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A Different Germany
 A Different Germany:
Pop and the Negotiation of German Culture

Edited by

Claude Desmarais
 A Different Germany: Pop and the Negotiation of German Culture,
Edited by Claude Desmarais

This book first published 2014

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2014 by Claude Desmarais and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-6626-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-6626-2

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Difference: Reading Progress and the Contested Spaces of “German”
Popular Culture
Claude Desmarais

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 15

Fatih Akın’s Take on German-Turkish Film: Altona is in Hamburg
and East Meets West in Istanbul
Anette Guse

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 43

The Artist in a Foreign Land: The Liminal Spaces of Minority Literature
Gerd Bayer

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59

Kismet: P. I. Kayankaya Fights Ethnocentricity and the Yugoslavian
Civil War in EthniCity Frankfurt
Claude Desmarais

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 91

Berlin as a “New” Metropolis? Tom Tykwer’s Lola Rennt
Ute Lischke

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 105

At the Crossroads of Nature and Culture: German Garden Culture
Enno Lohmeyer

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 121

Beyond Media Critique: Performance and Pop-cultural Pleasures
in Elfriede Jelinek and Frank Castorf’s Raststätte oder sie machens alle
Morgan Marcell Koerner

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 139

Slaying Bluebeard: Buffy Takes a Feather from “Fitcher’s Bird”
Alicia Carter
vi Table of Contents

Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 155

Meggie Folchart’s Absent Mother and Omnipotent Father:
Gender Roles in Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart
Britta Kallin

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 173

Literary Classic or Pop Fiction? Reading Julchen Grünthal for Pleasure
and for Pain
Margaretmary Daley

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 193

Troubles with Gender Trouble in Thomas Meinecke’s Tomboy
Florence Feiereisen

Contributors ............................................................................................. 213

Index ....................................................................................................... 215

 INTRODUCTION

DIFFERENCE:
READING PROGRESS AND THE CONTESTED
SPACES OF “GERMAN” POPULAR CULTURE

CLAUDE DESMARAIS

This volume has two basic premises. The first is that for all of its
traditions, Germany—and Austria and Switzerland, in their own particular
ways that often interact with Germany—is a culture of difference, and that
as a (or any) country or nation, its culture is constantly shifting and
changing. Such a change is in part due to the constructed nature of culture,
just as the nation is both constituted by “imagined communities” (Benedict
Andersen), and, to refer to Homi K. Bhabha, exists as a narrated entity.
But this continual change and shift is also caused by the need to constantly
recreate or reconstruct culture and the nation, as well as other
manifestations and forms of community. The second premise of this book
is that popular culture is the space where the negotiation of difference is
often most vibrant and clearly evident. Culture is more consistently
engaged in the mediation of space between incorporation into hegemonic
structures and strictures, and its resistance to them (Stuart Hall), than are
other societal institutions. Popular culture is, furthermore, a particularly
useful field and object of inquiry in assessing the metaphorical and literal
space available for, and involved in creating new identities in Germany
and other German-speaking countries.
Mapping the changes, the contested spaces and identities of culture
(and the nation), and examining and analyzing them, means that we often
have to see Germany as a place quite different from what we may have
imagined; or at least as more differentiated than what has been proposed to
us so far by various specific instances of popular culture. Take, for
instance, the enduring Cold War reception framework in North America,
which at least partially explains the success and interpretation of the film
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen, 2006, directed by Florian
2 Introduction

Henckel). But rather than being an either/or proposition, examining

difference in Germany, to use an analogy taken from one of the
contributors’ papers, is more like remixing a song (or writing different
endings to a story, in literary terms). Remixing (as a metaphor for
difference) offers a myriad of choices of equally valuable tracks
(narratives or narrative threads), although not all will receive the same
attention in each remixing. For whether the difference is discussed in
terms of German history and tradition—that of city and countryside, and
of the various regions (or Länder) and dialects—, or in terms of the
contributions to and struggles for recognition and rights within German
society of women, ethnic minorities and others, these cultural constructs
are in continual flux. As a result, we need to constantly rethink and
reimagine Germany, and keep our minds agile and open to the multitude
of different manifestations of “things German” (and Austrian, and Swiss).1
Within such a conceptual framework, it is clear that no one book can
write Germany.2 In fact, what any report, written or otherwise, can do is
take a snapshot of a certain time and place, and thus provide a measuring
stick for any future developments, or for past events and phenomena. As a
result, this book attempts to give an in-depth examination of some of the
variety within German culture (broadly defined as the places where
German is spoken), revealing how the aesthetic, cultural and political
tones of popular culture point to the shifts, changes and upheavals in
German culture and its construction. Moreover, as a way of balancing out
the importance ascribed to the actions of the German state and German
industry, this volume focuses on the cultural productions and spaces of
those groups who often have to assert their agency in the face of being
assigned minority status, whether that assessment be based on gender,
ethnicity, class, religion or other components of identity. How is German
identity in part denied the members of these groups, and how do they
nonetheless ascertain their right to shape German identity, to make it a
marker of difference among many commonalities? The essays in this
volume provide readers with an array of interrogations of a different
Germany, in which various minorities (and majorities, depending on the
lens used) take center stage and push back against the confines of the
German nation, revealing its inter-workings with a little-spoken past that
presages the present-day growing interconnectedness with various worlds,
with a particular focus on the post-war cultural creation of Turkish-
Germans and of women. Difference, long considered to be a critical
counter-discourse to the culture of the majority, is that which defines the
relationship of all parts to every other one, at the same time as certain
commonalities bind them all. The whole, the combination of these parts,
 Difference 3

only exists, and then but momentarily and ephemerally—no matter how
permanent we believe this wholeness to be—as a constructed entity. This
constant interplay is at the heart of identity, which itself is no more than
the relation between the differing parts that constitute its manifestations,
and the narrative(s) thereby created.
The different Germany presented here aims to upset the notions both of
an immovable permanence and of an unchanging and unchangeable
wholeness, in the individual as well as in society at large. The
contributions assembled here focus on popular fiction and television,
theatre, music, garden culture and filmmaking, while addressing issues of
gender, minority culture and the different Germany that opens up the
country to a multitude of complementary and at times contradictory
interpretations. The essays in A Different Germany point to the modern
admixture of the traditional, the transitory and the new that makes up the
ever-changing construct of all things German. This book attempts to fulfill
the task of explicating a key part of that different Germany by focusing on
three themes in a variety of media: first, German identity as inflected and
expanded by Turkish-German identity in film, music, literature and
popular fiction; second, architectural, garden and theatre/media space as
inflections of identity and the German (and Austrian) nation; and third,
gender as the key to unlocking youth and young adult culture, from
modern television series through to fairy tales, eighteenth-century popular
literature, and 1990s popular literature. Before sketching the individual
chapters of this book, two very brief forays into politics and notions of
progress will set the stage.

The Culture of Politics and Difference

When, in 1994, Cem Özdemir became the first politician with a Turkish
background to be elected to the German national parliament, the
Bundestag, it only seemed natural that this would happen in the ranks of
the Green party (since 1993 Bündnis 90/die Grünen); the party which
arose from the calls for large-scale social, political and ecological change
amongst those commonly referred to as the “68er Generation” in
Germany. Fast-forward to early 2011, and Germany can be said to have
reached a number of benchmarks of political maturity as relates to
diversity. Take for instance two events that resulted from the German
government federal election of 2009: Angela Merkel (CDU) became both
the first woman German Chancellor, and the first Chancellor from the new
German states; while Philipp Rösler (FDP) became the first German of
Asian descent to be appointed minister (of health) in the German cabinet.
4 Introduction

At the same time, political participation of minorities (and women) in

German politics is still low. Although roughly 15 million people have an
immigrant background, which amounts to 18 percent of the Federal
Republic’s population, this part of the population only makes up 2 percent
(11 members) of the Bundestag.3 Likewise, on the more popular political
front, the vast majority of German society and government clearly rejects
right-wing extremist groups, and even actively works against them—take,
for example, the program Gesicht zeigen (Show your face, i.e., true
colour)4—, but right-wing groups still exist and even seem to find more
support in difficult economic times, not just in Germany and Europe, but
also in the rest of the world.5 So on the one hand, much progress has been
made, but on the other, not so much. But what is progress?

Deconstructing Progress: Towards Sanity

and the Promotion of Culture
The use of the term “progress” in scholarship and society is multi-faceted,
and often tied to development issues. The term is also commonly used to
denote a movement forward, leaving behind bad or outdated practices, or
making improvements. The deconstruction of the term “progress” that
follows is not so much meant to take apart and unmask the problematic
aspects of modern-day notions of progress (take, for instance, modern
capitalism’s difficulties in preserving the earth’s ecology). Instead this
deconstruction is aimed at the use of the term in relation to a particular
aspect of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. It should first be
noted that the idea of progress on human rights in our era is itself, sadly, a
very ironic statement on notions of progress, as many scholars argue that
we now live in the period of the earth’s history when there is the greatest
amount of slavery.6 Fully aware of this bitter irony, the discussion of
progress that follows is linked specifically to the removal of impediments
to ethnic minorities and women—to name just the two largest groups that
still struggle for full equality—, and the reduction of the effect of
prejudicial laws and of prejudice in the workplace, which is viewed as
progress by mainstream society in those countries where such changes
have taken place.
Just what is wrong with attaching the label of “progress” to such
developments? Let us turn to Chris Rock, American comedian and
documentary filmmaker of Good Hair (2009). On the CBC’s Q radio
show—Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, roughly equivalent to the
BBC in Great Britain, and the ARD or ZDF in Germany, and NPR in the
United States—, Rock argued that African Americans did not “progress”
 Difference 5

to achieve a status of (greater) equality. He instead argued that “white

people have gotten less crazy.”7 In other words, if there has been any
progress, it has been within the mainstream society, which, in the United
States and Canada, is still dominated by (at times stereotypical) Anglo-
Saxon cultural attitudes that in many respects mirror, despite all the
difference between them, the ethnocentric attitudes that dominate in
Germany. For Rock, to call societal change since the end of WWII
“progress” is particularly ludicrous, because it suggests that the minorities
need to better themselves in order to be worthy of enjoying their full rights
as citizens. Instead, Rock argues, minorities have always been worthy of
full participation in society, and, moreover, this has always been their right
in truly democratic societies. This is the first step in the deconstruction of
the notion of progress.
The second step involves not attaching the notion of progress to these
changes in mainstream (American) society. For Rock, the values and
actions of the majority prior to recent changes were “crazy.” With this
designation, Rock is not taking aim at those with mental disabilities, but
rather pointing to the way in which the majority culture engaged in the
complete and utter distortion of moral, ethical and political codes and laws
because of its prejudice. That this complete and utter distortion has ended
(or at least become much less prevalent) is not progress in his view, so
much as it is an end to very disturbing, prejudicial treatment of minorities
and of difference. The attainment for all citizens of equal rights in society
before the law, therefore, is not so much a movement forward, but rather
the place at which society should start to consider how to “progress.”
Indeed, in most majority cultures, including Germany, there is wide-
scale subscription to a universalist discourse, whereby citizens are seen as
sharing equal rights that are guaranteed by equal treatment. While such a
universalist position is not a necessarily bad starting point, the overly
broad application of such a universalist discourse can lead to
discrimination because it ignores difference. Despite the shortcomings of a
universalist position applied too broadly, the prevalence of this discourse
means that those who have not gotten “less crazy” (that is, those who still
openly discriminate against others) stick out more. Yet before the majority
cultures of the Western world (or anywhere else for that matter)
congratulate themselves on their collective shoulder for attaining a greater
sanity in intercultural relations, the relative fragility of the universalist
framework should be considered.8 For the acts of violence perpetrated by
majorities against minorities, examples of which are to be found in almost
every nation, show the possible outcome when universalist frameworks no
longer can make sense of reality. In other words, in societies, democratic
6 Introduction

and otherwise, which aspire to truly embrace and make better use, socially,
culturally and politically, of their cultural richness, a much more open
negotiation of diversity, difference and commonalities is necessary. We
need to continue the trend of not just embracing culture, but of embracing
cultures, of embracing both our commonalities and differences. The
question that remains is how this relates to Germany and the study of
“things German” (and Austrian and Swiss).

Difference and Studying “Things German”

In German Studies, as the institutional and academic space where a
popular and cultural studies approach generally finds refuge in the North
American context, we might be tempted to point to the lack of minority
rights in Germany in relation to the American situation, or examine the
culture of remembering and memorializing the recent German past
(including WWII and the Shoah). The reasons for doing so rest just as
much in the nature of (North) American society,9 and its interactions with
Germany, as for reasons tied more strictly to German cultural
manifestations. This is an entirely valid approach. However, from
whatever standpoint we may critically examine “things German,” we
should not forget to consider how perhaps our own pre-conceived views of
Germany, or of any nation or community (particularly from afar, but even
from within), might blind us to the developments within such entities.
Personally, I have had enough occasions where my preconceived notion of
German culture and society—the sort of generalization I use on a daily
basis to negotiate my sense of things German—has been changed, or even
upended; as a result, I am at the very least always ready to have my sense
of “things German” contested, shifted and deepened.
As German culture continues to renegotiate its place in North
American society and beyond, and redefines its place in the post-Wall era,
German Studies has benefitted from a wealth of individual studies looking
at particular cultural and social phenomena in German-speaking countries.
Citing three random titles provides only the slightest suggestion of the
breadth and depth of studies available. Nonetheless, the three works
briefly mentioned below demonstrate the specificity of many books on
Germany, as well as the impossibility of giving a comprehensive, in-depth
overview of German culture in one single volume.10 Carol Poore’s
Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 2007) asserts the centrality of a critical disability
studies perspective in understanding German culture. In writing the history
of disability in twentieth-century Germany, Poore removes the study of
 Difference 7

disability from the medical discourse to that of the social, cultural and
political discourses tied to certain bodies as part of a greater, largely
North-American and British scholarly turn. Gail Finney’s edited volume
Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006) is the first anthology to
focus squarely on visual culture in Germany for the period, with an
examination of media such as film, art, dance, and photography, to name
but a few of the topics discussed therein. Meanwhile, Not So Plain as
Black and White: Afro-German Culture & History, 1890–2000 (Rochester:
Diaspora Books, 2005), edited by Patricia Mazon and Reinhild
Steingrover, demonstrates how, despite institutionalized eugenic policies
from the early twentieth century up to the end of National-Socialist
Germany, as well as continued discriminatory policies and practices post
WWII, Afro-Germans to this day continue to actively participate in and
contribute to German society, thus challenging society to recognize its
multicultural reality.
Understandably, given that such scholarship is most often written in
North America, that the post-war influence of American culture—in
particular its popular culture—is pervasive, that theoretical approaches
either generated in or adopted into the English-speaking world are likewise
dominant, and that American culture still plays a dominant role in the
world, the state of German Studies does not surprise; it focuses on themes
particularly important in North America and relevant to the American
context and to theory prominent in North America. What is less common
are works that take a cultural studies perspective on a wide range of topics,
or which take note of Germany’s role as mediator and player between East
and West (and North and South), and thus can offer to students and
scholars alike one source for a diversity of materials. The chapters in this
book provide just such diversity, and thus seek to replicate, albeit in a
limited way, the fascinating and sometimes difficult and contested cultural
space called Germany.

