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The experiences of six adolescents in Berlin, as depicted in two documentaries, serve as examples of failed integration. These young people, some with and some without a migrant background, allow glimpses into their lives in Neukölln Unlimited (2010) by Agostino Imondi and Dietmar Ratsch, and in Bettina Blümner’s Prinzessinnenbad / Pool of Princesses (2007). This article highlights how the films corroborate the findings made by social system theorist Ulrich Schmidt-Denter about disaffected youth in Germany. He argues that German self-loathing is a significant reason for the failure of many migrants and their children to integrate. An apparently specifically German tendency to observe and reflect on oneself critically seems to sabotage integration and aspiration. To illustrate how both documentaries validate Schmidt-Denter’s findings, I analyse the six protagonists’ attitudes to themselves and others, demonstrating that they contradict the diagnosis of a new German norm in relation to national identity.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, unification, and the subsequent reinventionof the nation, German filmmakers have revisited theircountry’s cinematic traditions with a view to placing themselves creativelyin the tradition of its intellectual and artistic heritage. One ofthe legacies that has served as a point of a new departure has beenthe Heimatfilm, or homeland film. As a genre it is renowned for itsrestorative stance, as it often features dialect and the renunciation ofcurrent topicality, advocates traditional gender roles, has antimodernovertones of rural, pastoral, often alpine, images, and expressesa longing for premodern times, for “the good old days” that supposedlystill exist away from the urban centres. The Nazis used Heimatfilms in an effort “to idealize ‘Bauerntum’ as the site of desirable traditionsand stereotyped the foreign (most often the urban) as thebreeding ground for moral decay.”

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