Rescreening Memory Beyond the Wall

Abstract

This essay analyzes futurity in relation to the themes of Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East, and Indianerfilme, East German western genre films, in The Last Cowboy, a 1998 DVD artwork by international artist pair Nomad and one of the first artworks ever made for DVD. Borrowing analytical frameworks from digital media theory and aesthetics, the essay suggests alternatives to the liberal–humanist binary logic of exclusion, substitution, and exchange implicit in many discussions of German cultural experience after the Wende. Rather than projecting desire for community and shared cultural memory onto an idealized, “utopian” past, The Last Cowboy locates them in an engaging frontier of representational possibility that might become the foundation for a more inclusive future and for new ways of conceptualizing cultural memory.

Keywords:

• cultural memory
• digital aesthetics
• German unification
• globalization
• Indianerfilme
• Nomad
• Ostalgie
• post–Cold War identity

Notes

Margaret Morse, “Body and Screen,” Wide Angle 21, no. 1 (1999): 63–75, 63–64.

The Last Cowboy has no dramatic characters but invokes a textual “I” in a series of written texts. “Narrator” here denotes this “I,” though the texts involve more reflection and description than narration as such. No indication is given of this figure's gender; I use the feminine pronoun more or less arbitrarily.

This claim is noteworthy but impossible to substantiate. Since winning regional acclaim on European independent film and media circuits with The Last Cowboy (1998), artists Tucker and Epperlein have become globally successful independent filmmakers. In 2003 and 2004, Tucker spent several months living with and filming a group of U.S. soldiers in Baghdad, creating a documentary film that was released in 2004 as Gunner Palace; the team's follow-up film, The Prisoner: or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, was released in 2006. My reading of The Last Cowboy refers to a 2007 version owned by the artists: 1997, Nomados LLC, 2007.

Wolfgang Emmerich, “Cultural Memory East v. West: Is What Belongs Together Really Growing Together?” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 242–253, 251.

See Daphne Berdahl, “N(O)stalgie for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64, no. 2 (1999): 191–211, 193 (hereafter cited in the text with page numbers), and Paul Cooke, “East German Writing in the Age of Globalisation,” German Literature in the Age of Globalisation, ed. Stuart Taberner (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2004), 25–46, 36. Cooke refers here specifically to Ingo Schulze's Simple Storys (1998).

Karen Leeder, “Introduction,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 236–241, 240.

Dominic Boyer, “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future,” Public Culture 18, no. 2 (2006): 361–381, 372–373; hereafter cited in the text with page numbers. The most visible and globally familiar examples of Ostalgie fall into this category, for example, the cult appreciation of the two-cylinder East German Trabant and the emphasis on consumer products in internationally popular films, such as Wolfgang Becker's 2003 hit Goodbye Lenin!, which cinematically revive memories of GDR consumer culture.

See, for example, Allucquere Roseanne Stone's description of “How I Fell in Love With My Prosthesis,” in The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

Berdahl notes that “several of the supposedly eastern German products are now produced and distributed by western German firms” (206). See also Boyer's investigations of the Ostalgie publication Super Illu and its Bavarian publisher, Hubert Burda.

David Clarke, “Introduction,” Seminar—A Journal of Germanic Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 187–190.

Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: The Ethics and Politics of Memory in an Age of Mass Culture,” Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 144–161, 144. Landsberg does not refer specifically to Ostalgie.

Clarke, “Introduction” 197.

Martin Blum, “Remaking the East German Past: Ostalgie, Identity, and Material Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 34, no. 3 (2000): 229–254, 231; hereafter cited in the text with page numbers.

See Gilles Deleuze, Masochism and Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1999).

Georgina Paul, “The Privatization of Community: The Legacy of Collectivism in the Post-Socialist Literature of Eastern Germany,” Oxford German Studies 38, no. 3 (2009): 288–298, 289; hereafter cited in the text with page numbers.

Here Paul quotes Lothar Probst, “Transition from Community to Society?,” After the GDR: New Perspectives on the Old GDR and the Young Länder, ed. Laurence H. McFalls and Lothar Probst, German Monitor 54 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001): 209–220, 216.

