Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxis (review)

Angelica Fenner’s double entendre in her book’s title aptly captures its twofold focus on the reconstruction of race after the Nazi period and the function of blackness in the service of reconstructing West Germany during the Adenauer period. Fenner brings to bear a wide range of theoretical paradigms and methodological approaches in her reading of Robert Stemmle’s 1952 West German film Toxi, a melodrama about an Afro-German child, with the eponymous name Toxi, abandoned at the doorstep of a German bourgeois family. Mining American critical race studies, German history, psychoanalytic film theory, and feminist scholarship, Fenner produces a multifaceted analysis of the film and its production history, public relations campaign, critical reception, and international connections. Coinciding with the publication of Fenner’s book, the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, released Toxi for the first time on DVD, with an audio commentary by Fenner and Tobias Nagl, additional scholarly materials, and English subtitles. These two editions fill a crucial gap in the teaching of and scholarship on race in German studies. While the sophistication of Race under Reconstruction’s close readings and transnational connections constitute its particular strengths, the book-length focus on Toxi also raises the question whether the extensive attention reflects this film’s richness for theoretical engagement or its actual impact in the discussion and imagining of race in postwar West Germany.

The racist tropes that Fenner diagnoses as embodied by the Afro-German child Toxi will not come as a surprise to those familiar with the racial melodrama or the race-problem film, both of which pivot on the emotional attachment to a minority character, while disavowing their own reliance on racist structures of representation. Yet Fenner shows how Toxi takes on specifically historical functions in the negotiation of Germany’s singularly racist past and its projected affluent future. By allowing Germans to project themselves into the role of heroic rescuer, Toxi absolves them of their racist guilt associated with the immediate past. Fenner interprets the household that takes Toxi in as an allegory of the German nation, which ultimately excludes the young heroine from its national social body. Nevertheless, the child’s yearning for a community offers spectators a fantasy of the imagined nation.

Fenner excels when she links Toxi’s blackness to other aspects of her character, iconic black figures, and American films and literature. Relying on the repeated shots of Toxi’s nude body as instantiations of her sexual and racial difference, Fenner shows how the character serves to inspire consumption and simultaneously critique excessive materialism, and in that paradoxical function, assuages the anxiety about women’s supposed irrationality in the capitalist marketplace. Fenner’s impressive exploration links the childlike, subservient icon of the “Sarotti Moor” to the American classic film Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934), both of which share the use of race to organize the desires of consumer markets. Equally insightful and original, her comparison of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Toxi illustrates the importance of race for a national imaginary under reconstruction that in the 1950s is in the process of being reconstructed. The most intriguing intertext, the figure of Shirley Temple, provides a foil for characters such as Toxi, and according to Fenner’s fascinating contention, performed “whiteface” with a cuteness that poised her to circumvent the production code. Despite the extremely engaging and expansive discussions, the six chapters dedicated to one film lead to much foreshadowing and referring back, as well as repeated returns to scenes of the film that emerge as key moments. Unfortunately, typographical errors, such as incorrect spellings, particularly of German words and authors’ names, distract and in instances confuse, as for example when after an extensive account of Aunt Wally as a spinster, the photo’s caption mentions her son-in-law (57).

Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema constitutes a sophisticated and...