“The Tragedy of Tony Blair”). Žižek claims utterances like these demonstrate that the concept of ideology itself has come into its own. He adapts the classic idea of ideology in

Marxism for today’s late capitalism media society. Ideology remains the locus of the

“production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness” (Marx/Engels The German

Ideology 47), but Žižek disputes that it can be easily exposed by unearthing the truths that the ideology obscures. This is due to several reasons connected to the plurality of today’s public discourse and the eclipse of the master-narratives. There is so much readily accessible information today that truths simply appear to be another narrative next to many others. Additionally, today’s liberal and cosmopolitan subject lacks the faith in the political institutions and the media to fully and unreflectively internalize the ideologies that they present. Therefore, Žižek proposes a different concept of ideology to explain today’s political and social machinations. Two attitudes must be present for a false consciousness to persist: First, the ideology in question must be portrayed as absolute truth, something that for example neoliberalism does extraordinarily well. Secondly, the subject needs, what

Žižek calls “ideological cynicism” - individuals accept ideologies despite their knowledge that they are wrong (cf. Sublime 24-27). One clear example of ideological cynicism is the nation based on ethnicity. The information to discern that the notion of one people - “ein

Volk” - is a construct that does not hold up to any scrutiny is often acknowledged in public discourse and generally readily available to everybody.9 Many German public discourses on communal identity implicitly or explicitly, however, still utilize the concept today in discourses surrounding the German nation or immigration. Žižek, therefore, calls for a change in the conceptualization from “ideology for itself” to “ideology in-and-for-itself.”

He describes ideology as elusive, momentary, and implicit in the common and everything.10 Relegating the concept of ideology to obsoleteness, Žižek argues, blinds the discourse to its presence, leaving it unchecked and allowing it to unfold its power. In the case of the German nation, declaring it obsolete had two effects. On the one hand, it persisted in a form that has strong roots in the nineteenth century and therefore in ideas of

“Volk.” It also became authoritative in parts of the society that were in desperate need of identification and allowed it to become authoritative in those discourses, which, as we see today in Germany and in many other countries spills back into the larger public discourse.

I will write more on the special constitution of nation below, after the following analysis of another social but also very personal effect of obsoleteness – negative affects.

Obsoleteness causes a host of negative affects in the involved parties. These affects include hatred and shame, as well as fear, contempt, embarrassment, and anxiety.11 The

9 For the sake of the argument, I neglect some other factors here that do play a role, like the perceived truth- value of information in different groups of society (cf. McCornack et al “When the alteration of information is viewed as deception”) or the inertia of belief-systems (cf. Kolodko 12-16), but the fundamental argument remains true that there is a broad political-, media-, and scientific- discourse consensus (at least in Germany) that a German ethnicity is a construct that can easily be deconstructed. 10 In this, he actually follows Althusser’s argument of ideology being present constantly in the everyday (cf. Hirst “Althusser and the Theory of Ideology”). 11 I do not want to invoke here that the fear of obsolescence leads to clinically detectable symptoms in all of society. The way Adorno, Fitzpatrick, Joel Burges, I, and others use these terms does not equal their clinical usage or how they are defined in affect theory. Rather, the terms are aids to describe collective

cause for these affects is the late-capitalist association between obsoleteness and loss of use-value. It marks everything that is no longer worth our attention and work.

Consequently, it causes mostly negative emotional reactions.12 The source for the affects of obsoleteness is desire, a fundamental human emotion. Desire takes on a distinct form in late capitalism, namely the desire to consume. Consumer desire is linked to the concept of contemporaneity. It describes the need to obtain the newest things and gadgets, partake in the latest media trend, consume all trending cultural goods, and stay attached to technological developments, as Adorno describes in “Galadiner” (MM 217). To be able to consume the right goods signals the belonging to a specific groups, like the (re-)unified nation. Importantly for this dissertation, this consumer desire extends into all domains of life, including identity constructions such as the nation. To lose touch with the sphere of contemporaneity on any level, material goods, information, cultural goods, experiences, causes an existential dread: “Die Furcht aber, trotz allem hinter dem Zeitgeist zurückzubleiben und auf den Kehrichthaufen der ausrangierten Subjektivität geworfen zu werden, ist daran zu erinnern, daß das arriviert Zeitgemäße und das dem Gehalt nach

Fortgeschrittene nicht mehr eins sind” (MM 425). The primacy of contemporaneity, expressed in consumer desire, causes dread even if one is not yet part of the obsolete. The

sentiments and social phenomena which manifest themselves in public discourse. Occasionally, it is useful to borrow ideas from the clinical to describe effects that manifest themselves in the collective; collective affects might very well be linked to manifestations of clinical symptoms in individuals. This, however, shall not be the theme of this dissertation. 12 The exception here are trends that are usually subsumed under the name “retro.” They mark the nostalgic elevation of the outmoded into the realm of aesthetic appreciation, through which the outmoded can become valuable again. This, however, is a special case of dealing with the obsolete and only affect a very small number of objects or ideas (cf. Thorne 102).

focus of the contemporary is thus not on the present, but always on what lies ahead - the future of consumption, and the next object of desire.

In the historical situation of eastern Germany of the 1990s, contemporaneity was associated with material consumption, but also distinctly regarding western knowledge and experience, a field in which eastern Germans inevitably had to feel obsolete. Hence, many overcompensated in their self-association with Amerika, with capitalism, the celebration of individuality, and the boundless consumerism, painted by the utopian Amerikan image that was prevalent amongst GDR citizens. In the eyes of the West and the (re-)unified

German nation, this overcompensation raised the suspicion of obsoleteness, because eastern Germans seemingly lacked the sobering experiences western Germans had had with

America and specifically the United States. As my analysis of the cultural products below shows, not achieving contemporaneity can cause individuals to lose their sense of belonging. The threat that obsoleteness poses here is fundamental. To stay contemporary is always a question of means, of financial means, of educational means, of social access means. Consumer culture therefore quickly creates large groups of the obsolete.13

13 Despite the large-scale production of obsoleteness in late capitalism, the system stabilizes itself by referring the fulfillment of contemporaneity to the future, for which the American working class can serve as an example. It self-portrays itself as lower middle-class, not as a poor class, as it keeps up the belief in future riches, as Ronald Wrights paraphrase of John Steinbeck illuminates so fittingly: “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (124). It also stabilizes itself by allowing for contradictory ideologies like the nation to exist and provide alternatives of identification for the obsolete, which is a sign of ideological stability, as Žižek notes.

A system of obsolescence such as late capitalism also creates fear, namely the fear of becoming obsolete. Fear is so ubiquitously present that Kathleen Fitzpatrick in The

Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television suggests that anxiety might be a more adequate description of the primary affects it causes. Anxiety, in clinical terms as a disorder, is defined as a prolonged episode in which the subject experiences fear and worry. This state of being, which Adorno describes as ubiquitous in modernity, leads to severe symptoms. Subjects are restless or feel wound-up, are easily fatigued, have a difficult time concentrating, are irritable, and so on (“Anxiety Disorders”).

These symptoms correlate in many ways with studies of social behavior toward spectacle and today’s media consumption (cf. Debord 128; LaRose & Eastin 360; Tsao 89-105;

Elliott 285-291). As Kinnick, Krugman, and Cameron describe in their example of

“compassion fatigue,” these symptoms manifest themselves in many different spheres of the modern lifeworld (687-689). The chain of causation in this complex field of social interaction cannot be part of this dissertation, but a connection between anxiety, obsoleteness, and media consumption with emersion in the spectacle as momentary remedy appear to be a plausible line of argument. The fear of obsoleteness is the fear of not belonging or the constant anxiety of losing that feeling of belonging, a situation nearly everybody can relate to on a very personal level. In the wake of literally losing one’s country and nation combined with the common loss of employment and the disadvantages in information and knowledge about the new nation leads to extreme fears of obsoleteness.

It can also lead to aggression as an expression of the two affects Adorno associates with obsoleteness: hatred and shame.14 In “Ausgrabungen,” he asserts that hatred even extends beyond the obsolete object itself. It extends to schools of thought that are being declared outdated. Adorno illustrates that using modernism and Ibsen’s play. Whenever

Ibsen is mentioned, Adorno bemoans that there are always voices claiming that his work is outdated, and especially his women are portrayed in an old-fashioned manner, instead of understanding them in their historical value for the ideologies today. It is not only historical distance that creates obsoleteness but “history’s judgment:” “Sein [der Urteilsspruch der

Geschichte] Ausdruck an Dingen ist die Scham, die den Nachgeborenen im Angesicht der früheren Möglichkeiten ergreift, der er zum Leben verhelfen versäumte (MM 163-164).

The ideology of necessary and constant progress causes a multitude of missed chance.

Logically, there are always at least as many things somebody decided against as for, which, as Adorno argues, necessarily causes shame about what has become obsolete. Shame, according to Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie by Sigmund Freud, is impeding and prohibitive and leads to self-imposed restrictions. Simultaneously, the system consistently

14 Burges, in contrast, argues for different terms to describe the processes of obsolescence in late capitalism, as he assumes hatred and shame are affects too vehement to be sustainable in everyday life. Instead, he suggests, that obsolescence causes contempt and embarrassment. “Capitalist contempt” he positions as dialectical other of consumer desire, it falls between hatred and distaste and can target any desired item or structure “to which the adjective outmoded or obsolete can be affixed” (78). This lower level of affective investment, allows modern people to relegate obsolescence emotionally and cognitively to a realm outside of everyday experience. According to Burges, the difference makes it possible to maintain our own contemporaneity and deny our obsolescence. I suggest Burges’ argument is not an alternative, but an addition to Adorno’s and Günther Anders’ evaluations. The described sets of affect, however, work on different levels, often simultaneously. Shame is the stronger affect not only regarding emotional energy but also in terms of intransigence. You can only endure shame or ensconce oneself. Embarrassment, however, already points to a solution of the situation, the retrieval of one’s identity (Tisseron 54). Embarrassment is, therefore, a driving force for progress, as it implies the solution by consumption and change already within itself.

excludes individuals and groups on various levels and in varying degrees - exclusion causes embarrassment. Shame and embarrassment become an interdependent pair of misserey in obsoleteness. They also lead to other adverse affects, shame to hatred, and embarrassment to contempt. When the promise of progress and participation contained in embarrassment vanishes for people, who feel left behind or excluded from ongoing progress, shame and hatred gain emotional prominence.

Consumer capitalism has made humans themselves a production commodity. This commodity can become obsolete, not only as a consumer but also as part of production, when the individual’s labor is no longer needed.15 Obsoleteness then concerns the individual directly, which in consumer culture also entails economic obsoleteness and the lack of possibilities to participate. The individual’s obsoleteness, not being able to partake in the central process of society, is very likely the strongest actuator of the affects of obsoleteness.16 In the years after (re-)unification, the production of obsoleteness in general and the individual’s obsoleteness in particular was plainly visible in eastern Germany. Not only was the political and economic system changed to capitalism, but eastern Germans also experienced the force of capitalism unhindered by West Germany’s rules and regulation. The East’s means of production changed so quickly and so radically that shame has not only been an underlying somewhat subdued affect toward the system but a

15 Günther Anders argues that the ubiquity of shame in late capitalism stems from the technological progress and its slow abolition of the human. He calls it “Promethean shame” (19-56) and describes how humans, in a time of technological progress, become aware of their own (impending) obsoleteness, as the machines can produce everything with greater precision and faster than people themselves. 16 cf. David Fore: "Approaching the limits of spatial extension and recognizing the finite number of global markets, capitalism began taking up residence in the inner space of man, establishing new sites of concentration in his body and psyche" (20).

communally shared reaction to becoming obsolete the what is genuinely called technological and economic progress. As is often the case in such situations, it affected the less educated differently and more powerfully than the more mobile and often more flexible educated class. As will become apparent in the course of the following chapter, they were nevertheless both affected by it.17

In summary, obsoleteness is of importance for this dissertation on multiple levels.

It allows me to conceptualize the broader cultural status of consumer culture and explains how concepts such as nation can be simultaneously declared obsolete and outmoded and be ever present in public discourse. Obsoleteness, furthermore, exposes the revolutionary potential in everything that is being declared obsolete, as it can be use as a counter-history

17 Also German phenomena such as PEGIDA or AFD, as well as the 2016 US presidential race can be read through the prism of obsolescence, which offers insights into some mechanisms, which I can only mention here in passing. Nevertheless, even these superficial thoughts afford a glimpse on the workings of obsolescence and its affect. The case of Donald Trump's election is perhaps the most prominent of such situations. Many of the decisive voters for Donald Trump were part of a white working class that felt disenfranchised from public discourse. Part of that disenfranchisement is due to racism, sexism, and a general fear of the Other. This, however, does not contest the general diagnosis of a feeling of impending or already manifested obsolescence, culturally, socially, politically, and economically. For years these groups were confronted with the narrative that they are part of a vanishing majority, whose jobs will become obsolete in the near future and that America is becoming a diverse, multicultural, and multiethnic society. While there is probably truth to this narrative, these pluralistic ideas stoked shame, hate, fear, and the anxiety of becoming outmoded as a group – along with all the modes and concept of identification and understandings of the world. The problem, therefore, is the feeling of disenfranchisement from public discourse not, like Die Zeit’s Niels Markwardt suggested, that people have to deal with Judith Butler personally. Instead, they are confronted with the effects of Butler on the public discourses, from which the workers feel excluded, which triggers the familiar group of affects. Instead of suffering the shame of obsolescence, these people collectively created their own discourses which run parallel to the relative center of society. The split of the discourse shows itself in the mistrust and inability of most politicians to connect to the disenfranchised. This problem spans the Western World as can be seen in the cases of Sigmar Gabriel showing his middle finger to protesters or Hillary Clinton’s famous designation “bunch of deplorables.” Disenfranchised from discourse and their concerns and identity continuously marked as obsolete, these groups are open to the fetishization of master signifiers like nation, race, or religion. Obsolescence coincides with a resurgence of the nation and with the excessive form, nationalism, as a concept of identity. Obsolescence is certainly not the only perspective which seems feasible on these political phenomena. But it appears to be promising, and therefore merits further examination in the context of this dissertation and beyond.

to the singularity of master narrative of positivist neo-liberal history. It offers a perspective on affective relationships to all the outmoded categories and objects, present in the cultural products examined in this dissertation. Among the concepts that have been declared obsolete and that are important for this dissertation are Amerika as utopian space, the

United States as the biggest global power, Germany as nation, and the idea of nation in general as well as concretely obsolete things such as the GDR nation and the so-called communist bloc. Obsoleteness as analytic tool equips us not only with means of counter- historical thinking but also with an instrument to identify the hegemonic ideologies which declare others (and sometimes themselves) obsolete. Therefore, it can promote awareness in times in which conditions - political, social, economic - often appear to be without alternatives. It reveals that change and utopia can be inspired as much by the past as by the future.

2.3. Nation and the subject of a lack

To a large degree, obsoleteness is responsible for the implicit and explicit cultural focus on communal identity, which I analyze in the following chapters. It is particularly central to the development of nationalism in eastern Germany after the fall of the Wall.

The reason for this prominence of nationalism and nation lies in the unique role the concept has played in the relationship between individual and society since the eighteenth century and its extraordinary capacities of providing identification where other means fail. This investigation into the concept of nation and its pervasiveness in the complex systems of

late capitalism must begin, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, not with society, but with the subject and its needs. This exposition of a nation starts with the idea of humans as

“Mangelmutant,” as “deficient,” “auxotrophic,” creatures of lack. My outline of this idea will rest primarily on a psychoanalytic approach as well as anthropological considerations found in Slavoj Žižek’s reflections and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and

Obstinacy. The goal of the following exposé is to suggest that humans are in fundamental need of communality building ideologies, of which nation has proven to be the most pervasive and stable in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

Kluge and Negt’s approach the question of why humans need society primarily from a practical anthropological perspective, as Devin Fore explicates in his introduction to the recent English translation of Geschichte und Eigensinn.18 Kluge and Negt argue that the pivotal quality of humans is that our bodies are not well equipped for survival, particularly in the first years of our lives. This lack forced our ancestors to rely on their brain and the help of other humans. Consequently, they had to develop social relations and hence a way to communicate: a complex language: “In evolutionary theory, an auxotroph is a living being that depends on specific associations with others because it is not metabolically autonomous” (Kluge and Negt 94). The reliance on sociality is so fundamental that humans are not able to exist without associating themselves with others.

Belonging to a group, however, not only includes benefits but also always involves giving

18 The book was originally published 1982, reprinted in a revised version 1993, and published in English as History and Obstinacy in 2014. These dates are of interest, because they illustrate the persistence and actuality of Kluge and Negt’s ideas, and because it hits historical and geographical markers important to my project as well.

up on personal longings and comfort for the good of the community. Social rules and rules of possession and participation are some ways in which the single being must concede personal longings to the benefit of being a member of the group. These rules need a legitimization to stabilize them historically.19 Externalization in principle is necessary for an understanding of the fundamental effect of the environment on the individual. It is the basis for the possibility of identity - group and individual itself.20 Individuality, as well as community, is, therefore, the result of these conditions and processes.21 Until the era of enlightenment, social associations in the western world were locally organized by divine will, traditions, family, and fundamental economic ties. Most significant for the social organization was the belief that a divine being decided on social rules and the individual’s position within the group, which stabilized communities on macro and micro levels. On a micro level, this rigid system was aided by the codification of fundamental economic and

19 Kluge and Negt’s understanding of the auxotrophic mutant is not only grounded in anthropology but has its footing in psychoanalysis as well. Using Arnold Gehlen’s and Sigmund Freud’s works, Kluge and Negt diagnose intersections between both concepts of humans as auxotrophic creatures. In both theories, lack is transformed into an advantage as it forces humans to language, technology, symbols, and instruments. In “Öffentlichkeit als wertvolles Gut und die Idee der Gegenöffentlichkeit,” Kluge explains this further: “On the one hand, we are deficient beings [Mangelwesen]. [...] On the other hand, we are prepared: we have been armed with constructions that required 4.2 billion years of existence on this blue planet - the planet on which we have emerged and with which we have emerged, together, in a most improbable way” (translation in Fore 25). Gehlen calls this human advantage “Weltoffenheit” - world openness. For him it is only the lack we experience, that forces us to open up to the world itself. 20 Karl Marx pointed this out while referencing Aristotle’s concept of the Zoon politikon: “Der Mensch ist im wörtlichsten Sinn ein zôon politikon nicht nur ein geselliges Tier, sondern ein Tier, das nur in der Gesellschaft sich vereinzeln kann” (Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie 615). 21 How these effects extend further than the social or political realm becomes paradigmatic clear in Walter Benjamin diagnosis of the changes modernity brought along in Einbahnstraße: “Menschen als Spezies stehen zwar seit Jahrtausenden am Ende ihrer Entwicklung; Menschheit als Spezies aber steht an deren Anfang. Ihr organisiert in der Technik sich eine Physis, in welcher ihr Kontakt mit dem Kosmos sich neu und anders bildet als in Völkern und Familien” (82). As he writes this in the context of a visit to the planetarium, Benjamin illustrates how externalization and technology fundamentally change the development of group associations and experience of the Other and the Self. I would, however, in the following doubt his positive outlook on the transcendentalizing power of these new associations, when it comes to nation or “Völkern.”

family ties in traditions. Extreme economic and philosophical changes in the era of enlightenment did away with God as a social and political stabilizer. Communities not only needed a new way of legitimizing their social rules but also rationalizing their existence in post-feudal political systems. Most communities in the western world eventually arrived at concepts of nationhood as a replacement for the divine order. Discourses of nationhood, however, did not suddenly appear in the “Sattelzeit.”22 They rather came into their own and were disconnected from confessional discourses and differences (Giesen 16-17).

Slavoj Žižek uses the idea of the auxotrophic being in his explanation of the apparent persistence of the concept of nation today and combines it with a fundamental critique of post-structuralism. In the last chapter of Tarrying with the Negative (“Enjoy your Nation as yourself!”), Žižek engages with the reasons for the persistence of nation in late capitalism. He argues that the complex social bonds caused by the auxotroph’s compensation through association came at the price of giving up impulses and longings, parts of the individual’s enjoyment.

Nation, for Žižek, is an ideology- albeit a very powerful one which is codified in the constitutions of many nation-states and fetishized in nationalism. The basis for his analysis of nation is the mentioned human of a lack. For Žižek, however, what is lacking is specifically “jouissance,” often translated as “enjoyment.”23 Žižek argues that subjects

22 The term usually gets translated as “saddle time” and designaties the time around the French revolution, which saw extreme changes in political, economic, and social structures. (cf. Koselleck XV) 23 “Jouissance” is a concept notoriously difficult to describe, as it is underdefined and diachronically changing in Lacan’s works. Broadly speaking, one can summarize jouissance as an excess of life and as enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle (cf. Braunstein 102-110). Zizek makes that clear in the first footnote of “Enjoy your Nation as Yourself:” “What should be pointed out here is that enjoyment ( jouissance, Genuss) is not to be equated with pleasure ( Lust ): enjoyment is precisely ‘Lust im[sic!] Unlust’ it designates the paradoxical satisfaction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs

are too often portrayed as purely rational, neglecting their body and especially their emotions. The concept of the subject as “rationality machine,” however, is the basis of ideas of modern nation-states as a social contract. The need for association, according to

Žižek, however, goes deeper than the rational level. Being social and belonging to a group is a necessary condition of being human and that belonging sits deeper than a willing abandonment of rights to the group. Since the individual gives up enjoyment, communities are based on the fantasy of returning that enjoyment in excess - they provide collective fantasies of jouissance. We desire what we perceive as the others’ desire.

What is at the core of communities, according to Žižek, is a typical emotional relationship towards symbolic systems based on the fantasies of collective jouissance, which he calls “the Thing” – a community‘s particular incarnation of enjoyment (Sublime

64-68).24 The structuring force of the communities’ relationship towards the Thing are fantasies. By definition, the relationship is not grounded in something real, which allows for fantasies towards the Thing to be inconsistent or even contradictory. To the community,

the equilibrium of the ‘pleasure principle.’ In other words, enjoyment is located ‘beyond the pleasure principle’” (280). For this dissertation, it suffices to understand that jouissance is a result of enacting fundamental human drives, which in many cases is prohibited in society. In order for the individual to be impelled to give up this jouissance (unconsciously) it creates a fantasy of the excess of jouissance it will gain via the belonging to a group. 24 The Things are in what Lacan calls the discourse of the “Master” (cf. Evans 45-48). The Master’s role is to remedy the imbalance created by the superego and to “regulate the excess:” “With the figure of the Master, the antagonism inherent in the social structure is transformed into a relationship of power, a struggle for domination between us and them, those who cause antagonistic imbalance” (Tarrying 210). The Nation-Thing can take the role of such a master, by blaming its own excess on the outside, as can God, or the State, depending on the political-ideological system. All these masters fulfill their role in the form of a master signifier. They function, according to Žižek, as “sublime objects of ideology.” In this role, they become detached from inquisitive discourses. They are elevated to “the status of the impossible thing” (Sublime Object 77) and become so deeply entangled in the believers’ imaginary it actually becomes almost impossible to question their role in the constitution of the group. One could say they are being naturalized, as they are considered an anthropologically or divinely given fact of life. The master signifiers are believed to hold the truth of a community, despite being largely empty signifiers.

the Thing “appears as giver of plenitude and vivacity” to the individual's’ life, but at the same time, it is an elusive category. The Thing evades stable definitions beyond the meaningless signifier “our way of life:” “All we can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community organizes its feasts, its rituals of mating, its initiation ceremonies, in short, all the details by which is made visible the unique way a community organizes its enjoyment” (Tarrying 201). The “Nation-Thing” is no exception to this: It is develops in a community as “our Thing,” the community’s specific “way of life,” which is only accessible to the members of that specific community and which outsiders of the community cannot fully comprehend (Tarrying 200-203). This definition shows that the

Nation-Thing does not necessarily have to be a concept of right wing conservatism, but is foremost a tool for group identification, necessary in a system that represents the status quo as that of particularities. At the same time, the Nation-Thing lacks any substance. It only exists in a tautological relationship to the community, as it exists outside the subject as the Thing but simultaneously is only upheld through the subject’s belief in it. Žižek elaborates: “The national Thing exists as long as members of the community believe in it; it is literally an effect of this belief in itself” (Tarrying 202). The belief is ensured, however, not only by the community itself, but by the institutionalization of its politics, its education, its memory, and its myths. All institutions buttress the continuation of what must be called the ideology of nation - ideology being defined by Žižek as “the Cause which is produced by its effects” (Tarrying 202). All Things, therefore, only reveal themselves in hindsight and from a historical perspective. The Nation-Thing rationalizes arbitrary relations from the past for today’s discourses.

Things, however, are not unilateral in their influence on the subject. Subjects do not simply follow a kind of civil theology. They cannot know how their reality is functioning, but they believe an Other within the Thing does - Žižek calls it “belief through the Other”

(cf. Sharpe and Boucher 54). The political and social system works because the people submit to the authority of the Other, an entity or person that does understand the complexities of the individual’s life-world and is therefore entrusted with its organization.

Žižek often uses Hegel’s example of the Latin mass held in front of the laity to exemplify this notion. In Lacanian fashion, the authority is a primarily symbolic order. These symbolic orders are structuring the subject’s belief-systems. There is a difference in the individual between what it believes through the Other and what it is free to voice cynically.

In a modern society and for the concept of nation, this Other can take many forms: it can be found in politics but increasingly is perceived to be located in different forms of media and in them foremost in the expert, the eyewitness, and the poet. Eyewitness as well as poetic accounts promise access to realities that are not graspable for the consumer, while the expert seems to offer a level of abstraction which is out of reach of the consumer. As a writer educated in the fields of literature and film, I will mainly examine the poetic, as a place of belief through an Other.

In presenting his concept of the Nation-Thing as the aim of collective jouissance,

Žižek does not do away with the post-structuralist mode of understanding nation as overdetermined discourse and a construction of textual practice. He rather declares it insufficient to explain the perseverance and attraction of the concept: “[S]uch an emphasis overlooks the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment which must be

present for the Nation qua discursive entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency”

(Tarrying 202, emphasis in the original). A Nation-Thing only exists as long as it is activated by the expression of what is perceived as its distinct enjoyment in the form of social practices and the discourses of myth that structure the practices. This gives credence to the importance of discourses of the nation in Germany after (re-)unification, as there was a considerable disconnect between parts of the mythology, but especially in social practice, between the ex-West and East Germany. The differences in mythology were especially blatant for the time after WWII, when the GDR attempted to emancipate itself from the idea of the historical German nation by means of a universal socialism. In West

Germany, it was not that state that initiated the attempt to emancipate itself from ideas like

Volksnation, but the student movement of the 1960s in its confrontation with the hegemonic fantasies of the German Nation-Thing using radical opposition and with their version of a universal socialism. Still, the fantasies of the (re-)unified German Nation-

Thing survived these emancipatory confrontations. The architects of the German (re-

)unification relied heavily on the idea of Volksnation. The differences in social practices between the two German states and in the organization of all levels of society, however, complicate this fantasy. The (re-)unified German Nation-Thing, therefore, only had its footing in a couple of ancient fantasies of ethnic and linguistic unity.

In order to clarify the symbolic system nation, on which Žižek relies, I will outline its most important foundational features based on some of the most relevant theories. The elusiveness of the concept of the nation has led to a multitude of different approaches of

which many are legitimate.25 The nation must be understood as an overdetermined semiotic system between myth, symbol, and ideology, which is upheld through belief, re-narration, and practices.26 Due to the multiformity of the nation, theorists from a wide variety of disciplines shaped the scientific discourse on nation.27 Most notably, the fields of history, political science, sociology, philosophy, literary studies, and cultural studies. Most of the central arguments in the discourse about nation and nationalism agree on a variety of main points of nations being constructs: nations are conceptualized as arbitrary overdetermined semiotic systems that determine an arbitrary and imaginary group. In order to stabilize themselves, nations need to form a relative strict duality of Self and Other, as it ideologically derives from the dichotomy of inclusion and exclusion. Also, nations need to invoke a commonly shared history of their members, often called “a usable past” (cf.

25 Ernest Renan in his 1882 lecture What is a Nation? already noticed the insubstantiality of the concept and called it “spiritual principle” or “soul.” (18-19). Renan anticipates in these notions later theories of nation, which constitute the foundation of the analysis of the concept for this dissertation. The approach to nation shall be primarily grounded in three concepts, the well known imagined community, the narrated nation, and the necessity of nation in the identification process of the modern political regime. 26 Henry Nash Smith summarized the interdependence of myth, symbol, and ideology already when writing about the American nation in Virgin Land (1950): “I proposed to use the terms 'myth' and 'symbol' to designate 'larger or smaller units of the same kind of thing [...].' I might have avoided some misunderstandings of what I was about if I had introduced the term 'ideology' at this point by adding that the intellectual constructions under consideration could not be sharply categorized but should be thought of as occupying positions along a spectrum extending from myth at one end, characterized by the dominance of image and emotion, to ideology at the other end, characterized by emphasis on concepts, on abstract ideas” (20). 27 Noticeably, there are some further complexities between nation and nationalism, a differentiation that often remains blurry in studies. Its differentiation is further complicated by the historical difference in its connotation. Heralded as a movement of liberation from the aristocracy in the 18th and 19th century and therefore a term designating progressives and liberals, it came to be associated with conservatism and backwardness in the 20th century. Ute Planert, for example, loses any differentiation between the nation and nationalism and exclusively speaks of nationalism. Following Anthony Smith and others, I suggest nationalism is the moment in which nation becomes the sole hegemon in political and individual identity construction in a certain discourse – “the doctrine that makes the nation the object of every political endeavor and national identity the measure of every human value” (Smith 18). In psychoanalytical terms, one can speak of the fetishization of the nation.

Bouwsma’s A Usable Past, and others). This history entails national myths of origin and legitimization, such as America’s myths of Columbus’ discovery and the settler’s city upon a hill and Germany’s Arminius myth and the myth of a “German people.” Ideologies of nations also always go hand in hand with other ideologies of inclusion and exclusion and the distribution of power such as gender or race. From a more political perspective, nations are secular belief systems, and they demand hegemony over other belief systems and the loyalty of their subjects. Nations tend to be associated with a particular territory and aspire to align their imagined space with the borders of a political entity and a political order, ergo becoming a nation-state. They pledge participation in the fate and arrangement of the populace (Andrew Thompson 137-139), in which it surpasses the possibilities offered by the existing polity. The promise gives the individuals who are part of the group an incentive to act on behalf of the group. Today, most nations are further stabilized by their codification in the foundational documents of nation-states. As much as discourses surrounding the nation-state present the symbiosis of the political entity of the state and the ideological entity of the nation as stable, the nation remains a precarious category based on myths and ideologies (cf. Chernilo 22-35). The historic importance of the interplay between state and nation and how it is responsible for the difference between German and US-American incarnations of the nations will be the topic of Leah Greenfield’s theories below.

Historically, nations and their borders have often been the reason for violent confrontations; nations have been based on, promoted and upheld by a particular social class motivated by specific social goals, usually a manifestation of the bourgeoisie. Over

time, the attachment between nations and the social class that carried them severs and nations become systematically institutionalized. (cf. Ute Planert 11-12).

The most influential text on the historical formation of the nation for today's discourse is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Nations, Anderson argues, are groups too large to be based on social interaction, as not all citizens can be personally acquainted. Nations, therefore, are imagined communities, social constructs upheld by the belief of the members that they exist. Nation, Anderson writes, “is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). The community is imagined because even in the smallest nations, it is impossible for every group member to have a personal social connection to all other members of the nation. The national is equally imagined because it proclaims an equality of group members, a “horizontal comradeship,” thereby obscuring inequalities of class, gender, heritage, ethnicity, sexuality, and more. The nation, described as limited, includes the notion of a necessary

Other for its construction, a notion that is of specific significance for the historic formation of the German nation, as I will argue in more detail below. A nation must have boundaries, and it tends to a negative Othering of outsiders and a consequent overvaluing of the Self.

Its sovereignty is imagined because it includes the myth of a collective will of the people and of the freedom of the body of individuals to decide their political order and faith. The claim of a nation, on the one hand, neglects the multiplicity of opinions. Alternatively, it gets reduced by mechanisms of self-identification of the group member.

Žižek affirms this importance of the Other and expands it by Lacan’s theory of enjoyment.28 Therein, the Other is always also part of the Self because it is interdependent with the fantasy as the collective Self. First and foremost, it is needed as a stabilizer for a community, differentiating one community from others. Paradoxically, the Other on this level is perceived as endangering a community’s enjoyment and is at the same time believed to offer more enjoyment than one’s own community – the others are imagined as having an “excess” of enjoyment. The threat perceived in the Other largely remains symbolic; it is concrete only in the rarest of cases. Žižek compares this perceived menace with Freud’s notion of castration anxiety, which is ever present in a theoretical way, despite the unlikeliness of its manifestation. Referencing Jacques Alain Miller, he argues that the differences between Nation-Things are not only the symbolic identifications but their way of jouissance: “The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications.

What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship toward enjoyment” (Tarrying 203). Here, Žižek’s theory allows for cultural specificity and again expands the idea of the individual's relationship to the symbolic order

28 Žižek follows Lacan’s definitions of the Other relatively closely. Lacan differentiates between two main forms of alterity, the other in lowercase and the Other with an uppercase “o.” The other (also called object a), for Lacan is the Imaginary ego and its alter-egos. Lacan claims that Freud’s ego, which children discover in the mirror stage, is an imagination. Registering one's ego has an alienating effect and consequently takes the role of an other (cf. Homer 39). The Other with a capital “o” on the other hand is split again between the symbolic and the real Other. The first is the Other (also called object A) as a symbolic order as inherent in Žižek’s definition of the Nation-Thing. This Other includes imagined authoritative structures onto which explanations for the unknown are being projected - Lacan calls them the sujet supposé savoir - the subject that is supposed to know. The other part of the Other is what Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, amongst others, calls the “real Other” (16). It is the Other which we know from the binary opposition between the Self and the Other. It is what is unknown, what does not belong to the Self, an “unfathomable abyss of withdrawn-yet-proximate alterity” (Johnston 2.1.). Freud explain this in the image of the “Nebenmensch” (cf. Freud “Das Unheimliche” II).

by the notion of a particular relationship to the enjoyment of nation. The difference between the American and the German nation is hence not only located in the variance of the symbolic system, their myths, and rituals but substantially in the affective relationship with that construct.

From its modern conception onwards, the nation has been the filler of a void created by the obsoleteness of another Thing. It has filled voids, experienced when excess is perceived as especially threatening or when another Thing of enjoyment becomes obsolete.

After the fall of socialism, both obsoleteness of the GDR-Thing and the threat to the former

“way of life” were ubiquitous, because the existing system collapsed and the old mode of enjoyment become outmoded. Simultaneously capitalism cleaved its way into the societies of the Soviet bloc abruptly and with great force. The excess was visible across society, as shown in exemplary fashion by Andreas Voigt’s documentary film series Leipzig Filme, which focuses on both, the enjoyment of belonging to a German Nation-Thing and the void left by the collapse of the old regime based on the personal stories of citizens of GDR.

They first had the fantasy of gaining an excess of jouissance through the (re-)unification - by switching Things to an Other that was assumed to possess an excess of enjoyment. As

Voigt shows, most of these eastern Germans, however, have immediately and continuously been confronted with economic obsoleteness and a personal obsoleteness, caused by the loss of their old Nation-Thing. For many, the fetishization of the new (re-)unified German nation based on old ideas of ethnic belonging provided the necessary alternative means of identification, others searched for it in a self-association with Amerika. Historically, the

Nation-Thing has filled the void left by the loss of God and the divine order as Thing after

the fall of the theocentric feudal order, and after socialism, it filled the void of legitimization of groups identifying with a state, a system, and as a society. In Žižek’s words, the Nation-Thing especially likes to fill the void of the collapse of “Big Others”

(Tarrying 231). In filling out this void, the nation frequently turns into nationalism: “[T]he crucial point is that nationalism as a specifically modern […] phenomenon designates the moment when the Nation, the national Thing, usurps, fills out, the empty place of the

Thing[…] (Tarrying 218). Nationalism is the “transcendental illusion” (Tarrying 222) of providing direct access to the desired Thing. In late capitalism, in which seemingly fixed traditional ideological positions such as gender, sex, or class become more and more destabilized in the face of the unhindered commodification of humans and their everyday life, the Nation-Thing seemingly fulfills a longing for the absent fixity of social relations.

In this function, as I will show in a historical overview below, the German Nation-Thing has actually been competing with Amerika and Amerikanized globalization as other Things that promise jouissance and the creation of social connections.

The idea of humans as auxotrophic beings and the further explanations by Žižek give a perspective on the reason the Nation-Thing is such a pervasive ideology and why it was – and in many ways still is today – such an important component of discourses of (re-

)unification. It also foreshadows some reasoning of the persistent presence of the Nation-

Thing in German images of Amerika and some roles Amerika takes in the cultural products central to this dissertation. The theory of humans as “auxotrophic” beings and its connection to the concepts of nation, however, does not suggest the necessity of nation itself, it shows the need of human association with external Things. The Nation-Thing is

only one master signifier among many, but its uncanny ability to occupy spaces left open by other systems of signification and its capability of providing narrative against social and economic obsoleteness preserve its powers vis-a-vis postmodern ideas of identification.

2.4. The cultural specificity of the Nation-Thing: America and Germany

I have established above that when we analyze German representations of Amerika, we need to be aware that it says a lot more about German sensitivities than America or the

United States of America as it is the fantasy of the Other that gets represented semiotically in these works. Nevertheless, this fantasy is influenced by the German consumption of

American products and historically through the American presence as an occupying power with programs such as re-education by myths, ideologies, and images of the American

Nation-Thing, whose construct of enjoyment differs fundamentally from the German

Nation-Thing. Since these differences influence the German image of Amerika and in this difference the German nation constitutes itself, it is necessary for this dissertation to establish some of the fundamental distinctions. First and foremost, there is the linguistic difference between the English word “nation” and the German word “Nation,” which are influenced by the histories of the terms and their employment in current discourses. The history of the nations exhibits a fundamental distinction as Liah Greenfeld points out. She differentiates between individualistic-libertarian and collectivist-authoritarian forms of the nation and chose Great Britain and America as prime examples for the first and the German nation for the second variety. The difference originates in the order of historical events at the birth of the nations and their constitutions as nation-states. As Greenfeld explains,

individualist-libertarian nations usually developed in societies that had already gained their autonomy from the governing authority and developed an idea of nation quasi as an afterthought to ensure political and social cohesion - nation filled the void an obsolete

Other had left. These forms of nation are usually based on a civic understanding of belonging and not excessively prescriptive in their “way of life.” America falls exactly into that mold.

During the political liberation from its colonial status most Americans thought of themselves as belonging to one of the thirteen colonies, not to a nation-state USA. Even after the conception of an American nation, belonging was organized by the belief in it, which one can plainly see in the often-cited Letters of an American Farmer by J. Hector

St. John de Crèvecœur, in which he describes an American as a re-born European:

He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners,

receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government

he obeys, and the new rank he holds. [...] The American is a new man, who acts

upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.

(54-56)

As has been pointed out numerous times, Crèvecœur constructs America based on status and values that are held by individuals (Bellah et al 36). The foundation of what makes a person an American lies in the individual’s acceptance of the American values, not in heritage or other factors. In exchange for the acceptance of values, America affords the individual the possibility of economic self-reliance and advancement. In Germany, on the

other hand, nation was not the retrospective explanation why a certain group of people should conceive of themselves as a social and political unit. Instead, it became the political argument of needing such a unit. Instead of being a retrograde explanation, it became a prescriptive argument (much like it did again for the (re-)unification of Germany after the

Wende). The modern German Nation-Thing was founded on the fantasy of an ethnic belonging, which included the construction of a common history of a people and the strict connection of the ethnicity to individual character marks, the so-called “Deutsche

Tugenden” (cf. Schulz 133). This historical condition, Greenfeld argues, lends itself a lot more to a collectivism, in which the welfare of the people is more important than the welfare of the individual, but also becomes authoritarian, exclusionary, and prescriptive

(cf. Greenfeld 9-11).29 Greenfeld’s categories are only tendential thinking patterns, as

29 This difference between the principles of belonging is exemplary for the history of the legislation of nationality in Germany and the US. Both, traditionally, were on opposing sides between jus sanguinis (the law of blood relations determining one's nationality) and jus solis (the law of place of birth determining one’s nationality). The 14th amendment to the constitution of the United States denotes “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” This law makes the United States a proponent of an unrestricted jus solis (First generation Americans born abroad can invoke a jus sanguinis). The history of nationality law in Germany is more complicated, because of the multiplicity of “German” states in the 19th century. People were citizens of Bavaria or Prussia, not Germany. A fact that did not change with the founding of the German Reich in 1871. Many of the different laws, however, followed the French example of jus sanguinis, like Prussia in 1842. 1913, the jus sanguinis was established in paragraph 3 of the Reichs- und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz. Today’s article 116 of the Grundgesetz states; “Deutscher im Sinne dieses Grundgesetzes ist […], wer die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit besitzt oder als Flüchtling oder Vertriebener deutscher Volkszugehörigkeit oder als dessen Ehegatte oder Abkömmling in dem Gebiete des Deutschen Reiches nach dem Stande vom 31. Dezember 1937 Aufnahme gefunden hat.” In Germany, the law has been amended to acknowledge children who were born in Germany, lived here, and have their “Lebensmittelpunkt” - center of their life - in Germany. Being a member of a state does not equal being a member of a nation, but since both countries are nation-states, their self-constitution as a national community is part of their nationality laws. In Germany, the idea of being an ethnic nation has been reinstated in the discussion about reunification, which I will detail again below. It is noteworthy how both nation states create exceptions for their laws, to acknowledge the increasing global mobility of people. The augmentation of both laws reflects the discursive and legal contention of the concepts of the Nation-Thing in both countries.

exemplified by the many nativist movements America produced over the years or the longing of many Americans for a strong authoritarian leader today.30

Greenfeld’s categorizations must be seen as useful but ultimately broad tendencies.

In the case of the German history, notably, different concepts of the foundation of the nation have existed. M. Rainer Lepsius identifies four basic types of concepts of German

Nation-Things in his often-quoted “Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland:”

Volksnation, Kulturnation, Klassennation, and Staatbürgernation. The first is created by imagining a common ethnic background for all Germans, which primarily originates in the eighteenth century (cf. König 106). The term “Kulturnation” was suggested by Friedrich

Meineke at the beginning of the 20th century to describe the German case of a developing nation outside of the boundaries of an already existing state. The term Kulturnation is historically highly problematic, as Otto Dann notes amongst others. On the one hand, it

30 Liah Greenfeld’s concept is certainly a helpful tool to distinguish between the German and American form of nationalism. However, structuralist approaches like hers have some definite limitations. Their categories simplify the complexities within different kinds of nation and their constitution in specific Nation-Things. Symptomatically, she states that America’s construct of the Nation-Thing is not at all based on ethnicity: “The population of the United States of America, the identity of which is unmistakably national and which undoubtedly possesses a well-developed sense of uniqueness, is a case in point: it has no “ethnic” characteristics because its population is not an “ethnic community” (13). On the surface level, as shown above in the laws of the country, this might be true, but when examined more carefully, this analysis loses some of its validity. Implicitly the exclusion from membership in the nation has been unyielding in the United States and was often based on ethnicity. Americans defined themselves as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and any other group had to struggle for inclusion into the nation. Ethnicity was, however, not the strongest marker of inclusion and exclusion. As the acronym WASP already exhibits, aspects of religion and skin color accompany ethnicity. Texts like Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish became White argue that it has been race which held, and in many instances still holds, the most power of in- and exclusion. He argues that whiteness was the strongest marker of being able to participate in the nation. The ethnic and racialized Othering in the name of the nation persists today, prominently in the current primary election cycle of the Republican Party, calling for the deportation of people with Latin American heritage. These additions do not render Greenfeld’s findings invalid, as her structuralist ideas can help conceptualizing differences between nations. However, their shortcomings show the complexity and multiplicity of the concept of nation that even exists in one country synchronically.

importantly expresses the significance of the cultural movement of the eighteenth century in the German nation-building process and illustrates the split between the concept of nation fostered by the new bourgeois, mainly Protestant classes and the very different ideas held by the dominantly Catholic aristocracy. On the other hand, however, it leads to the assumption that Kultur is the primary root of the German nation and its inherent superiority over other cultures. a trope that is very prevalent in early German Anti-Amerikan writings such as Kürnberger’s Der Amerikamüde and remains a major part of discourses on Amerika today It also neglects rituals, state institutions, and the role of the Reichsnation in the nation building process. Klassennation then is Lepsius’ designation of the GDR’s attempt to build a nation on the premise of a unified economic class. The Staatsbürgernation is actually based on Jürgen Habermas’ suggestion of replacing cultural and ethical considerations about the German Nation-Thing with the identification with the state itself and thereby a

Nation-Thing in its foundations similar to the American, an argument I will take up again below.

The belief in the different forms of nation is not only part of the public or erudite discourses, but their respective characteristics are inscribed in the myths, symbols, and ideologies of a nation and proliferated by its media. This fact is of particular interest for this dissertation for two reasons: It concentrates on the analysis of films and novels, and both German and American cultural products are highly influential on the fantasy of

Amerika. From its modern inception, the nation has been interdependent with media production - specifically the print media:

It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying

the “one, yet many” of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation,

a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles. Socially, the novel joined the

newspaper as the major vehicle of the national print media, helping to standardize

language, encourage literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensibility (Brennan

49).

Print media, as has been discussed in many instances, has helped to form an understanding of national belonging by enabling the intra-national understanding through language standardization and encouraging the creation of a reading-public as receivers of the unifying message. The usage of a standardized language also manifested the idea of a larger

Self – the people who spoke and understood that language – and an Other – the people who did not speak or understand the language. The notion of belonging to a larger group of language speakers involved the construction of a fantasy of cultural belonging to that larger group, replacing the understanding of identity as local and language as a continuum. The act of reading itself created the fantasy of solidarity with others who follow the same ritual

(Anderson 33-36). Nation and narration also show a structural homology – specifically nation and novel, which Anderson and Homi Bhabha point out. The novel (like the newspaper) exhibits a fixed social horizon with a clearly defined inside and outside paradigm so typical for the nation.31 Both deal in tropes, myths, and ideologies, and both create difference by employing semiotic systems (cf. Bhabha 3-5). In the course of the

31 Anderson deliberately likens novel and newspaper to each other: “Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of coherent plot” (33).

nineteenth century, many novels explicitly picked up national myths and symbolism. In the

German context Ernst Moritz Arndt’s “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” and Gustav

Freytag’s Soll und Haben have often cited examples of this inclination. So, the interconnection between novel and nation further intensified. Even today in a transnational book market, the connections between novel and nation are still there, visible for example in the longing for a great “Wenderoman” - a novel that aesthetically codifies the nation's experience during (re-)unification (cf. Grub 84).32

Film’s relationship with the nation has continuously been located in the glaring dialectic of international medium and nation cinema. Film was theorized to be a transnational medium in its early years, as it is based on the movement of images, a semiotic system that many assumed would be understandable to all cultures (cf. Bennett

47). The subject matter of some of the first big selling feature films, however, then were deeply nationalistic (cf. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation). With the introduction of the talkie, the feature-length narrative film became further entrenched in matters of the nation. As Ian Jarvie argues in “National Cinema: A Theoretical Assessment,” this is something that is taken to the medium not something inherent in it. For this dissertation, it is particularly interesting that the discourses almost universally use American movies as the Other to define their national cinema: “[I]n more cases than not, national cinema is touted as an alternative to, even a replacement for, American movies” (Jarvie 75). Hence,

German movies must always be read in the context of American movies stabilizing their

32 Notably, this tradition of reading literature as national-literature is still deeply engrained in the institutional division of literary and cultural studies into units determined by language and by nation-states.

aesthetics and narratives. By means of the dialectic position of the medium film between the assumption of the transnational semiotic language of moving images and its often international forms of finance and organization versus the expectation of cultural specificity of the content, film has established itself as site of constant negotiation of the

“limitations of a conception of national cinema as a seamless totality that somehow accurately expresses, describes, and itemises the salient concerns and features of a given national culture” (Hjort/Mackenzie 4). The close connection between national tropes, myths, and ideologies with the media forms of novels and movies in combination with the

German reception of American cultural products has led to the intrusion of many American tropes of forms of national jouissance into the German imagination of Amerika.

Despite the presence of numerous critical voices, the American self-image, particularly in popular culture, remains overwhelmingly utopian. The main reason for the stability of positive myths of the nation is that America is a “grand ideology,” as Seymoure

Martin Lipset claims, which constitutes itself as “civil religion.” “Americanism,” Lipset argues, is an “-ism” comparable to liberalism and communism and therefore powerful enough to remain stable despite evidence of its dysfunctionality. As is often the case when

“-isms” become hegemonic, they take on a quasi-religious form of worship: “America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence” (G.K. Chesterton 41).

Americanism is unique because of this religious formation’s direct connection to its

Nation-Thing. The result of this civil religion is an open nationalism that is mostly alienating to contemporary Germans. The confrontation with this different form of

jouissance not only alienates Germans, but often awakens a longing for an equal enjoyment either directly in participating in the American Nation-Thing, or by finding the same enjoyment in Germany. It certainly forces modern Germans to consider the power and importance of the Nation-Thing, which in Germany is often discursively claimed to be obsolete.

The main reason for the importance of the permanent presence of the Nation-Thing as a grand narrative in the United States is its short history. Compared to the European nations, America did not have a usable mythical past available (as Germany had Arminius,

Barbarossa, or the Nibelungen cf. Münkler 31-210), when it was founded as a nation-state.

The necessity of manufacturing a nation only arose with the need for producing a state from people who did not identify themselves with each other after the revolutionary wars.

Inventing traditions, a mythical past, and heroes of the national cause, albeit not unique, as

Hobsbawm and Ranger point out in The Invention of Tradition (84-89), is very prominent in America. Since the nation cannot rely on a constructed ethnic history that can place its foundational myths in time immemorial, the myths must be repeated and performed in rituals even more frequently and vigorously. 33

33 The American nation-building, encountered some circumstances that made its construction difficult and in turn, makes its brief analysis important for this text. The main difficulty of finding what Henry Commager deems “a usable past” (14-21) from a European perspective, was the short presence of Europeans on the continent and the relative diversity of their heritage and the presence of a print media. This exacerbates the process in distinct ways. First, it was not possible to base a group identity on a past beyond the borders of what Jan and Aleida Assmann, in reference to Maurice Halbwachs, call “communicative memory” (47). This form of group memory describes the histories that are used in a society’s discourses on a regular basis. It is comprised of historical events and narratives that become hallmarks of discourses of identity and self-representation. The communicative memory does not reach back more than 80 or 100 years as it requires a personal relation of the discourse’s participants to the historical event. Everything past the communicative memory becomes part of a mythical prehistory, that can be imagined more as a referential cloud of simultaneity than a linear history. Since members of the nation are missing the personal relation to the times, it is especially easy to place narratives of national

Foundational myths of nations are usually either narratives of heroism or of overcoming obstacles and achieving great deeds by single members or groups that belong to the nation or proto-national societies. Alternatively, the narratives entail stories of progress or belonging. The myths become essential reference points in discourses concerning the nation. Therefore, they can play a significant role in the analysis of Nation-

Things. Richard Slotkin calls them the “intelligible mask of ‘national character’ (3). The

American Nation-Thing exhibits a recognizable dialectics between the promise of self- fulfillment, liberty, and the promise of material wealth on the one hand (often called “the

American Dream,” which I will examine in more detail in chapter 5) and of violence on the other. Probably the central myth of America is the myth of the frontier, which Turner deemed the agent for the formation of the “composite nationality for American people”

(Chapter 1). The frontier includes the constant antagonism between civilization and nature and a constant state of conquest and capture. The expansionism shows its effects today in the dissemination of American products and the promise of salvation connected to it. The frontier myth particularly is strongly linked to violently assimilating the Other, as Slotkin argues:

The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their

spirits, and the power of their church and nation: but the means to regeneration

naissance and heroes in that time. These myths, however, are later constructions or are being appropriated for a national history, hence “useable past.” For most nations, this time of becoming also lies so far back that it lacks written accounts. Therefore, myths can easily be invented and placed in that time or distilled from an oral tradition. Both these paths were difficult if not impossible to walk for the United States. It was impossible to construct a nation around a state's history or on the basis of a constructed mythical ethnic past.

ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through

violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience (5).

Accordingly, all the central myths Heike Paul names in The Myths that Made America are based on reinterpretation of violence: Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of America, the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the myth of the melting pot, the myth of the American West, and the myth of the self-made man. With some of the myths their connection to violence is apparent, but for others, such as the myth of the melting pot, one must dig deeper to find their violent core. The myth America as an amalgamation of all the cultures it absorbs is based on the demand of the removal of distinct features of one's heritage as condition for the acceptance as part of the Nation-Thing. The violence of the American Nation-Thing as the dialectical counterpart of its promise of personal, religious, and material salvation encapsulated in the American Dream.

Kafka, in one of the most important German-speaking literary texts for the literary discourse of Amerika, Der Verschollene, highlights the threatening aspect of the arrival in the United States by changing the image of the statue of liberty, the icon for America as a nation of immigrants. In Kafka’s narrative, the statue holds a sword instead of the torch.

He replaces the metaphor of hope with the metaphor of violence and violent justice. As the narrator still calls her “Freiheitsgöttin,” the American freedom is connected with violence.

Consequently, the protagonist in Kafka’s story loses all sense of identity and becomes consistently alienated and victimized in the narrative, as the social conventions and values remain unidentifiable for him. The dystopian variety of the arrival trope becomes largely hegemonic in the twentieth and twenty-first-century German literary production. Mostly,

the traveler either experiences the disappointment of her expectations of Amerika, or her negative expectations are confirmed by the experience of arriving in the United States (cf.

Herzog, Wolf, Jirgl, etc.). The process of entering the country gets portrayed as an intimidating ritual, inverting the myth of freedom and welcome at the center of the utopian strand of the arrival trope.

Hidden in all of these American myths lies obsolescence as a central part beyond the pure functionings of capitalism. American settlement started as a project of renewal, to declare the old ways of life obsolete. The trope also exists in the idea of the melting pot, of becoming American and leaving one’s own culture behind in obsoleteness. Herein resonates the sentiment that America is the pinnacle of development in every aspect.

Simultaneously, the incoming Europeans judged the inhabitants of the land, the Native

Americans, their cultures and economies outmoded. This fundamental obsolescence has also inscribed itself in German speaking fantasies of Amerika. One example for this is Max

Frisch’s Homo Faber; another is W.G. Sebald’ Ringe des Saturn, who describes the frontier idea as built on the obsoleteness and decay of what had been left behind on humanities move westwards:

Auffällig viele unserer Ansiedlungen sind ausgerichtet und verschieben sich, wo

die Verhältnisse es erlauben nach Westen. Der Osten ist gleichbedeutend mit

Aussichtslosigkeit. Insbesondere zur Zeit der Kolonialisierung des amerikanischen

Kontinents war zu beobachten, wie die Städte nach Westen sich entfalten, während

sie in den östlichen Bezirken schon wieder zerfallen. […] (Sebald 191).

The frontier and obsoleteness become anthropological phenomena for Sebald. It is in constant movement and progress that the idea of obsoleteness becomes part of every new development that Sebald locates in the general human, but simultaneously associates specifically with America. This quality exacerbated with the advent of cheap materials in the middle of the nineteenth century, which introduced “disposable culture” or “throwaway ethic” as Giles Slade argues (13). I do not want to suggest, like Sebald does, that the westward expansion is indeed an anthropological phenomenon. It is rather the trope of the

American Nation-Thing that has naturalized itself in the German imagination of Amerika.34

The example of Ringe des Saturn shows how deep American myths have embedded themselves in the German imagination and how distinctly they are connected to the political, in which American tropes become positive or negative examples of social, cultural, or political developments. American myths and their enactment, as well as the specifics of the American Nation-Thing, are hence a necessary reference for the analysis of the cultural products below in their dualities of freedom and individualism versus violence, as well as progress and obsoleteness.

34 These changes in the American culture are also what J.B. Jackson retraces using the developments in American housing in “The Westward Moving House.” Jackson argues that houses in America increasingly became subsumed under premises of marketability and fashion. They, consequently, lost their value as a center for the family and became transitory. According to Jackson, this is the cause for the lack of building quality in America today. The houses are built with their immediate obsolescence already in mind. This planned obsolescence goes hand in hand with the introduction of cheaper building technologies and material and the automatization of processes in the home (Jackson 26).

2.5. Amerika as Ersatz for the obsolete Nation-Thing

The focus of this dissertation now does not lie on identifying the interactions between American and Amerikan images, but on the interdependence of Amerika and the

German nation. Important, however, are the images of Amerika and their role relative to the German nation. The history of the interdependencies between Amerika and Germany is at least as old as the United States of America, as I mentioned in the introduction. It served as a utopia for many German republicans and proponents of democratic sovereignty personal liberty, as well as a material fantasy. It also served as dystopia for authoritarians and aristocratic conservatives as well as romantics, who “considered natural rather than revolutionary development to be real and historically significant” (Diner 31). For this dissertation, the primary historical locus lies in the time from the end of WWII to roughly

2010, which some observers call “the American century” (cf. LaFeber/Polenberg/Woloch).

The following considerations, hence, focus on retracing the main historical backgrounds of Amerika and the German nation as a means to set up and anchor my discussions of the cultural products.

The concept of nation in Germany after WWII had been severely damaged as a

Thing by the Third Reich’s appropriation of German nationalism to legitimize the ideology of the “Herrenrasse” in the ultimate collectivist-authoritarian fetishization of the construct of the ethnic nation. Historians and cultural theorists have brought forward a multitude of theories of how the German nation lent itself specifically to its misuse in the Third Reich.

Some argued that the problem of the German nation, compared to its neighbors, was its delayed inception and the consequent feeling of being inferior compared to other European

powers such as Great Britain and France (cf. Helmuth Plessner). Others have argued that the reason was the increased reliance on an Other (mainly France, the enemy in the

Napoleonic Wars) as a catalyst of the German national movement that created a Nation-

Thing, whose jouissance lay particularly in outward aggression and the belittling of Others.

Internal issues of justification of that Nation-Thing ultimately lead to the Third Reich’s ideological focus on the ethnic superiority and its hostility toward the Other (cf. Mommsen

215-217; Hermann Glaser). Others again point to the political situation of the many states and their competing local identities including the resulting large group of civil servants interested in retaining a status quo (Dann 71). The reasons for the problematic inception of the German Nation-Thing will be of interest again in the historical localization of image of

Amerika in the next chapters. At this point, I am more concerned with the problem itself and its impact on the twentieth and twenty-first century. No matter the exact reason for the development, after 1945, the German nation is a Thing in crisis.

The nation, as well as the concept of obsoleteness, play an important role in

Germany’s relationship to its Nation-Thing and Amerika. The complexities of the German relationship to and its attitudes toward the nation and Amerika, of course, exceed the frame of this dissertation as well as any singular work, as they include political relationships, cultural exchange and appropriation, social and technological changes, phantasies of utopia and dystopia, and many more incorporated interdependencies. Nevertheless, it is important for this dissertation to briefly outline the historical backdrop against which it makes its case based on the primary works in the upcoming chapters. For this purpose, I will put the interrelations between the citizens of Germany, the German Nation-Thing, and Amerika

into a narrative of competition and ersatz and highlight the different situations in the GDR and the FRG. This narrative has no claim to absolute historical truth, but it gives the reader clues to localize the following interpretations. The narrative begins with the obsoleteness of the German nation as Thing after WWII, after which arguments based the German nation radiated the radical misuse of the term by the National Socialists and their embrace by the

German people. As I have established above, however, a Thing is necessary for the maintenance of a community. In many ways, this Ersatz-Thing has been Amerika - from youth culture to “Angestelltenkultur” and the embrace of consumer culture and capitalist orders of society. The second phase of West Germany’s relationship towards Amerika was introduced by the rebellion against the Ersatz-Thing in the form of the student movement of 1968, which perceived Amerika as an “Übervater” and the United States as an oppressor.

They, however, did not return to the nation as preferred Thing, but favored forms of internationalism and generationism. After this youthful rebellion followed a phase of an increased emancipated distance paired with a quiet admiration for the Ersatz-parent

Amerika, which, however, continued to deliver consumer-products and forms of identity practices that presented themselves as alternatives to the German Nation-Thing. The nation, nevertheless, retained its presence in public discourse throughout and maintained its centrality in public discourses surrounding the German (re-)unification.

In East Germany, the relationship between the citizens, the German Nation-Thing, and Amerika was largely marked by the government’s identification of the United States, its ideology, and its culture as a dangerous Other, on the one hand, and the public embrace of Amerika as the Other that held an excess of jouissance, on the other. In the context of

socialism, the GDR’s official attitude toward the history of the German nation was based on the rejection of the fascist past and the history before as proto-fascist, while finding a usable past in the communist and socialist movements and the resistance fighters of the

Third Reich. Socialism with its insistence on a post-national community of workers made the further attitude toward a GDR nation a deeply contradictory venture for the GDR government, which it nevertheless undertook. It portrayed Amerika as the Other that endangers the jouissance of the socialist union, as well as the own Nation-Thing, based on those Socialist ideas. This official line, however, had to always adjust to a popular image of the German Nation-Thing and especially of Amerika that was significantly different and regularly the exact opposite of the government’s line. Large parts of the society and in particular the youth longed for participation in the jouissance through consumption and the freedom Amerika promised. Amerika was used again as a quasi-ersatz-parent, not for the obsoleteness of the German Nation-Thing per se, but against the Thing(s) (nation and socialism) the GDR offered. In opposition to the state and the purely dystopian image it tried to produce of Amerika, the popular image retained many of the utopian aspects it had lost in the West, as an emancipation from the ersatz-parent failed to materialize.

The historical caesura then came with (re-)unification. For one, the Nation-Thing was again needed to legitimize the political actions. On the other hand, the Ersatz-parent in form of the government of the USA helped to secure the final independence from their own control and simultaneously Amerika and its systems were thought to become ubiquitous and omnipresent. In many ways, Amerika remained a parent that has seemingly granted independence but remains heavily involved in the child’s life through her soft-

power influence. For former citizens of the GDR the process meant the repeated loss of a

Thing - the state, its attempts to maintain a sense of a GDR nation, and its sense of community. This loss has been heralded by most as positive but it, nevertheless, created the need for a new Thing that can serve as a donor of positive or negative identification.

Initially, I will present some preliminary considerations and constants, before I explore the narrative of the Ersatz-Thing between Germany and Amerika in greater depth.