For a more complete discussion of this subject model and its relationship to modernity, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

The sense of community remembered as a real and significant element of GDR social life should therefore also be distinguished from the concept of “really existing socialism,” as in Rudolf Bahro's critique; see Bahro, Die Alternative: zur Kritik des real existierenden Sozialismus (Cologne: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1977).

When I suggest that these alternative models of subjectivity “persist,” I do not mean that they necessarily survive as intact or conscious expressions of identity. I refer more to a stubbornness of habitus and desire that may resist both the mandate for “flexibility” and the coopting power exercised by advanced Western capitalism.

“In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes…. A signifier on one level becomes a signified on the next-higher level” (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 31). This view of the flickering signifier suggests that, although “the digital text promises no ontological stability [in itself], its elements must be granted a functional and (if only instantaneously) provisional stability” from the pragmatic perspective of the running program. See Madeleine Casad, “The Virtual Turn: Narrative, Identity, and German Media Art Practice in the Digital Age,” Diss. Cornell University 2012, 57.

See Spivak's “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 2001), 270–304.

Murray, Digital Baroque 11.

Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Murray cites Gilles Deleuze's The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Ibid., 7.

Boyer describes East German memory as rendered “allochronic” by the dynamics of Ostalgie (378).

National identity formation in both West and East, Boyer argues, was largely structured by the difficulty of coping with the past, the difficulty of articulating a functional sense of national identity in the aftermath of the Nazis’ violent perversions of the very idea of nationhood and cultural identity (368–370).

N. Katherine Hayles, “The Seductions of Cyberspace,” Rethinking Technologies, ed. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 173–190, 187–188.

Petra Epperlein, quoted in Neuhaus, “Experiment mit neuen Erzählweisen” n. p., my translation.

See Wolfgang Neuhaus's discussion of the artwork in “Experiment mit neuen Erzählweisen,” Telepolis (August 26, 1998), http://heise.de/tp/artikel/3/3275/1.html. Cultural precedents already existed in 1998 that tested the expressive and technical possibilities of combining high-quality audio and video with richly complex and engaging interactivity; see, for example, the rapidly expanding popular genre of interactive computer games, which were already impressively cinematic by 1998, or the much earlier examples of interactive video artworks created for LaserDisc.

Karen Leeder, “‘Another Piece of the Past’: ‘Stories’ of a New German Identity,” Oxford German Studies 33 (2004): 125–147, 128–129. Leeder references Iris Radisch's discussion of “‘die zweite Stunde Null,’ as she called it.”

Hartmut Lutz, “German Indianthusiasm: A Socially Constructed German National(ist) Myth,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin G. Galloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 167–184. For a more extensive discussion of East and West German “Indianthusiasm” and its dynamics of race, memory, and identity, see Katrin Sieg's chapters “Race and Reconstruction: Winnetou in Bad Segeberg” and “Winnetou's Grandchildren: Indian Identification, Ethnic Expertise, White Embodiment,” in Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 73–114, 115–150.

Susanne Zantop, “Close Encounters: Deutsche and Indianer,” Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin G. Galloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 3–14, 5.

See Jon Raundalen, “A Communist Takeover in the Dream Factory—Appropriation of Popular Genres by the East German Film Industry,” Slavonica 11, no. 1 (2005): 69–86, 78.

Ibid., 78.

Ibid., 71.

May's novels were seen as too bourgeois and too marked by association with the Nazi propaganda machine, which also exploited their racialized “noble savage” subtexts for nationalist ends. May's novels were banned from distribution in East Germany on ideological grounds. Nonetheless, the author remained popular in the East—so much so that “when some of these books were brought to the big screen in West Germany in the early 1960s, East German youth traveled in large numbers to cinemas across the border of Czechoslovakia to see their beloved heroes in action” (Raundalen, 74).

Gerd Gemünden, “Between Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA Indianerfilme,” German and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections, ed. Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 243–256, 247.

Ibid., 247.

Neuhaus, “Experiment mit neuen Erzählweisen” n. p.

Hayles, “The Seductions of Cyberspace” 187–188.