Focus 2004.tif x insigh ts into those positions, as well as his though ts on globalization and th e formation of li terary canons. An expert on propaganda, Dr. Culbert spoke to Focu! about Leni Riefensrahl's films and techniques, along with ocher players in lhe field of German cinema d uring National Socialism. Taking over the editorship. JuJja Baker will continue her work with FtmlJ as journal edilo[~in-chicf and conference organizer for 2004---5. She has already begun planning d1C ninth annual Focus graduate student conference. entided "Forgetting and Remembering: l\ lcmory Discourse in German Literature," which WIll be held October291h and 30m, 200-1 in (he l\ lax Kade German Culmral Center at the Universiry of Cincinnati. Please contact us or see our website for mOrc informacion. Laura Teaser-Vas joins her as incoming book review ediror, and T am confident of Julia and Laura's furore success in their positions. 1 wish to thank a number of people for their suppon o f Forni on Germall Stlldiu. FirS[, 1 would like exp ress my gratitude to the Deparunem o f German Srudies at the University o f Cincinnati for entrusting me with the position of editor and its responsib ilities. D eparunent Head Sa ra Fried richsmeyer and advisor Katharina Gerstenberger deserve heanfell thanks for their continued suppon of th e journal and annual conference. I would also like to recogmze the Graduate Srodent Governance Associacion of the University of Cincinnati for thelI continued financial suppon. I wish to extend additional thanks to Volume lO's editor, Silke Schade, and Melinda Tracy for their helpful suggestions and suppOrt. Finally, it was a pleasure ro share me responsibility of selecting, revising and proofreading this volume's :ucicles with my fellow graduate s~dents. Due to lhcir assistance in the journal editing p rocess and wuh the 2003 conference, we stan a new decade of FOCI! 011 Gtrman 5 tMdits. Aille Zimmerman Toward an Event-based f-listory: Chronik del' lV"ende, Die 'eere Mitte, and Good Bye Lenill Christian Buss Film can funcrion as history: as a source or a document not only of ilS own aestheric history, bur of hislOry in general. Vicc versa, history can be presemed as film. Patrick Vandenu I f film is capable of fu nctioning as a document of history while also acting as a text that self-consciously creates narratives of history, we must ask the question, what kind of histories can fi lms p resent? Focusing o n filmic 3nempts (Q rep resent the fall of me Berlin Wa ll, this paper demo nstra tes how recent films engaging in the memory work of unification direcrly suggest the impossibili ry of a sequential narrative of historical meaning as a way to make sense of German unification. Specifically, tVlO recent films, Die lem Mitte (1998) and Good Bye Lmin (2002), problernatize traditional documentary na rratives, primarily through their exploration o f 'otherness': ethnic, economic and tempo ral. Ultimately, the re-focusing of events along the lines o f tbe status of 'Olhers' in lhese films leads to the implici t invocation o f a Ddeuzian even t-based history, in which every p resent is infinitely divided by its becoming a past event and a furo re. Beginning with the made-far-TV documentary, Chronik dtr W·'endt (1994), then moving to the film essay Die lure Mitte, and fi nally Good Bye I __ min, tlus paper argues that attempts to come to terms with the breakdown of entrenched borders leads to the instability of the traditional narrative of East vs. WCSL Reconfigurations of this na[[ative are initially affectivcly orieOled around a myth of 'oneness' exhibited in Chrollik der l j.7tntk~ documentation of the first month o f unrest. T he inability to main tain this myth of inslant un ification is explored in Die lure Mille, a fi lm essay that auempts to re-view [he events of 1989 and 1990 nOt wU.hin the hopeful malfix of 'together" bu t alternately from rhe perspective or estranged 'others.' The frame of the outsider is revisited in rhe pop-cultural phenomenon o f Good Bye Lt11ill, in which [he melodrama • 2 FolliS on Gtrmatl Studies o f the male lead's personal transformatio n negotiates and. paci,fi es the pm blematic sta tus o f diffe rence in the conrext ?f r~u.rufi~auon . T hese negotiations reject linear his[Q[Y and ins [ea~ un~liCllly Invoke the D eleuzian category of the event as an alrcrnanve histo ry. Hi story and Narra tive For D eleuze, the event is an event o f the senses that arises from a particular sta te of affairs in the world. This. sense is loc~ted, as Goulob Frege described sense, bet\\'een subjects and objects, resisting o rigin and particularity (78). 