Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

Abstract

The establishment of the European Union, reunification of Germany, and Germany's extension of dual citizenship to immigrant minorities provided challenges to the country's understanding of itself as a nation. In negotiating these changes, debates on citizenship frequently centered on definitions of German culture. Using the concept of Leitkultur (guiding culture), conservatives argued that Germany should reject multiculturalism and stem immigration. This essay analyzes discourses on cultural policy in Germany through a contextual and textual analysis of the film Mostly Martha. In its alignment with aesthetic conventions of the art house food film, Mostly Martha participates in the debate on cultural citizenship and embodies changes in the German film industry that have moved German cinema toward increased commercialism. The film's main character, Martha, is transformed through an intercultural relationship and a trip to Italy. We argue that the film's citation of this well-known tradition of traveling south to redeem oneself and its treatment of ethnic “Otherness” engages in the Leitkultur debate and participates in the transition from national German to transnational cinema. Through the utopian treatment of Italian food, the film fetishizes cultural difference and reaffirms fixed constructs of nation and gender, thereby avoiding an explicitly politicized engagement with intercultural citizenship and identity.

Keywords:

• Cultural Citizenship
• Food
• Film
• Intercultural Communication
• Multiculturalism

Notes

1. Lewis (2006) illuminates the construction of national identity in post 9-11 Germany: “The lament about the failings of Germany's poets and philosophers stands out much like a major chord in the postwar (West German nation's theme song, running like an insistent trope through the story the German nation habitually tells about itself). It is this recurrent refrain of failure and insufficiency that has effectively supplanted older, more positive, and self-congratulatory foundational narratives of the German nation. One myth of origin that has been drowned out in the current rhetoric of crisis, which has its roots in German Romanticism and the Enlightenment, in particular in Herder's notion of the Kulturnation, is the belief that Germany is a nation of Dichter und Denker, of writers and thinkers, poets and philosophers. In modern times, Germany has drawn much of its sense of identity and self-worth from its rich intellectual traditions and this foundational narrative” (p. 70).

2. See the slogan “Kinder statt Inder” (children instead of Indians) utilized by Germany's conservative parties in the 2000 elections to mobilize voters against the Socialists’ plan to fill vacant information technology positions through issuing German residence permits to technology workers from India and other Asian countries.

3. In his analysis of different definitions of cultural citizenship, Miller (2006) concludes that, although influential, “all of them neglect the political economy of cultural citizenship in favor of its political technology. We need to combine the two” (p. 73).

4. We conceptualize cultural citizenship through Miller's definition that considers the “uneasy interdependence of citizenship, consumption, and politics” (2006, p. 28). Miller outlines three “zones of citizenship” that overlap with each other, yet have specific histories: the political (the right to reside and vote); the economic (the right to work and prosper); and the cultural (the right to know and speak) (p. 35). For Miller, the shift to a service-based economy is intricately related to contemporary cultural citizenship (p. 51). Thus, analysis of the economy and of the media industries becomes imperative to the understanding of civic participation and cultural belonging (Miller, 2006, p. 73). See also Appadurai (1996), Appadurai and Society for Transnational Cultural Studies (2000), García Canclini (2001), Gordon and Newfield (1996), Hesmondhalgh (2002), Miller and Yúdice (2002), Shohat and Stam (1994), and Yúdice (2003) on the relationship of citizenship and media.

5. The recent hit series Tuerkisch für Anfaenger (Turkish for Beginners, Dagtekin, 2006–2008) preceded Canada's Little Mosque on the Prairie (Brunton & Snook, 2007–2009) and expressly deals with the topic of Muslim integration into mainstream culture through humor.

6. Halle (2002) writes, “television becomes an organizing force in the audiovisual market” (p. 18). In concert with Rentschler (2000), Halle (2008) notes the “increased presence of television officials on film boards, the increased role of television as a source of financing, and new arrangements between film schools and television as markers of a shift in the film industry” (p. 175).

