In his 1994 book, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers proposed such a framework, offering a differential analysis of displacement, of traveling and migrancy, that also proves helpful in the evaluation of the various voyages and cultural transfers discussed in this book. “To travel,”
Chambers writes,
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implies movement between fixed positions, a site of departure, a point of arrival, the knowledge of an itinerary. It also intimates an eventual return, a potential homecoming. Migrancy, on the contrary, involves a movement in which neither the points of departure nor those of arrival are immutable or certain. It calls for a dwelling in language, in histories, in identities that are constantly subject to mutation. Always in transit, the promise of a homecoming— completing the story, domesticating the detour—becomes an impossibility.5
Chambers’s distinction between traveling and migrancy is pertinent because it does not universalize difference; that is, it does not render crucial differences invisible. It allows us to recapitulate some of the pivotal contrasts between the Americanist passages of Nazi cinema and the referencing of German cultural material by German-speaking exiles in the Hollywood studio system. Nazi cinema was a cinema of imaginary voyages in which homecoming was preordained, a cinema in which fantasy could journey to distant places but remained unable to challenge the fixity of cultural boundaries and identities. Exile film practitioners in Hollywood, by contrast, had to dispose of the idea of dwelling in immutable images, sounds, narratives, and identities. At its best the exiles’ work indexed imaginary traditions and cultural differences so as to show that no promise of homecoming, no completion of the voyage, was possible anymore, that detours and dissonances had become the order of the day. Nazi cinema was a cinema designed for symbolic travelers; it domesticated the other in order to fortify the home. Exile cinema, on the other hand, was a cinema of migrancy, a cinema in which neither the original point of departure nor the one of possible arrival were ever certain or stable.
It is in recognition of the exile’s concrete experience of contingency and provisionalness that this study also insists on the differential use of yet another critical master trope of our times, namely that of masquerade. Similar to the notion of displacement, the concept of masquerade appreciates a nearly self-legitimizing force in contemporary discourse, connoting symbolic strategies of transgression, subversion, and resistance. For critics of deconstructive and poststructuralist provenance, cultural masquerades often seem to possess an almost natural ability to undo dominant codes of nationality, gender, or race and to expose the extent to which identity itself is a performance. The Dark Mirror, by contrast, having scrutinized a whole set of cross-cultural masquerades, shows that we ought not to overestimate the transformative force of symbolic negotiations and—in a crude misunder-standing of the project of cultural studies—reduce all social interactions and political dependencies to cultural matters. In the foregoing we wit-
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nessed German men cross-dressing as tough American engineers, Swedes slipping into exotic apparel to entertain German audiences, Tyroleans playacting cowboys in California. We traced the paths of exile film composers draping American mass culture in German musical traditions, East Coast Victorians mimicking Nazi racists, émigré directors impersonating the role of expressionist auteurs and ambassadors of European high culture. We also observed how both Nazi and Hollywood exile cinema not only shredded film in older theatrical or operatic conventions but parroted early cinema and its emphasis on self-contained attractions. In none of these cases of cross-cultural appropriation, however, did assessment of the masquerade’s full import prove adequate apart from analyzing how it interacted with larger political,social,technological,orindustrialenvironments.Insomeinstances the performative appropriation of other sounds, images, traditions, and symbols was successful in unfixing naturalized conceptions of history, agency, identity, and representation. It involved different cultures in a process of mutual interpretation and helped recognize the other as a potential source of emancipation. In other cases, however, the referencing of other cultures simply reinforced existing codes and cultural binaries. It blocked any experience of cultural difference as a springboard of self-critique and transformation. We therefore would do well to remember once more that acts of cultural redress and mimicry per se are neither subversive nor affirmative.
Their meanings and effects depend on historically specific constellations. If cultural studies is to assess the politics of cultural cross-dressing, it cannot do so without analyzing the various institutional frameworks within which people negotiate different cultural codes. Nor can it ignore the question of how individual or collective agents seek to convert performative constructions of agency into institutional structures and political practices. I hope that the case studies in this book have provided some persuasive examples of how to carry out this kind of project.
h i s t o r y a n d i t s d i s c o nt e nt s The narrative of German-American film relations after 1960 —the end of the historical period covered by this book—has been told many times over.