111e sense o f the event. break.s apa rt on the surface of the split between subjects and objects: It is, as Deleuze says, located bt:rween words and objects. T~e event's tempo rali ty resists teleologies o f past-presem- fu~re (Lo.gl(· 212). It exists in a time that has always JUSt passed and 15 always about to come. The event is therefore always expressed in the infinitive, ' to die: ' to be sick: Witho ut mo\'ement, the evem is inconceivable, temporally resisting specifi ciry as it resiS[s spariallocarion. \'(Iith respect to o ur recent histOry, Dd euze argues, ~he developmem o f cinema provides -a privileged site for compr~hending a decisive shi ft in strategies o f signifi cation, understandmg, and belief This shift concerns the question of time, because it provides a complex movmg-picture o f dura tion, arising as it does frol~ th e b~sis of me filmic interval. Since the interval fu nctio ns as an lCreduclble limit o f the cinema, "the Aow of images o r sequences bifurcate and develop senally, rather than continuing a line o r in tegrafjn~ into a who le. The time-image produces a serial rather man org~OIc fo rm of compositio n. Rather than di fferentiation and .mtegrano n, .there is only relinking by irratio nal divisions" (RodoWick 112). This (e­ linking describes a way o f mapping the images: " In th~ fi rSt pl.ace, the cinematographic in13ge becomes a direct pre~en(~oon of orne, according [0 non-commensurable relations an~ trraoonal cu.ts. In {he second place, this time-image PUts thought IIl IO contact ~th a~ unthought, the unsummo nable, the lIle):plicable, the undeCidable (Deleuze, Cinema 214). . . . The cinemarographic image is thereby pnvileg~d as .a p nmary device o f time analysis. In memory, the past eXJsts vltrually as a coUection of past LnstantS or perceplS uno r!r-'nized in any Towa rd an Event-Based l-lislOCY 3 particular way wi th relation (0 each mher. For Deleuzc, they exisr as a dissociated set o f singularities. Funhermorc. this paSt is nO( something apart fro m the present bur something that is comained within the present. As figured by the cinematogClphic image, the enure past (as memory) is part of each prescO! . This cinema o f time produces an image of thought as a nomotalizable process and a sense of history as unpredictable changt:. However, the ever-changingness of the past-as-present-as­ futu re o f the Deleuzian event is complicated by t.raditional narrative stnHegies. Following Banhes, narra rivity is a process o f resistance againstlhe ambiguity of linguistic codes. Narrative devices therefo re aHempt to crea te ho mogeneity out o f multiplicity (58). Deleuzian histo rici ty b ri ngs into question Ihe very possibili ty o f such unity, nOt by problematizing linguistic significa tion, as Barthes does, but wi thin the very status o f the film image's serializatio n, its fli ckering movement. The analysis o f film 's seriali ty demands an exposure o f the breaches o f ho mogeneity. However, Deleuze posits a totalizing effect of the cinema that, I argue, cannOt be maintained . For De1euze, this destabilizing is the inevitability signaled in Logique du $eftr. " mea ning is never a p rinciple or o rigin; it is produced [ ... j It is to be produced by new machineries" (89). This " always to be produced" but never "already produced," is called uuo q ues tion by narr:aciviry. Instead o f what De.lcuze takes as the final mo ment of fi lm , the exposure o f breach, the act o f ci nematic viewing induces instead a son o f oscillatio n at the borderline o f to tallty and its nega tion: multiplicity. Renll:ning m ci\c sile o f the Delellzian breach, the cinematic image, the purpose o f fi lm analysis becomes clear: ( 0 explo re the borderlines, examining the rup ture o f imposed un ity in o rder to mo re completely develo p a 'Chronik' o f contesta tio n between narrative mtality o n the o ne hand and its impossibili ty on the other. Within this p roject, I argue that specifi c ex ternal factors and the complicated status of history in German debates o n the fall or the Berli n wall and reunifica tion ex pose JUSt such a ruprure. -mis ~rea k di rectly suggests Lhe im possLblli ty o f his torical tdos, o f a sequential narrative of historical meaning tllat is