After the end of WWII, the future of Germany was in limbo. It was occupied and split by the allied forces, and different ideas of how to handle the situation with respect to creating a Germany that ceased to be a threat to the world and its neighbors specifically were weighed, such as splitting the country into smaller pieces, or reducing it to an agrarian nation, etc. The developing conflict between East and West, between the socialist Soviet

Union and the capitalist United States and their allies finally steered the development toward a split between the sector occupied by the SU and the sectors occupied by the western Allies under leadership of the United States. From this split two countries, the

German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany emerged, in political and economic orientation children of their respective protecting power. The conflict between the two powers led to excesses of power-struggles such as the Berlin-Blockade

(1948-1949) and doctrines like the insistence of the respective country to have the claim to sole representation for all Germans. Finally, it led to the building of the Wall and the almost total separation of West-Germans and East-Germans. The East/West split is also believed to be the definitive cause for the US's decision to help the country in its reconstruction efforts and its later admission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as well as

implementing programs aimed at making Germans democrats based on American ideals

(cf. Schwaabe 69).

Regarding identification, the years after 1945 were characterized by the obsoleteness of the National-Socialist German Nation-Thing and hence a search for a new

Thing. Different discourses surrounding different things were present in the public discourse, such as Christianity (cf. Blessing 60-107; Vollnhals 151-168), regionalism (cf.

Erker 368-407), Amerika and the West. Prominently, many championed a new German

Nation-Thing that blanked out the Third Reich as a disease that had befallen the German

Nation-Thing (cf. Kapczynski The German Patient), summarized in the idea of “Stunde null,” the hour zero, marking a new beginning with roots in a pre-war concept of nation

(cf. Olick 136-156). While the first three Things had a rather small influence on the public discourse of identification in post-war West Germany, the last two entered into a persistent dialectical conflict. The nation was upheld primarily by older and more conservative groups as well as political institutions and codifications (cf. Gerhard 168-183). However, much of the German youth and intelligentsia became increasingly troubled by the idea of a German nation altogether. This rejection is tangible in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s rewriting of Hölderlin’s “Ans Vaterland” - “Landessprache” (1960): “denn dieses land, vor hunger rasend, / zerrauft sich sorgfältig mit eigenen händen, / dieses land ist von sich selber geschieden, / ein aufgetrenntes, inwendig geschiedenes herz, unsinnig tickend, eine bombe aus fleisch, / eine nasse abwesende wunde: // deutschland, mein land, unheilig herz der völker” (Enzensberger Landessprache 5-13). The poem intensely portrays the feeling of being disenfranchised from any collective identity connected to the country itself. Instead

of the identity-forming Nation-Thing, there is a blank space, a wound. The loss of the

Nation-Thing is at the center of the German divorce from itself. Simultaneously, there is a sense of danger coming from this incomplete country and its Nation-Thing, which has been so destructive before - a reference to the fear voiced from not only the inside but also the outside of Germany arguing it would become a threat to the world if allowed to find access to nation as a Thing again.

The perceived loss of the German nation as a viable option as a Thing and the lack of role models lead to the embrace of Amerika as ersatz. When talking about the presence of Amerika as Thing as ersatz-parent in Germany, which is closely connected to discourses of Amerikanization, one must consider two different directions of impact in which

America/Amerika presented itself. Generally, 1945 is assumed to be the beginning of a true

Amerikanization, as Frank Becker explains. America, as the narrative goes, could force its will and its ideologies and cultural goods onto a Germany that had been broken by the war

(cf. Becker 25). On closer inspection, the narrative is a lot more complex. On the one hand,

Amerika was introduced as a Thing from above, by programs such as (re-)education (cf.

Tent 3-18; Gerhadt “A hidden agenda” 297-324), sending elites to study in the United

States within the framework of the European Recovery Program, commonly known as

Marshall-Plan (cf. Schildt Moderne Zeiten 416-417), the presence of American troops and their role as benefactor to a desolate and starving population, or the American control over many media outlets, as well as the German state’s embrace of the United States oversight.35

35 The importance of the media for the re-education efforts can be exemplified by looking at the numbers of theaters reopened during the reconstruction. By February 1946 351 movie theaters were in good working condition, by July 1946 the number grew to 700 and by 1948 over 10000 in the US-American zone alone.

On the other hand, Amerika was adopted from below primarily by young Germans, or what

Winfried Fluck describes as “Self-Americanization” from the “toolbox” of popular culture

(221).

As Jamey Fisher points out in Disciplining Germany, the shifting concept of the youth was a central site of the discourse of guilt and indoctrination and therefore also a specific target for the proponents of Amerika as a means of identification as well as the advocates for a new German nation (cf. 5). The social group was identified simultaneously as the responsible party for and the carrier of National-Socialism as well as the hope for resisting Nazi ideology and core social group for the democratization of Germany. The youth has then also been the group that first developed an affinity toward American popular culture. As Uta Poiger point out in Jazz, Rock, and Rebels this acceptance happened in two steps. Beginning around the middle of the 1950s, the so-called rebellion of the

“Halbstarken” - maybe best translated as “rowdy youth” - shook the German public (cf.

81-95). The movement was dominated by male working class teenagers, who, lacking

German male role models, identified themselves with idols such as James Dean and Elvis

Presley. The movement was accompanied by a preference for American products such as

Jeans, Hollywood movies, and American Rock’n’Roll music. The group was relatively small, but their effect on the public discourse was immense (Grotum 36). Their nonchalant and at times vulgar behavior, their clothing, and their music provoked the concern of

Ironically the Germans were described as ‘film hungry’ at a calorie intake of only 800 per day and person (Fay 40-45p). Before the movies, the Information Control Division of the US military government of Germany ordered the showings of Welt im Film a newsreel/documentary that was sponsored by the Americans, but the visual material was mainly provided by the BBC. The Welt im Film series is a good example for the paradigm shift in re-education.

teachers, parents, the churches, and the cultural commentators, who feared the erosion of the German bourgeois tranquility. In the second step, increasing numbers of the youth became “Amerikanized,” a process in which the public discourse seldom differentiated between Amerika and British Beat music. It was lumped together with a consumer culture that was also understood as Amerikan. The images of this Amerika not only came from the music but also increasingly from theaters and television:

[A] whole generation of young people at matinee showings in stuffy little suburban

movie theaters, or watching late-afternoon TV lineups, became familiar with the

open American landscape and with the American ideals of freedom, justice, and

democracy through the characters of Lassie and Fury, the never-ending Western

series with Tom Mix, Lash LaRue, and Zorro, and the Western films of John Ford

(Stephan “A Special German Case” 80).

In the wake of the Amerikan influence and the youth’s identification with it, a youth language developed, including terms such English terms as “manager,” “sex,” or “shooting star,” that are still present today. German/German-European products picked up on the involvement of Amerika as the Thing - most noticeably in the Indianerfilme, beginning with Der Schatz im Silbersee (1962) or with a focus on the Amerikanized youth culture such as Die Halbstarken (1956). Capitalism discovered the young people as consumers and as trendsetter, specifically in clothing and media consumption. So, it was mainly consumption that created a multifaceted construct of images and tropes with which primarily the youth could identify itself. Amerika as Thing and its connection to youth culture never truly dematerialized again.

In the late 1960s, however, the dialectic between philo-Amerikanism and anti-

Amerikanism, formerly primarily domiciled in a generational divide, moved into youth culture itself and anti-Amerikanism became hegemonic at least in the public discourse, if not in patterns of consumption. This is the phase I call adolescent rejection. The student movement strove to emancipate itself from Amerika, as well as the German Nation-Thing and followed the ideology of an international socialism primarily. Based on and aided by works of the Frankfurt school, specifically Adorno and Marcuse, who represented a critical image of Amerika, which they primarily associated with consumer and mass culture and a loss of cultural depth, the student movement adopted a culture-sceptical anti-Amerikanism formerly mainly found on the conservative right (cf. Poiger 5, Schwaabe 164). Amerika was portrayed as the place in which capitalism came into itself and from where it colonized the rest of the Western hemisphere. As Dan Diner argues, for many Amerika even became the personification of capitalism (137). That critique of cultural imperialism was paired with the critique of the United States’ political and militaristic imperialism, specifically the

Vietnam War. The second source of the student movement’s critique of Amerika was the

American Hippie-movement. Both associated America/Amerika with spiritual and social alienation, poverty, and war (cf. Brown 56-65).36

Hans Magnus Enzensberger in an interview with Heinz D. Osterle confirms the interpretation that the student movement’s anti-Amerikanism was indeed a German crisis of adolescence. The old nation had lost its power as a semiotic system of identification, but

36 I am using the spelling America/Amerika here, because the argument affects both constructs.

there was a lack of an alternative since Amerika had revealed its dystopian force instead of the utopian image it had as liberator and center of liberal democracy before the war:

Back then, we took a lot of things at face value (e.g., the whole democratic rhetoric,

beginning with the Bill of Rights), rather than examining whose interests were

actually behind American foreign policy. There was also an incredible ignorance

of the facts in this early encounter with America. But the turning point proved to

be the war in Viet Nam. This was true all over the world, but more so in Germany.

Because of our tremendous expectations we were particularly vulnerable to

disillusionment. You know what internal political consequences the war had in

Germany (129).

In his resignation letter to the president of the Wesleyan University, which he left abruptly in 1968, Enzensberger called the American ruling class the “Number One enemy of the world” (in Greiner 61). The Thing the student movement attempted to install instead of

Amerika or a German Nation-Thing was an international and at times spiritual socialist humanism. Its insider/outsider paradigm was based on capitalism versus socialism, imperialist West versus oppressed and imperialized Third World, and rationalism versus materiality and spirituality (cf. Weitbrecht 34-38). The movement anchored anti-

Amerikanism and the rejection of the Nation-Thing in the German public discourse of the left, which is still detectable today in its conflation of Amerika and soulless capitalism, cultural decay, Darwinist individualism, and consumer culture.

The student movement did not account for all of Germany’s youth, in fact, it presented a minority; it was largely a privilege of the educated class. However, it was

highly influential on the German public discourse, as it found a mixture of public enactment of protest and anti-Amerikanism and paired it with an amplifying media attention (cf.

Scharloth/Klomke 1). It also strongly influenced the cultural producers of the FRG and in their products gained even greater public attention. Many adolescents, nevertheless, continuously identified with American mass cultural products, which soon also included typical attire of the American and German counter culture.37 Arguably, the student movement itself used an Amerika as Thing for its identification, only a different kind of fantasy of Amerika. Nevertheless, in the discourse of its presence in Germany the student movement has generally been interpreted as radical abandonment of Amerika as the Thing.

In combination with its synchronic influence on the public discourse and its diachronic one on German attitudes toward Amerika, one can describe the student movement’s attitude toward the German Nation-Thing and Amerika as an equal adolescent rejection of the parent and the ersatz-parent.

After the long 1960s, I argue, a time started in which the West-German public slowly emancipated itself from Amerika. On the one hand, Germans differentiated more between Amerika and the USA and on the other hand, they showed a generally more indifferent attitude toward its presence, which I will discuss based on the

“Friedensbewegung” and the “Generation Golf.” The former still understood the United

States as a military aggressor, but it largely did not see Amerika as the refuge of all dystopian as had the student movement. The latter is an example of how American products remained at the center of identity practices, but how that was no longer seen as a political

37 On the appropriation of the counterculture by consumer culture cf. Frank The Conquest of Cool 26-37

statement. The Generation Golf’s affection for the “Erlebnisgesellschaft” - the event society - was governed by an increasing general apolicity, especially of the youth cultures

(Gerhard Schulze 531-535).

The peace movement, which was politically relatively diverse, was significantly incited by the NATO Double-Track decision in 1979, in which the NATO decided to (1) station new nuclear missiles in western Europe, and (2) demanded bilateral negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union regarding the limitations of the nuclear potential. In Germany, this was mostly seen as an act of aggression, which excited existing worries of a nuclear war in Europe and specifically Germany. The movement was the zenith of the “Zivile Wende” - the civic turn - and an anti-militarism that had its roots in the post-war era and the renunciation of German militarism that was responsible for two

World Wars. As Christian Schwaabe consequently argues, the critique of militarism, which was primarily directed toward the United States, was a performative and ritual abandonment of the German Nation-Thing of the fathers and grandfathers (191). German anti-militarism in those years became a central myth of the German nation and remains so until today.

The German change of the attitude toward Amerika becomes even more apparent when examining the “Generation Golf,” named after the title of Florian Illies’ book from

2000. This generation temporally parallels the Generation X in the United States but can be described as even more hedonistic. The members of that generation wanted to enjoy the wealth their parents had amassed and became largely apolitical. They fundamentally changed the idea of identity construction as this generation defined the past as something

truly obsolete and therefore lacked an understanding of historic guilt or heroism (cf.

Karasek 273-274). One must acknowledge the Generation Golf’s more temperate attitude toward life; politics did not play as prominent a role, consumer culture and its trends and fashions heavily controlled identification. Overall, West Germany before the fall of the

Wall had a more relaxed and distanced attitude toward Amerika, without losing many of the images and the fundamental opposition (cf. Emons 265-272). The explicit discourse about the German emancipation, however, only came to prominence after the fall of

Eastern Block and the apparent obsoleteness of the United States as protective power of the (re-)united Germany. Before I outline those years more extensively, however, I first have to portray the role that Amerika played vis-à-vis the Nation-Thing in East Germany.

Central to the difference between the FRG’s and the GDR’s images of Amerika are the

GDR’s persistent opposition between the state’s and the public’s image, the GDR’s lack of access to the United States, and the missing caesura of the student movement’s anti-

Amerikanism.

When writing about the influence of Amerika on East Germany, most critics emphasize the difference between state sanctioned and public images and this differentiation has its clear merits as there was indeed a significant disparity between the two (cf. Wicke 67; Poiger 202-203; Schnoor 775). It is important to note again that neither the groups nor the images are true unities, the categories are an attempt to highlight accumulations and tendencies of a complex situation. The following brief dealings with the matter in light of a GDR Nation-Thing can, hence, only be a historical clue to my argument about the continuing confrontation between Amerika as Thing and a German Nation-Thing

and the interdependence of both. The GDR’s official line of argument rejected the notion of a German nation across two states that was prevalent in the political discourse of the

FRG; it rather saw itself as an independent nation-state. The GDR claimed that it was separate politically and socially, even historically, from the other Germany. It conceptualized itself as the nation that already existed in Nazi Germany, namely socialists and communists who resisted the Nazi ideology and thereby formed a useable past for a

“Klassennation.” Klassennation, Lepsius argues, attempts to give a basis for the group association not in ethnicity, culture, or state, but the belonging to the same economic class.

It becomes apparent in the self-designation “Arbeiter und Bauernstaat,” the state being the collective Thing prescribed as identity politics by Stalinism (cf. Lepsius 241-243). Besides the state, the nation remained an important signifier in the GDR in names such as the

Nationale Volksarmee, which interestingly references the GDR as a nation based not on class but the concept of a people or ethnicity, concededly in delimitation to the BRD.

Logically, East Germany also attempted to separate itself culturally, by trying to control the distribution of western media and by censoring its own. The dominant art form was supposed to be Socialist Realism. The goal of this official doctrine was the separation from the contemporary developments in the West, the separation from the art of National

Socialism, and the propagated class war. However, East Germany found it difficult to enforce these policies over extended periods of time. Consequently, policies fluctuated between periods of substantial restriction and leniency. Examples of restrictive actions are the Bitterfelder Weg and the 11th session of the central committee in 1965 or the expatriation of Wolf Biermann in 1976 (cf. Jarausch/Geyer 300). Relative tolerance

prevailed in the 1950s and at the beginning of the 1970s. In popular media, such as tv, film, and radio, the GDR was under an even greater pressure to adjust, as many citizens of the

GDR consumed western media, despite the restrictions and the threat of punishment. To serve the citizens longing for western consumer goods, which mostly arose from the media consumption, the state attempted to make their own version of popular products, cultural and material. However, the people continued to consume Western cultural products, which lead the GDR to officially import some of these products, such as Hollywood movies or

West music (cf. Merkel Utopie 15-16).

In the GDR, similarly to the FRG, a competition developed for the people’s identification between, what I call, the GDR Nation-Thing and Amerika, which became even more heated after the erection of the Wall, which barred East Germans from consuming western cultural products in establishments close to the border that had been maintained by the western allies as they were keenly aware of their cultural product’s draw factor. That awareness is also reflected in the radio stations AFN, RIAS, and Radio

Luxemburg, which all had antennas strong enough to be heard in almost all of the GDR’s territory. After the Wall had been built, the SED followed a lenient path on the western cultural influence to appease those who now were cut-off from the products. It gave licenses to East German jazz and beat groups, allowed a youth radio station, and showed selected American movies in its theaters. Soon, however, the committee felt that Amerika and the West had gained too much influence, particularly on the youth and they tightened the rules on their eleventh plenary meeting in 1965.

Erich Honecker’s famous speech at this assembly of the GDR’s central committee reveals the competition between Amerika and the GDR Nation-Thing, as well as how much that Nation-Thing was anchored in old bourgeois ideas of a German national culture:

Es ist ein historisches Verdienst unserer Partei, daß sie in den 20 Jahren ihres

Bestehens den Weg zur sozialistischen Nationalkultur gemeinsam mit der

überwiegenden Mehrheit der Intelligenz der DDR ausgearbeitet und beschritten

hat. In der gegenwärtigen Etappe des umfassenden Aufbaues des Sozialismus

stehen vor den Künstlern größere Aufgaben. [...]Kunst und Literatur können mit

ihren spezifischen Mitteln die Schöpferkraft der Menschen in der sozialistischen

Gesellschaft entwickeln helfen. Das erfordert aber in allen Bereichen der Kunst den

entschiedenen Kampf gegen das Alte und Rückständige aus der kapitalistischen

Vergangenheit und gegen die Einflüsse der kapitalistischen Unkultur und Unmoral,

wie sie in der amerikanischen Sex-Propaganda und der Verherrlichung des

Banditentums zum Ausdruck kommen. [...] Unsere DDR ist ein sauberer Staat. In

ihr gibt es unverrückbare Maßstäbe der Ethik und Moral, für Anstand und gute

Sitte. Unsere Partei tritt entschieden gegen die von den Imperialisten betriebene

Propaganda der Unmoral auf, die das Ziel verfolgt, dem Sozialismus Schaden

zuzufügen. Dabei befinden wir uns in voller Übereinstimmung mit der

Bevölkerung der DDR und der überwiegenden Mehrheit der Menschen in

Westdeutschland. (1)

Honecker describes a binary opposition between the GDR nation and its way of life and the “American sex-propaganda.” His idea of the Nation-Thing, however, is deeply rooted

in a nineteenth-century notion of Germanness. In his tirade against an Amerikan influence, he even sounds close to what Adolf Hitler said about the Jewish influence on Germany in an interview about the loss of Germanness: “Altdeutsche Tugenden wie Anstand, Sitte,

Moral, Stolz, Würde, nationales Erkennen und Bekennen wurden verspottet, verhöhnt, bekämpft” (in Hans Merkel 26). I am not suggesting that the two regimes were similar, but

I am using the similarity to show how prevalent and retrograde the GDR Nation-Thing was behind the mask of socialism. Honecker perceives Amerika, specifically in the form of its cultural products, as a Thing that is diametrically opposed to his definition of a GDR

Nation-Thing and which, hence, cannot coexist with it.

In contrast to that official perception, America continued to deliver images and narratives with which many adolescents and to a degree older generations could identify themselves and their groups in opposition to the state (cf. Poiger Jazz 5). The state reacted to this by creating their own versions of what they perceived as the Amerikan threat to their culture. This reached from music and Western movies to design features such as the

Trabant’s tail fin, or the “doppeltgenähte Kappnahthosen,” the GDR version of the jeans

(cf. Boettcher 81-108). In many ways, these copies never reached the status of the original, and on the other hand, they solidified the presence of Amerika in the GDR, for which the

“Indianer”- camps that were regularly held in the GDR are a good example (cf. Penny 127-

134).38 The pervasive representations and re-enactments of Native American culture

38 Despite a definite discursive connection between the image of Amerika and America’s cultural influence on the GDR, one has to also acknowledge that Amerika existed in a diffuse conglomerate of images and ideologies, which was simply called “the west.” Some phenomena can therefore not simply attributed to Amerika, even if it certainly played an exposed role, like the longing to participate in consumer society, which theorists such as Daphne Berdahl, John Borneman, or Ina Merkel argue was a main factor in the peaceful revolution in the GDR and the subsequent (re-)unification, as much as it became a factor in the

exemplifies the state’s attempts to use the public’s preference of Amerika for their own benefit, by concentrating on their self-association with the oppressed of the American system, like civil rights activists or precisely Native Americans. They implicitly allowed the perception of the presence of a good Amerika and a bad Amerika but had little to no influence of the youth’s longing for the consumption of American products.

The split between the state’s highly dystopian image of Amerika and the mostly utopian image of the populous also pervades the cultural production in the GDR, even though the state heavily interfered in cultural production (cf. Wessel). However, one must differentiate here between the production of high culture, which was predominantly critical of Amerika, and popular culture, which could not show its devotion to Amerika explicitly, because of the state’s censorship, but appropriated American trends and aesthetics. Even in the high culture production, the image of Amerika was by no means unambiguous. Many producers such as Bertolt Brecht or Uwe Johnson painted a mostly negative image of

Amerika as riddled by poverty, alienation, and greed (cf. Seliger 105; Osterle “Uwe

Johnson” 506). This negative image was accompanied by news reports and documentaries about the struggle of the repressed in the United States or the poverty in the city (cf.

Hoff/Mühl-Benninghausen 403-410) and many DEFA films (cf. Große 298-305). More positive images of America, however, also found their expression in cultural products of

construction of difference between the East and the West as economies of scarcity or affluence respectively. Even national belonging get negotiated by consumption to a large degree in the (re-)unified Germany (cf. Berdahl 239). Now this consumer culture, as I have mentioned above, is not necessarily being perceived as an exclusively American product, but as I will show in chapter 5, the associations between Amerika and consumption are present in the GDR as well as the (re-)unified Germany. Amerika’s role as ersatz-Thing to the GDR Nation-Thing, which was defined by the fantasy of freedom, liberty, and consumption, remained largely intact in the GDR vice versa the state’s portrayal of an almost exclusively dystopian image.

the GDR outside of music, where the styles and topics relatively continuously remained prevalent until 1989. Most often cited for a depiction of the GDR populous’ utopian image is Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die Leiden des jungen W., in which he glorifies “Blue Jeans” and links it to an act of identification with an Other to the GDR Nation-Thing. Günter Kunerts travelogue Der andere Planet equally contains positive imagery of the United States and

America. David Bathrick calls it a “constant deconstruction of the ideological predeposition,” with which kh encounters the United States (46, my translation). On closer inspection, the differentiation between popular and official image is not as definite as one might assume initially, but nevertheless remains viable and generally speaking a much more stable construct than in West Germany.

The Wende brought about more conflicting narratives about Amerika in Germany, which I will clarify in the readings of my primary sources. First, however, I lay out some preliminary considerations regarding the dissertation’s time-frame, obsoleteness, Amerika, and the German Nation-Thing. I argue that the obsoleteness of the old symbolic systems of the GDR and the economic obsoleteness of many people and whole regions increased the value of Amerika as utopia,on the one hand. On the other hand, it is important as ans an Other that can aid in reimagining a (re-)unified German Nation-Thing that works beyond the old tropes of German virtues and the ethnic nation. As historical groundwork, I will briefly outline some developments and tensions concerning my main categories in the post-

Wende era. On the one hand, the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the dissolution of the systemic duality of the world led critics to celebrate the possibilities of a European emancipation from the US-American influences. On the other hand, without the opposing pole of

socialism, it was assumed that the American brand of liberal-capitalism would now become a stable, universal, and transcendent unifier of the world. In the case of Germany specifically, the United States first again assumed the role of an ersatz-parent politically, as it was the proponent of a German (re-)unification, an act about which the other Western allies had strong reservations. In the realm of the hard powers, however, the hope of a

European emancipation from the protecting power USA soon spread. This hope was based on a variety of factors. First, the fall of the socialist block at once removed Germany’s role as the locus of the world’s main line of conflict from Central Europe and hence made it less central to American military strategy. Many German commentators further tied the election of Bill Clinton in 1992 to the hope of an American government that relied more on diplomacy than pursuing realpolitikal interests of the United States exclusively (cf.

Hausmann 10). The same year, the members of the European Community signed the

Maastricht treaty, declaring the creation of the European Union, a common foreign and security policy, and cooperations in justice and internal affairs, as well as agreed on the future creation of a European currency (cf. Christiansen/Duke). Europe as a quasi-Nation-

Thing, which can foment political power as well as identity practices and myths, hence, clearly manifested at the time. This idea of a European Thing had been tentatively present in Germany as an alternative to the Nation-Thing since the End of WW II and appeared to become viable at the beginning of the 1990s (cf. Krieger 430-437).

Next to its military power, the United States’ economic strength and cultural soft power, nevertheless, remained unbroken after the Wende. Consequently, Amerika as a

Thing remained present after the fall of the Wall. Specifically, in eastern Germany the

initial embrace of consumer culture paired with a lack of retarding structures such as unions to allow an unbounded capitalism took hold, which was widely associated with Amerika

(cf. Kleßmann “Deutschland” 100). Furthermore, the complete cultural production was exchanged, and the market flooded with all the American and Western product that many

East Germans had longed for before the fall of the Wall. The post-Wende years opened a multitude of new and old tensions surrounding Amerika and the German nation. One tension is between a disillusioned western German image of Amerika and two eastern

German images, namely the negative, which still understands it as class enemy and destroyer of the GDR Nation-Thing, along with the far more widespread seemingly naive utopian image, which is generally interpreted as a chance of reactivating Amerika as a positive Other. (I have shown above that Amerika still had its significance as utopian Thing in West Germany through its popular cultural consumption, but in the significant German cultural production it lost that role).

Further tensions are located in the difference between eastern German expectations and realities in (re-)unified Germany, as well as the location of the Self in the Other after the fall of the Wall. The process of (re-)unification is an example of the ambivalence that the Other poses in a changing environment - it is simultaneously a target of the desire for more jouissance and therefore is supposed to be integrated into the Self to gain its excess of jouissance. On the one hand, it is the displaced locus of the fear of the “theft of enjoyment,” which arises out of “inner antagonisms inherent in these communities”

(Tarrying 205, emphasis in the original). The Other endangers the own Thing, the own

“way of life,” that it paradoxically helps establish. The fantasy of a capitalist utopia was

the expectation of the future in Eastern Europe and the former GDR; after this utopia did not materialize, the focus shifted onto different “thieves of enjoyment.” This common position of the Other was exacerbated in the former GDR because East Germany’s political, social, and economic systems got rapidly overtaken by West German structures in what has been described as quasi-colonialist fashion (Dümcke/Vilmar 13). This rapid loss of the old structures of identification led to a pronounced interaction with the duality of the the Other, which always exists in the duality of fantasies as bringer and thief of jouissance. In our specific historical locus this does not concern western Germany and

Amerika exclusively, but also other structures such as the European Union and some

Eastern European countries, as well as capitalism and consumer culture in general.

Another reason for the prominence of discourses of the Self and the Other, the (re-

)unified German nation and Amerika, lies not only in the pace of the systemic changes but in the obsoleteness these changes brought with them. Instead of the desired material and personal fulfillment, liberty, and freedom in consumer culture, many former citizens of the

GDR experienced the restrictions of capitalism and economic obsoleteness. Considering consumer culture’s failure to provide a Thing, the loss of the GDR Thing carries even more wait. To remedy the negative affects that come with obsoleteness, the German Nation-

Thing, as well as Amerika, were obvious choices for negative and positive identification.

Amerika has, hence, been a central locus of the dialectics between the promise of consumer culture, codified in the “American Dream,” and the realities of the capitalistic transformation of a socialist and bankrupt country. Amerika, therefore, also becomes an

ideal subject for cultural products to negotiate the tensions in the eastern German society after the Wende.

Another major point of tension between expectation and realization of the Wende lies in the crevice between two concepts of society – Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft.

Gemeinschaft is the idea of an organically linked society. The common good is the central motivation of the individual to partake in the society. In a Gesellschaft, on the other hand, the individual partakes for his or her own good. Connections to other people merely are a means to an end of one’s own advancement. It is a continuation of the community of convenience and chance that dissolves all organic links (cf. Tönnies Gemeinschaft und

Gesellschaft). Žižek assumes that after the fall of the wall “the substitution of capitalism by communism is a desire for capitalism cum Gemeinschaft” (Tarrying 211) in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. However, what they experienced was a capitalism that worked cum Gesellschaft. This, according to Žižek, explains the frustrations visible in these countries today and the intense nationalism. The nation in this instance is conceived as a way to reinsert Gemeinschaft into the people’s lives. Amerika, historically, often functions as a metonymy of the excess that capitalism entails and for its association with

Gesellschaft (cf. Büscher 12; Kürnberger “Kapitel 2”; Eckart 24, etc.). This interpretation of Amerika was already inherent in the official line of the GDR government and especially apparent in the narratives of Native Americans in literature and movies. So, Amerika plays a challenging role in the post-Wende time in the discourse created by competing myths and images. On the one hand it is strongly associated with the capitalist promise and utopian fantasy of self-fulfillment and participation in the consumer culture - the Other with an

excess of jouissance, on the other hand, it is also associated with its failures, spreading obsoleteness and changing forms of social organization - the Other as a thief of jouissance.

From an eastern German perspective, Amerika becomes increasingly important in that role, because western Germany, as well as other countries of the European Union, are gradually becoming part of a construct of the Self.

Next to the shift in the role and discourse surrounding Amerika, the German nation became more prominent in the German public discourse. To legitimize (re-)unification, politicians massively relied on the narrative of the existence and continued presence of an all-German Nation-Thing and found it in the ethnic construct of the German nation.39 The acceptance of this narrative, however, varied between the western and eastern parts of

Germany from the beginning. In 1990, 74% of people in the old West German states polled to believe that a national consciousness connects the Germans, while simultaneously only

30% of people in the former East German states agreed (in Busse 227).40 These numbers indicate a continuous split between eastern and western Germany, which further manifested itself and lead to the discourse of the “wall in the heads” (cf. Schmitt et al 402-

405; Falter 7-14). Friedrich Schorlemmer, a civil rights activist from the GDR, spoke of a

39 In many phrases and slogans of the mass demonstrations in East Germany which preceded the fall of the wall, one finds a connection to ideas of a Nation-Thing based on ethnicity. The most famous one, used as a motto for the mass demonstrations in Leipzig in 1989 was “Wir sind ein Volk,” next to “wir sind das Volk” - “we are one people” and “we are the people” (in Rödder 144). The one expresses the sovereignty of the citizens of the GDR, the other, however, refers to the unity of the people of all of Germany, a reference to the naturalness of the process of bringing both together again. This idea is also present in the slogan of “Deutschland, einig Vaterland,” which does not refer to the political unity of Germany at all, but in the fatherland evokes a powerful nationalistic imaginary - the homeland of the united people, bound together by a shared origin (cf. Diewald 9). These tropes of a Nation-Thing based on ethnicity were noted and criticized by many public figures, like Günter Grass (cf. Friedrich 131). 40 Using these numbers holds the problematic that, as outlined above, association with the Nation-Thing is not something one can decide upon, but is often fundamental. Nevertheless, self-identification influences public discourse and the discursive modeling of the Nation-Thing.

separation within reunification and a separation through unification (in Busse 228), F.C.

Delius called Germany an overstrained nation. Parallel to these low numbers of people who believed in a common German Nation-Thing, a strong nationalist movement developed in the new German states, inserting itself into the public discourse by the representation of a sharp increase in right-wing violence. The fetish of the German Nation-Thing had not only been reignited by the Wende and the accompanying economic obsoleteness, but had already been an underground movement in the GDR (cf. Franke/Richter Die nationale

Front: Neonazis in der DDR). The political reliance on an ethnic concept of nation and the following problem of being the foundation of extremist ideology led Rudolf Scharping, later SPD candidate for chancellor, to proclaim that Germany had to get away from the idea of “völkische Nationalbegriff” (interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung 13. 10. 1992). As a way out of the dilemma of the failures of the German Nation-Thing, Jürgen Habermas and others at the time suggested the renunciation of the old concepts of nation in favor of a

“Verfassungspatriotismus” - “constitutional patriotism.”41 It was proposed to name a new form for Germany of identification with the state, namely with its constitution and the values inscribed in it (Habermas 638). This suggestion is in itself a form of

Amerikanization as Amerika is based on a constitutional patriotism, in which the

Constitution becomes a semi-divine status as a national symbol with which every American can identify themselves. As I have described with the help of Greenfeld above, this would

41 Notably, Habermas uses patriotism instead of nation, or nationality, or nationalism. The distinction between patriotism and nationalism is contested and again many distinctions lack discriminatory precision. However, as a general differentiation, patriotism describes the love to one’s country, the “patio,” nationalism the love to one’s nation (cf. Primoratz and Pavković 1-14).

relieve a German tendency toward exclusion based on ethnicity and toward the fantasy of an authoritarian state. However, this idea of changing the foundation of the German Nation-

Thing and thereby making it useful again for a diverse and open society did not materialize.

Instead, consumption occupies an increasing part, next to the old ethnic ideas and today cultural ideas such as the “christliche Abendland.” Despite these early and continuing discussions about the role the German nation could or needed to play, by the time for the publication of my primary cultural products, starting 2000, the idea of a (re-)unified

Germany via a shared Nation-Thing tended to appear without alternative, as I will show by means of the following chapters.

Chapter 3: Amerika as Refuge – The Quest for a Lost Fantasy

I have struggled with the term “Amerika” in the headline of this chapter, because the cultural products that I will analyze below and their predecessors are also heavily influenced by America and the United States. In the end, however, they remain part of the representation of the German fantasy of Amerika despite being challenged and adjusted by confrontations with America and the United States. The second question that poses itself is why I use a myth of Amerika instead of functions of the German Nation-Thing, or different discourses as ordering principle. It is a challenging endeavor to group the works that make up my corpus, as they all overlap on multiple levels like discourses, time frame, setting, etc. Using different tropes of Amerika as the structure of the chapters is preferable to the alternatives, because it focuses on the representations of Amerika as the central object of this dissertation, and it does not use the theories on which the dissertation is based as a mold into which every aspect of the primary works must fit. Such an approach also follows a tradition of scholarly work on Amerika, such as Peter J. Brenner’s Reisen in die

Neue Welt or Ulrich Ott’s Amerika ist anders, which provide a diachronic view into the development or consistencies of individual myths and tropes. In this chapter, “Amerika as

Refuge,” the primary cultural products, Stadt der Engel and Schulze gets the blues, show similarities in their initial treatment because they portray Amerika as a refuge from obsoleteness; however, they differ in the type of obsoleteness from which they seek refuge and in the role Amerika plays for their negotiation of the old and new German Nation-

Things. The protagonist of Stadt der Engel uses Amerika as a refuge to deal with her grief,

which is caused by the loss of the GDR Nation-Thing and its utopia, as well as her personal relegation to historical obsoleteness. In Amerika, she finds out about the necessity of belonging, the importance of language, and the relative nature of personal identities.

Schulze’s obsoleteness is more social. He finds himself no longer useful in his old line of work and is forced to retire, which creates a feeling of uselessness and of not belonging in his old culture. He suffers the consequences of the loss of the GDR Nation-Thing differently than the protagonist in Christa Wolf’s text, but he is equally confronted with its obsoleteness. Both protagonists also find ways to conceptualize a new German Nation-

Thing beyond the constraints of ethnic nationalism and the prospect of obsoleteness in the neoliberal new-world-order.

Amerika as a refuge, historically, is the center of many European and German cultural products. It is an old trope and therefore warrants an investigation into its development and political usage over the years. Germans have sought refuge in the United

States for a variety of reasons. Many fled to escape economic hardships, others fled political persecution, and some social limitations (cf. Hoerder/Nagler and

Moltmann/Bickelmann). Tropes of Amerika as a free country and the land of opportunity have accompanied narrations of Amerika as a refuge from the beginning, in accounts by travelers as well as fictional texts. Historically, one can broadly divide German narratives about Amerika as a refuge into two categories – utopian and dystopian. The spectrum ranges from songs of praise for the United states as the ideal country in Die Europamüden to scolding critiques such as Kürnberger’s Der Amerikamüde or the aptly named Fuck

Amerika!, by Edgar Hilsenrath. Today the dystopian narrative, describing the German myth

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of Amerika as a refuge as an illusion, might be predominant, but initially, it was introduced as a rejection of the myths of Amerika as the promised land and as the land of opportunity

(cf. Diner 203-207 or Markovits/Rensmann 177/181). The early association between

Amerika and a utopian state had multiple factors: Relocation agencies, for example, ran advertising campaigns in Germany in the nineteenth century seeking settlers for the United

States. Additionally, Germans participated in the consumption of some American landmark texts that constructed the American myth and self-description of the promised land, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales (Huber 2). Finally, emigres came to the

North-America with high hopes for improving their lives and were reluctant to portray their endeavor, which cost them a significant sum, as anything other than a success story (cf.

Depkat 82-86).

The association between Amerika and utopia has not been a purely German phenomenon. It, in fact, drew largely on the myths created in Spain, Great Britain and

America. The Spanish believed in America being the place of El Dorado, and British settlers wanted to make it into the city upon a hill and distributed the myth of the promised land. In general, Germans were latecomers to the field of texts about North-America. In the times of colonization, only a handful of Germans participated in expeditions and settlements. Most of the published writings in Germany about this era, therefore, were translations (cf. Ott 65ff). The first German texts about Amerika were published in the early eighteenth century.42 As Kriegleder notes, these early texts either remain very focused

42 They were mainly reports written by German emigres, who left Germany out of fear of religious persecution such as Joshua Kocherthal’s Außführlich/und Umständlicher Bericht/Von der berühmten Landschafft/CAROLINA (1706). Kocherthal’s addition “berühmt“ – famous – indicates that Amerika had

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on a descriptive mode of writing or use Amerika as an exotic backdrop to tell their story

(84). Amerika was not a refuge but a blank slate, a terra incognita, to be discovered and described. This changed dramatically in the nineteenth century and again mainly in the context of emigration narratives. With the first wave of German emigration around 1817 came a great number of publications focused on different parts of the country or giving general advice on emigration.43 These texts have in common that they narrate emigration stories and express a liberalism that was largely suppressed in the German states in the restoration period. They stylized Amerika as an ideal bourgeois society that would grant

Germans the freedom to experience a liberal society and create a better Germany. Gottfried

Duden’s Missouri, for example, distinctly activates the myth of Amerika as paradise. As

Peter Brenner explains, this myth has its beginnings in Thomas More’s Utopia, who chose the west of England as the imagined location of his island, presumably because in the

Middle Ages it was widely believed that paradise could be found in the West (91/92).

Overall, the group of texts and their later nineteenth and early twentieth-century successors influenced the myth of Amerika as a refuge for people who were barred from owning land in Germany, who felt their liberal political attitudes underrepresented in nineteenth-century

German countries, or who had to flee economic obsoleteness. Amerika, in the utopian discourse, is not only a refuge, but it is also the superior alternative to Germany or Europe.

The publications describe Amerika’s society as friendly and free, the landscape as pastoral,

been known in German public discourse before the publication. 43 cf Traugott Bromme Hand-und Reisebuch für Auswanderer und Reisende nach Nord-, Mittel-und Süd- Amerika, Johann von Racknitz’s description of Texas in Kurze und Treue Belehrung für deutsche und schweizerische Auswanderer, Gottfried Duden’s Missouri

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the land as abundantly fertile, and the opportunities for personal and communal blossoming endless. On the one hand, the utopian discourse established myths about Amerika that remained stable for the last 200 years. On the other hand, they caused disillusions in many

émigrés when confronted with the lifeworld in the United States; beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century there was a noticeable increase in narratives critical of

Amerikan society. These texts focused on deconstructing the myth of Amerika as a refuge from obsoleteness.

The dystopian version of the myth of Amerika as a shelter is present in most of the texts about Amerika of the twentieth century and especially in those, for lack of a better word, of the Avant-Garde. One can historically establish a general trend between popular culture products, the majority of which present a positive image of Amerika, and narratives that place themselves in the realm of high art and maintain Amerika criticism. Products like Kafka’s Der Verschollene (1927) or Werner Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) narrate the seduction held within the myth of Amerika as a refuge but point out how they clash with the realities of their protagonists. They find Amerika to be selfish, heartless, mercenary, and superficial. Some anti-Amerika tropes describe it as greedy, uncultured, and malicious.

In many of the narratives, these negative tropes are linked to Amerika’s association with an uninhibited capitalism. Published in 1855, Kürnberger’s narrator already decries the fetish of profit in Amerika and likens it to a human who is bursting with power but only harbors “convulsions and delirium” underneath (Kürnberger Buch 1 Kap 1). Stroszek experiences it in the form of a ruthless bank that shamelessly profits from his dreams and illusions only to foreclose on all his property.

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Both groups of narratives always reflect on what is widely known as the American

Dream of freedom and economic success and in reverse use it to comment on the state of the German Nation-Thing. Stroszek, for example, is a product of the FRG and belongs to a group of products that dismantle the myth of Amerika as a refuge, like Peter Handke’s

Langsame Heimkehr or Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas. They arose from the disillusionment with Amerika as a culture but also include a more general critique of modernity, as they depict the bankruptcy of both Nation-Things. Eastern German cultural products exhibited comparable anti-Amerikanism but used it to construct a difference between Amerika and the GDR. Due to the isolation from the United States, Amerika as a refuge only existed as a fantasy. Therefore, however, it was also suitable to be a projection screen for strong utopian and dystopian images. Like the BRD, the GDR produced Indianerfilme and

Indianeromane. Contrary to the mainstream US-Western, narratives in which Native

Americans were the heroes were predominant in both Germanies. The German self- association with Native Americans is linked to Germany’s national mythology. As early as in the Arminius myth of the Germanic tribes’ fight against Roman intruders, one of the central foundational myths of the German Nation-Thing, they associated themselves with nature, which was struggling against an intruding culture (cf. Münkler 141-149). The myth harbors further dichotomies, like modernity and nature, authenticity and simulation, and others. Native Americans provided the refuge from capitalism, industrialization, modernity, and more. The imagination of an association between Native Americans and twentieth century Germans provided a refuge from the stress of obsolescence. This went so far that playing Indian, an enactment of Amerika as a refuge from the identity practices

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of modernity, became a favorite pastime in the GDR as well as, to a lesser extent, in the

FRG (cf. Penny 127-134). Amerika in these cultural products and re-enactments presents a space of anti-modern renewal, a way to experience a seemingly more authentic community, and the fantasy of freedom from either systemic constraints.

Narratives of Amerika as refuge offer a particular perspective on the Nation-Thing of Germany as the analysis of and confrontation with a space shifts the perspective from a visitor’s towards that of an inhabitant when one hopes to find refuge in it, i.e., stay there for an extended period and not just travel as a pastime or for education. It forces one to imagine oneself in the society, not just analyze and judge it from afar. One cannot just be an onlooker but must try to understand society’s motivations and participate in it. It creates a precarious situation of detachment for the seeker as she gives up her connection to the old Nation-Thing but struggles to insert herself into a new one. In most of the narratives found today the refuge is only temporary, which alleviates some of the pressure to assimilate as the future then bears the return home. The protagonists’ interest in Germany is also structured differently since the focus is more on the lessons she can learn from

Amerika. Another difference in Amerika as refuge today is that the protagonists find themselves in the history of German emigration and emigration literature: implicitly or explicitly, they are interested in the intertexts that describe experiences Germans had or imagined in relationship to Amerika before. Stadt der Engel, for example, examines the history of German émigré artists during WWII, while Schulze gets the blues clearly references Stroszek and der Verschollene intertextually.

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Notably, there exist a limited number of classic emigration reports in film or book form from the post-Wende years. By classic, I mean reports from people who went to the

United States with the intent to live and remain there for a potentially unlimited time. The factors for this circumstance are open to speculation and might be manifold. The United

States might no longer appear exotic enough to inspire interest in narratives of exile. Other reasons might be that modern means of transportation and communication, as well as the global mobility of the educated class, allow for existences without cutting the umbilical cord to the old home. Additionally, many professions today send employees to different countries for shorter stays. This is also true for products that have a western German perspective, such as Thomas Meinecke’s The Church of John F. Kennedy or Joachim

Meyerhoff’s Alle Toten fliegen hoch. Therefore, the texts and films I use all lack some elements of the classic narrative of Amerika as a refuge. The narratives in that vein that do exist are explicitly documentary in tone, such as Andreas Lehmann’s Go West! Ostdeutsche in Amerika, television documentaries or so-called Doku-Soaps like episodes of Goodbye

Deutschland! Die Auswanderer. My interest in complex aesthetic constructions of Amerika and their interaction prevented me from focusing on these narratives with an explicitly documentary tone. Nevertheless, they do inform the analysis below.

In the following discussion, I will show how the protagonist of the two cultural products Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel and Michael Schorr’s Schulze gets the blues are motivated by obsoleteness, which is caused by the obsoleteness of the GDR. While they both seek Amerika as a refuge from that obsoleteness, each ultimately comes to a different conclusion regarding Amerika and the role it can play in the discourse of the German

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Nation-Thing. The comparison of the two works hints at the central similarities in the discourse of the German nation and its relationship with Amerika but simultaneously demonstrates the different usages of the tropes of Amerika as a refuge on various levels of the discourse and in effect the different functions it has.

3.1. Stadt der Engel

A key text to this thesis’s discussion of Amerika as refuge and renewal is Christa

Wolf’s Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud. I chose the novel to begin the engagement with my primary sources because it interacts most deeply with the different aspects outlined in the previous chapter. Provoked by her self-identification with the GDR, her struggle with the GDR’s obsoleteness, her own feeling of being outmoded, and her inability to find a relationship with the (re-)unified German nation, the protagonist of Stadt der Engel is affectively deeply troubled. The United States serve her as a space for reinvention, change, and adaption to new circumstances – she comes to terms with systemic obsolescence and embraces a future lacking her Nation-Thing, the GDR. The United States and its citizens confront her with the fact that she is continuously associated with German nations, present and past. While this confrontation is restrictive and disillusioning, Amerika ultimately affords her the possibility of dialectic reinvention, between Realism and Magic

Realism, death and life, circular and progressive history. It also triggers her realization that her home is determined by language and that she, hence, is bound to the space where the

German language is spoken. Nevertheless, sometimes English provides her with the ability

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to express truths that are too painful in German. The United States is the place for her own teleological awakening and her coming to terms with her identity as well as her relationship to the (re-)unified German nation. Her essentializing and eroticizing appropriation of cultures from the periphery of America, however, requires critical discussion.

The book was published in 2010 and is Wolf’s last independent publication. The text is labeled a “Roman” – a novel - with which critics immediately found fault because of the narrative’s clear parallels to the author’s experience. In his critique for Die

Tageszeitung, Jörg Magenau described it as “boldly called a ‘novel’” and “fictionally inflated remembrance prose” (20, my translation). Others called it a “spiced up self- justification” (Wittstock 25, my translation) or “softened self-investigation” (Günther 15, my translation) because the narrator reasons out why she actually forgot that she had been a GDR secret police informant. Hence, much of the analysis initially focused on the novel’s autobiographical background. The parallels between the nameless narrator and the historical figure of Christa Wolf are indeed evident. Both were involved in the

“Literaturstreit” (cf. Anz “Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf:” Der Literaturstreit im vereinten

Deutschland), both spent time as writers in residence at the Getty-Center, Los Angeles in the early 1990s, and both must deal with the public revelation of their involvement in the

Stasi as unofficial informants - something they both claimed they had previously forgotten.

Nevertheless, calling Stadt der Engel a novel, instead of an autobiography, as the peritext does and the author herself did in interviews (Wesener/Wolf) is necessary for the text to

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convey a large part of its message.44 Some initial critics came closer to the central tropes of the text - loss, identity, and belonging: Thomas Schmidt called it “a wicked but warm book about home” (My translation).45 Stadt der Engel not only asks the question about the stability of memory and history on a personal level but wonders about the stability of personal and communal identities and the necessity and configuration of the German nation. The mixture between historical fact and fictional narration is only a means to that end. It alleviates the burden of having to cater to expectations of authenticity that come with memoirs and, hence, gives the text the freedom to deal with more general problems of personal and national identity after the fall of the wall. I would even argue against labels like “autobiographical novel” (Minden 196) as the autobiographical part only bears meaning if one is interested in the historical figure of Christa Wolf. Stadt der Engel’s discursive power, however, surfaces when one takes a global instead of a personal perspective. The autobiographical can maximally assist in positioning the protagonist in a broader historical context.

Two other fundamental aspects of Stadt der Engel necessary for this analysis are the narrative situation and the structure of the text. The narrative situation is in large parts typical memoir style, with insertions of magical realism and travelogue styles. The novel exhibits a relatively clear autodiegetic narrator and a noticeable storytelling frame. The narrator explains that she started the writing process right after her visit to the United States

44 “Alle Figuren in diesem Buch, mit Ausnahme der namentlich angeführten Persönlichkeiten, sind Erfindungen der Erzählerin. Keine ist identisch mit einer lebenden oder toten Person. Ebenso wenig decken sich beschriebene Episoden mit tatsächlichen Vorgängen“ (Peritext of Stadt der Engel). 45 “Ein böses, aber auch warmes Heimatbuch.“

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in 1992, but references to the terror attacks on the World Trade Center of 2001 and the stock market crash from 2008 clearly point toward a perspective close to the date of publication in 2010. Consequently, all the complications of memory that the novel describes apply to the text internally as well. Also, the narrator is removed from the focalization and is in a position to reflect on the developments between the time of creation and the narrated time. The images of Amerika in the German public discourse have changed dramatically between 1992 and 2010. The electoral win of George W. Bush and particularly the Iraq War reignited the German distrust of the USA as a realpolitikal aggressor who exclusively looks out for their own economic interests, and who is diametrically opposed to the German self-association with pacifism (cf. O’Connor 3-16).

In 2008 then, just after many Germans were reconciled by the election of Barack Obama, the United States once again became associated with late capitalist’ greediness as the US housing market crumbled due to a lack of oversight and the recklessness of the banks. As

I have shown in the previous chapter, Amerika had not had an exclusively positive image in the 1990s, but it was significantly better than at the time of Stadt der Engel’s publication

(cf. Markovits/Rentsmann 172-180). At the time, Amerika was still recognized as a liberator from oppressive socialist regimes and capitalism was still recognized as a fantasy of salvation through participation in consumption and prosperity. Hence, the novel not only focusses on the processes of history and remembering, but it claims that the difference between Amerika and Germany as well as the issues with the German nation in 1992 are significant for the construction of a German communal identity in 2010.

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That Stadt der Engel, like all histories, is merely one interpretation of a cluster of barely connected narratives is made explicit in the structure of the text, which gains significance in the context of the barred fragmentation of the protagonist’s personal history.46 Although the text is framed by arrival and departure in the United States, the novel is not arranged as continuous plot but a loosely organized net of stories, memories, investigations, trips, and conversations. Elizabeth Boa calls it an “endless mosaic of fragments with no inside and outside and no center other than Los Angeles” (148). The narrator herself talks about destruction repeatedly regarding herself and the (re-)united

German nation, as well as the GDR, whose role as unconscious Nation-Thing shines through her comment: “Wünschen müssen, was Zerstörung bedeutet, in der Klemme sitzen. Ohne Alternativen leben lernen. Deutsche Zustände” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 78).

She describes her feeling towards the hegemonic public opinion that prescribed an opinion in the case of the GDR, namely its transfer into obsoleteness.47 The trap that she mentions, the text acknowledges later, is that the regime and its politics made the state, connected to her Thing, a socialist nation, indefensible. The fall of the GDR, however, leaves Germans without a systemic choice; she must become part of a late-capitalist system without even having a glimpse of hope for an alternative to the neoliberal life-world. She feels as if she

46 The narrative mosaic is reminiscent of the cinematic notion of continuity. Often the narratives strands change as abruptly as cross cuts and the novel asks the reader to understand them as spatially or narratively co-existing. One could also compare the reader to a historian who is confronted with seemingly random and only loosely connected events and asked to make sense of them. The structure imitates the theme of the novel. 47 Repeatedly, the narrator complains about the lack of understanding by a predominantly western German public that she wants to preserve parts of the GDR-Thing: “Die westdeutschen Leser hatten genug von den Problemen der ostdeutschen. Sie zeigten echte Ratlosigkeit:“Was denn um Himmels willen dieses Geschrei um angebliche Werte bedeuten solle, die man von dem untergegangenen Staat bewahren wolle? Was man denn von einer Diktatur bewahren könne” (79)?

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were forced to support what she seems to conceptualize as the annexation of the former

GDR by the FRG, which in turn left her with a fragmented history, a loss of identity, and the prospect of historical obsoleteness. I argue that it is this fragmentation that is mirrored in the structure of Stadt der Engel and affects its portrayal of Amerika as well as the

German Nation-Thing as both also appear as mosaics, which impedes the development of a clear image. The fragmentation as one can argue with Fredric Jameson and many more is a common function of late capitalism and its symptom postmodernism. This world of global mass communication and surfaces structure mass media is void of any center. The subject in this understanding of late is “a place, a passive ground for the network of partial lateral links” (Žižek Tarrying 218) – Jameson calls this phenomenon the “postmodern schizo-fragmentation” (Postmodernism 372). The protagonist came from a system that explicitly offered a central Thing to one that appears to offer countless, without having one that does the same work as the one that was lost. This is the moment in which fantasies of big Things often gain importance because of the forlornness of the subject. The protagonist’s quest for another Thing is the central motif of Stadt der Engel.

3.1.1. The theme of memory and obsoleteness

The quest of protagonist/narrator happens on multiple temporal levels, rooted most importantly in the protagonist’s flight from the Red Army in 1944/45, her student days in the 1950s, her activities in 1989, her residence in the United States in 1992, and her position as narrator towards the end of the 2010s. Hence, it is no surprise that memory is a vital

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aspect of the novel. In the context of this dissertation, memory is primarily of interest in its dialectics between the narrator’s personal memory and the hegemonic cultural memory of the (re-)unified German nation and the problem of how she can remember the GDR positively when the communal memory prescribes its demonization. The narrator reports of a crisis of remembrance.48 Carsten Gansel and Sonja Klocke in “Erinnern und

Erinnerungen – Vorbemerkung” note that memory is the general topic of Christa Wolf’s oeuvre, at least since Kindheitsmuster (11), and Bircken adds that it has always been Wolf’s intention to challenge the hegemonic way of communal remembering (200)– which Jan

Assmann calls collective memory.49 The questions the novel asks are about the obsolete- residue belonging to what I call the Nation-Things and the individual’s freedom to deviate from the collective memory of the nation or reconstruct her own identity in relation to it –

Wolf’s concept of “subjektive Authentizität.”50 With her concept of “subjective authenticity,” Wolf originally positioned herself against the demands and restrictions placed on authors by the GDR regime and stresses authorial independence and

48 As for many of Wolf’s previous works, numerous publications quickly determined memory to be the central theme of Stadt der Engel. Amongst those are Franziska Bromski’s ““Moskauer Adreßbuch‘ – Erinnerung und Engagement in Christa Wolfs ‘Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud‘,“ Aija Skova-Merivee’s “Die Ausgrabung der Vergangenheit in ‘Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud‘,“ or Margrid Bircken’s “Lesen und Schreiben als körperliche Erfahrung – Christa Wolfs ‘Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud‘.“ This evaluation is supported explicitly by the text itself: “Es geht um Gedächtnis, es geht um Erinnerung“ (Wolf 202). 49 Jan und Aleida Assmann introduced the term into today’s critical discourse. The term, which is based on Maurice Halbwach’s studies from the beginning of the 20th century, describes a society’s selection of what it deems worthy of remembering. This selection and the mode in which something is stored in the collective memory is largely based on the emotions it causes the community at the time of remembrance. The collective memory is, therefore, not a mere storage medium, but it forms its subject and simplifies it. It does not tolerate multiplicity and thereby reduces history to mythic archetypes (cf. Assmanns 54; Novick 14). 50 “[E]s wird viel schwerer >ich< zu sagen, und doch zugleich oft unerläßlich. Die Suche nach einer Methode, dieser Realität schreibend gerecht zu werden, möchte ich vorläufig >subjektive Authentizität< nennen” (Wolf in Hilmes/Nagelschmidt 46)

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responsibility for the text. The crisis of memory the protagonist experiences is exacerbated by a crisis of cultural memory. As Jan Assmann argues, the early 1990s are an epochal threshold. Multiple factors generate the crisis: The status of memory shifts with the advent of new electronic media. The death of most witnesses of the Holocaust, the formative historical locus of an era, causes this part to lose its grip on the configuration of culture.

Cultural awareness shifts to a form that pronounces the ubiquity of obsoleteness – “what

George Steiner has called ‘post-culture,’ in which something is now coming to an end – which Niklas Luhmann termed ‘Old Europe’ – nevertheless lives on as the subject of memory and commentary” (Assmann vii). This condenses in the protagonist’s own fear of her memory being lost as well as with that of her own death.

For the narrator, the incisive experience that indicated an epochal change was the relegation of her state and her Nation-Thing to obsoleteness. The GDR for her was an I describe as extended Nation-Thing, since it also included pars-pro-toto the socialist utopia with which she still associated herself. However, not only is she struggling with her position and relationship with the Nation-Thing, but also her personal memory and history rely on the existence of the GDR. If one wants to follow Maurice Halbwachs’ argument of the intertwining of personal and cultural memory, the confusion the narrator experiences is to be expected. Halbwachs argues that memory is not an individual operation of a singular psychological System, but a collective phenomenon of cultures. Without the frame of culture, its traditions, conventions, and language, humans are left with only immediate sensory impressions (cf. Pethes 55-57). Forming or expressing a memory necessitates the tools of cultural framing, which for Halbwachs means that memory is a cultural

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phenomenon (cf. Halbwachs 396). The radical break the narrator experiences by using her cultural frame, therefore, according to Halbwachs, also means her memories are changing their form as they must fit in a different cultural frame. The change in frame the narrator sees becomes visible in her comments on the loss of cultural memory: “Aber das war es doch, warum ich an dem kleineren Deutschland hing, ich hielt es für die legitime Nachfolge jenes Anderen Deutschland, das in den Zuchthäusern und Konzentrationslagern, in

Spanien, in den verschiedenen Emigrationsländern, verfolgt und gequält, schrecklich dezimiert, doch widerstand“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 347). Simultaneous to the change in cultural frame, here the narrator’s belief in the GDR and its shared history with the anti- fascists manifests itself. The narrator constructs the GDR as a Nation-Thing that continued the German anti-fascist tradition of those who resisted by going into exile or even losing their lives over their convictions. This definition of the GDR is historically highly problematic because, despite its claim of strict anti-fascism, the country limited its denazification efforts (cf. Kappelt Braunbuch DDR), but as a foundational myth, the reference to national heroes who fought against injustice and for a better community, it does not constitute an exception in the construction of Nation-Things. The narrator’s comment on the passage is more abiding: “In diesem neuen Deutschland werden sie dem

Vergessen überantwortet“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 347). In other words, the narrator implies that the new cultural memory does not include the heroes so important for the foundational myths of the GDR. Consequently, she herself can no longer place herself in line with these heroes, which is a large part of her self-identification. Other things that she feels she has lost with the obsoleteness of the GDR are the socialist utopia and the clear anti-fascism of

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the GDR’s self-construction, which is a major point of her identification. She is confronted with a system that appears to offer no alternative but allows for fascist’ excesses of violence against people deemed non-German. Obsoleteness is the source of the narrator’s struggle with her personal memory and her struggles with the hegemonic cultural memory of the

(re-)unified German nation.

Along with historical obsoleteness, the narrator also reflects on capitalism's system of obsolescence, which includes the economic obsoleteness of people and importantly, the loss of the social order as community (Gesellschaft) – as I have shown in Chapter two. The narrator is acutely concerned about the situation of working class people in the United

States. Experiencing the current situation in Amerika, she understands it as being intertwined with race but nevertheless highlights the economic roots of the precarious life worlds of many non-white people there. When she meets the Hispanic and black cleaning crew of her building where she lives, she immediately describes their lives as characterized by hard work and austerity. She later describes the shame this economic obsoleteness generates not only in the people who live there but in the onlookers: “Ich verstand, daß ein

Schamgefühl sie davon abhielt, diese Menschen in ihrer Erniedrigung zu dokumentieren”

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 248). The shame of the onlooker is generated in the moment of the confrontation with economic obsoleteness. On the one hand, it is a reminder that obsoleteness is always a possibility; on the other hand, it makes the onlooker aware of the responsibility she has as a participant in capitalism. Apart from the narrator’s own association with a system that does not allow for economic obsoleteness of the individual, witnessing capitalism’s flaws is a further reason for her sympathy for the affects that

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economic and racial marginalization cause. In moments of confrontation with the negative sides of capitalism, the narrator also always notes that most of her conversation partners assume the failure of the GDR and the Soviet countries as historical proof of the superiority of capitalism. They make no distinction between the Los Angeles riots and the peaceful revolution in the GDR. They only see as an expression of all-encompassing longing for participation in the superior system, what had been a moment of hope for renewal for the narrator. For the narrator, capitalism and consumer culture are what actually betrayed the movement for a just community: “Die Augen richteten sich bald auf die Auslagen der

Schaufenster und nicht mehr auf ein fernes Versprechen. Die Roulettetische gewannen an

Zulauf” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 411). Capitalism, the narrator argues, was not what the people sought but instead has destroyed the hopes for a utopia. In capitalism, she argues, the idea of utopia itself becomes obsolete. The only viable behavior in capitalism is constant longing for consumption and personal financial gain, rendering all other parts of life, such as a sense of community for which the narrator longs, obsolete.

The text introduces obsoleteness as a motif from the beginning, and does so on multiple levels. The novel starts with the heading “AUS ALLEN HIMMELN STÜRZEN,” a variation on a German saying that signifies disillusionment or deep disappointment

(Duden Allegemeinbildung 31). The placement of the saying at the beginning of the novel and the narrator’s statement that she thought of these initial lines even before her visit

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 9), indicate that the implicit disillusionment is probably geared toward Germany. Overlooked by all critics, a parallel to a Bible verse describing the fall of the angel Lucifer opens up in the: “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son

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of the dawn! […] You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God […]. I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit” (Jesaja 14,12-15 EU). Little imagination is required to read this as analogous to a simile for the narrator’s perspective on fate of the GDR. If read autobiographically, one can also interpret it as personal obsoleteness in the context of the protagonist’s position as Kulturschaffende - culture producer. She has been an integral part of producing the GDR-Thing through her texts.

