Petra Anders
This overview identifies four tendencies regarding contemporary German film on disability that suggest close ties between disability and norm(ality). These ties exist in recent German films no matter whether they tend to reinforce the separation of disabled character(s) from ‘normality’, a trend that is criticised by most disability studies scholars, or whether they aim to bridge this gap. In this context it becomes important to investigate the stereotypes, myths and metaphors surrounding disability that the selected German films perpetuate or challenge, and to reflect on the consequences of representing disability in terms of the disabled or the able-bodied self/Other. As some of the films selected may not be familiar to the Anglophone word, some basic details about the plots of each film are provided. In the sections that follow representations of ‘The Disabled Evildoer’, ‘Institutionisation and (Self-) Improvement’, ‘Disability in Everyday Life’ and ‘Introducing Sexuality’ are explored as a way of chronicling the state of disability in contemporary German film.
The Disabled Evildoer
Reinforcing problematic perspectives, Christian Alvart’s thriller
Antikörper (
Antibodies, 2005) portrays a paedophiliac killer named Gabriel Engel and employs disability as outer sign and punishment for a mentally disordered soul. British academic and journalist Paul Darke states: ‘Formula films, or genre movies, seem to have played a key part in perpetuating disability’s image as one-dimensionally bad’ (1997: 12). Accordingly, Engel’s very first sentence in
Antikörper indicates that he is not only an evildoer, but a criminal, a narcissistic parasite, an immoral person, a monster, a freak/murdering lunatic, a hater and a sinister and sexually abnormal person as well:
Die Welt ist ungerecht, sogar zu Leuten wie uns. Pedro Alonso López, das Monster der Anden, hat 300 Sexualmorde begangen. Und wer kennt ihn heute noch? Kein Schwein. Jack the Ripper ist noch nach 120 Jahren weltberühmt. Und weswegen? Wegen fünf Nutten, fünf. Und Charlie Manson, dieser Hippie, hat es fertig gebracht, unser Kaiser genannt zu werden, und dabei nicht mal einen einzigen Scheiß-Mord selbst begangen.
(The world is unfair, even to people like us. Pedro Alonso Lopez, the monster of the Andes, committed 300 sex killings. And who remembers him nowadays? No one. Jack the Ripper is still world-famous 120 years later. And for what? Because of five whores, five. And that hippie, named Charlie Manson, managed to be called our emperor, even if he himself did not even commit a single fucking murder.)
1This first-person narrator’s characteristics are one-dimensional, too: he is mad, distant, brutal, demanding, mean, selfish, impatient, determined, jealous, talkative or stubborn. His actions are unpredictable. Moreover, Engel takes pleasure in scaring, terrorising and manipulating people around him, especially his antagonist, the policeman Michael Martens. In short, this character is a personification of all evil. Although he speaks of ‘us’ and ‘our’, it is clear that (most of) the audience will not want to identify with Engel but make sure he is the ‘Other’.
Susan Wendell explains the mechanism of othering in connection with disability: ‘When we make people “other”; we group them together as the objects of our experience instead of regarding them as fellow subjects of experience with whom we might identify’ (2006: 251). The asymmetrical consequences of this are dramatic:
If you are ‘other’ to me, I see you primarily as symbolic of something else – usually, but not always, something I reject and fear and that I project onto you. We can all do this to each other, but very often the process is not symmetrical, because one group of people may have more power to call itself the paradigm of humanity and to make the world suit its own needs and validate its own experiences. Disabled people are ‘other’ to able-bodied people, and…the consequences are socially, economically and psychologically oppressive to the disabled and psychologically oppressive to the able-bodied. (Ibid.)
This also means that: ‘Able-bodied people may be “other” to disabled people, but the consequences of this for the able-bodied are minor (most able-bodied people can afford not to notice it)’ (ibid.). In Alvart’s film, the last name of the main character, Engel – which means ‘angel’ – brings up the binaries of good/ evil; as does his first name, Gabriel, which suggests religious connotations in its connection to the archangel of the same name. He is further presented as other through suggested mental illness, immoral attitudes and criminal behaviour – a portrayal that intersects with physical disability. The paedophiliac becomes a wheelchair user after he has tried to escape the police by jumping out of a window. Within the genre conventions of the horror film, this physical disability serves as atmosphere of ‘menace, mystery or deprivation’ (Barnes 1992: n.p.) and as punishment for the crimes Engel commits. In this case, disability symbolises danger, too: a threat to characters in the film as well as to able-bodied norms. This becomes even more obvious when considering the policeman Martens, whose identity is deeply rooted in Christianity. That Martens becomes increasingly involved in Engel’s manipulations, unable to resist them until the very last chance, makes the film a prime example of a story in which the good able-bodied normality wins the fight (see Darke 1997: 13).
