Anti-Black Racism in West German Living Rooms: The ZDF Television Film Adaptation of Willi Heinrich’s Gottes zweite Garnitur

Director Paul Verhoeven’s 1967 West German television film adaptation of Willi Heinrich’s popular 1962 novel Gottes zweite Garnitur depicts the love story of an African American GI from Southern Rhodesia and a white French German medical student. This article centers the analysis of a key sequence to demonstrate how Verhoeven’s film exposes the structure and continuity of German anti-Black racism and its conceptual affiliation with other iterations of racism. In alignment with the format’s objective of public enlightenment, the production employs the Fernsehfilm genre’s didactic entertainment to engage in Germany’s public racial discourse and critique segregationist ethos, both domestic and foreign.