Presentations

Abstract: 

My presentation explores the images of Polish migrant women in feature films and series made for German television in the 2010s, in the first years after the opening of the German job market. While looking at productions made for state and commercial broadcasters, I focus on the representations of the work of female migrants from Poland who perform domestic tasks and care work for children and seniors. My goal in this presentation is to investigate whether these popular images of Polish women as ‘exotic’ maids, babysitters, and caregivers discursively position Polish women as colonially coded subalterns. I find the emphasis on professions such as housekeepers, caregivers, or au-pairs, particularly revealing, as the nature of their work is an eąective intervention inside the private and domestic sphere that changes family dynamics, and subverts power relations, also exposing the orientalist threads at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, language, and social class that are being articulated diąerently than in the public sphere. My study includes the following TV productions: … und dann kam Wanda (... and then Came Wanda), dir. Holger Haase (2014), RTL’s 4-season series Magda macht das schon! (Magda Is Gonna Do It!) created by Sebastian Andrae (2017-2021), and Unter deutschen Betten (Under German Beds), dir. Jan Fehse (2017).

Abstract: 

One of the critical outcomes of the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 and the freedom of labor migration within the EU was opening the doors to Germany's job market for Poles and citizens of other East-Central European countries in May 2011. Lifting the employment restrictions caused widespread fears among the Germans that the influx of a new workforce, particularly from Poland, could have unforeseen economic and social consequences. My presentation explores the reΟection of these anxieties in German popular culture by looking at the image of Polish migrant women in feature Ξlms and series made for German television in the 2010s, in the Ξrst years after the opening of the German job market. I focus on the representations of the work of female migrants from Poland who perform domestic tasks and care work for children and the elderly. My goal in this presentation is to investigate whether these popular images of Polish women as ‘exotic’ maids, babysitters, and caregivers discursively position Polish women as colonially-coded subalterns. The background for my analysis provides a 19th-century notion of Poland as an “inner” or “adjacent colony” of Germany that depicts the Polish lands as a landscape of colonial conquest and implies the social and economic backwardness of the local population. Articulating Poland in colonial terms laid the groundwork for the long-standing framing of the relationship between Germany and its neighbor, the colonizer and the colonized, until today, especially in German popular culture. My study focuses on, but is not limited to, the following TV productions: ... und dann kam Wanda (And then Came Wanda), dir. Holger Haase (2014), RTL’s 4-season series Magda macht das schon! (Magda Is Gonna Do It!) created by Sebastian Andrae (2017-2021).

Abstract: 

My goal in the presentation is to evaluate German cinematic constructions of Poland as a colonial space in works by German filmmakers in the first decade after the Wende. In the 1990s, the cinematic image of Poland and the Poles was a projection of the uncertainty surrounding Germany’s reunification. In the 1990s, the orientalist image of the project Mitteleuropa, the sphere of German colonial expansions in the East, was revived for contemporary purposes. While Poland and the Poles were perceived in racial and spatial proximity to the white European center, they were also used as a measuring stick to relativize the worsening of the population’s economic situation in the former German Democratic Republic and to relocate the frustration resulting from the systemic changes in Germany as the emanation of the “black market” and “economic jungle.” Therefore, in my analysis of narrative and aesthetic components associated with Poland in the selected films produced in the 1990s, I will take into account the 19th-century notion of Poland as Germany’s “inner” or “adjacent colony” that creates the conditions for discursively framing the country (and other areas included in the German colonial project of Mitteleuropa) as subaltern. The films under examination are Die Oma ist tot, dir. Angelo Colagrossi (Grandma Is Dead, 1997), Engelchen, dir. Helke Misselwitz (Little Angel, 1996), Polski Crash, dir. Kaspar Heidelbach (Polish Crash, 1993), and Heirate mir! (Meine polnische Jungfrau), dir. Douglas Wolfsperger (My Polish Maiden, 1999). 

Abstract: 

Since the German reunification in 1990, feature-length productions and films made for German television offer a wide range of cinematic interpretations of Germany’s eastern neighbor Poland, from highly negative views to distinctly positive readings. Negative associations bound with the image of Poland and the Poles are overwhelmingly evident in German cinema in the 1990s and the early 2000s. The abundance of the negative cinematic images of Poland plays into the colonial paradigm in German culture that derives from the long history of German expansion and settlement in East-Central Europe and expresses the lands and the people to the east of Germany through an orientalist vocabulary (Wolff 1994). Considering the historical tenacity of the orientalist perspective in Western European cultures, the colonial projection of the lands east of Germany in works by contemporary German filmmakers is not surprising. Only the re-definition of Germany’s place in Europe in the early 2000s, the European Union’s extension to the East (2004), the opening of the German-Polish border (2007), and the intensified social, cultural, and economic contacts between Germany and Poland have nuanced the filmmakers’ perception of the country and its population.

