Ghostly Business: Place, Space, and Gender in Christian Petzold’s <i>Yella</i>
2011; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/smr.2011.0033
ISSN1911-026X
Autores Tópico(s)German Colonialism and Identity Studies
ResumoGhostly Business: Place, Space, and Gender in Christian Petzold’s Yella1 Anke S. Biendarra (bio) What’s a ghost? Unfinished business. (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses) 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 Müller’s assessment that the phantom of a free market society finally replaced the ghost of communism (Müller 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, Café Umberto, 2005), in prose fiction (Rainer Merkel, Das Jahr der Wunder, 2001; Kathrin Röggla, wir schlafen nicht, 2003; Johannes Ullmaier, ed. Schicht! Arbeitsreportagen für die Endzeit, 2007; and most recently Terézia 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 dis-enfranchised 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” (Möller). 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”). [End Page 465] In Petzold’s oeuvre most characters have no real stake in the world and seem to exist in an in-between realm, yet they are also archetypes of our present. Their parallel existence unfolds in a universe of ghost-like data transfers, de-regulated economies, and social fragmentation. The question running through all his films is how to live meaningfully in Germany’s late-capitalist society shaped by globalizing factors. His films show familial and social networks as well as notions of Heimat dissolving and life measured in terms of efficiency, progress, speed, and mobility. They also suggest that these developments have accelerated since unification. As such, they participate in the (re)writing of East and West German stories under the sign of nostalgia, which scholars have identified as central to the cultural configuration of the contemporary Berlin Republic (Hell and von Moltke). Ghostlike spaces and people pervade especially the trilogy of films that Petzold made in the first decade of the twenty-first century and that he has called his “ghost trilogy” (Gespenster, booklet). In this triptych the motif of ghostliness becomes a political category and an aesthetic paradigm (Hinrichsen), which allows Petzold to narrate social and economic occurrences and emotional conditions that do not lend themselves necessarily to filmic portrayals. He shows characters on the margins of society who are largely invisible: In the 2001 winner of the German Film Prize, Die innere Sicherheit (2000), we encounter a pair of former Red Army Faction terrorists and their teenage daughter, who spend their life in hiding and on the run, ghosts forever held captive by the country they once haunted. In Gespenster (2005) the viewer follows two young women without a real past or future in their respective attempts to find the narrative thread of their lives. Nina and Toni, both without any familial connections, form a fragile friendship and drift arbitrarily through the urban spaces of postunification Berlin, driven by...
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