Inflections of Difference: Outline of the Chapters

Although the chapters of this volume are grouped into three broad
categories—Negotiations of Identity and Difference, Spaces of Identity,
and the Gender Politics of Writing—the intersections between the various
chapters in each grouping are mirrored by commonalities between papers
in different groupings. In particular, they all present an image of Germany
as a country that negotiates and lives difference and commonality, with all
that this entails. Below are brief introductions, facilitating readers’ ability
8 Introduction

to adjudge if the subject matter deals with any specific research project or
area of interest.
In her chapter that touches on the second and third generation Turkish-
German filmmakers, Anette Guse interprets the oeuvre of Fatih AkÕn as
that of a cosmopolitan Turkish-German director who posits German
culture as a transnational homeland. Guse argues that AkÕn emphasizes the
local in his films, particularly the Hamburg community of Altona. In the
place where Turkish (and German) elements of culture are daily
negotiated, Turkish-Altonaers utilize a frame of reference connected to
travel and the iconographic capital of Turkish identity, Istanbul, thereby
fostering and reinforcing transcultural identity in the sense proposed by
Homi K. Bhabha. Guse then focuses on the music in AkÕn’s Crossing the
Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), a site of identity construction that,
by blending western and eastern styles in the mode of global music,
practises transcultural identity. For Guse, music in AkÕn’s films points to
the dialectical interrelation between global and local, foreign assimilation
and rediscovery of the familiar as the lifeblood of intercultural exchange.
Gerd Bayer highlights the literary and theoretical side of debates about
Turkish-German identity by demonstrating how linguistic hybridity is
used to create a space for a constant contesting of identity politics and a
binary ethnicity construct. For Bayer, the writer Zaimo÷lu’s oeuvre is a
literary inflection of debates on Turkish-German identity that uses an array
of tropes to mark his place somewhere close to, but removed from, the
practical everyday solutions that can lead to stultification. In his analysis
of Kanak Sprak: 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1995), and its
sequel, Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (1998),
Bayer demonstrates the affinities of Zaimo÷lu’s work with Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of a “minor literature,” and shows how Zaimo÷lu creates
a space in the “sign of the hyphen” which controls the two discourses of
Germans and Turks and their interaction, without ever succumbing to one
or the other, a particular identity that cannot be properly determined from
the outside.
In the final chapter of this first section, Claude Desmarais focuses on
Jakob Arjouni’s fourth Kayankaya private detective story, Kismet (2001),
as the Turkish-German detective Kayankaya’s habitual, and humorous
debunking of stereotypical notions of German identity in the new context
of the Yugoslavian Wars. Desmarais follows the lead of Arlene Teraoka’s
work on earlier Kayankaya novels, where she posits the Turkish-German
private investigator as a someone in search of legitimacy in a culture that
largely precludes both private investigators and Turkish-German
detectives, and he in turn argues that it is the readers, everyday Germans,
 Difference 9

who are admonished to take up the empty space left by Kayankaya in

Kismet. To demonstrate this, Desmarais shows how Kayankaya negotiates
the territory between “good” and “bad” Germans, with a contrast strongly
favouring readers’ identification with “good” Germans, that is, with those
who are unencumbered by ethno-centric notions of Germanness or
identity. As a result, the readers’ focus is drawn to how the smallest acts of
civil courage help Kayankaya undo the human rights abuses of the “Army
of Reason,” and the concurrent abuse, negligence, tacit approval and
obliviousness of government officials and citizens who adhere to
ethnocentric views.
The second grouping of chapters focuses on how different spaces are
used to demarcate the lines, breaks and new formations of German
identity.
Ute Lischke examines the way in which film shapes the architecture of
Berlin as the new site of post-Wall German identity constructs in the film
Lola rennt (1998). Lischke examines space, media and marketing to show
how, in Tykwer’s film, techno-music and the CD tie-in function as
vehicles for a new urban model, placing Berlin’s architecture in a
cinematic, techno frame that speaks to innovation and possibility. Relating
the film’s reception of Peter Howitt’s Sliding Doors (1998) and Krzysztof
Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1982), Lischke argues that an over-emphasis
of the narrative, and its twin themes of fate and time, leaves out the city of
Berlin, its architecture and its street life, as the missing element in the
filmic equation which, while lost on most North American viewers, is an
element of the film that is second-nature to German audiences. Taking
Tykwer at his word, Lischke examines the city of Berlin and its
architecture, and the woman the director first envisaged running through
the city streets, Lola. A personification of Germany’s possibilities for the
future, Lola is the center for the film’s flashbacks and flashforwards, and
Berlin is the new stage of Germany upon which she plays.
Looking at a very different space, Enno Lohmeyer traces the
transmutations of gardens as markers of the landscape of German identity;
he provides a map of German gardening through the ages, and of the
various ways in which German, European and world cultures have
interacted on the plots of “German” soil. While discussing early Germanic
and medieval garden culture, Lohmeyer focuses particularly on gardens as
sites for negotiating aesthetics and art; they represented wealth and power
at a time when the German lands and peoples struggled to achieve a unity
beyond that of language and culture. Moreover, by examining such
phenomena as the Schrebergärten of the early 1800s, as an expression of
the budding Körperkultur, and the National Socialists’ garden politics,
10 Introduction

Lohmeyer shows how this symbol of culture is not so enclosed as to

provide refuge from the effects of modernity. A model for the multifarious
modes of interaction with our environment, Lohmeyer’s article uncovers
gardens as the crossroads of nature and culture in Germany.
To escape the gravitas of earth and architecture in the two preceding
chapters, Morgan Koerner reads humour as the marker of German
language theatre’s turn to global entertainment media and away from
notions of media critique/resistance. He traces this phenomenon in
Austrian playwright and writer Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the iconic popular
and car culture space, the rest-stop, in her play Raststätte oder sie machens
alle (1994). In providing an in-depth analysis in terms of the humour of
both Jelinek’s script and director Frank Castorf’s 1995 staging of the text
at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Koerner locates a high point of
German language theatre and culture colliding at the intersection of local
tradition and global entertainment in the media-saturated German
landscape of the 1990s. Koerner shows that Castorf radicalizes the comic
elements of Jelinek’s play and minimalizes her satirical tones by
introducing humour, gags and random silliness. Castorf thus both
thematizes the critique of media and Jelinek’s status within that tradition,
and maintains his own status as “cult director” by creating a theatre of
media spectacle, an event that plays upon and stages its own take on
German and global popular culture.
The third group of papers traces the gender troubles that shape modern
and historical representations of German identity constructs.
Alicia Carter looks at television’s rewriting of German fairy tales in
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and reads it as a conscious act of bringing
confident women role models to play upon modern debates on gender,
power and the perils of love and marriage. Carter alludes to the Grimm-
inspired episodes of Joss Whedon’s cult series in order to re-examine
whether the French “Bluebeard” (1697) fairy tale functions as the intertext
for the “Ted” episodes of Buffy. Focusing on the role of Bluebeard’s
passive wife, Carter suggests instead as intertext the Grimm fairy tale
“Fitchers Vogel” (Fowler’s Fowl), an older Germanic variant of the more
popular “Bluebeard” story. Carter applies Max Lüthi’s theory that fairy
tales divide different modes of behaviour inherent to a single person into
separate, distinct individuals in order to show how the single character of
the Grimm fairy tale is recast as Buffy and her mother, Joyce. As a result
of her analysis, Carter is able to reassess Maria Tartar’s view that the
Grimm Märchen cautions against female curiosity, and, in the case of
female sexuality as a precursor to infidelity, seems to justify the gruesome
murder of the Bluebeard character. By recovering fairy tales’ archetypal
 Difference 11

nature, Carter arrives at striking conclusions about how television

mediates the discourses of power, relationships and gender.
A look at a more problematic mediation of gender is provided by a
discussion of Cornelia Funke’s bestseller Inkheart (2003), which Britta
Kallin critiques within the context of popular literature for youth. For
Kallin, Inkheart is a modernized twenty-first century fairy tale that has ties
to the Harry Potter rage and the international market, as well as to cultural
trends more specifically linked to Germany and its youth culture. Kallin’s
particular focus is how the twelve-year-old Meggie’s coming-of-age story
is connected to the magical world of fairy tales in a way that presents
gendered messages that impact the socialization of children and teenagers.
Kallin takes special note of how, after her mother disappears into a book
her father Mo reads to her when she is three, Meggie’s life becomes the
attempt to reunite the real world and that of the fairy tale. This, however,
is impossible because Meggie’s heroic deeds take place in a domain
reserved for male heroes. For Kallin, Inkheart is not a feminist re-
visioning of classic fairy tales, but rather a work that highlights the
absence of young heroines in popular literature as a troubling instance of
gender politics.
Margaretmary Daley’s chapter shifts the focus from fairy tales to
popular fiction, and shows how gender and other issues blur the literary
genre borders in Friederike Unger’s Julchen Grünthal (1784). Daley
demonstrates how women’s reading is depicted as an illness, and as one of
the pernicious results of sending one’s daughter to a French-style school in
Berlin. By comparing the original text and a revised edition, Daley opens
our view to two texts in one: Julchen Grünthal as a didactic piece of
sarcasm that aims to correct bourgeois excesses in emulating the
aristocracy and over-intellectualizing Rousseau’s critique of education,
and the revised text which introduces elements of anti-semitism, anti-
feminism and literary coercion. What results is a view of these two books
as a compendium of reading assignments, or as an annotated bibliography
for middle-class women. By pointing to the work’s underappreciated
literary merit, and its status as pop fiction bestseller, Daley re-establishes
the text’s ability to provide insight into the pleasure and pain of reading,
learning, growing up and having children.
Florence Feiereisen examines how gender troubles modern German
male identity and its writing of feminism in Thomas Meinecke’s Tomboy
(1998). Feiereisen positions Meinecke as a “DJ-author” and musician
whose literary work utilizes techniques of sampling, mixing and remixing
to create a sound for German pop literature. Much like a song, Feiereisen
sees the author’s various characters as transport vehicles for gender
12 Introduction

discourses as varied as Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, androgyny, Otto

Weininger and others. While taking into consideration Meinecke’s own
troubles with Gender Trouble in an essay from 2001, Feiereisen also
deconstructs Meinecke’s fandom from the perspective of feminism,
showing how the narrative strategies employed in the text lead to a semi-
scientific flow as “proofs,’ and thus release the author into a gray zone
where he seeks to escape gendered notions of responsibility.

A Word of Thanks
Thanks for their support in completing this project are due foremost to
Edouard Jeauneau and Gus Dierick, two longtime mentors. I owe special
thanks to Gerd Bayer for his expert advice and encouragement. Thanks as
well to Rebecca Brady for editing help, to the publisher and to the
contributors who welcomed my suggestions, and who also showed great
patience as this project worked hard to overcome the hurdles of my
peregrinations across Canada, almost but not quite a mari usque ad mare,
and my subsequent debilitating physical injuries. A final note of thanks is
due to those colleagues who are an integral part of my academic home,
UBC in the beautiful Okanagan valley.

Notes
1
I take this term from the lectures of Mark Webber, a professor and former
colleague in Toronto, Canada, and founding director of the Centre for German and
European Studies at York University. Webber’s use of the term, as I understand it,
suggests the irony present in any such designation which attempts to be all-
encompassing or to give a definitive description of German culture. Liechtenstein
can also be added here, as yet another country where the German language, and
Germanic culture, play an important role in the national culture.
2
This volume is conceived as being in discussion with Mediating Germany: Pop
Culture between Tradition and Innovation, edited by Gerd Bayer (Newcastle:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006), where a lengthy discussion of attempts to
define “German culture” can be found.
3
See Anna Reimann, “No Obama for Deutschland: Ethnic Minorities Still
Overlooked in German Politics,” Spiegel On-line,
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,646733,00.html>.
4
See the website: <http://www.gesichtzeigen.de/>
5
For an assessment of the threat of radical right-wing politics in Europe, see Hans-
Georg Betz and Carole Johnson, “Against the Current–Stemming the Tide: The
Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical Populist Right,” Journal of
Political Ideologies 9.3 (October 2004): 311–27.
 Difference 13

6
See Howard Dodson, “Slavery in the Twenty-First Century,” UN Chronicle
Edition: <http://www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2005/issue3/0305p28.html>. Also see
Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd, and Alex Kent Williamson, Modern Slavery: The Secret
World of 27 Million People (Oxford: One World, 2009).
7
See Q, podcast 15 October 2009:
<http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/Q_on_bold/Film _and_TV/ID=1296200158>.
The deconstruction of the notion of progress, ironically enough, happens once the
interview is almost finished.
8
The basic framework for my consideration of intercultural relations is based on
the research done through the IDI (Intercultural Development Inventory). See, for
instance, M. R. Hammer, M. J. Bennet, and R. Wiseman, “Measuring Intercultural
Sensitivity: The Intercultural Development Inventory,” Special Issue on
Intercultural Development, edited by R. M. Paige, International Journal of
Intercultural Relations, 27.4: 421–43.
9
See, for instance, Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: Second
Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Visual Culture and the
Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2001),
127–51.
10
These three studies point to just three of the numerous areas in German popular
and cultural studies that could not be included in this study. However, some of
these areas, such as Afro-German Studies, are represented in Bayer’s Mediating
Germany.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture. Edited by Jay M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 1991.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1993.
Bales, Kevin, Zoe Trodd, and Alex Kent Williamson. Modern Slavery:
The Secret World of 27 Million People. Oxford: One World, 2009.
Bayer, Gerd, ed. Mediating Germany: Pop Culture between Tradition and
Innovation. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006.
Betz, Hans-Georg and Carole Johnson. “Against the Current—Stemming
the Tide: The Nostalgic Ideology of the Contemporary Radical
Populist Right.” Journal of Political Ideologies 9.3 (October 2004):
311–27.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1984.
14 Introduction