Culture in a narrow sense is the tradition of literary, musical, visual imagery, material- historical artifacts that a group of people deems preservable and therefore holds it in the public discourse. In a broader sense, culture is the system of social conventions of communication and lifestyle within a group at a particular time (cf. Pethes 38). Nation, in one of its shapes, can consequently be defined as a group that holds on to a certain culture

(Renan 35). Thus, the narrator feels as if she has taken part in the production of the Nation of the GDR in her function as a writer and in her function as a public figure who could influence the public discourse. All of this work, she feels, has become obsolete as the GDR has become obsolete.

Now her legacy is questioned by the obsoleteness of that Thing. Christa Wolf’s obsoleteness was at the center of a very public discourse about the value of GDR literature and public figures, the so-called “Literaturstreit.” The dispute revolved around Christa

Wolf’s Was bleibt, which describes the life of a writer in the GDR who knows that the

Stasi is surveilling her. As a reaction, Ulrich Greiner in Die Zeit and Frank Schirrmacher in the FAZ attacked not only the text but its author. Greiner doubted the sincerity of the

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novella; Schirrmacher even doubted Wolf’s relevance in the new historical conditions. The dispute escalated further and had affected Wolf deeply, as in its course she was made somewhat synonymous with, and by extension responsible for, the cruelties of the state.

Many critics accused her of trying to reimagine herself as a victim instead of a beneficiary

(cf. Anz Literaturstreit im Vereinten Deutschland). This personal evaluation also exists as critique of the protagonist in Stadt der Engel: “Die Zeitungen waren voll gewesen von

Zustimmungsadressen an jenes Gremium und für jene Maßnahmen, gegen die du dich aufgelehnt hattest” (189). The parallels between the narrator and the historical figure of

Christa Wolf extend to the prehistory of the novel. Under this assumption, the heading expresses the narrator’s deep disappointment in the end of the GDR, her defamation, and the problematic process of unification, which she formulates more precisely later in the novel. For the narrator, the GDR initially signified a utopia, a form of living higher than any other type, but it fell short of those aspirations and in the end passed into obsoleteness.51

Amerika is an escape from the lost fantasy of a utopia and from personal obsoleteness – a trope that is ingrained in America’s mythology as well as the German image of Amerika. The narrator expresses the novelty of the space by emphasizing that, despite being on an airplane and not on a ship like so many before her, she did indeed cross a whole ocean and arrive in the “new world” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 9). She thereby places her text in the tradition of previous emigration literature on the United States and alludes to the trope of traveling across the ocean by ship to reach Amerika. The expression “new

51 In the context of Wolf’s novel der geteilte Himmel, one can also read the passage as a sign that the space she entered by landing in Los Angeles is no longer one of the sky’s, with which she was so concerned in her previous novels, but a different place, one unknown to her, something foreign, something Other.

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world” and the allusion to Christianity in the first clause also open the hopefulness for a better place embodied in the arrival trope of the melting pot and the city upon a hill, so famously encapsulated in Emma Lazarus’s poem “The new Colossus,” engraved at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Even though the nameless narrator of Stadt der Engel does not arrive in New York but Los Angeles, the allusion to this moment of escape from obsoleteness and personal hardship fits well. The protagonist is fleeing from the new realities of a unified Germany, which she feels are oppressive and cannot offer her the jouissance of a home, in part because the German media claims her historical obsoleteness and persecutes her after the disclosure of her involvement with the GDR secret police.

The first scene further enhances the centrality of feelings of personal obsoleteness in the face of the obsoleteness of the GDR as a state and nation. The protagonist attempts to enter the United States of America with a passport issued by the GDR, which had ceased to exist two years prior - indeed a symbol for her attachment to the obsolete GDR-Thing.

Accordingly, she confuses the border control officer, who then checks her documents repeatedly, calls for help, and finally asks, “[a]re you sure this country exists,” to which she answers, “[y]es, I am” (10, my translation). She holds on to the GDR as her country of origin, as she sees no alternative in the (re-)unified Germany and is unwilling to give up many of the values for which, she argues, the GDR stood. After she has passed through passport control, she realizes the pettiness of her attempt to affirm her belonging to the

GDR because it only confused one border officer but did not change her situation in any meaningful way (Wolf Stadt der Engel 10). As the following text illustrates, she and her

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self-image nevertheless remain very much attached to the extended Nation-Thing of the

GDR.

The confrontation with the obsoleteness of her Thing, the GDR, as well as the hegemony of the western social and political systems make her feel helpless. Her frustration over her pettiness toward the officer in the first scene makes this helplessness stand out. It is impossible for her to express the exasperation she experiences over her loss of a large factor for her identity to anybody as she only has access to low-level representatives of the political and economic system after the Wende. After she had to play a major role in the GDR, suddenly nobody seems to value her opinion still or even show interest in her personal situation, beyond condemning her for being a part of the “wrong side of history.” The frustration is further exacerbated as the German media discourse assumes an entirely Western perspective, which portrays the (re-)unification as an almost exclusively positive occurrence. This problem extends to the positions of friends and acquaintances who obtain their information through the media and who, therefore, have no understanding of the protagonist’s struggles:

Ich merkte, wie schwierig es war, normale Alltagswörter mit dem Land in

Verbindung zu bringen, aus dem ich nun mal herkam und das in den Zeitungen, die

meine Freunde lasen, umstandslos dem Reich des Bösen zugeordnet wurde. Ich

bestritt ja vieles nicht, was da zu lesen war nur hatte ich doch in einem anderen

Land gelebt […]. [D]ie nackten Tatsachen sind nur ihre Oberfläche (Wolf Stadt der

Engel257).

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The narrator describes a disconnect between how she remembers the GDR and how the now hegemonic western cultural memory describes it. The things on which the newspapers focus are not wrong, according to the narrator, but they neglect the underlying idea of the

GDR, the utopia of a just community. The statement also opens parallels to ideas such as the “simulacrum” or Marxist ideas of “false consciousness,”52 both of which offer an excellent perspective on the Stadt der Engel and help explain the narrator’s helplessness.

Further, it increases the centrality of “Aus allen Himmeln stürzen,” as a description of the protagonist’s self-identified lack of orientation. She feels at the mercy of a new system, which she did not want and which makes her feel outmoded. Even her act of defiance does not remedy her affects caused by obsoleteness but instead makes her even more ashamed.

In the course of the novel, it becomes apparent that the narrator understands

Amerika to occupy a double role. On the one hand, it is the refuge from the struggles with the perceived lack of a home in Germany, on the other, she considers it to be at the center of the new system that is responsible for the loss of her home. This dialectic is part of the reason for her rejection of the United States as a permanent home. Consumer culture for the narrator is as much the reason for the demise of the GDR as it is at the core of Amerika.

She describes how the citizens of the GDR come back from West Germany radiating happiness after the fall of the Wall, and, agreeing with analysts like Berdahl (see Chapter

52 “Simulacrum” is a term primarily coined by Jean Baudrillard, who claims that today we are living in a hyperreality in which everything becomes a simulation, a reality which is only surface, and which he particularly finds in Amerika (cf. Baudrillard Simunlacra and Simulation). False consciousness is a term coined by Marx and describes the systematic misrepresentation of social causes and correlation, which manifests itself in the consciousness of the non-ruling classes. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry is in great part responsible for the dissemination and manufacturing of false consciousness (cf. Adorno and Horkheimer “Culture Industry”).

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2), concludes that participation in consumer society has been the “Pudels Kern” – crux of the matter – that made many revolt against the system but ultimately also destroyed the hope for a community instead of a society (Wolf Stadt der Engel 118). In the United States, she parallels the message of a televangelist who declares forgiveness of sins as the greatest asset on earth with the social reality of the centrality of the “actual temple, the shopping centers and supermarkets”53 (Wolf Stadt der Engel 118). She evokes the familiar image of a hollow, restless society needing religion to fill the emptiness with meaning but ultimately failing to divert the singular focus of consumer culture. Despite having been seduced by consumer culture, East Germans have preserved a different kind of community, a

Gemeinschaft, not a Gesellschaft: “[Den Ostdeutschen] sei es abgewöhnt worden, privaten

Besitz für so heilig zu halten, und auch wenn sie den früheren Staat abgelehnt hätten, neigten viele Ostdeutsche der Meinung zu: Gemeinwohl komme vor Profit“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 130). The narrator’s assessment here comes very close to Žižek’s analysis of the former Eastern-Block countries’ disappointment with capitalism's social order of society, which, in his view, for many led to an increased fetishization of the Nation-Thing. This fetishization whose eruptions she witnesses in the xenophobic violence in Germany in

1992, and leave her behind helpless and lacking an explanation. The prevalence of

Gesellschaft and the fetish of the consumer culture, which the narrator locates in Amerika, make it into a strong Other, one with which she does not share much, but that exhibits many traits that she also finds in western Germany in excess.

53 “der eigentliche Tempel, die Kaufhäuser und Supermärkte” (my translation)

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The novel repeatedly asserts the centrality of affects, personal and communal, to its narrative and the larger categories of society and history. Helplessness is, therefore, not the only feeling the narrator experiences as a result of her social and political position. In fact, all of the affects that accompany obsoleteness are present in Stadt der Engel, but they differ in degree, potency, and extent. Shame, hate, contempt, embarrassment, and anxiety all play roles in the affective makeup of the novel. Hate is only peripheral, but fear is ubiquitous for the protagonist and the narrator. It takes different forms ranging from the fear of personal obsoleteness to the fear of the systems of obsolescence and, in the end, the fear of the ultimate obsoleteness – death, which the loss of her life’s work exacerbates. Coming to terms with the fear of obsoleteness is one of the central quests the protagonist undertakes in the novel. It is not only emotionally problematic to live in this kind of fear, but in capitalism, others see it as a weakness: “Wenn Sie wittern, daß einer Angst hat, fallen sie

über ihn her. Wie die wilden Tiere, sag ich dir“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 203). The novel criticizes the new economic and media system via a commentary on participants in the public discourse, in which a very human emotion is considered a weakness to be exploited.

It falls in line with the general feeling of being misunderstood the narrator expresses repeatedly.

Next to fear, the other dominant affect that the narrator frequently mentions explicitly and that plays a crucial role in the text is shame. It is present on many different levels and in a variety of contexts. Most notably, she feels shame towards her self- association with the obsolete GDR-Thing as a function of difference to the hegemonic public opinion; she feels shame for her affective bond with the GDR, because of the taboo

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of patriotism in Germany as well as in socialism; she feels personal shame as object of the public discourse; and she feels shame towards the (re-)unified German nation. It is a major part of the protagonist’s reaction to the revelations regarding her function as an informant as well as her behavior toward her own imperfections and inability to immediately come to terms with the obsoleteness of the GDR and her guilt. Reading about her involvement with the Stasi in German newspapers, the protagonist experiences intense shame, leading her to ask whether she is a source of embarrassment for the Getty Center and should leave

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 59). Through the confrontation with her past, which she remembers differently, the narrator feels as if she is losing her Self, as if she herself is being relegated to an obsolete part of history: “Ich schlief ein, oder wurde bewußtlos, und erlebte, wie ich starb” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 237). The attacks on her and the consequent feeling of obsoleteness completely destabilize her concept of identity, so that she dies a social death.

Stadt der Engel is, consequently, what Heinz-Peter Preußer calls “Trauerarbeit” – work of mourning. Further, she experiences shame in connection with the obsoleteness of the GDR itself: “Was habe ich da gefühlt […]. Etwas wie Schrecken. Etwas wie Scham. Etwas wie

Bedrückung. Und Resignation. Es war vorbei. Ich hatte verstanden” (Wolf Stadt der Engel

75). The narrator lists these affects as her immediate reaction to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The affects that she describes do not exactly match the group of affects associated with obsoleteness, but they are an approximation. Shame also marks a stark difference between the German and the American nation. Explicit association with the nation is in most contexts considered a source of pride in America, even across large swaths of the educated classes. In both Germanies, however, particularly in the liberal realm of the educated

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classes, self-association with the nation is a source of shame because nation, nationalism, and patriotism are associated with the Third Reich, but also the self-dedication to the fantasy of jouissance through a Thing is considered a weakness of the Self and the loss of a critical distance to the construction of group identities. Even her love for the GDR, which is so important for her self-identification, she can only admit to herself in retrospect:

“Irgendwann bildete sich der Satz: Wir [her peer group of GDR intellectuals] haben dieses

Land geliebt. Ein unmöglicher Satz, der nichts als Hohn und Spott verdient hätte, wenn du ihn ausgesprochen hättest“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 73). Looking back on the obsolete state, the narrator feels ashamed of the feeling of affection for a country and not because of the unjust regime it produced, but for a general German distance to and distrust of love for a country. Nevertheless, the protagonist’s self-association is further complicated by the now hegemonic historical judgment of the GDR as solely unjust and inhumane. Hence, she is charged with multiple sources of shame: She does not only perceive herself and her symbolic order to be outmoded, but the very circumstance of her identification with the obsolete nation makes her feel ashamed because of its history. These affects are not only central to understanding her identity, but they are also central to understanding the construction of a nation and of history itself. The narrator’s concentration on her affects is a plea for their acknowledgment in public discourse and cultural memory.

Memory, even if it is not the motif this dissertation ultimately focuses on, is of great importance for the construction of history, community, and the jouissance of the protagonist. The narrator struggles with the obsoleteness of the GDR Nation-Thing because it has not only been her source of jouissance, but also because it has delivered a frame in

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which she could remember a certain way, excluding the trauma of the Third Reich and most importantly her cooperation with a part of the state that, despite her continuous admiration for the its foundations, she has to admit was intrusive and oppressive. The loss of her Thing, on the one hand, allowed her to remember her traumatic experiences, but she lost her community and is afraid that her memories, the way that she remembers the GDR, are going to be lost in the new hegemonic historic regime of the (re-)unified Germany. She feels helpless in the face of all the changes around her and the lack of alternatives they present to her and ashamed about the obsoleteness of the GDR, her own association with obsoleteness in the new nation, and towards the (re-)unified German nation as a whole.

3.1.2. Refuge and confrontation: Amerika’s initial role for the protagonist

Before I examine the strategies with which the narrator tries to deal with obsoleteness, its accompanying affects, and the role Amerika plays in that quest, it is important for the perspective of this dissertation to examine the role the United States and

Amerika play in Stadt der Engel, initially. Amerika’s importance for the text extends from the provision of a locus for the narrator’s grief and her memories in the sense of a

Benjaminian place of memory to a space for a pointed comparison between capitalism, real existing socialism, and the ideals of communism. Furthermore, the United States provides a liminal space between identification and other, a space that confronts the narrator with the (re-)unified German nation, and where she can find hybridity and difference in non- whites.

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Her arrival in the United States sets the stage for the importance of place in remembering the German past and understanding the German present. The “Erinnerungsort in den USA” (Birken 207) is not only the point of departure for the narrator’s musings on

Germany and her personal history but also an indispensable part of the narrative. The text highlights the deep relationship between the place of remembrance and contemplation and the act of remembering itself by placing a quote from Walter Benjamin’s Ausgraben und

Erinnern as a motto ahead of the main body of the novel: “So müssen wahrhafte

Erinnerungen / viel weniger berichtend verfahren / als genau den Ort bezeichnen, / an dem der Forscher ihrer habhaft wurde“ (7). As Benjamin’s image of excavation suggests, memory is a process that connects times as well as spaces. The dialectical relationship between two space-times that memory can build, however, is precarious. It is “as genuine as it is tenuous and as enigmatic as it is ephemeral” (Solibakke 95). Memories connect two places, namely the two locations in which the researcher acquired both parts of a memory: the place where the memory was made and the place where the memory was remembered.

Memory, therefore, is not an instrument to be employed in narration or research, but a medium that connects (Weigel 121). That Wolf chose a quotation from Benjamin’s text about the archeology of memory and the importance of circumstances for memory anticipates the relevance of Amerika in her process of remembering and in her attempt to create a significant history for herself and the (re-)unified Germany (cf. Sakova-Merivee

247; Opitz 91). The narrator herself argues that the United States is an ideal place for remembering and analyzing Europe because of its fascination with and acquisitiveness regarding all things European (Wolf Stadt der Engel 16). Somewhat inexplicably, the

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above-referenced critics interpret the Benjamin quotation in Stadt der Engel exclusively as a reference to the connection between present-day Germany and the GDR or Nazi

Germany, without acknowledging that the United States is the space in which the protagonist takes hold of the memories, not the (re-)unified Germany. Amerika is not only the space in which the protagonist remembers, but also the space that the narrator remembers, since the extra- and intra diegetic levels are approximately twenty years apart.

The importance that Stadt der Engel attaches to Amerika becomes apparent not only in the protagonist’s memories and the resolution of her issues with her personal history and the history of the German nation but also in the comparisons and parallels the narrator finds between the systems that made up the world before the Wende as well as between the situation in Germany and the USA in 1992. Central to those attempts at comparison are the characterization of both nations as failed utopias and the exposure of the jouissance they offer as fantasies, while simultaneously affirming the necessity of utopia and its inherent dynamic to create alternatives beyond the present. The comparisons are sometimes spelled out concretely for example when she compares the riots in Los Angeles with the “peaceful revolution” at the Wende (cf. Wolf Stadt der Engel 196 – my translation) or when she mentions that Thomas Mann today may have looked toward Russia and not the United

States as an example of a possible utopia (Wolf Stadt der Engel 354). More often, Stadt der Engel parallels the two by recounting matching narratives. For instance, she tells the stories of philosophers and authors who all felt unfree in either the Soviet Union or in the

United States. The protagonist also remembers the story of Lew Kopelew, who was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Lilja Brik. The memories parallel the stories she tells

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about Amerikans and German exile artists in the United States who were unable to earn a living in their field of expertise, had to do menial jobs, and were affected by the blacklisting of the McCarthy era. This triggers her memory of the situation in Czechoslovakia: “Unter

ähnlichen Pressionen schienen sich ähnliche Verhaltensweisen und ähnliche Formen der

Solidarität herauszubilden. Ich versank in Erinnerungen” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 275). The parallels extend to 1992, when, as the narrator describes, many GDR liberals still did not feel safe and pondered exile (Wolf Stadt der Engel 26). Amerika becomes vital as pars pro toto for the injustices of capitalism and is used to show parallels between the systems, which have, to a large extent, fallen victim to historical obsoleteness. All nations, GDR,

FRG, (re-)unified Germany, and America, promised to fulfill the human longing for community, equality, or liberty, but ultimately failed to fulfill those promises. The hegemon’s historical interpretation causes the difference in exposition: It has the power to declare its historical mistakes obsolete while highlighting those of the other side.

Contrary to those negative parallels between the United States and the GDR, the text acknowledges Amerika’s positive role as a space for remembering. The United States provides a space between identification and othering expressed in the re-narration of the exile of artists during WW II. It confronts the protagonist with the systems of economic and historical obsolescence and with her suppressed affiliation with the German Nation-

Thing. It helps her to find alternative forms to understand history and identity, which forces her come to terms with the German Nation-Thing. The United States also affords the protagonist time and space to bemoan, and come to terms with, the loss of her Nation-

Thing. The protagonist feels like Germans do not provide her that opportunity because their

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way of handling the loss of the GDR, at least in public discourse, is to accept it the mode the new history regime portrays it, as a historical accident and an unjust system. She repeatedly laments the behavior of her German colleagues who publicly switched from seeing the GDR as a possible utopia to a characterization as a dystopia in hindsight. As

Franziska Bromski points out, the loss of the GDR for the protagonist is not a moment to celebrate but is connected to feelings of grief and agony (273). As her reaction contrasts strongly with the public discourse, she also feels misunderstood in her grief: „Wie soll ich ihnen erklären, daß mich kein anderes Fleckchen Erde auf dieser Welt so interessierte wie dieses Ländchen, dem ich ein Experiment zutraute. Das war mit Notwendigkeit gescheitert, mit der Einsicht kam der Schmerz“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 289). The United States afford her a space far enough removed from the breathless German discourses to come to terms with these affects. Her only connection to the German discourse is delayed via letters and newspapers sent from Germany. Her state of disconnection affords her time to contemplate the role the GDR played for her and go through the later stages of grief. Admittedly, this function could be carried out by any exile far enough removed from Germany.

The United States also reminds the protagonist of the presence and importance of her identification with the GDR and how other German nations never appeared as viable alternatives. Her struggles with the (re-)unified German nation, and her doubts that it can serve as her Thing express themselves in two distinct fashions: First, the protagonist recognizes her Germanness in the Otherness of Amerika. Secondly, other figures identify her in a double function, as a representative of the GDR state and the (re-)unified Germany.

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The difference between herself and Amerika makes her aware of her belonging to a

Germany, which appears to be a diffuse construct between GDR and (re-)unified Germany:

Noch heute kann ich mich in dieses Taxi versetzen, an dem links und rechts

Lichterketten vorbeijagten, manchmal zu Schriftzügen geronnen, weltbekannte

Markennamen, Werbetafeln in grellen Farben für Supermärkte, für Bars und

Restaurants, die den Nachthimmel überstrahlten. Ein Wort wie »geordnet« war hier

wohl fehl am Platze, auf dieser Küstenstraße, womöglich auf diesem Kontinent

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 11).

The image of public space as advertising space is a typical image of Amerika/America that one can find not only in German cultural products (cf. Gudis 36-57; Koeppen 9; Adorno

“Kultur und Culture” 246-259). It unearths Amerika/America’s close association with late capitalism and its spatial configuration of space. The narrator speaks of chaos, which she speculates might have affected the whole continent, in opposition to the order that she seems to associate with Europe. In Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of

Supermodernity, Marc Augé describes how spaces in modernity become more and more featureless and in fact interchangeable. Places, particularly transitional places, lose their distinct markers, the distinct symbolic orders, which Augé determines to be history, social relationship, and identity. The place becomes an almost pure surface structure - a simulacrum. Baudrillard, among others, sees America at the forefront in the development of those locations without a deep structure, those non-places (cf. America 41). This lack of recognition, however, is not necessarily only inherent to the place but also to the disorientation of the protagonist. Order for the protagonist in Stadt der Engel must come

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from somewhere other than space, a fact Augé acknowledges as well in his discussion of home. He argues that today, instead of space, the presence of close social language ties is decisive for developing a feeling of orientation and belonging: “The rhetorical country of a character ends where his interlocutors no longer understand the reasons he gives for his deeds and actions, the criticisms he makes or the enthusiasm he displays” (Augé 108). We are auxotrophic beings that need the society, but we can only attach ourselves to a Thing if we have access to the specific symbolic order. This describes the quest of the narrator. She comes to the United States having lost her Thing and enters into a space that at least initially presents itself as a superficial place focussed on consumption; however, her “new” country, the (re-)united Germany, also fails to provide her with a home as she feels a disconnection between its symbolic order and herself. The disconnection manifests itself not only in the narrator’s lack of feeling at home, of participating in the (re-)unified Germany’s jouissance, but the explicit rejection of the German public discourse of the narrator. This works as the initiator of her residence in the United States. The Amerikan Other, however, also presents itself as inaccessible to her. Especially at the beginning it remains diffuse and produces mainly difference. The narrator compares US showerheads to European showerheads, speaks of the German need for quality coffee and underpins the statement with an example from the GDR (Wolf Stadt der Engel 14-16). This reflects the complex relationships within the discourse of the German Nation-Thing after the fall of the Wall.

The engagement with her belonging to a Nation-Thing is not limited to self- comparisons but is also forced on the protagonist by others during her stay in Los Angeles.

Particularly her association with the (re-)unified Germany alienates the protagonist:”[I]ch

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spürte, wie ich mich dagegen auflehnte, hier und jetzt für das ganze Deutschland reden und einstehen zu sollen, das ja auch mir zu großen Teilen nicht nur geographisch fremd war”

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 81). She does not self-associate with Germany after the Wende, but it becomes increasingly evident for the protagonist that she has no choice in the matter.

The alienation that the protagonist experiences is not only caused by her confrontation with the Nation-Thing but by the image Amerikans have of the GDR and the (re-)united

Germany. Faithful to their US anti-communist indoctrination, her conversation partners repeatedly refer to the GDR as a “regime” and expect her to also express her unreserved distaste for the history of the GDR. The (re-)unified Germany is not an improvement in the eyes of many Amerikans in the novel as its image centers on the coverage of the eruption of xenophobic violence in 1992, which leaves the protagonist at a loss for words. She herself has no affective access to the (re-)unified German Nation-Thing other than shame, which bars her from understanding the jouissance, the fetish, and excess. The general inability of the German intelligentsia to find any kind of workable affective relationship with the German Nation-Thing is one reason the nationalists were able to co-opt it and sell it as a substitute for a lost community. Particularly in facing the Jewish emigres she meets at dinner parties and the Center, the protagonist concludes that the only thing she associates with a (re-)unified Germany is shame. Shame for its history and shame for what was happening in Germany at the time. She explicitly questions the validity of shame as a basis for (re-)unification: “Wie denn aus zwei Volksteilen, von denen jeder ein schwaches

Selbstbewußtsein auf je verschiedene Weise kompensiert habe – wie denn, wenn man die zusammenwerfe, ein »gesundes Nationalgefühl« herauskommen solle“ (Wolf Stadt der

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Engel 110-111)? Within this statement of frustration, however, hides the belief in the existence of a German people, of a nation. According to the narrator, it is unavailable as a means of collective identification because both the people and the nation are disturbed by the historical guilt. Hence, the loss of the GDR meant not only a different identity but also an increasing reintroduction of the shame of German history after she had partially removed herself from that history via the utopia of communism. The protagonist’s inability to position herself regarding the Nation-Thing leaves her helpless in trying to explain the actions of others in its name. Over dinner, one couple asks her whether it was safe for them to move to Germany at all: “Ich erschrak. Kam ich denn aus einem barbarischen Land, in das man keine Kinder bringen durfte? Ich sagte, ihre Informationen seien gewiß einseitig, und ich wäre froh, wenn sie kämen. Aber einen direkten Rat wollte ich ihnen nicht geben. ich wich aus“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 130-131). The outside notion of the German nation appears to be even more problematic than her own historical one. In the course of the text, nevertheless, the (re-)unified German nation and the protagonist’s quest to find a way to accept it as her Thing emerge in the interplay of language and Amerikan hybridity.

Amerika is the place that provides distance to the German discourse of the Nation-

Thing and thereby gives the protagonist time to grieve for the lost GDR. It also affords her a liminal space to share with an outstanding group of intellectuals to whom she feels connected, but the distance and the parallels between West and East afford her a memory space, a space from which she can remember her past, even the memory she had suppressed. The difference of Amerika confronts her with the presence of the Nation-Thing and allows her to embrace the Nation-Thing of the GDR as well as gives her time to

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position herself in regard to the new nation. As I will show below, Amerika provides the diversity and hybridity to allow the protagonist to reimagine her position in the new nation and make it her Thing through language.

3.1.3. Solutions: Hybridity, Acceptance, and the Global in the Local

The obsoleteness of her own Nation-Thing, her discomfort with the (re-)united

German Nation-Thing, the perceived loss of utopia, and the issues with her personal identity lead the protagonist to search for remedies. She unsuccessfully looks for a useable history in other German exiles to the United States. She occasionally considers her colleagues at the Getty Center a community with which she can identify. The international intellectual community provides shelter from the abrasive media discourse about her role in the GDR and her contemporary relevance, as well as a level of reflection and understanding of her situation she lacks outside of it. She tries to find a solution in philosophy and theory, such as Benjamin and Freud as mentioned previously. Other attempts at dealing with her dilemma are her visits to a Chinese doctor or her interest in the Feldenkrais method to combat the physical effects stemming from the affects of obsoleteness. She attempts to compensate for the loss of utopia through the television series

Star Trek and its implicit relegation of utopia to a distant future.54 None of these efforts provide enduring resolutions for the protagonist’s issues with obsoleteness, but they

54 She mentions watching the show repeatedly throughout the novel, an act of preserving the fantasy of a utopia in late-capitalism reminiscent of Fredric Jameson writing on science-fiction and the hopelessness in late-capitalism (Archaeologies 42-55).

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illustrate a plurality of interpretations and perspectives. These cosmopolitan pluralities serve as “a means of reclaiming the particularity of the national collective” (Taberner 51).

The more fruitful attempts in finding solutions are the protagonist’s orientation to exotic marginal cultures and her basic realization that language is the fundamental symbolic system that offers her a stable home, but that this home implies rigidities which other symbolic systems can help to resolve. These symbolic systems she finds in the English language but also in magical realism and Native American myths. The appropriations of non-white culture traits, which she ascribes to these cultures, must be considered critically.

Ultimately, the text claims that the different symbolic systems help the protagonist to accept her personal situation through the insight that her perspective and that of the German public discourse are singular in a possible multitude of discourses.

First, however, she must follow the directions of German history in the United

States, represented by her quest to understand the exiles of the so-called “Weimar unter

Palmen” and Sigmund Freud. Exile, in particular intrinsically or extrinsically forced exile, is a liminal position providing a detachment from an individual’s own culture but no simultaneous integration into the culture of the host country. If the group of exiles is big enough, however, it can potentially form its own culture and serve at its own Thing. Not without reason does the narrator align the protagonist’s experience with current and former exiles, who came to the United States to flee economic hardship or political prosecution.

Particularly the German exiles of the 1930s and 1940s initially appear to provide a usable history to the protagonist to mitigate her own situation. Apart from their own history in exile, these intellectuals also offer a history of Germany that excludes the dystopia of the

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Third Reich. Here, Amerika plays a unique role and simultaneously provides a tool for the narrator to position her story in the greater narrative of the German nation. From the perspective of cultural memory, exile is dangerous, since, as Nicolas Pethes notes, removal of the person from the cultural frame threatens personal memory and one’s connection to the cultural memory (12). If, however, one understands the hegemonic cultural memory as a threat to your idea of history and identity, exile can equally present a chance for renewal and change. Concretely, Stadt der Engel is interested in the influence Thomas Mann, whose diary the protagonist reads throughout the text, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Neutra, and other members of the “New Weimar unter Palmen” (338) had on Amerikan culture as well as their fate after they returned to Germany. It is of great interest to her how they dealt with the exile and the loss of the Nation-Thing to which they belonged in the Weimar Republic.

Los Angeles seems to be a perfect space for these investigations as Francesco, a friend of the protagonist, calls it a city of immigrants (Wolf Stadt der Engel 31). Few of the exile stories that the narrator recounts are success stories. Neutra, the architect, experienced a degree of success, but all the authors and intellectuals struggled with exile. Many had to find menial work with film studios (Wolf Stadt der Engel 303), while others, like Brecht, had to fight to realize a few projects (104-105). Even the superstar Thomas Mann, who did not have to be concerned about his economic well-being, found himself at odds with

Amerikan culture (Wolf Stadt der Engel 126, 134). The narrator describes the society in which these artists worked as economically and culturally oppressive. The intellectuals who stayed had to adapt to it and learn to live in a state of mimicry (Wolf Stadt der Engel

312). Stadt der Engel also reports the helplessness that the distance to Germany produced.

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In the 1930s and 40s, the exiles were still deeply invested in Germany but were left with no recourse but appeals to politicians and the German people. This parallels the protagonist's feeling of helplessness. In the end, the search for a useable history in the exiles fails. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator writes about the lack of influence the exiles had in the United States as she finds only a few hidden clues to their presence and their belongings in the attic of an antiquarian book shop. In the reports about their time in exile, the narrator searches for parts portraying the harm exile did to the authors: “Was es hieß, wurzellos zu sein: Und zu erfahren, daß niemand, kein Einheimischer in ihren Exilländern und erst recht keiner ihrer ehemaligen Landsleute, ermessen konnte, wie die Jahre in dieser

Schattenexistenz sie veränderte“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 345). The liminal space United

State and other countries offered to those authors had not been a positive experience for any of them, according to Stadt der Engel. The exiles were only able to associate with other exiles as only they shared a semiotic system, but they ultimately still failed to form a community as such (Wolf Stadt der Engel 206, 349). For many, the process of returning to one of the Germanies was as painful as their existence in the USA, as the narrator clarifies in various anecdotes (Wolf Stadt der Engel 302, 351). This means that the protagonist’s quest for finding a useful past in other exiles’ histories fails as they themselves appear to struggle with problems similar to hers but did not find a solution for them. Instead, she must find a way out of the dilemma of being caught between an Amerika that demands assimilation and a Germany that does not understand her history in the United States and particularly does not understand her connection to the Thing of the GDR. She appears to be doubly exiled. Her failure to find a useable history in the exiles is part of one of the

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central roles Amerika plays in Stadt der Engel, namely as a reminder of the necessity of the Nation-Thing.

Sigmund Freud - already part of the title - must be seen as the protagonist’s other attempt to find an answer to her problems with her affects, her identity, her unreliable memory and her inability to come to terms with a (re-)united German Nation-Thing in a

German figure. Freud’s position in a novel that is at least in part about Amerika is also not surprising because of the prominence of his theories in the United States during the twentieth century, even though he himself was exiled in England and only visited the USA once.55 Freud’s central themes in memory are repression and the duality of the conscious and unconscious.56 Therefore, he ostensibly fits as an explanation for the protagonist's loss of her memory of being associated with the GDR’s secret police. Forgetting, according to

Freud, can only happen on the level of the conscious; traumatic experiences are, however, usually repressed and stored in the unconscious. Hence, the unconscious is a permanent storage for traumatic experiences and unfulfilled desires. Reminiscent of the obsolete, the repressed influences the surface structures despite its absence on that level. It does so by appearing in the conscious in altered form, which Freud termed “Wiederholungszwang” –

55 Recently, a number of histories have been published about Freud’s and psychoanalysis’ great influence such as Samuel A. Lawrence’s Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America or John Burnham’s After Freud Left: A Century of Psychoanalysis in America. Freud himself made only one visit to the United States, which went almost entirely unnoticed, but his theories have remained influential in the treatment of mental illness and in academic discourses. The memento of the overcoat and the magical powers the figure of university professor Bob Rice attributes to it stand for Freud’s importance for America. 56 Another aspect of Freud’s theory is that he still understands the subject as an intact unity, not as a construction of fragmentation like it is under Lacan and in postmodernity. Therein might also lie a starting point of the narrator’s attraction to him as a remedy of her own feeling of fragmentation. However, this must remain speculation because it is not made explicit in the text.

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“repetition compulsion” (cf. Zur Technik 205). Neurotics, a designation that holds true for all modern humans, are prone to live through the same traumas repeatedly in symbolic form. To work through these repetitions until the patient recognizes the trauma is the therapy that Freud’s psychoanalysis offers. If the protagonist’s original trauma is her work for the GDR regime, one can read her public and personal adherence to the GDR’s Thing as a repetition compulsion.57 Freud’s approach is of interest to the narrator because it offers liberation from the neurosis, a possible explanation for her repression of the memory of her complicity, and the German trauma caused by the history of National Socialism. As Kaleen

Gallagher, among others, points out, the text can be conceptualized as a “writing cure” for the narrator (381). In the end, however, the protagonist identifies Freud’s theory with what is wrong in Western society: its alienation, its loss of authenticity and its lack of ability to accept dualities, dialectics, and hybridity: “Wir Weißen haben uns am weitesten von ihm entfernt, sagte ich. Aber mir sei jetzt klargeworden, daß mir dieser Mantel des Dr. Freud aus keinem anderen Grund beigegeben sei, als um mich dieses Geistes zu vergewissern“

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 398). The metaphor of the overcoat supports the story’s point regarding the obsoleteness of traditional “Western” attempts at ontological explanations.

Her focus, again, is not on her own fate but on a broader correlation that at least includes

57 The central metaphor for dealing with Freud’s theory is his overcoat, which the figure Bob Rice first mentions in an anecdote called “Die Geschichte, wie er Freuds Mantel gewann und wieder verlor” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 154). As Preußer writes, the coat is a metaphor for the repression and covering up one’s own history (290). Later, the coat appears again and again when the narrator is talking about her struggles with cultural and individual memory. She talks about turning it inside out (228), which corresponds to Freud’s therapy

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the German nation. The Freudian cure remains unsuccessful, which leads the narrator to considerations of the “exotic” Amerika.

Central to the resolution of the protagonist’s identity crisis is what Boa and

Taberner describe as an excursion into magical realism. Their argument centers on the angel figure, Angelina, which appears after a visit to an African American church and which Boa says, “belongs in the ambit of Magical Realism” (Boa 149) and which is marked as a representation of the exotic. As in many German texts about Amerika before Wolf’s, the protagonist finds salvation from her own struggles with her past, as well as an

“authentic” Amerika in the exotic Other - an evidently problematic approach. The trope presents itself in such different narratives as Karl May’s Winnetou and Wolfgang Köppen’s

Amerikafahrt. It is also prominent in many GDR cultural products about Native Americans.

Angelina is first introduced as the cleaning lady in the narrator’s building. The narrator describes her as the only black woman among the cleaning staff and as “really black” (Wolf

Stadt der Engel 164–65).58 She clearly marks her as different in an exotic way, reminiscent of a mother goddess: “Sie hatte Rundungen, wo immer eine Frau Rundungen haben kann, ohne dick zu sein, auch ihre Stirn, ihre Wangen, ihre Lippen waren gewölbt” (Wolf Stadt der Engel 165). She appears right after the protagonist experiences a religious service at an

African Methodist church and after she notices the differences between white and black experiences of community and the acceptance of human flaws. The figure, which accompanies the protagonist until the end of the novel, is almost a textbook example of

58 “wirklich schwarz” (my translation)

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magical realism: “[M]agical realism is what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something ‘too strange to believe’” (Strecher 267). Magical realism fits into the novel's narrative of the suppression of the memory and identity of the GDR in

Germany as it is a tool for a postcolonial inversion of neoliberal hegemony of rationality and suppression, a feeling the narrator to a large extent shares, but it differs in the aesthetic negotiation of the local and the global. Mariano Siskind argues that “magical realism goes global as a particularistic aesthetic that satisfies the demand for local color from marginal cultures in the global field of world literature” (61). Stadt der Engel, however, does not use it explicitly to insert exotic local color into a global culture, but in reverse, to enter global aspects into her local culture or, to be precise, into her relationship with the (re-)unified

German nation.

The second function that “magical realism” or other forms of romance can fulfill is providing aesthetic disruption in the production of novels and films in which realism is hegemonic, as Fredric Jameson points out in the chapter “Magical Narratives” in The

Political Unconscious. Not only does it break with this tradition, which limits variety narratively, but it also provides an alternative understanding of history and carries different ideas of utopia or even a resurrection of utopia:

It is in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism that

romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of

freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic

representation is the hostage. Romance now again seems to offer the possibility of

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sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a

real now unshakably set in place (Jameson The Political 104).

Magical realism, as Jameson argues, can destabilize the singular narrative of the real. In

Stadt der Engel, it helps to resurrect an idea of community and companionship, of feeling understood by somebody else through the figure of Angelina.

The angel figure takes the form of the Ugandan cleaning lady who works at the building where the protagonist lives. The protagonist becomes aware of her after visiting a black church and notes its concept of community and acceptance of humans as fundamentally flawed beings. The church offers a perspective that fits with one for which the protagonist is searching:

[D]er Gott dieser Menschen schien kein eifernder Gott zu sein, keiner, der auf

Zerknirschung und Reue bestand, er schien zu wissen, daß es seinen Kindern

unmöglich war, seine Gebote einzuhalten, eigentlich war es schon viel in dieser

Welt, die auch er nicht ändern konnte, daß sie sich Mühe gaben und daß es ihnen

leid tat, wenn es wieder nicht ganz klappen wollte mit dem Gutsein und mit der

Vermeidung des Bösen, das nächste Mal mochte es vielleicht besser gelingen (Wolf

Stadt der Engel 323).

She wants to experience acceptance of her mistakes, first and foremost the mistake of working for a regime because she believed in its fundamental ideology, and lacks a sense of community in the consumer culture world. She seems to project all those needs and desires onto Angelina, who becomes “A SIGN OF HER HEALING” (Wolf Stadt der Engel

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325, my translation) and a guide in the quest for the discovery of a new self and a German

Nation-Thing not simply dominated by shame and the lack of utopian thought.

Angelina, however, is not the only angel the protagonist encounters in Los Angeles

- the city of angels. She is preceded by Benjamin’s angel of history. As Aija Sakova-

Merivee points out in “Die Ausgrabung der Vergangenheit in ‘Stadt der Engel oder The

Overcoat of Dr. Freud,’ Walter Benjamin is central to the novel and remains part of the narrative in the form of the research interest of Peter Gutman, the narrator’s primary confidante. He is never mentioned explicitly, as Gutman always just calls him “mein

Philosoph,” but the hints that Benjamin is that philosopher are strong.59 The impossibility of a closed world image, a fixed construct of reality becomes evident in Benjamin’s angel figure, his angel of history, a figure Gutman explicitly mentions and matches with the narrator. As a response to the protagonist’s lamenting about the attacks on her person by the press and how they expect to find a “monster” but find a “human” instead, Gutman compares her directly to Benjamin’s angel of history: “Ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, sagte Peter Gutman. Der treibt den rückwärts fliegenden Engel der Geschichte vor sich her.

Doch er macht kein Monster aus ihm“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 141). As much as Angelina is the protagonist’s guide, Benjamin’s angel is emblematic for the protagonist‘s struggles:

“Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen”

(Benjamin Passagenwerk 73). To fix what is lost and obsolete, to reanimate the utopia she

59 Gutman, for example, complains that his philosopher’s perfection in the incomplete is what keeps him from completing his own book project: “Denn daß er nur Fragmente hinterlassen hat, ist genau ein Zeichen für eine Sucht nach Vollkommenheit. Er hätte einen vollständigen Text, der ein vollständiges Weltbild voraussetzt, als Lüge empfunden“ (124). This fragmentation of narratives, memories, and the everyday realities of life is also something that the narrator investigates and that makes up the structure of the novel.

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had believed in for almost all her life is the protagonist’s longing. Like the angel, however, she has to come to the understanding that she has to give up her longing and come to terms with leaving the dead behind in obsoleteness. By identifying the narrator as the angel of history, Gutman also ascribes to her the capacity of seeing history as it is, namely a catastrophe that only produces rubble that accumulates and becomes more and more impossible to conquer or control. She is left with only loosely combined fragments that she herself puts together as her own history.

The protagonist finds a new access to history in the exotic, which becomes evident in her journey to the Native American reservations of the Southwest. The narrator frames the tour as a trip into clarity and liberation. It changes the mode of narration from an emigration memoir to a travelogue, a genre that has been deeply involved in modern concepts of identity, of the self and the other, and personal reorientation, as I describe in further detail in Chapter 4. Debbie Lisle in The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel

Writing, for example, problematizes it as a phantasy of colonialism, exotism, and racism preserved in the genre (8). Similar charges can be brought forward in the case of Stadt der

Engel. The narrator begins with a notion of authenticity, musing that Angelina might have been the reason she came to the United States of America, the answer to her conundrum surrounding obsoleteness and her inability to accept the (re-)unified German nation as a

Thing. The protagonist seems to immediately know that this space is what she was looking for, what she deems as more authentic Amerika, the Amerika she had expected:

Kam ich erst jetzt in dieses Land, das auf Legenden gebaut war? Als würden die

Monate davor, in der dichtesten Wirklichkeit gelebt, verblassen. Als wäre dieser

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staubige Ort, in den die Wüstenwinde hineinwehten, die erste amerikanische Stadt,

die ich sah, als wären die Indianerinnen, die in schweigsamer Reihe unter den

Arkaden am Marktplatz saßen und Keramik mit indianischen Mustern feilboten,

die ersten amerikanischen Frauen (Wolf Stadt der Engel 374).

In all likeliness, it is the German and particularly the GDR myths of Amerika that the protagonist recognizes in the Southwest - the dusty streets and the Native American women who sell artistic products. She experiences it as otherworldliness, a place that immediately removes her spiritually from the world in California, which in a continuum of Western cultures appears too close to her own lifeworld to provide viable alternatives for conceptualizing memory, history, and identity.

The trip that she takes further confronts her with two realizations: first, the disneyfication of the mainstream Amerikan culture paired with a human tendency to self- destruct, which profoundly alienates her, and secondly, the naturalness of how the Hopi deal with obsoleteness and their culturally specific interactions with time and obsolescence.

The first stop of the tour for the group is the birthplace of the nuclear bomb, the symbol of pending human obsoleteness per se. Its development spurred on in part by the fetish of

German nationalism and its outwards aggression, created a world that is always threatened by immediate obsoleteness. The small museum the protagonist visits narrates the

Manhattan project as a heroic story: “Es ist, sagten wir uns bedrückt, als habe man damals, im Jahr 1945, mit einem Zauberstab eine Vereisung der normalen menschlichen Gefühle bewirkt“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel 377). 1945 becomes not only the fateful year for Germany but the fateful year for the world until the present. Instead of dealing with immanent

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obsoleteness and the primal fear it should cause on the one hand and compassion for the victims of its use on the other, most people opt for distraction. Instead of dealing with the threat, people prefer to look at superficial fantasy worlds, represented in Stadt der Engel by the Hollywood studios and Las Vegas, a place the novel describes as the venue that satisfies the tourists’ Amerika fantasies. Those places are deeply alienating to the protagonist as she realizes their potential to render humans passive and unengaged with the constant production of obsoleteness and its affects. As Angelina points out, engaging with one’s affects is the only thing that counts (Wolf Stadt der Engel 414). This fits nicely into my line of argument of affects being central to history, the Self, and a working relation to one’s Nation-Thing. Repressing one’s emotions consequently means a lack of understanding of history, of identity, and of the subject’s interaction with the Things.

Suppression, in the Freudian form, causes trauma and neurosis, which can only be cured by admitting to the suppressed. Becoming aware of the constant threat of obsoleteness to everybody also has the potential to be beneficial in regards to communal identity constructions. According to Žižek, it is these fundamental threats that also have the power to transcend human constructs of the Self and the Other (cf. Tarrying 218); thus, key dangers have contained the potential to culturally specific ways to identify and create a

Thing for the human condition as a whole.

A path out of the alienation of the tourists’ Amerika opens for the protagonist in the form of the Native American culture in the region. She first finds parallels to the obsoleteness of the GDR in the fate of the Anasazi, a tribe that appears to have simply vanished but that the Hopi claim as their ancestors. Further, she finds solutions to her

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predicaments in the culture and language of the Hopi, particularly in their understanding of time, the hybridity of their concept of dreaming, and the way they deal with their hybrid existence between Western products and their own culture. The Anasazi are a Native

American tribe that built impressive cliff dwellings, like those the protagonist visits in the

Canyon de Chelly. Their buildings point toward a highly developed civilization, but after over 2000 years, the Anasazi vanished in the thirteenth century. The tribe fascinates the protagonist because of their presence despite their obsoleteness and how they seemingly gave up their place without causing destruction to the place they occupied. The Hopi, as the narrator writes, claim them as one of their ancestors, but otherwise, nobody knows what happened to them. Her musings about the Anasazi and her own situation lead the protagonist into a labyrinth that she metaphorically compares with the buildings of the tribe. Angelina, not Ariadne, is her savior, who leads her out of the labyrinth. This is an important divergence from earlier Christa Wolf texts, which so often are deeply invested in reinterpreting Greek mythology (cf. Viergutz/Holweg 34). Instead of being led by myths from the beginnings of Western civilization, she finds guidance in the Other of the West and finally arrives at the question of whether the Western way of life might be an aberration:

[O]b nicht diese Anasazi »mehr Mensch« gewesen seien als wir heutigen reichen

Weißen, Angelina beantwortete solche Fragen nicht, das wußte ich schon, sie hielt

auch nichts von Schuldgefühlen, sie war der Meinung, die würden einen nur daran

hindern, drauf-los zu leben und dabei Freude zu haben und, egal, was wir uns aus

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der Vergangenheit vorzuwerfen hätten, frischweg das zu tun, was heute nötig sei“

(Wolf Stadt der Engel 387).

The encounter with the Anasazi leads the narrator further into the dialectic between white and nonwhite, which started at the black church and with her guardian angel, Angelina. A familiar trope of exotic othering appears to slide into the narrator’s description at this point, namely the classic colonial of the Other being more authentically related to nature and living an existence less disguised by modernity, by technology and culture (cf. Hall

Representation 245). As mentioned in Chapter 2, many of the foundational myths of the

German nation are invested in the culture - nature divide. Simon Schama in Landscape and

Memory outlines how many German myths, specifically the Arminius myth, associate the

Germans with nature, forest, and authenticity against the artificiality intruder in that natural place, the Romans (75-134). This continues in the German association with the Native

Americans, which serve as regeneration of the primitivist aspect of the German nation, contrary to the American opposition to nature and the regeneration through violence (cf.

Penny 29-95). The positive, life-affirming attitude of Angelina also fits this trope, which has been present in the German imagining of Native Americans for almost 200 years. The narrator even comments on the simplicity of Angelina’s wisdom but appreciates it compared to her convoluted thought processes. The postcolonial perspective alerts us to the problems that arise concerning the narrator’s remarks as well as the later appropriation of Hopi mythology as the colonial gaze projects ideals onto the Other that are not necessarily present.

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The narrator describes her travels onto the Native American reservation as “REISE

AUF DIE ANDERE SEITE DER WIRKLICHKEIT” and a “Traum-Reise” that she longingly awaits every night (385). On the one hand, this statement can lead the reader back to Sigmund Freud and his theory of dreams as ways into the unconscious, but as I have ascertained above, the last section of Stadt der Engel is a renunciation of the western philosophical concepts. Thus, it is more illuminating to considers the Hopi word for dream, something that the text does not do explicitly, but suggests by describing the encounter with the Hopi as dream-travel. The Hopi word for dream, “dimoki,” has multiple connotations, which helps explain the protagonist’s awakening at the end of her journey through the reservations. Dimoki, according to Dorothy Eggan, has three distinct meanings: It is the bundle in which a corpse is tied up for the Hopi burial ritual. It also stands for a bundle of corn, which is of specific significance as corn is also the symbol for life. As a third meaning, it denotes dream, or more literally, a bundle of thoughts (Eggan

242). Hence, the Hopi word for dream bridges the difference between presence and obsoleteness. The Hopi also analyze and interpret their dreams in a fashion close to psychoanalysis but without associating them with suppression (cf. Hozzel 354). The

“Traum-Reise” is, therefore, not only a journey in dreams but travel to accept the unity of obsoleteness and presence, life and death.

The other change in perspective that the Hopi offer for the narrator is their relationship to time and space, or rather the theory of their relationship to time and space, in which they primarily align with Angelina. Both categories, as I have shown above, are of great concern for the narrator and she examines both of them from different perspectives,

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most notably through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s notion of memory as excavation,

Freud’s theory of suppression and Benjamin’s metaphor of the angel of history. Remaining unsatisfied in her quest for a solution to her obsoleteness and the loss of hope for the future, represented by the failure of the socialist and the lack of a capitalist utopia, she turns to the

Hopi language and their cultural heritage. The different perspective she now gains from them is their language’s unique way of conceptualizing time and, on the other hand, their concept of history and space, which are caught in repeated cycles of renewal. In respect to time, the narrator follows Benjamin Lee Whorf’s well-known hypothesis that the Hopi do not have a grammatical form that differentiates time, from which he deduced that they also cannot conceptualize time as progression the same way Europeans do.60 The narrator generalizes this to a degree:

[S]ie hatten ihre eigene Zeit, erfuhren wir: Am Tag stellten sie ihre Uhren um eine

Stunde zurück, um sie zur Nacht wieder vorzustellen. Den Grund dafür konnten wir

nicht herausfinden, aber Lowis erklärte uns, daß es in der Hopi-Sprache keinen

Verweis auf die Zeit und auch keine Beziehung zum Raum gibt, und ich verstand,

daß wir in einer anderen Welt leben als sie und daß wir ihr Denken nicht begreifen

können. (398)

60 There is a wide variety of responses to Whorf’s hypothesis, often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in general and to Whorf’s example from the Hopi’s language. His findings are in large part still contested today (cf. Daniel Casanato’s "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought;" Ekkehart Malotki’s Hopi-Raum: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse der Raumvorstellungen in der Hopi-Sprache and Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language; or Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct)

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The narrator reaffirms the otherworldliness of the Hopi, constructing an Other that is dialectically opposed to her perspective but that the Hopi themselves seem not to conceptualize the same way as they change cultures and places and successfully interact with Amerikans and Europeans alike. For the narrator, however, that concept of complete difference is useful for declaring the hegemonic system with which she struggles on so many levels to be just one perspective among many that all tend to present themselves as mutually exclusive.

Whorf’s hypothesis is certainly not uncontroversial: It generated the so-called

“Hopi time controversy.”61 Ultimately, the scientific debate about the truth value of

Whorf’s hypothesis is irrelevant for the interpretation of Stadt der Engel as it has to focus on how the text uses the hypothesis and seems to use it as fact. So, too, does the book the narrator references as her source for many of the myths and the history of the Hopi at the end of Stadt der Engel, Frank Waters’ Das Buch der Hopi, which contains an excerpt from

Whorf’s essay in the back. For her, the Hopi offer a way to utterly reconceptualize progressive time and space as obsolete. Water’s book provides this form by placing a strong focus on the Hopi myth of the four worlds and its inherent concept of circular history. In short, the Hopi believe that today’s world is actually its fourth incarnation and that we are on the threshold of the fifth. In each of the previous worlds created by the central deity,

61 More precisely, Whorf claimed that the Hopi language has “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past” (57), like “Average European” languages do. Additionally, he claimed that the Hopi language does not conceptualize time and space as a unity. Often, this debate is described as being about whether the Hopi have a concept of time and space at all, but it actually centers on the question of whether time is a grammatical property of their language and how its perceived lack influences the speakers’ concept of the term.

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people became unhappy after a while and disobeyed the deity’s rules. This led the deity to either destroy the world with all its people or destroy the world and lead the decent people to the next one, depending on the story (Waters 15-45). The Hopi, therefore, give circularity a positive connotation of renewal when things deteriorate as opposed to western ideas, as exemplified by Heinrich Kleist, whom the narrator also quotes: “Doch das

Paradies ist verriegelt und der Cherub hinter uns; wir müssen die Reise um die Welt machen, und sehen, ob es vielleicht von hinten irgendwo wieder offen ist“ (Kleist “Das

Marionettentheater” in Wolf Stadt der Engel 354). The quotation encapsulates ideas of a circularity of longing. In it, running in circles is simply the attempt to return to a state one once possessed. For the Hopi, the circularity is a learning experience, an attempt to improve what has gone wrong because of human greed. This circularity is what Angelina suggests to the protagonist at the end of the novel – “Zurück auf Anfang” (414) – but the protagonist declines.

This search for hope for her utopia of socialism, coming to terms with the loss of her Thing, finding an access to the jouissance of the (re-)unified German Nation-Thing, while preserving her memory of the past against the hegemonic historiography is at the center of the narrator’s longing. The question of her forgetting her past as informer of the

Staatssicherheit is only a part of these larger issues. She finds her answers in places and people furthest away from the economic, hegemonic center of society. Her guardian angel even shows her the possibility of synthesis when the narrator only sees irreconcilable difference: “Allein durch ihr Benehmen gab sie mir zu verstehen, es existiere ein

Zusammenhang” (381). The connection between the museum of the nuclear bomb and the

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entertainment center Las Vegas, I would argue, is an expression of obsolescence and how

Amerika and the world appear to need the illusion of the absence of imminent obsoleteness.

From the protagonist’s perspective, however, it becomes apparent that this control is just that, an illusion. Stadt der Engel confirms the centrality of coming to terms with obsoleteness, not only of the GDR, but as a constant of life. The farewell at the end of the novel clearly exemplifies this realization versus the limitations of a human life, which cannot only thing in the greater contexts and abstract ideas but is constantly confronted with its own obsoleteness:

Totes Tal. Tal der Toten. Dort lagen sie alle, meine Toten, und quälten sich aus

ihren Gräbern, während ich über sie hinflog. Sieh nur hin, sagte Angelina. Wie

lange war sie schon neben mir? [...] Meine Bedenken fochten sie nicht an. Daß jetzt

erst in Träumen- in Träumen, Angelina! - eine Ahnung mich anflog, worum es

wirklich gehen müßte. Hätte gehen müssen. Die Erde ist in Gefahr, Angelina, und

unsereins macht sich Sorgen, daß er an seiner Seele Schaden nimmt. [...] Müßte ich

jetzt nicht eine große Schleife fliegen? sagte ich. Zurück auf Anfang? Mach doch,

sagte sie ungerührt. Und Jahre Arbeit? Einfach wegwerfen? Warum nicht? Das

Alter, Angelina, das Alter verbietet es. Angelina hatte zum Alter kein Verhältnis.

Sie hatte alle Zeit der Welt. Sie wollte ihren Leichtsinn auf mich übertragen. Sie

wollte, daß ich diesen Flug genoß.[...] Und die Farben. Ach, Angelina, die Farben!

Und dieser Himmel. Sie schien zufrieden, flog schweigend, hielt mich an ihrer

Seite.

Wohin sind wir unterwegs?

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Das weiß ich nicht (Wolf Stadt der Engel 413-415).

The dense last couple of pages summarize many of the topics that I have laid out above and clearly references both angels. Angelina is still there as what Anna Kuhn calls a

“spiritual midwife, allowing the narrator’s latent wisdom to emerge” (180), and in the tropes of flying, the dead, and the uncertain future, one can find Benjamin’s angel. Instead of constantly considering the future and past, she gets enjoyment out of admiring the sky at that moment. The reference to the sky also postulates a circularity of the narrative. At the beginning stood “aus allen Himmeln fallen,” and now she returned to the skies and is able to admire their beauty. This is precisely the form of circularity that the Hopi mythology propagates. The return is actually a new attempt based on the mistakes of the old. By and large, one could summarize the narrator’s affect towards the protagonist’s situation with the term acceptance. The protagonist accepts the loss of her dead, which are not only her lost friends but also the obsolete utopia and her own inevitable obsoleteness. She realizes that for her, who is bound to just a lifespan and the material world, the ideas of circular history and dreams as ways of unity between life and death, presence and obsoleteness are valuable as alternatives but cannot define a path to life. All that she can do is enjoy the moment and the affects it causes. Amerika ultimately presented a space for the protagonist to come to the understanding that she does have a home in her language which also binds her to be engaged in the (re-)unified German nation and find a way to come to terms with its form of fantasies of jouissance, and that hybridities offer ways of understanding one’s own and the German situation. It affirms the necessity of the Thing, but it claims the possibility of partial and multi-faceted participation in its enjoyment

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Hybridities open up the possibility of partial and multi-faceted enjoyment of different Things, without giving up one’s home in language and social/communal identity.

The exotic is ultimately not an escape but a way back to herself and the German. She herself calls it a simplistic truth but insists on its value: “Meine Person war an die Sprache gebunden, die Sprache sei meine eigentliche Heimat, das klang banal“ (Wolf Stadt der

Engel 354). She adds that this home is valuable, especially when compared to people who live or are even born in exile and never feel that attachment to a language. As much as it provides a home, it is also a restriction: It ties you to the group of the speakers of the language and it restricts the perspectives one can take on life. This is, however, exactly where other languages can have a place, in opening notions of difference and hybridity, as in the case of the circular history of the Hopi, and they can transport truths that are too bitter to formulate or accept in one’s own language as they create a distance, a space to reflect on one’s own language. This is the case for the protagonist when she is dealing with the ultimate obsolescence: “Angelina, sagte ich, auf englisch: Wir alle müssen sterben. […]

Ich dachte, warum muß ich diese Wahrheit in einer fremden Sprache erfahren. Vielleicht hätte ich sie in meinem heimatlichen Deutsch nicht ausgehalten“ (Wolf Stadt der Engel

335). English is the language in which she can first pronounce the truth: that all humans must deal with the ultimate obsoleteness of death, this parallels Amerika as place in which she can access memories that remained buried in Germany. Hopi is the language that shows her that one can conceptualize death differently, namely as the completion of a circle before the arrival of the next one. Ultimately, she remains committed to her language and its inherent understanding of time as she says she is too old to start over. Despite her

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experience of difference, she still sees her own obsoleteness as an end point toward which she is ultimately traveling, but she does learn to accept that death – obsoleteness – is part of every life and inherent in any history (Wolf Stadt der Engel 413). The novel concludes with the assessment that in comparison to the earth’s existential crises, a precarious relationship to a fragile Nation-Thing is negligible.

The role of Amerika, the United States, and America in Stadt der Engel are manifold. Amerika begins as a refuge from the personal obsoleteness the protagonist experiences in the (re-)unified Germany and her feeling of lacking access to its jouissance because it appears to demand her giving up the GDR-Thing in all its facets. The United

States first becomes a place for the protagonist to come to terms with her personal history far away from the German public discourse surrounding her involvement in the dystopian aspects of the GDR, and her affects of shame and helplessness she feels because of her and the GDR’s obsoleteness as well as towards the (re-)unified German Nation-Thing. It further serves as a place to search for solutions of the protagonist’s conundrum of obsoleteness and need of a new Thing. The problematic solution she finds, she finds in the fantasy of the exotic hybrid of America, which allows figures to live in multiple cultures and with multiple things at once. In the exotic myths, she even finds ways to resurrect her hope for her utopia in their historical concept of history, which will not affect her personally but allows her to let go of her obsolete and accept her position in a new symbolic order, to which she returns, in the end, aware of her vanity.

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3.2. Schultze gets the blues

Schultze gets the blues, by Michael Schorr, is an art-house movie that had its theater release in 2003 and was met with great success given its production size. As Robert Pirro pointed out, the film resists its placement into genre, as it fluctuates between “funny and forlorn moments” (172), but one can best call it a dark comedy. It was Michael Schorr’s first feature length film as a writer and as a director. Notably, Schorr grew up in West-

Germany but chose an eastern German protagonist for his portrayal of the problems surrounding the German Nation-Thing and the function of Amerika. This opens up the film to accusations of intra-German exotism and stereotyping - namely the western German fantasy of eastern German protagonists to gain a naive perspective on Amerika, which has been lost in western Germany, thereby creating the possibility of reactivating Amerika as a refuge from the suffocating strictness and orderliness ingrained into the German Nation-

Thing.62 The constellation certainly adds a layer to the interpretation of Schultze and distinguishes it from Stadt der Engel, in which an eastern German, the author as well as the narrator, tells the story of someone who has herself lived in the GDR.