These films range from productions where the German-Polish relationships play a prominent role in the narratives to stories that contain only an episodic yet strongly codified appearance of a Polish character or camouflaged allusion to Poland, playing upon the stereotypical images of the country and its citizens that are widely recognizable to contemporary German audiences. My goal in this presentation is to assess the appearances of narrative and aesthetic components associated with Poland. In the 1990s, the cinematic image of the Poles was a projection of the uncertainty surrounding Germany’s reunification. It stood for unknown social and economic consequences and constituted a “repository for externalized inner-German anxieties” (Eigler 2013). Fears about the increase in criminal activity, the influx of illegal immigrants and cheap labor, and the worsening of the population’s economic situation in the former German Democratic Republic have all found their expression in the ambiguous figure of the Other, the Pole. My presentation examines the cinematic appearances of Polish women and men in selected German films in the first decade following the Wende, which are not readily categorized as a visible minority but are still a product of colonialist discursive practices: Polski Crash, dir. Kasbar Heidelbach (Polish Crash, 1993), Engelchen, dir. Helke Misselwitz (Little Angel, 1996), and Heirate mir! (Meine polnische Jungfrau), dir. Douglas Wolfsperger (My Polish Maiden, 1999). The Pole in these films may pose a threat to society, either by association with the criminal underworld (Kopp 2014) or by their alluring yet threatening eroticism that has the potential to tear at the social fabric.

Eigler, Friederike. “Introduction: Moving Forward: New Perspectives on German-Polish Relations in Contemporary Europe.” German Politics & Society 31, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 1–15.

Kopp, Kristin. “‘If Your Car Is Stolen, It Will Soon Be in Poland’: Criminal Representations of Poland and the Poles in German Fictional Film of the 1990s.” In Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on-Screen, edited by Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen, and Eva Näripea, 41–66. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014.

Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Abstract: 

The presentation focuses on the autobiographical accounts of writers who migrated from Poland to Germany as children in the late 1980s. The authors, born in the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, accompanied their parents who decided to move over the border. Their experience is defined by the initial ‘overidentification’ with Germans before their departure from Poland and enforced assimilation after their arrival in Germany. The gradual integration of their Polish childhood into their migrant identity is projected against the transition into adulthood. They are frequently called the “second” generation of writers of Polish descent to differentiate their perspective from the viewpoints of Polish migrants born in the 1960s who also relocated to Germany shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unlike the bilingual representatives of the older generation of migrants, these authors write exclusively in German: Emilia Smechowski (Wir Strebermigranten, 2017; Rückkehr nach Polen, 2019), Alexandra Tobor (Sitzen vier Polen im Auto, 2012; Minigolf Paradiso, 2016), Adam Soboczynski (Polski Tango, 2006), Malin Schwerdtfeger (Café Saratoga, 2001), Sabrina Janesch (Katzenberge, 2010), and Matthias Nawrat (Die vielen Tode unseres Opas Jurek, 2015), among others.

 Their literary accounts of the departure from Poland, the arrival in Germany, and the transition to life in the new country have been recently examined by scholars (see Rostek and Uffelman, 2011; Zduniak-Wiktorowicz, 2014, 2016, 2019; Trepte 2019; Palej, 2019; Szymańska, 2016, 2019; Helbig-Mischewski, 2015, 2019). In the presentation, I intend to take a closer look at the journeys of return: the representations of the authors’ visits back to Poland that were undertaken many years after leaving the country of their birth. Looking at the works of Adam Soboczynski, Alexandra Tobor, and Emilia Smechowski, in particular, I will explore the subjects of nostalgia for the realm of their childhood, of the language lost and reclaimed, and of reconciliation with the migrant experiences of their parents.