Accordingly, it is no wonder that this disabled character, who is far from ‘normal’, makes fun of norms. Regarding performing arts and cinematic representations, both Darke and Markus Dederich, a German professor working on disability studies, agree that normality is the key to understanding representations of disability (see Darke n.d.; Dederich 2007: 127, 139). Although ‘normality’ and ‘disability’ are both imprecise terms, disability is often codified as a medical and legal category.
2 As a consequence, (German) medical or legal standards decide whether people are considered disabled or not, and self-definition and individual agency become less significant than wider social structures that are conditioned by able-bodied norms. Anne Waldschmidt, head of the Internationale Forschungsstelle Disability Studies (International Research Unit Disability Studies) at the University of Cologne, for example, emphasises that normality serves to assure able-bodied people of their reasonability and, in this way, legitimises their participation in civil liberties (2003: 20).
Fig. 1: Prison cell bars separating the disabled evil from ‘normality’.
The power struggle between the bad (disabled) and the good (able-bodied) in Antikörper reaches its visual peak in the way the bars of Engel’s prison cell are depicted. In the relevant scenes, the disabled ‘evil with a human face’ is put behind bars, most clearly separated from ‘normality’. In one of these scenes, Martens decides to sit down while questioning Engel. He is (figuratively as well as physically) willing to get down to Engel’s level in order to get the information he needs to convict him. Martens’ decision is telling because he trusts in his own moral superiority.
Engel’s acts and their consequences – first disability and jail, then suicide (but not out of guilt) – contribute to a narrative in which the bad is needed to identify the good. Martens and Engels are, in this way, presented as characters that symbolise opposite ends of a moral spectrum.
The disabled Karl Winter in Margarethe von Trotta’s
Ich bin die Andere (
I am the Other Woman, 2005) can also be considered a disabled evildoer. Winter is the patriarch of a family that he believes is there to serve him, and his wheelchair serves as an outer sign for his moral wickedness. He even uses his hydraulic lift, which is supposed to help him overcome obstacles, as a murder weapon. The fact that he takes pleasure in exerting pressure on people, especially on his mentally ill daughter, Carolin, who obeys him, shows the pervasiveness of the mechanism that Martin Norden calls ‘the age-old practice of linking evil or innocence with disability’ (2002: n.p.). Interestingly,
Ich bin die Andere does without point-of-view shots which could help the audience to either empathise with the mentally ill daughter or to maybe get a better understanding of why Winter behaves the way he does. This makes it very easy for viewers to uncritically accept the stereotypes and the portrayal of disability as synonymous with evil as well as ‘the stigma attached to psychiatric disability’ (López Levers 2001: n.p.). Lisa Lopez Levers’ statement regarding the film sample for her analysis of Hollywood film is to some extent applicable to the characters of Winter and his daughter and fully applicable to the disabled evildoer in
Antiköper: ‘These portrayals of “madness” are not necessarily or even usually reflective of the reality of psychiatric impairment’ (ibid.). She further underscores the significant and ‘powerful impact which such stereotypical filmic images may have upon the viewer’ (ibid.). Accordingly, von Trotta’s film aims at evoking a distanced fascination and growing disgust for the wheelchair user Winter, thus reducing him to an example of what Colin Barnes, founder of the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of Leeds, calls ‘objects of curiosity’ (1992: n.p.).
