Ghostly Business: Place, Space, and Gender in Christian Petzold’s Yella

Abstract

In the wake of 09/11, the bursting of the “dot.com bubble” and the ensuing collapse of the “Neuer Markt” – mere precursors of today’s global financial meltdown – fuelled economic insecurities in the German-speaking countries. Much of the postmillennial aesthetic production demonstrates how painfully aware German-speaking artists are of the “flip side” of global capitalism, echoing Heiner Muller’s assessment that the phantom of a free market society finally replaced the ghost of communism (Muller 233). The toll that uncanny economic dealings inflict upon fragile individuals became a topic on the German stage (Rolf Hochhuth, McKinsey kommt, 2003; Moritz Rinke, Cafe Umberto, 2005), in prose fiction (Rainer Merkel, Das Jahr der Wunder, 2001; Kathrin Roggla, wir schlafen nicht, 2003; Johannes Ullmaier, ed. Schicht! Arbeitsreportagen fur die Endzeit, 2007; and most recently Terezia Mora, Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent, 2009), as well as film (Lichter, dir. Hans-Christian Schmid, 2003; Import/Export, dir. Ulrich Seidl, 2007). These and other narratives suggest that globalized, postnational societies governed by neoliberalism increasingly turn the flexible, cooperative, and efficient individuals living in them (cf. Sennett) into zombie-like creatures disenfranchised from themselves and their environment. This ghostliness shapes notions of subjectivity and identity constructions. Christian Petzold’s filmic work is a notable example for the connection between the economic woes of our time and a curious surge of the ghost motif in contemporary culture. Petzold is also the most prominent representative of the “seismographic, minimalist, existentialist” cinema (Suchsland) commonly referred to as “Berlin School,” a brand of films “devoted to the real as well as to realism, of a rare formal rigour and a stubborn tenderness” (Moller). By rendering visible aspects of social reality that are all too often absent from the consciousness of citizens in postwall Germany, filmmakers of its first generation, such as Petzold, Thomas Arslan, and Angela Schanelec, analyze the present of a country that still struggles with finding its “true” identity six decades after the end of World War II and two decades after unification (Abel, “Intensifying Life”).