German guest lecture: Frictional Race Representation in Cold War German-Language Cinema

The 360º program “Europe from the Margins” & Department of German Studies present a lecture by Evan Torner from the University of Cincinnati titled: Frictional Race Representation in Cold War German-Language Cinema.

From the end of the Nazi racial state in 1945 to the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, representation of non-white people in German-language cinema shifted from logics of exoticist colonial projection to the rudimentary exploration of a shared multicultural identity. How did this shift take place? This talk pulls some examples from four decades of divided German film history, contending that social pressure –– including that of the US Civil Rights movement, the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland, and the transnational women’s liberation movement –– exhibited cultural impact, despite entrenched and subsidized interests in both East and West Germany. Feature films such as Toxi (1952), Silent Star (1960), Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Were The Earth Not Round (1981), Kamikaze 1989 (1982), Momo (1986), Joan of Arc of Mongolia (1989), and Herzsprung (1992) stage comparable forms of frictional race representation, in which white European identity appears to hinge on the framing of non-whiteness.