More interesting for this dissertation are the strong parallels to Stadt der Engel, especially in its treatment of Amerika as a refuge from a German-made obsoleteness and its focus on peripheral American cultures and hybridity as an example for a way to renew the jouissance of the German Nation-Thing. Before the analysis and comparison of

Schultze and Stadt der Engel, it is important that I reiterate the issues that arise when one

62 Nick Nodgin in Screening the East describes the provincial simpleton and brooding loner, all fitting characterizations of Schultze, as “stock characterizations” of the eastern German male figures (195)

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compares film and novel. Feature films and novels both shape a part of the German public discourse on Amerika interactively through their fictional aesthetic appropriation of the object; thus, a comparison of both is certainly valid. However, the media differences make such an endeavor tremendously treacherous. As pointed out in the previous chapter, the differences outweigh the similarities. The two forms of media manifest a broad array of differences, for example, in semiotic language, in their codes, in their ability to change tenses, in their spatial and temporal orientation, and in their materiality, to just name some important distinctions. Feature films and novels, nevertheless, also exhibit a set of similarities that, to a significant degree, are connected to the narrative nature of both media.

The narrative, therefore, is the focal point of most comparative approaches, which is also true for this dissertation. There are other points of overlap that are essential for my work specifically, namely myth and trope. Both exist as a media-specific surface as well as a deep structure that survives even drastic changes in the surface, as Lévi-Strauss pointed out for myth: “[Unlike poetry, its] substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story it tells” (66). Amerika as myth and trope, consequently, remains comparable across media, even though its presentation and form of media are hardly comparable. The danger that a comparison between the two forms of media always poses is that it concentrates solely on the narrative and excludes media-specific differences such as signifying systems, perspective, specific narrative techniques, or the medium’s materiality. Arguably, the biggest difference between the two forms of media are the sign systems. To briefly repeat the considerations in this dissertation’s first chapter: Verbal signs are low in iconicity and high in symbolic function and consequently work

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conceptually. Cinematic signs are high in iconicity and uncertain in symbolic function and, therefore, they work in visual and auditory impressions. Instead of asking the reader to visualize what the text describes, the cinema fills out many of the semiotic work with iconic signs; the arsenal to mark the symbolic function of a sign is, on the other hand, far greater in writing (cf. McFarlane 13-28). Critics who compare both forms have to do more than just acknowledge these differences; they must appropriate space to the media-specific analysis of the cultural product without losing sight of similarities regarding their research object.

Thus, an analysis of Schultze gets the blues within the comparative approach I am taking must also include possible filmic intertexts and references. The most prominent intertext of Schultze is certainly Werner Herzog’s Stroszek - a dependency pointed out by

Emily Hauze in “Keyed Fantasies: Music, the Accordion, and the American Dream in

Stroszek and Schultze gets the blues.” The intertextual references between the movies range from aesthetics and the focus on music, especially the accordion, to the narrative and the construction of the protagonist as a simple-minded older single man whose existence is determined by strict social norms and expectations, and who is thrown into obsoleteness by a dismissive society. The temporal distance between both films, Stroszek was released in 1977, Schultze in 2003, begs the question of what historical circumstances necessitated the response by Schorr at that point in time and how Schorr attempts to change the imagological concept of Stroszek in his movie. Schulze in a way resurrects the myth of

Amerika as a refuge, which Stroszek utterly destroyed.

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Schultze comes late in an era in which, as Sabine Hake argues in German National

Cinema, German film production went through massive changes away from art house and toward a Hollywood framework of genre, production value, driven by a new model of financing. Instead of the old divisions between public and private, film and television,

German movies since the 1990s have been mostly produced through mixed funding:

“Independent production companies, international distribution companies, public and private television stations, and regional and local film boards now all work together in developing mixed forms of film financing and moving toward transnational modes of production” (Hake 192). This model has led to a concentration on two main factors by the

German film industry: (International) marketability and a local focus. The new central model of film financing arguably affected the possible function of Amerika in German movies as it steered them toward adapting Hollywood genres but demanded regional settings and regionally bound narratives. Noteworthy for their particular involvement with

Amerika, among the countless road movies or buddy comedies of the time, are Ronald

Eichhorn’s Amerika from 1995, a frontier drama set in Amerika, Saxony, and Detlev

Buck’s Wir können auch anders, a neo-western set in eastern Germany. Many of the movies deal with the tension between the regional and the cosmopolitan and in the case of the former GDR, with the adjustment that the change in the economic and political system and the dominance of a new Nation-Thing requires. Schultze does that as well, but importantly lets the protagonist actually travel to the United States.

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3.2.1. Schultze as Heimatfilm

As Robert Pirro points out, Schultze initially invites comparisons to the genres of

Heimatfilm and milieu film,as the first hour of the movie is set entirely in the small town of Teutschenthal and portrays the life of the miner Schultze and his two friends, Jürgen and

Manfred, who were sent into early retirement by the mining company that has taken over the salt mine following the Wende (172). Heimatfilme, as Nick Hodgin defines them, are concerned with “Heimat (home, homeland) identity, an identity that largely ignores the features of modern life and celebrates instead the traditions of an imagined, ostensibly apolitical, all-German past” (7). In this function, the films offer refuge from the complexities and diversities of the life world and simplify notions of belonging and communal identities. The films have been particularly involved in constructing a myth of the German nation as a positive idyllic ethnic community (cf. Ludewig Screening 25-30).

Schultze, however, despite relying on tropes and aesthetics of Heimatfilme, portrays the

Heimat identity as restrictive and as threatened by economic and personal obsoleteness, as well as lacking jouissance in comparison to the diverse life outside its narrow definition of

Germanness. The film narrates how Schultze and his friends struggle with the affects that come with being declared obsolete, by being forced to retire. Overall, one could describe their immediate reaction as repression. They attempt to continue living their lives within the traditions and rituals they had established before, between the pub, fishing on a railway bridge, and their homes. But without the identity sustaining aspect of work and the loss of perceived purpose in life, these rituals bring them no joy. The overall lack of camera movement and the often very long takes in medium shot underscore the stagnation in

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obsoleteness, the lack of positivity and excitement in the protagonists' lives. The long takes and the still camera are reminiscent of televised “Volkstheater” pieces, like the

Komödiantenstadel. The misé-en-scène reinforces the perception of Heimatfilm but not in its usual romanticization, rather, as a run-down and depressing milieu (cf. Ludewig 11).

The dominant colors are gray and brown, the spaces through which the friends move are largely either small and dingy, like Schultze’s little house and the pub, or oversized and unadorned, like the hall in which Manfred and Jürgen play chess. Many of the spaces are also clearly marked as now largely outmoded remnants from the GDR. Images like playing chess in the oversized hall in the industrial style of the GDR or of Schultze’s outmoded furniture create the impression that not much has changed since the Wende. The spaces and the people in it did not manage to partake in the consumer culture’s pressure to embrace newness. The only character who has bought into the consumer culture and its demand for constant novelty is Manfred. He bought a new fishing pole and a new house. Schorr presents the development area in which Manfred built his house in a montage of stills as equally gray and bleak as the rest of Teutschenthal but also riddled with symmetry and repetition, making it not only a depressing but also a sort of non-place. Schultze, hence, represents Heimat as broken and no longer capable of holding romanticized ideas of belonging and identification.

Driven by the loss of Heimat and their own obsoleteness, the protagonists show affects like shame, sadness, and aggression. Symptomatic are the many scenes in which they sit around tables, hanging their heads, with nothing to say to each other, like the two takes depicting their retirement celebrations (0:04:00-0:05:55). First, the camera shoots

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through a window, showing miners standing around Schultze, Manfred, and Jürgen, who sit at a table. The miners ironically sing a song about going into the mine in which “images of fellowship and collaborative effort predominate,” to the three who will no longer be working there (Pirro 173). After they leave, the camera cuts to the inside of the room, showing the three motionless and speechless, with hanging heads, in front of their salt lamps - a farewell present. The ritual manifests the exclusion from their work group of social contacts. It also expresses the changes from a socialist system to capitalism. Forced retirement was unheard of in the GDR, and the status of being a worker was a central part of the people’s identity in the “worker and farmer state.” In the capitalist system, the decision of who is allowed to work and who is not belongs to the private company, for whom the social aspect is irrelevant. Following their exclusion, the friend’s feeling of obsoleteness manifests itself in anger in the cases of Jürgen and Manfred. Jürgen yells from his window at a man who is mowing the lawn in front of his apartment complex, work that is necessary and routine upkeep (0:15:10). Manfred angrily quits a chess game between him and Jürgen as his loss is imminent (0:26:40). The focus at the beginning of the film is unequivocally on the region as well as the three figures and their milieu, and both are clearly marked as being threatened by obsoleteness.

At the same time, the film speaks to a broader German dilemma that is connected to the German (re-)unification. First, Schultze and his friends live in the fictitious place of

Teutschenthal, a fact that is already revealed in the second scene of the movie (0:00:30).

On the one hand, this is reminiscent of an obsolete spelling of “deutsch” – German, a spelling that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explicitly references in his Xenien, bemoaning

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the German inability to form a unified nation: “Deutsch oder teutsch, du wirst nicht klug”

(398). On the other hand, it opens an intermedia reference to the first German adventure novel, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Der Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus

Teutsch, a work that revolves around a simple-minded Picaro and criticizes the social and political conditions of the time - a description that also fits Schultze. Additionally, the gatekeeper of the railroad crossing continuously quotes a cultural founding father of the

German Nation-Thing, but not Goethe’s Faust, the German urtext, but Schiller’s Die

Räuber, a text about rebellion and escape from social chains and expectations: “Soll sich mein hochfliegender Geist an den Schneckengang der Materie ketten lassen” (in Schultze

0:08:05). The text is from Sturm und Drang, not German Classicism, and the utterance of

Franz Moor contains the dichotomy between idealism and materialism that develops its full symbolic power in the misé-en-scène. The gatekeeper as representative of the idealism is in a tower high above the protagonists and wishes for an escape from the material world, represented by them. He protects the protagonists from getting hit by a train - the eternal symbol of modernity and progress, but simultaneously hinders them from moving on, all the while he himself is backwards looking to a German prehistory. One can, hence, read the scenes with the gatekeeper as a commentary on the connection between the intellectual

“Kulturnation” and the lived German nation of the worker, in which the idealistic fantasy of revolution and self-fulfillment actually created a nation that does the exact opposite, namely constrict and rule the life world of the individual. Schultze’s references to foundational texts of the German nation are not the only thing that illustrates the movie's

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ambition to portray conditions of the German communal identity and its exclusionary effects.

The film also explicitly discusses the newest German histories and their effects on the protagonist’s and his friend’s lives. Most noticeably, in a scene in Schultze’s living room. Schultze, Manfred, and Jürgen are talking about their lives (after they have already broken their sedentary monotony of early retirement) and Jürgen notes: “Ich sag dir, die haben uns beschissen. ‘Ne neue Revolution muss her.” Schultze asks if the friends are not too old for another revolution, to which Manfred replies: "Quatsch, für ne Revolution ist man nie zu alt (0:46:16 - 0:47:25). The dialogue exemplifies the frustration of many eastern

Germans after the Wende who felt betrayed by the politicians and activists, who had promised “blooming landscapes.” Instead, they received economic obsoleteness and a social position at the fringes. On the basis of these references to a context of the German nation, I argue that the film seeks to portray an issue, a contradiction in the construction of the German itself, not only in the regional culture of an eastern German small town.

3.2.2. Ubiquitous Amerika

Despite these references to matters of the German Nation-Thing and its Heimatfilm character, Amerika permeates Schultze gets the blues from the very beginning.

Aesthetically, Schultze, like its intertext Stroszek, references Western movies in its first scene. But where Stroszek displays an incarcerated German playing a cowboy as a metaphor for the incarceration of the German imagination by tropes produced in the United

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States, Schultze comically contrasts the trope of the establishing shot known from Western movies. Instead of the American wilderness, however, it portrays a modern eastern German landscape, and instead of a rider on a horse, a big German on a bicycle crosses the screen.

Schultze uses the trope of the “wild east” to caricature its constructed parallel. In Western movies, this establishing shot is usually the desert or prairie of the Southwest of the United

States, e.g., John Ford's The Searchers. Stereotypically, a lone rider then enters the scene, filmed as an extreme-long shot, usually from the left back to the right front of the frame, visually bringing depth into the shot and showing the immense vastness of the country

(Folsom 197). The establishing shot in Schultze uses the trope but almost completely inverts it, choosing a very low angle of the camera, filming parallel to the ground and with a shallow focus, making the image appear almost two-dimensional, signifying confinement and limitation instead of vastness and freedom. The landscape is by no means untouched, a wind turbine, power lines, and a hill shaped like one typically created in mining are visible. The misé-en-scène depicts the progress in power production and indicates a power difference between the new and the old, placing the wind turbine in the foreground, dominating the picture. Like a cowboy, Schultze also rides through the picture, but on a bicycle, from right to left, and parallel to the camera. The film establishes him as someone caught in his ways as the lack of depth in the shot indicates limited possibilities of movement. His rotund figure and the conservative working class clothing add to that impression. That he is moving from right to left could, on the one hand, refer to him going west but might also show him confounding the expectations the viewer has given the landscape establishing shots and the general reading direction of Western cultures. Schultze

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gets the blues introduces itself as a movie that intends to work against the grain - of the expectations placed on Schultze by the local community of his hometown and on a macro level of images of Amerika. In contrast to the depiction of Bruno - the protagonist of

Stroszek, who is shown walking the halls of a penitentiary in the establishing shot - the limitations of Schultze’s life are depicted in a more subtle way: Schorr shows him in the open countryside, with a seemingly limitless choice of direction of movement, but limited by perspective and his routine. Another early allusion to America is the zydeco music that plays during the opening credits (0:01:10) as well as, of course, the title of the movie.63 I mark zydeco as American instead of Amerikan, as it is music that is known only to a minute minority in Germany and hence not part of Amerika. The blues of the film’s title is a misnomer musically but does pick up the common American English usage of blues as being sad or depressed. Nevertheless, it affirms the German lack of actual knowledge of the intricacies of America. Amerika also plays a role narratively early in the movie as the

United States are Manfred’s declared dream land. He is an adherent of the myth of the economic American Dream. This manifests itself when he states that his son has to ride in motorcycle races in the United States because that is where Manfred believes he can earn a lot of money, or in comments about Schutze when he is in the United States: “Schultze hats richtig gemacht,” claiming that Schultze probably got a record deal in Amerika and is now a millionaire. His association with Amerika is also signified visually in the American

63 “Zydeco […] is the exuberant dance music of south-west Louisiana’s black Creoles. Stylistically, it is a rich hybrid, with a core of Afro-Caribbean rhythms, blues, and Cajun music (zydeco’s white counterpart), and a wealth of other elements that may vary widely from band to band. Traditionally, zydeco is sung in French, and its lyrics are often improvised” (Sandmel/Oliver 2).

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flag he keeps on a couch in his home, and when the three friends visit the Motocross track, they all hold small American flags. In line with his buying into this specific American

Dream, Manfred also believes in the mechanism of consumer culture, demonstrated when he buys a new house and a new “Amerikan” fishing rod. However, he seems to be aware that his claims are dreams or he fears his disillusionment because he does not follow up on them and does not pursue a trip to the United States himself. The American Dream is an ersatz-utopia in the new consumer culture that, however, leaves the individual forever unsatisfied as she only has a choice between its deconstruction by confrontation with the

United States or to leaving it an unfulfilled longing. In Manfred, Schultze exemplifies how the most prominent of the German myths of Amerika, i.e. the land of economic riches, works. It shows the pitfalls of that ersatz-utopia but also portrays its potential to remedy some of the negative affects of the system of obsolescence called capitalism. From a

Western German perspective, the figure of Manfred is the incarnation of the naïve eastern

German fantasy of Amerika described by Reinhard Zachau in “Wie Amerika der DDR die

Freiheit gab:“ “[Die] Unkenntnis [der DDR Bürger] wirkte auf Westler komisch, […] konnte aber auch als erfrischend naiv empfunden werden, da sich für den Ostler oft große

Hoffnungen mit den USA verknüpften. Die Arroganz der Achtundsechziger fehlte völlig.”

All German characters in Schulze are located on this spectrum: Manfred, whose enthusiasm and infatuation are alienating and Schultze, whose naiveté appears more refreshing. In the end, the film uses Manfred’s one-sided image as a critique of the German tendency to project their biases onto Amerika, which it represents as diverse and evading a definite appropriation.

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3.2.3. America/Amerika and the power of disruption

America and Amerika also have the power of disruption in Schultze. It comes into the narrative as a possibility, namely in the form of a competition among the members of the local music club “Harmonie” over who will be sent to represent Teutschenthal at the annual German festival in New Braunfels, Texas. Such clubs are notorious for their backward ideas regarding the German nation and their general conservatism, as music clubs often attempt to preserve German folk music and the ideals connected to this form of music (cf. Bendixen 194), and the festival is introduced accordingly. The shot composition shows a group of old men sitting around a wooden table, with their beer and schnapps glasses in front of them and a club pennant in the middle. In the lower left-hand corner and out of focus is the back of a television, replicating an over-the-shoulder shot of the apparatus. A voice in a documentary voiceover tone gives facts about New Braunfels in

English, which the man with the remote quickly interrupts, indicating that the text has not been understood (13:05 - 14:15). I argue that the scene is a metaphor for the German images of Amerika, in which the television presents US media products that are not understood because they not only use another language but employ a different visual vocabulary - a different semiotic system - as well. Initially, this presentation does not disrupt Schultze’s life; rather, he is adamant that he does not want to go. But it sows the seeds of an idea and eventually breaks the monotony of personal obsoleteness and meaningless routines. The second time Amerika interrupts in the form of American music, it literally interrupts thoughts of obsoleteness.

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Amerika provides a source of disruption in the face of the ultimate obsoleteness - one’s own death. The movie never explicitly states that Schultze is sick, but it alludes to it by repeatedly showing him coughing. The explanation for the coughing is then provided by the radio: when Schultze turns it on in his home, the moderator is talking about a higher rate of lung cancer among miners due to their exposure to diesel exhaust gases in a confined space throughout their work lives (0:28:40). Presumably to avoid the confrontation with his own impending death, Schultze changes the channel and for the first time hears zydeco music. This foreign music initially also seems to cause unease: Schultze turns the radio off and turns his back to the camera, ready to head out of the room, only to turn back, turn on the radio again. After a second of listening, Schultze leaves for the living room, picks up his accordion and starts with a polka, slowly figuring out how to play zydeco by mainly increasing the speed. Compared to the difficulties the members of the music club have with the audio-visual medium of video, music appears as a semiotic system that allows an easy access of the Other, particularly in the form that has as many different influences as zydeco.

This is the beginning of Schultze’s transformation from someone stuck in repetitive rituals, to someone who embraces difference and hybridity. And it is America in its fringe cultures

- particularly that of the Southern Bayou - that becomes a place for this liberating embrace of cultural difference. Over the course of the movie, Amerika then becomes the space for embracing the unifying and disruptive power of cultural hybridity and dealing with the ultimate human obsoleteness, a clear parallel to Stadt der Engel.

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3.2.4. Amerika as path into hybridity

As much as the zydeco indicates the intrusion of a new diversity, it motivates

Schultze to go to the United States as a way out of his obsoleteness, which in turn enables him and his friends to find their jouissance in an open and diverse German nation. Amerika becomes an example of how one nation can consist of groups that find their jouissance in order and tradition as well as groups who find it in improvisation and personal liberty.

Schultze, hence, generally follows the typical distinction I introduced in the previous chapter between individualistic-libertarian and collectivist-authoritarian forms of nations.

The issue that the film identifies in the German collectivist-authoritarian nation apart from its exclusionary tendencies is its inability to deal with change. At the beginning of the movie, Schultze is the embodiment of those German ideals. He leads such a regulated life that the loss of one part of the routine, i.e. his job, causes his identity formation to collapse.

At the beginning of the movie, he is so caught up in the regimen of his life that even his mates at the music club make derisive comments about the polka that he always plays, and these men seem to be equally engrossed in the preservations of the German nation’s rules.

Teutschenthal, however, is confronted with the presence of outside agents of diversity and disruption. Apart from the the music, two female figures associated with

Dionysian vices like excessive alcohol consumption, gambling, and dancing are intruders into the social order that present Schultze with an alternative to his life in order and obsoleteness. The Lady Lorant from his mother’s retirement home makes Schultze drink alcohol and wants to take him to a casino before her unexpected death. Despite her sudden and early death, it is clear that her fate is preferable compared to Schultze’s mother, who

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leads her miserable existence in apathy. The casino stands for a different handling of money in consumer culture - not to acquire something but to spend it for a momentary stimulant effect and feelings of joy. The waitress with her visible breast and protruding nipples through her thin shirt as well as her spontaneous flamenco dance and her plan to go to

Spain stands for the allure of the Other, its promise of an excess of jouissance in sexuality and movement. Along with zydeco, both female figures disturb the order of Teutschenthal through the intrusion of difference that embraces excess of enjoyment as a remedy for obsoleteness. Schultze defies tradition for the first time when he plays a zydeco piece during the 50th anniversary celebration of the Musikverein. The intrusion of difference, particularly exotic difference, in the form of zydeco is for Schultze himself deeply shocking: He goes to the doctor immediately after first hearing and playing zydeco because he believes he is sick. The film seems to associate Amerika, or at least the peripheral cultures of America, with an embrace of difference. Through the figure of Schultze and his utter lack of knowledge regarding the history of images of Amerika in Germany, it can still serve as a space for the fantasy of romantic salvation, in which Schultze can risk the transgressions of the expectations of his German Nation-Thing without the repercussions he experiences at home.64 The movie plot is, one can argue, mainly a slow discovery of this form of personal enjoyment and the consequent renegotiation of the relationship and the construct of the German Nation-Thing by Schultze.

64 At this point I would like to remind the reader of above mentioned idea by Jameson that the romantic and magical can be seen as a disruptor in a society which is dominated by the real. It can futher offer an alternative for the conceptualizing of history and help create new utopias, lost in late-capitalism (cf. Jameson 104).

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The status of Amerika for a romantic vision of peaceful diversity is marked by the bending of continuity and the claim to reality. As in Stadt der Engel, magic realism breaks the early strictly realistic narrative and again leads to the resolution of the contradictions and hardships the main protagonist has with the German nation and his relationship to it.

In Schultze, however, this intrusion is set at the moment that the global encroaches upon the fixed order of the Thing. As one of the first acts after embracing America as a disruptive force enabling Schultze to break out, he cooks Jambalaya for Manfred und Jürgen. As he is following the recipe of a radio cook, the radio voice begins to react to Schultze’s actions, for example, Schultze wants to try the dish before it is done, but the voice reprimands him and then comments on how satisfying the beer is that Schultze is drinking (0:38:47). In the final scenes, the black women Schultze had met in the United States are part of his procession, a development that at least bends the probability of reality. Many scenes of the second part of the narrative point toward a dream-like state of being, different from the real hardships of the first part.

Schultze’s way of access to America via the radio, music, and later the book, Kings of Swamp Music, which the waitress gives him, continue the film's critique of the audiovisual media as the prime supplier of images of Amerika. The old media offer a viable access for Schultze to an America beyond surface structures of Western consumer culture.

Schultze also subtly hints at its unreliable narration through incongruities between the intercut narrative strands of Jürgen and Manfred, who remained in Teutschenthal and imagine Schultze’s fate in Amerika, and Schultze’s travel narrative. Continuity editing is broken when Schultze is depicted as having a Polaroid image taken with a cockatoo. After

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a cut, the audience witnesses Jürgen and Manfred holding the image in their hand, and after another cut, we are back on the houseboat. The time necessary for the picture to travel to

Germany by mail and the perceived duration of Schultze’s stay on the houseboat appear to be out of sync. Amerika in this as well affirms its role outside the strict rules of realism and instead becomes the locus of romantic ideas of cohesion and fulfillment of fantasies of belonging.

3.2.5. Music between Heimat, disruptive force, and connective semiotic system

As I have already stated, the primary access to America for Schultze is music.

Music is an aspect that both unites and divides Schultze gets the blues, its intertext Stroszek and my point of comparison, Stadt der Engel. All three cultural products thematize German folk music. For Stroszek it is a means of earning money by playing his accordion in

Munich’s backyards before it becomes a way to transport some of his Heimat - his home - to Amerika. For the protagonist of Stadt der Engel, it is a means to find an access to the

(re-)unified German Nation-Thing and create a sense of “Heimat” in the United States. For

Schultze, however, German folk music is a symbolic and ritualistic prison. It represents the endless paternalistic repetition of rituals, which seems impossible for Schultze, Jürgen, and

Manfred to break (cf. Layne 131). It is Schultze’s diversion from folk music and his experimentation with zydeco that leads him toward Amerika and a break with his father and his father’s rituals and traditions.

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Music has played a central role in the German tropes of Amerika in the twentieth century, in which US music often brought disruption and change before it became simply a consumer good and simulacra toward the end of the century. Most of the styles of

American music were at the beginning associated with African Americans, as in jazz, blues, funk, rock’n’roll, etc. on the one hand and with a youth counterculture and rebellion on the other. Beginning with the Weimar Republic’s infatuation with jazz, American music has often been identified as a threat to the order of society, the German nation, and its specific way of enjoyment (cf. Poiger Jazz 60-68). Notably, the GDR government felt threatened by the influence of American music on its youth as it represented not only a counterculture but also the product from the declared enemy, the United States (cf. Wicke

61-63). The GDR government had a fractured relationship with the blues, as Michael

Rauhut points out in “Lass es bluten: Blues-Diskurse in West und Ost.” On the one hand, critics from the East as well as from the West could romanticize the blues as an authentic expression of the black proletariat that was ruined by its commercialization, which corresponded perfectly with the GDR’s tropes of Amerika (cf. Rauhut 116). On the other hand, the government was afraid of its effects on the youth culture and its infatuation with the Klassenfeind. Rauhut argues that blues-rock was actually the culture that remained stable in the GDR far into the 1980s: “The model which the generations of ‘Bluesers’ who came after one another followed remained the ideals of the hippie era. Freedom, authenticity, and nonconformity were the primary values which were reflected in the behavior, the artistic preferences and outfits” (121). At the time of the Wende, there were still over 50 clubs that promoted the blues in the GDR and many of them were in the

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country. As many novels like Christoph Diekmann’s My Generation, or Wolfgang

Brüssig’s Sonnenallee describe, the contact with forms of American music was instrumental in establishing their identities in an oppressive system like the GDR. Schultze, however, was not affected by American music prior to his encounter with zydeco.

Aside from its role in mass culture, the medium music provides the possibility of constant variation, change, and transculturality, as shown in Schultze. The instrument that both Schultze and the protagonist of Stroszek, Bruno, bring on their journey to the United

States is the accordion, an instrument mainly used for folk songs in almost all of Germany.

The accordion is a traveling instrument and an instrument for travel, as Emily Hauze notes in “Keyed Fantasies:” “[T]he complex machinery of the accordion is a metaphor for the dreams that might be realised in America and for the mobility required to realise them. The accordion is a symbol of an intact and mobile body capable of crossing cultural boundaries”

(85). Initially, however, the opposite is true for Schultze; the accordion is a symbol of the constraints of tradition. He, like his father, has always played the same polka. One member of the music club even remarks that it should be called the “Schultze polka.” This overbearing connection between father and son is reinforced visually in an image of

Schultze’s father that he has in his living room and in which the father phallically stretches out the accordion. When Schultze discovers zydeco, he guiltily attempts to turn the image to face the wall, but it immediately falls, and he has to put it back the right way (0:56:45).

The overbearing gaze of the father cannot be remedied by ignoring him. Schultze must face the shame that initially comes with his musical transgression. If one is inclined to continue the metaphor of the father-son relationship as a representation of the relationship between

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the individual and the nation as Thing, the scene allegorically portrays the futility of attempts to rid oneself of the same. As much as Schultze cannot divest himself of the presence of his father through the act of turning his image, Germans cannot rid themselves of their nation by ignoring or denouncing its portrayal. Instead, Schultze presents how one can work with and adapt the rituals and histories of the father and by extension the Nation-

Thing into new and hybrid forms in an act of self-assertion as possibilities of making both productive for the protagonist and the community of Teutschenthal. Zydeco is a path of emancipation from his father and the tradition of the music club (Hauze 91). In its tradition of incorporating the polka and many other influences, zydeco does not do away with the father’s legacy but makes it into something new. Schultze does represent the desire to create an open and multicultural German nation without denying its presence and importance altogether.

The music associated with the bayou is a diverse mixture, its influences range from

French folklore, Caribbean music, the blues, and as Schorr explains in his commentary on the DVD, the polka. Schorr shows the commonality of polka and zydeco in the scene in which Schultze discovers the latter and moves effortlessly from playing one to the other.

The accordion also connects the two forms of music. The film depicts zydeco as being dynamic and not congealed in the expectation of what music representing a culture must be. It contrasts with both the music club in eastern Germany and the German music festival in New Braunfels, where old white males attempt to hold on to an old-fashioned understanding of German heritage and thereby hinder every change and diversification.

Tellingly, when Schultze plays his zydeco skid at the music club’s festival, he receives

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applause only from his friends, and one male guest even shouts “scheiß Negermusik” - damn negro music (0:56:39). The incident further highlights the problems a closed, backward, rigid German nation entails as it excludes any outside influence, even if it provides an excess of jouissance. The German Nation-Thing in Teutschenthal not only despises zydeco, but it also marks it as racial other, enhancing the notion that it does not have a space in the German nation and revealing that there is a concept of whiteness attached to it. Amerika, within this line of thought, is not only hybrid in culture but hybrid in race, which in the eyes of German nationalism is inherently inferior. While this trope of

Amerika as an example of the inferiority of hybridity contains disquieting connections to the National Socialist ideologies of pure race, it can be traced further in the German enlightenment thought of figures like Kant, Hegel, Herder, or Schopenhauer (cf. Gilman

106-111). In contrast, Schultze treats zydeco and the people of the bayou who play the music in a romantic fashion, depicting them as friendly and inclusive without exception, which potentially opens the movie up to accusations of exotism. It is not only the narrative of the “salad bowl” or the “melting pot” that is glorified as resort from the moribund

German nation, but the people in the bayou who come from a wide variety of backgrounds are ascribed specific utopian fantasies like leading an authentic, more natural lifestyle and having a closer connection to music and their body. However, I would not claim that the film does this in an exploitative fashion; rather, it is the fascination with the Other and the wish to participate in something subversive to one’s own culture that leads Schultze to idealize the music and culture of zydeco.

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3.2.6. Amerika as refuge

For Schultze, however, music is only the gateway to his fantasy of Amerika, which he visits after the music club has picked him as their representative to the New Braunfels

German music festival. Before he gets the improbable news that the music club has chosen him after he was booed off the stage, he attempts to save up the money to purchase the trip himself with a couple of odd jobs. But in what one can identify as a critique of the capitalist system manufacturing longing, just to continuously make it more difficult to achieve, the travel agency increases the price right at the moment he goes to purchase the trip to the

“Herbst in Louisiana” (1:00:00). His community, nevertheless, enables him to travel to what Frauke Hunfeld in her critique for the magazine Der Stern called “[a] new beginning full of longing in the swamps of Louisiana.”65 Before the flight, Jürgen and Manfred accompany Schultze to the airport, where one can witness that Germany also has a different side: Schultze, his clothes, and his luggage look completely outmoded among the other passengers and the modern architecture. The two lifeworlds appear to not be in communication with each other as the three figures only communicate among themselves.

Visually they are placed at the center of the screen; the other people become peripheral. As much as the movie hints at a German universality, as I have explained above, it briefly establishes a differentiation between a rural eastern and a cosmopolitan version of the

Nation-Thing in this short sequence.

65 “Sehnsuchtsvoller Neuanfang in den Sümpfen Louisianas” (Hunfeld - my translation)

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In the first impressions of the United States, Schultze sees his longing for hybridity and difference unfulfilled. After Schultze’s farewell scene at the airport, the film cuts to a thirty-second flight over the swamps accentuated by zydeco (1:05:30-1:06:00). The next cut, however, is to a pan over the “Edelweiss Inn” in the rain, and then to Schultze in a bleak US motel room. It is an Amerika that focuses on its European roots that Schultze encounters first, one in which the neighbor knocks on the wall just seconds after Schultze has started playing his zydeco on his accordion. More of this side of Amerika awaits at the festival, where Schultze first goes into the “Spass Haus” and witnesses people in

Lederhosen yodeling. The scenes of bleakness caused by the Amerikan appropriation of

German culture are interrupted only by a scene where Schultze enters a whirlpool at the motel where he meets a middle-aged black woman who asks him about the music he was playing and generally appears to be very accepting and interested. In all the other scenes,

Schultze seems to be alienated as he begins to wander around the beerfest aimlessly. The fest provides moments of recognition - when the German national anthem plays, Schultze stops in his tracks and stands at attention, and as the camera does a half-circle pan, it shows people doing the same thing on stage (1:11:45) - but in this recognition lies no jouissance.

The film continues with a cut to the empty fairgrounds, highlighting the isolation and the bleakness of this form of Amerika in whose creation and preservation Schultze is supposed to assist. However, he decides against participating and in favor of going on a quest to find the space of his longing. The next take encapsulates this decision symbolically. It shows

Schultze behind bubbling water, mirroring his experience in the motel’s whirlpool and symbolizing the power of nature and the material, contrary to the order of fest. After a short

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while of contemplation, Schultze starts walking and leaves the frame, signifying him leaving the frame of expectations within this European Amerika and the frame of expectations of Germanness in which he had been socialized (1:12:30). Simultaneously, he breaks with the image of Amerika present at home as the next cut shows Jürgen and

Manfred in the pub, in front of small plastic US-flags, talking about how Schultze will make a record and become a millionaire. Instead, he steals a boat and begins his trip to the

Louisiana Bayou.

In the protagonist’s success in finding a productive Amerika in peripheral cultures,

Schultze notably diverges from Stroszek but parallels Stadt der Engel. Schultze, Bruno, and the nameless protagonist in Stadt der Engel all experience very different parts of the country – New York and Wisconsin, Los Angeles and the Southwest, Texas and the Bayou

– and those places matter as they afford the protagonist different options for encountering the country. To an equal degree, the protagonist’s heritage seems to matter since a utopian hybridity in peripheral cultures appears to be possible still for the eastern German protagonists. In contrast, the West-German protagonist in the 1970s, Bruno, cannot find a home: as he is first confronted with a capitalist European-Amerikan world that he does not understand and in the end does not find sanctuary from the pressures of that world on a

Native American reservation, which is where he ends up taking his own life. Herzog’s film also places the protagonist in a sort of dialectical place, which he describes as follows:

“You have these points in the United States - for example, Las Vegas, or the Stock

Exchange on Wall Street, or San Quentin prison - where the dreams and nightmares all come together. And I count Plainfield, Wisconsin [the setting of the film], amongst them”

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(in Cronin 146-147). I would argue that the places Herzog describes are those where dreams actually remain unfulfilled and often vanish in varieties of Amerika that are governed by strict rules of enjoyment. The same happens to Schultze, with the remarkable difference that his attempt to take agency and find refuge is successful after he leaves the assigned social frame.

Schultze generally presents Amerika very differently from the other two cultural products, as it shows the land in a diverse variety, a landscape in all moods and colors - a hybrid concoction of landscapes and people. The people that Schultze meets after he leaves

New Braunfels are without exception friendly, open, and helpful. A Czech polka band helps him to find a gas station and gives him provisions for his trip (1:15:15) and police officers assist him to free his boat without prompting (1:31:21) - in a cutscene to Jürgen and Manfred in the pub, Manfred seems to comment on these circumstances: “Dem

Schultze gehts jetzt richtig gut. Freundlich sind se die Amis, da kannste nichts sagen”

(1:30:58). Manfred’s image of Amerika as economic El Dorado is certainly false in the film, but his comment shows the presence of intersections between different fantasies of

Amerika.

On the other hand, the film often plays with the expectations tropes of Amerika have wedged into the German imagination in these travel scenes. The police boat, for example, is shown to encroach on Schultze’s small boat and the voices initially sound demanding and intimidating, fitting the German image of Amerikan police, just to turn out to be worried about Schultze’s situation. At times, as in the encounter with the Czech polka band, the setting has surreal features. Schultze beaches his boat as he is evidently out of

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gasoline and wanders through an entirely deserted beach town. On one balcony, he, however, finds the band that is practicing their music, which ends up guiding him to the gas station and gives him provsisions. Another time a duck is shot and lands right in his boat. As he beaches the boat and cooks the duck over a bonfire, he hears a single fiddle playing zydeco. From the fire, the camera cuts to a single old man standing in front of an inconspicuous building, playing a fiddle. Schultze passes from the shadow behind the building into the dimly lit place, greets the fiddler and enters the building, which turns out to be a bar. Seconds later a couple approaches the building and converses with the fiddler in French (1:31:05-1:32.12). Here, the film refers to the hybridity of bayou culture, which has historically been not only a hybrid between white and black culture but between a great variety of cultures, most notably African American, Native American, African Caribbean,

French, and European American, all of which are, in turn, a mixture. Inside the bar,

Schultze experiences his first glimpse of happiness when he quickly finds a dance partner, whom he loses again through a misunderstanding. The dream-like character of these scenes is significant because Schultze’s argument regarding Amerika is not necessarily its value as actual utopia, but the fantasy of utopia is what makes it valuable.

The scene of his first encounter of a bayou dance is significant in another way.

Again alluding to The Searchers, the protagonist does not find an open door in a log cabin, showing the easy access to the source of communal jouissance, the core family, but instead, it shows a nondescript windowless sheet iron building. Schultze has to walk the whole side of the building to find its entrance and instead of being happily welcomed like in The

Searchers first scene, his greeting is ignored by a fiddle-playing older male in a cowboy

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hat. Inside he finds a group of people very different to the white family in The Searchers:

It is a diverse group that is dancing to a black band playing zydeco. This version of Amerika quickly welcomes him as a woman asks him to dance. As the film confirms later, this diverse group dancing to this hybrid form of music is where Schultze finds his enjoyment.

Schultze again shows Amerika’s strength in its diversity outside the stereotypical images.

Shortly thereafter, he arrives at his final destination, a place in which his struggle with obsoleteness and with belonging resolves itself. The space that he finds is notably also a hybrid between a house and a boat, a houseboat. There, Schultze finds the place that fulfills his longings, a place that seems to accept him effortlessly as he is. He enters the frame on his boat from the left-hand side and initially only asks for water but is invited by the inhabitant of the boat, a middle-aged black woman, to stay for crabs with her and her daughter. The houseboat represents a home that is mobile, that can be moved and still remains home, which Schultze extends metaphorically to the German nation, as will become apparent in the final scenes. That he finds his home and the place in which he will die in the home of a nurturing black woman can be interpreted as stereotyping because she can be read as a typical black “mammy,” as Robert Pirro does in The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship (179). As in Stadt der Engel there is a well-known exotism at work in Schultze depicting the escapist experience of the – at times racial – Other as salvation from the restraints and troubles of one’s own culture.

This escape not only lies in the racial Other but also in the other gender as the last station of his journey is predominantly populated by women. This contrasts starkly with much of his home in the mines and the music club, both of which are dominated by males.

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The earlier figures fostering his break from the ever-repeating rituals of his life are also both female, Miss Laurant and the waitress at the pub. Parallel to his movement from

Germany to the United States and the construct of cultural and ethnic unity to cultural and ethnic hybridity, Schultze moves from a world dominated by men to one in which the presence of women dominates. It is this world that opens up the opportunity for Schultze to experience community again instead of German society, which does not provide him an excess of jouissance. Therein lies a parallel between the world that he finds in Louisiana and the world that he lost in the GDR’s socialist system of community.

Without calling his motives into question, these women take him in and accompany him until his death. The parallels to Angelina from Stadt der Engel are striking here: Again, black women help the protagonist to face the ultimate fear, obsoleteness in its most extreme form from a human’s perspective, death. Like the Hopi in Stadt der Engel, they speak a language the protagonist cannot understand, but nevertheless, they offer the notion of difference, which is inspiring not only to the protagonist but also to the German community. Even without speaking the same language, communication does not appear to be a problem between the houseboat owner and Schultze. Initially, their communication is based on satisfying basic human needs like drinking and eating, but soon the owner asks

Schultze to follow her upstairs onto the roof of the houseboat and in a striking shot of the boat, with the swamp in the background and an American flag attached to the fence around the rooftop terrace of the houseboat, one can see the two having an animated (but for the viewer inaudible) discussion using their hands to illustrate what they are saying (1:36:10).

Other shots show communication via the shared appreciation of nature in the form of a

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cockatoo with which Schultze has his picture taken. The film implies that there is a human connection possible transcending specific semiotic systems and within that anthropological similarity lies the possibility of a human community that neglects origin and difference.

In the end, it is nevertheless again music and dance that unifies Schultze and his hosts. The movie cuts to a dance in which a black band plays Schultze’s signature zydeco tune and a diverse group of people dances in pairs. There are blue-haired women dancing with middle-aged men in baroque costume, men in cowboy attire and others in shorts and

Schultze in their midst dancing with the black woman whom he had met in the whirlpool of the motel “Edelweiss Inn” (1:38:11). Her presence underlines the previously mentioned dream character of the many scenes of the Amerika sequence of the film, as do the scenes that lead up to Schultze’s death on the house boat. After he suffers a coughing fit during the dance, the three black women guide him outside. From there the movie cuts to a shot of almost complete darkness. The only sources of light are the inside of the houseboat, visible as it illuminates the upper right-hand corner of the house and one of the posts, the full moon above, and two search lights on boats that slowly approach the camera. These three light sources communicate different symbolic meanings that are all central to the movie. Allegorically, one can read the light from inside the house as the inviting home that

Schultze has found after he had to leave his own home because of his obsoleteness and the people’s unacceptance of outside influences. The boats immediately prompt associations of death and the many rivers that were considered borders between the world of life and the world of death, most famously the river Styx. Finally, there is the moon, which in various contexts unites a multitude of different associations or symbolisms but which, most

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notably for this reading of Schultze, invokes the feminine, chaos, eternity, the phases of life, and the synthesis of the sun and the darkness of the night. As Jules Cashford points out in her extensive study The Moon: Myth and Image, the moon has inspired fascination and worship in almost all cultures around the globe. Particularly, it has been associated with the cycle death and rebirth: Perpetually moving - from crescent to full to crescent to dark to crescent - the moon tells one central story: birth, growth, fullness, decay, death and rebirth” (Cashford 15). Metaphorically, the film finds in the moon what the narrator of

Stadt der Engel found in the Hopi myth. This circularity is also reminiscent of Bruno’s death in Stroszek, in which he kills himself in a chairlift that keeps going around and around. In Schultze, as well as in Stadt der Engel, but in contrast to Stroszek, circularity is conotated positively. While Bruno finds himself caught in the ever-repeating failure predestined by his social position, Schultze delivers an image of circularity as renewal and improvement comparable to Stadt der Engel and associated to an equal degree with a seemingly more authentic Other.

Importantly, however, the film does not associate Schultze’s death with the new moon but with the full moon, the high point of its cycle. Death and decay - becoming obsolete – instead of leading to nothingness is essential for Schultze and the catalyst to finding his quest and finally its fulfillment in a fringe culture of Amerika and its hybrid constitution. The same applies to the film's argument regarding the German nation. Its obsoleteness should be understood as chance of a reinvention and constitution as an open concept that allows variations in the jouissance that people get from it. Additionally, the full moon also stands for a hybridity itself, namely a hybrid between day and night. It

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reflects the sunlight and thereby brings light into the darkness of the night. As Cashford explains, the full moon, in particular, embodies often contradictory properties: “It is not surprising that the rays from the Full Moon were once felt to be physical and palpable, carrying such magical potency that they could fertilize or blind, intoxicate, inspire or make mad” (Cashford 272). The full moon, therefore, embodies the film’s claim of the benefit of hybrid forms of order and disruption, of control and devotion, of the German Nation and its Amerikan influences.

The moon in the German imagination of Amerika also stands for authenticity and closeness to nature; for example, it is heavily associated with the German construction of the “Indianer” since they use the moon as reference to time (cf. Welskopf-Henrichs Harka

“Das Geheimnis der Höhle”). Winnetou, the most famous German Indianer narrative, references the moon as the Native American measurement of time, as well as a name for an Apache woman (443). Wolfgang Koeppen in his Amerikafahrt also connects the moon to the more authentic exotic, but like Schultze with the bayou and its hybrid culture, heavily influenced by African and Caribbean slaves:

Grelle Bogenlampen jedoch beleuchteten nüchtern, geheimnislos den alten Congo

Square, er heißt schon lange nicht mehr so, und die kalten Zweckfassaden

neuerrichteter Amtsgebäude blickten uninteressiert auf den allen Zaubers beraubten

Platz, [...] wo die Sklaven die Tänze Afrikas getanzt, ihre Ketten gegen den Mond

geschwungen und den großen Gott Voodoo beschworen hatten, mit Blitz und Sturm

über die Stadt und all die verfluchten Plantagen zu fallen” (77).

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The moon in Koeppen’s text is a signifier of the jouissance of the African Slaves, who used it to conjure up their liberation from the chains of the whites and for the destruction of the system exploiting them. To compare the liberation of slavery to Schultze’s liberation from an oppressive German Nation-Thing through the mixed culture of those slaves and

European influences seems far-fetched, but the moon and Schultze’s death do appear to liberate Teutschenthal - the last scene cuts from Schultze on the deck of the houseboat to a close-up of the moon and finally to a funeral procession to a German graveyard.

3.2.7. Obsoleteness and change - Amerika as possibility in Germany

In Schultze’s funeral procession, the movie gives an example of how American cultural products, particularly music and its embrace of hybridity can be a model for changing the rigidity of the German concept of nation, as the band plays his zydeco song.

Pierro points out the scene’s close resemblance to New Orleans jazz funerals (179).

According to Richard Brent Turner’s study Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New

Orleans, these funerals epitomize the continuities of Caribbean and African heritages in the United States:

[T]he second-line jazz street parades and related performance cultures in black New

Orleans re-create “flashes” of memories, rhythms, and rituals that evoke the spirit

world of the African diaspora and that periodically move the black community into

the sacred realm of introspection about the legacy of circum-Atlantic slavery and

its ancestral culture of Congo Square, Haiti, and West and Central Africa. [...] In

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these public gatherings, the African-descended community re-created the spiritual

power of West African festival and Vodou through drumming, masking,

iconography, music, and dance (6).

In Schultze, the jazz funeral cannot function the same way for obvious reasons since the cultural appropriation cannot evoke the same history and belonging as it does to the descendants of slaves in the bayou area. In its appropriation, it functions as the embrace of an Other that even has the power to disrupt such sacred rituals as a death ceremony and can fundamentally change the perspective on the self. It has the power to disrupt rituals and narratives that are located deep within the fabric of the German nation and its specific way of jouissance. Manfred enacts this disruption by pretending that Schultze is calling his cell phone in the middle of the funeral procession, earning him disapproving looks from the pastor. On the way out the marching band, which started out playing a solemn funeral march, begins playing Schultze’s zydeco tune. The effect of the disruption by the embrace of the Other further manifests itself in the cinematography. The last take of the movie is seemingly an exact repetition of the establishing shot of the film, only now instead of

Schultze on his bicycle, it is the funeral procession playing Schultze’s zydeco tune and dancing through the sparse landscape. The shot, however, is not exactly the same since it is minimally zoomed out further than the first shot, making a second pole of the power line visible. This clarifies visually that the power line does not run parallel to the camera, giving the image more depth than the first shot. The effect is minimal, but it encapsulates the film's argument that changes in the German nation depend on the embrace of an Other as source of jouissance and that parts of the culture of America can still provide this disruptive force,

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changing not only the German Nation-Thing but also the German fantasy of Amerika and the German way of handling obsoleteness as an end. It rather argues for obsoleteness as a possibility for rebirth and positive changes. US culture does not have to be a model that only causes reproduction in Germany, but if taken seriously, it can present alternatives and ultimately disruption for the German Nation-Thing. It does so, according to Schultze, by embracing the synthesis of zydeco and jazz funerals. While Stroszek favors regionalism over globalization, Schultze attempts to show globalization as an old form and how it can activate a force for regional change. What Schultze does neglect in its dream is the history of the establishment of this hybridity and the casualty and displacement that stand behind it. It rather reactivates a romantic German image of Amerika as a place of self-fulfillment and happiness, possible because of the naiveté of the protagonist.

Stroszek and Schultze are similar on the discourse horizon since they both oppose what they perceive as hegemonic German image of Amerika, only that the images are inverted. Stroszek opposes the image of Amerika as the economic American Dream, prevalent in the generation that lived through the “Wirtschaftswunder” - the German version of the Dream. Schultze opposes the hegemonic anti-Amerikan image that became prevalent at the time that Stroszek was released. Stroszek, hence, presents Amerika as similar to Germany in its structure. Only the truly opportunistic, personified in Eva, and the crazy, personified in Scheitz, can thrive in Amerikan society. In Schultze, Amerika is foremost not a space, but an idea of a hybrid society that allows for jouissance through order and tradition, as well as through hybridity, social inclusion and community. This difference in imagery is supported by the different roles of music. Bruno is at home in

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German folk music and uses it creatively; for Schultze folk music is oppressive and he finds a new way of expressing himself in zydeco. This difference is also an expression of generational differences. Herzog himself said in the commentary on the DVD that Bruno’s generation was composed mainly of orphans (Bruno himself was actually an orphan) and had no fathers to give them an identity; thus, Bruno searched for it in music. Schultze does have a father, but an oppressive one, who does not allow experimentation; thus, folk music becomes a prison and a symbol of the narrow-mindedness of the German society. In the end, both are repeating images that are perhaps subversive to the dominant images at the time, but are both based in imagery from the 19th century: first, Amerika as the fantasy of a dystopia, a space without culture and and characterized by a social coldness in which everybody is concerned only about his own welfare; and second, Amerika as the fantasy a space of democratic, inclusive community and cultural diversity, introduced by the liberals who fled Germany after the failed revolution in 1848.

3.3. Chapter Conclusion

At first glance, Stadt der Engel and Schultze gets the blues appear to be extremely different, almost opposites, in how they represent Germany and Amerika, their tone, and their protagonists. However, a closer analysis reveals a surprising amount of communality.

For both, Amerika is a temporary refuge from personal obsoleteness in Germany; both are disappointed by the culture they first find in European-Amerika; both end up reactivating

Amerika as refuge and as model in the hybridity of fringe cultures; both employ magical

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realism; and both media return to Germany at the end with new ideas how to relate to the

German Nation-Thing and how it can be changed or understood differently and consequently offer more jouissance.

The employment of magical realism is an aesthetic argument against the (re-

)unified German nation’s perceived rigidity and how it organizes its participation and its jouissance. Parallelly to the nations inflexible organization of jouissance, novels and movies primarily follow the hegemony of realism. Even though it is far more evident in

Christa Wolf’s novel, Stadt der Engel and Schultze both break the asphyxiation of realism aesthetically, which Jameson describes as act against the basic state of late capitalism:

It is in the context of the gradual reification of realism in late capitalism that

romance once again comes to be felt as the place of narrative heterogeneity and of

freedom from that reality principle to which a now oppressive realistic

representation is the hostage. Romance now again seems to offer the possibility of

sensing other historical rhythms, and of demonic or Utopian transformations of a

real now unshakably set in place (Jameson 104).

Jameson does not speak of magical realism per se, but the historical kinship of magical realism and romance is well established (cf. Warnes 19). That both primary sources seek the romance in the racial other is certainly problematic, but as a parallel to the German nation and its old conceptualization of ethnicity it is a fitting argument for its reconceptualization. This reconceptualization becomes a lot clearer in Schultze, as it shows the change in the people of Teutschenthal. In Stadt der Engel, the change remains personal and theoretical. The protagonist finds a way towards the German Nation-Thing in the Hopi.

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Her feelings of obsoleteness may be transferable to other eastern Germans, her position as cultural producer and as the target of a disparaging discourse about the significance of East-

German culture and her role as informant are in this execution uniquely her own. The effect on Germans of Stadt der Engel only happens in the social and historical horizon, i.e. as public discourse and as a critique of the hegemonic system.

From a diachronic perspective, one must acknowledge that Amerika has lost its function of permanent refuge. There are documentary accounts like Go West! Ostdeutsche in Amerika, Wolfgang Etlich’s film Vom Fichtelberg nach Florida Auswandern nach

Amerika, or Christian Bauer’s Als Truckerin durch die USA. In all cultural products that are not exclusively documentary, the refuge in the United States always has an end, which clearly reflects the primary focus of the products not on Amerika, but the effects its representations have on a German individual and can have on the German Nation-Thing.

That applies to both primary sources of this analysis as well. Stadt der Engel ends with the return-flight to Germany, but it clearly articulates the changes Amerika cause in the protagonist’s relationship to the German Nation-Thing, which she has learned to accept as a necessary entity for which she, however, does not need to give up all her beliefs. Instead, she can partake as a visitor like the Hopi partake in the European-Amerikan culture and then return to their culture on the reservation. If permanence is relative, Schultze did find permanent refuge in Amerika, but he remained a visitor, who did not have to deal with the fundamental necessities of participating in a society and ultimately returned home.

Schultze himself only returns from the United States as a body, but the change he experienced in Amerika does return with him in the change it brings to his friends and

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others in Teutschenthal. The refuge from obsolescence that Amerika provides to the two protagonists is certainly temporary, and Amerika’s transformative powers for the German nation itself and the individual’s relationship to the German Nation-Thing are the final argument.

Amerika, hence, in both products assumes the role of remedy to German obsoleteness, without losing sight on Amerika as source of the system that produces said obsoleteness. Both products criticize Amerika for its capitalistic orientation and the superficial semiotic system that orientation creates. Both, however, also acknowledge

Amerika’s strength in allowing a cornucopia of existences outside of its ideological center and how these fringe cultures are able to find their jouissance in cultural border crossings and hybridity, all within the construct of an Amerikan nation. Therein, Amerika becomes a model for the German nation in the post-Wende world, amidst the influx of diverse myths and images and the difference between eastern and western, intellectual and worker perspectives.

Eastern Germans appear to be granted a fresh and comparatively unencumbered gaze on Amerika, particularly on the exotic. While this trope of the confirmation or alteration through the exotic has been common in German literature during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, e.g. Karl May’s and Charles Sealsfield’s novels,

Egon Erwin Kisch’s Paradies Amerika, and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Amerikafahrt, it vanished or was even inverted in most of West-German cultural products after 1968, e.g.

Stroszek or Wim Wender’s Paris Texas. In these West-German products as well as many western German products after the fall of the Wall, e.g. Thomas Meinecke’s The Church

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of John F. Kennedy, Amerika is corrupted by an excess of consumer culture and capitalism from the center to the fringes. Instead of the refuge for hybridity, it often occurs to be the great leveler. From the eastern German perspective, it is both, leveler and refuge of hybridity. This point of view is far more prominent in Schultze, the simpleton from the eastern German province, than in the intellectual culture producer of Stadt der Engel, nevertheless it exists in both. One, however, cannot declare this an eastern German generality, since some products that thematize Amerika as refuge from an eastern German perspective, such as Susanne Schädlich’s Westwärts so weit es nur geht, represent it in a fairly typical anti-Amerikan fashion as a false fantasy of a utopia.

There are certainly great differences between the two primary sources as well. They originate in the media differences, the protagonists’ education and social standing, as well as differences in the representation of Amerika itself. One of the major differences stems from the disparity in genre. Stadt der Engel is primarily a biographical novel that takes itself and its quest for a new relationship to the self and the nation incredibly seriously.

Schultze gets the blues, on the other hand, is a comedy, even if it is at times tragic and serious. Hence, the relationship between protagonist and subject is much lighter and distanced. The source of comedy in Schultze is almost exclusively the German nation and its organization of as a Thing in Germany as well as the United States. Of course, the film essentializes its subject in its attempt to create comedic situations. It, however, uses this essentialization of the German Nation-Thing to emphasize the similarity to the Amerikans of German heritage who think their jouissance lies in the superficial replication of the

German traditions, but more importantly, it emphasizes the difference between the

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exclusionary “Kulturnation” Germany and the tolerance of difference and hybridity that

Amerika allows. To this end, Schultze leaves out the differences between western and eastern German varieties of the German nation and its organization of jouissance almost entirely. The airport scene is an allusion to a different, more cosmopolitan Germany, but the place of Teutschenthal and its engagement with classic German texts indicate that the film is interested in a (re-)unified German Nation-Thing. The east is just where the western

German author/director assumes to find a heightened awareness of obsoleteness and a simple and unbiased figure like Schultze. What Herzog marked as class difference – the simplicity of the proletariat – Schorr marks geographically, indicating an inner-German shift, away from class consciousness towards regional difference, specifically eastern versus western and urban versus rural. The difference of depth in the conscious confrontation with the German nation is also reflected in the products’ employment of historical references. Schultze relies heavily on its intertext Stroszek, a film published in the 1970s. Stadt der Engel, in contrast, deliberately and extensively grapples with the time of the National Socialist Regime and thereby analyzes the core trauma of the German

Nation-Thing. I argue that both cultural products exhibit the strengths and weaknesses of their genre. Schultze’s comedic approach clearly marks differences and allows the audience easy access to the presentation of the problem. In comedy, the effect as an utterance in the social horizon, however, is diminished by the comic relief. The comic relief reduces the tensions that the film constructs between the protagonist and German Nation-Thing, as well as Amerika and Germany. The weakness of Wolf’s approach shows in many of the above-

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mentioned critiques. The biographic focus creates the impression that the text is exclusively about the self-justification of one person and the larger context is being neglected.

The genre and media characteristics of Stadt der Engel, nevertheless, have great advantages as well. The narrative situation allows for significantly greater differentiation and affective elaboration. The narrator can detail her reactions and lines of thoughts, explicitly locating herself in complex theoretical and public discourses and examining the subjects, German nation and Amerika, from a variety of different angles. Particularly, the historic awareness stands out compared to Schultze. The novel also manages to lay out the problematic difference between eastern- and western-German concepts of jouissance and the consequences in much greater detail, which is probably also present because of the temporal difference in the setting of the two products. The differences exemplify the variety of a public discourse on Amerika. The similarities, on the other hand, indicate that both primary products identify a problem in the German Nation-Thing, namely its inflexibility and its exclusionary tendencies.

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Chapter 4: Amerika as an Adventure - Between Disillusionment and Self-awareness

As in the previous chapter “Amerika as refuge,” this chapter is structured in accordance to the type of protagonist and the function Amerika takes on in these depictions.

The adventurer is the polar opposite of the emigre and refugee of the first chapter. The protagonist who understands Amerika as refuge searches for spaces that can satisfy her needs; the adventurer, on the other hand, seeks to leave precisely those secure spaces behind and looks for challenges to safety and security. Adventure narratives are not necessarily the result of deliberate actions to seek out adventure, but for this dissertation, I will exclusively analyze narratives in which adventure was a main motivation for the journey. Like the emigre narratives, Amerika as Adventure has its origins mainly in the nineteenth century, and as I did in the previous chapter, I will outline the adventurer broadly based on Peter Brenner’s definitions for the nineteenth-century traveler in Reisen in die

Neue Welt in order to illuminate parallels and differences to the adventurer in late capitalism. In this short introduction, I will present the dilemma of adventure writing as a form of travel writing in a late-capitalist world. I will then provide the history and characteristics of Amerika as Adventure, relate it to this dissertation's terms of obsoleteness and the German nation, and then problematize it for the late-capitalist timeframe of the texts and films I am analyzing.

The German tradition of Amerika as adventure is closely tied to travel writing in the vein of “errand into the wilderness” (Miller 5) and the explorer narrative. In the age of late-capitalism, however, this form of traveling is endangered. Multiple authors have

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predicted the vanishing of travel writing as a whole because travel is being replaced by tourism, which radically changes the perspective on the Other: “Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement” (Fussell 38). Tourism on the other hand, Fussel continues, is being done for a leisurely change of scenery, which renders the

Other an entertaining ornament. Other analysts projected the survival of the genre, but only until unexplored places are no longer available or new and extreme ways of traveling are invented (e.g. Holland/Huggan 12). A third current sees a phantasy of colonialism, exoticism, and racism preserved in the genre and predicts its survival based on a longing for the repetition of these tropes (i.e. Lisle 13). The perception that the genre seems to be out of place in our world today, however, appears to be almost universal in the erudite literature that considers the interplay between cultural development and travel writing.

These worries are especially true for a space that is possibly the world’s most overdetermined.

A significant portion of German-speaking travel writing about Amerika seems to confirm the general idea that there is not much left to say about Amerika. One example would be Andreas Altmann, who merely confirms Amerika as dystopia in Im Land der

Freien: Mit dem Greyhound durch Amerika. Referencing many other texts, some of which are not even about Amerika (e.g. Dostoyevsky), he attempts to obscure the glaring repetition of worn-out images by concealing them with colloquial and sometimes vulgar language, such as, “wäre Memphis ein Film, man würde kotzend hinauslaufen” (67). The primary cultural products discussed in this dissertation partially confirm this thought as

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they all struggle with the predetermination of Amerika, but use different strategies to find means to negotiate the problems. Two choose to embrace preformed images of Amerika from a German perspective, notably as coming of age stories: In Jakob Hein’s Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, the protagonist’s embrace of the life at the economic margins echoes Jack Kerouac, and Edgar Hilsenrath’s Fuck America; Friendship! appropriates the dangerous road trip to find a father figure as a journey into emancipation and the fantasy of a post-national world; Alexander Osang’s Berlin-New York finds

Otherness in the rituals and myths that are woven into everyday life in New York City, while Bernd Wagner’s Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam finds it by deciding to explore Mexiko after he has seen the dystopian images of Amerika confirmed in his representation of the

United States and the Amerikan culture.

Travel and adventure writing, however, retain their true importance for public discourse in their affirmation of the subject and the focus they put on the construction of the Self and the Other. According to Žižek, in late capitalism, the idea prevails that the subject is “a place, a passive ground for the network of partial lateral links” (Tarrying218)

– Jameson calls this phenomenon “postmodern schizo-fragmentation” (Postmodernism

372). Žižek now suggests that this concept might not be what necessarily constitutes the subject, but how the ideology of late-capitalism constructs it. As it strips the individual of all agency, it becomes a mere reactor to “images which regulate his or her ‘passions’”

(Tarrying 218). The subject becomes a model consumer, always just a container of what the capitalistic system bestows on it. The Sponozist idea also entails a forced radical individualism: "[T]his subject perceives him-self as an out-Law [sic!], lacking the common

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ground shared with others. And for this reason, every contact with others is perceived and experienced as a violent encroachment" (Žižek Terrying 219). However, as I argued in chapter 2, social interaction is the basis of the human existence as auxotroph. Outlining these interactions between subject and community, the Self and the Other/others, is the great strength of travel writing as adventure. Within these affirmations of the importance of subject and society and the Self and the Other, it produces moments of resistance to the late-capitalist ideology of the subject simply being an intersection of images and ideologies. Simultaneously, the subject is constantly reminded of its belonging to a different community, even in a place as overdetermined as Amerika, as Wie ich nach

Chihuahua kam portrays impressively: “Als ich die Augen aufschlug, waren mit der Kälte auch alle schlechte Laune und das Unverständnis einer fremden Welt gegenüber aus mir gewichen. Werde mich schon bewegen lernen in dieser Welt, hoffte ich, und meinen

Rhythmus finden“ (Wagner 29). Here the Cartesian subject is reminded of its presence in space as well as its social belonging. The claim of authenticity inherent in travelogues, a claim that arguably differs from the seeming authenticity of the media as it radically reinserts the subject, allows the travelogue privileged access to public discourse. Instead of being read as authentic or novel approaches to an Other, German travelogues about

Amerika must be read as synthesis and commentary on the state of German self- identification. The United States provides the space for these self-examinations as they cannot occupy the position of radical or naïve Other anymore. Instead Amerika is the Other that is close and even part of the Self. Read this way and with Jameson’s rallying cry -

“always historicize” (Jameson The Political 9)- in mind, travelogues on Amerika become

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a great witness to discourses surrounding the concepts of community in the age of late- capitalist hegemony. First and foremost, the adventure story, therefore, remains a travel narrative with the goal to experience confrontations with an Other. Instead of the immigrant, who seeks spaces to satisfy her needs, she seeks spaces of confrontation.