posited as the end-result of the Status of the cinematic image. Beginning with the made- for-1V documentary, Chronile tier IWendt, and then moving to the fi lm essay 4 FoCliS Oil German SINdiu Dit lure !difte, and finally Good By Lmill, successive anemprs to comc to terms with the breakdown o f entrenched borders lead to the instability of the traditional historical narrative of the reunification of East vs. Wes£. However, these ruptures are not exposed uniformly, but are at rimes successfuUy suppressed, as within early documentary efforts to come to terms with me fall of the Wall. nncmprs to build narrative unity are initially affecovely oriented around a myth of 'oneness: as demonstrated in Chronik dtr I/Yende's documentarion of the first months of civil unrest. This narrative develops the period from October ro December of 1989 as the end of a European era and the return [0 a myth of German unity that is configured as inevitable: "They were days that changed global dynamics forever. The twO separate German states ceased [0 exist and the Iron Curtain came down, ending the war which had pitted mis country against itself". This formulation, in .whic.h the legitimacy of [wo countries, East and \Vest Germany, IS relected in favor of a narrative mat posits me entire period fmm 1945 to 1989 as the battleground. The fall of 1989 is men a rerum to the 'normalcy' of a unified German nation. The trope of re-unification is constantly repeated with mitdly variant blueprints, some positing their narratives as "protOcols of a [unitary] German revolution" as in the tide of Mascolo's documentary. Others narrow in on the developments of me 48-odd hours JUSt preceding the opening of me wall, claiming them as "me period that changed the world foreve£" as in H enle's Ais die Maller jiel Yet the narrative is repealed in terms of unification and transformation located in a discrete temporal space between October and December of 1989. Within these narratives, and Chronik der lt7entk in particular, the shock of the temporal is always evident, with talking heads alternately amazed or excited at how quickly the \\'Odd has changed. This "how quickly" signals not only an anticipation of how much can happen in a shorr period, figured in days and hours, but also serves to foreclose quesuons ~f before and after. October through November is nOt symptomatic of external factors. They remain a dosed seL These: months contain all causative and explanatory markers of 'unificauon'. Narratively, this film operates by moving from major moment to major moment, barreling from initial protests to nightly news reports of the day's occurrences. Inten'iews of dlOse present are use:d to highlight me Toward an Event-Based History 5 singularity o f the experience: "That day changed my attirude and tbat of all of the otbers there. It was a day of total disillusionmenr, d1C credibility of the system fell like I lumpty Dumpty," says one enthralled witness. Such intervie~ are often followed by a black screen wbicb chronicles occurrences for which there ace no visual images. Instead dle screen revea ls text in telex style, with a relentless ricker-tape's pi tter-paner accompanying each day's revelations: "Sa turday, December 9 1989, the SED elens a new chairman: Gregor Gysi." Throughout, there is a resistance to the bacl.."Ward glance, mimicking rhe political predispositions thar only look forwa rd in an attempt to subside internauonal fears of a unified Germany's power. For example, Helmut Kohl states in a speech excerpted in the film: "Ladies and gentlemen, I promise you rhat Germany will nor go it alone. T lus is a vehement denial that Germany intends to shun Europe. h is also a strong rejection of retrospective nationalism". "!1le hermetically sealed narrative of Chronik der IWende thereby circumvents me deeply p roblematic questions of German identity formation that characterize more criucal media and litcrary engagements in German unification. As Jarausch states regarding alternative readings of the fall of the Wall: The unforeseen rerurn of the nuion-state rhrough unification blocked these escape roures and forced Germans once again to confront themselves as a people. The subseq uent crisis of ideological beliefs has initiated anomer round of redefinitions of what it could or should mean to be German at (he end of the twentieth century. (10) The narrauve and historical unity implied by this film forecloses such a debate, as