Making Winter an object instead of a fellow subject leads to solidarity with the (able-bodied) character of Fabry, who wants to marry Winter’s daughter. Winter explains: ‘Kein Mensch beruhrt gern einen Kruppel. […] Die Einzige, die mich gern beruhrt, ist meine Tochter’ (‘No one likes to touch a cripple. […] The only one who enjoys touching me is my daughter)’. Talking to Fabry he says: ‘Sie mag Ihre Frau werden, aber sie wird Sie nie lieben konnen, weil sie schon einen anderen liebt. […] Mich liebt sie’ (‘She may become your wife but she will not be able to love you because she loves someone else. […] She loves me’). He becomes even more precise later: ‘Sie kriegen ihren Korper, ich behalte ihre Liebe. […] Ohne mich wird sie leblos sein. Ohne mich wird sie ein Nichts sein. […] Ich werde auch leblos sein. Ich werde auch ein Nichts sein’ (‘You will get her body, I will keep her love. She will be lifeless […] without me. Without me she will be nothing. I will […] be lifeless as well. I will be nothing, too’). In order to suit the action to the word, Winter manipulates the hydraulic lift that should bring him and his daughter up the hills, right into his vineyard, where Carolin’s groom and the whole wedding party wait for them. But instead of arriving at the top of the hill, Winter, wearing a white suit, and his daughter, dressed in red instead of a traditional white wedding dress, plunge into the depths below them – thus solidifying the film’s links between disability and evil/criminal behaviour.
Institutionalisation and (Self-)Improvement
Til Schweiger’s
Barfuss (
Barefoot, 2005) portrays a young woman with mental health problems who is supposed to live in a psychiatric ward after her mother has died. The most striking point about this film is neither the extremely stereotypical characterisation of Leila, nor her escape from the ward, but the idea that living in the ward for some time can even be ‘healthy’ for so-called healthy people. Thus, Nick, the main character of the film, benefits from ‘moving in’ with Leila – something he is allowed to do despite the fact that Leila’s doctor knows that there is no medical reason for him being there. In this case, Leila serves as a saviour of sorts who initiates emotional healing. By spending time with sweet, kind, innocent, childish and anxious Leila, Nick becomes a better person. This is an example of how (psychiatric) disability is exploited as trigger for the improvement of an able-bodied person. Therefore, this film does not imply that ‘we are all the same’, or that ‘we are all more or less disabled (or mentally ill)’. It once again clearly separates ‘normal’ people from ‘the weird’ in the ward. This can, for example, be proven by the fact that the film concentrates on Leila’s escape from the institution. Once she is officially allowed to leave the clinic she dresses like everyone else. All that is left of the rebellious free thinker are her bare feet.
Vincent will Meer (
Vincent Wants to Sea, 2010) by Ralf Huettner tells quite a similar story. This time three outsiders – Vincent with Tourette syndrome, Alexander with a obsessive-compulsive disorder and Marie with anorexia – escape from a clinic. Just like Leila in
Barfuss, Vincent is traumatised after his mother’s death. But why does this film try to make viewers believe a person with Tourette syndrome needs to be institutionalised at all? It seems as if this clinical picture fulfils the ‘“quick fix” syndrome’ (Klobas 1988: xv). This is also indicated by the fact that institutionalisation does not seem to be an appropriate way to cure a possible agoraphobia. It is mentioned several times that Vincent has had difficulties leaving his mother’s house. Nevertheless, he is fine with a little spontaneous ‘road trip’ to Italy with Alex and Marie. It seems that he simply felt obliged not to leave his alcohol-addicted mother alone until she died. In Vincent’s case the disability is needed to tell the narration of two outsiders, Vincent and Marie, who fall in love with each other. This enables at least one of them, Vincent, to develop a more mature and also more normalised self in the end. Meanwhile, Vincent’s selfish father slowly but surely becomes a better person, too, while trying to find his son. Both ‘improvements’ need to be criticised: in the first case because Marie, who cannot simply shake off her anorexia in order to behave more ‘normal’ or at least more ‘healthy’, is left behind.
Fig. 2: Extreme close-up on Leila’s bare feet in the last scene of Barfuss. The film’s title means ‘barefooted’.
Fig. 3: From the same scene, apart from not wearing shoes Leila now wears ‘normal’ clothes. The person in front is Nick who is waiting for her.
For Barnes the ‘normalisation’ of disability ‘does not really challenge or undermine its meaning to non-disabled people’ (1992: n.p.):
Like all media portrayals of disabled people they do not reflect the racial, gender and cultural divisions within the disabled community as a whole – disabled people do not fit neatly into able-bodied perceptions of normality. Also the emphasis on normality tends to obscure the need for change. Logic dictates that if disabled people are perceived as ‘normal’ then there is little need for policies to bring about a society free from disablism. (Ibid.)