One staple of most adventure narratives about Amerika is a claim to autobiographical authenticity, a claim that the protagonist has actually lived through the stories and that the text, therefore, contains a truth about its object of studyThe primary products of this dissertation are no exception to that rule. In the German context one example has been cited repeatedly that illuminates the difficult interplay between markers of authenticity within the cultural product, claims of authenticity of the work as utterance, and the effects the work has on the German public discourse: Karl May, who maintained that he had experienced all the stories that he wrote about Amerika and the Middle East.

His first visit to the United States, however, came long after the publication of most of his writing (cf. Rettner/Uedinger 78). Nonetheless, May has been one of the greatest influences on German images of Amerika. Brenner claims that most nineteenth-century adventure narratives are fictional or semi-fictional. The issue with authenticity in cultural products, I would argue, sits even deeper in their fabric, namely in their aesthetic. All travelloges and adventure narratives are aesthetic products, which means they translate the object into a semiotic system and then use that translation to create conguent stories for the consumer’s pleasure, and in that act alone, they divest themselves of authenticity. The narrativization and probable ornamentation of the experienced, authors are in no way objective recording machines themselves. They are influenced by their socialization and the internal map they

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have of the object of their descriptions, in our case Amerika, which they automatically use to process the phenomenological information that they gather.66 For travelogues particularly, one must acknowledge that they differ significantly from just a recounting of the facts, which would make them guidebooks. In The Global Politics of Contemporary

Travel Writing, Debbie Lisle ranks travelogues between fictional and factual descriptions

(30). America may intervene in the construction of Amerika, but in how far this is an

America that holds a connection to the authentic presence of the object remains opaque and hence is largely only of intra-diegetic significance. The claim to authenticity might, hence, be important to the reception of the text, for the analysis it remains secondary.

Today’s adventurers are very much influenced by the figures created in the nineteenth century. As Brenner describes, the typical traits are the means of travel, in which the adventurer opts against a safe and civilized form of transportation and instead chooses to travel on foot or horseback; at least parts of the travel are dictated by chance and not by planning; the adventurer exhibits a longing for danger as an escape from a safe order; and, she longs for a constant experience with the other and therefore with the self. This longing, as I argued in the first chapter, cannot be thought of without the association of a Thing, in

66 Fredric Jameson uses the term “cognitive mapping” for the process of individuals prefabricating images of and orientations in spaces, cultures, and societies (Postmodernism 51). He adapts the term from spatial studies and argues that individuals do not only have a map of spaces stored, which allows them to navigate complex systems like cities, but that these mechanisms are pertinent in other contexts as well. In the instance of this dissertation that means that travelers not only experience America in the way it presents itself, but also through the preconceived notions of Amerika. This effect intensifies when the experienced is then related in a text or a film (cf. also Freundschuh/Kitchin Cognitive Mapping).

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the Lacanian definition, and when it comes to Amerika as produced in German aesthetic products, not without the German Nation-Thing.

The traditional means of transportation Amerika’s “Wild West” was indubitably the horse. Everybody is familiar with the image of the cowboy riding through the prairie in search of adventure. This connection between adventure, Amerika, and the horse is still very much alive today, as can be witnessed in Thomas Arslan’s Western, Gold, from 2012 or in travelogues like Günther Warmser’s Der Abenteuerreiter, published in 2007. The traditional means of transportation of the adventurer in the German context, however, is walking. Walking incorporates the forgoing of the modern, secure means of transportation and supposedly offers a closer connection to nature and people. It is, additionally, a form of individualism as the traveler only relies on her own body and is entirely independent of others, animals, or technology.67 Walking as a means of transportation remains a staple of

German travel narratives in the twenty-first century. Wolfgang Büscher’s Hartland comes to mind, a travelogue in which the protagonist, against the advice of his friends and family, attempts to cross the United States from North to South. Hartland’s narrator repeatedly mentions that this form of transportation is hazardous in the eyes of Germans because of their image of Amerika (13, 27). Unusual or non-bourgeois means of transportation are a common denominator of the cultural products that this dissertation examines, with maybe

67 The journey on foot developed as an ideological form of traveling in the late Enlightenment and then in the romantic period. Johann Gottfried Seume’s Spaziergang nach Syracrus is the first major example of this genre. The narrator of Seume’s work reflects openly on the political and philosophical value of traveling on foot, especially highlighting the freedom it brings (cf. Seume 157-59; Frahm 2-5; Brenner 146- 148)

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the exception of Osang’s account, who walks a lot but does in New York City, where this is considered commonplace both by the locals and in the German fantasy, Amerika. All other protagonists narrate travels in Greyhound busses, as a hitchhiker, or in decrepit vehicles. Choosing a seemingly unsafe and non-touristic means of transportation has always been a hallmark of the adventure narrative of Amerika.

All those forms of transportation imply an uncertainty regarding the traveler’s schedule and direction. Consequently, the adventure narrative is characterized by a longing for danger and the embrace of the power of fate or destiny, according to Brenner. Both stand in contrast to the bourgeois society of the nineteenth century, in which order, rationality, and calculability were guiding principles. As Michael Nerlich describes in

Ideology of Adventure, these traits of adventure are a tool to illustrate the powerlessness of the human in the face of the greater powers that rule. They traditionally also have the human prevail in the end, as is evident in the most famous example of adventure narration, the Odyssee (xx - xxiii). The adventurer is searching for a way to prove herself in the face of the dangers and uncertainty her adventure entails. The feminine possessive article, which

I chose to use as a general idea as a sign of gender-consciousness is, however, a misnomer of sorts. The adventurer has been largely a male privilege as well as a male fantasy. It is not the case that protagonists in adventure narratives are always male (cf. Phillips 18) but the focus of this dissertation - the Nation-Thing - heavily intersects with questions of an insecure masculinity, as most protagonists in German adventure narratives about Amerika

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have been male.68 Seeking precariousness and danger in these cases, one must read as a sign of a fantasy of a concept of masculinity that goes beyond that offered by society at the time of production.

Portraying an adventurer has been largely a privilege of a male from a bourgeois background (cf. Brenner 163-168). Either being paid for the literary production of an adventure or coming from a financially independent background is a necessary feature of the deliberate adventurer in the nineteenth century and today. In Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam, Wagner describes the process of nonchalantly coming up with the necessary funds:

“Zwanzigtausend Mark habe ich für die Reise zusammengekratzt, was fünfzig Dollar pro

Tag macht und beim besten Willen nicht für die von mir geliebte Mischung aus Fußmarsch,

Eisenbahnfahrt und Übernachtung in Hotels ausreicht” (17). Twenty thousand German

Marks is an incredibly large sum to spend only on leisure travel. He tries to relativize his wealth by arguing that he had to scrape the money together. But he immediately places himself solidly in the realm of the well-off by referencing that this amount does not suffice for his preferred ways of traveling as he will not be able to sleep in a hotel. Walking, even with the smaller daily budget, remains a choice for the traveler, not a necessity. His privileged position becomes even clearer when he relates that at the end of his travels stands an engagement as writer in residence at the University of Kentucky. The allusion to the sacrifices in comfort he is willing to make for the sake of the adventure is a common trope

68 One can find more information about notable exceptions to the male dominance in Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James’ Sophie Discovers Amerika: German-Speaking Women Write the New World and for the perspective of this dissertation specifically Angela Krauß Milliarden neuer Sterne, a text which encapsules a tourist’s fascination with New York.

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in the genre of adventure writing. Most travelogues today, however, are a planned project in which the author can expect royalties from the production. The similarity of the backgrounds is historically notably different from Amerika as refuge. While Amerika as refuge works for a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, Amerika as adventure largely excludes the working- and uneducated classes. That is also something that markedly differs from the history of the American concept of the adventurer, the frontiersman and the cowboy, who represent a class mostly opposed to the growing bourgeoisie of the East Coast cities.

The broad theme of the German adventurer in the nineteenth century then also breaks with the order of bourgeois society. This break is particularly interesting for this dissertation because it contains struggles with its central concepts - the German Nation-

Thing and obsoleteness. The adventurer’s need to leave and go to different places is certainly an implied critique of the society of his origin and especially in the nineteenth century, this society became dominated by discourses of Germanness in a very determined way. This repressive social structure, paired with a largely oppressive authoritarian state, led to dissatisfaction with the socio-political developments in Germany among many liberal thinkers and actors (cf. Brenner 159; Dann 133-137).69 As Otto F. Best argues in

Abenteuer: Wonnetraum aus Flucht und Ferne, the premiere characteristic of the adventurer is that he seeks to escape his social circumstances, which he perceives as

69 For more information on the history of the discourses of the German nation, cf. Otto Dann’s Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland; Bernd Fischer’s Das Eigene und das Eigentliche: Klopstock, Herder, Fichte, Kleist: Episoden aus der Konstruktionsgeschichte nationaler Intentionalitäten; or Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe.

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inadequate to affirm the individual and collective, and delimit it from an Other. He tries to step out of the established social order, out of the traditional, and the socially expected in order to expose himself to a multifaceted Other - nature, social order, social status, different people, etc (9).70 He appears to be the phenomenological opposite of the emigrant, which

Peter Brenner summarized in his text on nineteenth century German travel and exile narratives about the United States of America. The emigrant searches for economic security and, particularly in the contemporary cases discussed above, emotional security and a remedy for the own obsoleteness. The adventurer, on the other hand, is looking for independence, a hazy concept of personal freedom, danger, and the affirmation of the Self in opposition of a threatening Other. His break with society manifests itself in his appearance, his mode of transportation, his lack of a socially acceptable occupation, etc.

The adventurer’s dissatisfaction, however, does not conclude in an opposition to the German Nation-Thing, and his critique of society mostly remains vague, as Brenner describes (109). Adventure narratives argue alternately or simultaneously against the bourgeois social order and the relics of aristocratic ideals. It is his broad dissatisfaction with the state and the society that, in the eyes of the nineteenth-century adventurer, impedes the complete development of a positively connotated German Nation-Thing. The confrontation with a collective Other is a clear indication of the need to discover a collective Self that he deems worthy. The exposure to alterity in landscape, nature, technology, and people challenges the concept of the Self and simultaneously reaffirms it.

70 Leo Strauss from the perspective of the conservative bourgeoisie consequently associates the adventurer with being irresponsible (in Bluhm 154)

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In an extension of that phenomenon, the belonging to a different group, a different Nation-

Thing is reaffirmed. May’s Old Shatterhand, for example, experiences his Germanness in opposition to nature as well as the Anglo-Saxons (Winnetou I 37, 287, 330, 461). This preoccupation with the Self also becomes clear in the adventurer’s usual return to civilization and, in the case of German narratives about Amerika, to Germany.

It is here, in the feeling of an inadequate German Nation-Thing, that we find traces of obsoleteness in the adventure narrative. The adventurer does not necessarily fear the immediacy of his personal or economic obsoleteness, but he does fear that his idea of a

German society is becoming obsolete or was never relevant in the first place. In the confrontation with nature, fate, and the Other, the nineteenth-century adventurer typically longs to rediscover a more primal German Nation-Thing untouched by the presumed negative influence of bourgeois society, or he attempts to prove German superiority in comparison to other Nation-Things, like the British or the American. Thus, there is some fear of obsoleteness in the nineteenth-century adventurer, but the term that probably describes his motivations more accurately is the fear of insignificance: personal insignificance in a strict social order or collective insignificance in comparison to other

Nation-Things. Insignificance, I argue, is a close relative of obsoleteness as it constitutes a part of obsoleteness. When something or someone becomes obsolete, it loses its significance for today. The insignificance that the nineteenth-century adventurer combats, however, is not necessarily motivated by the loss of a hegemonic position, but might also be motivated by the aspiration for hegemony. As will become clear in the analyzes below, today’s German adventurers are concerned with the obsoleteness of the German nation,

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which does modify the role of Amerika a as adventure compared to their nineteenth century ancestors. The confrontation with the Other is, nevertheless, a ritual to gage the existence and the position of the Self. As I described with Žižek in Chapter 2, this Other often occupies a peculiar space between romanticization and danger. On the one hand, many trades of the Other are appealing and in the case of the Native Americans, for example, harbor the typical traits of exotism, of being associated with authenticity and closeness to nature. On the other hand, the adventurer is looking for danger in the experience of the

Other, which expresses itself in the choice of means of transportation and willingness to go into spaces that appear to provide danger (cf. Büscher 153). The adventurer is deeply troubled by his relationship with the German Nation-Thing. He perceives the nation to be imperfect as it does not allow him to unfold his full potential as a German man. He shows reluctance to give up his jouissance, because he does not get enough in return. In the nineteenth century adventure narrative, the temporary social situation exists like a bad replica that obscures what Germanness should really be and possibly once was. Amerika is the space to recapture that Nation-Thing and bring it back to Germany for its salvation.

For the adventure narrative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it is not the fear of the insignificance of the German Nation-Thing, which would be, with a glance at the German history, completely unthinkable. However, as I will show below, the adventurer still struggles with a dissatisfaction with the German Nation-Thing and with the obsoleteness of the GDR. Many associate Amerika with their transcendence of the German

Nation-Thing in a global world, for which particularly cosmopolitan cities like New York offer a space. They see their adventure as a chance to become a global citizen – a “Mann

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von Welt,” but all must come to terms with the understanding of the necessity of a group and a Thing and that an abstract idea of globalization appears to be unable to fulfill that role. The means to deal with the issues of the German nation, its organization of jouissance, and the unattainability of the world as Thing are multifaceted and range from a nostalgic longing for a German nation akin to the ideal of the nineteenth-century to a fantasy of a

German Nation-Thing that creates its jouissance through the embrace of hybridity of cultures, ideas, and languages.

His diffuse critique of civilization and society and its affirmation of the difference between Self and Other moves the adventurer into the realm of a romantic idealist, as

Brenner indicates: “Wie die Romantiker, so versuchte sich der Abenteurer dem Sog einer unpoetischen Normalität zu entziehen” (168). In adventure narratives, the implicit critique of society often solidifies into a critique of civilization per se. Adventure narratives tend to equate civilization with normative constrictions and nature with freedom and authenticity.

Karl May, for example, describes in Old Shurehand II how the protagonist is physically repelled by the confinement of civilization, represented by a simple house: “Es war dem

Deutschen doch unmöglich, lange in dem engen Raum zu bleiben; er verließ ihn und suchte den Garten auf, wo er sich von Wohlgerüchen umduften ließ, bis er hinaustrat in das Freie”

(294-295). This realm of nature is also where we find the portrayals of the central figure of the “noble savage,” who has been part of Amerika as adventure from Fenimore Cooper’s narrations onward but enjoys special prevalence in German narratives of the “Wild West.”

While many American cultural products describing the frontier associate Native Americans with nature but in opposition to “Americans” (cf. Slotkin Regeneration through Violence,

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or western movies like The Searchers or Red River), the German adventure narratives associate Germanness with the nobility and authentic humanity of some Native Americans, which is often set against the greed of profit and lack of culture of the Anglo-Saxons and their allies, a circumstance which has been studied extensively (cf. Karin von Welck “Das

Indianerbild in der deutschen Literatur des 19.Jahrhunderts;” Matthias Peipp and Berhard

Springer Edle Wilde, rote Teufel: Indianer im Film; Till Hiddermann Winnetou und der

Letzte der Mohikaner). The noble savage is a vehicle for the romanticizing of nature itself.

Amerika is not only connected to romanticism by the figure of the adventurer, but as Germán Arciniegas points out in America in Europe, “[It is] at the roots of romanticism”

(239). This is primarily due to its association with revolution and freedom and these values’ projection onto its landscape, which has been described as paradisiacal, endless, and unspoiled. This association between nature and the American Nation-Thing has been widely researched and summarized in the mythical tropes of “the virgin land,” “the

American Adam,” “the Garden America,” “the errand into the wilderness,” or “the frontier,” and critiques like Slotkin, Donald Pease, or Heike Paul trace its influence back to the very earliest text on American history (cf. Slotkin 14-15; Pease 79; Paul 18-21). In the German context, the virgin nature is a topos in virtually all textual and most visual representations of Amerika in the nineteenth century: From explorer narratives like

Maximilian zu Wied’s Reise ins Innere Nordamerikas to fictional accounts like May’s writings or Albrecht Bierstedt’s paintings of the West. Even Kürnberger, in his piece of invective, notes the absence of the wilderness he expected but criticizes that Amerikans do not know how to develop the land into a “Kulturlandschaft” properly (1. Buch Kap.1).

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Untouched and unspoiled nature is a place of longing for the romantics, which they constructed by activating a utopian image of the European middle-ages, or in the fantasy of America as “virgin land.” The emblem for this romantic wilderness in the German literature of the nineteenth century becomes the prairie: “Karl May formuliert am Ende des

Jahrhunderts den Zusammenhang zwischen dem äußeren, zu einem Mythos verdichteten

Erscheinungsbild der Prärie und dem ebenfalls überhöhten Leben des Abenteurers in ihr”

(Brenner 172-171). Where Slotkin sees a “regeneration through violence” in the American context, the Germans mainly portray a regeneration through association.

The closeness to romanticism, the seemingly backward-looking definition of the

German Nation-Thing, and their choice of anti-modern means of transportation makes adventure narratives of the nineteenth century appear to be prone to a conservative worldview and anti-progressivism. They are, however, ambiguous in their orientation within the dialectic of progress and conservatism. In their embrace of the obsolete, they often embrace a counter-history of the German Nation-Thing to the “Recht und Ordnung” doctrine. Herein, one can find a certain nostalgia for an imagined past. Put in the context of the German national discourse of the nineteenth century, it presents a way forward and away from bourgeois constrictions. Amerika is the vehicle to experience this Germanness often in association with nature and Native Americans and against the American or British

Nation-Thing. Amerika, consequently, became associated with adventure, freedom, wilderness, and the regeneration of a German Nation-Thing in the experience of an Other.

The problem that contemporary adventure narratives face is that Amerika today appears to be developed and explored, medially in Germany as well as infrastructurally in

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the United States. The chances of finding a true Other, a wilderness, or of experiencing danger by exposing oneself to them seem to be slim to none. The romantic associations, fed by the historic predecessors, are still present in today’s adventure narratives. However, they must take on other forms than the nineteenth century adventurer. The United States no longer offers large areas of dangerous wilderness, consequently myths like the errand into the wilderness with all its dangers, of the cowboy, trapper, explorer and other

American adventurers had to find different modern formations to continue their existence.

Their tropes get appropriated in the myths of outlaws on their motorcycle, gun crazy rural

Americans, dangerous and violent sheriffs, African=American gangsters, the urban jungle, etc. I argue that even the cosmopolitanism that some contemporary narratives long for in places like New York is part of the appropriation of older myths of Amerika as Other. The fantasy of the globalized, cosmopolitan world in its constant fluidity and non-specificity creates a place that produces alienation as much as the Amerikan wilderness created in the nineteenth century equivalents.

The structure of the following chapter will differ from the chapter on “Amerika as refuge” as instead of concentrating on two exemplary works, I will examine four works in a briefer, more concentrated fashion. I selected the works because they all approach

Amerika as adventure from an eastern German perspective, but all confront the issue of the tension between late-capitalist overdetermination and longing for the experience of the

Other in very different fashions – showing, on the one hand, the stability of the images of

Amerika as space for adventure in the German discourse, and, on the other hand, the different strategies for finding this Other between acceptance and resistance. They all fall

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into the time frame of this study as they were all published after 2000: Osang’s Berlin-New

York in 2006 - written between 1998 and 2004; Hein’s Formen Menschlichen

Zusammenlebens in 2004 - but set shortly after the Wende; Wagner’s Wie ich nach

Chihuahua kam in 2003; and Goller’s film Friendship! as a latecomer in 2009. These primary works also illuminate the issues from different genres, however, the similarities predominate, as I have shown above. Nevertheless, the differences between newspaper columns that became a book and something close to an epistolary novel in Osang’s text, a relative classical travelogue in Wagner’s, a mix of coming-of-age narrative, exile, and adventure story in Hein’s, and a relatively classic adaption of the road movie in Goller’s film are points of interest for the following analyses.

4.1. Berlin – New York – The discovery of the Other and the nation in the everyday

Alexander Osang is a fairly central figure in the German literary discourse on

Amerika in the twenty-first century. Not only did he spend six years in New York working for Der Spiegel and the magazine of the Berliner Zeitung, he has also published a variety of books on Amerika. Lennon ist tot (2007) is a fictional account of the differences between a father’s Amerika and the Amerika the son finds as an exchange student and is centered on the history of John Lennon’s years in the United States of America and his murder.

Neunundachzig - Helden Geschichten (2002) juxtaposes the stories of everyday people and of “heros” of two geopolitical and historical breaking points, the peaceful German revolution and the terror attacks of September 2001; Wo warst du? Ein Septembertag in

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New York (2011), an account of the days after the terror attacks of 2001, which he wrote together with his wife, Anja Reich; Schöne neue Welt: 50 Kolumnen aus Berlin und New

York and Berlin-New York: Kolumnen aus der schönen neuen Welt (2004) are both collections of his weekly columns in the magazine of the Berliner Zeitung and were combined in 2006 to form the book on which this dissertation focuses Berlin-New York:

Alle Kolumnen aus der schönen neuen Welt. I have chosen the compilation of his columns as they deliver the most volume and the most interesting material for the overarching question of this dissertation.

Osang uses an interesting form in which what began as newspaper columns become something more than occasional pieces through their inclusion in a collection of essayistic reflections. He argues that combining the columns into a book does not create a coherent story arch: “Auch wenn man 50 Kolumnen zusammenfasst wie in diesem Buch, ergeben sie keinen übergreifenden Sinn” (Berlin-New York 163). I, however, would disagree with that perspective. The book is very much structured by the author’s narrative tactics, most noticeably his tendency to explain circumstances with film references and through historical events. The terror attacks, for example, create the biggest turning point of the text. Afterward, politics overtake everyday life as the central focus of the chapters. In the transition from newspaper to book, which marks a shift in the potentials of perception and consumption by the readership, the columns create a more complex symbolic field and therefore are more attractive to my dissertation, in particular in the political horizon. Only in the book form, do the contrasts that the narrator paints between Germany and the United

States become striking. For example, there is a juxtaposition of Berlin and Kentucky: he

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first describes his situation in Berlin and how it is dominated by the Western German’s interpretation of history and then talks about Kentucky, where the motel furniture reminds the narrator of the models he saw in his past and so in that moment seems closer to the

GDR (Osang Berlin-New York 78-80). The omission of the columns’ publication dates in the book, as opposed to the newspaper, amplifies the change within the horizons. While

Berlin-New York creates a textual field that is more than the sum of its single entries, scrutiny of individual chapters helps me to pinpoint the way traces of competing discourses confound an easy reconciliation of tensions within images of Amerika and the German nation.

The narrator’s claim to go on his adventures with the goal of becoming a global citizen appears to be contradicotry to the position of travelwriting as romantic affirmation of the Self and the Other. On the one hand, this contradiction gets resoveld in his failure.

On the other hand, one has to acknowledge the difference of Alex’s idea of global citizen and its enlightenment forebarers. To become a global citizen entails on the surface the longing to transcend dependence on the nation as Thing, and, on the other hand, includes the aspiration to understand the complexities of global systems: “Ich nehme mir ja vor, ein

Weltbürger zu werden. Aber es ist nicht einfach” (Osang Berlin-New York 9). The narrator expresses here the fantasy of the left leaning educated class in Germany to shed the outmoded and negatively connoted concepts of community like the nation in favor of the fantasy of transcending these boundaries to become a citizen of the globalized interconnected world of today. The ideal of the Weltbürger has a long history in German tradition, at whose beginning stands the enlightenment: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Die

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Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, Johann Goffried Herder in Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, and famously Immanuel Kant in Zum ewigen Frieden write about the ideal of the Weltbürger as a preferable alternative to the ideology of nationalism. These thinkers, broadly speaking, did not see a Weltbürger as individualistic and independent, but conceptualized the World as a single moral community (cf. Kant 214). Because it served as an ideological alternative to nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the idea of the Weltbürger again gained influence as an ideal in the twentieth century, when

German intellectuals searched for an alternative to the tarnished German nation (Ette

158).71 I argue, however, that this form of cosmopolitanism is born more from the apparent obsoleteness of the German nation as viable thing than the enlightened ideas of rationality, and moral and legal principles, as well as material goods. Instead it seeks in the cosmopolitan what it deems lost in the nation, an emotional and spiritual connection to a

Thing.

This conundrum becomes in Alex’s claim that in order to become a Weltbürger, he intends to bring a documentary on the Wende to New York. He intends to fulfill that goal by examining German history and its failure to successfully activate the nation as a Thing to unify Germany. The quest for another Thing becomes further apparent by the localization of this cosmopolitanism in Amerika, more specifically in New York. Despite his frequent travels to other places like Kuwait City, Pyongyang, Havana, Tokyo, he always

71 As Zygmund Baumann argues, the Weltbürger became reality in the educated classes, who identify themselves freely with different globally interconnected groups. This form, however, lacks the moral aspiration of transcending nationalism as a main goal (Culture 34).

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returns to New York, and the vast majority of his attention is on his time in the United

States of America. In his representation of Amerika, he is most interested in its hybridity, as well as its cultural specificity. Herein, he follows the primary cultural products of the previous chapter, which are exceptionally interested in America’s constitution as hybrid nation. Hence, the protagonist of Berlin – New York must necessarily fail at becoming a

Weltbürger as it becomes more and more evident that what he searches for is a Thing that differs from the German nation, which he experiences as dominated by a western-German idea of “Gesellschaft.” Further, in New York he experiences that his socialization is inherently connected to the German nation, which he cannot escape in his confrontation with the USA and the world.

On the surface, Berlin-New York may not be set up as a classic adventure into the unknown, Alex’s space of residence, New York, is relatively well mapped out for him via his media consumption, a fact that becomes clear in his constant allusions to movies or songs. The text even itself argues that actual romantic adventures are no longer possible in late capitalism, for example when the narrator explictly compares himself with past adventurers and must admit that his narrative of peril does not hold up: “Kisch ist auch vom Schiff gesprungen, um Australien zu erreichen, und hat sich ein Bein gebrochen. [...]

Ich habe mir den Magen verdorben. Wahrscheinlich an einem Eiswürfel, der in meinem gestrigen Mojito schwamm. Ich glaube, ich bin in diesem Moment genau dort, wo ich hingehöre. Historisch gesehen” (84). Nevertheless, the passage reveals a longing for the adventure of past days when the adventurer could still experience real danger.

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I argue that a number of critical aspects, nevertheless, make the classification in adventure narrative fruitful and that its placement at the beginning of chapter is appropriate.

First, Berlin-New York fits the mold of a late-capitalist adventure narrative of Amerika, not in the delusional longing for the repetition of adventures from the past, but adventures in a reflective consciousness of the possibilities that Amerika has to offer today. It is not about the confrontation with an unknown Other, but in the participation in the difference of the

Other’s jouissance, understood as enrichment of the self. The protagonist does not search for a space to satisfy needs; he already has that in Berlin. He does, however, long for new experiences and for a confrontation with an Other that has the power to alter his perspective on the Self. In fact, that Other, Amerika, constitutes itself as space for adventure according to the narrator. When New Yorkers prepare themselves for a snowstorm, he writes: “Meine

New Yorker Nachbarn schienen sich das Unglück zu wünschen, Amerikaner wollen leben wie im Abenteuer” (Osang Berlin-New York 118). This longing for adventure coincides with the narrator’s image of Amerika and hence is one reason for his journey. He sees this longing for adventure in the Amerikan love for SUVs (Osang Berlin-New York 130) but buys himself a Jeep because he connects it with Daktari - an US-American show about a veterinarian in Africa (Osang Berlin-New York 49). The longing for adventure that he discovers in Amerika also has adverse effects, namely a paranoia that the narrator diagnoses in Amerikans and that, according to him, infects Germans who come to the

United States (Osang Berlin-New York 261). The experience of adventure and the Other happens from a position of reflection and distance to the subject, which does not present itself as an unknown Other, but still contains the possibilities of adventure.

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Consequently, Alex repeatedly describes Amerika as dangerous. He writes about a young woman having been murdered with a plaster stone right outside his office (Osang

Berlin-New York 25), the danger that the police pose to inhabitants of and visitors to the

USA (Osang Berlin-New York 52), and falling window-unit air-conditioners (Osang

Berlin-New York 62), not to mention the dangers of social embarrassment he regularly encounters. The danger appears to originate from infrastructure, humans, and the state.

New York occasionally evokes tropes of the urban jungle, a Darwinian world. The narrator’s fear of falling air conditioners encapsulates the paranoia this image of Amerika causes:

Sie fällt immer nach draußen, das ist ja amerikanisches Prinzip. Ich habe vier

Stunden lang gebastelt, weil ich nicht glauben konnte, daß das so bleiben konnte.

Unten spielten Kinder, die Fenstereinheit kippelte wie ein Felsbrocken über ihren

Köpfen. Ich schaue wieder viel nach oben, wenn ich durch die Stadt gehe, ich

bewege mich am äußersten Rand des Bürgersteiges (Osang Berlin-New York 66).

Alex’s mountaineering comparison of air conditioners and boulders is reminiscent of Luis

Trenker’s Der verlorene Sohn (1933/34) which compares New York to the wilderness of the Alps by fading between both, assigning the same danger to a walk through the city than an ascent of a mountain. The parallel hints at a constant in the image of US cities as places of danger. For Alex, Amerika is a space, in late capitalism primarily man made, that creates dangers to its citizen’s comfort. Amerikan’s implicit longing for danger and adventure, which the narrator describes, is due to a powerful myth of their nation - the frontier. Since the declaration that the frontier had been closed in 1890, Amerikans have been longing for

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a reincarnation of that mythical place. Its recreation in everyday life through the replication of natural dangers in urban areas alienates for the narrator despite his enunciated longing for adventure. This indicates a difference between the Amerikan and German concepts of adventure the text constructs. Alex is longing for adventure via confrontation and association with the Other, a possible danger to himself is a necessary evil, at most. The

Amerikan longing for adventure appears to solely constitute itself via a longing for danger.

The places where Berlin-New York finds the Other that affirms a Self is in the everyday and parts of the popular media. As an example, I use the chapter “Die Söhne der großen Bären.” It highlights differences between the Amerikan and German economies and cultures and simultaneously exposes the complex relation between imagological concepts of Amerika stemming from East and West Germany, while highlighting their similarities in comparison to the American fantasy of Native Americans. Hence, it depicts the (re-

)unified German nation as being caught in tensions of difference and identity. It uses the idea of crime in New York as a means to reflect on culturally determined notions of security and belonging, calling upon differing images of Native-Americans from the United States and the two Germanys. The title evokes a specifically East German discourse on Native-

Americans in its intermedial reference to the famous book and film series by Liselotte

Welskopf-Henrich, which greatly influenced the GDR’s imagological concept of and relation to Native Americans. The East German state promoted and produced the series as a response to the West German Winnetou movies. It entails a pointedly socialist ideology.

The series depicts Native Americans as noble warriors struggling against the occupation of their land by militaristic, aggressive, inhumane, capitalist, white intruders. In the absence

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of the traditional Hollywood western narrative of the evil Native American, this was the dominant image of the Wild West in the GDR and source of the GDR’s self-association with Native Americans.

The title thus refers to the intra-German media discourse of the 1960s and 70s on the history of Native Americans, which was ideologically charged. Shortly into the entry, however, Osang complicates this allocation of the discourse by his choice of words: “Wir waren eigentlich immer auf der Indianerseite, aber das vergisst man schnell” (Berlin-New

York232). Looking back from the post-Wende perspective, this sentence reflects an ambiguity in the construction of the united Germany as a nation as there are two unmarked group references. The first person plural marks a group of which the narrator is a part, and the title suggests this to be East Germans. In the most iconic discourse about Native

Americans in West Germany, which surrounds the Winnetou narratives, it was understood that the West Germans were friends of Native Americans, at least the noble ones. These crossed references are further confounded at the end of the column, when the narrator recites a line from Gus Backus’s “Da sprach der alte Häupting der Indianer.” Backus was a US-American, who came to the FRG in the 1960s as a banal “Schlagersänger” often promoting stereotypes about the cowboy, and was one of the few West German stars whose songs were allowed to be played on East German radio. The quoted song was a hit in both

Germanys in 1961. The narrator, thereby, invokes a shared German image of Native

Americans for the reader. The “wir” carries the ambiguity of group membership of

Germans from an East German perspective. The indeterminate pronoun „man,” on the other hand, carries a different ambiguity: between the “I” and a general social group. The

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“I,” which includes itself in a general group that could be the German public or the global western world, in combination with the verb “vergessen” indicates a general statement about the inclusion of historicity in post-Wende times.

Further complicating the German associations with the Native American, the text mentions Michael Moore’s claim in Bowling for Columbine that US-Americans seem to be afraid of Native American revenge, an unacknowledged remnant of America’s bloody past. “Die Söhne der großen Bärin” extends this parodic hyperbole to the Amerikan need for defending the home with alarm systems. The narrator surmises that the fear of revenge of Native Americans as a basis for the constant fear in Amerikan society and its need for home protection. Adding the historical context, even as hyperbole, inserts a historicity that emphasizes the ridiculousness of the diagnosed exaggerated fear. The column uses the imagological concept of the American frontier to emphasize the difference between the

American and the German imagological concepts of the Native American, simultaneously alluding to a fundamental similarity between East and West Germany, without neglecting the differences. The imagological concepts of Native Americans thereby become a means for the affirmation of inner-German similarities against the othering of America, which develops out of two differing but close concepts during the “Teilung.” This, however, is only one characterization of Amerika in which the chapter partakes. Others are Amerika as a nation of salespeople (represented in the alarm system sales lady), as a space of dehumanizing technical advances (represented by the tale of the incompatibility of family life and alarm systems), as the site of the local and the global in the confrontation of differing images of Native Americans (new Hollywood-produced images from Ocean’s

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Eleven), and as obsessed with the heartfelt personal narrative over factual analysis. Osang’s text reaffirms the differentiation between the German and the American adventurer, in which the former experiences the Otherness of Amerika in association with it, while the latter experiences it in opposition. The aspect that is instead the dangerous Other in all these narratives is white American greed, combined with the fetish of securing their wealth.

Therein, the narrative shows, lies the real danger, the obsoleteness of jouissance out of greed, fear of loss, and delimitation. In the German fantasy of the experience of the Native-

American as adventure, however stereotypical it may be, appears to allow for more inclusion of the Other into the Self than the American Nation-Thing allows.

“Die Söhne der großen Bärin” exemplifies the significance the text puts on media products to make the space accessible to himself and his readers. In these references and images, he creates familiarity with the space but also succumbs to the dangers the preconceptions hold for the observer. Specifically, the usage of references to and images from movies and television shows exemplifies the media-imagery that Berlin-New York uses to convey the protagonist’s impressions to the implied reader and which thusly structure the experience of the subject. The mentioned intermedial references are too manifold to examine in full in this dissertation. They range from publications like Trabi goes to Hollywood to Sergio Leone’s Once upon a time in America, and the Western Cat

Ballou, both of which were shown in the GDR (cf. ofdb.de). Noticably, he does not use many German literary images of Amerika or New York but relies heavily on filmic and musical images from Germany and the United States. The text posits that Amerika is a

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space mapped out by music and film in the public discourse rather than by literary products of any kind (cf. Bauschinger “Mythos Manhattan”).

Alex writes extensively about the news media and about music, but it is the filmic representation of America that structures and determines the portrayal of his experiences in the United States. He reflects on this when he talks about the power of images while fantasizing about witnessing a murder, which is reminiscent of the Alfred Hitchcock classic

Rear Window:

Vielleicht würde einer der Detectives zu mir rübergucken, denn ich sitze ja selber

in einem Fensterchen. Man kann es ansehen, aber nicht berühren. Es bleiben Bilder.

[...] Manchmal habe ich das Gefühl, daß auch diejenigen, die lange hier sind, nicht

hinter die Bilder kommen, sie sitzen irgendwann vielleicht mit den wichtigen

Leuten am Tisch. Das ist alles (Osang Berlin-New York 29-30).

Amerika, in the narrator’s eyes, is so overdetermined by medial fantasies that it is impossible for the actual space to assert itself over those images. This is exactly how the above-mentioned cognitive mapping of spaces works. Everybody maps out spaces according to their own experience, media images, and fantasies. For Amerika, the media images specifically are so dominant and numerous that they consume the space whole. One can argue that Berlin-New York is an at least semi-conscious reflection on how Amerika - the narrator’s image of Amerika - constantly influences the perception of the space and culture the United States; this consciousness markedly reflects back on the German nation and its organization of jouissance.

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It becomes evident in Alex’s recognition of dissimilarities between Amerika and the United States, which furthers the impression that Berlin-New York, despite the recognition of the American influence on the German Nation-Thing and the detailed

German imagination of Amerika, finds the Other in the details. In practice, it turns out that much of the knowledge about Amerika and specifically about New York is a misconception:

Jeder gibt gern New-York-Tips ab. [...] Als ich vor fast genau fünf Jahren ein älteres

Berliner Ehepaar auf seiner ersten New-York-Reise begleitete, sagte ich vorher

schlau: Nehmen Sie sich warme Sachen mit, es kann sehr kalt werden in New York.

Wahrscheinlich hatte ich das aus dem Film Kevin allein in New York, keine Ahnung

(Osang Berlin-New York 28).

He and the married couple then end up experiencing rather warm weather, proving that medial knowledge is not necessarily wrong, but showing that it often is at least inaccurate.

Alex, who spends most of his time in New York, also recognizes quickly that the United

States is far from having a unified identity, from producing a unified image, as he finds inordinate differences between the East and the West Coast (85), but particularly between the urban and the rural (80). Aditionally, the United States appears to be regularly and abruptly changing, which the text exemplifies with a story about doctors or babysitters suddenly moving without even leaving a forwarding address (86).

Beyond the differences between Amerika and the United States, the narrator finds many parallels between the GDR and the United States. A German film producer tells Alex

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that he had always found New York boring until he had realized that it is very much like the GDR, which then makes Alex recognize the parallels. He writes about the lack of room heater adjustment - “wie die Röhrenheizkörper des Sozialismus” (31), the water in the shower being either too hot or too cold, the unreliability of the gas company, the comparable facial expressions of Fox New anchors with those of the Aktuelle Kamera, their shared love for sitcoms and sports, the relative similarity between George W. Bush, Dick

Cheney, Erich Honecker, and Günter Mittag (Osang Berlin-New York 277). It even affects his behavior, as he catches himself being as submissive to people in temporary positions of power (the telephone man installing a landline) as he was in the GDR, where one imagines the power of the state being omnipresent and demanding submissiveness. Despite his acknowledgment that those are cliches, he insists on a similarity between the two from the perspective of a (re-)unified Germany: “Es passt alles zusammen. Die DDR und die

USA haben aus gesamtdeutscher Sicht vieles gemein, vor allem, wenn man aufs Land fährt” (Osang Berlin-New York 277). Amerika is as much an Other as the GDR for a (re-

)unified Germany, which reveals itself not as unified but as a continuation of West-German ideologies. This means that from the narrator's perspective, Amerika can play the role of

Germany today that the GDR had played before: the Other that reveals itself in terms close enough to understand. The similarities are only obscured by the imperialist writing of history, in which, according to Berlin-New York, similarities become differences. The charade is illustrated in the portrayal of Ronald Reagan as a savior and Erich Honecker as a deranged villain (Osang Berlin-New York 314). Despite the similarities, which are obvious to the narrator, history does not acknowledge them, but from the hegemonic

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perspective of the victors only considers ideologically constructed difference to be the proper perspective.

These ideologically skewed perspectives on the German nation are also the reason for the protagonist’s struggles with his association with Germany, which he perceives as generally problematic but specifically dominated by fears of obsoleteness. His unease with the German Nation-Thing shows itself when his wife calls him “typically German:”

»Typisch deutsch« ist das fieseste Argument, das ich kenne. Wenn ich laut

»Mahlzeit« gebrüllt hätte, wäre das sicher auch typisch deutsch gewesen. Ich will

nicht typisch deutsch sein, und meine Frau weiß das. Aber was soll ich machen.

[...] Wenn ich am Strand entlanglaufe, fällt mir das Lied Deine Spuren im Sand von

Howard Carpendale ein. In zehn Jahren werde ich aussehen wie Gerd Fröbe in Die

tollkühnen Männer mit ihren fliegenden Kisten. Ich werde ein starrköpfiger

weißhäutiger Deutscher mit Pickelhaube sein.[...] Kürzlich habe ich mich nach

einer Party von allen Leuten mit Handschlag verabschiedet, obwohl ich schon beim

zweiten gemerkt habe, daß niemand damit rechnet. Aber ich war nun mal dabei.

Ich schüttelte zu Ende. Am Ende kam ich mir vor wie ein Staatsgast aus

Deutschland. Ich will nicht so sein wie ich bin. Ich glaube, deswegen wollte ich

auch immer nach New York (Osang Berlin-New York 104-105).

This passage makes it obvious that Alex’s longing to go to New York, to seek adventure, and become a Weltbürger originates in a deep uncomfortableness with the German nation, which he perceives as self-fulfilling prophecy. The choice of Carpendale’s song and

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Fröbe’s film are both interesting. They indicate the narrator’s conviction of the agency of national stereotypes through media products. Notably, the narrator cites two products created by non-Germans, Carpendale is South African and the Fröbe film is a British production. Die tollkühnen Männer relies heavily on national stereotypes for its comedy and is set at a time in which the German nation was characterized by Prussian militarism, conservatism, and social rigidity. Carpendale’s song is about the loss and the disaffection from a former partner, but in the context of the discussion of Alex’ relationship with his

Nation-Thing becomes a marker for the loss of a positive affective relationship with it. The tension that the narrator constructs here is between the German nation, particularly its old stereotypes, and his indirect recognition of the necessity of the Nation-Thing. The Thing exists in the duality of the recognition of a loss that was suffered and the fear of the nation’s persistent presence in old and negative stereotypes. His experiences in New York and other parts of the United States make the narrator ultimately realize that there is no way to dissociate himself from his socialization and his belonging to a German socio- psychological communal identity. Hence, the text implicitly makes the German nation and its organization of jouissance the subject of many of its.

Additionally, the text identifies the lack of a German public discourse about nation, which, as I argue, would remedy the strong association between Germanness and old stereotypes about the German nation. He does identify the source of the problem of the

German nation in public discourse and the historical shame it carries: “Der Deutsche

Verein galt im vorvorigen Jahrhundert mal als eine der ersten Adressen der Stadt, er besaß ein Haus direkt neben dem Plaza, aber dann verschwanden die Deutschen aus Scham

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immer mehr im Schatten von New York” (Osang Berlin-New York 192). Referencing the plans of the German public television stations to expand to the United States, he further claims that the German way to compensate for the feeling of obsoleteness is their focus on economic and media spreading and dominance (Osang Berlin-New York 194). Hence, I argue that Berlin-New York must be read primarily as an adventure narrative: The narrator mostly describes Amerika as a space of adventure in which he repeatedly emphasizes the dangers of the country and New York City specifically; he is keen on finding the confrontation with the Other and does so in the everyday rituals and myths of the American

Nation-Thing; and he uses this Other to confront a feeling of inadequcy of the German

Nation-Thing, not like many of the nineteenth century adventurers as unfulfilled potential but based on its negative past, its powerful stereotypes, and their negative effect on contemporary Germans.

While Germany appears to disappear in its alliance with the United States, the USA becomes globally ever more pervasive in the eyes of the narrator. He bases his observation primarily on his politics, the behavior of Amerikans abroad, and his association of Amerika and capitalism: “Der Mann aus Chicago sah mit unzerstörbarem Selbstbewußtsein aufs

Meer. Man kann sich gut an Amerika anlehnen »Die Welt kann ruhig schlafen«, erklärte

Bill Clinton gerade irgendwo in Asien zur verfahrenen Präsidentenwahl. »Die Welt«, sagte er" (Osang Berlin-New York 102). As much as Alex ridicules the Amerikan sense of entitlement to lead the world, he simultaneously testifies to their influence. He claims that then chancellor Gerhard Schröder can no longer let his bad mood show like his predecessors could because “the world is becoming more American” (Osang Berlin-New

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York 16).72 Amerika also appears to be synonymous with the global spread of unrestrained capitalism in Berlin-New York. The narrator follows a scathing criticism of New York’s capitalism and its desire to consume with a statement about the system’s spread to

Germany: “Ich höre, in Deutschland darf jetzt auch gehandelt werden. Viel Spaß. Ich laufe mit meiner großen schwarzen Moskauer Bärenfängermütze als Warnung durchs kalte New

York. Ein Jäger der verlorenen Zeit” (Osang Berlin-New York 111). In form of his “bear hunter hat,” which I assume is an Ushanka, Alex associates himself in this singular instance via Moscow with the socialist system and resistance against this Amerikan capitalist system, in which he usually, however, fully participates. In this instance, Osang’s narrator appears to be caught in platitudes of Amerika. Amerika as place of boundless capitalism and his self-association with the socialist system exemplify his position as eastern German, who has bought into the new system, but for whom the socialist Thing is present enough to be available to distance himself from capitalism when considering its negative aspects.

He is caught between a marveling fascination for the Amerikan economic system and its rejection when it seemingly affects the German nation. This parallels a perception of the

Other that I described in Chapter 2, in which the Other holds a function between amazement at the fantasy of an excess of enjoyment and the threat to the Self when it appears to intrude into one’s own space. In this basic function, Amerika still works as an Other, maybe the

Other per se, for the narrator. Its rejection as capitalist Other that endangers the German organization of jouissance ultimately confirms the difference between the fantasy of the

72 “Die Welt wird amerikanischer” (16 - my translation).

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Other and the Self, just like the nineteenth and twentieth century Native American adventure narratives did. Berlin-New York, however, also describes the limits of the global expansion of Amerika. Some spaces resist their appropriation by the Amerikan system, namely Central America and Cuba: “Wir mussten über Mexiko fliegen. Wir holten unser

Gepäck in Cancun, Mexiko, ab und schleppten es zum Schalter der Fluggesellschaft

Aircaribe. Von da an aber schienen wir Amerika wirklich zu entkommen. Es gab keine

Kontrollen mehr, ich hätte eine Knarre im Hosenbund tragen können" (Osang Berlin-New

York 201-202). Moving outside the Amerikan zone of influence also means escaping the paranoia for which Amerika stands for the narrator.

Amerika in Berlin-New York works on multiple levels in regard to the German nation and his relationship with it. On the one hand, he experiences how heavily his access to Amerika is influenced by media products, particularly US-American movies and the myths and images they transport. Simultaneously, he is reminded of his own Germanness and while he recognizes differences between the socialization of eastern and western

Germans, there appears to be a common ground for a (re-)unified German nation, beyond the stereotypes of militarism, conservatism, and strictness. This similarity surfaces in the construction of difference between Amerika and Germany, which he exemplifies via their respective fantasies of Native Americans and the different manifestations of danger in the longing for adventure, as well as everyday rituals, such as children going places by themselves, and the embrace of capitalism. 73 The three main underlying issues the narrator

73 The difference reveals itself in a great number of other anecdotes as well: Osangs narrator talks about the alienation of experiencing New York as a non-place when he looks out of his hotel room (13); describes his feeling of superfluousness in the face of the “Menschenmaschine” that is Manhattan (27); talks about

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diagnoses in Amerika are greed, megalomania, and paranoia. The German Nation-Thing, as much as the narrator concedes its necessity, also remains difficult for Alex to embrace, due to its negative historical connotations and the hegemonic rule of western histories and ideologies. During a visit to Berlin, Alex witnesses an exchange between Matthias

Wissmann, a former minister under Helmut Kohl, his companion, and an Eastern German restaurant owner. The two western Germans insult the eastern German woman by claiming that the sewage smell coming out of the old sewage system originates in her kitchen, which the narrator interprets as proof that the western German worldview is hegemonic: “Ich hätte ihm gern in den Hintern getreten. Aber das hätte niemand mehr verstanden. Es war zu spät.

Die Wahrheit gehörte Typen wie Wissmann” (Osang Berlin-New York 78). One must read this as a plea to the implied German reader to deal with the East German past more equitably based on his example of the hegemony of a ideological western narration of history. Amerika in Berlin-New York does not offer a solution to Alex issues of identification. In the images and tropes the narrator employs, however, a not-quite dystopian, but negative world is about to force its ways onto Germany as well. Germany is no utopia either, but it at least appears to be less influenced by greed and paranoia.

American superficiality (66, 74). He also mentions that Americans are incredibly attached to rules (125); have different social conventions, which is exemplified by Alex dressing up for a childrens’s Halloween part, while all other adults are not in costume (219; 243 - 244) and his description of finding the Pledge of Allegiance in his son’s school alienating (217-218); etc.

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4.2. Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam – In search for an Other and a stable concept of the

German nation

Bernd Wagner’s Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam is a relatively classic travelogue in which a citizen of the former GDR goes to Amerika to explore the country and relate the adventures he experiences away from home. The critical reception of the book has been small and mixed. Hans Christoph Buch praises the book and its author in his critique

“Pilgerfahrten in die Wirklichkeit,” published in Die Zeit. He writes that Wagner is one of the few writers concerned with the Wende who do not romanticize socialism, but instead welcomed (re-)unification as he himself had left the GDR in the 1980s of his own accord.

Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam, claims Buch, is a balanced look at the USA, “the world police force […], which strikes fear into Europe’s heart with its arrogance, bristling with weaponry.”74 He particularly commends the text, which he calls “road-movie,” for its non- judgmental look at the “downside of the American Dream,”75 lower class lives, far away from the jet-set and the glamor of New York high-rises. Florian Welle, who wrote his critique for Die Sueddeutsche Zeitung, on the other hand, bemoans what he considers to be the false advertising of the book’s blurb, which praises Wagner as a “late descendant of

Seume.”76 Instead of the promise that lies in this recognition of an unconventional perspective on Amerika, Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam delivers an aggregation of

74 “dem Weltpolizisten USA, der das alte Europa mit waffenstarrender Arroganz das Fürchten lehrt” (my translation)

75 “Kehrseite des American dreams” (my translation)

76 “Späten Nachfahren Seumes” (my translation).

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stereotypes, according to Welle. He further argues that this makes the text a better travel guide. I agree in large part with Welle’s assessment on the extensive usage of stereotypes but it is not a better travel guide as the narrator takes extensive aesthetic and content-related liberties in his descriptions. One of the most notable examples is in his description of a college football game that he attends in Texas. He writes elaborately of a Texas college team called the “Rockets” and the opponents, the “Crocodiles,” describing scoreboard animations and how college players all play only for a “salary” (Wagner 303). Herein, he takes up an important discourse surrounding college sports alien to most German readers, but so shortened and distorted that its lack of basis in reality becomes clear. His misnaming of the college teams - there is no football team called the “Rockets” in Texas, nor is there a team called the “Crocodiles” – confirms my earlier argument that authenticity is a ineffectual categorie, since even the narrator of the text that claims the factuality of the narrated proves to be unreliable. Wagner’s narrator appears to be very much entrenched in images of Amerika and only finds a new relationship to Amerika and, by extension, to the

German nation to a minimal degree.

Wagner opens his text with the creation of a juxtaposition between Manhattan and the rest of Amerika in which he associates Manhattan with the Self, a place of which he knows the everyday processes and that he will miss like a home; and the space outside of

Manhattan with the Other. On his first trip to Harlem, he describes how he fell asleep on the subway and how his head slid onto the shoulder of a black woman who not only harbors the sexual allure of the exotic other, but also the motherly aspects of the black mother figure given form as his daughter tells him that she could imagine her as her stepmother: “Wir

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kamen in die Gegend, wo ich einmal, ermüdet von der noch ungewohnten klimatisierten

Luft, an der Seite einer schwarzen Frau eingeschlafen war, mein Kopf auf ihre Schulter rutschte und ich, aufgeschreckt und Sorry murmelnd, mich nur langsam aus der Wärme und dem angenehm betörenden Geruch ihrer Haut gelöst hatte” (Wagner 8). The attraction of the exotic Other is not the other person’s intellect or her social signals like clothing, but her body, the sent and warmth she radiates, which the narrator qualifies in a sexual way as beguiling. He repeatedly likens these encounters of an exotic other to Germans of Turkish decent in Berlin (e.g. Wagner 8, 217). Even further on his way out of the city, he writes about exotic appearing stores selling spicy food and storing goods on the floor, which he immediately associates with Turkish stores in Berlin, and explains that crammed stores like this are a sign of “large families” (Wagner 8).77 New York is, for the narrator, not a melting pot but a salad bowl in which he firmly associates himself with the parts that are dominated by people with European heritage and explains the exotic Other in terms of the Other in

Germany, immigrants of Turkish heritage. In this respect, New York appears to not be different from Berlin – as social spaces, they both stand for a cosmopolitan hybridity.

Initially, the narrator believes he can find difference and otherness outside of New

York City and claims that it is there that the truly foreign begins.78 In his further travels,

77 “ein Zeichen, das sich hier große Familien versorgten” (8- my translation)

78 The narrotor says “die Fremde,” which, in German, is different from “das Fremde,” which is the translation for “the Other” as in the “das Eigene und das Fremde.” “Die Fremde” is a space that is completely “foreign.” It is “the strange, unknown, and alien Land” that lacks intersection with the known - with anything that has been appropriated. The English language lacks this nuance and proximity, which complicates the translation and my analysis of it. I chose to use “the foreign” here as I want to preserve the Other to describe attributes like the “exotic other,” which is present in the book. The foreign is an Other that appears to be completely unknown.

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however, he notes that moments of recognition predominate moments of experiences of otherness. This differentiation between New York City or sometimes the whole East Coast as a land of culture and the rest as wilderness is itself a trope that one can trace back to nineteenth-century literature about Amerika and that remains in place today, not only in

Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam (cf. Wied Reise; May Winnetou; Kürnberger Der

Amerikamüde; Herzog Stroszek). As in the trope of the errand into the wilderness (cf.

Miller 1), the narrator immediately connects that foreign space, which he declares the space west of New York City to be, with Native Americans: “Ich hatte Poughkeepsie zum

Ausgangspunkt meines Fußmarschs gewählt, weil es so indianisch nach Fremde klang”

(9). This is a first glimps into the longing for a vintage adventure that Wagner’s text demonstrates throughout. This desire is connected to a longing for a more stable concept of the German nation and how it organizes its jouissance; however, as he is writing the text in the twenty-first century, the narrator is necessarily disappointed in what he finds. Welle argues that these stereotypes, he specifically mentions “brodelndes Leben” as a description of New York (Wagner 8), are due to the author’s lack of imaginative prowess. His longing for a nineteenth-century adventure and the implied wish for difference could, however, be the more convincing explanation of the parallel tropes he employs. The narrator specifically connects him to his childhood, in which he and his friend explored foreign places and experienced a feeling of euphoria (Wagner 10) – hence inadvertently connecting his longing for adventure and the underlying wish for a more stable definition of the

German national identity with a romantic notion of the childish stability of Self and Other.

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Wagner’s text indeed operates with a plethora of very common tropes of Amerika to describe his travels through the United States, some of which are traceable to a concrete intertext and some appear to stem from German discourses on Amerika. I have already mentioned the travelogue’s explicit intertextual connection to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century adventurer narratives from Germany and the United States, e.g.

Winnetou and Huckleberry Finn. Another explicit influence is represented by Beat

Generation road novels like Jack Kerouac's On the Road (14). The third clearly identifiable influence is Hollywood (for example, he names New York City Gotham), which he complains is everywhere (35, 201). Some of the most common tropes found in Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam describe the US-American landscape as endless (e.g. 24, 126), the layer of culture over nature as incredibly thin (269), and Amerikans as fat (33) and racist

(25). He employs typical images of Puerto Rican children playing in the water of an illegally opened fire hydrant and how they play tricks on the police (79), and he travels like

Kerouac by bus and train to encounter the lower classes. Most notably, like Adorno and many others, he again and again bemoans the boundless consumerism and how it has taken over all other forms of social interaction (e.g. 34, 219, 305). I argue that the employment of these stereotypes, because of the sheer impossibility of avoiding them, are expressions of the narrator’s longing for Amerika as a romantic space of adventure, something he feels has become obsolete and in which he assumes a counter-history could be found to not only its current social circumstances, but his precarious masculinity and identification with the

German nation.

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This true foreignness of the unknown Other repeatedly fails to materialize. One central example of this is the description of the protagonist’s encounter with Native

Americans. The story of the Native Americans fluctuates between its two tropes of the noble savage and the resigned drunks (Wagner 133). Notably, Wagner’s language slips into the language of nineteenth-century adventure novels when he talks about his encounter with Native Americans. The racist tropes appear even more pronounced when he uses them to describe today's Native Americans:

Meine roten Brüder, zwar bin ich nicht ausdrücklich wegen euch übers große

Wasser gekommen, aber in dieser Runde zu sitzen, freut mich ungemein.

Angesichts der Mauer hinter uns ist mir klargeworden, daß wir Blutsbüder sind.

Auch ich, der ich im Osten Deutschlands großgeworden bin, weiß, was das Leben

in einem Reservat bedeutet. Aber die Verbundenheit geht tiefer, da ich nämlich

vom Stamme der Sachsen bin, und die sind seit Karl May alle nebenberuflich

Indianer. (Wagner 135)

The piece of the Berlin wall, which he finds on the reservation, prompts the narrator to a rather distasteful comparison between former citizens of the GDR and the history of the

Native Americans on reservations. In this unsolicited appropriation of their culture,

Wagner again shows the colonial gaze as the underlying longing for adventure in Amerika.

When he subsequently participates in a Sundance, he fully becomes a white man playing an Indian, a phenomenon that Philip Deloria describes in his eponymous book. Deloria argues that in the American context pretending to be an Indian has often been used to buttress national identity by means of encountering “the authentic amidst the anxiety of

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urban industrial and postindustrial life” (7). The fear of the obsoleteness of the Self as well as one’s own communal identity prompts whites to borrow the authenticity that they feel they lost from an Other whom they see as being in possession of that authenticity. Deloria further argues that putting on the Indian mask, figuratively or literally, promotes the self- consciousness of a “real ‘me’” (7). For the narrator of Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam, this self is connected to his regional heritage in Saxony, including Karl May’s adventure fantasies, which display an image of Amerika that appears to be a source of longing for the narrator, including the aforementioned hegemonial construct of the German nation, which is ingrained in May’s oeuvre. In the German context, impersonating has significance for the nation beyond the affirmation of a Self, as Katrin Sieg argues in Ethnic Drag: “The

American West became a displaced theater for the racial imagination, whose auspicious surrogations reworked the dynamic of accuser and accused, victim and perpetrator, mourning and denial and thereby promised to purge the terms of historical trauma” (10).

The self-association of Germans with Native Americans that the narrator of Wie ich nach

Chihuahua kam displays here, must also be read as a means to deal with the historic guilt and shame that the racism of the National Socialist agenda caused in the German nation.

By associating oneself with the racial Other and simultaneously concentrating on the production of difference between the White and the Native Americans, Germans can perform an imagined cleansing of the German nation.

Beyond his appropriation of the Native Americans’ culture, the protagonist struggles to fulfill his longing for adventure and the confirmation of his own identity and the German nation in the experience of the Other, which leads him to flee the United States

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to a culture less overdetermined, in this case, to Mexiko. The trip to Mexiko to experience otherness is a trope well known in the American public and literary discourse (eg. Saul

Bellow Augie March) and is employed in other contemporary German travelogues about

Amerika, such as Wolfgang Büscher’s Hartland. Other than in Hartland, however, the description of the narrator’s adventurous travel through Mexiko is the central part and climax of Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam, which the title anticipates. The narrator explicitly states that he chooses Mexiko because it is less overdetermined: “Ähnlich leer wie die

Karte war mein Kopf was dieses Land betraf” (184). The second reason he gives is

Mexiko’s distance from the overtly capitalistic structure he bemoans in Amerika. The narrator goes on to experience the naïve otherness he missed in the USA in Mexiko, a country he labels in decidedly exoticizing and primitivizing terms. He explicitly describes the fulfillment of his longing for otherness in Mexiko:

Endlich war ich in der Fremde angelangt. Zur Fremde gehört, daß man in ihr kein

Wort versteht. Während ich beim Englischen immer den Eindruck hatte, die Leute

brauchten sich nur etwas mehr Mühe zu geben, um verständlich zu sein, war die

Sprache hier eine Folge wirklich fremder Laute, wurde sie wieder zu einem

Mysterium, zu Rythmus und Melodie. (Wagner 188-189)

He associates otherness with language and identifies English as part of a quasi-Self, which means, in turn, that if he spoke Spanish, Mexiko could not serve as the exotic Other, and

English as a global language is the path to making Amerika no longer function as an Other in the German discourse. For the narrator, however, Spanish becomes the sign that he has

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arrived in the foreign - the exotic Other - which is always connected to rhythm and melody

(cf. Sheppard 21-22). Consequently, his view fits Lisle’s notion of the colonizing gaze.