its starns as 'Chronik' supprc;:ses ca(egorical indeterminacy. However, later fihnic engagements in the fall o f the Berlin WaU and the end of the GDR are unable [0 resiS{ such doubt • and skepticism, particularly Hito Steyerl's Die lure Mit/e. W hat allows such a break? I argue that it is [he re-focusing of even ts along the axis of the problematic starns of 'others' in the film Negot.ia ti.ng Ot hers 6 Foau on German Sluditl FoUowing Lhe work of Homi Bhabha, cultural di~fere~ce is always framed within narrative strucmrc: T he O ther IS cned, quoted , fumed, il luminated, encased in the shm/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and the ('IIltural po~rics become the closed circle of interpretation. The Orner loses ItS power to signify, (0 negate, lO initiate its lustonc desire, lO csl!lbtish Its ~~n insutuuonal and oppositional discourse (31). As such, nan::auvny de-voices and builds over 'otherness; asking it [0 hold itself as silent to unified meaning, exerting its discursive control. Critical here IS that Bhabha establishes lhis silencing historically, locking the loss of lhe Other in terms o f its inability to "initiate its hiSlOric dcsite," a silencing [hat existS beyond the culruml "here and now" but rather within historical movement. i-1 ecemgeneity is opposed historically, the direct implication of which is mat O thers are figured ahistorically, without the ability to bmld narrative hislOry, and hence outside: of time. The alternative posited by Bhabha is based upon lhe enunciauon of "culooral difference" which problematizes the binary division of past and presem, tradition and modernity at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and uanslated in rhe name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of hlSlOrical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of rhe arufice of lhe archaic. (9) The enunciation of cultural difference thereby int.ervenes in narratlvity by challenging our sense of the hIstorical idencity of culrure, and as such displaces what Benedict Anderson has described as "culture written in homogeneous, serial time" (205). Nor only is culrure dlUS rewntten bUl the very foundauons of culrure in historicity. With the expl~sion of heterogeneity It becomes impossible to ~aintam unity of intent that is SO critical to a chronic history. Erupaons of the 'other' [hereby deslabilize history's scarus as part and parcel of reconfigurations ~f cul~ral st~rus .. Th.e questio~ th~n [em~in;: what alternative is pOSited \llHh tlus relecuon of hlsto ncal UOlty. Does Toward an Event-Based l lislory 7 ti le historicity enacred wi thin the enunciation of culrut'al difference coincide with the event-based history of Deleuze, in which past­ present- future coincide? UndOing the N arracive In Du ken Alil/e, a fi lm essay that reviews me events of 1989 and 1990 not within the hopeful matrix of 'togedlcr' but Instead from dle perspective of marginalized 'others,' JUSt such a reconfiguration is attempted. Ultimately, the inabili ty to resolve the status o f o therness within the narrarive leads to a direct confronmtion with the fail ure [Q impose homogeneous structures on the issue of unification. I-lito Steyerl's histo rical glance 10 Die ken Mille instead refashions Berlin through a blending of past, present, and future, main mining a distance from any object of furure realization. In Die ken Mille me past exists coterminous with Ihe present, and ulopun visions of the furure retain parity with images of preselH-acuon worker unrest. The film begins with an ellipsis: the film's framing shot is a black background OntO which a seraph £),pewriter font is blended revealing a mere segment o f a quotation from Siegflied Kracaue r's From Caligan To Hiller. "To establish a rradlIJon of lost processes; givmg names 10 the hilherto nameless." TIle fi lm then cuts to an image of the Berbn WaU. On the nght Side of the screen a man faces one remaining section of tile Berlm Wall with hammer and chisel, chipping off a piece, perhaps to take home as a souvenir. The narrator's voice intones: ''There are many ways to speak about borders ... there are many ways to ereCl new borders ... In 1989 the Berlin wall comes down." With this introduction, lhe fi lm's narration mirrors coun tless documentaries of the fall of Ihe Wa ll , beginning with images of the Wa ll itsel f b~ fore moving on to a chronology of dates, places and times. Historical moments,. are d iachronically located as building blocks of a revolution or the realization of a d[eam of ulllhcation. 