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Racial Narratives and Counter-Discourses in German Film After 1950

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Racial Narratives and Counter-Discourses in German Film After 1950 Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950 by Michelle René Eley Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William C. Donahue, Supervisor ___________________________ Ann Marie Rasmussen ___________________________ Kimberly K. Lamm ___________________________ Corinna Kahnke Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 i v ABSTRACT Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950 by Michelle René Eley Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ William C. Donahue, Supervisor ___________________________ Ann Marie Rasmussen ___________________________ Kimberly K. Lamm ___________________________ Corinna Kahnke An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2012 Copyright by Michelle René Eley 2012 Abstract This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring Black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a dynamic and flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between "race" (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro- Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work – Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003) – provide evidence of attempts to create counter- discourses within the space of this language gap. Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films' depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both iv confined by and add new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in a German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany's history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for using poetic politics and communities of coalition to affect social change. v Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures .................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ vi Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 1. Dark Legacies: Colonial Remnants & U.S. Imports in Discourse on Black Germans . 15 Resistance in Early German Cinema .......................................................................... 16 Robert Stemmle's Toxi: Race, Culture and the Location of "Home" .......................... 26 Ethnographic Evidence ............................................................................................. 37 Ethnographic Geography .......................................................................................... 45 A Multicultural Messiah? ......................................................................................... 52 Toxi's Legacy .............................................................................................................. 61 2. Re-framing Racism in Black and White ....................................................................... 64 Gottes zweite Garnitur (1967) – An Overview........................................................... 66 Fernsehfilm as Educational Form ............................................................................. 69 The Frame of "Race": Imagined Blackness, Real Racisms ...................................... 75 Re-Framing Racism .................................................................................................... 81 Black GIs, White Germans and Gender Constructs .................................................. 97 Follow the Money ................................................................................................... 108 Sex and Freedom ..................................................................................................... 120 Progressive Pessimism .............................................................................................. 126 3. Shaded Desires: The Shadow of Race in the Double Binds of Fassbinder's Melancholic Romances ........................................................................................................................ 133 vi Cinematic Psychoanalysis as Political Activism ...................................................... 135 Troubling the West German Matriarch in Angst essen Seele auf (1974) .................. 139 The Illusion of Privacy ............................................................................................ 144 Caught Between Love and Motherhood ................................................................. 150 The Conundrum of Conformity .............................................................................. 155 Fatal Romanticism in Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) .......................................... 163 Love is Blinding ...................................................................................................... 167 Love is Binding ....................................................................................................... 174 Judging Maria ......................................................................................................... 186 The Demands of Ideals and the Dangers of Mythology ........................................... 191 4. Transforming Silence into Language: Self-Narration, Self-Determination and "Community" .................................................................................................................. 194 The Failure of German Multiculturalism and the Challenges of Diaspora ............... 196 Refashioning Black German and Diasporic Identities: Community, Self-determination and Self-narration...................................................................................................... 206 Farbe bekennen and Black German Consciousness ............................................... 210 W.E.B. Du Bois in the Afro-German Context ........................................................ 218 The Influences of Audre Lorde in Afro-German Feminism ................................... 225 A New Black German Cinema ................................................................................. 230 Alles wird gut (1998) and the New Pleasures of Performance ............................... 231 Depicting Heterogeneous Community ................................................................ 235 Who is Kim Berger? ........................................................................................... 238 Recovering History and Mending the Splintered Self in Tal der Ahnungslosen (2003) ...................................................................................................................... 249 Concluding Remarks ................................................................................................. 261 vii Appendix A ..................................................................................................................... 264 "Ich möcht' so gern nach Hause gehen" (Das Toxi-Lied) ....................................... 264 Appendix B ..................................................................................................................... 265 Excerpts from Poems by May Ayim (as recited in Okpako's Tal der Ahnungslosen) ................................................................................................................................. 265 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 267 Biography ........................................................................................................................ 274 viii List of Figures Figure 1: "Jumbo." 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