Vincent’s disability is exploited as a trigger not only for the transformation of his able-bodied father but also for the disabled son himself. In the most important dialogue of the film, Vincent’s father wants the doctor to call the police because his disabled son has escaped from the clinic, together with two other patients whom he refers to as ‘disabled’ as well. It is the doctor that reminds him that his son is 27 years old and therefore does not have to ask anyone for permission to leave the clinic.
Although this doctor is strict with Marie and Alex, she differs very much from the intrusive institution’s administration in Anno Saul’s
Wo ist Fred? (
Where is Fred?, 2005). Given that this film is a comedy whose humour arises from able-bodied perspectives on disability, what Barnes says about ‘The Disabled Person as an Object of Ridicule’ is important to keep in mind:
While such thoughtless behaviour might be expected in earlier less enlightened times making fun of disabled people is as prevalent now as it was then. It is especially common among professional non-disabled comedians. Several of the comedy ‘greats’ who influenced today’s ‘funny’ men and women built their careers around disablist humour. […] Today the mockery of disabled people is a major feature of many comedy films and TV shows. […] Those who exploit this kind of material are not confined to one specific brand of comedy – they are common to them all. (Ibid.)
In the film, Fred is an able-bodied construction worker who pretends to be a wheelchair user and to be unable to speak so that he can get a signed basketball, which is given only to disabled fans of a certain basketball team. Fred’s ‘disabled’ self, named ‘Fred Krüppelmann’, which means ‘Fred Cripplemann’, represents the opposite of the able-bodied, rude, extroverted redneck Fred usually is. All of the sudden, he turns into a modest, empathetic, withdrawn, adorable, shy do-gooder who realises what really counts in life. At the same time, the (allegedly) disabled Fred becomes a stereotypical helpless victim of the nursing staff at the institution that he has been brought to. Whenever he pretends to be a wheelchair user, Fred becomes an object rather than a subject and can be ridiculed (in the film as well as by the audience watching the film). This short description already shows that the rude and blunt humour used here does not aim at bridging the gap between able-bodied and disabled people at all. In each of the cases above, the narrative of (self-)improvement hinges on somewhat superficial and stereotypical representations of disability.
Disability in Everyday Life
In contrast, Andreas Dresen’s
Sommer vorm Balkon (
Summer in Berlin, 2005) integrates disability into the everyday urban life of its able-bodied protagonists. One of them, Nike, works for a nursing service and competently deals with her disabled clients. Using a Berlin dialect, she interacts with them in a respectful manner, provides assistance in everyday tasks such as getting washed, getting dressed, reading books and eating meals. In contrast to the films mentioned before,
Sommer vorm Balkon gives a rare example of a character working with and for disabled persons that does without the stereotype of the good carer who benefits from helping by becoming a better person. Instead, Nike wants to make her clients’ lives a little easier and more self-determined.
While clients such as Oskar and Mr. Neumann have dementia, Helene has physical disabilities. Significantly, all three of these fully developed characters are portrayed as having various character traits: they can be friendly, well tempered, generous, adorable, humorous or happy but also pessimistic, desperate, fearful or jealous. They are talkative and caring as well as shy, insecure or childish. This proves that filmmakers can tell narrations and create representations that go beyond one-dimensional disabled characters or able-bodied carers. Thus, Dresen’s disabled characters make less use of stereotypes, myths and metaphors. In Sommer vorm Balkon disability serves at best as a metaphor for dependency or vulnerability, but foremost it is simply a part of Nike’s job at the nursing service.
Camera and editing contribute to this impression by making the audience eye-witnesses of disability seen as an everyday reality. This means that the camera precisely observes how Nike changes Mr. Neumann’s incontinence pads or feeds him, using close-up or extreme close-up views. Instead of cutting these scenes out, which would be quite common in other films, Dresen makes the decision to use the camera as a way of having viewers co-exist with the characters they see. When the camera gets quite close to the film’s characters, the lightning is restrained and contributes to the impression that the camera is actually another human being present at the scene. It is important that Dresen uses this same close but respectful method to observe Nike spending time with her friend Katrin or her boyfriend, who are not disabled. Thus, the camera uses the same representational strategies whether at Nike’s work or in her private life.