1·loweve[, the wall figured ~n this fi lm is nOt the Wall as monument to {he division of East and \\lest, but rather the image of an mcomplete Wall, wah a large secuon torn down and replaced by temporary consrruc[lon fencmg. The visual effect IS that of the voyeur looking beyond Ihe cunalll, but II is a peep show 8 Focus 011 German Sludiu of a revolution missed, with o nly ruins left in the aftermath. T he sound of me mao chjsding away at the wall is a soli tary act, and not a joyous rebellion of the masses. \'«har we are witnessing instead, as the voice-over implies, is the b reakdown and simultaneous creation o f borders. Throughout the !lIm, the image of the POlsdamcr Plarz as a site o f COIlSrtUction, nO[ jus t o f buildings, bur of borders, is constantly emphasized. Marked by the camera's peeking mrough holes in walls and gaps in fe nces, the film interrogates the supposed empriness of the PQ(sdamer Platz, a space ready co become me new center of Europe, with its past as the "D eath Zone" erased, and its legacy as a center for the National Socialist Pan y effaced. The film questions this emptiness, constandy interrupting the examination of present debates o n t.he promiscuous construction at !.he Potsdamer Platz wim reminders of the Starus of the site in German history. T he film essay thereby re ruses to fi x itself temporally, for ex:ample serving as video wimess to unio n protests while simultaneously looking bad.-wards al me functions of a b uikling that was being replaced during (he Weimar Republic. Visually, dus branching is nOt accomplished sequentially, as wilh dle rapid cuts from present to historical object o f Cl;rollik der Well/u. Instead, the video relies heavily o n a layering effect in which twO o r more cutS of video foo tage are s treamed simultaneously, o ne image moving from an initial transpare ncy to greater opacity unlil it fully replaces dle orhec. The effect is ghost-like; we see a person standing in a field, but are also able [Q see through lum. Similarly, the audio track resists a single voice: ~Ifendelssohn's music ar rimes overlays [he voice-over, the IOnes o f which cemalo present long after a shift to a different thematic centeLAs such, it becomes impossible to establish the moment of transition berween time periods and scenes in lhe £l im: a Weimar Republic narrative is equaled visually and auditorily with debates on construction along with discussions of [he status of foreigners in Berlin. Even the histo rical specificity o f the Berlin \X'aU is brought into question: while showing images o f the GDR checkpoint with Trabis passing through, tbe voice-over speaks of the customs wall mat stood fro m 1734 until 1869. T hematically, tOO, the fi lm is quite complex, resisting linear disclosure while asserting a suongly defined sct of foci, all prolepcically circling around the cenual topic of the film: the starus of 'otherness' in tbe idea space Toward an Event-Based HistOry 9 o f Berlin's cen ter, the Potsdamer Platz. Analysis of this fi lm remains problematic as a central assertion of heterogeneity dominates and is instantiated bodl visually and thematica lly. A loose structuring is necessary here to get at the implicit pro ject of !.he film. Reductivcly, eiglu thematic scrains are presented, repeated and revisi ted throughom lhe film_ They arc as follows: the guestion of the borderlines tim have been enacted at dIe Potsdamer Platz; Felix lvlendelssohn's status as a Jew in Berlin; buildings, born their construction, desuucnon and cultu.ntl St""Atus in Bedin fro m 1770 to dle mid 19905; the role of anarchist squatters in the construction area; the starns of foreigners in 19905 Berlin; prOtests rega rding the rebuilding o f Berlin post- 1989; an African soldier's biography and Weimar music halls' exoticism. Within me film, eac.h of these foci engage in questions of inside vs. outside, frOIll the borders of Berl in as dramatic spatial enactment of a break between those who belong and [bose who are excluded, to deep ly personal investigations o f H usseyn, an African soldier who fights for Germany in lhe first World War. These themes are not deployed sequentially, but as with th e visual and auditory blending o f the film, are o ften merged within a single segment of the film. One four-minute sequence of the film enacts this multiplicity of