Denham, Scott, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds. A User’s

Guide to German Cultural Studies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1997.
Fehrenbach, Heide and Uta G. Poiger, eds. Transaction, Transgression,
Transformation: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan.
New York: Berghahn, 2000.
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman,
1989.
Gemünden, Gerd. Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization, and
the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Hall, Stuart. “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular.’” In People’s
History and Socialist Theory. Edited by Raphael Samuel, 227–40.
London: Routledge, 1981.
Hammer, M. R., M. J. Bennet, and R. Wiseman, “Measuring Intercultural
Sensitivity: The Intercultural Development Inventory.” Special Issue
on Intercultural Development, edited by R. M. Paige. International
Journal of Intercultural Relations 27.4: 421–43.
Hansen, Miriam. “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: Second Commandment,
Popular Modernism, and Public Memory.” In Visual Culture and the
Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer, 127–51. Piscataway: Rutgers UP,
2001.
Harrington, C. Lee and Denise D. Bielby, eds. Popular Culture:
Production and Consumption. Malden: Blackwell, 2001.
Highmore, Ben, ed. The Everyday Life Reader. London: Routledge, 2002.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo. New York: Picador, 2005.
Mueller, Agnes C., ed. German Pop Culture: How “American” Is It? Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
Storey, John, ed. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. New
York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
—. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization. Malden:
Blackwell, 2003.
 CHAPTER ONE

FATIH AKIN’S TAKE

ON GERMAN-TURKISH FILM:
ALTONA IS IN HAMBURG AND EAST
MEETS WEST IN ISTANBUL

ANETTE GUSE

Celebrated by the Turkish press as the “Turkish Tarantino”1 after the

success of his film Gegen die Wand (Head-On, 2004), and compared to
Fassbinder by some German critics,2 the German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih
AkÕn continues to leave a mark on German Cinema with Auf der anderen
Seite (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), the second film in his proposed trilogy
Liebe, Tod und Teufel (Love, Death and the Devil).3 This chapter deals
with AkÕn’s take on the construction and transformation of national,
cultural, and personal identity. Focusing on Gegen die Wand and Auf der
anderen Seite, this chapter argues that AkÕn makes the case for a concept
of cultural identity that allows individuals to have more than one culture at
their disposal. I argue that the Turkish-German experience becomes, on
the one hand, a framework for AkÕn to explore issues such as the social,
political, and individual conditions of assimilation, the universal issue of
human relations, and the tension between tradition and modernization in
this age of globalization and urbanization. Clearly, his feature films Kurz
und schmerzlos (Short Sharp Shock, 1998), Im Juli (In July, 2000), Gegen
die Wand (2004), and Auf der anderen Seite (2007) all depict individuals
who are in a transition triggered by crisis, and are challenged to change
their lives. On the other hand, AkÕn mediates and negotiates German,
German-Turkish, and Turkish culture through the portrayal of people and
locations in his films, from the predominantly positive to the neutral,
critical, and subversively ironical. In addition, in his documentaries AkÕn
explores the issue of identity, and the significance of the local in relation
to the global. Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We Forgot to Go Back,
16 Chapter One

2001) traces his family’s experience of migration, and Crossing the Bridge:
The Sound of Istanbul (2005) presents a portrait of the music scene in
Istanbul. The city of Hamburg, in particular the Turkish-multicultural
neighbourhood of Altona, represents the cosmopolitan/multicultural haven
that has become home to the second generation of migrants. At the same
time, home is also embodied in the metropolitan city of Istanbul, strikingly
epitomized with its music symbolizing the fusion of East and West, or the
space between tradition and modernity. This chapter further demonstrates
that the identity-constructing function of music in AkÕn’s film plays into
an overall neo-romantic aesthetic approach, as indicated by my analysis of
a conspicuous image in Auf der anderen Seite which is reminiscent of the
German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

Self-perception, the Identity Crisis Myth,

and Hybrid Identities
Born, raised, and educated in Germany, Fatih AkÕn belongs to the second
generation of migrants who regard Germany as their home and
disassociate themselves from the stereotypes about the Turks in Germany
and the mentality of Gastarbeiter.4 In contrast to their parents, whose
migration experience was taken up by New German Cinema filmmakers
such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Helma Sanders, and Hark Bohm,5 the
second and third generation of Turkish migrants stand behind the camera
themselves6 and, as Gemünden states about AkÕn, “assert[s] a position
within a German national cinema that encompasses, rather than
marginalizes, Turkish-German directors.”7 As opposed to what can be
described as the somewhat paternalistic view of New German Cinema
(Gökturk), which tended to assign the role of the victim to the foreigner,
today’s narratives by German-Turkish directors explore culture clash from
a perspective that has been described as “between cultures” or as a “third
space.”8 This new generation of German filmmakers from a migrant
background, for whom AkÕn has become a sort of spokesperson, is self-
confident and articulate, and perceives its double cultural identity, or
hybrid identity, as an advantage. The young German-Turkish director
Buket Alakuú, for example, stresses that she cannot separate her Turkish
from her German identity, and that she tries to take the best of both
cultures.9
As a result of this pragmatic view, humour and self-irony have entered
the discourse on national and cultural identity in current German-Turkish
film and entertainment, thus lending the self-representation a remarkably
different and lighter note than the portrayal of the Turkish Gastarbeiter
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 17

(literally, guest worker) in the New German Cinema. This is perhaps a

sign, or the effect, of a new, more inclusive approach in the questioning of
nationality and identity that speaks to notions of transnationality and
transculturality. For example, the German-Turkish stand-up comedian
Senay Duzcu maintains that “when you’re laughing, you don’t need an
interpreter,”10 and Kaya Yanar, the popular host of the TV-show Was
guckst du? (What are you lookin’ at?),11 undermines German clichés about
Turks by joking about them and playfully questioning stereotypes. In both
cases, the artists are able to establish a connection to the audience through
comedy based on self-irony and self-deprecating humour.
The complexities of cultural identity are readily apparent in the
interdependence of factors such as class, gender, age, access to education,
and bilingualism. However, statements from artists, despite their socially
privileged status, in addition to statements from Turkish youth in
Germany, suggest that the much-discussed identity crisis of migrants does
not exist, or at least not as it is discussed in the mainstream media. The
problem may lie, rather than in the thinking of those citizens with hybrid
identities, in an unchanged notion of culture, a rigid understanding of
national identity, and the misperception of the dominant culture which
takes ethnicity as a cue for categorization. Asked about his cultural sense
of belonging, the author ùinasi Dikmen states:

[I]ch bin sowohl Deutscher als auch Türke. Ich bin also weder Deutscher
noch Türke. Ich bin ein Individuum und ich habe langsam an meinem
Individuum Geschmack gefunden […] Identitätsprobleme habe ich nicht.12

(I am German as well as Turkish, that is, I am neither a German nor a

Turk. I am an individual and I have slowly started to discover a taste for
my individuality. […] I do not have issues with my identity.)

According to Gunnar Lützow, for the young German-Turkish rap-

musician Özgür Bozkurt the question of dual identities does not even
exist: “Whether I’m a German, a Turk, or a Chinese is of no importance to
me whatsoever. We are entering the twenty-first century, and this question
is truly medieval.”13 Even taken with a grain of salt, Bozkurt’s and
Dikmen’s statements illustrate the inadequacy of national labels which
equate cultural identity with national or ethnic identity. It follows that
culture cannot unambiguously be tied to nationality or ethnicity, a point
made by Wolfgang Welsch:

The description of today’s cultures as islands or spheres is factually

incorrect and normatively deceptive. Cultures de facto no longer have the
insinuated form of homogeneity and separateness. They have instead
18 Chapter One

assumed a new form, which is to be called transcultural insofar that it

passes through classical cultural boundaries.14

As a result of the increasing global mobility of people and media, culture

is no longer a locally rooted, closed system, defined by nation. Referring
to Homi Bhabha and other critics of postcolonialism, Welsch describes
contemporary individuals as “cultural hybrids” and he notes that “[w]ork
on one’s identity is becoming more and more work on the integration of
components of differing cultural origin.”15 Regina Römhild, a cultural
anthropologist, emphasizes the impact of globalization on people’s
lifestyle and everyday culture, particularly in cities:

In the future, fewer and fewer people will live their entire lives where they
were born, and even the most settled people will recognize that the world
around them changes unceasingly, that the world comes to them at home
even if they themselves do not move. The salsa scene or the esoteric
networks in the cities are examples of the development of new cultural
marketplaces, in which Germans, together with non- or semi-Germans,
actively participate in the globalization of their lives.16

Thus, we can observe a cross-cultural exchange ultimately impacting

minorities and the host-nation.17 According to John Tomlinson, the
common assumption that migration and globalization have led to a general
process of loss of cultural diversity requires re-evaluation:

Globalization, so the story goes, has swept like a flood tide through the
world’s diverse cultures, destroying stable localities, displacing peoples,
bringing a market-driven “branded” homogenization of cultural experience,
thus obliterating the differences between locality-defined cultures which
had constituted our identities.18

Tomlinson argues that, on the contrary, far from destroying cultural

identity, globalization has been perhaps the most significant force in
creating and proliferating cultural identity.19 As a response to the
dissemination of cultural modernity through institutions, media, and
communications technologies, and increasingly through international food
cultures, an enhanced awareness of the value of cultural practice can
follow, prompted by a desire to differ and to reconnect with cultural
roots.20
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 19

The Narrative: Gegen die Wand (2004)

In discussing the impact of globalization processes as a cross-cultural
exchange, I have attempted to sketch a framework for discussing culture
clash and the quest for identity as portrayed in AkÕn’s films. Gegen die
Wand (Head-On) tells the story of Sibel, a young, attractive, and sex-
crazed woman of Turkish descent who tries to escape the restrictions of
her traditional family through a marriage of convenience with the German-
Turk Cahit, an aging punk-rocker. In this film AkÕn not only portrays
Turkish-German subculture, but calls attention to conflicting moral codes
and the oppression of women through Turkish religious patriarchism,
while also highlighting the loss of cultural and personal identity. Both
Sibel and Cahit are rebellious and desperate characters who attempt
suicide; but while Sibel’s suicide attempt is a cry for help, Cahit’s motives
appear to be more amorphous and psychologically complex, and he is, in
fact, the central character of the drama. The narrative implies that it is the
unprocessed mourning of his wife’s death that causes him to spiral
downward into self-destruction, as manifested in depression, alcoholism,
domestic disintegration, and outbursts of violence. As Matthias Knopp has
noted, Sibel’s and Cahit’s extreme behaviour, such as the simultaneous
excessive zeal for life and suicidal tendencies, also points to the possibility
of a borderline personality disorder syndrome.21 While the reasons for the
ambivalent and impulsive actions of Cahit and Sibel ultimately remain
ambiguous, the struggle for positive change in both characters is clear,
consequently prompting questions about the nature and depth of personal
and cultural awakening.
Since Cahit undergoes the most profound transformation in the film—
he goes from being a “dead,” “lost” person to one with “love” and
“power”ʊ, I focus on him in order to examine the manifestations of his
lost identity. Identity is to be understood as a construct, multi-sided and
dynamic, which is negotiated through interaction22 between the self and
society.23 Social theory distinguishes between a social identity and a
personal identity, whereby social identity is the part of an individual’s self-
concept that is derived from her/his knowledge of her/his membership in
social groups, as well as from the emotional significance attributed to this
membership.24 Personal identity, by contrast, refers to the uniqueness of
the individual in connection with his or her unmistakable life history.25
Since many areas of societal life today have lost their stability as core
stocks of our identity constructsʊfor example, family, national and ethnic
identity, gender and body identityʊthe term “modern patchwork-
20 Chapter One

identities” has been introduced to describe the inconsistency of the identity

construct.26
Gegen die Wand includes numerous scenes which suggest that for
Cahit the loss of personal identity and cultural identity are interwoven.
Evidence that he has been stripped of his cultural and ethnic identity
includes: his inability to speak Turkish, his inability to remember certain
Turkish traditions (for instance, at his wedding), and the way in which
representatives of the Turkish community state that he does not look
Turkish. This final point suggests that because he is an outsider figure, his
acceptance into the Turkish-German community is conditional. Moreover,
Cahit disassociates from the German-Turkish community, or at least from
its traditional representatives, by complaining about the “Kanaks.” In
using this term, he both distances himself from the community
representatives, and uses this label in the derogatory sense as used by
many Germans as a term for Turks, rather than as a term taken back by
young German-Turks to describe their alternative identity construct. Cahit
openly disapproves of the patriarchal double-standard during the card
game with his Turkish male relatives who boast about their visits to a
brothel. Although he himself has a violent streak, he angrily swears about
the Turks, irritated by the aggressiveness and brutality of the Turkish men
in the club who beat him up.
Since language is central to the discussion of identity,27 Cahit’s
rejection of being labelled as Turkish because of his language is
significant. During his appointment with the therapist in the hospital, Cahit
is asked about the meaning of his name, but he exhibits, or feigns
ignorance about the meaning traditionally associated with Turkish first
names. He acts annoyed, and subsequently refuses any help. Another
example can be taken from the scene of the marriage proposal at the home
of Sibel’s family. Cahit responds rather flippantly to the probing question
of his future brother-in-law, about what happened to his Turkish: “I threw
it out!” This offensive reply clearly directs a challenge to Sibel’s skeptical
brother, and Serif, Cahit’s colleague and friend who acts as uncle in the
wedding proposal, quickly rescues the situation by declaring the statement
as a joke. Cahit does not even try to hide his disinterest in his Turkish
heritage and his negative comment can be seen as representing the
tradition of punk rock, which centers on delivering messages that
challenge middle-class bourgeois values. The marriage proposal becomes
a farce-turned-comedy, as Cahit’s and Serif’s disguise delivers a playful
treatment of Turkish customs and clichés focusing on the patriarchal
rituals of the traditional Turkish family.
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 21

Cahit’s process of re-identification with his culture of origin is

triggered by his falling in love with Sibel. When Cahit realizes his love for
Sibel, he is overjoyed. Almost as if to heighten the intensity of this
emotion, he smashes schnapps glasses on the bar counter, presses his
palms into them and, with his hands bleeding, runs off first to the dance
floor, and later onto the stage where a Roma band (Fanfare Ciocarla) is
playing. Domestic bliss lasts only briefly at the Turkish dinner which Sibel
has lovingly prepared, as it ends in hurt and anger caused by a strange
exchange, ultimately revolving around their not having sex together. Cahit
is offended, or his male ego is threatened, and because of his sense of
rejection, he storms out of the apartment. His impulsive reactions and self-
sabotage illustrate that cultural identity is only one of many factors that
determine an individual’s identity and behaviour. Cahit is therefore not a
Turk or German-Turk, but an individual with a unique personal history
and personal problems. Just as Cahit and Sibel recognize their love, events
take a tragic turn through Cahit’s murder of Sibel’s former lover. Their
relationship comes to an abrupt halt: Cahit is imprisoned and Sibel moves
in with her cousin in Istanbul to escape family conflict and the possibility
of an honour killing by her brother YÕlmaz, who is angry because she has
slept with a man other than her husband.
A noticeable change of behaviour and perspective is apparent after
Cahit’s release from prison, at which point he travels to Istanbul in search
of Sibel. He meets with Sibel’s cousin Selma in the Hotel Marmara, brings
chocolates, and acts politely. His refusal to drink alcohol is indicative of
his new-found maturity, part of which is apparently fuelled by his desire to
reunite with Sibel. This scene with Selma is significant in that Cahit offers
a self-analysis: “When I met Sibel the first time, I was dead,” he says, “I
was dead even long time before I met her.” And later, “I lost myself, then
she came and dropped into my life, she gives me love and she gives me
power.” His code-switching to English from Turkish in this conversation
with Selma, who does not speak German, is motivated by his concern that
he will not be able to express himself and his feelings in Turkish.
Although Sibel and Cahit finally meet and consummate their love, their
paths separate again, as Sibel, despite her initial determination, cannot
bring herself to leave her new life and family in order to join Cahit in his
search for a new beginning. In a sense, Sibel is ultimately unwilling to
once again tie her life to his fate.
Does AkÕn convey a sense of resignation or fatalism by way of the
film’s ending? Not necessarily: he does, after all, portray two modern
survivors of a world where the rigidity of socially acceptable (national)
identity constructs leads to much suffering and self-questioning. AkÕn’s
22 Chapter One

resistance to a Hollywood type of happy end, which would have staged the
triumph of an impossible romance, can be read as both a preference for the
neo-romantic gesture of doomed love and/or for emphasizing the human
ability to adjust to new circumstances. Rather than being tragic, the end
shows signs of progress and new beginnings: after being raped by a
barkeeper and brutally beaten by a group of Turkish men whose
masculinity she had challenged out of drunkenness and desperation, Sibel
is rescued by a young taxi driver with whom she ends up staying. Her
motherhood, and its responsibilities, is essentially what gives her life new
meaning. Cahit, although he does not have the family bonds Sibel has
made for herself in Turkey, transforms himself from a metaphorically dead
person to an individual capable of self-acceptance through the power of
hope, and the experience and acceptance of loss. It is significant, then, that
he makes the trip to his hometown—which he had originally envisioned
making together with Sibel and her daughter—by himself, thus concluding
an important step in his search of identity and entering upon a new road to
travel.