The emotions evoked by Dresen’s disabled characters are much more complex than we have seen in the other films above. His approach induces a cautious empathy in viewers of the film. For example, able-bodied viewers may wonder what it would mean to need help to wash oneself, to be as disoriented as Oskar who sees and talks to his deceased mother although he is alone in the room or puts the coffee in the bathroom instead of the kitchen, or Mr. Neumann, who is convinced that he is a young pupil who needs to go to school. Who would want to rely on help in order to change incontinence pads?
As all of Nike’s clients live their own flats and not in a retirement home,
Sommer vorm Balkon moves away from a culture of caring that relies on the spatial separation of disabled from able-bodied characters, and toward an everyday realism that is significant among other recent German films.
Fig. 4: Nike feeding one her clients is shown in close-up just like…
Fig. 5:….Nike and her boyfriend
Introducing Sexuality
Noting how disability falls outside of social expectations, attention can be drawn to the way the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ lies close at hand, dividing disabled people into ill-fitting ‘bad cripple[s]’ on the one hand, and ‘good cripple[s]’ whose bodies can be ‘normalised’ on the other (Darke n.d.). In this context, the sexuality of disabled characters has often been erased, ignored or even vilified. As Barnes notes, ‘The Disabled Person as Sexually Abnormal’ is an extremely old stereotype (ibid.). Both
Renn, wenn Du kannst (
Run if You Can, 2010) by Dietrich Brüggemann and
Phantomschmerz (
Phantom Pain, 2009) by Matthias Emcke deal with disability and matters of physical attraction/sexuality in a way that other German films have avoided.
Importantly, Renn, wenn Du kannst quite explicitly deals with the disabled person’s sexual appetite and opts not to link disability with either sexual abnormality or asexuality but instead to pursue its resonance with the notion of autonomy. It tells the story of the paraplegic Ben who can live in his own flat thanks to his mother and his helper Christian. Ben and Christian both make advances to Annika, a beautiful young musician, who is attracted to both of them. In the context of the representation of disability in other German films, it is astonishing not only that Ben and Annika want to have sex but also that they talk about Ben’s bladder bag, Viagra and the penis pump. This scene shows how uneasy Annika feels about these things, but Ben utters: ‘Wir müssen drüber reden. Einfach machen geht nicht’ (‘We have to talk about it. Simply having sex won’t work’). Although they stop having sex at that moment, Annika is still attracted to Ben, who remains the rival to the able-bodied Christian.
This love triangle is unconventional for German film, as yet another dialogue between the characters shows. When Annika wants to know why Ben separated from a young woman he had met after the accident that caused his disability he remarks:
Ben: ‘Sie war behindert. Und zwar von Geburt an. Und mit Behinderten kann ich einfach nichts anfangen. Ich wünschte es wäre anders, aber es ist so’ (‘She was disabled. Disabled since she was born. And disabled [women] don’t mean anything to me. I wish that wasn’t the case but it is’).
Annika: ‘Heißt das, wenn ich jetzt im Rollstuhl landen würde, würdest du michts mehr wollen?’ (‘Does that mean that if I would need a wheelchair you would not want to be with me anymore?’).
Ben: ‘Ja’ (‘Yes’).
Annika: ‘Weißt du, was du da sagst?’ (‘Do you know what that means?’).
Ben: ‘Weißt du, man muss bei seinem Marktwert bleiben. Schöne Menschen haben die Auswahl. Durchnittsmenschen müssen Kompromisse machen und Behinderte halten miteinander Händchen’ (‘You know, you need to stick with your market value. Beautiful people can choose. Average people have to make compromises. And disabled [people] hold hands’).
Annika: ‘Das ist Müll’ (‘That’s rubbish’).
Ben: ‘Das ist kein Müll’ (‘No, it’s not’).
Annika: ‘Doch! Wenn man jemanden kennenlernt, der im Rollstuhl sitzt, ja, dann denkt man nicht sofort daran, mit dem was anzufangen, aber wenn derjenige interessant ist, dann…Es gibt doch Partnerschaften zwischen Behinderten und Nichtbehinderten’ (‘Yes, it is! If you meet someone in a wheelchair, you don’t necessarily think: “He means a lot to me”. But if he is interesting…There are relationships between disabled and able-bodied people’).
Ben: ‘Ich will aber keine Partnerschaft…’ (‘I don’t want a relationship…’).