perspe.ctives powerfully. T he section begins with a voice-ovec describing late Weimar employmem quotas which prohibited dark­ skinned people from working in the Cabarets, while sho\\oing images of Friedrich Hollaender a t a cabaret. The camera cu ts to a close up of a model for the new "house fatherland" that is to be built in Potsdame.r Platz while [he voiceover guotes Siegfried Kracaucr 's description o f the " rosy pink morali ty" that is centra l t(I tile hiring practices of a retail shop. The sequence then sh ifts to :i group of Trabis and several couples in traditional German dress p:uadlllg by spectawrs on Ocwber 3, 1991, lhe official holiday of unifica tion , before cutting to a long sho t of dIe photographs o f white Germans working in a poster fo ra new office building. Concurrcntir, the. voice­ over continues the narrative of racially determined work quotas in 1931. The (iJm blends 10 an image o f squanen;' homes in the k>rmer death zone, marking the border belween East and \Vest Germany as dlcir disembodied voices debate what they describe 3~ the new fo rms of fa scism of the 'Wessis.' This short seq uence is Interrupted 10 FwU$ on Germall SJudiu by me voice..()\'cr of a Chinese srudent, Dong Yang, presented in a full fmow dose-up shot. He explains: "At first, they w~re ha~py after the fall of the Wall, but now outsiders arc at raub. Financially they don' t fcel they are well off, the East Berliners and then th e East Germans as a whole. so mey look for lhe guilry, fOI someone [0 take the blame", He then repeats a Story about being beaten by SIX Germans. As the SlOry is told, screen images blend (0 the building model for the new House Fadu~_dand. while an audio overlay plays a Mendelssohn Concerto. Dong Yang's voice-over is then replaced by the directOr's narrauon of Mendelssohn's difncuhies crossing the customs gate at the POLSdamer Platz in 1743. Steyerl goes on to describe the various buildings that have stood in onc corner of the Porsdamer Plan, from the Palais Mendelssohn to the Reichsug, and men documents a major protest action by the BAU union at the construction site for the new Reichstag. This sequence closes with shots of these proteSlO£S as Steyer! reads Kraauer's description of the spectators wimessing the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 .. Tn this ShOIt sequence, anti-Semirism in 1743, \'(lemur discriminatory laws against blac.ks, the rise of NatiQnal Socialism in 1933. the problematic s tatus of 'Ossis' and '\'(IesSIS' in the ~lewly unified Germany, as well as mid 1990s German xenophobIa are blended together, with images of one period auditorily lin.k~~ .to an entirely different rime.. The film thereby resislS me poss,bilioes of histOrical specificity. Instead it posits a rrans-histo rical presence o f marginalization that, almough differing in details, cannot be asserted as belonging to any singular penod. As such, me film Intervenes in traditional narrative suategies, challenging our sense of the historical uniry of visible culrure, rejecting the possibilities of serial histOrical narrati,'e. In me film, the present of post-unification Germany COntains the past-life marginalization of Mendelssohn, of Mohammed Husseyn. and o f the burning of the Reichstag. The film thereby repeatedly effaces the assertion of unification as a m?m~nt of rarucal change. Instead, the film reveals the aporia of margtnality, in which the temporal and narrativ~ spedficiry are rej~cted in favor o f a temporal hetcrogeneity tn which past, presem and furure a~e eternally in colliSIon, as in the film's dosing line: "One space IS United. At [he same rime new horders arise. In this place mey have a tradition that is broken again and again." In the world of the empty I Toward an Event-Based Historv 11 centcr, history can only exist as a narrative of a tradition that can never be fuJly realized, but is instead always being reconstructed and refashioned; it is a mdition in a permanent sra te of becoming. Narrative Com peti tion Cemral to the strategy of historical undoing in Die kere Alille is the fo rmal radicaliry, the non-linearity, and the regular use of blending between sequences, thereby visually and auditonly destabilizing the viewer's (and critic's) auempts to construct uO\rary, sequential meaning within the tex t. This raises the question of whether such forma l narrative instabihry is a requiremem in order to instantiate the historial uansformations and