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Orientalism and Ethnic Drag in DEFA Fairy-Tale Film: Wolfgang Staudte’s The Story of Little Mook
- Marvels & Tales
- Wayne State University Press
- Volume 29, Number 2, 2015
- pp. 324-342
- 10.13110/marvelstales.29.2.0324
- Article
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Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the paradigm of socialist realism in East German cinema has been subject to scholarly debate, scrutiny, and academic rethinking on a global level. Few scholars, however, have examined socialist ideology in the framework of Orientalism in fairy-tale film. In his groundbreaking book Orientalism (1980) Edward Said argues that the Orient was a European invention to portray Asia as a place of romance, exotic beings, and landscapes. I analyze Said’s argument about Orientalism in Wolfgang Staudte’s popular fairy-tale film Die Geschichte vom Kleinen Muck (The Story of Little Mook, 1953), which is based on a literary fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff, and contextualize it with the notion of “ethnic drag,” a term coined by scholar Katrin Sieg.