Abstract
The two German independent films, 1 Berlin Harlem (1974) and Auf den Zweiten Blick (2012), depict Black communities in Berlin. Whereas 1 Berlin Harlem explicitly shows how its African American male protagonist is objectified by white German men and women, Auf den Zweiten Blick takes an implicit approach in its critique of racism: The film emphasizes the relation of race and visibility by presenting three plotlines that evolve around couples with one blind partner. In contrast to 1 Berlin Harlem’s focus on African American expatriates, it depicts a Black German community as a matter-of-fact. Paying special attention to the films’ negotiations of race and gay sexuality, this essay analyses how conceptualizations of Blackness have changed throughout the four decades that lie between their productions. It considers the emergence and success of the Black German Movement, which started in the 1980s, to be one important factor for this shift in addressing race and racism in Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
Connecting the plotlines through taxis that drive across Berlin, the film takes up a device used by Jim Jarmusch in his episodic film Night on Earth (1991). Auf den Zweiten Blick strongly resonates with the episode set in Paris, which narrates the encounter between a Black sighted taxi driver and a blind white woman.
- 2.
After the completion of this essay, Olivia Landry’s ‘Color/blindness in Auf den Zweiten Blick’ was published. Landry, too, builds on Hagen’s unique approach to visibility and race to discuss how Auf den Zweiten Blick relates to the work of Branwen Okpako and to Turkish German Cinema (Landry, 2017).
- 3.
Priscilla Layne similarly observes that the film poster’s imagery points towards racial fetishism. She furthermore notes that ‘in the middle of his chest, one sees the emblem of West Berlin as if the man has been marked as a piece of property’ (Layne, 2016, p. 336).
- 4.
The screening of the film at the conference ‘Transnational Perspectives on Black Germany’, with Sheri Hagen, Noah Sow, and Fatima El-Tayeb as keynote speakers, which took place in May 2018 at the University of Toronto, demonstrates the film’s rootedness in Black German political culture.
- 5.
ADEFRA is an organization for Black women* in Germany, ISD refers to Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland (Initiative of Black people in Germany).
- 6.
For detailed accounts on the history and development of the Black German movement, see Lennox (2016).
- 7.
Layne contextualizes 1 Berlin Harlem by giving a detailed account of depictions of Blackness within both American and German film histories (Layne, 2016, pp. 339–341).
- 8.
This example is on the same level as the ongoing debate about the change of the racist terminology for a sweet which is popular in Germany. It is noteworthy that the ‘arguments’ people bring up to this day in favour of keeping the name are already exposed as racist and ridiculed in 1 Berlin Harlem.
- 9.
Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the German are ours—S.D./A.P.
- 10.
While we were writing this essay, luckily the Berlin-based Haroun Farocki Institut screened five of Norman’s films, which are held in the archive of Berlin’s film institute Arsenal.
- 11.
For a detailed discussion of the reception of Mapplethorpe’s work see Mercer (1994, pp. 171–220).
- 12.
An audio description makes the film accessible for blind viewers. Surprisingly, the audio description does not follow the film’s politics and addresses the Blackness of most of the characters with the word ‘dark-skinned’ (dunkelhäutig) and, in a few instances, points out racialized physical features, such as full lips and black curly hair. Whiteness, however, remains an unmarked category.
- 13.
In Staring: How We Look, Garland-Thomson differentiates between starers and starees, i.e. those who stare and those who are being stared at.
- 14.
However, the depiction of gay sexuality in Auf den zweiten Blick seems to follow stereotypical conventions: the gay cruising area is negatively shown as a zone where the sex is rough and unpleasant because the men do not seem to care about each other. In contrast, the ‘good’ gay sex is confined to the relationship of Till and Pan.
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Dickel, S., Potjans, A. (2019). Racial Seeing and Sexual Desire: 1 Berlin Harlem and Auf den Zweiten Blick. In: Afken, J., Wolf, B. (eds) Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970s. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27427-6_9
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