The Local, Localities, People

Throughout Gegen die Wand, the regional character of Hamburg shines
through in certain idiomatic expressions that Cahit uses; for example
“Digger,” which can be translated as “pal” or “dude.” A rather funny
situation arises after Cahit’s arrival in Istanbul, where he unexpectedly
meets another German-Turk: a Bavarian-Turkish taxi-driver. This scene
also plays with a Turkish stereotype: the taxi-driver states that he was
deported because he dealt drugs. Further, this scene illustrates how within
German and German-Turkish identity, there are very narrow identity
marker distinctions, tied to regional origin and dialect or dialectical
influence. Localism, even encountered in an international city such as
Istanbul, is clearly set in opposition to the global, and plays a considerable
role in identity construction. Featherstone comments that “locality and
localism, have generally been associated with the notion of a particular
bounded space with its set of close-knit social relationships based upon
strong kinship ties and length of residence.”28
In all of AkÕn’s films the neighbourhood provides the social context
with which the characters identify. In Kurz und schmerzlos (Short Sharp
Shock 1998), a movie recreating the atmosphere of 1980s US crime films,
AkÕn depicts life in the “mean streets” and the “hoods of Hamburg
Altona,”29 where three male protagonistsʊa Greek, a Turk, and a
Serbʊbond through their ties to the local neighbourhood. In AkÕn’s
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 23

follow-up film, Im Juli (2000), a romantic comedy and road-movie,

Hamburg is the setting at the outset of the movie, before the action moves
across the Balkans towards its final destination, Istanbul. As in Kurz und
schmerzlos, public spaces such as streets, an outdoor flea-market, an
alternative outdoor bar and concert space, and the shores of the Elbe River
are featured, but in accordance with the storyline about the good-natured,
slightly uptight teacher Daniel they appear in predominantly bright and
clear colours. His character is expressed in his tidy high-school classroom,
and his clean and neat apartment is highlighted with inviting, bright
sunlight. Likewise, the characters in the expository first part of the film are
so friendly, generous, and accommodating that they appear comical. This
film also employs exaggeration, but unlike the realism of Kurz und
schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand, Im Juli plays with stereotypes in an
explicitly humorous and ironic way. Because of how the camera
foregrounds such a wealth of cultural information, and because of the feel-
good narrativeʊDaniel’s introduction to other cultures and the comedy of
errors that results from an initial mix-upʊ, this film has been used as
intercultural learning tool in German classes in the North-American
context.30
The documentary Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren (We Forgot to
Go Back, 2001) also presents Hamburg to viewers. This time the
neighbourhood of Altona is viewed in light of its multicultural nature, or at
least as it is found within AkÕn’s own circle of friends. Here, individuals
from diverse cultural backgrounds socialize in their leisure time, and
nationality does not play a role. As the actor and musician Adam
Bousdouskos states: “Wenn man mich fragt, wo bist du her, dann sag ich,
ich komm aus Hamburg” (If somebody asks where I am from, I answer
that I am from Hamburg).31 The apparent connection between the local
neighborhood and the multicultural context seems to confirm Römhild’s
findings:

Is the city the smallest common denominator that enables integration into
German lifeʊif not on a national level, then at least on the local one? The
Frankfurt Turks contradict this notion: it is not the German Frankfurt to
which they are referring, not the city as a part of the national republic, but
rather the potentially cosmopolitan metropolis, which offers the social and
cultural framework for their particular life plans.32

The Hamburg neighbourhood in Gegen die Wand also constitutes a home

for Cahit and the city’s subculture: for example the event space “Fabrik”
and the Turkish disco are close to/right beside the local bar and
hairdresser. Yet in this film there is an odd sense of disconnectedness,
24 Chapter One

resulting from Cahit’s own detachment from society, with the sole
exception of his German-Turkish friend Serif, who unselfishly gives him
money to fly to Istanbul after his release from prison. In yet another
movie, Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven), the specificity of its
location is highlighted. The film is set both in Bremen and Istanbul, and as
New York Times film critic A. O. Scott notes, AkÕn’s “camera absorbs the
authentic beauty of both countries […] manifesting local knowledge.”33
Here too the street is a locale of symbolic significance, this time
functioning as the site of a political rally and community gathering. The
spectator is presented with scenes from May Day demonstrations, the first
of May being an important day for the labour movement in both countries.
Apparently the documentary shots of the Turkish street rally were taken at
a demonstration by the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and
AkÕn explains the inclusion of this scene as a reminder of the fact that
many mothers on this day mourn their murdered sons.34
As the narrative switches back and forth between Bremen and Istanbul,
the motif of return to the homeland reoccurs when Nejat, the male
protagonist, travels to Istanbul to look for the daughter of his father’s
girlfriend, but ends up staying in Istanbul running a bookstore. In terms of
location, however, AkÕn’s comments about the role of cultural identity and
the search for origin in his films are telling: “Ich glaube nicht so recht an
Wurzeln. Es geht um Menschen, nicht um Bäume. Ich glaube eher, es ist
nicht wichtig, wo du bist. Sondern es ist wichtig, was du machst.” (I don’t
quite believe in roots. It is about human beings, not about trees. I rather
believe it is not so important where you are, but it is important what you
do.)35 Just as Sibel assumes the responsibility of staying in Istanbul for the
sake of her daughter and her new life, Cahit also is ready for a new
beginning, acknowledging his origin through his journey to his birthplace
Mersin. Petra Fachinger sees the motif of the “homecoming” in Gegen die
Wand, as well as in Kurz und schmerzlos, as highly ambiguous,36 and one
may add that Sibel’s decision to remain in Istanbul is caused by the turn
her life has taken. It appears as though the determining factor is not
location, but rather the responsibilities of life and the emotional ties to
other people. Similarly, the characters in Auf der anderen Seite travel to
and stay in Istanbul because they feel needed and have a sense of purpose
in the city. Thus, paradoxically, identity is not so much determined by the
locale or location, but more by a sense of belonging to a social group, and
subsequently “constitutes itself in relationships rather than being merely a
characteristic of individuals.”37
Aside from the portrayal of locations, viewers are of course also
manipulated through the portrayal of characters. The use of exaggeration
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 25

in order to amplify the dramatic effects is a stylistic choice which seems to

follow to some degree one of the greatest American filmmakers, Martin
Scorsese. AkÕn refers to Scorsese’s Mean Streets as the model for his first
better-known film, Kurz und schmerzlos.38 It is not only the use of
violence as a metaphor for ruptures in society, but also the portrayal of the
hero as a loner seeking to be reintegrated in some way that seems to have
inspired AkÕn. There are other allusions, such as AkÕn’s incorporation of
taxi drivers as characters in his two major films, which further suggest
Scorsese’s influence. In terms of character representation in Gegen die
Wand, the extreme portrayal of Turks is striking, and AkÕn’s way of
dealing with the subject matter has been called blunt.39 There is a long
history of “Western manufactured images of the Turks since the early
modern ages [that are] clichéd representations of the Turk as the ‘outsider
or the other,’”40 and Margret Spohn remarks critically that these
representations are recycled and recirculated, up to and including the
present time.41 A further factor that bears mentioning is that, just as in
most other countries, a process of cultural modernization has been at work
for a considerable amount of time in Turkey. Ayúe KadÕo÷lu elaborates on
the particularly difficult position of women in this modernization process:

The Turkish psyche has been burdened with the difficult task of achieving
a balance between the Western civilization and the Turkish culture.
Perhaps one can argue that the women’s world is like a microcosm of this
paradox ingrained within the Turkish psyche. Since the early days of
Westernization at the beginning of the nineteenth century, women have
been burdened with the task of being tightrope walkers between tradition
and modernity.42

Has AkÕn painted a negative image of Turks in an urban setting? The

portrait of the Turkish-German scene in Hamburg, as well as of some
Turkish men in Istanbul, is without question a rather stark picture
containing drastic violence, as well as scenes of sexual and drug abuse.
There is indeed a risk of stereotyping based on the connection between
categorization (the Turkish) and “the generalizing ascription of
behavioural modes to individuals as representatives of specific larger
units.”43 However, AkÕn has stated that the characters in Head-On are not
meant to represent the whole Turkish minority, but rather the outsiders of
that community.44 Ultimately, the conflicted characters in AkÕn’s films
remain ambivalent, and thus perhaps unable to create identification in
viewers. However, there is another important aspect of his films that
addresses the emotions of viewers in a universally understood language:
music.
26 Chapter One

Music and its Functions: Structure, Meaning, Messenger

Some critics have pointed to the crucial nature of the soundtrack for Gegen
die Wand, yet generally films by German Turkish filmmakers tend to be
discussed primarily in terms of their political and sociological content,
while their aesthetic, poetical, and artistic merit tend to be neglected. In
the following I review the functions and effects of music in AkÕn’s films in
order to counteract this general trend.45 Music is, in a first instance, used
as a structural device in AkÕn’s films: the interludes of Turkish traditional
music (arabesque) presented by Selim Sesler and his orchestra in Gegen
die Wand, positioned by the Bosporus on a huge red carpet in a postcard
scenery with blue sky and boats drifting by in the background, divide the
narrative into five acts. This theatrical element serves as a distancing
device, and also signals the fictional nature of the story to viewers.46
Moreover, the first song’s lyrics about the loss of love and unrequited love
lend the film a general melancholic, sad feel. The critic Mukund Lath aptly
compares the songs to poetic comments, and stresses the affinity of the
sung tale to the sagas of love sung all over Western and Central Asia,
including Indian love sagas, all of which speak of the transformative
power of love.47
As if to symbolize the various facets of cultural identity, the musical
styles of the sound-track range from traditional Turkish music to Turkish
pop and club music, electronic music, reggae, and rock. The music was
selected before filming, and AkÕn explains the crucial role of music as the
driving force for the scriptwriting, directing, and cinematographic work:
“Am Anfang war für mich der Sound. Sound, der mich begleitete, mich
inspirierte, den Drang hatte mit einem Bild einer Szene, einem Drehbuch,
einem Film zu verschmelzen.” (In the beginning there was the sound, it
accompanied me, inspired me, pushed to be fused with an image, a scene,
a script, a film.)48 The music enhances moods and emotions, in some cases
foreshadowing and commenting on the plot, and as the final song plays
during the credits, the soundtrack provides the quintessential moral of the
film: “Life is what you make it.” The song, the band Zinoba’s cover-
version of the Talk Talk original, features lyrics that emphasize the
individual’s responsibility in shaping his or her life and personal identity:

Baby
life’s what you make it—can’t escape it
baby
yesterday’s favourite—don’t you hate it?
ev’rything’s alright—life’s what you make it
ev’rything’s alright
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 27

baby
life’s what you make it—don’t backdate it
baby
don’t try to shake it—beauty is naked
ev’rything’s alright—life’s what you make it
ev’rything’s alright—what you make it baby
life’s what you make it—celebrate it
anticipate it—yesterday’s faded
nothing can change it—life’s what you make it
ev’rything’s alright—life’s what you make it
ev’rything’s alright—life’s what you make it
ev’rything’s alright—ev’rything’s alright.49

The documentary Crossing the Bridge, which followed Gegen die Wand,
is entirely devoted to the portrayal of Istanbul’s music scene, and is
narrated from the perspective of musicians and singers. AkÕn considers
this film a “sort of supplement” to Gegen die Wand because of the key role
that music plays in both films.50 Apparently the idea to make a film about
the sounds of Istanbul came to AkÕn during the filming of Gegen die
Wand, when it struck him how the German musician Alexander Hacke
was able to communicate with the Roma musicians entirely on the basis of
music.51 The documentary deals with the theme of East–West conflicts
among Turks, by illustrating the presence of Western elements, rhythms,
instruments, and styles in Turkish music. Clearly, the range of music, and
the respective influences from the East or the West, reflect a pluralistic
concept of cultural identity, and, moreover, denote the inflections of
(post)-modernity within a national culture. This is by no means a recent
process:

In 1925, shortly after the inauguration of the Turkish Republic, Atatürk

made a speech proclaiming that “the capacity of a country to change is
demonstrated by its ability to change its music.” Putting his theory to the
test, Atatürk prohibited the performance and distribution of music sung in
Arabic or other minority languages and deemed that traditional folk songs
arranged in the western classical style should become Turkey’s musical
destiny. […] By opening up the musical boundaries, the Turkish people are
once again putting Atatürk’s theory to the test—using music to redefine
Turkish culture as one that embraces ethnic diversity and isn’t afraid of a
good groove.52

