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284 The Origins of German Minority Cinema in Colonial Film Patrice Nganang How can one account for the changing definition of both minority and Germany while writing a history of Germany’s minority cinema? This essay is an attempt to answer this very simple question. Any reflection on minority artifacts today has to confront Deleuze and Guattari who in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, as an answer to the question “What is minor literature?” suggest to understand minority in literature as being characterized by three things: first, the deterritorialization of language; second, the fact that everything in minority literature is political; and third, the fact that in such a literature “everything takes on a collective value.”1 But most important is that their three categories transform minority into the condition of possibility of a certain type of artistic (literary) expression that they call “minor.” Although it sets my preliminaries, their theoretical disposition alone cannot solve the problems at hand, for it is indeed impossible to discuss the concept of minority in German cinema without also confronting the difficulty of clearly defining what a minority exactly is in Germany . The concept has undergone dramatic redefinitions, since its introduction into the German public language via the Minority treaties in 1919. That Germany has been since then the ground of the most murderous experiment on minorities, the Holocaust, also makes it problematic to only use “migration” as the theoretical stepping-­ stone around which minority would be understood, to analyze the German case. And furthermore, relating minorities to colonialism has to take into account the fact that colonialism in effect, and German colonialism for sure, was the rule of a minority. Thus, to limit myself to one German colony, Cameroon, it was the factual rule of the “Kameruner Deutsche,” or of the “Kameruner,” as the colonists are called in the films Deutsche Pflanzer am Kamerunberg (1936) and Unser Kamerun (1937) of Paul Lieberenz, over the so-­called “Eingeborene” who outnumbered them. If German colonial cinema was therefore a cinema made about a minority and its imagining of “natives,” what then is minority cinema? More important: How is minority cinema then related to colonial cinema? The problem be- The Origins of German Minority Cinema in Colonial Film    285 comes rather complicated when considering the post–­ World War II constellation ; one attempts to explore the increasing presence of “Turkish” characters in German films, for example, by giving them a genealogy that begins with the “Greek” Jorgos and the “Moroccan” Ali in Fassbinder’s early films Katzelmacher (1969) and Angst essen Seele auf (1974) to conclude with the “Turk” Iskender in the award-­ winning film Lola und Bilidikid (1999) of German-­ Turkish director Kutlug Ataman. Such genealogy is questionable, most notably because it overlooks the unexpected figures of minority that install these three films into an underground teleology of masking and unmasking sexuality.2 Yet it is not all: for how can one account for the fetishization of Sibel Kekilli, the German-­ Turkish shooting star of Fatih Akin’s masterpiece Head On (2004), while at the same time forgetting the sheer sublimation of the foreign-­ born stars of German films of the silent era, Asta Nielsen or Pola Negri? Are racial categories that are being challenged in the public sphere in Germany today going to find their last entrenchment in the critical discourse on minorities, and this at the expense of the complex texture of the cultural artifacts that address them? Or to put it differently: can one be satisfied by tracing the history of Fatih Akin’s Solino (2002) back to Fassbinder’s Katzelmacher (1969), and forget that unlike the Turks, the Italians and Greeks are already as equally Europeans today as are the Germans? Yet such questions do not even address the equally important challenges that the rapidly changing notion of cinema create, at a time when film is being recomposed around the most intimate instruments, technologies, and screens of picture making and viewing (home video, cell-­ phone, iPod, video games, etc.), which are also increasingly appropriated by minority groups in their daily activities. Since the appearance of minorities in German cinema coincides with the formal end of German colonialism, 1919, the date of signature of the first Minority treaties will serve as a historical marker in my analysis. I will restrict myself to a classical definition of cinema, by which I mean films that use celluloid as their preferred technology. Three notions will therefore inform my understanding of the concept of minority: first, Homi...

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