Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Reconfiguring the Border of Fortress Europe in Hans-Christian Schmid'sLichter

2007; Routledge; Volume: 82; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3200/gerr.82.1.31-53

1930-6962

Kristin Kop,

German History and Society

On 1 May 2004, the external border of ‘Fortress Europe’ was shifted to the east to bring Poland into the fold of the European Union. Hans-Christian Schmid's 2003 film Lichter (Distant Lights) is a contemporary German film produced at the cusp of this development. It presents a shift away from the dominant mode of depicting the German-Polish borderlands guiding discourse in Germany during the decade prior to the EU enlargement. Throughout the 1990s, the German-Polish border had been depicted as a barrier protecting the German (European) self from a non-European other defined by endemic economic underdevelopment, social malaise, and criminal propensities. Schmid's film transcends this East-West divide by shifting the categories of spatial identity to global vs. local. Lichter generates a new portrait of the German-Polish borderland as a transnational but nonetheless local space situated at the disenfranchised margins of a new global order—one in which Warsaw joins Berlin as a privileged seat of wealth, power, and mobility. Lichter constructs this cross-border symmetry through both its narrative structure and its visual and aural aesthetics, both of which are treated at length in the article. These film strategies work together to inhibit the viewer's ability to correlate the films elements (individual scenes, agents, and emotional affects) with particular (national) spaces. On the one hand, this aesthetics of dislocation allows for the transcendence of the East-West dichotomy and an erasure of the stereotypes through which it had been structured. On the other hand, it has led many reviewers of the film to appeal to precisely such stereotypes of East and West to locate those elements spatially estranged by this aesthetic stratgy. The article thus questions whether viewers are prepared to engage with the critique of globalization the film presents.