Crossing the Bridge opens with a quote by Confucius on how music is

essential to understanding a society’s culture: “When you come to a place
and want to understand the culture prevailing there, how profound or
superficial it is, then listen to the music that is played there. You will learn
28 Chapter One

everything about this place.”53 Travelling back from the present through
the recent development of Turkish music, the film begins with the more
Western sounds of bands and musicians who use rock and hip hop, before
dealing with the more Oriental sounds of influential traditional artists such
as Orhan Gencebey, the “Elvis” of the Arabesque style, Müzeyyen Senar,
the Grande Dame of classical Oriental salon music, and the pop diva
Sezen Aksu, also called the voice of Istanbul. According to AkÕn, this film
also tries to reach Turks in Germany, who “know almost nothing about
Turkey today.”54 While AkÕn takes a critical stand towards traditional
Turkish moral codes, he injects Turkish cultural identity with new life by
employing its rich music, a language that is universal and accessible to
everyone.
It is noteworthy that from the mid-nineties onwards, an ethnic revival
among the German-Turkish youth living in large German cities could be
observed, also manifested in an increased interest in Turkish traditional
music. As part of their search for identity, young people have rediscovered
their cultural roots and blended Turkish music with hip hop, house, and
pop, thus creating a new sense of community and solidarity among
themselves.55

[C]afés and clubs emerging in the expensive downtown areas have

established themselves in the mainstream yet still serve/cater to almost
exclusively Turkish patrons, especially from the middle class. Here, one
can listen to Turkish pop as it is played in Istanbul or Ankara, and the
interior design is urban and fashionable. The décor here is neither ghetto
nor arabesque folklore. Understood as modern and European, urban
Turkey is the inspiration for this scene.56

Interestingly enough, a process associated with the increased validation

and recollection of traditional folklore in the context of globalization, and
tied to political liberalization at work in Turkey, also began in the early
nineties, roughly at the same time as the rediscovery of traditional Turkish
music among German-Turkish youth.57 This validation of folklore was a
veritable unearthing of the cultural wealth of Turkey with its diverse
minority music (folk songs of Anatolia, and those sung in Kurdish,
Aramaic, Laz, Armenian, and Greek).
In AkÕn’s most recent film, Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of
Heaven), the music still echoes the East-meets-West-theme of Crossing
the Bridge, although the accent has shifted to the fusion of Turkish
traditional music and contemporary western electronic music styles.
Interacting with the image and the dialogue, the soundtrack accompanies
the protagonists in the manner of a road movie, and the music oscillates
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 29

between traditional tracks from Istanbul and the Black Sea, and European
club and dub sounds. The main track was written by singer/songwriter
KâzÕm Koyuncu, and the acclaimed German producer and DJ Shantel
(Stefan Hantel), known for his remixing of traditional Balkan music with
techno beats, composed a haunting, atmospheric score in which he fuses
the different influences into his unique style.58

The Language of the Image: Auf der anderen Seite (2007)

In the following I argue that AkÕn has evolved into a director who has
“revived German Romanticism” in his films,59 giving it a modern twenty-
first-century twist that reflects the essential human ability to adapt to crisis
and challenges. In order to show how AkÕn articulates these notions
aesthetically I examine his cinematographic strategies, focusing on image
composition and symbolic language. At the same time, I make evident the
interconnectedness of Gegen die Wand and Auf der anderen Seite. In his
discussion of Gegen die Wand, critic Matthias Knopp demonstrates
through detailed sequence analysis that the dramatic concept of Gegen die
Wandʊattraction and rejection (Annäherung und Abstoßung)ʊis
mirrored cinematographically. This is achieved, for example, through
close-ups typically filmed with a hand-held camera, so as to create
intimacy. It is also evident in the use of a static camera with a point of
view as invisible observer, without shot-reverse-shot editing of
conversations, in order to create distance. In addition, Knopp observes
several significant cinematographic features that contribute to the dramatic
energy, urgency, and finality of this doomed love story. These include: the
claustrophobic mise-en-scène of some crucial scenes depicting Sibel and
Cahit, the documentary character of scenes shot with a handheld camera,
the accelerating effect of sound bridges, and the slower pace of editing in
the last third of the film.60
In contrast to the intensity of raw emotions, to the images of excessive
violence, to the driving beats and mournful sounds of the music in Gegen
die Wand, AkÕn’s Auf der anderen Seite is characterized by a more
meditative and slower, yet no less powerful style in terms of visual and
acoustic impact. As in Gegen die Wand, the film draws a great deal of its
effect from the images and its soundtrack, but foregrounds its more
complex plot. It tells the story of the fragile lives of six people who, linked
by death, connect on emotional journeys toward forgiveness and
reconciliation. The cleverly structured non-linear narrative introduces the
motif of death and expands on the motif of generational conflict. As the
second film in the trilogy Liebe, Tod und Teufel (Love, Death, and Devil),
30 Chapter One

it connects with Gegen die Wand through the common preoccupation with
human life and relationships, presenting extreme situations that reflect the
human condition within the framework of German-Turkish interculturality
in which AkÕn’s stories materialize. But whereas the neo-romantic feel in
Gegen die Wand stemmed from the melodramatic plot and its heightened
emotion, as well as the impossible love relationship, the romantic focus in
Auf der anderen Seite is on death, contemplation, reflection, and
spirituality, all of which represent central motives of Romanticism.
As noted above, the cinematography in Gegen die Wand corresponds
to the dramaturgical concept of closeness and distance, and just like a
variation in Auf der anderen Seite, what is conveyed is similarly the
polarity of solitude and/or isolation, and connection. This binary
opposition is apparent in images that either show the protagonist alone or
absorbed in his thoughts, or face-to-face with another protagonist who
offers contact and support, for instance through the gesture of holding
hands. In the first instance, the image that lingers in viewers’ minds lets us
see the protagonist from the back, looking into the distance in a pensive
mood, waiting, and perhaps full of desire. For example, we watch Nejat’s
father gazing out of the prison window, or we watch Nejat gazing at the
horizon of the sea. As the camera is positioned behind the figure, attention
is called to the fact that the audience assumes the role of voyeurs. A clear
allusion to a technique used by the German Romantic painter Caspar
David Friedrich, this positioning of the camera and composition of the
picture, especially in association with the image of the sea or the view out
of a window, evokes a sense of loneliness or immersion in the world, as
well as the power of space, transcendence, spirituality. Yet at the same
time it reflects on the post-modern gaze, thus distancing us from the story
just as the two intertitles do, in a manner similar to Brechtian techniques of
Verfremdung (alienation), and it forewarns viewers of the death of Yeter
and Lotte.
A striking image of connection is the scene in the asylum, which
shows the two young, female protagonists each sitting on the bed quite far
apart from one another, but reaching for and holding each other’s hand.
Gegen die Wand presented a similar scene in the prison’s visiting room,
where Cahit and Sibel sit across from each other. In the latter, the
remorseful Cahit, unable to say anything, reaches for Sibel’s hand, who
tearfully promises to wait for him. While Gegen die Wand depicted
subculture, rebellion, and featured punk music, as well as social spaces
such as the club and bar-scene, and hotels, Auf der anderen Seite is
interspersed with the motif of reading and education, and features more
quiet spaces such as private rooms, a garden, a bookstore, and a lecture
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 31

hall. Not only is Nejat, the male protagonist, a professor of German

literature, but he also teaches the iconic German author, Goethe. In one
scene he is shown lecturing on Goethe’s rejection of the idea of revolution,
which Nejat argues resulted from Goethe’s understanding of nature, of the
natural, organic order of the world, and of the order of the seasons. The
link between this motif and the plot of the film consists in the critique of
the use of violence and force: Auf der anderen Seite indicates the violence
of political suppression (e.g., of the Kurds), of political rebellion (e.g.,
Ayten owns a gun which becomes by accident the weapon that kills Lotte),
and violence in gender relations (e.g., Nejat’s father tragically kills Yeter
through a blow delivered during an argument). In contrast, the film
advocates through its characters Nejat and Yeter the cultivation of the
mind by way of reading and studying: Nejat gives his father books to read,
hoping to inspire in him an appreciation of Turkish literature. In the end,
he even leaves his academic job in favour of his love for books, when he
has the chance to buy a German bookstore in Istanbul. In this way, Nejat
puts into practice the idea that action matters more than place, while, at the
same time, he fosters cross-cultural enrichment. Similarly, the prostitute
Yeter highly prioritizes education, as she uses most of her earnings to
finance her daughter’s university studies in Turkey.
What is more, and in contrast to Gegen die Wand, Auf der anderen
Seite depicts intergenerational learning, which is tied to the notion of
forgiveness. When Nejat’s father is in the hospital, the son has to take care
of his father’s backyard garden. Yeter, his father’s girlfriend, reminds him
to water the tomato plants and check the ripeness of the fruit. Nejat plucks
a couple of tomatoes and they both eat the fully ripe tomatoes. Thus, Nejat
learns to observe the cycle of nature in seasons, a topic he formerly only
lectured about, as a theory. Later, we see Nejat’s father after his
deportation to Turkey sitting in a public park by the side of the Bosporus,
absorbed in the book his son gave to him, with the former church-turned-
museum Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofya) in the background. Just as the son
learns from the father, so the father learns from the son. Eventually, the
father returns to the fishing village of his youth, situated on the shore of
the Black Sea. This is where, in the film’s closing shot, Nejat awaits his
father’s return from a fishing trip.
This scene, during which Nejat prepares to forgive his father for
Yeter’s death, is strongly reminiscent of the famous Romantic era painting
by Caspar David Friedrich, entitled Mönch am Meer (Monk on the
Seashore, 1808/09). Friedrich’s painting shows the tiny figure of a monk,
exposed to the sublime grandeur of nature, standing forlorn at the pale
white shore and looking out on the dark sea over which the cloudy sky
32 Chapter One

towers like a baldachin. Nature envelopes Nejat too here at the Black Sea,
but moreover, we can deduce from Nejat’s quoting Goethe’s words about
natureʊfrom his realization about the importance of time for the ripening
of the fruit to his waiting for his father who is fishingʊ, that he recognizes
in his father an earthiness and wisdom that he does not (yet) possess. It is
also no coincidence that Lotte’s mother, in a key scene with Ayten, is
shown placing cherries on a cake while Ayten hurls political statements at
her: the parental generation more so than the idealistic, lofty daughters and
sons is depicted as grounded in nature and nurturing actions. The strength
of Lotte’s mother becomes tangible in her decision to make peace with
Ayten, the woman who indirectly caused her daughter’s death. Here too,
the location where forgiveness takes place is highly symbolic: it is in
Nejat’s bookstore, which is a place of musing, learning, and intercultural
exchange, that the two women meet. In a still from a shot where Lotte’s
mother, Susanne Staub, kind-heartedly reaches out and holds Ayten’s
hand, one can detect two little flags on the corner of the desk, the German
and the Turkish flag. According to AkÕn, his producer and friend Andreas
Thiel placed them there before the scene was shot.61 The allusion to the
possibility and reality of political and cultural cooperation between the two
countries is a topic which has become all the more current in both
countries since Turkey’s move towards membership in the European
Union.

Conclusion
AkÕn’s Gegen die Wand offers a narrative that includes rich, three-
dimensional characters, and depicts the harsh reality of clashing cultural
norms and restrictions. The film addresses the theme of cultural identity by
showcasing Cahit’s self-conception as a German, thus rejecting the notion
that there exists a clear-cut national cultural identity, and instead replacing
it with the notion of cultural hybridity. AkÕn promotes Turkish culture
through its music, language(s), localities, and literature, thereby
contributing to the dialogue of cultural and social bilingualism through his
bitter-sweet tale of two lovers, defeated in their quest to share their lives
together, but who nonetheless survive.
As a storyteller, AkÕn narrates stories of personal growth, and he
succeeds in drawing viewers in with a cinema of realism that does not shy
away from big feelings and drama, and which, beyond that, is evocative of
iconic romantic themes such as love, death, and transcendence. It is
noticeable that AkÕn shows strong women who take the initiative, who are
unafraid of risks and sacrifices, who seek out their dreams and fight for
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 33

them, whether they be personal or political. His message revolves around

belief in change, both on a personal and political level, and he portrays
figures that are on a quest both for identity and for giving their life a
purpose. AkÕn’s belief in the value of education is expressed by the
characters in his films, which feature a teacher, a professor turned
bookshop owner, and a prostitute who works to finance her daughter’s
university studies. Rather than hiding behind a presumed collective
identity, AkÕn underlines the importance of individual agency through his
credo: “Life is what you make it.” This emphasis on the personal is
inseparably linked, though, to a political critique of society. Auf der
anderen Seite also addresses Turkish political issues. For instance, AkÕn
refers to some thematic recycling from Crossing the Bridge, that is, the
Kurdish fight for freedom of speech. Moreover, by emphasizing this theme
of cultural fusion, and its challenges caused by society as well as by the
individual’s personal limitations, he addresses a very important issue in an
aesthetically appealing and timeless fashion.
Among German-Turkish directors, AkÕn’s unique signature appears to
be the way he weds filmic imagery to compelling soundtracks with mood-
creating effects and a wide range of styles, which play a significant
function as a complement to the narrative. The soundtracks in AkÕn’s films
produce meaning as a cultural subtext, and represent an aesthetically vital
element of the film. AkÕn’s relative celebrity, garnishing public attention
thanks both to the more popular media and critics, helps give his work a
status whereby it shapes the public discourse on diversity in Germany. His
films are so important perhaps because, while telling tales of German-
Turkish characters, AkÕn goes beyond delivering a social-political
message, giving his films the literary and aesthetic qualities that make for
great cinema.