In Mexiko, the narrator also finds an, in his eyes, graspable Other to the

German nation, which he misses in Amerika. There he has thus far only found the evaporation of identity in the late-capitalist systems of obsoleteness and the primacy of consumption. Mexiko, on the other hand, offers exactly what he has been longing for, an

Other in which he can experience alienation, but at the same time recognition and confirmation of the Self, personal and communal:

Mit einem Wort, für das ich keinen Ersatz weiß: Sie waren eine Nation. Das heißt,

sie hatten ein relativ homogenes, aber nicht undurchlässiges System aus Sprache,

Geschichte und Gewohnheiten herausgebildet. In diesem Sinne sind sie viel mehr

eine Nation als die ständig im Umbruch befindlichen Amerikaner, deren Identität

trotz Football, Stars and Stripes und Nationalhymne vor allem dadurch geprägt

wird, daß man etwas nicht ist, nämlich kein Italiener, Deutscher oder Mexikaner

mehr. Amerikaner zu sein bedeutet, einer Supernation anzugehören, die alle

anderen Nationen hinter sich gelassen hat. Mexiko hatte also etwas

Zurückgebliebenes. Und da ich mich selbst angesichts des rasanten Fortschritts der

Menschheit als immer zurückgebliebener empfinde, fühlte ich mich entsprechend

heimisch. (Wagner 189- 190)

In this explanation, Amerika becomes the incorporation of the hyper-modern, in which the old methods of identification no longer work, which causes a disorientation that can only

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be remedied by the invocation of a negative self-determination. Wagner’s definition, on the other hand, misjudges Mexiko’s own difficult history of exclusion and inclusion based on an individual’s European and Native American heritage. Because of its artificiality,

Amerika also promotes an “Einheitskultur,” a standard culture, from which it tolerates only minimal diversion, as an effect of its lack of identificatory potential (cf. Eisenstadt Politics,

Identity, and Mexico’s Indigenous Rights Movements). Amerika is, in fact, not an Other usable for the confirmation of one’s own Nation-Thing, but the incorporation of the danger of its obsoleteness in late capitalism. The Mexiko passage confirms that the underlying text in Wagner’s work is a romantization of the past, including a German Nation-Thing that still relies on bourgeois values and allows for a colonial perspective on the exotic Other.

This exotic Othering manifests itself in many different instances, like his description of the landscape, the people, the culture, but nowhere as strikingly as in his sexual encounter with a young woman, which clearly shows strong undertones of a colonizing gaze and masculinity, which appears threatened by the female empowerment of late capitalism. He tries to explain his objectification of the woman he meets with an anthropological argument: “Machen wir uns nichts vor, der Wandertrieb ist eine Abart des

Geschlechtstriebs, ein Herumstreunen auf der Suche nach geeigneten Sexualpartnern, das primitive Menschen wie mich von der Inzucht abhalten soll” (251). Wie ich nach

Chihuahua kam closely connects the longing for adventure with a longing to procreate and in this act, at least in his case, for an affirmation of his masculinity as he further argues that it is the male’s “duty” to initiate sexual contact once he is alone with a fitting female. The whole episode mirrors a fantasy of a strictly patriarchal society in which the male can

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simply take a woman for his satisfaction. In the woman, he finds the almost ideal incorporation of a hegemonic white masculinity: she shows her feminine form, she is non- white, almost mute, and almost exclusively passive. Without any knowledge of her cultural conditions, he interprets her participation as her desire, even though he initiates the contact.

The constant willingness to engage in sexual intercourse, in particular with whites, is a constant trope in the exotic Other (cf. Hall “The Spectacle” 264-267). Mexiko is the colonial Other for which the narrator has been longing. Consequently, he feels his masculinity and his own identity, based on the German Nation-Thing, reinvigorated.

Despite Buch’s praise of Wagner as being free from nostalgic affects toward the

GDR, these affects are indeed present but hidden in the Mexiko episode, in which he recognizes the GDR in multiple instances, which always appear to put him at ease. After changing into his swim trunks within eyeshot of a family and being subsequently arrest for public indecency, the protagonist does not show great fear as he is used to being picked up by the police from his travels “behind the iron curtain” (Wagner 230).79 The similarities between the Mexican police and the police forces of the Warsaw Pact and especially the

GDR go even further: “Wenn ich jetzt zu einer amerikanischen Polizeiwache gebracht würde, wäre mir etwas mulmig zumute - aber das revolutionäre Gebaren der Mexikaner war mir zu vertraut, um mich zu erschrecken" (Wagner 230). In his comparison between the Mexican executive force and the GDR’s in opposition to Amerika’s, the narrator sees a culture with which he can identify, something familiar with which he could communicate.

79 “hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang” (my translation)

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Accordingly, he easily talks himself out of the situation, but not before praising Mexiko for providing refuge to Trotsky and Anna Seghers (Wagner 231). The connection between the GDR and Mexiko has long been special, as Olivia C. Díaz Pérez describes in Mexiko als antitotalitärer Mythos. The special role of Mexiko in the GDR arose from multiple factors. Mexiko did offer refuge to a number of prominent socialist writers apart from

Seghers, like Egon Erwin Kisch or Rudolph Feistmann. Additionally, the GDR glorified the revolutionary past of Mexiko, declaring it one of the first countries to liberate itself from the oppressive forces of capitalist colonialism. Furthermore, Mexiko was considered the immediate adversary of the class enemy, Amerika (cf. Nikolaus Werz 32-35). I, therefore, argue that the narrator’s fascination with Mexiko in combination with his invocation of the benefits of a stable concept of the German nation, and the fear of obsoleteness does indeed show an attachment to the, in his representation, clearly defined thing of the GDR. He exhibits a nostalgia about the past that not only includes nineteenth- century adventure narratives but extends to the GDR, which, despite its lack of personal freedom, at least provided a stable sense of identity in identification with or rejection of its ideologies and the steadiness of its customs, rituals, and exercise of power.

Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam positions Amerika in opposition to this stability and conservation of identity. Amerika is the incarnation of late capitalism, its constant change and its inability to produce culture. The text, however, does appear to also portray that it only stands in for a trend in late capitalism that it identifies as accountable for the decay of identities - primarily the mass media, while the United States as state, in the eyes of the narrator, still serves its role as protector of personal freedom and democratic basic values.

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The narrator uses the focalization figure of Gabriel, who conflates state, nation, and culture, to exemplify the notion of Amerika as protector of the world’s freedom:

[Die demokratisierte Welt] nämlich beruht daruf, daß eigenständige Kulturen

zugunsten einer von den Massenmedien verbreiteten Einheitskultur verschwinden.

[...] Der Siegeszug Amerikas ist der Siegeszug seiner Popkultur, die es in

Ermangelung einer gewachsenen Kultur herausgebildet hat. Als Ersatz für die

fehlende Kommunikation in seinem menschenleeren Land, Herr Bernardo, hat

Amerika die elektronische Kommunikation wenn auch nicht erfunden, so doch zur

beherrschenden gemacht. Und mit deren Hilfe verkleistert es die Köpfe in aller

Welt.” (Wagner 173)

He relativizes Gabriel’s statement by his emphasis on the stabilizing and freedom- fomenting political power of the USA; he later relativizes differently, as he identifies the lack of culture as a general problem of late capitalism. After contemplating San Francisco as “wooden Athens” – as tired copy of the original – he asks: “Warum verlangen wir von

Amerika etwas, was wir selbst nicht leisten? Es ist doch nur die Zuspitzung unserer eigenen

Existenz und zeigt, daß die Gegenwart grundsätzlich keine Kultur mehr hervorzubringen imstande ist. Wo wir etwas treffen, das diesen Namen verdient, ist es älteren Ursprungs”

(Wagner179). Despite giving an excuse for Amerika in this passage, the narrator maintains that it is the center of a system of obsoleteness of identities and a destabilizing force in the narrator’s relationship to the German nation, which he imagines as a stable historical concept. He believes that Germany is becoming a version of Amerika, as it is continuously modernized (Wagner 101), which he believes to be a danger to his enjoyment of the nation.

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The narrator is longing for a stable definition of Other and Self, and hence an Amerika that remains in its role of the Other, as space for adventure, and therein for self-affirmation.

In Wagner’s text, Amerika appears to have lost the ability to provide the narrator with a reaffirming Other. Through its mass media, it is inching too close to the Self and especially lacks the ability to see a retrograde fantasy fulfilled in its space and by its inhabitants. Furthermore, the global Amerika appears as threat to the narrator’s fantasy of the German nation and his fantasy of the communal jouissance. Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam mostly stays away from romanticizing the GDR, but rather seems to long for a stable

Nation-Thing that it assumes to be even older. Its depiction of Amerika oscillates in the process between longing and hope for finding the Other that stabilizes that Thing and the disappointment of not finding it. Its romanticized image of Mexiko shows that the underlying problem is really Amerika’s overdetermination and consumer culture, which do not leave enough space for the evolvement of the narrator’s romantic ideas of an exotic

Other.

4.3. Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens – adventure into Americanization

Jakob Hein’s Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens differs from Osang’s and

Wagner’s texts in setting and protagonist. Although published in 2003, it is actually set in the early 1990s. It shares this historical distance with Stadt der Engel. The para-text of

Formen and the inclusion of a note indicating that the pictures used are the author’s do construct an association between protagonist and author. Hein, like the protagonist, went

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to the United States shortly following his graduation from Gymnasium right after the

Wende. Structurally, the text shows similarities to Schultze gets the blues as well as another

German coming-of-age story set in Amerika, Joachim Meyerhoff’s Alle Toten fliegen hoch, in that it chronicles the protagonist’s time before his travels to Amerika and shows his prior relationship to and image of it as well as his return and the changes in Germany during his time abroad. Andrea Payk-Heimann argues in “Zwischenstation auf dem Weg ins wiedervereinigte Deutschland” that Amerika is thus only a stop on his journey and an instrument for the protagonist to navigate (re-)unification. Her argument is largely convincing, but I would go even further Hein’s text portrays the (re-)unification as an

Amerika-becoming – as Amerikanization. Despite the ending’s theme, the central part of the novel is made up of the protagonist’s travels in Amerika, and his journey is clearly marked as an adventure narrative.

The text can be divided into three parts. The first describes the obsoleteness of the

GDR and its information policy, which led to a romanticized image of Amerika in the young protagonist. The second relates the protagonist’s adventures in Amerika, which contain the disillusionment and restructuring of his Amerika-image. The last section, telling of the protagonist’s return to a Germany that he experiences as extremely

Amerikanized, is short but enormously important for this analysis.

Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens exhibits curious similarities to the genre of

Bildungsroman in its structure of the classic tripartite of “Jugendjahre – Wanderjahre –

Meisterjahre” - of youth and delusion, adventure and education, and return and participation in society (cf. Selbman 2-4). Some further similarities are the episodic

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structure in which the protagonist fails to find a place in society and the combination between a spatial and a figural novel (cf. Jacobs 271). The structural reference to the

Bildungsroman suggests a connection to an eighteenth-century ideal of education that notably contained the recognition of ones belonging in the nation. Instead of a bourgeois society, the protagonist is introduced to Amerikan society, which he then also encounters in Germany. The main difference from the traditional Bildungsroman is founded in the protagonist’s origins and his failure to return as “Meister” of a trade. He comes back simply as someone who is well trained in navigating an Amerikanized society after traveling in the country. The novel’s unique position among the cultural products this dissertation analyzes is further supported by the interspersed photographs of Amerika it uses.

In German texts about Amerika, using visual representations is not a unique feature.

Maximilian zu Wied already had his own painter at his side and used his illustrations as exemplifications of his text in the the early nineteenth century. Contemporary with Hein’s novel, Kathrin Roeggla, for example, uses pictures in really ground zero. Just as in

Roeggla’s text, the pictures in Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens appear to be placed at random, rather than in an effort to further illustrate what the text describes. They are mostly photos that reference Amerikan iconicity: skylines, stores, wall murals, signs, etc.

First and foremost, one can interpret the inclusion of the images as the text’s claim of authenticity since in an assumption deeply ingrained in the visualism of late capitalism, the

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image of a place is seemingly proof of its existence and proof of the photographer's presence in the space.80

Apart from this claim to authenticity, I argue that the images have at least two additional functions. They demonstrate how the German image of Amerika is largely made visually. As the images are added to the text in an attempt to create authenticity for the implied reader. One recognizes Amerika in the images, one realizes how much the premade network of visuals, tropes, and assumptions determine every interpretation of the object.

They express a power over the object that lies in the act of photography itself: “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge - and, therefore, like power. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire” (Sontag 4). Susan Sontag further argues for clearly differentiating between the functions of writing and photography. Writing, she argues, easily exposes itself as an interpretation as it has a voice and prominent entity that relays the mediated image. Photography, on the other hand, is interpreted as an index of what it depicts. Using pictures in novels, therefore, increases the power of appropriation of

Amerika and a heightened sense of making it part of the Self in the act of taking the photograph and then again in the act of looking at the image – a Sontag says in the act of making and acquiring. The recognition value of Amerika in the pictures presented in

80 Many critics have written about the dominance of the visual and vision in the construction of authenticity, which manifested itself in the nineteenth century and became even more dominant in the twentieth (cf. Fabian Time and the Other; Levin Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision)

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Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens illustrate how much the visual appropriation of

Amerika has progressed in the German public discourse. Consequently, the photographs become part of a display of the extensive presence of images of Amerika in the German visual aparatus.

In true Bildungsroman fashion, the novel begins with a short description of the protagonist’s youth and his naiveté. It describes his life in the GDR and the development of his image of Amerika. The obsoleteness of the GDR manifests itself in the description of its distribution of ideologically filtered information and the critique of its education system, which result in an image of Amerika focalized in the protagonist that is comical in its naiveté. Hein’s protagonist explains how a used sweatshirt with “n.y.c.” printed on the front that he received from his cousin instilled in him a longing to visit Amerika. The oppressive system of the GDR, however, influenced his plans as much as it altered his image of Amerika. The depiction of the United States in the media and the rejection he receives from his English teacher for his interest in Anglo-American literature and culture are exemplary of the text’s depiction of the GDR. For the protagonist, this rejection only has the effect of enhancing his longings: "In den Sendungen wurden häufig

Hintergrundreportagen aus den USA gesendet. Und obwohl es in diesen Reportagen immer nur darum ging, wie schlimm alles in Amerika war, wieviel Arbeitslosigkeit und Elend es dort gab, so wurde in mir doch eine merkwürdige Sehnsucht geweckt" (Wagner 13). His longing is an expression of his rejection of the GDR as a whole and leads to a self- identification with a romanticized image of Amerika as a reaction to the East German state and its fantasies of jouissance. As a novel published in 2003, its description of the system

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of the GDR underlines the inevitability of its obsoleteness through its promotion of oppression and patronization and contrasts with the association of the “West” with an unbounded freedom.

Amerika’s association with freedom and the protagonist’s naiveté image become clear in two passages. In one of them, he assumes that he can just live and work in the

United States because the West is free: “Ich wollte einfach nach Amerika! Ich hatte mich auch nicht über irgendwelche Einreiseformalitäten informiert. Wir waren jetzt Westen, dachte ich, und innerhalb des Westens mußte man sich doch schließlich frei bewegen können” (Wagner 25). The narrator shows the same naiveté in the protagonist when he describes his image of Amerika:

New York, das hieß über die Golden Gate Bridge zum Empire State Building fahren

und dort eine Coke on the Rocks trinken. Am Abend vielleicht noch durch den

Grand Canyon cruisen, natürlich mit einem dunkelblau-weißen Chevrolet, auf dem

sich oben die Polizeisirene drehte. Beat Street in der Bronx. Grandmaster Flash.

Und vielleicht würde man im Sommer mal einen kleinen Urlaub in Manhattan

machen, das gleich in der Nähe von New York lag“ (11).

The description shows a severe lack of geographical as well as cultural knowledge about the USA. The narrator interfuses it with individual tropes that originate in Hollywood movies and commercials like the image of the police car or the cola on ice. The iconicity of Coca Cola representing Western products has been a common trope in movies depicting the West (cf. Gooodbye Lenin; One Two Three). Rita Böttcher writes: “Kaugummi und

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Coca Cola wurden die Hostie und der Messwein bei der Einsegnung des westdeutschen

Konsumenten auf eine Lebensweise, die bis heute als amerikanisch schlechthin angesehen wird” (92). Payk-Heitmann sees in the idolization of Amerika a function that was created by the socialist system, in which the communist utopia appears increasingly unattainable.

This void is then filled with a utopian image of Amerika. Accordingly, it becomes a space that offers an absolute excess of jouissance in which all attractions exist in close proximity

(210-211). In the context of the discourses of the German nation, one has to add that the comedy of the naive former citizen of the GDR has been a staple of German discourses after the Wende and German entertainment of the 1990s (cf. Costagli 182; Zahlmann 262), which fluctuated between contempt for their ignorance and admiration for how ostensibly historically unencumbered these figures can experience objects like Amerika.81

Formen Menschlichen Zusammenlebens does not ridicule its protagonist by depicting him as an East German simpleton but rather sets him up for a rude awakening when confronted with reality, an experience that represents the mood of many eastern

Germans after the fall of the Wall. As Payk-Heitmann points out, the persistent trope of a romanticized image of Amerika transforming into complete disillusionment does not materialize in Hein’s text. Instead, the protagonist embraces the otherness of the place, clearly understanding it all as a learning opportunity that he faces with a pragmatic and stereotypically American “can-do” attitude (cf. Goodhart 65-68). For example, when he

81 One remembers films like Go Trabi Go! or Trabbi goes to Hollywood in which Eastern Germans are depicted as unsuspecting jackasses presented for ridicule; Schultze gets the blues is an example of the benevolent depiction of the Eastern German naive character

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realizes that a server’s constant questions of whether he wanted to order another drink is not a sign of Amerikan hospitality but rather a signal of his intention to get rid of a customer who is not consuming enough, he blames himself for his lack of understanding more than getting angry at the waiter’s insolence. In a longer process, the protagonist’s image of

Amerika approaches what the novel presents as America.

The novel uses a number of standard tropes of Amerika, arguably not least because of its constructions of the dichotomy of the utopian GDR image of Amerika and the mostly dystopian America it presents. It shows New York as a dangerous urban jungle in which dealers take over from the bankers after five o’clock (Wagner 81). The protagonist’s second stop is Florida, which is dominated by descriptions of sunshine and the manifold issues of his three friends from Germany, who came to the United States in hopes for adventure and to mend their strained relationship with each other, but who end up worrying solely about money (Wagner 88-95). In Kentucky, he describes the only attraction as “cow tipping” (Wagner 110) and the description of California is shrouded in loneliness and the superficiality of his host and her friends.

The most critical of his adventures in the United States is certainly his time in New

York, which mainly consists of descriptions of his roommates, who all appear to lack social warmth or understanding, and of his work at the café. The narrator relates stories of these failed existences and their attempts to compensate for failed dreams. One of his roommates is a German guitarist who failed to make a living at it and instead spends all his time in jazz clubs. Another lodger is a Frenchman who substitutes his disappointment caused by a failed long-term relationship with sleeping with as many women as possible. In his work

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in the cafe, the protagonist learns that his life in New York is characterized by materialism instead of social belonging or interaction: “[H]ier war der Zucker im Kaffee weitaus interessanter als meine großartigen inneren Werte. Und auch ich schätzte es bedeutend höher von einem Kunden ein überdurchschnittliches Trinkgeld als ein gutes Gespräch zu bekommen” (Wagner 39). New York becomes the experience of alienation by a capitalist system that does not care about the personal. Faced with his representation of Amerika, the place loses its function as the land of opportunity and instead becomes the land of shattered dreams.

In this world, the protagonist also learns of obsolescence as a function of capitalism and the lack of a sense of belonging, which is all that the system must offer in general.

Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens narrates this explicitly based on the description of the protagonist’s alienation after once visiting a dance club, which the novel parallels with the lifeworld description by one of his parents’ friend who hosted him during his first few days in New York and whom he still visits occasionally:

Ich war also in New York kein Kosmopolit geworden, sondern nur Dorfbewohner

einer kleinen eingebildeten Siedlung, die um das Café herum existierte. Gern

besuchte ich auch Rachel, bei der es jeden Tag vegetarische Ravioli zum

Abendessen gab. Sie erklärte mir, daß ihr Leben ausschließlich aus Veränderungen,

Umbrüchen und Wandlungen bestünde und es ohne ihr Abendbrot gar keine

Kontinuität darin gäbe. Ich verstand sofort. (Wagner 49)

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Hein’s text is, along with Berlin-New York, the second describing the protagonist’s failure to become cosmopolitan. However, instead of connecting this state of affairs with his socialization in Germany, the protagonist assumes that he has become a part of a social group no bigger than the one he left behind in Germany. Around this small society is a world that remains alien to him as it constantly produces obsoleteness and difference.

Rachel holds on to the repetitiveness of eating the same dinner everyday as the only ritual that she can preserve from obsoleteness and that, therefore, can lend stability to her formation of identity.

Pay-Heitmann argues that, in contrast with his other stops, California, his last, resembles a withdrawal from Amerika. However, I claim that his stay in California marks the protagonist’s understanding that Amerika can function as a space neither for adventure nor of refuge. Just before he comes to California, he has an affair with a student at the

University of Kentucky, whom he hopes to marry, but she “sadly is still a little bit married”

(Wagner 106).82 This marks the moment the protagonist tries to turn Amerika from an adventure to a refuge, from a space to confirm the self, to one in which he sees a different

Thing for himself, which keeps him from confronting the social and political changes in

Germany. In California, he is then forced to live in the cheapest room he can find and relinquishes any activities in order to make his money last until his return to Germany. As a consequence, he gets to know the lifeworld of the working class or suburban lower- middle-class, as it is often euphemistically called in the United States. This lifeworld

82 “[...] leider immer noch ein bisschen verheiratet” (104, my translation)

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reveals itself to be void of meaning. He encounters the same emptiness in the dates his host arranges for him, all of which he finds formulaic and trite as he meets women whose whole existence revolves around their work (Wagner 134-135). His host constantly talks about trivialities and gossip; her friends only talk about sex and wallow in their stereotypes about a sexually more tolerant Europe. Payk-Heimann argues that the confrontation with these absurd national stereotypes - his host’s friends claim all European men are homosexual - cause the protagonist’s emotional reconnection with the German nation: “Gleichsam als

Reaktion auf die Absurdität solcher nationalen Stereotype und Vorurteile beginnt sich die

Perspektive von Heins Hauptfigur erneut zu verändern, und mit einer zunehmenden

Selbstvergewisserung beginnt sich eine vorsichtige Wiederannäherung an Deutschland abzuzeichnen” (218). This reconnection, I argue, is the realization that against the protagonist’s hopes, Amerika cannot serve as alternative Thing for him. The realization that Amerika is good for neither self-assertion through adventure nor security of the self through refuge causes lethargy to take control of the protagonist: “Ein statischer

Gemütszustand, irgendwo zwischen geistiger Lähmung und einem schlechten Gewissen

über diese Lähmung, breitete sich in mir aus” (Wagner 132). In the end, he feels trapped in Amerika “in every aspect” (Wagner 145).83 What the protagonist experiences in

Amerika is his own obsoleteness and his guilty conscious is the shame that obsoleteness generates. Amerika’s system of obsolescence and its generation of obsoleteness does not offer a Thing for the protagonist, so he experiences its effects even more concentrated than

83 “Ich war in jeder Hinsicht gefangen” (145 - my translation)

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in Germany. Held captive by a life and a place that he had imagined so very differently and which cannot provide the experience of adventure because of its blandness and emptiness.

At the same time, it keeps him from becoming part of it as he is always identified as the

Other.

The only way Amerika does work is as a means of dissillusionment with regards to the utopian image in the GDR, vicariously representing the disillusionment with the (re-

)unification, which the protagonist experiences as Americanization. After he travels back to Germany, which he describes as “waking up into a dream” (Wagner 146), he realizes that Amerika has trapped him in yet another aspect, namely by invading the space of the

German Nation-Thing. The metaphor of waking up but remaining a dream works as a reminder that in the text the (re-)unified Germany is largely a copy of Amerika and a continuation of the dream of Amerika, which revealed itself as not quite a nightmare but as far less exciting and far less welcoming than imagined. The herald of Germany’s

Americanization for the narrator is language, and it is concentrated in places of consumption such as stores, advertisement, cocktails, and movie theaters. But it also has effects on the people’s behavior who, to the narrator, appear more distant:

Während meiner Abwesenheit schien Berlin amerikanisch geworden zu sein. Wenn

ich einen Laden betrat, wurde ich mit »Hi!« begrüßt. Keiner meiner Freunde gab

mir mehr die Hand zur Begrüßung. Sämtliche Produkte warben mit komplizierten

englischen Vokabeln und Wendungen, und die Filmplakate, die ich vor kurzem

noch in Amerika gesehen hatte, wurden jetzt unübersetzt in den Kinos Berlins

aufgehängt. Eine Zeitlang versuchte ich, einfach weiter Englisch zu sprechen. Doch

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das hatte zur Folge, daß sich die Leute begeistert auf mich stürzten und mir die

Stadt zeigen wollten. [...] Abends ging ich mit alten Freunden in alte Kneipen, wo

uns vom Kellner seitenlange Listen amerikanischer Cocktails gebracht wurden. Wir

saßen draußen, und die am meisten und deutlichsten zu hörende Sprache war

amerikanisches Englisch (Wagner 148).

The people’s excitement about hearing and communicating with Amerikans refers to the high degree of self-Americanization, which appears to be driven by the longing to participate in a global economy dominated by the United States (cf. Fluck 223). The difference from Amerika, nevertheless, persists in the social bonds he has to people in

Germany. It is not the German nation that works as Thing, but a close social circle that fulfills the role of retaining the fantasy of the communal excess of jouissance. His adventure in Amerika, hence, did not really bring him closer to Germany, it rather brought him to the realization that a national community as a Thing appears to be impossible in late capitalism. In the end, the protagonist, nevertheless, falls for the ideology of late capitalism himself as he states that his goals became having a productive purpose in life and a place to stay that he can call his own.

Amerika did not offer the possibility of self-affirmation through adventure, a home to the protagonist, or a path back into a (re-)unified German Nation-Thing. Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens uses Amerika as the baptism by fire of a new global society that from the narrator’s perspective does not hold the Nation-Things of the past but follows the ideology of production and possession. Communities in that ideology only work on the level of personal acquaintance and only the closest communities of friendship and family,

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which notably formed in the GDR, can carry the fantasy of an excess of communal jouissance. The protagonist exposes himself to the new system of the consumer society, which thoroughly dismantles his romanticized image of Amerika but exposes him more completely than Germany to his interpretation of the “new world order” - a phrase that adorns the book’s cover. His adventure, therefore, is not the errand into the wilderness of the nineteenth century, but an errand into the extreme form of fragmentation of consumerism.

4.4. Friendship! – or the German fantasy of Amerika as a Global Village

Adventure movies that deal with Amerika are few and far between. Those providing an Eastern-German perspective are even rarer. The reasons for this small number of movies are manifold. First, it is difficult to film in the United States of America because of the strict regulations of the Screen Actors Guild, which requires financial securities for the actors’ salaries and other production costs (cf. Screen Actors Guild Codified Agency

Regulations). The organizational effort is also higher for reasons like transport and permitting.84 One of the biggest issues, however, is the current funding model for German films. For most productions, public sources still play a significant role, and most of them have strict rules about the relevance of the film to local, national, or European issues.

Therefore, it can be challenging to acquire funding for films portraying an overdetermined

84 Famously, Werner Herzog his New York scenes in Stroszek illegally for that reason (Herzog Herzog on Herzog 149).

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space like the United States, in which one also faces tougher competition by Hollywood, as Thomas Arslan explained in an interview about his Western Gold, shot in Canada and not in the USA (Kilb/Körte 2). The few movies that are being produced are mostly slapstic comedies like the US-produced Trabbi Goes to Hollywood (1991), in which Thomas

Gottschalk plays an East-German inventor who tries to sell his 250 km/h Trabant in the

United States, or the privately funded (RTL) Und Tschüss - In Amerika, in which a group of friends goes on an adventure to the United States in order to acquire American RVs.

Both movies are full of stereotypes and play with the culture clash between the naive eastern German and Amerika. Und Tschüss’s blurb gives an idea of the quality and reflectiveness of the movie: “Jetzt heißt es Chaos und Spaß zwischen Las Vegas, California

Girls und Knast…”

A similar reliance on old tropes and stereotypes is also one of the main points of critique regarding the film that I will analyze below - Friendship! Die ersten Ossis in

Amerika. Critics like Maurice Lade, Philip Bühler, Rainer Gansera, Josef Engels, Rüdiger

Suchsland, or argue that the film is a relatively generic buddy road movie from New York

City to San Francisco but note that it at least is not a typical “Ostalgie-Komödie” (Gansera).

Gansera references a series of movies here that all revolve around young people from the

GDR around the time of the fall of the Wall, most successfully, Sonnenallee and Good bye

Lenin!, which most critics perceive as formulaic. These movies portray a romanticized image of the GDR as an exotic space for adventure and thereby provided affirmation of a

Self for the protagonist and an Other for the audience to create communality in (re-)unified

Germany (cf. Cooke 141).

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The plot of Friendship! can be summarized quickly: Immediately after the fall of the Wall, but before (re-)unification, two East-German friends decide to travel to San

Francisco in order to see the “most Western point in the world.”85 One of the friends, however, has yet another motive, namely to find his father, who had fled the country but kept sending one postcard per birthday from San Francisco. Unfortunately, the friends only have enough money to fly to New York City and decide to find their way to the westcoast from there, mimicing the classic trope of westward expansion and the frontier, as well as nineteenth century German travelogues and adventure narratives. On the way, they, in stereotypical road movie fashion, find adventure, danger, and almost fall out with each other over a woman. When they finally reach San Francisco, they find a Stasi operative instead of the father who died in his attempt to flee the GDR. However, when one takes a closer look, one must realize that, Amerika as place of adventure, of Self-confirmation, and confrontation with the own nation and its organization of its jouissance is still intact.

Friendship! therein parallels other German comedies about Amerika that use a comparable plot and setting, e.g. Und Tschüss and Otto – Der Außerfrießische. In the following, I will argue that the confirmation of Amerika as utopia works through the naiveté of the protagonists in the specific point in time of the setting. Nevertheless, the film attempts to also affirm images and tropes of Amerika as a global unifier enabling communication across cultures. In the end and without being the motivation of the protagonists, they find

Amerika to be an alternative Thing of identification that allows for freedom, self-

85 “[...] den westlichsten Punkt der Welt”(00:04:54, my translation)

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affirmation in adventure, and acceptance of difference and hybridity in the American tropes of belonging.

In the tradition of the adventure narrative, Friendship! also stakes a claim to authenticity as well as tenously to comedy its blurb states that the movie is “based on an almost true story.” The Berliner Morgenpost published an interview with producer Tom

Zickler, whose own experience parallels that of the protaginists in the film: While in film school, he was unsure about the future of the school after the fall of the Wall and therefore went on a similar trip. This claim of authenticity is picked up aesthetically by the film immediately in its usage of grainy Super-8 film stock, usually seen in documentaries and home videos, to introduce the protagonists and their life in the GDR. Friendship! buttresses this impression by using a voice-over narrator to relate the story. The claim of authenticity combined with the narrating voice over and the plot put the film firmly into the tradition of adventure narration.

The film also deals in the cliché of the naive Ossi, who stumbles from one blunder into the next, all caused by his ignorance of Western culture and language, a cliché exploited countless times after fall of the Wall (cf. Naughton 92). But like Schulze gets the blues, Friendship! finds a way to make the naiveté productive beyond the comedic display.

The vehicle of the naive Ossi allows the audience to experience the stereotypical positive tropes of Amerika, which are discouraged by a public discourse that often condemns the

USA and Amerika as sources of injustice, war, and exploitation. Therein, the film notably differs from Hein’s Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, in which the protagonist is equally naïve, but in which Amerika disappoints his utopian fantasies. For the audience,

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the recognition of images and tropes in Friendship! creates a feeling of shared knowledge, of belonging to a group of insiders. It takes the role of a useable history that in combination with the setting exactly at the time of the negotiations of the (re-)unification still locates itself in the discourse surrounding a German Nation-Thing and its Amerikan components.

The movies cited in Friendship! to create this web of recognition are innumerable, but many are still charged with significance despite their commonality. The first recognizable trope of Amerika is the protagonists’ arrival at its border, in which the film first portrays Amerika as a melting pot (travelers with a variety of locally significant clothing are shown), and in which the friends experience rough treatment by the border guard. This interaction between the guard and the friends is also the first instance of a very typical humor based on misunderstandings: the two friends’ lack of knowledge of language and culture. It is, however, also the moment in which the stay is marked as a negotiation of the proplematic constitution of the eastern German position in the constitution of the

(re-)unified German nation, since they are doubly associated with autocratic and inhuman regimes, onto which they, however, have a completely different perspective. The guard asks them initially if they are Nazis because they are German, to which they reply that they are good and free communists, not understanding that both are considered threats to

Amerika (00:06:36-00:07:35). The question the film poses at this moment is how can you participate in the fantasy of jouissance of the (re-)unified German nation as a former citizen of the GDR when the hegemonic historiography marks you as doubly obsolete via your association with two regimes responsible for attrocities. Particularly the reinterpretation of the GDR-Thing as exclusively negative appears to be a daunting task. The film seeks the

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answer in an embrace of a post-national and global world. Following the scene at the airport, the movie cuts to its first montage. One of New York, including the typical zoom ins and low angle shots of skyscrapers, as one has seemingly seen it a countless times from

Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) to Home Alone 2 (1992). A number of German movies have also participated prominently in the creation of this stereotypical technique of representing New York: Stroszek and notably, the Luis Trenker movie Der verlorene Sohn

(1934). The technique is mostly used to convey the awe the protagonist is experiencing and the modernity of the city, which in the German context has regularly been used to distance the setting from Germany, in Stroszek from the Munich worker’s quarters and in Trenker’s movie, from the German mountains. In Friendship! it creates the allusion to metropolitanism and modernity in comparison to the dinginess of East-Berlin. The montage becomes another allusion to the difference between Germany and Amerika that the film intends to construct (or in the case of Stroszek specifically) deconstruct (cf. Birgel

42-45).

After the protagonists leave New York, the movie makes use of many tropes from famous road movies and Westerns.86 Again, there are multiple montages of landscapes and intertextual references to many of the most iconic movies of the genre, like

Easy Rider, Smokey and the Bandit, and again The Searchers. The tropes and images highlight two central arguments the film brings forward in regard to America, namely its

86 The main presence of intertextual references to these two genres are not surprising because many critics have argued that the genre road movie is an extension of Western movies (cf. Thompson/Bordwell 518- 519; Roberts 45-70).

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delivery of freedom, mainly in the form of freedom of movement, and its potential to be a connector between cultures. On the road, the two friends find bonding among themselves but also community in encounters with different groups and individuals. The skepticism and danger Veit and Tom sometimes sense is always resolved through their own action or by the friendliness of other Amerikans. The only time they are in true danger is when a father chases them out of his house with a gun after he has found them there with his two daughters (itself another classic film trope). The Easy Rider motif centers on the friends hitchhiking with some bikers at a country diner. Instead of the dystopian conclusion of

Easy Rider, which finds its climax in a similar place, Veit and Tom almost exclusively find a romantic idyll on the road. The bikers themselves emerge as excessively friendly and even help the friends out by entrusting them to deliver a car to one of their brothers in

California. What looks like a drug smuggling mission is later resolved as just a car transfer.

The car in question is the iconic Pontiac Firebird Trans, which became famous as the central car in Smokey and the Bandit, in which the car turns into the symbol of the genuine outlaw fighting for his freedom against the oppression of the state - a hero for individualism

(cf. Johnson 105). Again, the semi-serious conflict between law enforcement and protagonist in Smokey and the Bandit is changed into an amiable farce in Friendship!. The police stop the protagonists as they drive naked and weaving down a country road. The cops ask the friends to open the car’s trunk and only find a Darth Vader costume, at which point the encounter turns friendly (00:46:15). Both movies have at their center a display of freedom through physical movement, a theme that has been at the heart of many Western and road movies and that gains significance in light of the travel restrictions GDR citizens

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had to suffer. As Michael Kimmel argues, among others, this physical movement in late capitalism functions as a substitute for the lack of upward mobility, a horizontal instead of a vertical movement that has its roots in the frontier as a place for existences that failed in creating upward movement in the cities of the East (62). This is one of the functions that

Amerika still has to offer in Friendship!; the experience of freedom that is accessible to

(almost) everybody, even to two penniless East-Germans. In the logic of late capitalism, this form of freedom is the freedom of the lower classes, which the movie appears to further underline through its portrayal of the protagonists’ enjoyment of simple consumption of, e.g., burgers or chocolate. The chocolate causes Veit to exclaim that it is the best he has ever had and Tom to answer: "Ich glaube wegen dem hier [hat dein Vater die DDR verlassen], was wir hier alles erleben" (00:41:50). Amerika is the golden land of personal freedom (of movement) and consumption. In a hyperbolic statement, one could say that the film argues that poverty, scarcity, and obsoleteness are acceptable in the light of freedom of movement and consumption.

Unlike many of the American-made road movies, Friendship! does not end with a critique of Amerika, but rather in an affirmation of the American idea of freedom and its spontaneous creation of social ties and belonging, explicitly inverting the famous last moment of The Searchers, in which the weary travelers does not find a place in the family’s home (cf. Coyne 75-78). Actually, Friendship! combines the first and the last scene of The

Searchers in what feels like a tacked-on passage. The two friends embrace on the Golden

Gate Bridge at the conclusion of their travels, which we see in a dissolve from their embrace into a wide-angle shot of the bridge, into a aerial shot, followed by a fade to black

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(1:38:30 - 1:39:27). The viewer expects the film to end there, but the black is broken by an opening door and a shot from inside a building, over the shoulder of a black male, onto the

Pontiac and the two friends in front of a field of dry grass resembling the prairie, with farming equipment and mountains in the background. Instead of returning the robbed daughter, however, the protagonists deliver the car they were given by the man’s brother, excluding all the violence that structures The Seachers. The man is astonished at the trustworthiness of the “two commies” and almost immediately asks them to come inside, marking their arrival in Amerika and their finding a home in the West. Again, Friendship! uses the image but changes the meaning, so it fits its utopian ideas. In The Searchers, the final and first scene center on the family home of a white prairie family, which needs protection from the evil Other that seeks to destroy it (cf. Budd 63-67).87 The family home inverts the image of the white family as the central but broken fantasy at the core of

America, as the family home they show is not inhabited by a wealthy white family but by an African American, and his young son. Notably, female figures are completely absent in the scene, harking back to the protagonists’ search for a father figure and their absence in the GDR. The two figures, father and son, in contrast to the images of masculinity found in the film’s representation of the GDR mark a masculinity that unifies the dialectic of freedom and domesticity as well as function as marker for the celebration of Amerika as a place of multiplicity and intercultural understanding. They live in a trailer in an open field, both markers of mobility as well as domesticity. They exhibit a strong familial bond,

87 The home in The Searchers is also a representation of American national values, as Julia Leyda describes in “Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers.” The different presentation in Friendship!, therefore, speaks to a difference in the movie’s perception of American national identity.

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showing the father’s loving relationship to his son and the brothers’ closeness of entrusting each other with the symbol of freedom, the Trans Am. The functioning family is African

American, but they entrust white German teenagers with the transferal of said symbol of freedom and in the end even invite them into their home. Therein, the film underlines the fantasy of Amerika as heterogenic (masculine and transcultural) utopia, which provides a sense of belonging in the repetition and re-appropriation of all the common tropes and images it imploys. This power extends beyond the (East-)German experience of Amerika and becomes a vehicle for intercultural understanding.

In their arrival at the homestead and their acceptance by an African-American father also lies the emancipation of the protagonists from the GDR, mirrored in Veit’s emancipation from the memory of his father, who had abandoned him he felt. The film makes the dysfunctionality of the father figure in the GDR and the GDR as father personified its point of departure. It begins with a short introduction in Tom’s and Veit’s prehistory that, according to Maurice Lade, causes an “agonizing not-again-feeling” in its conventionality. In a five-minute exposition, a voice-over narrates the history of the friendship of two boys, who struggles with the conformity the GDR demands of them. The oppressive system leaves no room for the development of a personality because its only two modes are demanding conformity and penalizing non-conformity. The country is simultaneously devoid of any functioning father figures; it is led by old men kissing and the male figures in school only reprimand. The two friends escape into popular culture and moviemaking in which they reference Nosferatu, a classic of German cinema from the

Weimar Republic, notably a time before the separation of Germany. The voice-over

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narrator summarizes his relationship with the GDR toward the end of the sequence while he is being arrested by Stasi agents: “Die DDR und ich standen immer noch auf Kriegsfuß.

Ich hatte eine andere Vorstellung von Freiheit. Ich hatte eine andere Vorstellung vom

Leben. Ich hatte einfach eine andere Vorstellung von allem” (00:03:25 - 00:03:53). The protagonists’ journey to Amerika is, hence, not only a quest for Veit’s biological father but also for a fatherland, a Thing for which they see fit to trade jouissance for belonging.

The association between the GDR and the bad father becomes evident when Veit finds out that it was not his father who sent him postcards for his birthday all those years, but a man who the Stasi let emigrate under the provision that he would post some greeting cards each year to a group of people. He quickly realized that he was standing in for individuals who died trying to flee the GDR - “Die konnten sich keine Mauertoten mehr leisten” (1:31:35) - but he kept up his end of the deal. The Stasi become, literally, the absent father, a circumstance foreshadowed by the police finding a Darth Vader costume in the trunk of the Pontiac, in which they and the friends assumed would be drugs. Darth Vader is the epitome of the absent and evil father, the symbol of a whole evil system, who the son needs to slay before he can achieve freedom and help the good side succeed. Friendship! seems to also operate in these very simplistic terms when it comes to their image of the

GDR. It is the evil father one needs to do away with and Amerika is the force of good that aids in the process. The narrative can be read psychoanalytically as the murder of the father and consequently a liberation of the superego, metaphorically located in the GDR-Thing.

The slaying of the father allows the ego to affirm a new superego, metaphorically a new

Thing, namely Amerika in its postmodern formation of hybridity and repetition. In the

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focus on the GDR as father who the protagonists must overcome, Friendship! mirrors the

GDR literature’s dealings with the fascist German past, in which the fascist father got replaced by a socialist or communist father, which Julia Hell argued extensively in Post-

Fascist Fantasies (cf. 153).

Emancipation from the GDR is also the context in which a central part of the plot functions, namely the screening of a “Heimatfilm” about the GDR in a small town in the

Midwest. The friends are having car troubles, and as the mechanic tells them that the repairs will be $600, they realize that they are stranded without food and are in need of a lot more money than they possess. Attempting to steal food, they run into a girl – later a love interest and cause for a brief separation – Zoey, who speaks German and helps the friends to implement their initial plan of making money showing their films. This time, instead of showing their adaption of Nosferatu, they decide at the last minute to play their documentary about the GDR, which they entitled “Liebeserklärung an meine Heimat.” Veit argues that Nosferatu is of no interest to anybody and has never been. The only thing they can resort to is their “Heimat” to entertain the masses.88 This statement offers itself up to multiple interpretations. On the one hand, one can read it as a plea to let go of the search for continuities in the German Nation-Thing from the Weimar Republic to now and instead focus on integrating the newer history into the discourse.89 On the other hand, it offers itself as a plea for the search for a useable past and cultural identification in popular media

88 “Nosferatu interessiert niemanden, glaub es mir bitte, hat niemanden interessiert, je. Also bleibt uns nur unsere Heimat” (00:53:33)

89 Nosferatu can indeed be and has been read in a nationalistic way, as the fear of an evil other that comes into the home and threatens one’s own existence (cf. Schlüpman 38-44; Müller 49-53).

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instead of high culture. In the context of the movie, one can assume that both interpretations are fitting. The documentary starts and immediately develops its humor in the tension between image and speech. The voice-over declares in a speech-pattern that appears to be an official political statement: “40 Jahre DDR – das ist vor allem der Stolz auf das gemeinsam Erreichte. Da sind zum Beispiel auch solche Dinge: Arbeit und Bildung für alle, Leben in sozialer Sicherheit, eine kinderfreundliche Familienpolitik. Das ist ein

Wohnungsbauprogramm, das in der Welt seinesgleichen sucht“ (00:54:34). The images shown, however, are in stark contrast to the announcer’s praise of the GDR. They are a montage of a desolate-looking country in grainy Super-8 film stock. It shows a man transporting goods in a horse-drawn wagon, old “Plattenbauten” - the prefabricated apartment blocks typical of socialist states - and other buildings fallen into complete disrepair. After this introduction, which would be incomprehensible to the audience in the movie theater, the mode changes to slapstick akin to silent film classics like Charlie

Chaplin movies or Laurel and Hardy. The scenes are underscored by a funny score full of the whissles and crashes of the silent film comedy. The film is played back marginally faster than normal motion so that the takes of the parades it shows look involuntarily humorous. An extradegetic soundtack is soon superimposed over the slapstick score, while the camera cuts back and forth between the screen and the two friends basking in the laughter of the audience. Its slow-picked guitar melody suggests more than just contentment in admiration. The friends appear to feel like they can make themselves understood and bond with the Amerikan audience. Soon the mood shifts to melancholy as only the extradiegetic music is audible and the montage of the takes of the GDR as well as

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the takes showing the theater switch to slow motion. Gansera speculates here about the existence of a “secret consent between the Amerikan and the East-German provinces.” I, however, argue that the source of the consent is rather the relegation of the GDR into obsoleteness, a state in which it can only serve as a comical display of an otherness in which the friends only momentarily recognize themselves. This relegation to an obsolete past shows in the images themselves as they resemble films from the early times of filmmaking before the talkies. It uses intertitles and a soundtrack they must play from a cassette player, synchronizing it by hand. As the images are grainy and black and white, they appear to be from a different time, not from “89” as the intertitle states. That the obsoleteness causes melancholy instead of shame and anxiety in Tom is because he himself has relegated the GDR to obsoleteness in an effort toward emancipation. All that is left for him is a feeling of loss and the melancholy the memory of a distant past can cause.

The knowledge about the obsoleteness is the source of the Amerikans’ amusement, but the key to understanding these foreign people is the universal language of film, of visuals. Goller’s movie reactivates not only many tropes of Amerika as utopia, but also the nineteenth-century utopian idea of visuals as a universal language, far more able than spoken languages to create an inter- and transcultural world (cf. Michael North Camera

Works). In this context, a different meaning of the montages establishes itself - montage as a form of identity formation and the fantasy of the replacement of conventional communal identities like nations or socialism. Amerika and its visual tropes can have such an effect and can provide a Thing with which one can identify even if one is East-German. The condition for this utopia to be fulfilled, however, is that people let go of their old

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allegiances. Friendship!’s excessive use of montages is certainly also due to their conventional presence in contemporary popular cinema, specifically Hollywood movies.

Their constant use and the film’s makeup as a form of a collage itself citing famous tropes and images and forming them into a utopian image of Amerika is an example of the fantasy of this state of post-nationalism and post-ideology (cf. Francis Fukuyama The End of

History). In this operation, the concept of identity formation in the GDR-Thing actually takes over the role of the Other, against which a hybrid montage of Amerikan tropes manifests itself as Thing to also resolve the issues of the (re-)united German nation, its fantasies of jouissance, and its historical shame.

Given the timeframe of the film’s completion and release, this fantasy is itself relegated to obsoleteness. The film was produced in 2010, after the rise of violent nationalism in Eastern Germany, after the two wars in Iraq, after Bush’s de novo split of the world into good and evil, after the confrontation of Old Europe with the USA, and after the prediction of the clash of cultures. In short, it captures a moment in history in which a united world under Amerikan leadership seemed possible and sells it as a fantastic utopia that could not be realized because only a few were as ready to embrace that world as Veit and Tom and the Amerikans. The fantasy the film presents, in which Amerika is the post- national utopia, is also relegated to obsoleteness. One, therefore, must read the film as an alternative history, as an attempt to reactivate Amerika as a utopia for the 21st century.

Set as an adventure narrative, Friendship! quickly embraces the fantasy of Amerika as a refuge from the GDR and the identitary chaos of (re-)unification. However, it does not lose the tropes of adventure but embraces them as means of identity formation outside the

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paradigm of the Nation-Thing. The point of departure is the historic moment right after the fall of the wall and in the wake of (re-)unification. Hence, the film has to deal with the immediate realities caused by the obsoleteness of the GDR-Thing, which work as negative identification for the protagonists. The historic locus appears to be the ideal moment for this fantasy of a post-national world, in which identity manifests itself in the commonly known tropes of Amerika and the construction of the social fabric, which can be freely re- appropriated to form connections across cultures and ethnic groups. In this moment, the old fantasies of communal jouissance and, hence, identity formation become obsolete but in their obsoleteness can serve as an Other against which the new, free, hybrid, and individualistic Thing can constitute itself. In the difference between production and setting of the film, the fantasy, however, gets exposed as a nostalgic fantasy.

4.5. Chapter Conclusion

The fantasy of the United States as space for adventure remains present in the

German imagination of Amerika, which the analyzed cultural products use as the protagonists’ motivation for their journey. Particularly the protagonists of the literary products imagine it to be a place in which they can find affirmation of their fantasy of the self and a different relationship to the (re-)unified German nation. Two – Osang’s Berlin-

New York and Wagner’s Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam – are set at the end of the1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, while two – Hein’s Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens and Goller’s Friendship! – are set in the early 1990s. The difference in historical settings

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makes an apparent difference concerning the way the products conceptualize the state of the German nation and how they approach the fantasy of Amerika as space for adventure.

The ones set earlier draw on the protagonists’ naiveté and their utopian image of Amerika, developed as a counter-image to the GDR’s official image. The ones set later on must find different strategies to rationalize the longing for Amerika as adventure. Osang’s protagonist appears to occupy a position of reflective distance towards Amerika but acknowledges his longing for it by describing it a fascination that he acquired in his youth.

Wagner’s protagonist does not clarify his position explicitly. Instead, the narrator argues that the plan for his journey through the United States originated in his boredom before his engagement at an American University. However, the narrator in Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam is the most firmly attached to the nineteenth-century idea of the romantic exploration of an Other and is hence ends up disappointed when he finds his longing unfulfilled.

The longing for Amerika as space for adventure expresses itself in all products via an attempted re-appropriation of tropes of adventure originating in German cultural as well as US-media products. In all of them, noticeably, most of the intertextual references are from American media, primarily from Hollywood movies. Underlying is an awareness of the power of the American media that is also expressed in explicit contemplations of the power of Hollywood and the appropriation of images and tropes in the products. Osang’s and Wagner’s narrators discuss the effect most explicitly, indicating a historic change in the development of the German nation after the (re-)unification, in which the problem of the American influence surfaced more explicitly from an eastern German perspective after the initial upheaval of the immediate post-Wende years. The two products, however,

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evaluate the excessive presence of Hollywood imagery differently in their fantasy of

Amerika. Osang celebrates the difference between German and American fantasies of adventure and the Wild West and sees a community constructing similarity in East- and

West-German images against the Other of the images produced by America, which insists on the permanent delimitation from the Other and a resulting pervasive paranoia that underlies the constitution of Amerika. However, he does not see those media-images as dangerous for the jouissance of the (re-)unified German nation. Instead, he evaluates the late-capitalist system and its consumer culture to be the greatest threat to the German jouissance. Curiously, he does not directly associate consumer culture and US-American mass media. Wagner’s narrator, on the other hand, is wary of Hollywood’s influence on the construction of reality and blames it as well as consumer culture, for the decline of

“Kultur.” He qualifies that Europe and Germany have also lost their ability to create great

“Kultur,” but implies that Amerika is the center of that loss of cultural prowess. Despite their difference in perspective, all narrators must acknowledge at some point of the narrative that the romantic fantasy of Amerika as adventure as it is present in the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century products is not able to withstand the confrontation with the present day Amerikan lifeworld.

In general, one can attest to the failure of the nineteenth-century romantic fantasy of Amerika as space of the Other that can affirm the self in all cultural products. Instead, the narrators describe the United States as a space that is the source of a familiar consumer- culture, late capitalist obsoleteness and the producer of simulacra, society as Gesellschaft, and mass-cultural stereotypes that only appear to differ in their excess from their

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incarnation in Germany. However, they differ significantly in how they interpret these findings, which allows one to draw conclusions about the product’s political ideology and their interpretation of the condition of the German nation and its suitability as Thing in the process of (re-)unification.

Wagner’s text occupies the least ambiguous, and most politically conservative, position in relation to the Amerika as the center of late capitalism and consumer-culture.

Originating in his fantasy of nineteenth-century adventure and the underlying longing for an unambiguous and stable German nation, he describes Amerika primarily in dystopian tropes and images, which are only interrupted when he recognizes either the German-Self or the old fantasy of the Other in Amerika. Because of his constant recognition of German images in Amerika, he declares it to be too close to the Self to constitute an Other still. As a cultural and political conservative, the narrator welcomes the United States role as a political and military stabilizer of the current capitalist but democratic order, he, however, unreservedly reject the Amerikan culture. He then finds the exotic and total Other he desired in Mexiko, which he describes in decidedly exotizing terms. Curiously, he recognizes the GDR in the Mexican state apparatus, connecting the GDR to the Other and in opposition to the (re-)unified German nation. Wagner’s text occupies a stereotypical conservative position, which includes the quiet, nostalgic longing for the fantasy of a nineteenth-century German nation, the rejection of Amerika and its culture as inferior, and the simultaneous embrace of the United States as the protector of personal freedom and material wealth.

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Goller’s film and Hein’s novel exhibit an interesting similarity beyond their setting in the early 1990s. They both portray Americanization as the eastern German protagonist’s way into a world of consumer culture and late capitalist ideologies, dominated by

Amerikan tropes. Yet, they interpret this journey fundamentally differently. The protagonist of Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens is disappointed by Amerika, caused by his explicitly utopian image of Amerika that had been the motivation for his journey. In the United States, he experiences its society as producer of obsoleteness and the social distance of a Gesellschaft. He is unable to experience many adventures because he lacks the funds and the metropolis of New York reveals itself to be an accumulation of very discrete social circles. After the fantasy of the adventure becomes obsolete, the protagonist attempts to find instead a Thing with which to identify in Amerika. From the narrative’s beginning, to experience Amerika as a Thing has been present as a longing of the protagonist, who had used it to distance himself from the GDR. After the failure of the fantasies of adventure, he seeks to have his other fantasy confirmed in the form of longing for the love of a married Amerikan student, who he meets in Kentucky, and the connected imagination of settling in Amerika. After that fantasy also becomes obsolete, his utopian image gets the fatal blow in Californian suburbia and the meaningless lives people lead there. Americanization itself only comes in focus on the last couple pages of the novel, but with the journey to Amerika being a journey of disillusion, the protagonist’s assessment of

Americanization is bleak. It hinders the development of a German society based on

Gemeinschaft, and leaves the protagonist to imagine his future in similar terms as the

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suburban lives he has experienced in the United States. The protagonist comes to terms with the Americanization of Germany, since it appears insuperable.

In Goller’s Friendship!, Americanization appears as a liberating choice that the protagonists make, and that is underlined by the film’s appropriation and re-appropriation of Hollywood imagery. Amerikan global consumer-culture and its tropes have the potential to transcend differences based on old systems of identification like the nation, or the Thing of the GDR. In these tropes, the protagonists do indeed find adventure and use it to affirm a self, but not in association to a Nation-Thing, but as a fantasy of the post-modern subject that constitutes itself in a net of different images and narratives. The film implicitly postulates that this concept of the subject allows an individualism and simultaneously a social bond that transcends the big Things. The film, however, locates this fantasy of a global Amerika that enables a post-national world specifically in the time right after the fall of the wall, alluding to its obsoleteness in the time of the film’s publication. This highlights the different hegemonic attitudes towards Amerika that the film assumes between the early 1990s and the late 2000s, even though it does not make this difference explicit. It, furthermore, underlines the presence of the longing for the affirmation of a global self in the consumption of American media in the German struggle with it nation.

Notably, Friendship! is based on the experiences of an East-German producer of the film but written and directed by western Germans. Like Schulze gets the blues, one can hence accuse it of representing western German fantasies of the possibilities a naïve and fresh perspective could give the utopian fantasy of Amerika and its positive differentiation from the GDR, which is being relegated to the role of the obsolete Other.

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The one narrative that engages with the issues of the precarious constructs of the

German nation, as well as the fantasy of Amerika as space for adventure in relationship to the Amerikan realities is Osang’s Berlin-New York. The protagonist begins his journey to

New York to experience a cosmopolitan global Thing, with which he longs to associate himself in lieu of his perceived and desired association with the German nation, which he understands as historically handicapped and caught in stereotypical fantasies of the nineteenth-century Nation-Thing. In the course of the text, he, however, recognizes that the fantasy of the global metropolis New York – it reveals itself as a part of Amerika - and

Amerika is caught in a circle of the portrayal of heroes in control and the paranoia of losing control. The (re-)unified German nation appears to have the potential of resistance to the

Amerikan globalized consumer-culture, but only if it finds a way to declare the East-

German history, rituals, and traditions obsolete in favor of exclusively adapting a western

German (Americanized) historiography and society.

The common thread in all these works is that the presence of Amerika is portrayed as a necessary force for the protagonists to emancipate themselves from the GDR-Thing, or in the case of Osang, renegotiate its presence in a construct of identity. Concerning the

(re-)unified Germany, however, Amerika has mostly lost the ability to serve as a truly working Other in the vain of the fantasies of nineteenth-century adventure narratives. Only if it is not tasked with working as a Thing to distance the protagonist from the GDR, it can still work as Other, as it does in Osang’s text in the everyday rituals and myths. This partially reaffirms the concept of Self and Other established in the Cold War and marks the hegemony of the western German imagination in the construct of the (re-)unified German

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Nation-Thing, which, as Osang emphasizes, does not allow positive memories of East-

Germany in its collective memory. Except for Friendship!, however, the analyzed products, still, identify Amerika as a threat to the (re-)unified German nation, insisting that there is a connection between eastern and western Germans beyond pure fantasies of belonging. I must establish that the position and the function of Amerika vary in German narratives of adventure, but that it remains relevant in functions to distance oneself from the GDR, to establish a post-national fantasy, or to imagine a better (re-)unified German nation.

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Chapter 5: Amerika in Germany - Amerikanization and the German Nation-Thing

This fourth chapter differs distinctly from Chapters 2 and 3 as it does not consider the portrayal of the United States and the inherent confrontation between different fantasies of Amerika - the encounters of a German image of Amerika with the space of the United

States of America. Instead it deals with the presence of Amerika in Germany and its interaction with the German nation and its fantasies of joussiance, often summarized under the term Americanization, or in German Amerikanisierung. Americanization, however, is too broad a term, apart from often being considered not scientific (cf. Lösche XVI).

Americanization covers the expansion of America into other spaces, economies, political systems, societies, and cultures, as well as the appropriation of American standards by those cultures. To what degree one can actually speak of Americanization in these instances or has to rather label it westernization, globalization, or modernization has been the source of many debates, spurred by the lack of concrete connection to America or the United

States in some instances, with reference to the reciprocal influence, or by arguing that the

American influence on other states, particularly culturally, is being overestimated. These concerns, however, are secondary to my analysis of the matter since I am interested in the discourse surrounding the explicit discursive imagination of the American/Amerikan presence and the role it plays in the location and constitution of a (re-)unified German nation. Therefore, I will in the following call it Amerikanization because, despite its connections to American myths and (cultural) products, it is a distinct fantasy of German coinage. I will center my attention on works that not only deal with Amerikanization aesthetically (e.g. through genre, tone, etc.) but that also concretely and explicitly

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participate in the public discourse surrounding Amerika and its presence in Germany. For that reason, I will center my attention on two works, Reinhard Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer

(2000) and Vanessa Jopp’s Vergiss Amerika (2000), and contrast them with the romanticisation of Amerika in popular cultural products like Helden wie Wir, Sonnenallee, and Good Bye, Lenin! But before I can begin the analysis of these primary works, it is necessary to locate my study historically and quickly reexamine my key term(s).

Americanization and Amerikanization are both highly ambiguous terms and concepts. They have catalyzed a multifaceted discourse in Germany, as well as in the

United States and many other places. Frank Becker argues in “Amerikabild und

‘Amerikanisierung’ im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts - ein Überblick” that Amerika has been used to explain many effects that one could just as easily attribute to modernity or late capitalism, and at times Amerika is used to describe political and social cultures that are arguably not American in origin. Consequently, it remains unclear what

Americanization is and if it has any truth-value. It is a conglomerate of ideas and images from America, products of America, and associations with Amerika, which exhibits a loose correlation to historical events in the United States. Its connection to “reality” is, however, not the question in which this dissertation is interested. It is the discourse of Amerika and its function that is of interest, not whether there is Americanization in Amerikanization.

Generally, one can again separate Amerikanization into Amerikanism and Anti-

Amerikanism, whereby Anti-Amerikanism predominates in the meta-discourse and

Amerikanisms predominates most Germany’s lifeworlds.

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5.1. The history of Amerikanization between Amerikanism and Anti-Amerikanism

The notion of Amerikanization arose even before the United States became a global military power in the course of the world wars - hence before the so-called “American

Century” (cf. Zunz XI). The spread of liberalism after the American Revolution had long been a concern for aristocratic-conservative Europeans. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the United States, by rapidly developing economically, became the symbol of modernization and technologization (cf. Diner 42-45 America; Beyer 29). William T.

Stead’s The Americanization of the World: Or the Trend of the 20th century (1902), which was published in Germany the same year as Die Amerikanisierung der Welt, and Ludwig

Max Goldberger’s Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten were early incarnations of the discourse of America/Amerikanization, which, drawing from the discourses of the nineteenth century, already fluctuated between admiration and disdain for a country that showed the promise of taking over the leadership role from the declining British empire and whose system consequently would influence Europe. For example, n Bernhard

Kellermann’s exceptionally successful novel Der Tunnel, published in 1913, Europe becomes a suburb of the more technologically advanced Amerika after the construction of a tunnel between the continents. Most of these early expressions of Amerikanization from a German perspective transported an admiration for the business acumen and the technological progress it creates, but they also already contain the Anti-Amerikan criticism on which Amerikanization discourses in the twentieth century often focused: the inhumanity of a system that only seeks profit and the lack of culture Amerika delivers.

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In the 1920s, the Amerikanization discourse mainly centered on the concept of

Fordism, on the one hand, and popularization of American musical forms, specifically of jazz and blues, on the other. These two phenomena are connected in the German perception. Under Fordism, one understands the definite association between Amerika and mass production, which extended to jazz and its mode of consumption in the forms of dancehall entertainment and records (cf. Nolan 91-95). In the course of these transitions,

Germany saw the continued emergence of a type of work that was associated with mass production and Amerika, namely the white collar/office worker, which occupies a place between worker and bourgeoisie. This dichotomy steadily dissolved in the course of the twentieth century (in the West) as it suggested that everybody could participate in the consumption of luxury goods. While the working classes and German youth readily accepted the newly created massed-produced consumer goods, many of the bourgeoisie saw in the mass culture and the mass product a danger to the (superior) German culture (cf.

Czaplicka 1). This differentiation between the working class and the bourgeoisie, or later the educated and working class, in which the one readily accepts the influence and products of the USA and the other sees in them a danger to its own identity, is a constant, at least in the West-German context, only complicated by the emergence of a separate youth culture.

