Globalization as Uneven Geographical Development: The “Creative” Destruction of Place and Fantasy in Christian Petzold’s Ghost Trilogy

It is very difficult to write a novel about money – it is cold, glacial, devoid of interest.

(Emile Zola, qtd. in Harvey, Consciousness 2)

In the opening sequence of Christian Petzold’s film Yella, two subtly contrasting images indicate what has, at least in part, rendered his work – with four best-film awards from the Association of German Film Critics (in 2000, 04, 07, and 09; see Nicodemus) – the most critically celebrated cinema of post-1989 Germany. In this opening sequence, the eponymous protagonist, arrives by rail in the former East German town of Wittenberge. Upon arrival, she walks from the Wittenberge train station to her childhood home, and her progress is followed, somewhat menacingly, by a man in a Range Rover, who turns out to be her estranged and abusive husband. As the film offers an over-the-shoulder shot from the husband’s vehicular perspective, his point of view locates Yella amidst the streets of Wittenberge full of traffic and shoppers, bustling as one would expect in a small city on a summer afternoon (fig. 1). When Petzold cuts to Yella’s point of view of the very same spaces, however, the town appears empty, devoid of both street traffic and pedestrians – in fact, Wittenberge, her hometown, is absolutely, eerily deserted (fig. 2). These contrasting shots point to two central aspects of Petzold’s acclaimed cinema: not only the importance of the spaces surrounding his characters, but also those characters’ subjective processing of them.

Petzold’s films have been widely praised for their sense of eerie and uncanny “liminal” spaces. He himself speaks of the importance of transit zones and transitional spaces in his films (Buß; Petzold, Interview). Rather than taking a psychoanalytic approach to this uncanniness, however, this article proposes that a materialist accounting of space, elaborated by theorists like David Henry and Henri Lefebvre, can illuminate the aesthetic approach of Petzold’s most heralded work, his “ghost trilogy” (2000–07) consisting of Die innere Sicherheit (2000), Gespenster (2004), and Yella (2007). In the above opening sequence, Yella is returning to her hometown after successfully interviewing for a job in an economically more dynamic part of Germany, in Hanover, such that what Harvey has foregrounded as “uneven geographical development” – here that of Germany’s cities and particularly between those in the former GDR and those in the former West Germany – lends the film its initial impetus. Yella has travelled from the former West of her new employer to her home in the former East, on the move here, as she is throughout the film, in search of work, money, and a love that is consistently entwined with both. The character of these struggles, in both their narrative causes and their representational tendencies, underscores how Petzold’s recent films are subtly, but substantively, interwoven with diverse processes that often bear the label “globalization.” As this early and revealing sequence indicates, even beyond the economic characteristics of the city, Petzold emphasizes the subjective

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

perception and processing of these economic realities, the subject’s responses, conscious or not, to the economic forces swirling around and under them.

This article argues that Petzold’s cinema proves so arresting in large part because it operates at that nexus of a space symptomatic of what some theorists have come to call uneven geographic development and the subjective processing of it. Especially with regard to this subjective processing, the theories of geographer David Harvey prove illuminating. Although these theories cannot offer a totalizing analysis of Petzold’s cinema, they can elucidate the ways in which his films take up the socioeconomic and psychological operations of capitalism at this historical moment. This article takes up again the concept “Globalisiserungsbewältigung” (coming to terms with globalization) used in previous analyses of multiple small film productions (Fisher, “Globalisierungsbewältigung”) and uses it here to engage with the body of work of this single important post-1989 filmmaker. Petzold allows the aesthetic approach...