Abstract:

This presentation proposes to interpret the “Eastern European turn” in German cinema of the last 25 years as an opportunity to revisit the colonial paradigm in German film productions that are set in the German-Polish border area and in Poland. The overview of the films in the first part of the presentation assists in drawing a picture of landscapes still haunted by notions of “adjacent colonization” or “inner colonization” of the East to the present day. Many directors choose Germany’s eastern borderlands as the sites of their films: the borderlands emerge here as sites of hybridity, exposed to foreign trans-border influences and cross-border movements, and subjected to cultural clashes. Such portrayal is an instrument for proposing an alternative to the processes of European identity building, for decentralizing and challenging debates about German identity. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of this instrumentalization of the borderlands is their shifting character over time: as they become more “European” (more integrated into the European political and administrative structures), the sites of hybridity (together with their colonial associations) relocate farther east, to Poland’s eastern border. To illustrate the shift, as well as the emerging critique of the processes of Europeanization that are often charged with neo-colonial practices, the second part of the presentation will discuss two films that offer a particularly interesting treatment of colonial tropes: Schröders wunderbare Welt (Schröder’s Wonderful World, dir. Michael Schorr, 2006) and Hochzeitspolka (Wedding Polka, dir. Lars Jessen and Przemysław Nowakowski, 2010).

Dariusz Muszer, a Polish-German writer born in Western Poland (in Górzyca/Göritz near the German-Polish border) and living in Hannover since 1988, successfully connects work in the Polish and German language in his literary activities. German readers know Muszer as the author of prose works: in 1999, he published the novel Die Freiheit riecht nach Vanille [Freedom Smells Like Vanilla]; in 2001, Der Echsenmann [The Lizard Man]; and in 2007, Gottes Homepage [God's Homepage]. In Poland, Muszer is acclaimed as the author of a number of lyric volumes and translator from German, he also translates/renders his own novels into Polish. In the proposed paper, I would like to concentrate on Muszer's German language prose works and investigate the construction of a male protagonist figure in his novels, proposing a post-colonial reading of his work. I plan to focus on the last two novels, The Lizard Man and God's Homepage, which in a most consequent and artistically compelling way display Muszer's artistic intention to create a figure of a male protagonist who is not able to escape from the underprivileged position reserved for an immigrant in the German society of the 1980s and 1990s. This marginal status causes a reaction in form of post-colonially coded, poetic (and occasionally, violent) revenge on representatives of the structures he holds responsible for his social degradation.

Muszer, unlike any other Polish author living in the German-speaking countries and writing in German, turns the frustration of the immigrant experience into a cruel vengeance fantasy which spares neither the protagonist nor other figures around him. His novels contain an implicit criticism of the diverse, multicultural and multilingual German society, in which male and female roles are being redefined, depriving the protagonist of the dominant gender position he exercised in his native country, but the works also criticize the sexist attitudes that no longer apply to his new migrant status.

I argue that Muszer’s novels, especially The Lizard Man, can be interpreted within the framework of postcolonial discourse. The narrator of The Lizard Man, a migrant and a taxi driver, is deprived of his own voice to tell his experience, his clients create a story for him (and instead of him) during the taxi trips, and this story is a narrative that justifies social injustice. Also the title of the novel points to a possibility of a postcolonial reading: during the short contacts with the passengers, the taxi driver chooses to construct an identity and play the role imposed on him, and then deconstruct this identity during the next drive, then creates a new one, and the process repeats. He is a master of hybridity: he takes an advantage of the hybrid identities and practices mimicry as survival method (for money). The process of identity construction phrased in postcolonial terms implies also an existence of a third space where the person can reject the imposed identities and show a symbolic resistance. A need for such space causes the narrator’s visions in which he is a lizard-man: his natural habitat is a tropical forest, far away from the city where the taxi driver works. The narrative self-destruction that concludes the novel, together with a dystopian vision of disintegration of the post-national society in God's Homepage, are an expression of Muszer's disbelief in creating a hybrid migrant identity. In my interpretation, Muszer's writing is quite unique among other Polish-German migrant authors and it does not allow for positioning in the dominant stream of the German-Polish migrant literature. In his works, Muszer takes advantage of the crime novel structure and uses elements of fantasy in order to create a post-colonial image of migrant existence in Germany.