7. The term refers to a period in German cinema that was heavily influenced by the French New Wave. In 1962, a new generation of filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto and declared the death of commercial cinema. From the 1960s through the 1980s, directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Werner Herzog revitalized the German film industry and produced a number of low-budget art house films, some of which received worldwide acclaim. This cinema was avant-garde, highly political, and deeply critical of past and current German society, especially of the fact that many “de-Nazified” individuals took on prominent positions in government, education, and society post WWII.

8. Kebab Connection (Schubert, Schwingel, & Saul, 2005), Im Juli, the internationally acclaimed Gegen die Wand (Head On, Schubert, Schwingel, & Akin, 2004), and Auf der anderen Seite (The Other Side of Heaven, Akin, Maeck, Thiel, & Würl, 2007) are multilingual and depict the lives of transnational individuals. Kebab Connection is in Greek, Turkish, and German; Head On is in Turkish and German. Göktürk et al. (2007) describe the latter film as portraying characters who “show little concern for assimilation for either Germany or Turkey; instead, they challenge binary oppositions between native and foreign, here and there, them and us” (p. 15).

9. The country's film industry receives significant support from German national and regional funding bodies as well as from two main EU level funds: MEDIA (the EU's Measures to Encourage the Development of the European Audiovisual Industry) and the Council of Europe's Eurimages. Both EU funding sources have the goal of strengthening Europe's ability to compete “as a global player in the face of Hollywood domination” (Cooke, 2007, p. 37).

10. Halle (2006) notes that Germany's attempt to reach the “broadest possible audience in the global film market” expanded the German film industry's share of its national box office “by over 10%, reaching up to 30% in some quartiles” (p. 251). Halle (2002) discusses three major shifts in film financing. First, the definition of what constitutes a “German film” has expanded and opened up German film production to transnational EU coproductions. The Filmförderungsanstalt (The German Film Board [FFA]) changed its definition of a “German film.” A film now qualifies as German if “the film script author or leading actor is a German citizen and if the film premieres in German in the territory of the FFA, or if it premiers in an A-level film festival as a German entry.” Second, regional joint public and/or private funding organizations now provide seed money for the film industry and have shifted German film toward “marketability.” The third shift “results from the substantial involvement of private interests” (Halle, 2002, pp. 12–17).

11. See Bower (2004) and Poole (1999).

12. Food is conspicuously absent in films like La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (Silberman & Buñuel, 1972), and it expresses social criticism in food films like La Grande Bouffe (Malle, Rassam, & Ferreri, 1973).

13. Eat Drink Man Woman, for example, was remade into Tortilla Soup.

14. A recent independently produced U.S. film, Waitress (Roiff & Shelly, 2007), uses a similar strategy to illustrate the internal conflicts of the film's main character.

15. DeVault (1991) demonstrates that even though more men have begun to cook, the work of feeding the family remains women's work.

16. Falwell's (2008) analysis of German travel guides discusses the relationship of foodways, guidebooks, and politics. She determines, “the more critical the view of the country's history as violent and bloody, the less positive the depiction of its traditional cuisine” (p. 144). Both positively and critically inclined guidebooks tend to represent German cooking as heavily based in animal protein, especially pork (p. 139).

17. The Leitkultur debate acquired political urgency after the deadly neo-Nazi attacks on Turkish homes in the cities of Mölln (November 1992) and Solingen (June 1993). In 1995, the controversy surrounding the dismissal of a Muslim teacher from a public school for wearing a head scarf revealed deep-seated fears of the perceived dangers of Islam to German culture. While the German Federal Court upheld the right of female Muslim employees to wear head scarves in public institutions in 2003, individual states have the right to pass their own legislation. In view of the fact that church and state are not strictly separated in Germany—students can receive religious instruction in public schools, and citizens professing a religious affiliation are taxed to finance their churches—this ruling is not inconsequential. With education and the transmission of cultural values at stake, at least one German state has already banned teachers from wearing head scarves in public schools.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gisela Hoecherl-Alden

Gisela Hoecherl-Alden is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Classics, University of Maine, USA

Laura Lindenfeld

Laura Lindenfeld is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine, USA