Annika: ‘Wieso? Was willst du dann?’ (‘Why? What do you want?’).
Ben: ‘Liebe’ (‘Love’).
Annika: ‘Aber das kann es doch auch geben’ (‘But that’s possible, too’).
Ben: ‘Soweit ich weiß, nein. Es gibt nur das Modell resolute Pflegefrau bemuttert Invaliden oder zwei Behinderte machen sich gegenseitig ihr Los ein bisschen lustiger. Beide Modelle kotzen mich an’ (‘As far as I know, no. There’s only the model of a resolute female nurse who chaperones an invalid or two disabled persons who try to put up with their fate. Both models are disgusting’).
Annika: ‘Weißt du, was mich anekelt?’ (‘You know what sickens me?’).
Ben (interrupting her): ‘Ach, was soll’s. Es laufen eh lauter Kompromisse rum und haben Liebesbeziehungen miteinander’ (‘Well, who cares, the world is full of walking compromises who are in relationships’).
Annika: ‘Mich ekelt deine Vorstellung von Liebe an’ (‘Your idea of love is disgusting’).
In the end, Ben’s desire for love does not seem to fit the role he is meant to play in society. Social convention would dictate that he should either be happy with a carer who likes him or find someone of his own kind: a disabled person.
Emcke’s
Phantomschmerz is based on a true story. Therefore, it is in some respects more realistic than other dramas or thrillers and crime stories that use disability to separate the ‘Other’ from the able-bodied majority. Still, the basic plot is that of a disabled man who triumphs over his fate and becomes a better person. In a sense, the film plays on the ‘supercrip’ dichotomy:
By emphasising the extra-ordinary achievements of disabled [people]…the media implies that the experiences of ‘ordinary’ people – disabled or otherwise – are unimportant and irrelevant. Hence non-disabled people view super cripples as unrepresentative of the disabled community as a whole and the gulf between the two groups remains as wide as ever. (Barnes 1992: n.p.)
In this case, the man who had once been a loving, but not necessarily reliable, father finds out what really counts in life after he loses a leg in an accident. Marc, who used to have a lot of one-night stands, was forced to earn his living with odd jobs, but he soon realises that Nika is his true love and makes peace with his deceased father. This moral improvement is directly linked to the ‘new and better’ self as disabled person while the character of Vincent has lived with Tourette syndrome for a long time. Marc’s ‘triumph over his fate’ is most observable in that by the end of the film, this man who used to be a passionate hobby athlete prior to his accident now rides his bike as an amputee thanks to a high-tech artificial limb.
Marc’s stump is shown in an extreme close-up focusing on the ugly stump’s large scar. It is the stigma on the perfect body that I will refer to below. The ugly scar is the symbol for the trauma that the loss of a body part means. At the same time it symbolises the healing and ‘normalisation’ process. At the beginning of this process, Marc needs a wheelchair; a little later he can already walk on crutches. Once Nika helps him to get rid of them (both figuratively and literally), Marc can walk on his artificial limp. At the end of the film, he can conquer a mountain that had once been part of a Tour de France course. This corresponds with Barnes’ observation that, in case of the stereotype of ‘The Disabled Person as Super Cripple’: ‘the disabled person is assigned super human almost magical abilities’ (ibid.). The effort required for his recovery is severely downplayed in the film: thus, only a short episode at a doctor’s office that depicts someone else doing exercises indicates that training is needed. The regularised physiotherapy required to learn to walk with an artificial limb, not to mention to ride a bike with one, is not shown. Interestingly, the crucial scenes in which Marc is still in intensive care are filmed with a blue-green colour filter, which visually marks the traumatic experience of Otherness.
Marc’s sexual appetite despite heavy phantom pain also supports the ‘supercrip’ image. His body seems to be in perfect shape although the loss of his left leg should have had a negative effect on his body’s muscles. Instead, it does not take long until he has sex with several women who pity him. Shortly thereafter, he and his true love have sex as well and finally decide to begin a serious relationship. The film thus portrays a disabled body that seems to recover from physical trauma all too easily, maintaining the able-bodied standard of ‘excellent shape’ without much difficulty. Nevertheless, both
Phantomschmerz and
Renn, wenn Du kannst go further than many films have gone before in addressing the sexual lives of disabled characters in detail.