Note
1
See Suzan Gülfirat, “Was türkische Blätter über Sibel Kekilli schreiben,”
originally published in the Tagesspiegel 23 January 2004, reprinted in Fatih Akin:
Gegen die Wand. Das Buch zum Film mit Dokumenten, Materialien, Interviews,
edited by Helge Machow (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2004), 219.
2
Thomas Elsaesser, “Ethical Calculus: The Cross-Cultural Dilemmas and Moral
Burdens of Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven,” Film Comment May/June 2008,
<http://www.filmcomment.com/article/the-edge-of-heaven-review>. See also Petra
Fachinger, “A New Kind of Creative Energy. Yadé Kara’s Berlin and Fatih Akin’s
Kurz und Schmerzlos and Gegen die Wand,” German Life and Letters 60.2 (2007):
254.
34 Chapter One

3
AkÕn weaves his themes of cultural identity, gender relations and local scene into
the film Soul Kitchen (2009), which could not be given full consideration in this
chapter. Set in Hamburg, and revolving around “trust, love and loyalty” (AkÕn),
this romantic comedyʊwith comedy a genre which AkÕn feels is the most difficult
to directʊis also a Heimatfilm, following in the tradition of films about the life of
youngsters and rockers in Hamburg (Klaus Lemke Rocker, 1972, Hark Bohm
Nordsee ist Mordsee [Baltic See is Death See], 1975/1976, and Sebastian Schipper
Absolute Giganten [Absolute Giants], 1999). In keeping with the film’s title, Soul
Kitchen features soul music and plenty of food and kitchen scenes, starring Adam
Bousdoukos from Short Sharp Shock as a restaurant owner, Moritz Bleibtreu from
In July as his brother, and Birol Ünel from Head-On as a rock-star chef.
4
Lale Heckmann-Yalçin, “Negotiating Identities: Media Representations of
Different Generations of Turkish Migrants in Germany,” in Fragments of Culture:
The Everyday of Modern Turkey, edited by Deniz Kandiyoti and Ayúe Saktanber
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2002), 309.
5
Deniz Gökturk, “Beyond Paternalism: Turkish German Traffic in Cinema,” in
The German Cinema Book, edited by Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter, and Deniz
Göktürk (London: The British Film Institute, 2002), 249.
6
See Filmportal.de, “Kino und Migration in der BRD,”
<http://www.filmportal.de/thema/kino-und-migration-in-der-brd>, and likewise at
Filmportal.de, “Sowohl als auch: Das “deutsch-türkische” Kino heute,”
<http://www.filmportal.de/thema/sowohl-als-auch-das-deutsch-tuerkische-kino-
heute>.
7
Gerd Gemünden, “Hollywood in Altona: Minority Cinema and the Transnational
Imagination,” in German Pop Culture: How “American” is it?, edited by A. C.
Mueller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 180.
8
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
9
Young Germany, “I try to take the best of both. Upcoming director Buket Alakus
talks about her Turkish background, her family and her films,”
<http://www.young-germany.de/life-in-germany/life-in-
germany/article/9474220923/upcoming-director-buket-alakus-talks-about-her-
turkish-background-her-family-and-her-films.html>, accessed 3 February 2008.
10
Petra Tabeling, “German Turkish Stand-Up Comedy. Laughter Fosters
Integration,” translated from the German by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida, Qantara.de,
<http://en.qantara.de/content/german-turkish-stand-up-comedy-laughter-fosters-
integration>.
11
Sabine Pahlke-Grygier, “Kaya Yanar—‘What you lookin’ at?’,” Qantara.de,
<http://en.qantara.de/content/kaya-yanar-what-you-lookin-at>.
12
Quoted after Erol Boran, “Eine Geschichte des Türkisch-Deutschen Theaters und
Kabarett.” Diss. Ohio State University, 2004,
<https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO :10:P10_ETD_SUBID:63395>.
13
Gunnar Lützow, “Okay, we are Kanaks.” First published in English in the
Berliner Morgenpost International 28 March 1999. Translated from the German
by David Gramling, reprinted in Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration 1955–
2005, edited by Deniz Gökturk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2007), 456.
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 35

14
Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality—the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in
Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, edited by Mike Featherstone and Scott M.
Lash (London: Sage, 1999), 197.
15
Welsch, 199.
16
Regina Römhild, “When Heimat Goes Global,” first published in Die Zeit (14
March 2002), translated from the German by David Gramling, reprinted in
Germany in Transit. Nation and Migration 1955–2005, edited by Deniz Gökturk,
David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
California Press, 2007), 373.
17
Göktürk, 248–49.
18
John Tomlinson, “Globalization and Cultural Identity,” in The Global
Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, edited by
David Held and Anthony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 269.
19
Tomlinson, 270.
20
See Tomlinson, in particular 273–76.
21
Matthias Knopp, “Identität zwischen den Kulturen: Gegen die Wand,” in
Kontext Film: Beiträge zu Film und Literatur, edited by Michael Braun and
Werner Kamp (Berlin: Schmidt, 2006), 72.
22
Janet Spreckels and Helga Kotthoff, “Communicating Identity in Intercultural
Communication,” in Handbook of Intercultural Communication, edited by Helga
Kotthoff and Helen Spencer-Oatey (Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007),
416.
23
Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity: An Introduction
to Modern Societies, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth
Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 597.
24
Spreckels/Kotthoff, 415.
25
Karl-Heinz Hillmann, Wörterbuch der Soziologie (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1994),
350–53.
26
Quoted from Spreckels/Kotthoff, 417.
27
Anselm L. Strauss, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity (Mill Valley
CA: Sociology, 1969), 15.
28
Michael Featherstone, “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity,” in Global,
Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob
Wilson and Wimal Dissnayake (Durham and London: Duke University Press,
1996), 47.
29
Gemünden, 184.
30
See, for example, Anette Guse, “Das Medium Spielfilm im DaF-Unterricht:
Chancen zur Kommunikation und interkulturellen Wahrnehmung,” in
Interkulturelle Kompetenzen im Fremdsprachenunterricht. Intercultural Literacies
and German in the Classroom. Festschrift für Manfred Prokop, edited by
Christoph Lorey, John L. Plews, and Caroline L. Rieger (Tübingen: Günter Narr
Verlag, 2007), 223–46.
31
Fatih AkÕn, Wir haben vergessen zurückzukehren, Germany 2001.
32
Römhild, 374–75.
33
A. O. Scott, “Tying Knots that Bind Lives despite the Divisions of Generation
and Nationality,” The New York Times 21 May 2008,
36 Chapter One

<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21 /movies/21heav.html>.
34
See Katharina Dockhorn, Interview “Mein Heimatgefühl hat sich ausgebreitet,”
EPD Film, Das Kino-Magazin 24.10 (2007): 31.
35
Lasse Ole Hempel, Interview “Ich glaube nicht an Wurzeln,“ Der Tagesspiegel
Online 7 November 2002,
<http://archiv.tagespiegel.de/archiv/07.11.2002/286520.asp>.
36
Fachinger, 257.
37
Spreckels/Kotthoff, 433.
38
Volker Behrens, Interview “Das Leben ist, was man draus macht,” Hamburger
Abendblatt 10 March 2004, <http://www.abendblatt.de/kultur-live/article240428/
Das-Leben-ist-was-man-draus-macht.html>.
39
See Eleonora Volodina, interview, Deutsche Welle: Culture and Lifestyle 2
February 2004, <http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1114779,00.html>.
40
Azade Sehan, “Paranational Community/Hyphenated Identity: The Turks of
Germany,”
<htpp://jsis.washington.edu/programs/Europe/wendep/SeyhanPaper.htm>,
2. Accessed 9 April 2006.
41
Margret Spohn, Alles getürkt. 500 Jahre (Vor)Urteile der Deutschen über die
Türken, (Oldenburg: Bibliotheks- und Informationssystem der Universität, 1993),
<http://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/664/>.
42
Ayúe KadÕo÷lu, “The Paradox of Turkish Nationalism and the Construction of
Official Identity,” Middle Eastern Studies 32.2 (1996): 1–13.
<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/ acad/intrel/ayse.htm>.
43
Spreckels/Kotthoff, 423.
44
See Volodina, <http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1114779,00.html>.
45
Filmportal.de, “Sowohl als auch: Das ‘deutsch-türkische’ Kino heute,”
<http://www.filmportal.de/thema/sowohl-als-auch-das-deutsch-tuerkische-kino-
heute >.
46
Knopp, 64. See also Fachinger, 258.
47
Mukund Lath, “A Response to Head-On,” Cinemaya. The Asian Film Quarterly
63–64 (2004): 50.
48
See CD Booklet Auf der anderen Seite (Soundtrack), Label: Normal (Indigo).
49
See <http://www.justsomelyrics.com/1523597/zinoba-life%27s-what-you-make-
it-lyrics.html>.
50
Daniel Bax, Interview “Rocking Istanbul,” original version in Tageszeitung 9
June 2005, <http://print.signandsight.com/features/206.html>.
51
Anke Dürr and Marianne Wellershoff, interview, “Turkey is neither Eastern nor
Western. Or is it Both?” translated from the German by Christopher Sultan, Der
Spiegel 6 June 2005, <http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/new-film-from-
head-on-director-fatih-akin-turkey-is-neither-eastern-nor-western-or-is-it-both-a-
359213.html>.
52
Lisa Grossman, “Turkey: Lost Songs Rediscovered,” April 2004,
<hhttp://archive-com.com/page/1006540/2012-12-19/http://www.roughguides.
com/website/Travel/SpotLight/ViewSpotLight.aspx?spotLightID=358>.
53
Fatih AkÕn, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, Germany, 2005.
54
See Bax, <http://print.signandsight.com/features/206.html>.
 Fatih AkÕn’s Take on German-Turkish Film 37

55
Thomas Jahn, “Türksün—You’re a Turk.” First published as “Türksun—Du bist
Türke” in Die Zeit 12 January 1996. Translated from the German by Tes Howell,
reprinted in Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955–2005, edited by
Deniz Gökturk, David Gramling, and Anton Kaes (Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 2007), 448.
56
Römhild, 375.
57
See Chris Morris, The New Turkey: The Quiet Revolution on the Edge of Europe
(London: Granta, 2005), 239–42. The label Kalan Music, founded by Hasan Saltik,
has published forgotten ethnic music as well as old Turkish classical music.
58
Essay recordings, Essay on Auf der anderen Seite. Soundtrack,
<http://www.essayrecordings.com/essay_adas.htm>.
59
Feridun Zaimo÷lu, “Sex, Drogen und die Schocks der Moderne,” originally
published in Tagesspiegel 10 March 2004, reprinted in Helge Malchow, ed., Fatih
Akin. Gegen die Wand. Das Buch zum Film mit Dokumenten, Materialien, Interviews
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004), 213.
60
Knopp, 66–73.
61
Fatih AkÕn, Auf der anderen Seite. Presskit, <http://www.auf-der-anderen-
seite.de/THE_EDGE_OF_HEAVEN_presskit.pdf>, 2, 8. See also NDR- Online.
Kultur, Film, Produktionen. “Soul Kitchen”: Fatih Akin dreht “Heimatfilm,”
<http://www.ndr.de/der_ndr/presse/mitteilungen/pressemeldungndr2652.html>.

Bibliography
AkÕn, Fatih. Auf der anderen Seite. Presskit. <http://www.auf-der-
anderen-seite.de/THE_EDGE_OF_HEAVEN_presskit.pdf>. 1–14.
—. “Rocking Istanbul.” Interview by Daniel Bax, original version in
Tageszeitung 9 June 2005.
<http://print.signandsight.com/features/206.html>.
—. “Das Leben ist, was man draus macht.” Interview by Volker Behrens.
Hamburger Abendblatt 10 March 2004.
<http://www.abendblatt.de/kultur-live/article240428/Das-Leben-ist-
was-man-draus-macht.html>
—. “Turkey is neither Eastern nor Western. Or is it Both?” Interview by
Anke Dürr and Marianne Wellershoff. Translated from the German by
Christopher Sultan. Der Spiegel 6 June 2005.
<http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,359213,00.html>.
—. “Ich glaube nicht an Wurzeln.” Interview by Lasse Ole Hempel. Der
Tagesspiegel Online 7 November 2002.
<http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/art772,1973462>.
—. Interview by Eleonora Volodina. Deutsche Welle: Culture and
Lifestyle 2 February 2004.
<http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1114779,00.html>.
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Auf der anderen Seite. Soundtrack CD. <http://www.essayrecordings.com/

essay_adas.htm>.
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ausgebreitet.” EPD Film Das Kino-Magazin 24.10 (2007): 31.
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heaven-review>.
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Braun and Werner Kamp, 59–77. Berlin: Schmidt, 2006.
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Witsch, 2004.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “Go to Orelle,” Brann said. “I’m winning too easily. Perhaps they
can use another fighter. Then they may be able to give me more of a
battle. Though, if I chose, I could crush you with a thought—turn the
air itself into a weight that would flatten you in an instant. But Orelle
may think of a use for you. I can’t, except to divert myself with your
reactions to certain experiments.”
The unheard voice grew carelessly casual.
“Too easy a victory is no victory at all. Go away.”
Anger stirred in Miller at that calm assumption of superiority.
Brann was thoroughly justified, of course, yet no man likes to be
discounted utterly. With all his power Miller willed himself to rise, to
float upward as easily as he had floated down—and this time he was
certain that his feet lost contact with the earth.
Then a weight like a great stone crushed down on him. Only for
an instant did that frightful, unbearable pressure continue, while the
veins swelled on Miller’s forehead and he heard his breath coming in
deep, rasping gasps as he tried to resist the onslaught.
He went to his knees—down till he lay on his back, prostrate,
helpless beneath that furious assault of the air itself. A screaming
river of wind thundered down and the thin bushes in the gorge stirred
and small landslides began as the air-river rushed in hurricane force
from above.
Brann laughed idly again and obviously lost interest. The
pressure vanished. Sweating, breathing hard, Miller struggled to his
feet. He did not try teleportation again. For a moment he stared up at
the cliff-rim. Then he turned and began to walk up the gorge in the
direction of Orelle’s palace. His mouth was thin and his eyes held an
angry glow.
So Brann was winning too easily. Well—perhaps something could
be done about that!
Far off across the glimmering valley a green hillside rolled high
against the sky. The diamond twinkle that was the castle he must
reach grew larger as he walked—grew larger with abnormal speed.
Miller looked down and was surprised to find that measured by the
pebbles and the flowers underfoot he was taking increasingly long
steps.
 Seven-league boots, he thought, as he found himself striding like
a giant through the softness of the grass. The earth slid by beneath
his feet with dream-like fluidity. Now the diamond glitter of Orelle’s
palace was dividing into hundreds of tinier glitters and he saw the
walls of pale-colored glass rising fantastically upon the green height
of the grass-clad mountain. A palace of glass—or ice.
“Ice,” he thought suddenly. “Ice and snow and rocks. That’s all
there is here. This is a dream. There’s no such world—there couldn’t
be.”
And then reason, stirring in his mind, argued, “Why not? How do
we know the limits of possibility? Out of the few simple building
blocks of the universe—out of neutrons, protons, electrons—
everything we know is made. How much else may there be we can’t
even perceive—unless transmutation takes place and the structure
of a man’s nuclear patterns change to let him see. . . .
“After all, you aren’t the first. There was Van Hornung and who
knows how many before him? There was Tannhauser in the magical
mountain of Venusburg—there was Thomas the Rhymer under the
hill in fairyland. Paradise itself sounds like a distorted tale of just
such a land as this. Legend remembers. You aren’t in any new world.
You’re only exploring a very old one, and—”

