Observing the imperial gaze: On Peter Fleischmann’s Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein

When Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein, Peter Fleischmann’s film adaptation of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii’s 1964 novel Trudno byt’ bogom (Hard to be a God), came out in 1990, German critics labelled it as one of the worst sf films ever made and regarded it as further proof that European filmmakers are unable to produce Hollywood-style blockbusters. Twenty years later, this failure to transform the Strugatskiis’ bestseller into a good film can be read as symptomatic of the Perestroika period and the end of the Cold War. After the traumatic experience of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan (1979–89), the central conflict of the film – about an ostensibly highly developed civilisation entering into contact with an allegedly primitive, backward world – gained a much more ambiguous and political meaning. This was amplified when Hollywood offered extremely popular interpretations of these events in the same time period, such as Rambo III (MacDonald US 1988). Using a postcolonial perspective, this article analyses Fleischmann’s film as an attempt to question such hegemonic narratives with the help of a second-order observer, integrated into the original plot. Thus, Fleischmann’s version of Trudno byt’ bogom reveals such popular films about humanitarian interventions to be products of colonial desire, mutual surveillance and an omnipresent imperial gaze.