Abstract:

In the introduction to his Exiles Traveling (2009), a study of travel accounts written by German exile artists between 1933 and 1945, Johannes Evelein notes that “narrowly defined boundaries of genuine travel exclude many practices of displacement and expose fields of tension between the various forms of mobility” (24). Arguing for broadening the definition of travel writing, Evelein points out that “the social, cultural, and economic navigations of a Gastarbeiter in a foreign society, whether absorbing or rejecting otherness,” (ibid.) can be the subject of critical inquiry, as the term ’travel’ denotes a wide range of material and spatial practices within various colonial, neocolonial and postcolonial contexts that produce cultural expressions.
The proposed article focuses on Steffen Möller’s texts Viva Polonia (2008), Expedition to the Poles (2012), and Viva Warszawa (2015) as representatives of such non-conventional narratives that intersect travel with migration. Möller, born in Germany in 1969, moved to Poland in 1994, where he gained popularity as an actor and stand-up comedian performing in the Polish language. Since 2009, he has been living in Berlin, but his frequent stays and professional engagements in Poland prompt him to describe himself as a constant traveler. He declares, alluding to JFK’s speech in Berlin in 1963: “Ich bin ein Betweener.” The three works, published in German, are collections of his impressions about Poland and the Poles, notes on the country’s history, travel tips, and accounts of the author’s performances in the countryside.

The article discusses Möller’s self-presentation as a “betweener” and construes it as a central concept of his travel narratives and as a strategy to address the emergence of a specific diaspora of ‘Gastarbeiter’ in the “transnational moment” of the mid-2000s (Khachig Tölölyan, 1996), in which the dominance of the nation-state is challenged by movements of labor and cultural commodities which unify and globalize Europe. Four elements in Möller’s oeuvre are elaborated in this context: First, Möller’s frequent use of humor in his narratives, with a special emphasis on self-deprecating humor and the ironic presentation of his traveling autobiographic narrator, can be seen as a way to escape the colonial conventions of travel writing. Second, starting from Mölller’s observation that the “Heimat des Betweeners” (“homeland of the betweener”) is located on the EC train Berlin-Warsaw where he finds his “community,” the article looks at the author’s rendering of heterotopias as spatial zones of transition, which accommodate shifting senses of time and place and are characterized by their own idiom. Third, the article comments on the compositional principle of Möller’s travel writing, which avoids linearity. This is most evident in his first work in the series, Viva Polonia, a set of loosely connected stories, organized alphabetically, that can be read without a starting point and destination in mind. Fourth, Möller’s very narratives can be seen as transitional, traversing both languages and genres. Viva Polonia was first penned in Polish as Polska da się lubić (Poland Is Likable, 2006) and re-written in German two years later, and the stories included in the three volumes are re-formatted and re-used in different media: stand-up routines, documentary films, YouTube clips, and audiobooks.

Abstract: 

The proposed presentation focuses on contemporary German and Polish films that depict children growing up at the border between Germany and Poland. The productions discussed include the German film Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003) by Christoph Hochhäusler, a modern variation on the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale theme set in the German-Polish borderland. In Hochhäusler’s interpretation, the German-Polish border functions as a divider between the rational and predictable world and the realm of unexpected scenarios. The other side, like a fairytale forest, remains unknown and dangerous, but that is also one of its main magnetic attractions. A similar depiction of the border in another contemporary film, the German-Polish co-production Ich, Tomek (Piggies, 2009) by Robert Gliński, provokes questions about the impulses that have led the directors to propose such images of the border as the dividing line between two worlds. In both films, the border invites transgression and promises a learning experience—an experience of growing up and growing wiser—but also has the potential to destroy the life of the trespasser.

That, however, is not the only parallel between the two films. Hochhäusler’s reading of the border, located within the narrative structure of a fairytale, also defines the choice of the main character for his story: only a child can attempt such a transgression into a strange land. In both films, This Very Moment by Hochhäusler and Piggies by Gliński, through the child protagonist, the geographical space of the borderlands turns into a domain of childhood, dependent on specific cinematic and narrative codes of representation and characterized—from the point of view of the adult audiences—by an amalgamation of the familiar and the Other. Through its analysis of the two productions, my presentation explores different representations of childhood in Germany’s eastern peripheries and proposes reading them as metaphors that enforce the politically loaded notion of the borderline as a ‘frontier:’ the outer edge of the civilized area subjected to conquest and colonization, and sometimes, as in Piggies, also a domain of physical violence resulting from the clash of two cultures.

The proposed presentation places both films in the context of German-Polish borderland films by other contemporary German and Polish directors (Michael Schorr, Hans-Christian Schmid, Andreas Dresen, Piotr Mularuk, Monika Anna Wojtyllo, and others) and explores the ways in which both directors exploit the metaphor of childhood projected into this particular geographical, cultural, and social space.