Go West
During the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2005 Shai Heradia, director of the Experimenta Festival in Bombay asked if I might like to present there a selection of my programme, Der gefallene Vorhang1. There was just one slight hitch: for an Indian audience unaccustomed - due to censorship - to on-screen sexuality, even an experimental film festival has certain limits. We took Amami se vuoi out of the programme: it’s a very provocative film, also for Westerners, in which Michael Curran allows his male partner to spit into his open mouth. On the other hand we kept Stan Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving,2 with its close-ups of all the details of a birth: a film for which Brakhage was once almost gunned down in the American mid-West, no less.3 Astonishingly, the reaction to that film in Bombay in 2006 was the same as in Germany: a breathless silence. After the festival I asked Shai what kind of reactions there had been to particular films. People had become very angry about the Pet Shop Boys’ clip, Go West4, she replied: it was American propaganda. When I explained it was a UK video and meant to be ironic she insisted that Indians hate Americans and a little irony would not suffice. During the ensuing discussion, all of that abysmally bad country’s shortcomings were listed for me in great detail, which was nothing new to me: anti-Americanism is equally fashionable in Germany. Alone the Iraq War was never an issue in India, to my surprise.
“Americans have colonized our subconscious.” (Kings of the Road, Wim Wenders 1976)
In my case Americans had not only occupied my subconscious but my very consciousness; admittedly not personally but by proxy, thanks to a German, Karl May, who had never even seen America. His characters were part of my childhood as far back as I can remember. When I began to read his books at the age of eight, I already knew Winnetou and Old Shatterhand from strange films that were in aesthetic terms, a hybrid of the Western, the Heimat film and a provincial theatre revue. I loved them. I wanted to be neither white nor German but a Red Indian Chief – yet by no means Old Shatterhand; he was far too German for me and probably too close to my real identity. As I was already aware at the time that the Red Indians’ nomadic lifestyle had practically died out, this identification seems strange to me in retrospect, almost as if I had wanted to break out of my role as a descendant of National Socialist culprits and switch to the victims’ side. I hated white Americans for all they had done to ‘my’ people as colonialists and perpetrators of genocide.5
Kim Phuc
In 1972, when the famous photograph of a young girl burnt by napalm was published, I was seven, two years younger than her. I must have seen the photo in Stern and even now, I can see the fold of the double-page spread before me.6 It was probably the first picture of a war crime I ever saw. I well remember that she was naked, which I found equally interesting: the pornography of war. To my mind, American soldiers were behind this.7 So they obviously hadn’t changed. In my parents’ circle, students in ’68, anti-Americanism was run of the mill: Americans were not only imperialists but also philistine, stupid and fat.
McDumb
Their products were, not only bad but dangerous. Whilst a teacher with evidently right-wing tendencies regaled us before every holiday with tales of WWII American bombs disguised as toys, I heard similar tales from the left-wing camp about Coca-Cola in which, it was reputed, a piece of meat would disintegrate completely if left to steep overnight.7McDonalds by contrast had not a thing to do with meat but instead, with a germ-free artificial extract that did not however, stay germ-free for long, thanks to employees who spat on bread rolls before packing burgers in them, as a means to avenge their employers’ American-style, out and out exploitation. This propaganda was pretty successful. A moment of distrust creeps up on me to this day, whenever I bite into a burger. My well-nourished anti-Americanism survived for an astoundingly long time. Of course I consumed lots of American films. If they were bad, I saw them as proof of American philistinism; if they were good, I reminded myself that Hollywood was the creation of Europeans in exile. Europe good, America bad: a rather primitive formula, but one typical of such resentment. Nor was I the least inclined to examine my prejudice in a realistic light although my opportunities to do so abounded: Giessen, where I spent most of my childhood, was home to a huge American military support base. I totally avoided contact. To boycott the German-American Friendship Fairs remained a matter of honour, even when my curiosity slowly began to get the better of me.
The end of the Vietnam War was not the end of American imperialism: from Chile and Nicaragua to Grenada, the list of interventions was long. The so-called Sandino-Big Boom ground coffee mix was part and parcel of international solidarity but ruined ones stomach. Joining the gigantic peace protests against NATO’s double resolution was altogether healthier. The American president at the time was a comic-book foe: a gun-toting, cheap, B-movie hero, with his finger on the red button that could blow us sky high – it was all too close to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. That didn’t stop us from discussing for hours on end in a kind of post-colonial neurosis whether Reagan was to be pronounced “Raygen” or “Reegen”. I never received a satisfactory answer to that question. The only American I ever asked didn’t know either. Nor did he actually give a damn. The international dominance of the Anglo-American language is, on the one hand, a wonderful thing that allows one to communicate easily everywhere yet it also provokes a permanent inferiority complex vis-à-vis native speakers. Conservatives take public issue with the problem in their fight against Anglicisms or in their rather odd attempts to establish the dominance of German culture in Germany – whereby they totally overlook the fact that American culture has long since become the au fait mainstream. Thus, on the occasion of our Biennial in 2006, Happy Believers, we received an email from a fellow citizen who was obviously less than delighted by its title and asked us, what “this nonsense” was about, how many Anglo-Americans we were expecting to come, whether Germans were even welcome and finally, whether we had any love at all for our mother tongue. We actually had intense discussions before every event about whether to choose an English or German title, and about which would (linguistically) exclude the most people. In left-wing circles the dominance of the English language is less of an issue and insisting on one’s own language more likely to be seen as chauvinist or provincial – yet whispered complaints about Anglo-Americans’ dominance of international podium discussions are rife nonetheless. It would be surprising, if the constant humiliation of acting within an ‘inferior’ culture did not also, lead to conscious or subconscious resentment. Perhaps resentment is even necessary. I have frequently had to ask myself why a culture such as that of India, which seems to be relatively resistant to American culture, produces such fundamental anti-Americanism.