5.1.1. Amerikanization and West-Germany

The era that is of most significance for this dissertation, however, is the time after

WWII, as the role Amerika and Amerikanization split between West- and East-Germany

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and patterns became manifest that strongly influenced the historical frame this dissertation analyzes. How to characterize the political, economic, social, and cultural developments in

West-Germany has been a hot-button issue for a number of years and has led to different analyses of the events and a large number of alternative terms to designate these developments (e.g. Döring-Manteufel’s “Westernisierung;” Ritzer and Silman’s

“Globalisierung” and “McDonaldisierung,” etc). The distinct discourses regarding to what degree the political and economic system of the FRG are based on their American equivalent (cf. Schwartz 59), or to what degree the West-German social structures appropriated an American model (cf. Schäfers 170-171) are only of concern to this dissertation when they influence a more public, cultural, and aesthetic discourse in

Germany. I will briefly trace the difference between Amerikanization of East-Germany and

West-Germany. In the GDR, it was primarily marked by the people’s longing to participate in a consumerist society and the American utopia and the state’s dystopian image of the

American dystopia. The FRG, after an initial embrace of Americanism, dealt with the pervasive feeling that everything had become Amerikanized, which is expressed in the often cited exclamation from Wim Wender’s film Im Lauf der Zeit (1975): “Die Amis haben unser Unterbewusstsein kolonialisiert.” The central roles of this idea of

Amerikanization are the consumption of cultural goods and consumer goods associated in the FRG, the adoption of American youth cultures, and the critical reflection on everything

Amerikan beginning with the student movement of the late sixties and seventies. Notably, the experiences and perception of Amerikanization differed greatly between East- and

West-Germany, a field of tension that also influences the time after the Wende.

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The notion of Amerikanization of the FRG notably began with a conscious act on the part of the United States occupying force called re-education. Re-education had the goal of transforming the German mindset from authoritarian to democratic based on the example of America. It was based on a performative theory of culture and a political system that Margaret Mead outlined in And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at

America in 1942. She proposed that democracy is not just a system, but a “character structure” that is inherent in every American: “It would be impossible suddenly to introduce ‘democracy’ which is a word for a type of behavior and an attitude of mind which runs through our whole culture, through our selection of candidates for office, our behavior in street cars, our schools and our newspapers [...]. We are our culture” (20-21). Mead introduces democracy here as inherent cultural performance, which opens the possibility of mimicry as a way of ‘learning’ democracy. For the program in Germany, the occupying forces, therefore, picked Hollywood movies to be shown in German movie theaters and founded the Amerikahäuser, in which they had libraries and which functioned as a place of encounter with American culture and the American people (cf. Jaimey Fisher

Disciplining Germany; Jennifer Fay Theaters of Occupation; James F. Tent Mission on the

Rhine). Much of the re-education program, especially its employment of Hollywood movies, was linked to the exploitation of previously closed German markets for these products.

Re-education is part of a narrative of Amerikanization called cultural imperialism, which refers to an unequal power relationship between two cultures. The hegemonic power imposes its values, practices, and meanings on another culture in an act of suppression (cf.

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Tomlinson 79-80). Criticizing aspects of re-education is certainly valid, but one must acknowledge the historic necessity of (re-)installing democratic values into the German citizens, who had just experienced twelve years of autocratic rule (and who had only ever experienced fourteen years of democratic organization). As I pointed out in the first chapter, and as have other critics before me, the argument regarding Amerikanization as cultural imperialism, as potent and as good an explanation as it is in many instances, falls short of mapping out the complexities of the issue at hand. It is often deployed under the assumption that the imperialized culture is unwillingly or reluctantly forced to accept the foreign culture, which Winfried Fluck denounces with his term of

“Selbstamerikanisierung” - “self-Amerikanization.” Fluck claims convincingly that

Amerika and American products fulfill a longing for participation and individuation that makes Germans seek them out and appropriate them for their own identity construction:

“Individualisierung bezeichnet somit im Kontext unseres Arguments einen Prozess der

Suche nach Formen ästhetischer Erfahrung, durch die die eigene Interiorität immer intensiver erfahren und artikuliert werden kann. Weil das so ist, ist es angebracht, den

Prozess der Amerikanisierung als Selbstamerikanisierung zu beschreiben" (69). Hence,

Amerikanization is something that works with push and pull factors, supply and demand, as well as a unique accessibility of American mass media.90

90 As Fluck argues further, American popular culture products are not only so successful because of the United Statess’ standing as an economic, political, and military hegemon, but also because of its unique history. Cultural products in America had to deal with a variety of exceptional factors, which predestined it for broad global success. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the country lacked a strong bourgeoisie, not to mention an educated class, to demand complexity or hold on to older standards. It also had a very diverse market, which fostered the development of narrative strategies that employed the smallest common denominator, an advantage from which it benefited in the twentieth century. This does not mean the United

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A central motor for the advancement of American cultural products in Germany was the development of a youth culture modeled after America’s and the successive establishment of this youth culture as a trendsetter. It began in the 1950s and 1960s, initially as a phenomenon of lower-class youth, who identified with stars like James Dean and listened to Rock’n’Roll, but soon began to affect young people in West-Germany to such a degree that the majority were listening to English-speaking popular music by the end of the 1960s (cf. Poiger Jazz 5). Within the realm of popular culture at that time, there also began an association of Amerika with rebellion and freedom, an image that was also cultivated by American industry in their advertisements, which associated American products with those attributes (cf. Kroes 92). The example of the blue jeans illustrates this association nicely on both sides of the iron curtain. They were perceived as distinctly

American and symbolized freedom from contemporary social norms, as well as one's sexuality and movement (Poiger Jazz 80-81). Other consumer products that transported similar images were leather jackets, Coca-Cola, and American cigarettes. Alexander

Stephan sees a “Special case of Americanization” in Germany’s appropriation of American mass culture and links it back to the lack of a useable history and role models for the construction of a collective identity after the National Socialists (69).91 He adds that the presence of American soldiers in Germany also influenced the German confrontation with

States has not also produced high culture products, but when we talk Amerikanization, those are usually excluded (cf. Fluck 64, Mukerji and Schudson 17). 91 “Sonderfall der Amerikanisiserung” (my translation)

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American cultures: They “brought the Main Street” with them, as Wolfgang Koeppen puts it in Amerikafahrt (7).

Yet, as Ute Poiger points out, the strong association of youth culture with fantasies of Amerika and Amerikan consumer products only lasted until the late 1960s. Instead of an Amerikanization, much of West-Germany‘s youth longed for an internationalization, wearing ponchos and the keffiyeh - the Palestinian scarf: “Während in den fünfziger Jahren

Modestile, insbesondere Jeans und Lederjacken, als amerikanisch angesehen wurden, galt das für die Mode der Gegenkultur Ende der sechziger Jahre nicht” (Poiger “Popkultur” 68).

In the course of protests against the foreign policies and aggressive military behavior of the United States in countries of developing world, the mood of large parts of the youth culture became distinctly Anti-Amerikan. The movement found its theoretical backbone in the Frankfurt School, which equated Amerikan culture with mass culture (cf.

Adorno/Horkheimer “Kulturindustrie”). The Frankfurt School appropriated a cultural negativism about Amerika, formerly mainly found in conservative arguments, but shed the accompanying open nationalism for an all-encompassing critique of enlightenment, consumer culture, and (art) production along the lines of the American system (cf. Walter-

Busch 219). A distinctly Anti-Amerikan sentiment took root in the German avant-guarde.

Much of the ambitious cultural production in West-Germany and the German-speaking countries grappled critically with the perceived Amerikanization of Germany and the whole world. Along with Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog, and Köppen’s Amerikafahrt, many others intervened in the discourse of Amerika’s influence on Germany, for example,

Wolfgang Koeppen Tauben im Gras (1951), Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der

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Katharina Blum (1974), Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s film adaption by the same name (1974), etc. They all represent a less or more pronounced Anti-

Amerikanism that is mainly geared toward consumer and mass culture. Nevertheless, one could still argue that even the Anti-Amerikan turn can be interpreted as Americanization, as the counterculture movements in Germany received their impulse from their American counterparts. This circumstance in combination with the history of the youth cultures,

Anglo-American music, and some aspects of clothing (e.g. American Army parkas) made the counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s appear as further Americanization from the outside. Again, as Kaspar Maase argues, the context and the participants define what counts as Amerikanization: “Der Kontext macht die Bedeutung. Und der Kontext aktualisiert sich in den Praktiken der Aneignung” (15). The German movement was, therefore, largely both Amerikanized and Anti-Amerikan.

All the while, the anti-Amerikanism of the countercultures was an influential current in German society when one considers the impact on the public discourse, but it was quite clearly the opinion of a minority. The movement’s loud and vigorous participation in public discourse and their continuous performance of breaking norms has led to an overrepresentation of their opinions in the historiography of Amerikanization

(Beyer 49). In the meantime, much of the popular culture production from Germany and especially the United States conveyed a positive image of the United States like the Wild-

West shows of the sixties (e.g. Fury; Bonanza; Rauchende Colts) and glitz and glamor productions from the seventies and eighties (e.g. Dallas or Dynasty [German: Denver

Clan]). In movie theaters, the rise of the blockbuster ensured an increasing market share

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for Hollywood movies (cf. Garncarz 14). As Becker points out, surveys of German attitudes toward Amerika have been relatively constant since the 1960s and approximately

50 % answer the question of how they see Amerika positively (“I like Amerika”) and around 20 % answer negatively (“I do not like Amerika”). The West-German discourses are hence a complex mosaic of images and opinions that often are not even clear in a certain political current. Nevertheless, one can attest to at least a predominant skepticism toward

Amerika in the cultural public discourse of West-Germany after the student movement of the late 1960s.

5.1.2. Amerikanization and East-Germany

As holds true for most cases in the GDR, one must differentiate fundamentally between the official attitude of the state and popular opinion - between rejection of and longing for Amerikan products. Similar to what I elucidated for West-Germany, when it comes to positions on Amerikanization in East Germany, the following descriptions can only be approximations of dynamic processes. They are nevertheless of importance for the further argumentation, as the protagonists of the cultural products that I will analyze below have been socialized with these ideas. Politically, Amerika was the declared class enemy for the GDR government, the incarnation of the imperial power that Lenin had described as inhumane and reactionary in Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism.

Consequently, for most of the time every product and trend that was marked as Amerikan was a thorn in the side of the government, even as the political tensions between the GDR

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and the United States changed over the years, which Poiger describes as “zigzag course”

(Jazz 215). The image the central committee intended to portray remained mostly negative since they understood Western goods as propaganda. However, they occasionally utilized society’s demand for cultural goods from the West and often used that longing to their advantage. In the beginning, the political class fought against the influence of the West, campaigned against the American and British “NATO” radio stations that deliberately broadcast into the area of the GDR, and jazz clubs were not allowed as they supposedly were initiated by Western agents.92 After the erection of the Wall, the GDR loosened its attitude toward Western products, especially music and film, in order to compensate for the loss of opportunity to consume those goods in the West. In 1963, the GDR published its “SED Jugendkommuniqué,” in which they exhibited an understanding of youth close to

Western ideals, claiming that young people should have time to socialize and have fun and be able to listen to their own styles of music. That same year, the first American Western,

The Magnificent Seven, was shown in GDR movie theaters and one year later the youth radio DT 65 was founded, which was allowed to play 40 % foreign songs. 1964 was, however, also the year that marked the change in policies concerning Western products.

Led by Erich Honecker and guided by the fear of losing GDR youth to Western ideologies of consumption, the Central Committee started campaigns against Western culture’s influence. In the fall of 1965, many GDR beat bands lost their license to play, and

92 The Central Committee’s argument about the jazz clubs as Western propaganda was difficult to maintain because jazz was, on the one hand, supposedly distributing commercialism and imperialist ideologies, but on the other hand, it was the music of oppressed African-Americans. Many listeners of American music took advantage of this argument to defend their consumption (cf. Bratfisch 81)

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participants in the Leipzig Beat-Demo were arrested and sentenced to prison or work camps based on their “Texas ideology” and “Ranger behavior” (in Poiger 216). After the infamous

11th plenum of the Central Committee, the GDR began to again strictly censor cultural products by producers from the West as well as from the GDR because of their

“antihumanism” and “American lack of morals and decadence” (Deutsche Geschichte in

Dokumenten und Bildern 1-2). Honecker declared: “Unsere DDR ist ein sauberer Staat. In ihr gibt es unverrückbare Maßstäbe der Ethik und Moral, für Anstand und gute Sitte.

Unsere Partei tritt entschieden gegen die von den Imperialisten betriebene Propaganda der

Unmoral auf, die das Ziel verfolgt, dem Sozialismus Schaden zuzufügen” (Deutsche

Geschichte in Dokumenten und Bildern 1). Western products, especially from America, were portrayed as the cause of the youth’s brutalization and sexualization. The 11th plenum marked the beginning of a restrictive phase of Anti-Americanism, which was gradually relaxed after the United States recognized the GDR as an independent state in 1974, when

Honecker hoped to be invited to the White House.93 One can also not really speak of a complete Anti-Amerikanism of the GDR because it supported the struggles for recognition of Native American and African American civil rights activists (Becker 30). The Anti-

Amerikanism was primarily geared toward the state and the political system.

The private image of Amerika in the GDR is diffuse, but in many instances diametrically opposed to the official Anti-Amerikanism. It is difficult to come to a definite

93 There are a number of publications that deal with the economic, political, and cultural exchanges between the USA and the GDR: cf. Burton C. Gaida USA-DDR. Politische, kulturelle und wirtschaftliche Beziehungen seit 1974; Daniel Hamilton “Ferne Sterne: Die Beziehungen der USA zur DDR 1974-1990;” Christian Ostermann “In Bonns Schatten: Die Beziehungen zwischen Washington und Ost-Berlin;” Heinrich Bortfeldt “Beziehungen USA-DDR;” etc.

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conclusion as the private image lacks synchronic and empirical documentation and the sources of the images are diverse and caused by a lack of public discourse regionally and socially. Nevertheless, for this dissertation, it is exactly the people’s attitude toward

Amerikanization that is of interest as it is the social backdrop to the author’s narratives after the fall of the Wall. Opposite the sometimes ambiguous but mostly negative image of

Amerika propagated by the state, a very positive, often romanticized image developed within the GDR’s popular culture and public discourse. The image of Amerika was significantly influenced by media of different origins and through various channels. Before

1961 citizens of the GDR had access to West-German media products, particularly in

Berlin and other places near the border. Even after the erection of the Wall, many still watched West-German television and listened to West-German and Allied radio stations.

Selected Hollywood movies were also shown in GDR theaters and on television (cf. Stott

144-153).94 As mentioned before, Cowboy and Indian stories by German authors, but also from America, played in GDR theaters and on West-German television. Taken together, these sources created a romantic image of the Wild West. The government took up the citizen’s fascination with this fantasy, and DEFA created a host of “Indianerfilme,” which focused on Native Americans and usually gave the struggle with the white Amerikans the tone of class struggle (cf. Gemünden 25-36).

94 Stott shows how important Hollywood movies were in the GDR and how in the course of the crisis of the GDR movie industry, the regime even allowed more and more ideologically conservative blockbuster movies to play (151).

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As a result of the media consumption and the repression, especially the youth culture developed a fetish for American goods. Here, too, jeans were often at the center of attention, so much so that Ulrich Plenzdorf condensed the message in his Die Leiden des jungen W. into a slogan: “Jeans sind eine Einstellung und keine Hose. […] Es gibt ja

überhaupt nur eine Sorte echte Jeans. Wer echter Jeansträger ist, weiß, welche ich meine”

(26-27). In this quotation, Plenzdorf hints at Levi’s jeans and also comments on the GDR’s alternative, the “Niethose.” In general, the Central Committee was very eager to quench their citizens’ thirst for Western goods by creating East-German alternatives. This practice went from pants and cola to the creation of their own forms of dance, music, and sport. By giving people an option, they attempted to prevent Amerikanization by consumption. As

Plenzdorf’s line indicates, however, these attempts were mostly futile. Most people, particularly the youth, wanted to consume the real, authentic goods from Amerika, be it jeans or other cultural products. Between the longing for participation in an America- shaped consumer culture, and as a reaction to their disbelief in the official image, many citizens of the GDR developed a romanticized image of Amerika that stood in stark contrast to the formal policies as well as to the West-German image of Amerika. We have already seen how cultural products utilized the tensions between the two images of America in the structure of some of the protagonists who go to America as naïve East-Germans with the expectation of finding a utopia.

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5.1.3. Amerikanization after the Wende

The fall of the Wall and the (re-)unification that followed threw former citizens of the GDR into a deeply contradictory situation in which they experienced the conflict of their socialist history and the capitalist present, community and society, state and nation, obsoleteness and progress, etc. One effect was a perceived turbo-Amerikanization in which the new German states did not, at least initially, turn into an extension of West Germany but into “little America.”95 The perceived Amerikanization happened on different levels simultaneously, primarily economically and culturally. The economic system changed at a dizzying speed in eastern Germany, and without the limiting powers of labor unions and their collective agreements, the GDR quickly developed into a market-economy that more closely resembled the United States than it did West Germany. This development was aided by political action, like keeping wages in eastern Germany low and fostering privatization efforts. Almost none of the industries in the former GDR could compete with their equivalents from the West, so after the processes of privatization, coordinated by the

Treuhand, many of the industries were liquidated, as it is called in neoliberal terms. They were shut down, and the assets were either sold or moved (cf. Buechler/Buechler 123-126).

The Treuhand sold much of the formerly state-owned property off for a symbolic Euro, attracting investors who were looking for fast and easy profits, in the fashion of so-called

Raubtierkapitalismus - dog-eat-dog capitalism, which Germans clearly associate with

Amerika. Today that immediate privatization is widely regarded as a failed policy (cf.

95 This association with “little America” is not exclusive to eastern Germany, but in even exaggerated terms for many of the former Sovjet countries (Kovasc 28).

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Schröter 142-153). The state also subsidized many infrastructure developments. This led to the rapid building of new streets, malls, supermarkets, and residential areas without much regard for the older organically developed spaces, a process that the affected often associated with an “Amerikanization” (Herfert 33). The media and the cultural industry experienced rapid changes as well “at an accelerated pace,” as Stephan argued in his introduction of The Americanization of Europe:

The deeply rooted readers’ culture in the East was replaced in a flash by the film

and music industries, which generate better profits. High culture, which in

communist countries was regarded as part of the cultural heritage and consequently

was state-promoted and subsidized, was crowded out by violent videos,

pornography, and a riot of self-help books. (11-12)

Stephan describes, in rather exaggerated terms, the rapid changes that shocked not only eastern Germans but notably many western Germans as well. But not only the rapid-

Amerikanization was shocking from a western German perspective, but also the embrace of these changes by many eastern Germans who still associated them with freedom and prosperity (McFalls 4-6). Therein, eastern Germans were just as alien as a larger number eastern Europeans who also embraced capitalism even in its uninhibited incarnation (cf.

Kovacs 29). Many saw the perceived rapid Amerikanization of the East as an encroachment of America on the German nation, constituted in a market economy with socialist elements.

This found its expression in terms such as “der Wilde Osten” – “the Wild East” and in cultural products such as Ronald Eichorn’s film Amerika, in which a West-German emigrates not to the United States, but to a small town in Saxony called Amerika. All of

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these narratives about the embrace of or distancing from Amerika by large groups must be received with caution as the reactions varied significantly from place to place and generation to generation. They, nevertheless, give an indication of the tensions and discourses the cultural products I analyze below present. Jirgl’s and Jopp’s products both focus on the negative aspects of inserting fantasies of Amerika into the eastern German space. For both, these utopian fantasies of Amerika, still present in the eastern German space, represent a revolutionary potential that can help to renegotiate the German Nation-

Thing if it is used conservatively.

5.2. Amerika/Amerikanization in cultural products - Ostalgie and the romantic Amerika

Amerika and Amerikanization have been a present but not ubiquitous trope in

Wende-literature and -film. The most common usage of Amerika is its positioning in opposition to a GDR drowning in conceit and philistinism. Good examples of this are the well-known film Goodbye Lenin and Thomas Brussig’s novels Helden wie wir and Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, which is based on one of the most best-known and successful movies of the category, Sonnenalle, for which Brussig co-wrote the script. In

Brussig’s works specifically, Amerikanization is associated with liberation, individualism, and freedom. American products are vehicles for the assertion of the Self in conflict with the GDR, which continuously demands adaption and obedience. As Reinhard Zachau argues, this embrace is an expression of the historical situation in the GDR, in which

American products were long associated with subversiveness and a sign of a new relaxed

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attitude toward Amerika and American products by a new generation of authors and film- makers. These authors and film-makers mainly belong to a new generation, the so-called

“Generation Golf” from the west and 3te Generation Ostdeutschland from the east. They take up American popular cultural aesthetics and themes, integrating them as a natural part of the history and identity process of their protagonist. This treatment of Amerika, according to Zachau, is noticeable in both eastern and western German cultural products, but the vehemence and definitiveness, as well as the prominence of the topic, is by far more prominent in products from an eastern perspective. The western German texts that deal with the Amerikan presence in Germany such as Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre’s Blackbox,

Maxim Biller’s Harlem Holocaust, or Tobias O. Meißner’s Starfish Rules are only marginally involved with (re-)unification and the German Nation-Thing, if at all. For most of the products from eastern Germany, just as for this dissertation, the interplay between

Amerika and the German nation after the Wende are central to their plot and argument.

The laid-back, ironic, and self-mocking handling of the Self and the Amerikan present, for which all these movies and novels have been criticized as superficial, are programmatic in these products. They seek to break with the necessity of assigning deep meaning to everything and embrace life in an illusory and superficial world in which the fate of the subject still carries significant meaning. One can find a clear example of this in Brussig’s treatment of the New York Times, psychoanalysis, and Christa Wolf in Helden wie wir.

The protagonist, Klaus Uhlzsch, gives an interview to the New York Times narrating how he caused the fall of the wall with his penis: “Die Geschichte des Mauerfalls ist die

Geschichte meines Pinsels (7). The reporter for the New York Times does not have a voice

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in the novel. She appears to be an imago, a fantasy of the big wide world, which the narrator of the story longs for, but which remains indifferent to his story as much as to his megalomania. The relationship between the Americanized globe and the individual is a one-way street but is still preferable to the old literature of West- and East-Germany. As

Zachau shows, Brussig borrows from a multitude of American literature:

Neben Salinger nennt Brussig den Amerikaner Henry Miller als Modell[...]. Die

wahren literarischen Helden des Wunderkinds Brussig sind jedoch die "Sexologen"

Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint, The Anatomy Lesson und The Breast), wo

politischer Protest zu privatem sexuellem Aufbegehren reduziert wird. Dazu

kommen Charles Bukowskis Lyrik sowie die Romane des Medienstars John Irving

mit seiner bizarren Sexkomödie The Hotel New Hampshire. Besonders Irvings

grotesker Roman The World According to Garp wirkte auf Brussigs Helden-

Roman, wie in der forsch-fröhlichen Beschreibung der sexuellen Praktiken seines

Helden Uhltzscht deutlich wird. (“’Das Volk jedenfalls war’s nicht’”)

Brussig’s text deliberately ties itself into an American literary tradition and constructs itself in opposition to a German one (East or West). American literature is not only his frame of reference, but the text describes Amerikan values and behavior as preferable to and a way out from the strictness of GDR culture (cf. 85). When the narrator of Helden wie wir does mention German cultural products, then it is usually to subject it to ridicule or for scathing critiques. For example, he associates himself with the Little Trumpeter from the folk song of the same name about a military trumpeter who is shot and dies, which the GDR appropriated and gave a socialist spin (cf. Siedentop 184). Brussig’s narrator, however,

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associates himself with the Trumpeter not because he sees himself as a martyr but because he claims to have a tiny penis. With his constant mocking sexualization of everything, he also takes a stab at psychoanalysis, but the individual he criticizes most directly is Christa

Wolf. According to the narrator, she is the personification of the stuffiness of the GDR as she romanticizes the state and its social system as fundamentally good, failing only in a couple of aspects. He confuses her, presumably on purpose, with Katarina Witt’s ice skating trainer Jutta Müller, when he relates the famous speech at Alexanderplatz on

November 4th, 1989, heightening the sense of Wolf’s participation in the GDR’s cadre.

Helden wie wir talks about Wolf’s ideology as “Mutti-Sozialismus” - mommy socialism

(288) -- and how its representatives still rave about socialism’s advantages in a way that borders on cynicism for those who live in it. That the confusion of the two women is purposeful becomes palpable with the title of the last section of the novel, “Der geteilte

Pimmel,” a mocking reference to Wolf’s novel Der geteilte Himmel. In it, he describes how he intends to finish using his penis what neither these idealists nor the people of the GDR could accomplish – a better and liberated future (318). Sybille Schönborn argues that

Brussig’s dissociation from Wolf is a sign of a caesura in German literature that came with the (re-)unification – away from post-war literature and toward postmodernity (11-14). The argument is admittedly narrow but gains traction as a when read as an implicit comment about hegemony. As I have argued above the postmodernity does contain some

Americanization and American globalization as it postulates the switch from a literature deeply concerned with questions of the German Nation-Thing to one that sees the German

Nation-Thing and its literature more as a culturally specific accessory to a universal

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aesthetic, a form of consumption, and construction of a life-world. Christian Schwaabe calls American postmodernity a “focused, fast moving, flexible, friendly and fun making enterprise" (203).

Brussig seems to embrace exactly this definition in Sonnenallee, which is much less critical and more a celebration of growing up in the GDR in the late 1970s and its embrace of Amerika as a countercultural influence. The nostalgia of which Helden wie wir accuses Wolf in respect to displays of socialism, Sonnenallee shows with respect to the

GDR’s counterculture. Consequently, many critics have accused him of “Ostalgie,” a nostalgic embrace of the past in East-Germany (cf. Andrea Rinke “Sonnenallee-’Ostalgie’ as a comical conspiracy;” or Paul Cooke “Performing ‘Ostalgie:’ Leander Haussmann’s

Sonnenallee”). The film has shed almost all of the high-culture references like Wolf or the

French chansons present in Helden wie wir and substituted them with popular culture.

Sonnenallee is episodic and appears aesthetically like an early music video. The protagonists are not occupied with grand politics but with participation. They record

English-speaking pop songs from the radio, buy Rolling Stones albums on the black market, smoke herbs because drugs are out of their reach, try to impress girls with their dancing skills, and gush over a girl who has a boyfriend from West-Germany.96 The attempts by the group of friends to emulate the American counterculture’s protest against society falls short because of their willingness to ultimately participate in society and go to university (the friends agree to serve as border guards for three years so that they can study

96 The conflation of English speaking, often British, music and ideas of Amerikanization is a phenomenon that different scholars have described before: cf. Wicke “Rock’n’Roll im Stadtpark” 71, or Poiger Jazz, Rock, and Rebels 215.

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afterward). The film even celebrates the state to a degree as it creates such a clear Other, which aids in the formation of an identity in opposition and creates comic relief through its seriousness. The film portrays in detail the ridiculous attempts by the state to make

Amerika appear in a negative light. The children learn that children are not treated well there, and the social issues are highlighted through the school’s association but helpless symbolism as a girl runs up to a teacher and tells her that she has just finished drawing another sunflower for Angela Davis. The teacher thereupon discusses in all seriousness how these images of sunflowers that are being collected all over the GDR will make

Americans shudder (00:23:30 - 00:23:50). For the friends, however, Amerika is only present as a positive force of aiding in the construction of a division between self and state and a promise of freedom. Sonnenallee affirms the surface structures of postmodernity, which Baudrillard describes in Simulacra. Life, the film claims, should be fun, and

America is a producer of almost all things fun. Brussig’s works are not alone in this romanticizing fantasy of the role of Amerika. The other big financial hit about the GDR,

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), for example, also celebrates Amerikanization as liberation, which is only destructive for older people and for people who are too dim to understand its limits.

Based on the positive utopian images of Amerika present in these movies and novels, I will analyze two cultural products below that have a much more critical perspective on Amerikanization. This point of view is not theirs alone. A number of other movies and novels have looked at this Amerikanization or Westernization highly critically, for example, Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories, mentioned above, Michael Klier’s visionary

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processing of the matter in Überall ist es besser wo wir nicht sind (1989), Detlev Buck’s

Wir können auch anders (1993), or Ester Groneborg’s Alaska.de (2000). I decided on

Vanessa Jopp’s Vergiss Amerika and Reinhard Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer because of their explicit focus on Amerika and its role in Germany after the Wende and because they are exemplary of two different arguments about Amerikanization. Both are critical of

Amerika and its role in the (re-)construction of a German Nation-Thing, but while Vergiss

Amerika argues that Amerika leads into obsoleteness, Die Atlantische Mauer acknowledges the revolutionary potential that Amerika as utopia can still have on a bourgeois construct of the German nation constantly producing personal obsoleteness. As has been emblematic in prior examples, it is important to note in advance the difference in milieu between film and novel, one portraying the provincial working class, the other the urban bourgeoisie/the educated classes.

5.3. Vergiss Amerika – The catastrophes of Amerikanization

Vergiss Amerika is the award-winning debut by Vanessa Jopp, written by Maggie

Peren. Noticeably both director and scriptwriter are from western Germany. At least in part, the film is, therefore, a western fantasy of life in the eastern part of Germany, of (re-

)unification, and the role Amerika plays in it. Jopp confirms this notion in an interview she gave to Der Spiegel: “My scriptwriter Maggie Peren and I had been interested to find out who the people in the East are and what they are like. When I traveled through the [new

German states], I discovered truly fabulous landscapes – and a new feel for and of

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Germany. For me as a [western] German, this feeling was exhilarating and new. (Der

Spiegel 45/2000, in Heinsohn 146). She describes traveling the eastern parts of Germany somewhat like an adventure into an Other that is supposed to be part of the Self but remains so alien that the confrontation with it fundamentally changes the own perception of the

German nation and its validity as Thing. Eastern Germany, as well as Amerika in Vergiss

Amerika, are vehicles for a western fantasy of the (re-)unified Germany. The film is set in the fictional town of Aschleben in rural eastern Germany, close to the Polish border, and revolves around the love triangle of three young people and their aspirations in a desolate region that does not offer a future to younger generations. David is the narrator of the film and together with his best friend, Benno, he meets Anna, the daughter of the new minister.

Both fall for Anna immediately, but she chooses the loud and boastful Benno over the quiet and brooding David. Benno dreams of opening a car dealership for US-American cars, which he will eventually do after he finishes his military service, and Anna goes to acting school in Berlin after the summer and dreams of becoming a star. After his civil service on the island of Rügen, David plans on moving to Berlin and finding a job there in order to be closer to Anna, but his father’s work accident, which makes him wheelchair bound, forces

David to return home instead. Soon after that Anna also returns home because she cannot find employment as an actress. Benno’s incentive to open a car dealership is located in the material Amerikan Dream of rags to riches, but he soon finds out that he cannot sell any of his cars. To remedy his financial squeeze, he falls in with the Polish mafia and works on stolen cars for them, but soon finds himself threatened and harmed. The stress their failing dreams put on them and the hopelessness of their situation puts an enormous strain on the

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three protagonists’ personal relationships. They start to argue more and more, and after

Anna falls out with Benno, she has an affair with David. Benno still persuades David to transfer one more car to Poland with him, after which he says that he wants to break with the Mafia. On their way to Poland, Benno’s car veers off the road, and he is killed in the crash, caused by a cut brake hose. Benno’s death causes both David and Anna to split, resulting from the shame over the breach of trust before the accident, and the film ends with both of them boarding the same train out of Aschleben, without knowledge of the other’s presence on the train.

Critics have analyzed Vergiss Amerika from a variety of perspectives, most of them concentrating on borders, transnationalism, and European integration. None of them are necessarily wrong in their approach, but by relegating Amerika to a side note, they fail to address the central argument of the film, namely the futility of an Amerikanized globalization, in which neither the individual nor its promise of an economic utopia hold any merit. Alexandra Ludwig writes about the film in the context of portrayals of the Baltic

Sea in post-Wende German film and argues that the Baltic seashore offers a liminal space in which David develops and becomes aware of his situation. Benjamin Heinsohn identifies

Vergiss Amerika as representative of films that promote the idea of open European borders.

Jakub Kazecki and Christin Kopp analyze the movie for its portrayal of the stereotypical

Pole as gangster and thief. Kazecki further argues that the film nevertheless differentiates between a Europe before the Wende that only looked to the West and a newer concept of

Europe that includes the East. Jaimey Fisher considers the film to be an example of the clash between the local and the global and the inherent shifting boundaries of a precarious

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identification of a Self in the light of global flows of commodities. According to Fisher, this requires the protagonists to come to terms with globalization, a phenomenon that he intentionally positions close to the German’s coming to terms with the Third Reich as it again requires Germans to deal with the loss of a stable identity (406-411). It is interesting that he equates the presence of Amerika in the movie with globalization without explaining the connections, despite the focus on Amerika indicated by the film’s title. Christin Kopp comes close with her interpretation of the film's portrayal of a choice between East and

West: “If the ‘American Dream’ represents a utopian fantasy linked to the West, its opposite is a dystopian nightmare that threatens from the East, and that is much closer and more palpable in Aschleben than the distant dreams of Western economic success” (43).

But as I show below, only the dystopia in the East is another incarnation of the American

Dream; the Polish mafia is not a representation of an East but of “little America,” where the material American Dream leads when it is insufficiently kept in check by social institutions or a sense of community. Consequently, I suggest an interpretation that takes the film’s foregrounding of Amerika into account without dismissing the previously mentioned perspectives: Poland and Berlin are two incarnations of Amerika on a scale between individualistic self-fulfillment on the one side and brutal dog-eat-dog capitalism on the other. Anna’s space of longing is Berlin and her dream is to become a star, an expression of the individualism and the definition of success within that myth. Benno, on the other hand, wholeheartedly buys into the idea of the material Amerikan Dream of creating something that leads to significant personal financial gains. David is initially the odd one out who does not subscribe to either dream. His self-actualization on Rügen, a

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German island in the Baltic Sea, I argue, is the film's allusion to a possible third way informed by a romantic notion of the German nation and pragmatic relationship to

Amerika. It does not lead him to the life he imagines, but it is the only fantasy that is still possible in the end.

My focus on Amerika makes one intertext appear clearly, which critics have missed so far, as they have neglected to analyze the name of the place and instead argued that the site stands for any rural town in eastern Germany (cf. Fisher “Globalisierungsbewältigung”

407). The made-up name of the town, however, is telling as “Aschleben” alludes to the famous valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. The valley of ashes is a place of desolation and a product of the material Amerikan Dream, and its ubiquitous need for wealth accumulation: “This is a valley of ashes – a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air” (26). In Gatsby, the valley, situated between Long Island and New York City, is the place of obsoleteness, filled with hopelessness, very similarly to Aschleben, which does not offer much more than obsoleteness for all of the figures in the movie and which is situated between Poland

(associated with Benno’s material Amerikan Dream) and Berlin (associated with Anna’s individualistic Amerikan Dream). The similarities between Vergiss Amerika and The Great

Gatsby continue beyond the similarities in names of places. Like Gatsby, the film’s plot is structured by a love triangle (Gatsby actually has two) and like Gatsby, it ends with the death of the one who dreams the rags-to-riches Amerikan Dream, the difference being that

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Gatsby becomes rich but lacks the personal fulfillment of love and companionship. Benno is even twice removed from that myth in Vergiss Amerika. Another parallel is the prominence of a billboard. Instead of Dr. Eckleburg’s billboard with the eyes looking upon the valley of ashes instead of God and who bears witness to the obsoleteness of the

Amerikan Dream, it is a billboard of the “Arbeitsamt” in Jopp’s movie (00:06:37) associating the promises of the “blühende Landschaften” and of economic success (cf.

Reuband 109) that politicians made in the context of (re-)unification with the promises of the Amerikan Dream.

The movie emphasizes its focus on Amerika from the first scene onward. It starts out with a very idiosyncratic road movie shot. A car, followed by another car, drives toward and past the camera at an extremely low angle, and then a cut takes us 180-degrees to view the two vehicles from behind, driving away from the vantage point. This shot combination is a trope often used in movies that center on mobility, like road movies, or in chase scenes like Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968), or 1980s TV shows like Knight Rider. The shots stand for a fetishization of the object as well as dynamism and the freedom of movement, which exemplify the promise of the Amerikan Dream of spatial and social mobility but stand in stark contrast to the following narrative of stagnation. The allusion to the road movie, nevertheless, references essential themes of Vergiss Amerika carried by this generic play: namely a search for a sense of meaning in life, “exploration, discovery, and transformation

(of landscape, of situation and identity” (Mazierska/Rascaroli 4). The shot combination at the beginning of Vergiss Amerika, however, is different from its American model in two main aspects. First, the landscape is different, namely eastern German, discernible from

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the tree-lined rural road. Moreover, the first take is shown upside down and with the cut to the cars driving away, indicating in rather bold terms that the world portrayed in the movie has undergone radical changes.

The scene contains another strong allusion to Amerikanization, namely its use of intra-diegetic music. The two cars driving along the rural road are easily identifiable as a huge American “big boat” convertible and a German BMW. The driver of the BMW signals the youthful driver, to whom the film cuts in profile and then to the second driver’s point of view, to drive next to him and tells him to switch on the radio. As he does so, the audience hears the intradiegetic sound of “A Horse with no Name” by the band with the telling name America. The song is based on Western motifs and tells the story of a rider who must ride through a desert, but finds solace in the loneliness and in the end arrives at the ocean, which is reminiscent of the American Westward expansion. Yet, the arrival is not salvation but brings the realization of having arrived at just another desert “with its life underground, and a perfect disguise above” (Bunnell “A Horse with No Name”). The song foreshadows the film's argument that the GDR, as well as the (re-)unified Germany, are places that produce obsoleteness; however, the latter has it hidden underneath the

Amerikan Dream. One of the two young men in the two cars, consequently, has already met his ultimate obsoleteness at the end of the first scene as his car veers off the street. The film then cuts to two figures, Benno and David, splashing around in a fountain at night, flashing back to the beginning of the plot, which is the moment when they meet Anna

(00:02:17). The first scene, as the audience later learns, is a typical “how we got here” in medias res opening of the narrative. In its repetition as the climax of the movie, we learn

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that Benno dies in the crash. Notably, he does not crash in the American car but in the

German BMW, a first reference to the destructive energy Amerika has in and on Germany.

The place the film returns to after the initial scene and to which it and the protagonists continue to return is the previously mentioned Aschleben, which Vergiss

Amerika portrays as riddled with obsoleteness in which the compensatory concepts of nationalism and Amerika compete for people’s affection. The appearance of the town already hints at obsoleteness as the buildings that the film shows in the background are crumbling and some are even boarded up. The greatest factor for obsoleteness in the film, nevertheless, is economic obsoleteness and the loss of identity and self-confidence. At the beginning of the movie, Aschleben is still a place that has the ability to inspire dreams for the protagonists, but bit by bit it reveals its true desolation, especially for the male inhabitants of the town. The father, unable to work and bound to his wheelchair, is the ultimate example of the emasculated and obsolete middle-aged man in eastern Germany.

After his accident, his sons even must help him onto the toilet, where he begins to cry out of sheer helplessness. His code of masculinity, nevertheless, makes him reject the son’s offer of consolation. David’s brother cannot find employment and starts drinking beer in the morning. David himself initially finds work in a small photo studio and takes cheesy pictures of customers who, for example, live out their Amerikanized fantasy of romance by reenacting the pivotal scene from Titanic. However, he soon finds himself without a job as well. Tellingly, an automatic photo booth brings about the photo studio’s demise as the movie shows when David confronts two boys who have just had their photos taken in one

(00:27:40). It is a particular kind of shame that causes David’s anger in this scene and that

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Günther Anders calls “Promethean shame” (19-56). He describes how humans, in a time of technological progress, become aware of their own obsoleteness as the machines can produce everything either more conveniently, with greater precision, more cheaply, or faster than people themselves. Consumer capitalism has made humans a production commodity. This commodity can become obsolete, not as a consumer, but as part of the production. The remedy that consumerism offers as an escape from those feelings of obsoleteness is consumption, and thus, Benno and David buy themselves new clothes, all inspired by Amerika. David’s shirt says “fuck,” and Benno’s has a picture of a pinup girl on the front. Additionally, David is wearing a straw hat and large sunglasses whose form is traditionally associated with femininity. In combination with Benno’s asserted masculinity in his pin-up girl t-shirt, Vergiss Amerika connects David’s Promethean shame with a loss of masculinity. The film further underlines the crisis of masculinity, which accompanies the obsoleteness of the place, by making the remaining workers almost exclusively female as their traditional jobs, the movie seems to suggest, are not in production but retail. The big new supermarket at which David finds a job almost exclusively employs women but is managed by a man from western Germany. David’s mother also still works, but her corner store no longer has customers, except for a confused old lady who takes merchandise but does not pay. Her comment when she leaves the store,

“Who are you, I don’t even know you” (my translation) is surely a sign of dementia in the old woman, but also a reference to the development of a social order based on society instead of community, which consumer culture brought into town. Vergiss Amerika further exemplifies the flaws of that underlying system of capitalism in the store manager, who

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the audience learns toward the end of the movie is an impostor who has falsified all his documents. The capitalist system that the film portrays from an eastern German rural male perspective is rigged and inevitably leads to obsoleteness.

The obsoleteness causes shame, anger, resignation, and nationalism. Except for

David, Benno, and for the longest time, Anna, people in Aschleben are resigned to their fate. The best example of this is David’s conversation with the owner of the photo studio after it has closed down. David asks him why he did not tell him that the store was close to bankruptcy, in which case he could have found work somewhere else. The owner initially only replies “tja” and “naja.” However, after David yells at him, he adds in a resigned tone that he just thought it would get better again sometime (00:22:37). He does not see a chance to fight against the obsolescence the new system brings with it but rather, closed his eyes and resorted to blind hope. In David’s brother and father, one sees the effectiveness of different forms of the nation to move in where obsoleteness has befallen other Things. The father represents a construct of the nation that resorts to the glorification of a distant past as he picks up the hobby of painting nineteenth-century tin soldiers (00:31:51). In this act lies the longing for a time when the Nation-Thing, a Germanness based in Prussia, promised pride to people from the region of Aschleben. This form of the Nation-Thing that also glorifies the so-called German virtues of diligence, politeness, order, and punctuality clashes with David’s brother’s Neo-Nazi fetishization of the nation, which is based on the ideology of Germans as the master race and glorifies purity, strength, and violence. The confrontation between father and son, however, remains unresolved as they are both helpless in their personal situation and further avoid each other. Their varieties of

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constructs of the nation and their specific fantasies of jouissance do not provide a solution to their status but are band-aids for the actual problem of obsoleteness and the connected stabilization of one’s own identity as a productive member of a community. David reacts to the altercation by numbing himself with the consumption of television in his room, watching an American television show. Therein, film criticizes the role of the entertainment industry as providing a senseless distraction from problems foundational to the community.

Next to the generational conflict about the definition of Germanness exists a confrontation between the German nation and Amerika in the boldly stylized conflict of

Neo-Nazis and cowboys, which comes to a head in a disco fight that David must navigate.

Repeatedly, Vergiss Amerika makes mention of David’s brother as a Neo-Nazi who is not alone but who hangs out with a group at the gas station, notifying the audience that his interpretation is not a singular appearance. Simultaneously, the film repeatedly shows figures of the friends’ generation who fetishize Amerika so much that they walk around in full cowboy outfits, including hats, holster and presumably fake Colts. Both are an indication of the two Things of identification that the space seems to offer for young people, and the film stresses the similarities of both regarding their skewed utopian fantasy, their substantial hollowness, their false promises, their inherent violence, and their eventually harmful fetishization of a Thing.

The three protagonists are also more intricate and less bold personifications of this conflict. As mentioned above, Benno is the material Amerikan Dream personified. The

American Dream, in general, has been a broad discourse focusing on a variety of aspects.

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James Truslow Adams popularized the term in his study The Epic of America (1931), in which he argues “that the dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank, [...] is the greatest contribution we have made to the thought and welfare of the world” (4). From this quotation, one can deduce the Dream’s main cornerstones, namely individualism, universalism, progress, and the fetish of material wealth.97 The American dream thus stands for the ideology of personal liberty and self-fulfillment over the collective, of self-improvement, material success as a goal and measurement of achievement in life, and of the fantasy of access to these ideologies and fantasies for everybody. That it is not accessible for everyone is widely recognized but also identifiable in the sheer numbers: “The top-earning 20% of Americans — those making more than

$100,000 each year — received 49.4% of all income generated in the U.S., compared with the 3.4% earned by those below the poverty line, according to census figures. That ratio of

14.5-to-1 was an increase from 13.6 in 2008 and nearly double a low of 7.69 in 1968”

(Jones). The fantasy’s presence, nevertheless, persists in America. In Germany and

97 The discourse surrounding the term upward mobility is without a doubt far more complex than I can demonstrate in this dissertation. Early dreams of America were different in their orientation. They focused primarily on the possibilities of freedom of worship and relative liberty in way of life. It largely lacked a focus on the material. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence codifies these ideals of liberty: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. In this definition of the American Dream, personal happiness is the focus, but soon under the influence of capitalism, happiness became associated with financial success. Many name Horatio Alger Jr.’s novels as proof of these changes. Alger also coined the expression “from rags to riches,” which exists in Germany as “vom Tellerwäscher zum Millionär.” This form of materialism has a side effect of causing a society of rivals in which only personal material gain counts as a measure of success and social standing. Today, we call this conduct Social Darwinism (cf. Hahn 110). For a more detailed history of the American Dream cf. Jim Cullen’s The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, or Lawrence R. Samuel’s The American Dream: A Cultural History.

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particularly Vergiss Amerika it predominantly exists as a materialistic utopia. The German

Amerikan Dream mostly lacks the association with ideas of liberty and pursuit of happiness, and is reduced to its material side, as it feeds on narrative tropes of wealth originating as much in German emigration narratives as it does in American cultural products (e.g. Hollywood movies like Gabriele Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happiness and countless narratives of the upbringing of stars) and in American politics (cf. Ralph Benko’s

“Trump's Trump Card: He Sells The Dream”). From an East-German perspective, the myth was further connected to fantasies of consumer culture and the prosperity of the West.

Hence, other movies, such as Roland Suso Richter’s Sara Amerika, follow a similar idea of the persistence of what I will call in the following the Amerikan Dream, in order to mark it as a phenomenon connected to the German nation; not least in oposition to the American

Dream, which is still being re-narrated in American popular culture One has to read the

Dream, therefore, as a pacifying instrument in the face of the inequalities of late capitalism on the one hand and a powerful fantasy on the other, which produces the self-association with a system that is mostly unfair.

In Vergiss Amerika, Benno falls victim to the material promises of the Amerikan

Dream and of an image of masculinity that accompanies it. He tries to woo Anna by explaining that he will soon open his own dealership selling “super awesome American rides,”98 and that if Anna marries him, she would have a wealthy husband tomorrow

(00:04:58). He plays the role of the go-getter and daredevil by, for example, making Anna

98 “super geile Amischlitten” (my translation)

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jump into a cold river with him - a trope that already stood for personal freedom in

Friendship - and pretending to steal his own car. He follows up on these self-portrayals by signing on for military service - instead of David’s choice of civil service - and therein to a militant and vigorous masculinity that he also sees in the Amerikan Dream. As a special signifier, he even wears his uniform when he and Anna visit David on Rügen and goes jogging in it in the early morning as proof of his virility. Simultaneously, however, the film begins to show the vulnerability that Benno’s social-Darwinist concept of masculinity entails. He is extremely jealous of other men and confesses to erectile dysfunctions. The material Amerikan Dream later quickly falls apart as there is no interest in the cars he is selling in a region that is struggling economically. The contrast between reality and Dream is visually reflected in the misé-on-scène of his body shop (00:23:40). In the foreground is an old phone on a pole that is no longer used, signifying that the space had been a different workspace before Benno took over, referencing the obsoleteness of GDR industry. In the center of the room is a make-shift living room made exclusively from old GDR furniture, signifying Benno’s connection to the past, his lack of funds to make the place speak the same language as the cars, and the lack of work that he does in the space. The last aspect stands for the expectation that the Amerikan Dream will deliver wealth to the one who dares, not necessarily the one who works hard for it. The Amerikan Dream itself is represented by a poster of a classic American convertible with tailfins driving through the desert next to a highway sign. The poster is draped over a dirty and bare wall. Benno’s

Amerikan Dream is nothing but a Simulacrum of a surface structure taped over the existing desolation. Due to his financial hardship, Benno engages in dealings with Polish gangsters

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who buy cars from him without ever collecting them in return for Benno fixing stolen cars for them and driving them to Poland. Notably, as Heinsohn identifies, the film does not depict the border crossings, even though it was filmed before Poland was part of the

Schengen area (146). Jamey Fisher adds that one characteristic of globalization is the free movement of goods (“Globalisierungsbewältigung” 406). Apart from being a representation of the East as “little America,” the gangster is a known figure of the

American Dream (cf. Cernkovich et al. 132-135). As Steven Messner and Richard

Rosenfeld argue in Crime and the American Dream, breaking the law is a reasonable effect of the material American Dream. Ambition and the often singular measurement of success in wealth causes people to become criminals. The gangster, therefore, exists in a dichotomy as the personification of danger, but at the same time as a revered figure who understands how to take advantage of the system (Messner/Rosenfeld10-31). For Benno the gangsters are a last resort to settle his debt and hold on to his Dream, but the reaction of the bank teller already foreshadows the futility of his endeavor since she immediately asks him when they can expect payment of the rest of his debts, right after he happily has given her a large sum of money (00:27:15). How much Benno has bought into his idea of the Amerikan

Dream also becomes evident in his treatment of David and Anna. He always drives them around in his big American car and buys Anna clothes, particularly a red dress. He also offers David a job after he gets fired, in “public relations or something like that”

(00:26:35).99 For that purpose, he has already bought David and himself a suit in which they dress before a visit by the Polish gangsters. Emblematic of the power of the materialist

99 “Public Relations oder sowas” (my translation)

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Amerikan Dream is the altercation between David and Benno after Benno had been severely beaten by the criminals and David had to drive to Poland at night to pick him up.

David confronts Benno about the hopelessness of his situation and says that he should come to his senses and understand that he has failed. Benno answers with the famous anecdote regarding how everybody laughed at the first man to build a hotel in the desert and how today that place is called Las Vegas. It exemplifies that the longing Benno feels for riches is not his own but something he picked up and repeated like the proverb. He continues offering money for David’s driving services, to which David replies: “Was ist dir unsere

Freundschaft denn wert? Ein halbes Auto? Zwei Autos?” This altercation and many quarrels with Anna mark the deterioration of the social contact in a system and thought pattern that attempts to put a monetary value on every part of life. In the end, Benno comes to his senses as he asks David to accompany him on one last drive, despite the fact that he has just had caught David having an affair with Anna. This last ride leads to Benno’s death in a car accident, which also appears aesthetically Amerikanized, as Benno’s car rolls down a hillside in slow motion and in the end, explodes (1:18:52). The articles about the movie always immediately declared that Benno was killed by the Polish gangsters as we later learn that his brake hose had been cut. While this is a likely conclusion, the film also offers a different possibility, namely Benno’s suicide or at least his knowing about the cut brake hose. Two actualities are relevant to this second option. First, Benno is the one who fixes up the cars for their transfer to Poland; thus, it would be likely that he is keenly aware of the condition of the car. Secondly, and most importantly, he acknowledges that he has been playing a high-stakes game, one that he has lost at that point. After telling David he wants

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to back out of his deal with the gangsters, he asks David to go to the wishing well they dove into at the beginning of the film and asks David to throw in a 5-Mark coin. After

David protests, Benno says suggestively: “Den Leuten sind ihre Wünsche nichts mehr wert” (01:17:22). On the one hand, he apparently references the lack of money in the well caused by the economic situation of the region, but metaphorically he invokes the lack of risk taken by others, a risk that he has already paid for with his physical integrity, and possibly knowingly will pay for with his life. Regardless of the immediate reason, he is killed by his belief in the material fetish of the Amerikan Dream, elucidated by the aesthetic presentation of his death.

Anna also follows an incarnation of the Amerikan Dream but one that is primarily based on the celebration of individualism and in which material wealth is one but not the only objective since she wants to become a famous actor. As early as 1941, Leo C. Rosten outlines in Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers the deep connection between the film industry and the fantasy of individualism: “To Americans raised in the American tradition, faithful to the American concept of unbounded personal achievement, Hollywood is the last frontier. In the movie colony, as in the content of the movies themselves, romantic individualism, the most compelling idea in American history, has reached the apogee of its glory” (16). This romantic individualism is what Anna is drawn to in the

Amerikan Dream. Benno summarizes her ambition in his terms as follows: “Du willst also ein Star werden, Anerkennung und so, Kohle ohne Ende, jeder kennt dich, jeder betet dich an” (00:04:25). At first, Anna denies her ambition, but once she admits to it, Benno tells her that he likes her Dream. The space onto which Anna can project her version of the

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Amerikan Dream is not Hollywood, but Berlin, the only German metropolis and therefore a suitable carrier of fantasies of a globally integrated world under Amerikan portent. The relationship between Anna and Benno shows their connectedness via the Amerikan Dream, which can focus on different aspects but ultimately comes from a core idea of personal gain and which falls apart once the dreams fade. Anna must admit to the failure of her Dream even earlier than Benno, as she moves back to Aschleben only half an hour into the film.

Her return opens the possibility of two ersatz-aims in life - the focus on having

“fun” and to start a family. Both of these alternatives are also part of the America/Amerikan

Dream in late capitalism, even though especially the ideal of family is part of a larger ideology of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the America/Amerikan Dream has been deeply involved in the fantasy of the traditional core family, in which the male is the breadwinner and the female takes care of the house and the children (cf. Samuel 8). At the same time, fun is the culture industry’s means of misleading unhappy people in late capitalism into believing they do experience happiness, as Adorno and Horkheimer present in Dialektik der Aufklärung: “Fun ist ein Stahlbad. Die Vergnügungsindustrie verordnet es unablässig.

Lachen in ihr wird zum Instrument des Betrugs am Glück” (165). Vergiss Amerika negotiates both exit strategies for Anna’s Amerikan Dream in one scene. David confronts her with her failed Dream after he sees her dancing in a club (00:36:01). He asks her if she now plans on becoming the star of Aschersleben, to which she answers: “Wieso? Kann man nicht mal ein bisschen Spaß haben?” Whereupon, he rightfully claims that she does not look like she is having fun. Their tense conversation makes Anna’s friend stand up and the audience becomes aware of her pregnancy, which David uses to follow up with the

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question of whether Anna now plans to become a housewife and mother. Even though she affirms it flippantly, it becomes undeniable that this is not an alternative that would be fulfilling for Anna, but simply to admit to the obsoleteness she feels causes her too much shame.

The film makes the shame that is caused by the failure of her Amerikan Dream explicit in another scene. David drives her to a job in Leipzig in which she is supposed to provide the dubbed voice for a thriller, a job she has done before,100 but it turns out that the job is actually the dubbing of a softcore porn movie, a sign of the commodification of even the most intimate human relations. For Anna, it is also the moment of revelation that her dream has not come true. She runs away from the studio and from David, who is trying to console her as she tells him of her frustration with a cultural system that promises easy success and delivers precarity: “Es hat mir keiner gesagt, dass das so schwierig ist. [...

]Euch habe ich die ganze Zeit vorgemacht, dass ich sonstwie toll bin und jetzt sprech ich nen Porno. [...] Weißt du eigentlich wie peinlich mir das vor dir ist” (00:59:15)? David first tries to console her by claiming that things are not as bleak as she thinks and by telling her that she has to resign herself to her circumstances. He then disrobes in front of her to perform his lack of shame in front of her, exclaiming that she has no reason to be ashamed

100 The act of dubbing a movie or a television show, as Anna does, is again an ersatz the Amerikan Dream provides as it excludes people from actually participating in its promises. Instead of taking advantage of the late capitalist system as a star, it commodifies the two things it deems useful in her, her voice and her Germanness. The study of dubbing and its cultural impact has increased in the last couple of years and gist is that dubbing has a fundamental influence on how cultural products are received as part of a specific culture as it loses language as a marker of difference (cf. eg. Irene Ranzato’s Translating Culture Specific References on Television : The Case of Dubbing and Maria Pavesi; Maicol Formentelli; Elisa Ghia The Languages of Dubbing)

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in front of him. The strategy, however, is not a way to alleviate the shame of obsoleteness; instead, the option the film presents is to expose ourselves to the same level of shame and admit to our humanity, which can, at least in this instance, transcend obsoleteness. In the end, Anna’s loss of the Amerikan Dream shows the potential of the heroine’s fall into the despair of personal obsoleteness.

David is the third part of the trio and the narrator of the film. He follows neither of the Amerikan fantasies, but instead portrays a mixture of German romanticism and pragmatism. The film represents him as a somewhat failed artist who is, however, not opposed to selling his skills. He is a photographer who has no concrete plans for his life.

Slowly but surely, however, he gets sucked into the mechanisms of capitalism, first working in the photo studio on his street until it closes, which forces him to find a job at the newly opened giant supermarket. The supermarket is the direct competition for his mother’s corner shop, which has lost almost all its customers. I argue that David, nevertheless, represents a third path in Amerikanization, namely dealing with the necessities of a system that regularly produces obsoleteness, without sacrificing all of one’s integrity. The film associates this attitude through David with the German Nation-Thing, using the German island of Rügen as its vehicle. As Alexandra Ludewig describes in

“Screening the East, Probing the Past,” Rügen is the place for David to find himself, where he gains insight into the dysfunctionality of Benno and Anna’s relationship, and where he finds the courage to take concrete steps to move to Berlin in order to get close to Anna.

These steps are only interrupted by his father’s work accident and his necessary return home to Aschleben (157).

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Rügen is certainly not a random choice here as it is deeply ingrained in the myths of the German nation. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the island served as a projection surface for bourgeois fantasies of the German nation because of its remoteness and imagined purity from foreign, that is, French, influences: “Rügen became the site on which national sentiment entered the realm of the sacred. The nation became something holy, and the Stubbenkammer cliffs became the altar of the fatherland” (Scheib). This imagination of Rügen as the seat of a national spirit has been at the center of many of the interpretations of Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting The Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818).101 In its reference to such an important space of German Romanticism, it hearkens back to a

German anti-Amerikanism, originating in that movement. According to Dan Diner:

The Age of Romanticism had a definitive influence on the German image of

America. It is easy to see why the Romantics did not have very much nice to say

about North America, since they considered natural rather than revolutionary

development to be real and historically significant. They viewed the principles of

both 1776 and 1789 as contemptible rationalism and materialism - mechanical rule

of abstract institutions. By countering pure civilization with highly valued culture,

they created a ‘gap between a European and Western, American world that has not

been bridged to this day’” (America 31).

101 The place remained in the German focus beyond Romanticism. The National-Socialists built an enormous complex for their Kraft durch Freude Program there. The GDR made Rügen a prime example of economic socialization and planned to make it into a fortress and the base for their fleet under the code name “Aktion Rose” (cf. Johst “Die Festung Rügen”).

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David is not a total reincarnation of a romantic, but his figure shows hints of associations.

He does not let himself get sucked into Benno’s and Anna’s materialism but holds up ideals like friendship and romantic love. He also finds himself among nature and seclusion on

Rügen. I argue that David is portrayed as the personification of an ideal German Nation-

Thing, one that feeds off the positive aspects of the history of German self-identification but does not fetishize it, one that otherwise shows a distance to utopian dreams and to

Amerika without rejecting it altogether, and one that shows a quiet pragmatism in the face of obsoleteness.

All positions of the protagonists, in the end, lead to failure in a system that appears to be unforgiving in the way it flaunts possibility and delivers obsoleteness. The narrative’s point of departure and the movie’s center of critique, nevertheless, is the toxicity of the ephemeral presence of Amerika in Germany and the dreams its consumer products produce in young eastern Germans, which inevitably leads to failure, shame, and a heightened sense of obsoleteness. The Amerikan Dream, thereby, destroys the last intact aspect of the protagonists, the social bonds they have created among each other. In the end, Benno dies after he finds out how his girlfriend and his best friend have deceived him, and Anna and

David no longer communicate. In fact, the last scene shows them both boarding a train without noticing each other. The train has long been the symbol of technological progress and of a sense of history that is progressive (cf. Presner 24). Simply put, on the most basic level, the film appears to call for the realization that the effects of Amerika can be managed if Germans realize that they are all in comparable situations. The film assesses eastern

Germany as having a lack of means of identification, but does not present a final answer.

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The least treacherous path appears to be a reactivation of a romantic ideal of the German nation that gathers its power of identification from a sense of space instead of ideals of superiority. Amerika and the consumer culture for which it stands are responsible for the economic and personal obsoleteness of the people in the whole region and for the destruction of its social cohesion so that it produces not only disillusionment, shame, and anger, but also loneliness and social isolation.

5.4. Die Atlantische Mauer and the failed emigration

Structurally and linguistically, Reinhard Jirgl’s work Die atlantische Mauer is the most complex and demanding of all the primary works considered in detail in this dissertation. It is composed of four major parts and has a multitude of narrators and protagonists that are sometimes only loosely connected to each other. It is also a work that one cannot easily categorize. Christine Cosentino calls it an “Amerika-Roman” (179),

Jochen Hörisch a “Berlin-Roman” (79), Helmut Böttiger a “Roman des Übergangs” (4), and Peter Walther focuses on the motives of family and failure (100-7). Simone Barck summarizes the complexities of the novel in her review for Der Freitag:

Jirgl interessieren ‘Fortgang und Zerbrochenheit von Biografien’, und so kann man

- je nach Interessenlage und Lesebedürfnis - den Roman entweder (und zugleich)

als Familiendrama, Liebesgeschichte, psycho-analytisches Lehrstück über die

Bindungslosigkeit und Kommunikationsunfähigkeit des "modernen" Menschen,

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oder als neuartiges, aufschlussreich vergleichendes und kontrastierendes

Städtebuch über Berlin und New York lesen.

As I will show below, one can also read Die atlantische Mauer as a didactic novel on the presence of fantasies of Amerika in Germany and how they function and fail as an alternative to a broken and obsolete German Nation-Thing. Again and again, critics stress the author’s position as an outsider and as a writer of the negative, of darkness, of deterioration and decline, as a rogue who maintains his own aesthetics and who is mostly interested in the underbelly of what has largely been sold as a success story, the German

(re-)unification (cf. Scherer “Aus dem Herzen der deutschen Finsternis”). It is this focus on what this dissertation calls obsoleteness of the German Nation-Thing and its affective effects on people that made me choose Die atlantische Mauer over works that appear more centered on the Amerikanization of Germany such as Christoph Diekmann’s My

Generation (1999), a coming-of-age tale about the influence of western music in the GDR, or Ingo Schulze’s Simple Stories (1999), a collection of short stories that narrate lives after

(re-)unification in the tone and style of famous American models.

