German

Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform)

payal — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Manuela von Meinhardis despondently lays flowers on the grave of her mother. It is Prussia in 1910, and as an orphaned teenager, she isn’t left with many options.

Manuela’s aunt takes her to a convent, which is described as a citadel by the Headmistress, Sister Superior. “Poverty is an honor,” she barks at Manuela upon the girl’s arrival. “Get used to tragic blows—you are being trained to be the future mother of soldiers.” The militaristic attitude of Prussian culture is shown in various manners throughout the film: the girls march in formation to enter the convent, they eat in a mess hall, and they regard Sister Superior as their sergeant. Superior tells the students that the values of the school align with those of Prussian women: children, church, and kitchen. The convent is not a scholarly institution; the female students are being trained to serve man, God, and country.

A source of kindness and hope that the girls experience is in the form of Fraeulein von Bernburg. Sister Superior and the teacher von Bernburg are respectful to each other, although they are clearly at odds with each other. Superior welcomes rigidity, rules, and repercussions, while Fraeulein favors empathy and guidance. After a minor disagreement about student behavior, Superior predicts that she and von Bernburg’s paths will inevitably part some day. She fails to realize how quickly that day will arrive.

Manuela is in a new environment and still grieving the loss of her recently deceased mother, so it is easy to see why she gravitates towards Fraeulein von Bernburg. Not only is the teacher beautiful and kind; she genuinely cares about Manuela and wants her to thrive. But the relationship between the teacher and student is not destined to be gentle or effortless. Within the confines of the convent, feelings of repression, jealousy, and sexual curiosity stew among the girls and the all-female staff. This combination turns into a powder keg of sorts, with Manuela and her teacher directly at the center.

The relationship between the two is fraught with angst and drama, but it’s a relationship worth remembering. Despite the fact that the feelings between Manuela and her teacher are not accepted by the society in which they live, both women have a clear conscience about their actions—a lesson that should be noted by anyone, regardless of the culture or time period.

At first I doubted that I would enjoy the film. Honestly, I thought, will I care about a movie that takes place in a pre-World War I Prussian convent that is in German and barely qualifies as being rated PG? However, I was pleasantly surprised at the emotions I found myself experiencing throughout the course of the film: sadness, curiosity, and joy were just a few. And I was genuinely interested in the plight of the characters. The actions of the women at the convent reminded me that people always seem to fulfill roles that help them to cope with difficult situations. Sister Superior was the ailing but brutal general, commanding the troops. Fraeulein von Bernberg was the mother figure, offering tender support and comfort to the girls. One student even took on the role of class clown. Her morale-raising antics caused me to laugh out loud each time she took the screen.

Mädchen in Uniform offers viewers an honest and beautiful look at the relationships between women who are all at different, yet equally trying times in their lives. Its message rings true even fifty years after the original release.

Written by: Rachel Scheib, October 28th 2010

Soul Kitchen

admin — Sat, 31 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Directed by Fatih Akın

Corazón International

Soul Kitchen is a lot like cotton candy—sweet but, ultimately, not very satisfying. Like many festival favorites, the plot of this independent German film revolves around a cast of lovably quirky characters who get themselves eye-deep into trouble.

Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), a German of Greek descent, has a lot of stuff on his plate. He’s the proprietor of Soul Kitchen, a struggling eatery in a rundown section of Hamburg. The tax people, led by Frau Schuster (Catrin Striebeck), are knocking at his door. His ne’er-do-well brother, Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), seeks employment at the restaurant wanting “to go through the motions” of working so that he can make parole. Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring), a shady real estate agent, is sniffing around in hopes of acquiring the property. An uninsured Zinos makes the mistake of trying to move a heavy dishwasher by himself and gets a herniated disk for his trouble. On top of all this, Zinos is pining away for his girlfriend, Nadine (Pheline Roggan), who has hightailed it to Shanghai.