Me, a Kraut
My image of America began to change only very slowly and, remarkably enough, due to an American production about German history. I watched the TV series Holocaust9 at the age of 14, apparently along with some ten to fifteen million other German viewers. The combination of German genocide and the Hollywood narrative style had a dramatic effect: instead of focussing on distant American atrocities I now turned my gaze on my grandparents. There followed a period of many years in which I took issue with National Socialist propaganda and its inherent anti-Americanism, and I was horrified by how frequently stereotypes and prejudices were already familiar to me. From the National Socialist perspective America was the epitome of capitalism, and capitalism in turn a Jewish invention designed to subjugate the world, one that ‘bastardizing culture’ by means of miscegenation was meant to underpin. When ‘the great Jewish influence’ in America regularly pops up as a topic, still today, also in the serious German media, I feel ill. In reality, only circa 1.4% of US-Americans are practising Jews. Yet point out this statistic to the many advocates of the ‘influence theory’ and they tend to retort only that Jews wield enormous financial clout: the same line of argument one finds in Der ewige Jude from 1940.10
Ami go home!
I began to develop a feeling of genuine gratitude towards America because not only had they liberated us from National Socialism but they’d also introduced the Marshall Plan and re-education to teach us the basic rules of democracy. That was bitterly needed. By the mid-90s, when American troops began to pull out of Berlin, my image of America had changed considerably; I even felt uneasy about them leaving town. Not only had I spent my whole life under American occupation without this ever giving rise to a concrete negative experience, I also – given the developments in Hoyerswerda, Mölln and Solingen – lacked confidence in home-grown German democracy; in short, I didn’t want to be left alone amongst all these Germans. On the other hand it seemed as if the European miracle was repeating itself since the Cold War had been won: dictatorships all over Eastern Europe were turning into democracies. It even seemed for a moment as if Russia might become democratic. This positive experience of Pax Americana in Europe took its toll on two counts.For one, the Bush administration seemed to believe that one might export this model to other continents and cultures and democratise the Middle East by occupying Iraq. Secondly, the EU has become used to always having its big brother on hand when things somewhere turn risky, and seems to be unable to act without him, even when it witnesses genocide: be it Belgian troops in Rwanda or Dutch units in Srebenica, they were neither respected nor did they intervene.
Happy Sycophants
Together with some friends and 200,000 other people I went to hear Obama’s speech in Berlin in 2008. I normally avoid such extreme human gatherings. The last one I recall participating in was a peace movement protest against American missiles, almost a quarter of a century ago. It accordingly felt rather strange to be undertaking a pilgrimage to an American presidential candidate capable of mobilising a whole lot more people in Germany than any German or European politician might do. Certainly Kennedy’s legendary “I am a Berliner” speech played a role: it seemed to me a lot of people were there so as not to miss what promised to be an historic moment: to be in on a piece of big real-life cinema. On the other hand, it is perhaps no accident that a 1981 anti-Reagan march or a 2008 pro-Obama march took place in Germany: as president, Obama (like Reagan before him) would be in a stronger position than anyone else to make decisions on war or peace. Whomsoever we might elect in Germany has practically no say in the matter. Obama’s envious competitor McCain was therefore wrong to curse Germans out as “sycophants”. They actually just wanted to see their future ruler.
Quo Vadis?
If one talks with Germans about the imminent US elections Obama’s victory seems almost a dead cert. It’s logical: in eight years the Republicans have managed to land America with a war that is practically lost, an economy in ruins and a reputation in shreds. It’s time for a change. If the world that so much depends on the outcome of these elections was able to vote, McCain wouldn’t even, need bother to run. Obama is young, handsome and simpático. Hollywood and the music business love him. But what will happen if the Americans fail nonetheless to elect him? Or if some gun-crazed racist assassinates him first? Somehow it seems as if I have seen this all before: liberation from fascism and the end of the Cold War; Vietnam and Iraq; Kennedy and Obama. If, as Udo Israel writes in this present catalogue America is a soap opera, several instalments of which he has missed, one would like to shout in reply, “no problem! They will all be repeated”.
Berlin 2008
1 The Fallen Curtain, Retrospective International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, www.schwierin.de/fallen
2 Window Water Baby Moving, Stan Brakhage, USA 1959, 12 min. ASIN: B000087EYF.
3 Stan Brakhage, Telluride Gold: Brakhage meets Tarkovsky. Rolling Stock, no 6, 1983, pp. 11-14
4 Go West, Howard Greenhalgh (Pet Shop Boys), UK 1993, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G75tH2wfvQ
5 Empathy with the fate of African Americans was, by contrast, completely lacking on my part. Which is no surprise to me now, when I consider images of ‘the Negro’ drawn by Karl May or Jules Verne. The TV series Roots (Marvin J. Chomsky, USA 1977, 573 min) brought about a first change in this attitude.
6Nick Ut for AFP: a photo of Kim Phuc, a young girl injured by napalm in Trang Bang in July 1972. In 2007 I saw an original print for sale at a Berlin art fair. The art market bears strange fruit.
7 A misconception that persists to this day yet in reality, South Vietnamese troops were behind it. South Vietnamese bombers dropped napalm. The strategy and method were however American inventions.
8 Sonne statt Reagan, Joseph Beuys, Germany 1982, 2min. German version: www.ubu.com/film/beuys.html English version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsYHl_0yYNc The German title is a pun on the German verb ‘regen’, meaning ‘to rain’.