Without warning the world dropped away under his feet and all
logical progression of thoughts ceased abruptly. The sky was
beneath him now and the shining world whirling dizzily over and over
around him. But something firmer than gravity clasped him close so
that there was no vertigo, even though the earth had forsaken him.
Green translucence cradled him. There was a sensation of great
speed, and then—
Glass walls flashed past, spun, righted themselves gently. A solid
pavement fitted itself against his soles and leveled off to the
horizontal. He stood in a small, high room whose walls were row
upon row of lenses, like bull’s-eye panes, all looking down upon him
with—eyes? Black mechanical pupils that moved whenever he
moved, following him as he walked toward the nearest wall. For an
instant he felt stripped and naked under that multiple scrutiny.
Then a telepathic voice said, “You come from Brann.”
 Miller looked around wildly. He was alone. Almost automatically
he said, “No!” aloud, so that the air shivered to the harsh sound. He
wasn’t sure why he denied it. Brann had spoken of war.
“Don’t lie,” the voice said coldly. “I can see the dust of Brann’s
mountain on you. Do you think we can’t identify a simple thing like
dust from a given mountain? It streams off you like purple light in the
fluorescents. You come from Brann. Are you a spy?”
“Tsi sent me,” Miller said. “Take me to Orelle.”
“Orelle speaks,” the telepathic voice told him without emotion.
“My sister loves me—but Tsi is no woman to trust. No one on Brann’s
mountain is worth trusting or he wouldn’t be with Brann at all. What
Tsi finds distasteful she denies existence. What do you want here?”
Miller hesitated, glancing around the walls at the impassive,
watching eyes of the—machines? Power, he wanted to say. Give me
that power-source and I’ll go. But he was silent, remembering Tsi’s
warning.
How much of it he could believe he didn’t know now but it was
second nature for him to keep his own counsel until he was sure
enough to act. Orelle could not read his mind. Tsi had confessed that
would be impossible once he began to master telepathic
communication. He would be safe enough as long as he could give
the right answers.
“I’m from the outside,” he offered hesitantly, thinking that
hesitation and uncertainty might be his best defense until he learned
more about this place. Exaggerate them, play up even more than
was really genuine his bewilderment and confusion. “I—Tsi said
you’d help me get oriented here.”
The disembodied voice was silent for a brief, considering
moment. Then it said, “I think you lie. However—are you willing to
accept our search? Only after you’ve been proved weaponless can
we admit you here.”
What could he say but yes? For an instant he remembered the
watch Tsi had strapped to his wrist and what she had said of it. But it
was for communication only—she had said—and surely she knew
that a routine search would probably be made. She wouldn’t have
branded him with something that would give him away to the first
inspection. Or would she? What he had heard of Tsi did little to
increase his confidence in her. Still . . .
“Search if you like,” he said.
The room went dark. Miller, blinking in the sudden blindness, felt
something like the vertigo he had not suffered in flight seize him
relentlessly now he was on solid flooring. The air spun around him in
a shrill diminishing vortex and it seemed to him limitless gulfs were
opening underfoot and sucking him down, tight, tight, into a crushing
spiral of darkness. . . .
Out of the dark lights suddenly sprang into being, cold, blue lights
that struck him like cold water—struck and penetrated. Looking
down, he was aghast to see his own blood coursing red through
transparent veins, to see his bones stand out cleanly white in their
lacings of muscle, moving startlingly when he bent to stare.
The lights went out again. The darkness ceased to whirl. And
then for one instant he felt all through his body an indescribable
shifting, a terrible motion of inconceivable multiplicity. And in that
flash of the instant he was changed.
The atoms went back into their normal pattern. That unstable
isotope which was himself shed its changed form and he was as he
had always been, solid, human, normal.
It was a hideous feeling. Until that moment he had not realized
how much he had changed already, what nascent, nameless senses
had begun to open up in him, pushing back horizons upon glories
beyond glories. It was like deafness and blindness suddenly closing
in about a normal man. It was worse—it was like having all the
properties of death itself imposed upon the living. Miller held his
breath, closed his eyes.
He felt the shift again as the isotope form renewed itself within
him. The shifting stirred in the unthinkable myriads of the nuclei that
formed him. He was whole again.
Once more the vortex whirled and roared in darkness. Then the
dark lifted and he was standing beside a bank of thick yellow flowers
under an arched vault of glass. The floor was tiled in brilliant colors,
resilient to the foot. The flowery bank rising from it might be real
earth and flowers or it might be a skillful imitation. For it was also a
divan.
 Orelle lay upon it, smiling at him. He knew it was Orelle. He was
aware, though he could not have explained how, of the telepathic
emanation from her mind to his, individual as the pattern of the brain.
She was beautiful—as everyone in this world seemed beautiful.

He saw something of Tsi’s features in hers but she was not

dressed with the extravagance her sister affected. She was very
slender, and her graceful body was sheathed tightly in something like
clear satin that covered her to the wrists and ankles and flowed in
long smooth lines over the flowers she lay on. She was pulling them
idly and twirling the blossoms between her fingers.
“Well, you are welcome,” she said, almost reluctantly, eyeing
Miller with a smile that had wryness in it. “We found no weapons,
though we searched you down to the very structure of the protons.
To tell you the truth, we have no reason to trust you.
“But Tsi must have had some reason for sending you here and I
think we’re safer coping with her schemes at first hand than goading
her on to try something more subtle still. Be sure you’re watched, my
friend. Be careful what you do.”
Miller said wryly, “I’m not likely to do anything. From what I’ve
seen of this place, I feel helpless. Do you all have the same powers
as Tsi? How many of you are there? And what—”
Orelle shrugged. “We’re not used to hurry. Of course we have all
the time we need. Your race doesn’t—even here. I can see your
curiosity. And I’ll satisfy it, too. Yes, everyone here has the same
powers, though naturally some are stronger than others. There is the
telepathic factor, and—other things.”
“Bred into your race? But what about me? I’m not your kind.”
She said slowly, “A million years ago your ancestors were,
though. Since then your people have gone down. It took eons to
reach the peak when Atlantis and Mu were great cultures, and it will
take eons more for your race to regain what they have lost. Only
here, on this secret mountain, have we retained the strength of the
old civilizations.”
Miller said. “But what happened?”
“Oh, the usual thing. Men took weapons they weren’t ready to
use. In that time—try to understand this—the atomic structure of the
world itself was different. You know that? That the atom can change
—”
“I do indeed,” Miller told her grimly. “If electrons change, or if the
nucleus changes, the structure changes too.”
She said, “Well, that was what happened. All earth is dull and
dead now. Only here does the old special type of matter still exist. It
throws off a certain radiation that makes it possible for us to be born
and live as we are. In Atlantis there was experiment with nuclear
structures, and transmutation.”
“We have atomic power now,” Miller said.
“The beginnings of it. You’re merely beginning. It will be a long,
long time before you stand where Atlantis once stood. First you must
change the very structure of your world! Only then will you change,
will the radiation-caused mutation alter you and give you the powers
and senses you lost when a world went to war a millennium ago.
“The fires of matter itself moved across the planet, and where it
passed, structure altered and what was bright and shining and
glorious became a dull, empty thing. Men lost their specialized, hard-
won powers then. But the seeds remain latent in their bodies,
recessive characteristics. Here, on the mountain, the recessive can
become dominant for a little while. It is unstable, of course. . . .”
“Then—I’m like you? Tsi told me but I couldn’t believe it. I’m a—a
sort of superman?”
“Every gift has its price,” she said oddly. “There is beauty here
but there is terror too. You must have noticed that you see with
clearer eyes—the eyes of the mind.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed that. Things are—shining, somehow.”
“It would be well if you remembered your own world,” Orelle said,
after a little pause. Her eyes were troubled. “Your own atomic
structure has altered but that can take place only once.”
A man came into view through a glassy wall that melted at his
approach, and solidified again behind him. He looked no older than
Orelle, a firm-fleshed, smiling man whose vari-tinted hair lay
smoothly across his scalp. But his eyes were old, grey and cloudy
with the mists of incalculable centuries.
 CHAPTER IV
The Bomb
“Orelle—” he began. And then the aeon-misted eyes fell upon
Miller, and a look of bewildered recognition seemed to grow in them.
“This man,” he said uncertainly. “Should I know him, Orelle? Has he
been here before, or. . . .” Suddenly the mists cleared from his eyes
and he looked old no longer but resolute and certain.
“I know him!” he said in a crisp voice. “His face was in the Time
Pool. It meant danger. But the likelihood was so remote that—well, I
dismissed it. I didn’t believe.”
“What was the danger?” Orelle leaned forward anxiously, her
satin skirts moving with a gentle rustle over the flowery bank where
she sat.
The man shook his head. “You’ve seen the Time Pool, child.
There are so many possibilities of the future—who can say in what
ripple this man’s face floated for a moment before the bubble burst?
But it was danger. I remember that.”
They turned in one motion and looked at Miller with wise, wary,
thoughtful eyes, astonishingly alike in the two faces. He realized they
must be closely akin, and both akin to Tsi, whom no one trusted far.
He said quickly, “If you can read the future you must know I’m not
a man to break my promises—and I swear to you both I mean no
harm.”
The man made an impatient gesture. “The future is never that
clear. There is no ‘must’ in time—only ‘perhaps’.”
“Tsi sent him,” Orelle said. “She must have had her reasons.”
“She sent me because of Brann,” Miller declared. The two
nodded.
Orelle said, “Well, sometimes she’s moved to save one of
Brann’s victims. Sometimes I think she helps him in his—call them
experiments—on those he captures. She’d like us to think only
whims move her. But we know the thing that lies behind all she does.
Llesi and I—we know.” She smiled grimly at the man beside her.
“She wants the Power,” the man called Llesi said.
 Miller thought to himself, “So do I,” but aloud he said only, “The
Power?” in a voice of innocent inquiry.
Llesi nodded, his eyes fixed speculatively upon Miller as if he
gazed through the mists of incalculable years.
“A toy my brother and I once made that became far more than a
toy before we were finished. Now Tsi claims her share in her father’s
treasure. These two are my brother’s children but sometimes I think
Tsi has no blood of mine in her veins.”
Orelle said, “No, Llesi, she’s only weak. If Brann didn’t rule her so
completely—”
“She’d be welcome to her heritage. But we know that to give her
what she asks is to give it straight into Brann’s hands. And there’d be
an end to this castle and all who live here.”
“Who is Brann?” Miller asked impatiently. “I’ve heard so much
about him, I’ve even heard him speak. But I’ve never seen him. What
does he look like?”
Orelle shook her head. Small bells she wore in her ears tinkled at
the motion, and even the tiny sounds they made were vividly
beautiful to Miller’s increasingly keen new senses.
She said, “No one has seen him except Tsi. No one but she can
tell you what he is. He receives his friends only in the dark or from
behind curtains. Ever since he built that castle, centuries ago, he’s
kept his secret hidden—whatever it may be. I should like to see him
dead.”
She said it without passion. “Brann is true evil, perhaps pure evil
in its most flawless form. He’s very wise and very powerful. I’m not
sure why he chose us for his enemy but I only know now we must
fight or be killed.”
Miller made up his mind suddenly. “As I left his castle,” he said,
“Brann spoke to me from beyond the wall. He said this was a fight he
would win too easily. He told me to come to you as another fighter, to
make the battle more interesting.”
Orelle leaned forward quickly on the flowery bank, her earrings
tinkling musically. “He said that? You know, I’d have guessed the
opposite.
“I’d have said Tsi sent you here knowing Brann would covet you
for his experiments—knowing that with you here, he’d redouble his
efforts to conquer us and drag you back. If his interest were flagging,
that might be the best way to revive it against us and force her entry
here. Because she’d do anything in the world to get her hands on the
Power.”
Llesi interrupted her in a thoughtful voice. “She might send an
envoy here armed with some secret weapon Brann could devise—
something that could pass even our careful searching. Remember,
Orelle, I’ve seen this man before in the Time Pool—this man’s face,
and danger!”
“I’ve given you my word I didn’t come to harm you,” Miller said,
realizing that though he sailed close to the wind of truth in saying
that, at least it was accurate as far as it went. “Still, I’d like to know
more about this Power. Unless you—”
He never finished. For suddenly there was a blast of appalling
sound in the room, and a rush of white-hot fire that seemed to flow
down his arm and burst in a blinding gush from his wrist.
When he could see again, what he saw was stunning. For Llesi
was collapsing where he stood, his knees buckling, his face
strangely drained and empty as if he were dead before he struck the
floor. There was a curious shimmering glow bathing him, sinking
inward like a devouring acid.
Orelle was on her feet, stumbling forward, and from all around
figures were closing in through the glass that melted at their
approach.
Blinded and deafened by a sound that he knew was not truly
audible, Miller tried to spring back.
He could not move. The white dazzling flame still poured from
him upon the falling Llesi. Louder and louder that unheard,
cataclysmic shout roared through the room. Now Miller felt energy of
some strange sort pouring from Orelle and the others—mental
power, a silent, tremendous flood that beat upon the white flame and
—snuffed it like a candle.
The fire was gone. But Llesi had fallen.
A dozen men and women had crowded into the room by now,
bright in their sleek rainbow garments. Two men fell to their knees
beside Llesi.
 Orelle had swung toward Miller. Hot rage blazed tangibly from her
—tangibly, for Miller’s mind winced beneath that telepathic red fury.
Through the scarlet twisted a black thread—the thought and
intention of death, cold black against crimson.
“Orelle!” he cried desperately. “I didn’t—it was some trick!”
He could not speak, even telepathically. For he could see nothing
now but Orelle’s dark eyes, and they were expanding, growing into
luminous pools that chilled him, and effectively paralyzed muscle
and nerve and mind.
Eerily a thought that was not his own moved suddenly in his
frozen brain—moved and reached out toward Orelle.
“Wait, child, wait!” the thought said. “This is Llesi speaking.”