Attempting to revamp the restaurant’s simple cuisine, he hires the temperamental Shayn (Birol Ünel), a culinary snob who lost his last job for pulling a knife on a paying customer who asked for hot gazpacho. Things start looking up for Zinos when Shayn’s gourmet creations take off with the hip crowd. Eager to reunite with Nadine, Zinos makes plans to move to Shanghai, leaving Illias to manage the place. Illias gambles the restaurant away to Neumann. And poor Zinos discovers that Nadine has been cheating on him and aggravates his back injury on the same day. Zinos burns down his apartment in a fit of painkiller-induced pique. Homeless, loveless, jobless, and broke, Zinos has to figure out a way to get his restaurant back.

The script, co-written by the director and the leading man, is chock full of sly jokes and the dialogue is genuinely inspired. The filmmaker wisely decided not to let the food upstage the story. The problem is that the characters, with the exception of Zinos, are mere stereotypical sketches. Too much of the plot rests on contrivance—the romance between Illias and the surly waitress Lucia (Anna Bederke), for example—and things wrap up a little too neatly at the end. I never could root for the burgeoning relationship between Zinos and Anna (Dorka Gryllus), the physiotherapist who treats his back injury; the two don’t spend enough time onscreen together for me to care.

Full of whimsy, Soul Kitchen is definitely a film I would watch again. I can also see how it won the Special Jury Prize and the Young Cinema Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival. It should enjoy a respectable run on the art-house circuit when it’s released in the States later this summer; however, the film is much too flawed to ever make any “best of” list, and it definitely isn’t Fatih Akin’s best work.

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, July 31st 2010

Wetlands

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Charlotte Roche

Grove Press

Originally written for the German public, Wetlands has made its way west to shock some freedom into the views of female sexuality and feminism. Wetlands could be the placid story of Helen, a girl using her hospital stay to get her parents back together. Yet this very outspoken character makes it anything but placid.

From the moment you start reading, you are stunned by how little this character hides. At first, we know very personal details without even knowing her name. You’ll read eleven full pages about how her hemorrhoid problem doesn’t stop her from liking sex. All this before you know exactly who's speaking to you.

No matter how hard you try, you won't be able to keep your mind's eye from seeing the vivid descriptions. At some points, I couldn't decide if Wetlands should keep its rating as slightly racy general fiction or be rated as erotica. While Helen's sexual exploits are described for us in the same manner as the rest of the book, Roche manages to do it in a non-pornographic way that makes you laugh at times. That's the thing about this book: No matter how gross it can be, somehow you still find yourself laughing.

Sometimes you have to ask if Helen is in the correct department of the hospital. She has very random thoughts, and often talks to herself. “Top patient for the psyche ward” popped into my head so many times. She has no inhibitions, which means any and every topic is spoken about in detail. You may even feel sorry for the unfortunate male nurse, who finds himself the center of her sexually driven attentions.

Helen is a one woman wrecking ball who knocks down the sexist double standards have been erected by society. With musings about other women’s tampons and an affinity for public restrooms, Wetlands is interesting in the most uncomfortable ways.

Written by: Nina Lopez-Ortiz, May 16th 2010

Nadirs

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 09:01:00 +0000

By Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug

Bison Books

The first impression upon commencing Herta Müller’s collection of semi-autobiographical short stories Nadirs is one that is characterized by a child’s hybridized view of a world which is intensely real and also hauntingly and disconcertingly surreal. Nadirs illustrates Müller’s perspectives in Banat, her native German-speaking region of Romania. Nadirs was first published in Berlin in 1988. Sieglinde Lug, professor of German at the University of Denver, provides the English translation.

Müller’s transitions or segues between realism and surrealism are so seamless that it is not until you are deep into her stories that you realize some of the most interesting stories in Nadirs deal direct with the family and many times in fantastical language. For example, Mueller describes the preparations of family for the usual Saturday night movie in “The Swabian Bath,” where each family takes a bath in the water of the person preceding them. Another story entitled “The Funeral Sermon” describes the central character attending her father’s funeral where you learn the views of the father from certain members of the community and the child. Was the father a war hero or a rapist? The child is charged with the task of giving a eulogy in the midst of these tales being exchanged, and it is the fear described by Müller and confusion by the prospect of giving the eulogy in front of the townspeople that lends the story its memorable surrealism.

