Articles

Abstract: My article examines the cinematic appearances of Polish women and men in 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. The Pole 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. The films discussed in the article include Polski Crash, dir. Kasbar Heidelbach (Polish Crash, 1993) and Heirate mir! (Meine polnische Jungfrau), dir. Douglas Wolfsperger (My Polish Maiden, 1999).

Abstract: Articulating Poland in colonial terms in German literature and visual media in the 19th century 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 contribution explores the reection of the anxieties in German popular culture by analyzing the images of Polish migrant women in feature lms and series made for German television in the 2010s, in the first 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 seniors. My goal in this contribution is to examine popular images of Polish women as‘exotic’ maids, babysitters, and caregivers that discursively position Polish women as colonially-coded subalterns. My study focuses on the two TV productions, … und dann kam Wanda (...and then Came Wanda), dir. Holger Haase (2014) and the RTL’s 4-season series Magda macht das schon! (Magda Is Gonna Do It!) created by Sebastian Andrae (2017-2021).

Abstract: This article discusses the German-Polish author Steffen Möller and his self-presentation as a “betweener” in the works Viva Polonia (2008), Expedition to the Poles (2012), and Viva Warszawa (2015). The article construes it as a central concept of Möller’s narratives about Poland by connecting it with Greg Madison’s phenomenon of “existential migration.” The analysis of the motif of train travel in Möller’s oeuvre points out the author’s rendering of Marc Augé’s “non-places” as spatial zones of transition and heterotopias, which accommodate shifting senses of time and place, allow for the subverting of established social hierarchies and narrative structures, and are characterized by their own idiom and avoidance of linearity.

DOI: 10.1080/00085006.2018.1557452 

Abstract: The writing of Radek Knapp, a Polish-born author writing in German, is singular among the works of immigrant writers in the German-speaking countries for his nostalgic yet satirical view of Poland from the perspective of a long-time immigrant to Austria who understands both worlds well. The author, born in Warsaw in 1964 and living in Vienna since 1976, uses predominantly humoristic strategies to expose the national stereotypes that determine and undermine the contacts between Austrians, Germans, and Poles and shape the images of the foreigner in each of the countries. From this point of view, Knapp’s latest work, Gebrauchsanweisung für Polen [Instruction Manual for Poland, 2005], can be read as a work complementing his previous novel, Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen [Mr. Kuka’s Recommendations, 1999], in which, in a similarly humoristic style, he depicts the first encounters of a Polish high-school graduate with the idealized Western world.
The article concentrates on Knapp’s use of humour in the depictions of foreigners in Austria and Germany on the one hand and Poland on the other. Using humour theories based on incongruity and surprise as conditions for a humorous effect to take place, the article investigates how comic strategies are employed in Knapp’s works to create a ‘laughter community’ of readers thinking beyond and across borders.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2009.11092623 

Abstract: The article investigates the subversive effect of humor and laughter on masculinity models presented in the movie The Big Lebowski by Joel and Ethan Coen (1998) and demonstrates that the humoristic play with various movie genres (western, crime thriller, musical, porn, sports movie, buddy movie) challenges the heterosexual gender norm supported and confirmed by popular American film genres and by the star system developed in the 1930s and 1940s in Hollywood's dream factory.

Also available at Gale Academic OneFile

Abstract: In diesem Beitrag werden die deutschen und amerikanischen Propagandaplakate des Ersten Weltkiegs vergleichend untersucht. Während die meisten Wissenschaftler die visuellen, thematischen und linguistischen Ähnlichkeiten in den zwischen 1914 und 1918 entworfenen Plakaten betonen (z.B. Rickards oder Weill), beschäftigt sich der Beitrag mit den wesentlichen Unterschieden zwischen den deutschen und amerikanischen Plakaten. Die Unterschiede lassen sich auf die ungleiche Entwicklung des Plakatmediums in Deutschland und in den Vereinigten Staaten, auf die diversen Zielsetzungen der beiden Propagandamaschinen und vor allem auf die fundamentalen Unterschiede in der Rechtfertigung des Krieges erklären. Die sich in den Plakaten manifestierenden Kontraste in der Begründung des deutschen und amerikanischen Einsatzes in den Krieg sind auf zwei Grundpositionen zurückzuführen. Die Sprache der amerikanischen Propaganda wurde von den Ideenkomplexen der progressiven ‚Demokratieverbreitung‛ gestaltet, die Helmut Walser Smith treffend als ‚diffusionist narrative’ bezeichnet hat. Die deutschen Plakate zeigen dagegen eine Tendenz zu einer historisch und sozial verstandenen Regression in der Darstellungsweise, die in zahlreichen Verweisen auf die idealisierten germanischen Gemeinschaften bemerkbar ist.

