Screening the East, Probing the Past: The Baltic Sea in Contemporary German Cinema

Abstract

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.”

A transnational regioscape in the making. The Baltic Sea in Christian Petzold’s Barbara and Ilze Burkovska-Jacobsen’s My Favorite War

“…In the Cold War cultural imagination, the Baltic Sea was connected to the East, as opposed, for example, to the North Sea, easily accessible for Westerners and thus associated with the West (cf. Ludewig 2004). The trope of Eastern noir, including Baltic noir, has endured especially in today"s crime narratives (though not solely) and travels in both directions, so to speak; in Scandinavian films and television series, the Baltic Sea is imagined as arousing anxiety and fear, dangerous to cross and as a gate to an utterly different world.…”

“…Although the plot of the film is set in 1980s, we should not forget that the film was released in 2012. In an article on the Baltic Sea in German post-reunification films, Alexandra Ludewig (2004) advances the thesis that many of the films featuring the Baltic Sea revisit and reimagine the tradition of the German Heimatfilmthe homeland film. This cinematic genre that evolved from the late 1930s expressed traditionalist, nationalist and patriarchal values associated with Nazi "blood and soil" ideology.…”