If one considers the number of pages allocated to the two spaces of concern in this dissertation, Germany and the United States, Die atlantische Mauer is another hybrid, like

Schultze gets the blues or Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, as the first three parts are largely set in Berlin and Dresden and an unknown German mental hospital, including only sporadic excursions to the United States. The last part, however, starting a little after halfway through the book (page 283 of 450), is set outside of New York, with relatively regular flashbacks to Germany. Concretely, parts of Die atlantische Mauer are therefore

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about emigration and about the United States as a space characterized by satisfaction for those who have failed in Germany on an expansive meta-level. The novel, however, negotiates the presence of this possibility in a (re-)unified Germany that appears to only offer obsoleteness. In an interview with Uwe Pralle, Jirgl himself talks about his fascination with the “new emigrants,” “who radically break off their life in Germany and try to newly install their life in social spaces that already possess the myth of success” (109, my translation). The novel exhibits a keen interest in the motives for such a radical change that these people display, which is connected to an almost absurd belief in the utopian fantasy of Amerika in opposition to the corruption of a German bourgeois understanding of identity. As I will show in detail in the following paragraphs, Jirgl’s novel concludes that

Amerika cannot provide a utopian alternative to constricting German

“Spießbürgerlichkeit,” with its chauvinism, social coldness, and personal obsoleteness, but it does leave room for Amerika to create a space to break with some of the German darkness. Amerika is imperfect as a utopia; nevertheless, it is without competition as a provider of utopia and therein in remains useful.

The narrative of Die atlantische Mauer encompasses Amerika, emigration, border crossing, the German (re-)unification, family, and out of all these, identity formation of the individual in response to the German Nation-Thing. The first part, “Ostwestfleisch,” narrates a family history of the daughter and son of an art professor and a physician in

Dresden and Berlin. It starts out with the daughter’s failed attempt to emigrate to the United

States illegally and continues with her and her brother’s revision of their family history, the obsoleteness of the father, who was left by the mother for a female doctor from West-

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Germany. The West-German emigrated to the GDR not only for the mother but also to escape the history of a father who abused her sexually and physically and a mother who did not intervene. Further, it is about the siblings’ inability to form lasting relationships, the daughter’s professional failure, and her dream to restart her life in the United States as a gallerist, sponsored by her wealthy ex-boyfriend, an old West-German doctor. The second and third part, “Menschenschwemme: Vom Leben in der Tiefe” and “Die

Entdeckung des häßlichsten Menschen,” are the life-testimony of the daughter’s ex- husband, an actor who became a mass murderer, in which he rather incoherently describes his life in the asylum and his history of border-crossings that led him down the path to murder. The fourth part, “Grand Central Station: Endstation Selbst-Sehnsucht,” is the narrative of a failed author who goes to the United States to live with his son, whom he had sent there 15 years earlier. On the airplane, he meets the nurse from the first part and makes plans to meet her again, but she never appears. The author obsesses about her while he watches his son’s marriage to an Amerikan woman, who looks a lot like the nurse, fall apart and end. He does not manage to “start over” in Amerika, as his son suggests, but in the end, he receives an invitation from the nurse to the opening of a gallery in New York, suggesting that she has managed to make it to Amerika after all, fulfilling her fantasy.

The narrative, however, is by no means the only aspect of Die atlantische Mauer that is of interest for this dissertation. The structure of Jirgl’s text references a complexity that he sees in the German discourse surrounding the German nation, Amerika, and the

German way of handling failure. The often fluidly changing narrative perspectives, for example, between brother, sister, mother, and the mother’s partner in “Ostwestfleisch”

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indicate an understanding of the story, history, and discourse as polyphony.102 This thought is reflected in idiosyncratic typography and orthography, about which he himself wrote in his theoretical essay “Die wilde und die gezähmte Schrift:” “Es läßt sich an keinen, weder punktuellen noch andersartigen Ursprung denken, sondern vielmehr an ein weitverzweigtes Quellengelände, somit auch an mannigfache Herkunft von Sprache”

(298). His unconventional typography and orthography, which vary from narrator to narrator, is for Jirgl an expression of the depth to which language manages to expose the layers of the figure’s Self (297). As Arne De Winde points out, language becomes not just a descriptive, but a performative tool of the person’s life-world, comprised of language, society, and their reality (116). Most notable in Jirgl’s typography is the liberal use of punctuation and the frequent intrusion of numbers and mathematical characters [e.g.

“SCHMACH=im=Gerichtsal” (AM 103), “!Hmmm-!H-!Hmmm-?Hämorrhoiden”(AM

231), “DeMark+Resepass” (AM 61); “!sie=all-I” (122)]. These techniques have multiple effects on the reader. One is certainly to give pause and change the way the reader reads and therefore thinks: “Das Unterbrechen von alphabetischen Zeilen durch Zahlen erfordert somit vom Leser ein gehirnverrenkendes ‘Umschalten’ von einer linearen zu einer kreisenden, multidimensionalen Denk- und Lesart” (de Winde 123). I want to highlight specifically the circular here because it corresponds to Jirgl’s concept of history, as becomes clear below, in which trauma and escapism repeat themselves.103 As I argue, the

102 As many critics have pointed out, Jirgl’s typography is not without its predecessors, specifically Arno Schmidt and James Joyce (cf. Samson). On the one hand, Jirgl places himself in this tradition of critique of modernity; on the other, he claims it himself as a tool for the description of his specific phase of late capitalism and German history (cf. Jirgl “Wut im Kopf” 199).

103 Therein, I would disagree with critics like Simon Ward who understand Jirgl as a writer of the post-

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others are aspects of the post-capitalist world, namely the fantasy in the possible scientification of life and the optimization of space and time. These are also visible in today’s short message writing, which are brimming with symbols and shorthand notations that are also often understood as part of an “Americanization” of the language (e.g. “lol”).

Jirgl, however, re-appropriates both post-capitalist phenomena to achieve the opposite of their intentions. His typography gives pause, slows down the reading flow, and instead of unification, it creates individuation. Jirgl’s multitude of voices does not lead to blending into a cacophonic chorus; rather, the language and typology create separation.104

The typography is also part of a Verfremdungseffekt, very much in the tradition of

Brecht. It safeguards the reader from the temptation to submit herself to the narrative and to association with the figures: “[E]s ist neben dem Gestus des distanzierenden Zitats, die

Schrift, die in ihrer verschrobenen Typographie und sperrigen Orthographie auf sich als

Druckbild aufmerksam macht und die Leser dergestalt von dem Aufgehen in die imaginierten Furchtbilder bewahrt” (Grimm 187). Like Brecht, he also often leaves the description of the misé-en-scène to a bare minimum and concentrates more on mood, lighting and color [e.g. “Spülicht[sic!]” (42), “Hier im Himmel einer STADT nackt im eisblauen Licht” (331), “schmutzigen Lichtwogen” (43)]. Another technique from Brecht’s

histoire (cf. 153-170). It is true that in his work one finds the absence of unequivocally functioning grand narratives and a worldview that lacks progress, but instead of an ideological sameness, Jirgl does see revolutionary potential in difference: in Die atlantische Mauer specifically in the difference between America and Germany, as well as eastern and western Germany.

104 Below, I will not mark every unusual spelling with the usual moniker [sic!] as it would distort the typography applied by Jirgl, Instead the reader has to accord me a certain amount of trust that my citation is correct.

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toolbox that Jirgl employs especially in “Ostwestfleisch” is narrative commentary about the nurse’s actions by her brother, who also often points out alternative actions she could have taken, leaving the reader wondering in the end who the narrator is. These techniques of verfremdung also relativize the negative imagery Jirgl employs and mark it as a thought- provoking impulse toward the discourse, whose make-up and complacency he sees as problematic. For many of his novels, the central discourses are the (re-)unification and its interdependencies with core family structures, which he paints in relationship to obsolescence in late capitalism. In Die atlantische Mauer he adds Amerika to the same discourse. Jirgl certainly lacks Brecht’s ideological vigor. His texts appear to rather want to distance the reader without a clear underlying political agenda other than demonstrating the obsoleteness of life and history in a system that many of his critics call postmodernity

(cf. Tommek 505-507).

Jirgl, nevertheless, is adamant about historicizing the personal story he tells in his novels, and Die atlantische Mauer is no exception, as the title itself already indicates.

Initially, in the German context, the title suggests metaphorically an equivalence of the relationship between Amerika and the (re-)unified Germany to the separated two

Germanies before the Wende. The novel affirms that closeness of the two historical situations in the parallel between the flight taken by the lesbian partner of the nurse’s mother and the nurse as well as the author’s border crossing into the United States. All those figures are traumatized by dysfunctional constructs of core families and are searching for a better place beyond the wall. By calling the wall “Atlantic,” the novel also implies a difference between not only Germany but also Europe and America, something that the

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text, however, does not discuss explicitly. Instead, the title of the book points to another pivotal time in German history. The “Atlantikwall” was the name of the extensive military facilities the National Socialists built on much of their western coastline against an Anglo-

American invasion (cf. Wilt). The title metaphorically not only alludes to inner-German isolation but also the doubly failed attempt to keep Amerika out of Germany. Therein, it contains a reference to the positive impact the United States had on the history of Germany.

Walls and ramparts have repeatedly been in place only to be overcome by people who showed the determination to do so. In the protagonist of the nurse, the novel appears to suggest something similar. But if that will to cross the wall is lacking, the removal of the physical barrier itself is not enough to make the wall itself obsolete, as the novel exemplifies in the form of recurring prejudices between eastern and western Germans as well as between Germans and Amerikans.

It is consequently no surprise that the text is framed by the nurse’s experience to first run into the wall and in the end supposedly to cross the wall, or rather, with a moment of hope in which the realization of the dream of Amerika is in abeyance. It begins with her as a supplicant in front of her former lover:

?Würde dieser-Mann sein Wort !wirklich halten & -wie sie unbedingt glauben will-

ihr zur Hilfe sein beim 2. Versuch, ihr Leben in NEW YORK anders & neu zu

beginnen..... !Darum schließlich würde es ihr am meisten zu tun sein in diesem

Gespräch mit ihm, jenem ehemals Geliebten, u selbst die Kündigung=hier dürfte

in diesem Zusammenhang für sie nur 2.rangig sein (Jirgl Die atlantische 9).

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Some particular features become apparent in this passage, which is thematically otherwise a relatively typical prologue describing one person’s dream to emigrate to the United

States. First, the nurse appears to be absolutely dependent on the doctor, which amplifies the gender implications that I will explore in more detail below. The nurse’s dependency comes from the economic obsoleteness she has suffered at the hospital, which has just fired her, but also from her lack of access to the contacts to enable her to emigrate to the United

States of America. The rich doctor, on the other hand, has all the connections to influential people and claims it will not be a problem for him to arrange for her emigration despite the failed first attempt. Mobility and choice of space, it becomes apparent, are primarily a luxury of the wealthy. As the reader later learns, this prologue is actually the end of the first part. It again emphasizes the circularity of the movement of the nurse, whose first attempt to restart her life in a place that appears to be filled with promise and novelty begins in a comparative way. However, the notion of the second attempt clarifies her situation of begging for help again.

The trope of the nurse being at the mercy of men repeats itself in the next paragraph.

It marks the beginning of a relatively linear narrative that leaves the nurse as supplicant in the doctor's office, who had been her lover. It tells of her confrontation with and failure to surmount the Atlantic wall, caused by mistakes she blames on her Germanness. Before that failure, however, the section commences like many other beginnings of an emigration narrative.

Dort=draußen mochte es kühl sein, die Flughafenarbeiter, zumeist Schwarze u:

Latinos, trugen dicke wulstige Anoraks, Strickmütze & Fausthandschuh. I

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Hier=drinnen in der Einreisehalle jene künstliche Atmosfäre, aus der man weder

Temperatur noch Wind&wetter herausfühlen konnte. Eben die unfühlbare

Plastikluft wie in allen Flughäfen, weder zugig nochkühl- u dennoch eher ahn- als

spürbar jenes unaufhörlich nervös Voranziehende, treibend Ruhelose. (Jirgl Die

atlantische 10)

Except for the unique typography and orthography, the segment appears as a common description of an arrival at an American airport, which the narrator describes as a quintessential non-place, a place without character, history, or personality, purely designed to usher people through it. The description, however, already establishes the difference between the narrator and the Amerikan workers she sees outside, made extremely apparent by the employment of the equal sign between “dort” and “draußen.” These terms imply that she is on another side, namely here and inside. The text further constructs the barrier between her and the outside, between her and her space of longing - Amerika – by her assuming that it has a different climate and, in opposition to the artificial atmosphere inside, a place of authenticity. The adjectives in the first passages also introduce the inside as a place of danger, which the narrator describes in conjunction to emotional nervousness.

The danger manifests itself when she is selected for a special screening after the border guard discovers her application forms for a job as a nurse at a New York hospital, which is illegal given that she is seeking to enter the United States on a tourist visa. The state in her selection for a special screening exercises a power which, as Ali Bedhad argues in A Forgetful Nation, is a stable part of the nation, the enactment of an exclusive club of chosen ones which stands opposite the freedom of goods and money and which thoroughly

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screens everybody who wishes to enter. The United States, he argues, exhibits a dialectic of strict enforcement of its power to impede immigration on the one hand and its self- portrayal as an immigrant nation that offers new beginnings to whoever is willing to work hard and buy into the idea of liberty and the pursuit of happiness on the other. Behdad calls it “the idea of forgetting as a form of historical disavowal” (xii). He points to America’s formation and perpetuation through violence against Native Americans, blacks, and almost any group of immigrants and its heightened need for an Other to construct a precarious native Self in the face of its self-portrayal as an “immigrant nation.” The border guards’ treatment of the nurse is itself an act of violence and an exercise of total power over an individual, which she interprets as the conflict of the machine and the person: “[I]ch höre den beiden, dem Officer wie dem Dolmetscher- nicht mehr zu, es hatte ohnehin keinen

Zweck (meinte sie): -Im Kampf Mechaniker gegen Automat siegt im Ende, & wie beim

Schachspiel, immer der Automat....”(Jirgl Die atlantische 23). She quickly realizes she cannot win this conflict and consequently gives up. By understanding the state’s power as the strength of a machine and its inclusion of humans in its mechanism, the text exposes the fantasy of individualism as unlimited self-realization in the Amerika as a lie. Her apparatus image is connected to traditional systems of power, primarily the nation-state but also patriarchy, which she clarifies shortly after the above statement: “ !Scherereien,

!Protokolleschreiben- :!Das fürchten die-Bullen auf der Ganzenwelt wie ne Frau-als-

Boß..... : Also besser !raus & !fort mit der durchgedrehten dschörmänn weit bitsch” (Jirgl

Die atlantische 23-24). The insult, notably spelled in the German phonetic system,

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combines patriarchal condescension with the assignment of her belonging to a nation-state and a race, as well. Hence, the machine “United States” is nationalist, racist, and sexist.

Not only the border to the United States confronts the protagonist with her assigned identities as a white German woman, but her brother does not blame the United States for her treatment, but rather her Germanness in his recounting of the situation:

Weil du, Schwester Herz, halt eine Deutsche bist, u für Deutsche sprich=wörtlich

nichts wichtiger & bedeutsamer ist als Akten, Formulare, Unterlagen - & die, je

größer der zu erwartende Sturm, müssen umso dichter am Leib gehalten werden -

»als seis ein Stück von mir« - so daß du also deinen Arbeitsvertrag mit der Klinik

in New York, ausgefüllt & unterschrieben, nicht etwa der Post anvertraut

&vorausgeschickt hattest-: !Nein: du mußtest dieses Formular, den Saint

kaantreckt, !natürlich gansdicht bei=dir & obenauf im Gepäck tragen, damit es

auch !ja das Erste wäre, das nem Kontrollör in die Finger käme (Jirgl Die

atlantische 24-25).

On the surface, he blames socialization in the context of the German way of structuring society and its fantasies of jouissance in order and preparedness for her failure to cross the

Atlantic wall, but intrinsically he blames her for not emancipating herself from her

Germanness, even in the act of attempted emigration, which is a performance of precisely that emancipation. Her brother represents the idea of an inevitability of one’s belonging to a Nation-Thing that cannot be broken, even in acts like emigration to the space of a different Nation-Thing. In the tangle of narratives, images, and stereotypes, the novel

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introduces the reader in this first scene to its complex construct of power relationships and identity formations in which dividing lines are often blurry.

The lost battle against the apparatus sends the protagonist back to Germany, burdened with the intensified weight of shame. There she locks herself in her brother’s guest room for days in a manic-depressed state. In an attempt to analyze her situation, the nurse and her brother recount the history of her family, which they portray as a fundamentally dysfunctional system of personal obsoleteness - a representation that the other three sections confirm. Jirgl’s focus on the dysfunctions of the bourgeois family prompted Helmut Böttiger to formulate the phrase: “Jirgls Hölle ist die bürgerliche

Familie” (107). The family is, for Jirgl, the primary creator of personal obsoleteness. In contrast with this role of the family and Jopp’s movie, economic obsoleteness is only a peripheral consideration in the social spheres of Die atlantische Mauer. As Nicolai Kobus explains, the dysfunction of the family as the locus of identity formation is a fact in Jirgl’s depiction of East- and West-Germany: “Die Ehe der Eltern im Osten ist genauso ein bürgerlicher Sarg wie es Ehen im Westen sind, und das Familienleben ist die drumherumgebaute Leichenhalle.” This finding allows one to assume that the novel identifies the problem in the European social structure of bourgeois society and not the

German nation, but it gives it a distinctly German tone by connecting German history to its narration of the failure of the social structure of the family. The figures who struggle with obsoleteness the most are the men in Die atlantische Mauer, evident in the nurse’s father, a failed painter who, after his marriage fails, withdraws to the attic of his villa, copies Matisse paintings, sedates himself, and occasionally attempts suicide. These

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attemptsrepresent his inclination to give himself over to the ultimate obsoleteness. The nurse’s former husband, an unsuccessful actor, channels the rage that he feels in his obsoleteness into becoming a mass murderer. The author is another male character who falls victim to obsoleteness after he is no longer successful in his occupation and after his marriage, too, has failed. His son labels the father’s emigration as a new beginning, but both men seem to know that it is an empty phrase. The obsoleteness of males causes the dysfunction of the family, which in turn carries those structures or failures into succeeding generations. Obsoleteness also affects women, but they appear stronger in their attempts to remedy their feelings of obsoleteness, even though all their efforts seem flawed. The nurse herself repeatedly tries to get to the United States to start a new life and appears to be at least successful in getting there. In the end, her mother leaves her father for a relationship with a West-German woman, and the author’s son’s wife leaves him for better opportunities for self-fulfillment.

Parallels between East- and West-Germany and the historical situation of children and the parent generation interlace in the novel like a large net. Specifically, the history of the mother’s new partner, who the nurse and her brother call “Schwesternfrau,” is an important parallel and allegory for the nurse’s relationship to Amerika and her fantasy of emigration. She is also an example of the destructive force of the German nation and the trauma it carries. The Schwersternfrau flees from the FRG to the GDR to live with the nurse’s mother on one hand, but also to escape her own family's failure: Her father did not just drown his experience of violence and his shame about the obsolete Nation-Thing in alcohol, but abuses his daughter physically and sexually for years in an act that is

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apparently compensatory. Her mother is too weak to intervene and becomes an accomplice by actually helping to cover up the father’s crimes. To escape that shame, anxiety, and distrust, Schwesternfrau enters a relationship with the nurse's mother and moves to the

GDR, leaving the nurse’s mother doubting her motives for their relationship, which creates further instability and distrust. Like the nurse in her first attempt to flee to Amerika, she must endure lengthy interrogations in which she is blamed for being a spy and a trafficker

(Jirgl Die atlantische 62). The reasons for the questioning might have shifted from the political to the economic, but particularly in the affects that the novel describes, they show a strong resemblance. Unlike for the nurse, however, the reader learns the outcome of

Schwesternfrau’s history of emigration, in which she does not find the distance from her own history for which she longed. Die atlantische Mauer uses her story to exemplify the interplay between a Self and an Other, the precarity of living out utopian fantasies, and to portray the futility of attempts to search for satisfaction-spaces in an Other without resolving one’s own problems. The other side, the GDR, to which Schwesternfrau flees because of her disappointment in the face of a dysfunction rooted in history and her own family experience, is not a better system as it too produces obsoleteness (cf. Jirgl Die atlantische 56). As the nurse-narrator later determines, history is a series of repetitions and an exercise in failure:

All-!diese Muster für Scheitern, genau !diese [...] -die mir von den-Alten & von

deren Trieben Wünschen speichelsprühenden Schreiereien & Agonien geblieben

waren, die ich in=mir habe & die mir bleiben, egal wohinauf-der-Welt-ich auch

fliehen will. Aber !was heißtfliehen (rief sie). -Niemand wird dieses Laufen,

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Sichbewegen, Reisen, Auswandern als Flucht bezeichnen od begreifen, aber es !ist

eine !Flucht, auch wenn ich=selbst Das natürlich nicht in jeder Izelnen Minute

meines Weiterlebens so empfinden kann od: gar will [...]. Aber genau= !Das werde

ich=für=mich: !Jetzt !ändern. (Jirgl Die atlantische 170)

The passage describes the nurse’s acknowledgement that there is no escape from her family’s history, her socialization, and her connection to the German nation, but that the prospect of going to a different space, one that has a different history and a different understanding of the social, nevertheless presents at least the fantasy of an alternative to the endless repetition of the same failures. This fantasy alone is enough of an incentive for her to attempt to break out of the endless repetition. Schwesternfrau maybe did not succeed in escaping her demons, but she has still found a variance in the nurse’s mother and her family.

The parallel of the functions of Amerika and the GDR from a western perspective is confirmed by the comparison of Saxons and Amerikans by the author and his son in the third part. The passage reveals the generational difference in which the Other is used but assigns the same attributes to Amerika and the GDR – a surplus of jouissance of the family:

Seit langem hatte ich die Vermutung, daß jene-Menschen=dort [in Sachsen] den

familiär-spermatischen Verbreitungsprinzipien lebten, damit jenen Gruppen-,

Gemein- & Familiensinn besaßen, dengleichen, den mein Sohn in seinen Briefen

auch den-Amerikanern zugeschrieben hatte, der in gewissen Seelenfalten dieses

Menschentyps das uralt Menschliche nicht allein zu bewahren, vielmehr immerfort

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weiter am Leben zu erhalten weiß: Zugehörigkeiten schaffend. (Jirgl Die

atlantische 317)

The novel exposes the location of the family idyll in the GDR or Amerika as fantasy since all family concepts presented in the novel prove to be highly dysfunctional. This passage, however, shows the power of the fantasy of the Other as the keeper of authenticity and an alternative to one’s own dystopia. The father assumes that Other in the GDR, as did

Schwesternfrau – the mother’s partner. The son, influenced by (re-)unification, instead locates it in Amerika, signifying that Amerika has assumed functions of the GDR in a process that eliminates the possibility of finding a definite Other in the other Germany.

What Amerika can do, however, as somewhat crude as this conclusion appears to be, is house a private utopian vision and therein a driving force for personal as much as for communal change. I do not mean progress in the sense of new developments for the sake of newness and consumption, but changes on the personal level and an alternative for propagating the same traumatic experiences so deeply ingrained in the history of the

German nation. This fundamental function of Amerika as the provider of a utopian as well as dystopian space and therein an Other that not only affirms but also questions the Self and allows for a change of perspective is present in even the most negative images of the cultural products analyzed in this dissertation. Die atlantische Mauer makes precisely that clear in its adherence to positive images of Amerika. The author gave an indication of his concept of Amerika in the Pelle interview: “Alle Ideen der letzten zweihundert Jahre, die in Europa geboren wurden und gescheitert sind, kommen in Amerika wieder hoch und funktionieren" (109). Jirgl’s concept of Amerika is one of counter-history, where the

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obsolete of Europe can flourish and which in Adorno’s sense of obsoleteness, therefore, grants a possibility of change from the obstructive linear concept of history. The novel gives an indication of the origin of the counter images, which it calls multiple exposures of memory and film: “[J]ede Izelheit eine Folge von Mehrfachbelichtungen, die allesamt hier & jetzt aus Erinnerungen & Filmen immerfort aus dem Gehirn & den Kinoleinwänden heraustraten - I déjà-vu nach dem anderen (52). Interestingly, the narrator leaves out her own medium and focuses on movies as a vehicle for Amerika as a German utopia. The images, however, are not a form of blind conformity but become mixed with personal experiences and thereby function as the source of personal fantasies. As the narrator continues to explain, the reason for this relative malleability lies in the Amerikan understanding of realism, which, as she explains, aims at being shown and not being explained like European realism: “Amerikaner benutzen in ihren Filmen ebenso wie in der

Präsentation ihrer Künste Wirklichkeit nicht um sie zu deuten, sondern um sie zu !zeigen”

(Jirgl Die atlantische 52). The narrator indicates a more liberal regime of images in

Amerika, which allows for her to imbue the images with her personal Amerikan Dream of mutual compassion and the freedom to dramatically change careers.

The main difference between Germany and Amerika in Die atlantische Mauer, personal liberty, is repeatedly expressed in the few images of landscape and the representation of the social fabric. The author-narrator describes a “weithin flutendes

Land” and a “Landschaft für tiefes weites ausatmen” (300), which contrast with his description of Berlin, which speaks of gray concrete and rubble. Furthermore, the vastness in his description contrasts with the social narrowness of Germany. The nurse,

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consequently, even experiences freedom in the narrowness of a New York apartment (cf.

141). Through the novel’s focus on the interpersonal, the narrators emphasize this aspect of American liberties. The novel continuously portrays Amerikans as socially more accessible. An old married couple has offered to take in the nurse for the first couple weeks, without even knowing her, hinting at a freer and stable concept of family in Amerika.

Centrally to Amerika’s difference is its lack of “Speißertum,” a term that can only be passably translated as petty bourgeoisie, as the author points out: “Natürlich wie in allen

Städten Aufderwelt gibts auch in New York Spießertum [...] Nur, dieses Spießertum=hier wird ununterbrochen von wildfreien Energien bis ins Fundament erschüttert -; ein

Spießertum, dem von wirbelnden Kräften in dieser-STADT immerfort die Tüllgardine von den seelischen Fenstern weggerissen wird -” (Jirgl Die atlantische 360). It is important to note here that this observation is not valid for all of the United States. It implicitly acknowledges that other parts of Amerika are home to the petty bourgeoisie, but in this particular area, probably the most formative for a German image of Amerika, it destroys the confinements of the bourgeois family that is the source of all the personal misfortune in Die atlantische Mauer. Amerika, in conclusion, may not have the immediate power to change German bourgeois misery, but it presents a personal utopia and an immediate exit strategy. As Christine Cosentino suggests, the four-part installation of the novel as well as its position between Amerika, eastern- and western Germany suggests the overcoming of dualities, the duality between Europe and Amerika, between the Self and the family, and particularly, the duality between the two Germanys, for which Amerika offers a utopia that has the potential of leading to productive change of old and constricting structures and the

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trauma inherent in the history of the German nation.105 Notably, that utopia is a feminist utopia of transcending the patriarchal structures encoded in the bourgeois core family. As flawed as the utopia is, it appears as the only available fantasy to escape German constraints and the personal obsoleteness the German nation has continuously produced at the latest since WWII. Amerika presents a counter-history to troubling German conditions, a personal utopia, but the text does not resolve the issue of whether it has the power to spur actual change. If anything, it appears doubtful of that possibility. Jirgl himself speaks of the impossibility of having utopias fulfilled (Pelle 31). Instead, Die atlantische Mauer focuses on the importance for a utopian Other in situations of dire obsoleteness to give hope and the power to move on. Consequently, the novel closes with the author narrator’s poetic descriptions of the years after the Wende as years of constant change: “?Was ist gewesen in diesen zehn Jahren. Ich hätte diesem Menschen geantwortet: Sturm- nur Sturm ist gewesen-- Niemand ist hier geblieben“ (Jirgl Die atlantische 450). What the Scorpions once sang about as “the Winds of Change” turned out to be a storm. A storm is usually caused by great differences in pressure between two spaces, with the wind rushing into one. This must be read as a rapid Amerikanization of the eastern Germany. A storm is a destructive force, one that displaces things and in this instance, has displaced people. In the storm, holding on to traditional structures is not an option, independent from the individual’s personal embrace or rejection of the change the storm causes. Ultimately, Die atlantische Mauer upholds the positive characteristics of Amerika in its contrastive

105 The prevelance of the number three in Die atlantische Mauer goes far beyond what has been mentioned. As Cosentino notes, the novel includes three emigrees, three male narrators, love triangles and more (187).

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depiction of the bleakness of the German Nation-Thing. Simultaneously it warns of the expectation of finding a way to actually redeem the utopian fantasy. Taking the story of the “Schwesternfrau” as a parable, the utopia needs to be kept intact and promote change in Germany.

5.5. Chapter conclusion

Compared to the portrayal of Amerikanization in Brussig’s cultural products and other popular films and novels describing the pre-Wende period, one notices a definite change in its assessment in Vanessa Jopp’s Vergiss Amerika and Reinhard Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer, which are both set in the late 1990s. If one rather crudely associates the

Amerikan utopia with eastern Germany and the dystopia with western Germany, as many cultural products as well as public discourses have done, the conclusion has to be that the utopian representation struggles in its confrontation with the reality of the Amerikanization of eastern Germany, specifically in light of economic obsoleteness and resulting personal crises. This becomes exceedingly well-defined in Vergiss Amerika, which portrays the utopian image as an individual and material dead-end that destroys personal relationships, and in its inevitable failure, leads to obsoleteness. It also brings along a form of capitalism that destroys the accumulated interconnections of the society of the east and forces people into jobs they perceive as fundamentally alienating. Die atlantische Mauer paints a quite different picture, which is largely due to its various conceptions of Amerika not as a space of material success or fame as in Jopp’s movie, but as a dynamic space of individual self-

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fulfillment. Not least because of its inclusion of Amerika, more precisely its focus on New

York and the bourgeois milieu it examines, Jirgl’s novel differentiates single tropes within the Amerikan Dream and speaks more to an older concept of individual liberty and the aspirationsof the educated classes than its late capitalist counterpart of “rags-to-riches” and road to fame.

These two cultural products exhibit some decisive similarities, particularly in their representation of post-Wende Germany as an obsoleteness-producing dystopia. Especially the men in both fall into personal obsoleteness. This masculine obsoleteness is in both instances connected to the men’s inability to produce something as the only industries promising success appear to be service and health care, represented in the physicians in

Die atlantische Mauer, and sales, represented by the car dealership and the supermarket in

Vergiss Amerika and the nurse’s Dream of selling art in New York in Jirgl’s novel.

(Eastern) German masculinity, however, is portrayed as linked to production and social value creation, which is not surprising given its overall history and particularly the GDR’s socialist fetishizing of production (cf. Coles 40). They also confirm the erosion of social cohesion in Germany, even though they differ in the identification of the source and the extent of the effect. Vergiss Amerika places the problem squarely in the former GDR and connects it with the loss of the social system of identification and the ferociousness of the expansion of capitalism in its space. Die atlantische Mauer detects the erosion as a pan-

German problem caused by the trauma of the Third Reich and the inherent problem to update the nineteenth-century imaginations of a bourgeois family at the core of identity formation.

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Masculinity is then also most strongly connected to concepts of the German Nation-

Thing in both products. Even though they portray different socio-economic spheres, they agree on the destructiveness of the German Nation-Thing. However, where Jirgl’s novel finds continuities of a traumatized and personally obsolete Bildungsbürgertum in West and in East Germany that continuously produces failure, Jopp’s film argues for the concept of a lost Nation-Thing in the GDR and the limited possibilities of identification a (re-)unified

German nation offers, at least on the surface between the father’s nineteenth century militarism and the son’s neo-nationalism. Vergiss Amerika, however, also finds productive histories in Germany’s past. In Die atlantische Mauer a bourgeois romantic concept of the

German nation is the source of all miserey in the novel; without ever being fully articulated in Jopp’s film, this romantic notion of the German nation has the potential to be the source of a self-aware, reflective, and confident German Nation-Thing in times of global

Amerikanization.

In the details of their dealings with Amerikanization and the German Nation-Thing, the two products are, hence, very different. Jopp’s movie is interested in the dissemination of the utopian image of Amerika and takes it cues mainly from a media-centered interpretation of the fantasy. It cites road movies, includes English music, shows the influence of television, and expresses Amerika’s manifestation in at times farcical depictions of East Germans in cowboy costumes. Its concept of Amerikanization exists very much in the confines of late capitalism as it exists in the dialectics of the production of economic obsoleteness and the production of material and personal grandeur. It is this

Amerikanization that inevitably leads to personal and economic obsoleteness in the eastern

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German province. The effects and affects of this Amerikanization are mostly shown in the movie and rarely explicitly articulated and, when they appear, then only as allusions.

Hence, in the affects it concentrates on the effects of the feelings of obsoleteness, namely aggression and lethargy.

In Die atlantische Mauer, the source of the utopia of Amerika, which the nurse describes as a mixture between memory and film, is only a side note, in which she explicitly mentions the East-Germans’ emigration through television (cf. 59). As Cosentino points out, by choosing the topic and its orientation, the text implicitly puts itself in a German tradition of Amerika production (181). Its treatment and analysis of the German Nation-

Thing, on the other hand, is explicit. The novel traces it in the collective trauma of the world wars as well as in the personal traumas of an outdated social structure. It is Germany, not Amerika, that produces obsoleteness. In contrast, Amerika points toward a way out of the obsoleteness of the German family, at a counter-history that enables self-fulfillment within its own constraints. It is not a utopia that allows for the fulfillment of all dreams, but it offers difference from the Self and within that space, at least room for the projection of a personal utopia and an escape from the circular history of perpetual failure. In its portrayal of the affects of obsoleteness, it also differs distinctly from Vergiss Amerika, which is certainly also connected to the difference in their mediality. Lethargy and aggression are clearly also parts of the protagonists’ reaction to obsoleteness, but the description and portrayal are pointed much more strongly inward, previously describing and enacting shame and anxiety.

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Jopp’s Vergiss Amerika is firmly placed in a dystopian anti-Amerikanism in which

Amerika, its myths, and ideologies are solely responsible for almost all the adverse developments in Germany’s east after the Wende. It destroys the social structure and sows fantasies of grandeur that are destined to fail. The only option left is to manage those effects as well as possible. Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer, by contrast, paints a much more differentiated picture of the relationship between Germany and Amerika. It still acknowledges the dangers that are lurking inside the utopian image of Amerika but likens them to the risks inherent in any other form of utopia. It, nevertheless, can offer a necessary impetus for change. When one looks very closely, a comparable insight can also be found in Vergiss Amerika. Both their representations of Amerika’s presence in Germany uncovers a desolate German Nation-Thing that drifts between its own history, norms, and practices, and Amerika, searching for a stability that none of those things can provide permanently.

The utopian image of Amerika, however, has a place in a Germany that otherwise lacks all sources of utopia and therefore all revolutionary potential, all potential for change.

Implicitly, Jirgl and Jopp call for reflexive and distant dealings with the Amerikan utopia without linking it to a promise of salvation in the United States or Germany. Much more, they call for a pragmatic approach to a system that appears all powerful and inevitable in both products but that ultimately contains the chance for positive change by providing motivation and hope in otherwise desolate situations.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion: The discourse on Amerika and the problematic constitution of a

(re-)unified German nation

The foregoing analyses have not unearthed a uniform image of the central subjects of inquiry. Instead, they illustrate complex discursive fields in which this dissertation’s perspective is surely only one amongst many. Nevertheless, one can recognize distinct currents, fantasies, and narratives that illuminate concepts as complex as Amerika, the

German nation(-Thing), (re-)unification, late capitalism, and obsoleteness. In the following, I will give some order to the analyses in their social and historical horizons, with specific attention to the idea that cultural products do not transport a truth of discourses, but reveal contradictions in their makeup (cf. Jameson The Political 77-81).

This dissertation proceeded in two steps. First, it described and historically contextualized the representation of Amerika in Germany after the fall of the Wall; second, it examined the role this image plays in a discourse of (re-)unification, or more specifically the construction of a new collective identification. By using the analysis of the representations of Amerika to analyze a constructed sense of the German nation that unveils itself through artistic works by and about eastern Germans, I argue that: (1) there exists a form of shared group identification beyond the identification with a political entity at work in (national-)cultural artifacts; and (2) the evocation of Amerika serves as catalyst in the attempted cumulative construction of a German national self after the Wende.

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To follow the narratives of the national self, I explored different theoretical approaches to the concept of the nation, in an effort to illuminate the contradictory aspects of constructions of the nation with specific focus on Amerika and Germany. The foundation of my approach is the idea that nation is not a concrete concept based in real belonging, but a fantasy, an overdetermined symbolic system. In order to explain the persistence of the nation in the postmodern world, however, I turn to the anthropological and psychoanalytic idea of the auxotrophic being or the human as a being that is constituted through lack. Both approaches theorize that humans are born with a lack for which they compensate by becoming part of a social group. A social group as large as a nation, however, needs to be stabilized by its identification with a master signifier, which requires a common symbolic system, a set of rituals, and the creation of a usable past in the form of myth. The nation became the dominant form of legitimization for large social groups in modernity and remains influential, even in times of escalating globalization and cultural differentiation, because it is ingrained in the western political system, institutions, cultural memory, and cultural products. Additionally, it provides the illusion of a fixity of social relations in times of increasing change.

The logic of group identification such as the nation necessitates an Other, which must be palpable enough so that it can be perceived as a threat to the values of the self- construction of the nation. Regarding (re-)unification, such an Other was not readily available, as the socialist countries to the east were themselves in perpetual change and the countries to the west were supposed to become part of the self by integration of the

European Union. Therefore, Amerika, the German fantasy of the United States, with its

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cultural and economic expansionism again became an influential Other, but it is historically a concept full of contradictions, most overstated in the erudite discourse of the dialectic of

Amerika as utopia and dystopia (cf. Erhart 99-110; Osterle “The Lost Utopia” 447-453, etc). As Jameson specifies, cultural products are the place in which discursive contradictions like this are being negotiated.

The specific historical situation and the German attitudes towards their nation also necessitated a closer inspection of the effects and affects of obsoleteness. Obsoleteness plays such an important role, because this dissertation examines a historical time that was characterized by the dissolution of the GDR and the economic and personal obsoleteness the systemic change brought along in easter Germany. Additionally, the dissertation puts stock in a term that has been declared obsolete by multiple theories and political actors- the nation. The term is also so charged in Germany by the guilt it accrued in the Third

Reich that it appears non-functional for the construction of a communal identity to many

Germans. Nevertheless, I argue that nation plays an important role in personal and communal identity formation of Germans after the Wende. This necessity of the nation is further heightened by the historical situation in which eastern Germans have lost their

Thing of identification and the nation was used to rationalize the (re-)unification.

In order to follow the roles literature and film play in the construction of the fantasies of the nation and the diverse ways they convey these fantasies, the chapters include novels and films. The three central chapters of analysis focus on different forms of narrating Amerika: Amerika as a refuge, Amerika as an adventure, and Amerikanization narratives. For America as refuge, I analyzed Christa Wolf’s novel Stadt der Engel and

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Michael Schorr’s Schultze gets the blues. For America as adventure, I examined the texts

Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens by Jakob Hein, Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam by

Bernd Wagner, Berlin-New York by Alexander Osang, and the film Friendship! by Marcus

Goller. In the last chapter about Amerikanization, the discussions of Vanessa Jopp’s

Vergiss Amerika and Reinhard Jirgl’s Die amerikanische Mauer follow an examination of

“Ostaligie” cultural products and their images of Amerika.

This dissertation, in parts, runs contrary to many theories in the humanities over the last 20 years. The predominant theories of belonging and identities have focused on questions that go beyond nation, like globalization, inter- and transnationalism, new media, gender, or multitudes. Often, this emphasis was accompanied by claims of the concept of nation itself becoming obsolete in the (post-) modern world. This line of narrative, however, is a myth itself. It is certainly true that nation is no longer the undisputed hegemon in the construction of large group identities, especially in light of the internationalization of many groups and the accompanying physical and data mobility. One must see post-

Wende Germany with its discourse of Amerika an exemplary case study for these phenomena: This discourse has an important position as the necessary Other, which is perceived as a threat to the fantasy of the own nation but simultaneously must be present to stabalize the concept of the Self. Thereby, the dissertation also adds to the discourse of representations of Amerika in acknowledging the continuation of old strict dichotomies while highlighting the transformation and differentiation of the images in light of postmodern systems of group construction.

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All the cultural products discussed here centrally exhibit an association between

Amerika and consumer culture. Herein, they parallel nineteenth-century texts such as Der

Amerikamüde and reverberate reservations that were present in the West-German student movement and the East-German state's image of Amerika alike. This trope speaks to a focus of the German public discourse on questions of Germany’s place in a global economy, its handling of a global late-capitalist system, and its own prerogative to remain a social market economy - a public discourse that, for example, found its deposition in the political initiative Agenda 2010.106 In the representation of the United States as space in which consumer culture presents itself uninhibited by unions, laws, and social structures is an indicator of the German struggles with this system of society and the prevalence of the negative assessments of this “American” system, particularly in Wolf, Osang, Hein, and

Wagner. It becomes associated with the idea of simulacra, in which the system only produces meaningless surface structures, and with excessive consumption that paints over the contradictions of Amerika, such as its fear of obsoleteness (Wolf), its cultural and social decay (Wagner), its paranoia (Osang), its lack of a meaningful social fabric (Hein), its lack of a unifying history (Schorr), and in its incarnation as Amerikanization causing economic obsoleteness (Jopp). Amerikan consumer culture, however, is not painted in dystopian terms in all these works. Goller celebrates it as a liberation in portraying it in opposition to the restrictive life under GDR socialism. Consumer culture appears as a way to find similarities and communal cohesion across nations and cultures and hence in the form of

106 An important factor in the negotiations surrounding the Agenda 2010 was the economical strain that the (re-)unification still put on Germany, as well as the slower than promised economic development of eastern Germany (cf. Feil et al. 161-184).

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the montage as a Thing that transcends the old orders. Goller’s film, however, is itself the cultural product in my corpus that is most distinctly part of popular mass culture and, hence, has an interest in celebrating the ideas that underlie its production. Nevertheless, the product that places itself most plainly in the avant-garde my its style and typeset alone,

Jirgl’s Die Atlantische Mauer, also notices positive aspects in American consumer culture.

In its negation of history, it allows for fantasies of complete reinvention and therein represents an exit to the repetitions that arise from the bourgeois German Nation-Thing.

Amerikan consumer culture can contain both aspects, a positive fantasy of liberty from the weight of the history of the German Nation-Thing, as well as the fantasy of a danger to the

German Nation-Thing, the German “way of life.” It mostly depends on the implicit or explicit assessment of the validity of the German nation’s promise to an excess of jouissance.

Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens and Vergiss Amerika particularly show the fear inherent in the German association of consumer culture and its perceived encroachment on the German nation. Hein’s protagonist comes back home to eastern

Germany after a year-long journey through the United States, only to find his home completely Americanized and engrossed by consumer culture ideologies. In Jopp’s film, it is Amerika that is associated with the dialectics of catalyst and remedy. Amerika’s simulacra consumer goods are followed by the obsoleteness of old social and economic system, but simultaneously Amerika offers its own (fatal) remedy, namely a German version of the American Dream, the Amerikan Dream, in which the Dream is reduced to material success and fame. In Vergiss Amerika, which is a product of a western German

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director and writer team, eastern Germany is the exemplification of the negative effects the system that it associates with Amerika can have on Germany, as the eastern German rural towns are the most susceptible to its production of obsoleteness. In the film’s affirmation of the German nation as a source of the fantasy of a personal excess of jouissance, beyond the enjoyment of consumption, the film postulates the problem to affect the whole (re-

)unified German nation.

Consumer culture, however, is not the only thing with which Amerika is associated in the discourse of this dissertation’s cultural products. It is also the space of the exotic

(racial) Other and hybrid cultures. Specifically, the two products that I have analyzed in the chapter of “Amerika as refuge,” as well as Goller’s film and Wagner’s text still find the exotic Other in Amerika. The exotic (racial) Other has been part of the German fantasy of Amerika since the nineteenth century and is one of the most consistent tropes in all ideological formations from the nineteenth-century adventurer to the post-war travelogue, the imagination of the student movement to even the GDR government. As Osang points out, the German specificity in the representation of the exotic Other and the difference to

American myths and tropes is the German self-association with it. In the most famous

German fantasy about the Wild West, Karl May’s Winnetou, the German protagonist becomes a blood brother of the Native American, who is partly “noble savage” and partly

“noble German,” due to his German teacher. This trope also carries a German critique of

Amerikan-style capitalism as the protagonists in Winnetou, German and Native American, fight against the corrupt and greedy Americans and their Native American associates. This

Amerikan exotic Other, which, as Kathrin Sieg points out, has a history in the context of

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the German nation to displace the negotiation of issues of ethnic exclusion and racism, largely remains in the position it had before. It still delivers a different and helpful perspective to the protagonist which aids her/him to negotiate shortcomings of the German nation. For Wolf’s narrator, it is mainly the (re-)unified German nation’s inability to provide a means to include the voices that perceive the vanishing of the GDR as a loss that she finds negotiated in her appropriation of the exotic Other. Wagner’s narrator finds a way to convey his longing for an ethnic concept of belonging by constructing a parallel between the Native Americans and the Saxons, paralleling amongst other things the experience of feeling othered in the own nation. In Schulze gets the blues, the exotic Other is a guide towards a more inclusive German nation that finds an excess of jouissance, not in its past incarnations, which included fantasies of ethnic and cultural purity, but in the embrace of hybridity as cultural enrichment. Osang’s narrator even finds a common Germanness in the fantasy of the embrace of the exotic Other, which differentiates the (re-)unified German nation, as well as its East- and West-German predecessors, from the American fantasy and safeguards Germany from the American paranoia. Wagner’s version of the exotic Other, I argue, is the remnant of a nineteenth-century fantasy, in which it primarily serves to confirm the German nation as having retained a lot of its original connection to the nature and the wild (in the foundational myth against the cultured Romans). For the other products, the exotic is part of a fantasy of an inclusive German nation that embraces other cultures as an asset for its own jouissance. Amerika in this trope is not a utopia that embraces its hybridity, as all cultural products emphasize the dominance of European-

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Amerikan cultures, but it allows these other forms of culture to exist on its fringes and therein is a step further than the German nation.

The association between Amerika and materialism and consumer culture proves to be the most stable of the tropes of nineteenth-century fantasies of Amerika. Other tropes like Amerika as refuge and Amerika as adventure are still present in the German fantasy of Amerika and the incentive behind many of the journeys, but they are being exposed as obsolete in almost all instances. As a reminder, this is not unique to the post-Wende time, but it appears to turn specifically against a perceived renewed presence of the utopian fantasies of Amerika in the eastern German protagonists. The products by Goller, Osang,

Hein, Wagner, and to a degree Wolf connect those fantasies specifically to their protagonist’s life and in the instance of the first four their youth in the GDR, in which fantasies of Amerika as utopia formed a Thing to distance themselves from the GDR-

Thing. All except for Goller’s Friendship! describe these fantasies of Amerika as a utopian space for the discovery of a self and the experience of the cosmopolitan cannot withstand the realities of the United States of America, which mostly appears to be too close to the

Self to play an Other for true adventure or a true alternative to life in Germany. Its consumer culture fetish, furthermore, makes it almost impossible to find structures with which to identify. Beyond Goller’s protagonists, only Schulze, who does not have any preconceived notions of Amerika before he hears Zydeco and decides to travel to the United States can see a fantasy of the Amerikan utopia fulfilled that, however, has not been his own. The issue, in this case, is not Amerika, but the constitution of utopian fantasies, which always have the characteristic to unravel when one attempts their enactment. Nevertheless, as

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particularly Jirgl’s Die Atlantische Mauer emphasizes, these fantasies of Amerika have their function in Germany, namely that of a catalyst for the imagination of a better social and political system, which is all the more important after the failure of the socialist utopian fantasy. As Paul Ricoeur argues, utopias are a necessary function of social critique, but they must exist displaced in time and space, in other words, they must be nowhere and in the future, not to lose that function by their confrontation with realities:

Thus I propose that Utopia, taken at this radical level, as the function of the nowhere

in the constitution of social or symbolic action, is the counterpart of our first

concept of ideology. There is no social integration without social subversion we

may say. The reflexivity of the process of integration occurs by means of the

process of subversion. The nowhere puts the cultural system a distance; we see our

cultural system from the outside precisely thanks to this nowhere. […] Utopias

speak to so many divergent topics — the status of the family, the consumption of

goods, the appropriation of things, the organization of public life, the role of

religion, and so on — that it is extremely difficult to fit them within a simple

framework. (Ricoeur 15-16)

The failure of most of the utopias of Amerika are hence predestined, but their presence, nevertheless, allows the critique of conditions and developments in Germany, such as the perceived lack of communal identification in a system dominated by consumer culture.

Goller’s film also displaces the utopia that it paints, but it places it in the past, a move typical for today’s late capitalism (cf. Esra Özyürek’s Nostalgia for the Modern). The film can do this only based on its historical distance of 20 years. However, a utopia placed in

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the past which cannot be replicated in the future (the naiveté of the protagonist was a function of the specific historical circumstances) makes the utopia non-functional for social progress. The necessity of utopias is specifically central to Die amerikanische Mauer. In

Amerika, Jirgl’s protagonist can still imagine a different life than the cyclicality of the

German nation, one that offers self-fulfillment and self-determination outside the parameters of the German Nation-Thing with its rigid and prescriptive forms of jouissance and its hidden traumas. As for all utopian fantasies, however, they never endure a confrontation with reality, something that Jirgl’s text circumvents by ending it with only a hint to its realization. Accordingly, Die atlanische Mauer underlines the necessity of utopias, but their lack in the (re-)unified German nation, and hence the importance of the fantasy of Amerika as imperfect as the United States might be for the critique of the

German nation.

The role of obsoleteness varies among the products that I have analyzed in the different chapters, but the affirmation that a form of (often negative) identification has been lost is present in all of them. The main difference between the importance that obsoleteness plays in each individual text mainly depends on three factors: the historic distance to the fall of the Wall, the age of the protagonists, and their social position. It tends to be less central in narratives that use younger, educated protagonists from an urban rather than a rural heritage and that take place longer after the fall of the Wall. In Stadt der Engel, obsoleteness is the most central aspect, but it is a particular type of obsoleteness, as the narrator is a producer of cultural products from the GDR, who in the (re-)unified Germany feels expelled from the public discourse and shows a unique affective reaction towards her

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own perceived obsoleteness. She focusses exclusively on the loss of the GDR, which she held as the place of her fantasy of utopia and which she feels now has been lost entirely, as only the hegemonic western-German memory of the GDR as the oppressive regime is socially permissible. For other protagonists, in Schultze, Vergiss Amerika, and to a degree

Die atlantische Mauer, economic obsoleteness is the catalyst that throws identity into crisis. This economic obsoleteness, however, is clearly marked as a result of the Wende, specifically in Schorr’s and Jopp’s movies. The new economic system (in Jopp strongly associated with Amerika) causes the majority of particularly rural economies to collapse, costing not only jobs but the identificatory rituals of work that were an even more important part of identity formation in the GDR. The cultural products all depict obsoleteness affecting the genders differently, being much harder on the male figures than the females.

The reason are not old patriarchal role models per se (even though they do play a role in

Vergiss Amerika) but the evaluation that women handle the transition to a late-capitalist system better and more calmly than men. While the male figures fall into depression, caused by shame and anxiety, or fetishize either the German nation or Amerika, most women (in Die atlantische Mauer, Vergiss Amerika, and Schultze) are trying to make arrangements with the late capitalist system and to find ways to use it for their subsistence, while simultaneously finding other means of identification – nation and work appear to be of less importance to them.

Not all men, however, are afflicted with the effects of obsoleteness: particularly the educated-class males of working age appear to be less affected, which is specifically observable in the texts and the film that revolve around the longing for Amerika as

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adventure. Three of the protagonists, Hein’s and Goller’s, are teenagers, who are drawn to visit the United States by their youthful naïve image of Amerika and the celebration of their freedom to travel, after the fall of the Wall. They too, nevertheless, are from an educated and urban background, which seemingly enabled them to imagine the United

States as a space in which they can find a constitution of a new self via the confrontation with an Other that has the potential to become a Thing. The older protagonist’s in Osang and Wagner, have come to terms themselves with the late-capitalist system, obviously enjoying some aspects of consumer culture while maintaining an academic distance to the object, reflecting on the effects of Amerika on Germany.In how far this danger is a fantasy of German heritage, or how the protagonists pick it up during their journey is difficult to distinguish.

The two narrators of Osang and Wagner also have in common that they negotiate the obsoleteness of the German nation explicitly. However, while Wagner’s protagonist fears for the German nation and longs for an older construct of Germanness that includes a stability founded in ethnic exclusion, Osang’s narrator is longing for the obsoleteness of the German nation, which he associates negatively with the old stereotypes of Germanness and with historical shame. Except for Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam, the longing for the renegotiation of a certain construct of the German nation is ubiquitous in the cultural products. The German nation is associated with the historic guilt of the Third Reich, with outdated rules, narratives, and rituals, as well as with exclusionary practices based on ethnicity, origin, and cultural practice. In Osang and Wolf these exclusionary practices are extended in the texts’ portrayal of the historic treatment of the GDR – only the willingness

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to renounce the GDR absolutely grants acceptance to the (re-)unified German Nation-

Thing.

Despite or precisely for the reason of an uneasiness with the German nation, the implicit negotiation of the relationship between the protagonist and the nation as Thing is central to all the works that I have analyzed. They each, however, conceptualize the problems of and their relationships with the German Nation-Thing in different terms.

Christa Wolf’s novel focusses on the historical guilt that appears to repeat itself in the xenophobic attacks on refugee centers in eastern Germany in 1992 and the obsoleteness of the GDR as anything but a negative in the historiography of the (re-)unified German nation.

Schorr’s film concentrates on German bigotry and its strong exclusionary tendencies, which does not ensure but hinders the enjoyment of the nation in Schultze and others. For

Osang’s narrator the German nation is an outmoded fantasy, with which he does not want to be associated. It is determined by the affect of shame towards it and therefore loses its place in the public discourse, where it got substituted by discourses of economic prowess and expansion. The narrator, however, experiences how the nation reveals its necessity in the confrontation with Amerika. For Wagner’s protagonist, the German nation is of great importance for his identification and for his way to approach Amerika. Of all the protagonists, he is the least at odds with the nineteenth-century fantasy of the German organization of jouissance and longs for an even stronger and more stable definition of the

German nation. In Hein’s Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens and Goller’s

Friendship! the (re-)united German Nation-Thing does not appear explicitly, due to the proximity of the setting to its establishment. Yet, both were published with ten to twenty

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years of distance to their setting and one hence must read them in the context of the history of the (re-)unified German nation. In Hein its absence is immediately filled by American values, systems, and even people. Goller’s film, on the other hand, imagines a world without nations, but bases that world on the embrace of tropes of American popular culture and ideologies of its consumer culture as identity-forming aspects, a fantasy that appears distinctly utopian. In Vergiss Amerika, the German nation plays a role in three separate incarnations- in a nostalgic glorification of militaristic nineteenth-century fantasies, as neo- nationalist fetishization, and as the romantic idea of a guiding connection to the landscape and the positive history of the nation as unifier and donor of identity in opposition to the superficiality of Amerika. Jirgl’s Die atlantische Mauer focusses on the bourgeois idea of nation and its emphasis on family as the central place to enact its ideologies, which, influenced by the German history shame, end up in the circular re-enactment of trauma, shame, and anxiety.

The necessity of the nation as Thing for the protagonist’s identity, particularly when confronted with Amerika, is present in all these products, but only Osang and Wolf’s texts affirm it explicitly. Both narrators describe the protagonists’ aversion to the (re-)unified

German nation, which they define as outmoded in their organization of jouissance and too charged with shame and guilt to work as a Thing. During their stay in Amerika, however, they experience the extent to which they use and need the German nation for the construction of their personal identities. Hence, it is important to engage with the nation and, particularly in Osang, to reactivate it discursively in order to dispense with the old stereotypes that still adhere to it. The Nation-Thing, nevertheless, remains a problematic

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reference in most of the cultural products that I have analyzed. In the confrontation with

Amerika for one group (Berlin-New York, Wie ich nach Chihuaha kam, but also texts that

I did not treat extensively such as Westwärts soweit es nur geht) it gains importance in the makeup of their own difference to the Other; for another (Schultze, Die atlantische Mauer, and Stadt der Engel), Amerika still contains the power of change for the German nation, allowing for a fantasy of an inclusive and hybrid nation that permits an excess of jouissance outside of its strict and congealed rituals, rules, and myths.

All the above-mentioned similarities and parallels should not divert from the fact that the cultural products in this dissertation exhibit considerable differences, which are important to an understanding of the vast discourse of Amerika in Germany and the multitude of opinions and functions it takes. A central difference, which I have already mentioned indirectly, is the usage of Amerika as an affirmation of the necessity of the national, which the majority of films and texts exhibit, versus the use of Amerika as a tool for the affirmation of a cosmopolitan individualism or a cosmopolitan communalism.

Berlin-New York emphasizes the presence of cosmopolitanism in the German fantasy of

Amerika most explicitly, but it is also present in Die atlantische Mauer, Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, and Vergiss Amerika. Cosmopolitanism in the German imagination is primarily located in the metropolis of New York, and in the tropes of

Amerikanization of the only German metropolis, Berlin. The longing for cosmopolitanism or for the confirmation of a national identity are reactions to the dialectical discourse that is marked by terms such as “globalization,” “global market economy,” “multi- or interculturality,” etc. This discourse is defined by the chances for an excess of jouissance

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in diversity, in economic gains, and the fear that the people are being deprived of their form of communal jouissance and the stability of the identification via a definite Thing. As I outlined in chapter 2, this discourse is structured by class affiliation and by the affective fears of becoming obsolete. As the analyses of this dissertation show, these affects are elevated by the historical situation after the German (re-)unification, because of the obsoleteness of the GDR-Thing and the connected accelerated production of economic and personal obsoleteness in eastern Germany. The problematic historical situation of the

German Nation-Thing also plays a role in this discourse, as it appears not be a true alternative to many liberals, contrary to the way that it is presented to them through media products.

Underlying the contradictions in the representation of Amerika, such as the fantasies of Amerika as vehicle for the affirmation of the cosmopolitan or the nation are contradictions between eastern and western fantasies of Amerika. The division between western-German fantasies of eastern German images of Amerika and eastern-German fantasies of Amerika interestingly also constitutes the partition of the media, film and literature. Friendship! is the most ambiguous, as the film is based on the experiences of a producer who was raised in the GDR. The director and the scriptwriter are both western

Germans, as are the directors and screenwriters of the other two films. One can only speculate about industrial factors for this split, but it is significant because film (and television) is the medium that is the most important in creating the images of Amerika in all these works. Many of the films (and television shows) that are being used as intermedial references are American, but the hegemony of the audiovisual media remains significant

373

for the German forms of media as well. I argue that the western German quasi-monopoly on the German representation of Amerika reflects the western-German hegemony over the historiography of (re-)unification, which specifically Wolf, Osang, and Jirgl bemoan in their texts. I suggest that film in the frame of production offered by a (re-)unified Germany becomes a kind of accomplice to hegemonic interpretations of German lifeworlds.

Noticeably, the films in this dissertation reveal some strikingly similar tendencies. They all are based on the extreme naiveté of their eastern German protagonist in order to either reactivate an American utopia (Goller, Schorr) or exemplify the dystopian effects of

Amerika in a way only possible vis-a-vis the eastern-German obsoleteness. The naiveté of the protagonist in Jopp and Schorr is further heightened by their origin in the rural parts of eastern Germany, a trope familiar from slapstick comedies like Go, Trabbi, Go. The eastern-German protagonists, on the one hand, hold an innocence that allows them to reactivate tropes of Amerika that are imagined to be lost in western Germany. At least in

Goller and Schorr, they are, hence, vehicles of nostalgic western fantasies of Amerika. In

Jopp’s film, on the other hand, the naiveté is the weakness that leads to disaster. In both instances the eastern-German protagonists lack agency in these western German fantasies.

The last significant difference that I need to observe in this conclusion is between the avant-garde and popular culture. As problematic as these terms are and as much as they must be understood on a continuum, they represent a significant difference between my primary. Die atlantische Mauer and Stadt der Engel, the two texts one can most securely localize in the avant-garde, do show a nuanced image of Amerika and of the German nation. Wolf describes in detail the difficulties with which she is confronted concerning

374

Germany and Amerika. Jirgl gives his examination of the German nation a polyphony that allows for a differentiated consideration of social and generational differences and of the historic depth of the discourses surrounding the German nation. Both attempt to find different relationships to the overdetermined spaces by using newer and unusual images.

On the other side of the spectrum one needs to locate Goller’s Friendship! and Wagner’s

Wie ich nach Chihuahua kam. Both deal in the repetition and re-appropriation of Amerikan tropes and deal with Amerika largely in utopian and dystopian terms. I do not want to insinuate a value judgement about the single work in these considerations, but use these terms in recognition of the diversity of the public discourse of Amerika and the merit of acknowledging the differences and prevalences as manifestations of the public discourse, in which the loudest and most heard voices give the impression of a simple dichotomy, when others recognize and express their difference.

Even though, Amerika does not work as utopia or as true Other within the narrative of most cultural products that this dissertation analyzes, when understood as utterances in a public discoursethey themselves have the identificatory power of an Other. By exposing

Amerika and the United States as inherent to the German discourse, by depicting them as space and ideology that affirm or disappoint the German fantasies of Amerika - its expectations of refuge, of adventure, and of jouissance – they insist on Amerika as an Other of significance, even if they stress the Amerikan/German similarities or Amerika’s malfunctions as Other. What I mean here concretely is that no matter how many tropes they adapt from American sources and how many “authentic” experiences they claim to contain, they are by their means of production and circulation utterances in a German

375

public discourse of Amerika. As such, their representation of Amerika, framed in whatever manner, creates the place for the identification on the level of a German public discourse.

By writing about American influence and the protagonists’ confrontation with Amerika, the United States, and American products, they inherently affirm an Other to the discourse in which they intervene. Hence, the products themselves bear witness to the importance of

Amerika in the construction of a German Nation-Thing and how Germans still need that

Other specifically to displace and discuss issues that are inherent to their self-conception of nation.

376

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