Durch die Untersuchung ausgewählter Beispiele der deutschen und amerikanischen Plakatkunst im Ersten Weltkrieg wird gezeigt, wie die zwei narrativen Strategien im Kampf um die öffentliche Meinung in den beiden Ländern konkurriert haben und inwieweit diese Strategien zur Rechtfertigung der militärischen Auseinandersetzungen immer noch angewendet werden.

Journal's Webpage

Abstract: This article 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 text 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. This 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 article focuses on 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). 

Part of DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2j04szc.8.

Abstract: Dariusz Muszer’s novel Der Echsenmann [The Lizard Man] (2001) creates 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 the form of post-colonially coded, poetic (and occasionally, violent) revenge on representatives of the structures he holds responsible for his social degradation. The article proposes a reading of Der Echsenmann within a post-colonial framework, focusing on the discourse of dissent and cultural negotiation through the conceptualization of space (Foucault 1986; Augé 1995), as well as through the concept of hybridity outlined by Homi K. Bhabha (1994).

Part of DOI: 10.3726/978-3-653-06149-9

Abstract: Walter Bloem’s World War I memoir Vormarsch (The Advance from Mons 1914: The Experiences of a German Infantry Officer), published in 1916, was counted among the most popular German war narratives until the 1940s. Its author, born in 1868, took Germany’s literary market by storm in 1910, when he published the first part of his monumental novel trilogy commemorating Prussia’s victory over France in 1870-1871 and continued with his career as the author of Unterhaltungsromane, quality entertainment novels in the years of the Weimar Republic. Between 1911 and 1922, Bloem was Germany’s bestselling author, loved by his readers and respected by officials (among them Kaiser Wilhelm II). Despite Bloem’s literary successes, his Great War memoirs escaped closer attention so far, as his writing was overshadowed by the author’s later support of the Third Reich and his professional involvement in the regime’s writers’ associations. Today, Bloem’s work is almost completely forgotten, as he is perceived as a “Nazi apologist” and “Nazi fellow traveler” and there are no re-editions of his works.

Using the sociological theories of humor (by William H. Martineau, Chris Powell, and George E. C. Paton, among others), the chapter focuses on the ways in which Bloem entertains his reader in order to present a conservative view on issues that were debated at the time, such as the violation of Belgium’s neutrality by the German troops and lack of the fighting spirit during the mid-war stagnation. These deficiencies, as perceived by Bloem, needed a literary vehicle to convince the German population at the home front of the war goals. The chapter argues that Bloem’s preference for using humor that creates inter-  and intragroup hierarchies and patriarchal structures is an expression of the narrator’s desire to transfer these structures onto the German society as a guarantee of the success in the war under a strong leader.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137436436_6

Abstract: The chapter discusses the manifestations and functions of humor and laughter in two of the most popular and influential German novels written in the Weimar era (1919-1933): Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (first published in 1929) and Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel (first edition in 1920). The investigation of humor and laughter in the narratives focuses on their function as a vehicle for communicating traumatic events to non-combatant audiences and establishing popular images of the conflict, as well as their function of acknowledging and expressing the incongruity that accompanies a traumatic experience. In addition, humor and laughter in the two works are depicted as a social device that allows the establishment of a community united by shared laughter at something or someone, or stresses group solidarity.  

DOI: 10.3726/978-3-653-04423-2

Abstract: The chapter focuses on German and Polish films produced in the 2000s that explore the juxtaposition of the romanticized notion of childhood as a time of innocence and images of borderlands as a frontier and an area of shifting values, demoralization, and constant threat, and not as a place of hybridity and positive exchange. The article examines the films that place children as their protagonists on the German-Polish border in the 2000s, in the time of intensified contacts between the populations of the two countries, a decade after the reunification of Germany in 1990, and before the complete border opening in 2007. In the film narratives examined in this article, children become involuntary victims of the social and cultural dynamics in the border areas. The stories of their abuse and abandonment and their revenge on adults become the creators' commentary on the negative aspects of the borderland existence. One of the most prominent examples of such border treatment and the central point of the analysis is Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003) by Christoph Hochhäusler. The article places This Very Moment in the context of other contemporary German and Polish borderland films with child protagonists, Lichter (Distant Lights, 2006) by Hans-Christian Schmid, and Ich, Tomek (Piggies, 2009) by Robert Gliński, and explores the ways in which the directors of these films exploit the metaphor of childhood projected into the particular geographical, cultural, and social spaces. 

