Race under Reconstruction in German Cinema: Robert Stemmle’s Toxi by Angelica Fenner (review)

Race under Reconstruction is an intriguing, even bold effort to read an entire era and its concerns through a single text – through, in fact, one that is not particularly complex aesthetically. Robert Stemmle’s 1952 film Toxi, a melodramatic box-office success, addresses lingering post-war racism by delivering an Afro-German child to the doorstep of an ethnically German, middle-class home. Angelica Fenner’s ambitious approach to Stemmle’s film rises or falls on its ability to interweave into that text the relevant threads of context and theory around the single work. With Race under Reconstruction, the results are, for the most part, richly hewn, offering a considerable contribution to the fields of both German studies and German film studies. As Fenner argues and convincingly shows, Toxi was at the intersection of various post-war debates, trends, and anxieties: concerned as the film was with the fate of Afro-German children – many of whom were the offspring of occupying soldiers and ethnically German women – Toxi challenged conventional ways of thinking about race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, as well as the war and its many racist crimes. Fenner incorporates all these discourses into her study in sophisticated and innovative ways – although one might at times wish she had cast the net a bit wider, her unusual approach works effectively and convincingly.

Fenner’s approach proves particularly fruitful in part because it operates at the nexus of (at least) three important trends in the field of German studies. First, her book extends and elaborates on what she characterizes as a significant turn to race in German studies that has only belatedly built into the field concerns arising from race and ethnicity. Building on works like the 1986 Farbe Bekennen and Blacks in German Culture, Fenner offers an important intervention here with a 1950s film, as most attention to race and ethnicity in German culture has focused more either on recent society in the wake of Gastarbeiter or, to a lesser degree, on the Weimar era. Fenner confirms and analyses how modern Germany has also consistently been part of a larger African diaspora: even if the numbers have been small, such phenomena have played a significant cultural role in the national imaginary and culture. In analysing these aspects of German culture, she offers an overview of Germany’s “racial iconography” and its essentialist, racist assumptions. Second, Fenner convincingly demonstrates how race functions consistently within emphatically transnational frameworks, even as it has had indelible consequences for the nation. Fenner’s deliberate balance between the transnational and the national moves forward this other important trend in German studies, here brought into fruitful concert with race/ethnicity. For instance, she elaborates how Toxi’s visual stereotypes for (putatively) racially/ethnically “different” peoples emerge in a transnational public sphere including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Birth of a Nation, and, perhaps most important, Shirley Temple; it was a transnational public sphere that also influenced discussions and decisions on integration in Germany. Finally, Race under Reconstruction also contributes to an important recent turn to the 1950s, a decade that has recently come under critical re-examination after years in a scholarly wasteland of presumed “bad objects,” as Johannes von Moltke has memorably put it.

In terms of the specific analyses of the film, Fenner demonstrates impressive critical acumen by acknowledging and using quasi-psychoanalytic spectatorship models – concerned with the production and tracking of desire in the text – but then also, and at greater length, contextualizing such approaches within the relevant institutional and historical frameworks. For instance, she traces not only (as is most standard) the reception of the film but also telling details of its production and distribution. Her archival work on those aspects of Toxi turns up a number of interesting findings, including the shift in production companies, probably a result of the anti-communist climate of the early 1950s, as well as a slightly but...