Outsiders, Foreigners, and Aliens in Cinematic or Literary Narratives by Bohm, Dische, Dorrie, and Oren

Abstract

Ongoing heated exchanges on the merits of dual citizenship in the Federal Republic show how difficult it is for many Germans to conceive of their identity in anything other than ethnic terms. By inaugurating dual citizenship in certain cases, however, the parliament and its constituents have signaled a readiness to explore other concepts of identity less concerned with lineage. Yet the political successes of a conservative backlash against such ideas demonstrate that a sizable portion of the population still retains a desire for a stable sense of ethnic or racial Germanness.1 Although the tradition of constructing identity around a mythical Germanic past or blood is yielding to the reality of Germany's increasingly multicultural social make-up (Dirke; Jarausch; Zeit; Leggewie/$Senocak 131-36), almost half of youth claim to be suspicious of (Williams) and some assert the primacy of their own ideas of violently and adamantly. This combination of anxiety about and yearning for a definitive identity is increasing at a time when changing laws and demographics in Germany make it more and more difficult to pinpoint who is and who is not.2 Exactly this quandary has intrigued writers and film directors in the Federal Republic of Germany since the 1960s, and growing numbers have been probing the complexities of identity politics through various figurations of the German and the foreigner.3 A recurring literary and cinematic trope used to enact evolving ideas about Germans and non-Germans in the FRG is the figure who is neither the one nor the other. In films, novels, and stories, characters whose identities fluctuate between German and foreign offer contesting notions of what means by challenging the very desirability of being German. This essay investigates a selection of four such challenges. In Irene Dische's short story Eine Judin fair Charles Allen (1989) [The Jewess in the original], Aras Oren's novella Bitte nix Polizei (1981), Hark Bohm's film Yasemin (1987), and Doris Dorrie's film Keiner liebt mich (1994) the figure of the German becomes just as much an outsider as the ostensible foreigner and vice versa.4 The diverse backgrounds of the authors and directors preclude the possibility of pigeonholing the questions they address into neat categories that concern only specific groups. Dische frequently populates her fiction with culturally disoriented, urban figures and explores stereotypes about Germans and Jews. Oren's work focuses on the difficulties Germans and Turks in Berlin confront in their attempts to negotiate intercultural differences. Hark Bohm has created numerous films about young people and the difficult process of maturation (Gollub/Stern 25), often involving youth of different ethnicities. Dorrie has achieved renown for her cinematic probing of gender and multicultural issues. Yet the representative narratives analyzed here all culminate in different scenes of emotional or physical (dis)union to illustrate the disastrous consequences of privileging one aspect of self over others. These unsuccessful couplings expose a broad range of constantly and often violently shifting, interrelated positions between the boundaries of and nonGerman, of insider and outsider. In these narratives, the intermediary figure who is also inscribed as Jewish, Turkish, American, or African, prevents any settled sense of self from permeating the story.5 Encounters between such figures and textualized mainstream Germans and/or foreigners in the FRG set in motion a dynamic of attraction and repulsion that alters the central position the figures occupy, a dynamic with repercussions for the positions of the non-mainstream figures. These attempts at cultural redefinition are at the same time efforts to reconceptualize an increasingly blurred German/foreigner duality without resorting to a relativity that would deprive Germanness of any meaning. …