Conclusion
This chapter is intended only to give a brief impression of the stereotypes, myths and metaphors surrounding disability in contemporary German film. The selected films that appeared since 2005 show that in addition to narrative structures, camera or editing contribute to the close ties between norm(ality) and disability in films. These ties are interpreted in different ways depending on the individual film, director or character. Although disability is predominantly ‘othered’ in contemporary German film in various ways, there are cases in which films have attempted to go beyond this notion of ‘other’ – for example, in Sommer vorm Balkon or Renn, wenn Du kannst. Nevertheless, it is still more common to portray disabled characters through stereotypes that have been identified in disability studies scholarship in the Anglophone world – as shown, for example, in Antikörper, Ich bin die Andere or Wo ist Fred? Constructed as the ‘Other’, disabled characters are used to perpetuate binaries such as bad/good, evil/righteous, weak/strong that obscure the social norming of able-bodiedness.
Thus, it is actually not that surprising that – once again referring to Darke and Dederich – normality is the key to understanding the representation of disability in film. Considering Waldschmidt’s idea that normality serves to assure able-bodied people of their reasonability – in this way, legitimising their participation in civil liberties – and Wendell’s remarks on ‘Othering’, it can be noted that the close ties between norm(ality) and disability are not limited to fiction. In conclusion, it is worth remembering Darke’s statement:
Stereotypes are very useful in the identification of relations between social groups (the oppressed and the oppressor) and, as such, are both revealing of a wider social framework within which, in this case, disabled people are seen. Equally, stereotypes can be highly empowering and enjoyable for the oppressed in revealing the true nature and picture of their social relationships: I am right, society does see me in this way; I am not imagining it. Positive imagery, on the other hand becomes a further threat to disabled people by making clear that to be accepted and valued by society one must be like this or that (i.e. normalised and educated). Thereby an equally false/arbitrary reality is created which many disabled people either cannot or do not want to emulate. (n.d.: n.p.)
This means that stereotypical (filmic) representations of disability need to be analysed and criticised, but also that they should neither be eliminated nor forbidden.
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
Alvart, Christian (dir) (2005) Antikörper (Antibodies). 127 minutes. Kinowelt Filmproduktion/ MedienKontor Movie GmbH. Germany.
Brüggemann, Dietrich (dir) (2010) Renn, wenn Du kannst (Run, If You Can). 112 minutes. Südwestrundfunk/Westdeutscher Rundfunk. Germany.
Dresen, Andreas (dir) (2005) Sommer vorm Balkon (Summer in Berlin). 107 minutes. Peter Rommel Productions/X-Filme Creative Pool. Germany.
Emcke, Matthias (dir) (2009) Phantomschmerz (Phantom Pain). 97 minutes. Film1/Neue Bioskop Film. Germany.
Huettner, Ralf (dir) (2010) Vincent will Meer (Vincent wants to Sea). 96 minutes. Olga Film GmbH. Germany.
Saul, Anno (dir) (2006) Wo ist Fred? (Where is Fred?). 107 minutes. Bioskop Film/H&V Entertainment. Germany.
Schweiger, Til (dir) (2005) Barfuss (Barefoot). 118 minutes. Buena Vista International Film Production/Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen. Germany.
Trotta, Margarethe von (dir) (2006) Ich bin die Andere (I am the Other Woman). 104 minutes. Clasart Film + TV Produktions GmbH. Germany.
Anders, Petra-A. (2014) Behinderung und psychische Krankheit im zeigenössischen deutschen Spielfilm: Eine vergleichende Filmanalyse. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Darke, Paul (1997) ‘Everywhere: Disability on Film’, in Ann Pointon and Chris Davies (eds) Framed: Interrogating Disability in the Media. London: British Film Institute, 10–14.
Dederich, Markus (2007) Körper, Kultur und Behinderung: Eine Einführung in die Disability Studies. Bielefeld: transcript.
Klobas, Lauri E. (1988) Disability Drama in Television and Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Waldschmidt, Anne (2003) ‘Selbstbestimmung als behindertenpolitisches Paradigma - Perspektiven der Disability Studies’. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte: Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament, 13–20.
Wendell, Susan (2006) ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability’, in Lennard J. Davis (ed.) The Disability Studies Reader, 2nd ed. New York, NY: Routledge, 243–56.