As the two aforementioned stories indicate, within each of Müller’s tales, one progresses from an initial assumption of what to expect and is quickly deposited into unfamiliar territory containing the lucid, vivid and sometimes frightening descriptions of events that you don’t imagine usually reading of, but are still very intrigued. Nadirs, in each of its segments and in its entirety, as one of the first of Müller’s forays into the literary world remains a testament to her current Nobel Laureate status and also to the significant likelihood that her works will endure.

Written by: Brandon Copeland, January 24th 2010

German for Travelers : A Novel in 95 Lessons

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:42:00 +0000

By Norah Labiner

Coffee House Press

Norah Labiner's third novel German for Travelers reads a lot more like poetry than prose. Each chapter, which is framed as a lesson, begins with a seemingly disconnected sentence translated into English from German, before jumping to a different time period, country, character, or all three. Though a somewhat dizzying read, German for Travelers is a unique family history told through a gradual unraveling of a long kept family secret. It might also be described as a nonfiction mystery novel—à la Truman Capote—that takes as a starting point Sigmund Freud's famous (and, from a feminist perspective, rather notorious) Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.

The novel’s narrative(s) center on the Leopold/Berlin family who are descendants of a renowned Jewish German psychoanalyst, Franz Apfel. It begins besides Lemon Leopold's pool in her Hollywood mansion, year 2000-something. Lemon is a famous Hollywood actress; her brother Ben a frustrated psychoanalyst. Their cousin, Eliza Berlin is a gloomy romance writer who, unlike Lemon, has had a lot of "rotten luck". Lemon and Eliza, in fact, are opposites in almost every way. If they weren't cousins, they would no doubt never cross paths, but as can only happen with family, the unlikely pair travel together to Berlin to unravel the unsolved case of "Elsa Z"—their great-grandfather's incurable patient.

In some ways, German for Travelers is a critique of Freud's Dora, and perhaps of the limits of psychoanalysis in that, in Elsa's case, the doctor never discovers the obvious (and ruinous, for him) truth about Elsa until it is too late. Elsa is also turned into a somewhat prophet of the approaching Holocaust (although I actually found this aspect of Elsa's character a little hard to swallow). It is successful, I think, in highlighting some of the misogyny and homophobia of Freud's incomplete analysis of Dora—but the novel is too short, and there is too much going on in it, to form a sustained and coherent critique.

It’s Labiner's characters who manage to stay with the reader by the time the book spirals to its end. I found the dark, world-weary romance writer Eliza and her deceased husband Hans two of the most compelling characters in the novel. Hans is portrayed as a haunted, tragic, yet romantic character—though we are never quite sure if we are seeing him through the narrator (who is constantly shifting) or Eliza's point of view. For example:

He lamented: Time is the fire in which we burn. He pronounced: Every man his own football! He railed: I think of Germany at night: the thought keeps me awake till light. Once as he and Eliza rushed through a station to catch a departing train—he made it onto the platform first—and he called out to her: Run, comrade, run; the world is behind you. (Lesson 13)

I was, at first, somewhat frustrated with the chapters given to the Hollywood-dwelling siblings, Lemon and Ben Leopold, but I came to feel that there was a lot of truth to the characterization of these two somewhat superficial personalities who nevertheless are respectively intrigued and haunted by their family's past. Lemon and Ben's parents were (publicly) an image of the sugar-coated all-American family; one, however, that is hiding a few scandalous secrets. Lemon, Ben and Eliza's grandparents were Holocaust survivors who, as is often the case with many Holocaust survivors of that generation, (and in fact survivors of such traumas in general) never seemed to speak about their pasts. Their grandfather, in fact, after the war, is supposed to have lost his mind, and hence rendered voiceless. I found the way the novel touched on the trans-generational effects of trauma, and the effects of the repression of family history, quite touchingly and intelligently portrayed.

My one reserve is that there is so much going on in so few pages that, at its close, it feels somewhat unfinished. It is a part-critique, part-novel, part-history that can barely hold its characters bursting with personality, its references to pop culture and pop psychology, and its weighty themes. However, I also think this is part of the charm of this book: it leaves the reader thinking and, given its digestible size, this might be the kind of book that deserves a repeated reading—or perhaps, given the book's brevity of words, weighty themes, and lingering phrases, it is, as I first suggested, better read as a poem than novel.

Written by: Rachel Liebhaber, November 17th 2009