All must have heard it, for every head in the room turned sharply.
The blinding pools that were Orelle’s eyes began to fade and dimly
Miller could see again. In his mind that voice of another brain said,
“The bracelet on his wrist—take it!”
No one stood near Miller but he felt a violent tug at his
wristwatch, saw it torn free. It sprang through the air to Orelle as if
thrown by an invisible hand. She spread her fingers and received it.
But she was looking at Miller.
“Llesi?” she said uncertainly, still staring into Miller’s eyes. “Llesi
—you hear me?”
“Yes. Wait. I must speak with this man . . . Miller . . . wait.”
Orelle gestured. Llesi’s body was lifted without support and
floated toward the bowery couch. It sank down gently. One of the
men came forward and made a quick examination.
“He isn’t dead. It’s stasis, of a sort. But I can’t communicate with
him. Try it, Orelle.”
“Llesi?” Orelle’s thought arrowed out. “Llesi?”
Miller roused from his stupefied amazement. That fantastic voice
in his brain was speaking quietly to himself alone.
“Don’t fight me. They’ll kill you unless you obey me. Empty your
mind, Miller. Let me speak through you. Now. . . .”
Miller listened to the thought that was not his, riding on the waves
of his own telepathic mind, speaking to Orelle and the others. But he
believed it spoke to himself as well.
 “This must be Brann’s doing,” Llesi said. “The bracelet—when I
guessed at a weapon the man Miller could have brought Tsi must
somehow have been listening. Even our tests failed to find it but a
weapon that bracelet must have been. Well, Brann failed but only
thanks to you for smothering the weapon so soon. I’m not destroyed
but I think it may be a long while before I can think or move in my
own body.”
“But you can hear us, Llesi?” Orelle’s voice was soft.
“Through this man—yes. This is a telepathic rapport with him.
There must have been electronic contact at the crucial moment.
Without Miller I would be cut off completely until my body mends
again. I think it will in time. I know the sort of weapon Brann used.
My body will have to absorb vital energy, to overcome the insulation
of atomic stasis the weapon threw about me.
“Now listen, because my strength is going. The mental must draw
on the physical and my body’s an ember now. I must sleep and
gather power. Brann will know what’s happened here—depend on it,
he’ll strike while I’m still helpless. I must think—and rest.”
Orelle said, “We can handle Brann!”
“We can handle him if I can lead you. Otherwise. . . Take no risks.
Remember, my only contact with you is through this man Miller.
Brann will destroy him if he can. But the sword is two-edged.
Through Miller I can fight if I must. Now let me rest. I must gather my
strength, and think.”
The thought trembled on the air—faded—and was gone into an
enormous stillness. Miller was alone again in his own brain.
Orelle stared at him, anger still bright in her mind but leashed
anger now.
“How much of this have you passed on to Brann already?” she
demanded.
Miller said, “I swear I didn’t know I was carrying a time-bomb like
that. Tsi told me it was only a communication device she’d built into
my watch. I can only say I’ll help you fight Brann in any way I can.”
Orelle came forward with quick steps, her satin robes rustling,
and took Miller’s shoulders in a tight grip, reaching high with both
hands to do so. Her eyes were close to his. She stared compellingly
up at him and he felt the warm force of her mind probing his with
angry emphasis.
“Tell me one thing—the truth,” she demanded. “Are you Brann?”
 CHAPTER V
The Signal
The stars were glittering rayed circles of colored fire in the night
sky. Miller lay staring for what seemed a long while, wondering
vaguely what had wakened him. The wall before his bed was clear
glass through which the night sky seemed to look in at him with its
countless silver eyes. He had never seen the stars before, he knew
now.
With his other eyes, they had been only dots of brilliance, without
pattern. Now he could see that there was indeed a pattern to their
arrangement—one too vast for even his augmented mind to grasp
but something he could recognize as being there, even though it lay
outside the range of human understanding.
He could see colors change and glitter in the discs of light that
had been only points without dimension to his old sight. He could
even make out dimly the shapes of continents on one or two of the
planets. And there was a strange, distant, ringing music, almost
inaudible, circling through the dark vault above.
He knew now that it was no legend which told of the music of the
spheres and the stars that sang together. Light-waves and sound-
waves blended into a melody that was neither one nor the other,
neither sight nor sound, but a beautiful medley of both.
“Men in the old days must have heard it,” he thought to himself,
half-asleep. “Maybe in ancient times they were still close enough to
—this state—to catch the echoes of the old music. . . .”
Deep in the center of his drowsing mind a thought stirred that
was not his own. “Miller, Miller, are you awake?”
He framed the answer with an eerie feeling of double-
mindedness. “Yes, Llesi. What is it?”
“I want to talk to you. I’ve gathered enough strength now to last
me awhile. What’s been happening? Are you safe?”
Miller let a ripple of amusement run through his mind. “Thanks to
you. Can you tell from my thoughts that I didn’t know what I was
bringing into your castle? I didn’t mean to attack you.”
“I believe that—with reservations. Does Orelle?”
 “She thought I was Brann. She may still think so though I hope
I’ve convinced her.”
“I can’t read your mind. But I must trust you—no more than I can
avoid! Get up, Miller, and look toward Brann’s castle. I have a feeling
of danger. I think that was what roused me. Something evil is coming
our way.”
Conscious of a slight chill at the gravity with which Llesi spoke,
Miller rose. The floor was ineffably soft to his bare feet. He stepped
out into the little glass bay that formed one side of the room. From
there he could look down over the valley he had traversed that day.
Far off lights glimmered at the height of a sheer cliff—Brann’s castle.
“Why—I can see in the dark!” he exclaimed in surprise, staring
out at the soft, dim landscape that seemed to be lit by a soil of
invisible starshine so that details were delicately visible as they had
never been before.
“Yes, yes,” Llesi’s mental voice said impatiently. “Turn your eyes
to the left—I want to see that wall of the valley. There—now
right. . . .”
The commands, couched in mental terms that took only a
flashing fraction of the time words would have taken were almost like
reflex commands from Miller’s own brain.
“I think you’d better dress and go down to the Time Pool,” Llesi
said at last. Miller could feel the profound uneasiness stirring in the
disembodied mind that his own brain housed. “Hurry. There’s no
guessing what unnatural thing Brann may have shaped to attack us.
He wants you, Miller. Your coming brought our war to a climax and I
know now he won’t stop until he gets you—or dies. It depends on
you and me which thing happens.”
There was a guard at Miller’s door—or the glass wall that melted
like a door when he approached it. Llesi’s mental voice spoke and
the guard nodded and followed down the long sloping ramp of the
glass castle, through great, dim, echoing rooms, along corridors
behind which the people of Orelle’s dwelling slept.
They came out at last into a garden in the heart of the castle.
Circled by glass walls, it lay dim and fragrant around the broad
shallow pool in its center. Starlight shimmered in changing patterns
on the water that rippled slightly in the wind.
 Miller found himself glancing up toward the wall-top without being
sure whether the impulse was his own or Llesi’s. In a moment he
knew, for there was a whispering rush and in obedience to some
command from his own brain—and from Llesi’s—a domed roof of
glass moved across the garden, closing it in.
Now the starlight fell in prismed rays through the dome. It struck
the pool in somehow focused patterns and the water seemed to
respond to that unimaginably light pressure.
Circles formed where the rays struck, formed and spread outward
in interlocking rings that seemed to gather momentum instead of
losing it, so that they were seething together in a very short time,
breaking over one another in tiny waves, tossing up bubbles and
foam. The pool boiled in the cool starlight.

And among the boiling rings there were reflections. Pictures

moved chaotically through one another, so rapidly and so
bewilderingly that Miller grew dizzy as he watched. Once he thought
he saw Tsi’s face with the rainbow hair disordered, streaming in the
wind.
Once he had a glimpse of himself, seen confusingly from the
back, struggling against something that seemed to tower and stoop
above him but the vision rolled under again before he could focus on
it and the faces of strangers floated among bubbles to replace it.
“Is it real?” he asked Llesi inaudibly. “Is this the future?”
There was an impatient movement in his own mind. Llesi, who
had been studying the pictures in the profoundest silence, said, “No
—yes—partly. These are the likeliest futures. No one understands
fully, but the theory is that somewhere in hyperspace all possible
futures work themselves out from any given point.
“And the light-rays—the pictures of all that happens—move on
out into space endlessly. When the glass dome is closed starlight,
falling through the moving rays, projects these pictures back into the
pool for anyone to read who knows how. Men from time everlasting
have tried to read the future in the stars but you can see from this
how difficult it is and how unreliable even a trained mind can be
when it has only this to work from.
 “One decision may alter all probable futures. And those are
unstable, shifting and changing—no man can know the future with
any certainty. But it’s possible to see dangers, sometimes, and
prepare for them—though that may mean facing a worse peril later
on. Wait—”
In the pool a ripple took form at the impact of a reflection and
began to spread. It showed the picture of a shifting, cloudy mass
moving against the translucent water—but moving with a directive
purpose, Miller thought. The background took form. He saw himself
and Orelle in miniature with the cloud no longer shifting but swooping
purposively above them.
Another ripple collided violently with the first and the picture
vanished in a burst of bubbles. But it took shape again in the next
moment, though different now, with a shift in background. The ripples
raced over that image and washed it out with another, like a not-
quite-identical copy. Then he saw the castle in which he stood and it
was, he thought, collapsing into ruins.
That changed. He saw himself in tiny reflections, facing Tsi— And
then a ripple washed across the pool in which he saw his own face
and Slade’s and there was something inexplicably terrible about
both.
Shaken, he asked Llesi a mental question. Llesi answered him
briefly.
“If part of what you just saw happens, other parts can’t happen.
But you saw that cloudy pillar? It appeared too often against too
many backgrounds to be very far off in space or time. Brann is
sending a warrior against us. Not a human warrior. I think we can
expect the cloudy thing we saw quite soon, in one or another of the
versions we’ve been watching.”
“But what is it?”
“I don’t know. Something dangerous—that much you can be sure
of. I think we can defeat it, once we discover what it is. So far we’ve
always been able to defeat Brann’s warriors, no matter what form
they had.”
“So far?” Miller asked. “And then someday—what?”
Mentally Llesi shrugged. “Who knows? I, who read the future,
realize better than most men that I have no way of guessing what is
to come. I can see the possibilities here in the pool, I can foresee the
worst dangers and prepare against them—but beyond that I can’t go.
No. I don’t know what the outcome will be between Brann and me.”
Miller said with abrupt decision, “You’ve looked too long in the
Time Pool! You’ve been depending on what you see there to tell you
what to do. Why not take the future into your own hands?”
There was a curious stillness in his brain at that, as if Llesi were
suddenly wary and watchful. Finally the voice that shared his mind
spoke cautiously.
“What do you suggest?”
“Someday, if I understand you, Brann may succeed at last in
creating a kind of warrior you can’t overcome. I saw this castle falling
in one of those pictures in the pool, so I know it’s possible—no, even
probable, that this thing he’s sending, or maybe the one after it, will
be the one to destroy you. It that right?”
Still caution and distrust ruled Llesi’s mind, but there was
reluctant interest in the mental voice that said, “Go on. What are you
thinking about?”
“Brann wants one thing—the Power. Is that right?”
“The Power and yourself, now. Yes,” Llesi answered.
“So he’ll keep on attacking until he gets one or both. Why haven’t
you attacked him first?”
“Do you think we haven’t tried? Brann’s castle is invulnerable.
We’ve failed and failed and failed again to force any entry by any
means we know. But Brann’s failed, too, against us. It’s stalemate.”
“It needn’t be. I have an idea.” Miller hesitated. “I won’t tell you
now. You wouldn’t accept it. Later on, if things go wrong, maybe
you’ll be willing to listen. Maybe—”

From across the Time Pool, in the dimness of the garden,

Orelle’s mental voice said clearly, “Don’t go on, Miller. Or are you
really Brann?”
Miller had the curious sensation in his brain that both he and Llesi
had actually moved in the center of his skull, as he spun toward the
dark tree where she stood watching.
“How long have you been here, child?” Llesi said.
 “Long enough. I saw the cloudy thing coming in the Pool. I know
what we’ve got to face—but not with treachery to make it even worse
than it is. Oh, Llesi, won’t you let me kill him?”
“Not yet,” Llesi said with a deadly sort of practicality. “Not yet,
because you need me in the fight, and I’m helpless without this man.
Nor am I wholly sure he can’t be trusted, Orelle.”
“I heard what he was trying to suggest. Something treacherous—
some way to help Brann win at last. Llesi, I’m afraid! This isn’t safe. I
—”
A flash of soundless white light without warning illumined the
garden and the whole castle around it, so that every figure stood out
in abrupt silhouette against the whiteness. As suddenly as it came, it
went out, leaving momentary blindness behind it.
Orelle caught her breath and said, “The signal! Llesi—hurry!
Whatever it is, it must be almost here!”
 CHAPTER VI
Invasion
They saw it first far off on the plain, moving toward them through
the clear darkness. At first it seemed only a mist that drifted with the
wind but, when the wind shifted, the grey fog came on. Its heart was
thicker and dimly the eye could glimpse intricate matrices of light far
inside the cloud, glittering patterns like diamond cobwebs arranged
in lattice formations.
Miller and Orelle, with Llesi a bodiless awareness beside them,
stood at a glass wall looking out over the plain toward Brann’s castle.
Llesi breathed softly. “I know that pattern. It’s a bad one. The
thing’s brain and control and energy-source are in the bright matrix
you see. Watch now.”
The lattices shifted into new geometric formations and out of the
cloud rippling, soft grey tentacles thrust, thickening as they moved.
“That would be stronger than iron once it took shape,” Llesi was
saying. “The pseudopod principle, of course. It will be a hard thing to
fight.”
They stood watching in silence while the grey cloud flowed
forward with increasing speed until it was nearly within reaching
distance of the castle. Far off, across the valley, the lights of Brann’s
walls watched like eyes. Miller spoke impatiently.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Can’t you stop the thing?”
“I could. But I want to see what new ideas Brann has
incorporated into this. It’s better to know than to guess. If I destroy
this he’ll just send another. I’m going to let it try the gate.”
The cloud flowed up to the outer wall. . . paused . . . seemed to
be considering the massive glass barrier before it. Then the lattices
rearranged, glittering. A finger of greyness reached out, seeped
through the crack between gate and wall.
Metal groaned in the quiet of the night. That tiny pseudopod was
expanding with monstrous force. The gate shivered, crumpled—gave
way.
Radiant shimmers of color flared down from the walls upon the
cloudy thing as Llesi’s batteries went into action at last. In his own
brain Miller could feel Llesi’s tense watchfulness as he waited to see
how the creature would meet them.
Its lattice-work heart shifted like a kaleidoscope. The clouds
thickened, grew dark. It shrank—expanded again—and moved on
into the castle, a wreathed thing of velvety blackness that swallowed
up the attacking lights and ignored them.
Now they lost sight of it but they could hear, partly through the
vibrations of the castle walls themselves and partly through the
confused mental cries of the people below them, the progress the
machine was making. A transparent wall gave way before it and the
crash of the collapse sent a terrible, ringing music all through the
castle. There was the silent voiceless cry of a man caught in its
unimaginable grip—a cry that shivered up to an unbearable peak in
the brains of all who heard, and then went silent with a suddenness
that made the listeners reel.
Orelle seized Miller’s arm in a tight grip. “Come with me,” she
said. “Hurry!”
She was half-running as she led the way through the dark castle
which was yet so clearly visible to the sight. The confusing halls
were strange to him but before they reached their goal Miller was
leading the way, Llesi in his brain sending out the mental orders that
guided him, so that the corridors and doors and sloping glass ramps
seemed to swing around and to fly open before him without the need
of knowledge on his part.
There was pandemonium below. Miller could feel the tension in
Llesi’s mind and in Orelle’s as they raced toward the breached wall
of their fortress. Llesi was unsure.
“Maybe this is the one,” he said, half to himself, as the
translucent walls spun past. “Maybe this one we can’t fight.”
More than one wall had been breached by the time they reached
the scene of the fight. The castle was filled with the jangling, musical
crashes of shattered glass and the cries—some of them vocal cries
now—of the defenders. But from the attacking machine itself no
sound came.
Miller saw it through jagged walls and over the heads of the
castle’s men—a great coagulated cloud, velvet-soft and iron-hard,
the colored lights of the defenders’ strange weapons beating upon it