Although most of the tropes through which German filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1980s viewed American culture echoed the conventions of earlier decades, the cinematic topos “America” served less as a means of encod-ing hopes for or anxieties about one’s own future than of catalyzing imaginary spaces in which to negotiate the German past. Not Richard Wagner’s nineteenth-century utopianism but the “unmastered” Nazi period itself
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figured as the third point of reference in the triangulated relationships between Hollywood filmmaking and German national cinema after 1962. Curiously combining Americanist and anti-Americanist stances, the Autoren of the New German Cinema could simultaneously view Hollywood films as legitimate alternatives to German cinema and denounce them as harbingers of cultural imperialism. As in the case of Wim Wenders, American popular culture was endorsed as the “only thing [that] had nothing to do with fascism,”6 yet at the same time it was seen as a ruthless instrument of cultural homogenization, as fascism with other means, as a leveler of differences that—according to the infamous line from Kings of the Road (1976)—
has “colonized our subconscious.” Germany’s new national cinema was a cinema of self-proclaimed orphans and colonized subjects. In search of er-satz fathers and legitimate points of departure, celebrated filmmakers such as Herzog, Wenders, and Fassbinder took recourse to the work of Weimar expressionists (Murnau, Lang, Pabst) and/or projected images of rootless-ness and disorientation. They rejected Germany’s own popular cinema and/
or went to Hollywood in order to legitimate themselves. With the notable exception of Douglas Sirk’s Universal melodramas (his career as Detlef Sierck was not considered), the war narrative and postwar narrative of Berlin in Hollywood, on the other hand, did not really play any formative role in the attempt to rebuild “a legitimate film culture in Germany again.”7 For the Autoren of the New German Cinema the classical Hollywood studio system and its industrial division of labor mostly signified a direct extension of Nazi coordination. With their critique of Fordist modes of film production they believed they were enacting a kind of antifascist resistance that their parents had failed to level against Hitler and Goebbels. Thanks to this negative view of studio filmmaking, the Hollywood work of German-Jewish directors such as, for instance, Robert Siodmak and Curtis Bernhardt experienced yet another history of displacement and misrecognition.
It is not without irony that the reputation of the New German Cinema largely rested on its favorable reception by American critics and cineastes.
A national cinema without national audience, Germany’s new “legitimate film culture” was in large measure a product of American demands for art house alternatives to mainstream Hollywood. The young filmmakers’ attack on the colonization of authentic German culture through National Socialism and Hollywood imperialism resonated neatly with American highbrow expectations that Germans after Hitler would concern themselves exclusively with the atrocities of their history. For this reason it should come as no surprise that some of the most influential historiographies of the New German Cinema rely on psychoanalytical vocabularies to account
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for this cinema’s complex relationship to America and Hollywood. The New German Cinema related to America as both father and mother, paternal authority and maternal nurturer. Eric Rentschler, for instance, argues that for the new German filmmakers of the 1970s the United States played
“the role of an imaginary (in the Lacanian sense), a set of possibilities one contemplates and toys with, or put it another way, as a hall of mirrors one passes through while self-reflecting. Confused, inexperienced, and incomplete human subjects gain wisdom and insight in America.”8 Films such as Herzog’s Stroszek (1977) and Wenders’s Alice in den Städten (Alice in the cities, 1974) embraced America not as a tangible space but as a playground for the imagination where tormented subjects realized identity by experiencing themselves as others. The true point of these films, however, was the implied or depicted moment of homecoming when the German travelers believed they were exiting their American mirror stage and entering the German symbolic, thus achieving a seemingly autonomous standpoint of consciousness and self-expression.
Refocusing Rentschler’s argument, Thomas Elsaesser separates New German Cinema’s projective fantasies about America into three different scenarios.9 In the perspective of one group of filmmakers postwar American cultural imperialism simply continued the Nazi destruction of authentic German culture. In a gesture of Oedipal revolt German cinema’s task was seen to contest Germany’s double colonization and, by directly or allegorically exploring the darkest chapters of German history, to find new forms of national authenticity (Syberberg, Herzog). Represented by directors such as Wenders or Fassbinder, the second strategy was that of a discriminating exploration of Hollywood cinema as a source of possible identifications. It entailed the orphan’s search for alternative father figures (Ford, Ray, Sirk) who would not trigger neurotic dependencies: “Contact rather than conflict, identity lived and renewed by interchange rather than by territorial claims seems to be the goal, but it is a world that excludes women.” 10
The third prototype, labeled by Elsaesser as the “no-contest paradigm,” focused on the painful formation of German subjectivity, although with the conspicuous omission of any reference at all to American popular culture or Hollywood. Mother-daughter bonds in this paradigm became the primary trope of recalling the ruptures of twentieth-century German history and of recapturing a lost sense of expressive authenticity (Sanders-Brahms, Brückner).
Whether they employ a Lacanian or a Freudian matrix, both Rentschler’s and Elsaesser’s accounts of German-American film relations during the 1970s shed light on some crucial transformations in the role of American
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fantasies in twentieth-century German culture. As we saw in part 1 of this book, Nazi Americanism served as a vehicle to capture disparate longings and align conflicting temporal experiences, to even out unwanted discontinuities and project alternative futures. Integral to Goebbels’s efforts to engineer fantasy through governmental interventions, the Americanist projec-tions of Nazi cinema recalled eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visions of cultural homogeneity and provided mass audiences with a spurious sense of normalcy. In spite of many striking ideological inconsistencies they were meant to mold assent by unifying the national and the popular. The American topoi in the New German Cinema, on the other hand, were crucial in the younger directors’ rejection of former notions of normalcy and mass consent. Rebelling against the fathers of the Nazi and the Adenauer period, the state-funded German cinema of the 1970s exploited “America” in order to expound the exceptionality of German history and subjectivity, their rudimentary ruptures and dissonances. The representation of nonidentity may have advanced to this cinema’s new trademark and identity,11 but with the exception of, arguably, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff the referencing of Hollywood and American popular culture now played a pivotal function in cutting through the linkage between the national and the popular.