Hochhäusler's This Very Moment is a modern variation on the Hansel and Gretel fairytale theme set in the borderland. The film tells the story of two children who go on a quick shopping trip from Germany to neighboring Poland with their stepmother who abandons them on the side of the road after crossing the border. The abandonment reveals the children's resourcefulness in dealing with threatening circumstances but also—contrary to the conclusion of the Grimm's fairy tale in which the children come back home enriched by the experience and prepared for adult life—the children's detachment from and disappointment with the world of adults. The director's comment about childhood as a period of negotiation of adult agendas and interests to which children can only respond but which they cannot shape is amplified by placing the narrative in a borderland area where different languages, cultural attitudes, and landscapes (social and natural) confront each other. In opposition to other contemporary German filmmakers who deal with the same borderlands (Michael Schorr, Andreas Dresen, and others), Hochhäusler draws a very strong divide between Germany and Poland and their cultures and does not allow for any cultural or social exchange. Following the paradigm of the frontier, the director of This Very Moment takes advantage of both the intertextual echoes of his narrative (the Grimm brothers' story) and the linguistic and cultural otherness of Poland to offer a metaphor of childhood as a borderland, a crossing line between many oppositions: innocence and corruption, victimhood and victimization, self and others.

Ebrary link 

Abstract: This chapter explores images of German-Polish relationships in the German films of the early 2000s that depict social life in the areas close to the German-Polish border (e.g. Frankfurt an der Oder in Brandenburg or the eastern part of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). The proximity of the border and the more intense contacts between Germans and Poles resulting from increased cross-border traffic play an important role in the filmic representations of life in the states of the former GDR. Rapid economic and social changes in the Eastern part of Germany brought about questions about the attitude toward the incomers from Poland in the competitive conditions of the free-market economy. Also, the intensified contacts with Poles forced the local population to re-evaluate national stereotypes popular in the Western part of Germany that depict Poles as car thieves, illegal workers, or prostitutes.

The chapter concentrates on German movies produced in the last decade that pose, directly or indirectly, questions about the problematic relationships between Germans and Poles. These movies place the main personal conflicts of the narrative against the background of a society in change or build the main narrative tension around the confrontation with an Other that manifests itself in the landscapes of Poland, in Polish language and social structures, and in the alluring yet threatening sexual appeal of foreigners. The movies included in the project are Vergiss Amerika by Vanessa Joop (2000), Herz im Kopf by Michael Gutmann (2001), Halbe Treppe by Andreas Dresen (2002), Klassenfahrt by Henner Winckler (2002), Lichter by Hans-Christian Schmid (2003), Befreite Zone by Norbert Baumgarten (2003), Milchwald by Christoph Hochhäusler (2003), and Schröders wunderbare Welt by Michael Schorr (2006). 

The chapter investigates how Poles and their country are perceived in these and other contemporary German films (i.e. to ask the question to what extent the national stereotypes about Polish people influence the construction of characters in the movies). It also explores the narrative functions of the geographical border and describes the social consequences of the act of border crossing. The framework for the project is provided by theories of Border Studies that, transferred from the US-Mexican into the European context, help address the question of what the German-Polish borderlands portend for the development of a multicultural society: as portrayed in contemporary German cinema, is the border area the true link between Western and Eastern Europe (like "Slubfurt", the proclaimed merging of German Frankfurt an der Oder and Polish Słubice) or is it a territory infiltrated by foreigners who put the national community in danger?

Part of ISBN: 9781554582259 

Abstract: The chapter explores how Black and White in Color by Jean-Jacques Annaud is a comedy about racial, national, and gender norms in the conditions of colonial French Africa. The chapter investigates incongruence as the main condition of the comic in the movie and its (subversive) effect on the norm: the comic subverts not only the norm of the dominant culture of a 'white man', meaning that the viewer does not laugh exclusively at the colonial attitude of French settlers. The comic effect subverts also the viewer's understanding of relationships in Africa: the spectators laugh at themselves when realizing that simply modifying of/reverting to the norm does not eliminate the incongruence, and the reality is far more complex than expected. Thus, the comic presented in the movie can be described as a post-colonial comic, and the source of the comic appears as the comic of the displaced.

DOI: 10.1163/9789042026735_013

Abstract: In his classic Posters of the First World War (1968), Maurice Rickards focuses on the universality of first world war poster language: on the similarities - thematic, visual, and linguistic - that pervade the poster production of the time.  While not disputing the presence of such general similarities as the common universal archetypes, persuasive slogans, and emotive images to which Rickards points, there are nevertheless fundamental underlying differences that the posters of the various combatant nations express.  We argue that this is nowhere more apparent than in the antithetical modes of presentation employed in German and American posters.  

