Session 3(b): Cinema, TV and the Media
Session 3(b): Cinema, TV and the Media
Chair: Brigit Breninger
Points of Entanglement: The Overdetermination of German Space and Identity in Lola + Bilidikid and Walk on Water
Nicholas Baer
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Within recent debates in Germany regarding the integration of Turks, various phrases and discourses have served to reinforce the literal and figurative boundaries between Germans and Turks. Scholars have noted that such phrases and discourses blame integration problems on Turks and thereby obscure “the uneven distribution of goods and resources” within German society. In my paper, I argue that these phrases and discourses also dehistoricize the current debate, suggesting that issues of integration are unprecedented within German history. I seek to contextualize the current debate by utilizing the analytical category of Raum, which has overdetermined struggles between Germans and “others” since the founding of the German nation. At the outset of my paper, I provide a cursory overview of spatial politics in German history in order to establish not only the continuity and transposition of anxieties around Raum within and across Germany’s history, but also the perpetual articulation of spatial politics around race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. After providing this brief overview, I devote my attention to two recent films, Lola und Bilidikid and Walk on Water, which negotiate the spatial politics of contemporary Berlin in the context of past and present relations between and among Germans, Jews, and Turks. I claim that within these films, German history not only overdetermines contemporary struggles over German space, but also bears on articulations of identity. Indeed, identity itself becomes a contested space within the films – particularly for characters who maintain intersectional identities or who engage in interpersonal interactions across social boundaries. I argue that both films stage crucial interventions in Germany’s current integration debate by historicizing the debate, by claiming Raum as a primary category of analysis, and by negotiating the complex intersections between spatial politics and the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
The Return to Home through the (Magic) Film Image
José Manuel Mouriño Lorenzo
Painting Deparment, Faculty of Fine Arts, Poneverdra, University of Vigo, Spain
The cinematographic history of Galicia (a region in the nord-west of Spain) offers an a very special type of documentary closely related to the migration (specially to South America). This kind of documental films, called ‘emigration documentaries’, can be explained with te term “cinematographic correspondence”: a way to send images from home to the foreign community, to the emigrants. The images of this films stimulate, on a very special way, the configuration of the memory (the single memory and the collective memory) and shows the real significance of the affective participation in cinema.
Download Draft Conference Paper – 
The Russendisko and Music From and Of the Post-Soviet Diaspora
David-Emil Wickström
Musicology Section, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
“Geographically it is the 15 former republics [of the Soviet Union] or people who come from these republics”
The Russendisko and music from and of the Post-Soviet diaspora
The Russendisko, a fortnightly musical event in Berlin, sports a stream of popular music predominantly sung in Russian (however also Ukrainian, Yiddish and German can frequently be heard). Run by two emigrants from the former Soviet Union, Wladimir Kaminer and Yuriy Gurzhy, the event and its music can seem to be a part of the Post-Soviet diaspora living in Berlin. A closer scrutiny of both the Post-Soviet community in Berlin and the music played uncovers several layers that make problematic the term diaspora and expose the complexities of the music linked to the community and the target group of the event and which reveal layers of interaction and relationships between the host and hosted.
This paper first aims to critique the term diaspora as a homogenizing element by scrutinizing the (primarily) russian-speaking diasporic community in Berlin which is both ethnically and religiously heterogeneous, including Jews, “Spätaussiedler”(ethnic Germans) as well as “ethnic” Russians, Ukrainians etc. This diversity is also reflected in diverse consumption patterns with different clubs catering to different groups. Thus the Russendisko itself is not emblematic for the diasporic community living in Berlin – the target group is actually Germans (and now tourists as well).
A second aim is to examine music in diasporic communities since the music played at the Russendisko is also multilayered. The selection criteria is geography – the former states of the Soviet Union – including also music by emigrants from them (as alluded to in the title’s quote of Gurzhy). This creates a multileveled sonic texture of musics from and of diasporas as well as from “their” home – showing that the motherland is just another node in a complex transnational network.
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