Intersections: Issues of National, Ethnic, and Sexual Identity in Kutlug Ataman's Berlin Film Lola und Bilidikid

Identity is something you fabricate, something you make.

(Ataman; qtd. in Christie)

Doesn't immigrating to Germany also mean immigrating to, entering into, the arena of Germany's recent past?

(Şenocak 6)

Ever since the Berlin Wall opened in 1989 and the two German states were reunited in 1990 after forty-five years of separation into East and West, the question of Germany's national and cultural identity has become a hotly debated issue in social, political, and cultural discourses. An essential element within this context is the debate around the increasingly multicultural nature of the Federal Republic of Germany, a country with a population of approximately eighty-two million, which over the past decade has become home to more than seven million so-called foreign residents, approximately two million of whom are Turkish nationals (Chapin 275).

Since the mid-1990s, numerous filmmakers of Turkish background have entered into the discourses about national and cultural identities, adding a transnational and transcultural dimension to the manifold representations of this issue. These films articulate and visualize aspects of Germany's polycultural society today, thereby joining other social forces in destabilizing traditional notions of a homogeneous German or Turkish national and cultural identity. Filmic portrayal of the varied Turkish-German community in the 1990s has moved far away from the established "one-dimensional" ethnocentric roles that Turks have historically been assigned in German film. In contrast to earlier representations of Turks as subaltern objects and victims in paternalistic textual and filmic discourses in Germany, the films of the 90s reflect a new and more self-confident attitude of the Turkish-German protagonists (Göktürk; Hamm-Ehsani; Mennel).

Kutlug Ataman can be counted among this "new wave" of Turkish-German or Turkish-born filmmakers on account of his film Lola und Bilidikid, released in Germany in 1999. Born in Istanbul in 1961, he studied film in Paris and Los Angeles, where in 1988 he graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, film school. His short film La Fuga (1988) was screened at many international film festivals and won the Cine Golden Eagle Award and First Prize at the New York International Film Exposition in 1988, as well as a Certificate of Merit from the Chicago Film Festival in 1989. His first feature film, the 1995 Karanlik Sular ('The Serpent's Tale'), won prizes at several international film festivals. The filmmaker and artist, also well known for his experimental video-style documentaries, lives in Buenos Aires, London, and Istanbul ("Kutlug Ataman"). Although he was never actually a resident of Germany, his Lola und Bilidikid can be considered a "German" film because it was produced in Germany, with Turkish-German actors who speak mostly in the German language, and because it dramatizes the lives of Turkish-Germans living in Berlin after the fall of the Wall. The film is of particular interest in the context of this "new wave" of films made in Germany because the film not only presents to (Western-European) viewers an inside look into the life of the Turkish minority in their adopted homeland after the Wende, but also complicates this perspective considerably by situating its characters and events in the queer Turkish community of Berlin. The film illuminates the fact that sexuality is a political phenomenon that is, in the words of Deborah Posel, "entangled in relations of power, and fashioned in ways which bear the imprints of other vectors of inequality and difference, such as race, class, status and generation" and enmeshed "within a wider matrix of [...] anxiety, social instability and political contestation" (3).

The purpose of this article is to explore the representational strategies in Ataman's film and to highlight the characters' identity negotiations in relation to the double marginalization they experience as a result of xenophobia and racism as well as homophobia, not only in the wider German society, but also within the Turkish community in Germany. This article proposes that, in addition to contesting the notion of sexual otherness, the film interrogates and destabilizes other commonly perceived divisions along the lines...