heterogeneity of the Deleuzian event. A recent allemptto question the fall of the Wa ll in a popular German film brings the question to the fo refront. The fi lm Good By Le"in invesogates the status of a "Grand Other," a mother who misses the fa ll o f the Wall and reunification due to a hean atuck-induccd coma. This attack comes from the shock of witnessing the changes of the fall of 1989. As silent witness, she sees her son protesting the GDR govemmem and falls into a coma, thereby miSSing the events of late 1989. When she finally comes Out of the coma in the spring of 1990, doctors make it d ear that hcr very life depends upon her nO[ being exposed to a Berlm without borders. Her life, (hen, hangs on the maintenance o f the past within the present. As the. Web site for the film (www.79qmDDR.i.th muffled vOIces and a distanced perspective, and the discussion is ended prematurely when the camera interrupts the conversation by cutting to Alex, who remains unaware of me change. These filmic strategies shift mention away from this supposedly diSaS{rOllS injection of the present imo the mother's life. Visually and narrative!.y, wh~t ~as been figured throughout as the decisive event to be avolde~ I.S IIlstead a mere filmic sidebar, a moment that almOSt disappears ill ItS subclety. The resulting ambiguity of [his moment of reiling, and rhe mother's \'ery abi/j!J [Q handle me news of the fall of the Wall dra~atic~lly caUs into question fo r whom the illusion of the GDR IS being maintained. In its dosing sequence the film discloses how critical the problematic question of the GDR past, the unification present and lhe unclear funlre is for Alex and not for tbe mother. In the final scene, Alex and his family sit by the hospiraJ bed, watching the false news report thar he and his friend, an aspiring filmmake~, have created in order to break the news of [he open borders to Ius mother. They have done this by hiring Alex's boyhood hero, the first German in space, Sigmund Jahn. I n a melodramatic speech, jiihn, refigured as the new leader of the GDR, explains how dle values of rhe GD R have come to be recognized as the correct world oreler, and how there exists an alternative to the opposition between East and West. During this speech, the film cuts from clte tel~vision image to Alex silting a[ the bedside watching the film, doubling the opening scene of the film in which we have seen an enrapmred Alex Toward an Event-Based History 13 as a young boy watching the news of Jahn's uavels in space. As the speedl continues, rhe camera cutS back to the television and then to the mother, who, already knowing what has happened, instead watches her son, smiling at the extremes to which he has gone in order to rebuild dle Easf Germany of his childhood. This lingering glance and smile signals that we are to read the film in terms of Alex's altempts to come to terms wilil the problematic s(arus of his past in East Germany and his present in a unifying Germany. In this closing speech, its visual and narrative privileging demands )iihn's message of a synthesis between East and \'(fest, of a past being maintained within Alex's values as dte resolution of the film. What is at stake is lhe very questio n of Alex's identiry, which he atlCmprs to form in his mania for GDR pickJes and fal sified news reports. The apparent resolution of the conflicts of his identiry, of his past and his present, allows precisely dle mailHenance of the past in a process of becoming. As such, Good Bye uflifl extends lhe problematic of an event-based hislOry from Die !em MilU onto {he developmc~H of the male lead in a uadicional me.lodrama. The film thereby suggesrs that the only adequate means for Germans to come to ter ms Wilh the past is not duough 'Bewiiltigung' of the paSt, but instead through personal transformation. r n me aCl of defining the self as mediated event of external transformation, the past and the present collide. Coming to terms with lh e end of lhc GDR, and the presence of otherness raised by this moment of ruprure is on ly possible in such symbiotic temporal co-presence within tbe individual. Conclus io ns In as much as Good Bye Lenin and Die lure Miue prob1ematizc our ability to nar rate sequen tial history as opposed to Chl'oflik del' IPmde, the films also lay bare the implications of tht: Deleuzian evem. Whereas ChrOflik de,. If/tnde assens a temporal and logical homogeneity, and with it implicates a teleologica