“Seit der Wende hat der Mann nur Pech gehabt. Jetzt soll er auch noch Jude sein”: Theatricality, Memory and Identity in Dani Levy'sAlles auf Zucker!(2004)

Abstract

While Dani Levy's Alles auf Zucker! is a comedy about Jews and “Jewishness” in an increasingly cosmopolitan world, in its exploration of Otherness the film also addresses more general questions of identity within the multicultural milieu of post-unification Germany. Levy's technique of quoting stereotypes only to debunk them can be seen as part of an attack on all discursive systems that seek to prevent change by “fixing” identity in terms of a series of “eternal” essences. In place of the latter Levy's film offers a new anti-essentialist notion of identity based on a concept of “performativity”. Seen in this light Alles auf Zucker! is part of a wave of recent German films in which to be “Other” is no longer to be cast in the role of the victim, but rather to adopt a position from which the contradictions and absurdities of the dominant structures of society might be exposed.