Vivien Silvey & Roger Hillman (Canberra, Australia) p.99-116
2010 Issue 3
Cultural Encounters in Contemporary German Cinema
Abstract
In this paper we explore how Fatih Akin’s film Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven) situates Turkish-German transnationalism within historical and contemporary frameworks. The film reconfigures paradigms of Eastern and Western relationships, positioning Germany and Turkey (and beyond) within each other‟s sights/sites, rather than following the traditions which cast Turks as Germany’s cultural others. Throughout the film references to the Koran and the Bible, the Gastarbeiter programme, Turkish and German literature and music, and Turkish history triangulate the Jewish, Christian and Islamic roots of German and Turkish culture. Also rooted in cinematic intertextuality, Akin’s film comments on and inverts traditions of the representation of Turkish-German relationships, repositioning Turks and Turkish Germans as constitutive of German culture and vice versa. Beyond blurring these borders, it places transnational cinema in a global context. Auf der anderen Seite belongs to a recently emerged class of films whose structures emphasise pluralistic perspectives and whose themes revolve around globalisation’s effects upon national borders. As such it remaps relationships between the European Union and the rest of the world, putting Turkey under the spotlight politically and geographically, which widens the periphery of European and global mediascapes.