l hiSlQricai projecr, the frame of the Deleuzian event allows the assertion of heterogeneity as a fundamental condition o f history. Causality is then rejected in favor of multiplicity, and present events arc inseparable from [heir relational scatus wi(hin a matrix of occurrences that have no beginning and no end. The breakdown of racial and economic 14 Focus on German Studies borders, in Die ken "'[illt and temporal borders in Good B)'l unin are the nssures that provide the leverage with which official histories can be cracked open. The search for difference and 'otherness' dH:n becomes rhe key to a fundamental shifl in historical analysis of the fall of the Wall. More generally, the idea of history as film is made productive by exposing the implications of the Deleuzian event. Within the logic of the evem, the purpose of film analysis is to explore borderlines, examining momems where uniform meaning is impossible. History as film, then, allows us [0 expose (he unceasing contestation berween narrative lOrality on the one hand and multiplicity on [he other. Univerri!J 0/ California, Berkel<;y Works Cited Au dit MDlm fit! . 50 SllImll", ~ tU4 IV'tlt //triil/dultn. OiL Hans-Hermann H~ft.l~. Icestorm, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. bllagilltd COINmIJnititS: RtjkCtiOIU on the On gin alld Spread oj Nationalimt. London: Verso, t 991. Barthes, Roland. Introduction w the Struc/ural Ana!Jsis oj Narrative. 13inningham: University of Bimungham Press, 1966. 13habha, Honu. The UxatitJll oj CU"Jm. London: Rouuedge, 1994. Colw~ll, C. "Dd~uze, Sense and me Event of AIDS." Posll11odmIGllllm;. 6.2 (1996): 37. Chrom'/e dec jj;7mdt: Teill. oir. Wolfgang Drescher. DEFA, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles.. Cililma 2: tm tillle intagt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesor:a P, 1989. -. Tbt Logico] Smse. New York: Columbia UP, 1990. Die km Mitte. Dir. Him Secrer!. HFF Munchen, \998. Frege, Gottlob. The mgt" Rtadtr. Oxfmd: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Fun! lI:7«htn im HtrlJ.1l. Dir. G. Mascolo. SP iEGEL-TV-Dokumemation, 1992. Good B)'t' L.mi". Dir. Wolfgang l3ecker. X Filme, 2002. - .25 June 2004 http:/ / www.79qmDDR.de. Janusch, Konrad. The R.J..sh to German Uni!). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Rodowick, David Norman. Gillu DtItMZt~ Tillie Mathine. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Vonderau, Patrick. "Film as History/ Hislory as Film:' Gtmmskaper/ Gtllltinschajim. (1989): 1. 'Zungen,' Borders and Border Crossings: Ozdamar's M Jfttel"{!mge as an Attempt to Deal widl d,e Effec,s of G lobaliza tion Sonja EUen K10cke T he fac t that Emine Sevgi Ozdamar was thi!: MrS[ non-native speaker of German to receive the Ingeuorg Bachmann Prize win 1991 has twO implications. It can ccnainly be read as an increase in the interest about literature written in German by non·native speakers of German; simuhanl::ously, it can hI:: viewed as :a rl::action to globalization. Though 'globalization' seems to be the buzzword of the 1990s and today, it is not really new, "but rather on ly a matter o f scale and speed - old hegemonies in new forms. Globalization can be seen as an agent of imperialism and an updated version of the modernization which was direCted th rough colonial conquest" (Amandiume 90). Based on (Ilis idea J will argue that in Ozdama r's 1I" MllerzulIge globalization and its effects manifest themselves within such tropes as migration, political syS[ems, and most imporrantly language. I After a short introduction to globalization, I will demonstrate how Ozdamar deals with the problematic inferences as well as the chances implied in globalization specifically for migrant women, who afe caught in Ihe 1W0foid peril of being female and a foreigner. Globalization is a vast and complex field that has been d iscussed extensively and bas a wide range of meanings. I t usually suess~s (he international spread of \'«estern economic, socia~ and policica1 methods of interaction, norms, and values. Moreover, a focus on cultural and sociological aspects of globalizarion can be d etected. !t o ften acuminates in the notioo of a "McDonaldizacion' of culturc. l James t..-li nclman's explanation goes fu n her [han this and helps to dearly define it: The manifestatioos of globalization [ ... J include t.he spatial reorganization o f production, [ ... 1 massive transfers of population within the South