Our chapter highlights these fundamental differences through a comparison of a representative cross-section of individual German and American examples.  Organized around a central distinction between the regressive (Germany) and progressive (US), our paper argues, through the articulation of a list of oppositions, that German and American posters employ antithetical modes of signification.  While German posters invoke a shared and idealized collective past, those produced in the US, we argue, emphasize future goals to be achieved through the cooperation of individuals: German posters are thus collective and historical, their American counterparts more individualistic and visionary.  While German posters tend to appeal to reason, often relying on lengthy textual arguments, and even on diagrams and maps, to do so, their American counterparts appeal far more to the subconscious in their use of short slogans often coupled with sexualized images.  German posters could thus be considered rational, American posters more visceral.  

We likewise argue that German posters tend to employ static situations pictorially, those produced in the US emphasizing motion; that German posters tend to convey a somber mood, while American posters tend to be exuberant, employing brighter colors and more expressive gestures generally; and that German posters emphasize the notion of return (to the shared homeland and its traditions), while the emphasis in American posters is on adventurism and expansion.

In light of our conclusions, we finish by examining the question of whether American posters from the first world war should be considered a more effective medium for selling their product.  In their greater employment of color, motion, symbolic abstraction, and sexualized images, they would seem not only more graphically sophisticated than those posters produced in Germany (and elsewhere), but moreover to have more in common with subsequent directions in pictorial advertising.  However, such an assertion fails to take into account the specific audience at whom these posters were directed; nor is it attuned to the mood that prevailed among this audience at the time.  The success of Lucien Bernhard’s often entirely textual and very Germanic war loan posters, for example, would suggest that judgments regarding the effectiveness of such forms of advertising must be firmly rooted in the time and specific circumstances of their production.                                                       

DOI: 10.2307/j.ctt1dgn3t0.9

Abstract: The chapter describes the life and work of Zweig, Arnold (1887-1968). Arnold Zweig is a German writer who is seen as a continuator of the tradition of the 19th-century European realistic novel. He is best known as an author of prose narratives about the First World War that established his reputation as a writer, such as his popular and critically acclaimed novel The Case of Sergeant Grischa (Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa, 1927) or Education before Verdun (Erziehung vor Verdun, 1935). He wrote also a series of other novels and short stories, ten dramas on contemporary topics, a volume of poems, and a number of essays. His literary creations are described as responses of an engaged artist to Germany's intellectual movements and socio-political events of the last century. Most of Zweig's works investigate the questions of truth, morality, and justice, problems of the behavior of the individual under the pressure of the powerful social institutions, and the accountability of the individual for his undertakings. In his search for the universal explicatory model of human actions and peoples' co-existence in the internally conflicted social system that forces the individual to make the necessary compromises, Zweig moved gradually during the course of his literary life from the fascination with Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis to Karl Marx' socio-political theories. Because of the shifts in his intellectual orientation, his choices to get personally involved in the Zionist movement until the 1930s, and his active support for the post-WWII communist state of East Germany, Zweig is a controversial figure in the eyes of many critics. The criticism regarded also his literary representation of Marxist doctrine and put his late work in an ambivalent light. Nevertheless, his prose works are an important contribution to the genre of the realistic novel and his depiction and interpretation of the First World War influenced many authors in the 1920s, shaping the literary discourse about the Great War.

Part of ISBN: 0816062331

Abstract: Stefan Chwin’s Death in Danzig, one of the most popular Polish novels of the 1990s, is the story of the anatomy professor Hanemann, who survives the battle of Danzig in January 1945 and refuses to evacuate the city with his German countrymen. Driven by personal motives – feelings of loss and resignation – he chooses to stay behind in his house and witnesses the gradual takeover of the city by its new inhabitants, Polish repatriates, and the establishment of the new administration. Among the literary representations of Danzig’s destruction in WWII, Death in Danzig takes a special place and not only because Chwin is the first Polish author who describes in detail how a Polish family moves into a house that had previously belonged to Danzig’s Germans, thus thematizing a subject that did not evoke major concerns in the post-war Polish literature: the subject of acquiring goods and inhabiting spaces that have been taken from their lawful owners.  More importantly, however, from the point of view of identity shaping, the novel offers an interpretation of Danzig’s change into Gdańsk, in which the physical destruction of the city and the escape and/or death of its German population is incorporated into the transformation process, meaning not a civilizational rupture and total annihilation of the city’s material heritage but the safeguard of a sense of historical continuity. What interests me are the narrative strategies employed by Chwin that contribute to the preservation of this historical continuity, connect Danzig with Gdańsk in various practices of social memory, and allow for the establishment of an identity framework that suppresses the potential of national and generational tensions and conflicts, yet, at the same time, does not allow the troubling elements to be forgotten.

DOI: 10.1515/9783839406144-006