Being black in Nazi Germany
May 22, 2019 8:49 AM   Subscribe

Film director Amma Asante came across an old photograph taken in Nazi Germany of a black schoolgirl by chance. Curiosity - who the girl was and what she was doing in Germany - set the award-winning film-maker off on a path that led to Where Hands Touch, a new movie - an imagined account of a mixed-race teenager's clandestine relationship with a Hitler Youth member, but based on historical record.
posted by hugbucket (19 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is an excellent post--thanks for sharing.
posted by duffell at 10:13 AM on May 22, 2019




This article is really interesting but I am not here for romances with handsome Nazi youths. This movie sounds gross.
posted by leesh at 10:32 AM on May 22, 2019 [22 favorites]


Week before last there was an interesting interview with Amma Asante about the film on Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review.
posted by Kattullus at 10:56 AM on May 22, 2019


Gotta admit having the same reaction as leesh. This article is really interesting, but, uh, fuck this movie and its bullshit Nazi romance.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 1:15 PM on May 22, 2019 [3 favorites]


I find some things improve given a first viewing.
posted by howfar at 1:24 PM on May 22, 2019


i can see why the beat made story sense, but considering the context, and the general amount of narrative weightlifting you need to even render the story of black germans sensitively, that the movie needed to spend time on that 'imagined romance' with a nazi boy is such a misfire, imo. at the end of it, that's all we want to talk about, so it's just distracting and less than illuminating.
posted by cendawanita at 3:00 PM on May 22, 2019 [10 favorites]


Seriously — the (fictional, no less!) nazi romance is like making a biopic about a really unknown, amazing person with a brilliantly interesting story — but, for some reason, every shot has them covered in shit. Just the foulest feces. Of course that's all we're gonna focus on! Why would you do that?!
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 4:42 PM on May 22, 2019 [5 favorites]


One of the huge things that acts as an inadvertent barrier in cross cultural understanding is the American assumption that PoC in the Rest of the World think like their homegrown PoC and thus the interactions between PoC (a "minority" like "women") and the "ppl" are all the same.

Huge chunks of the rest of the world is a) not minority PoC b) first class citizens in their own countries, and c) do not have the same heritage/culture/history of race relations that are still highly charged domestically.

This basic assumption causes problems in all interactions.
posted by hugbucket at 12:59 AM on May 23, 2019 [6 favorites]


uh, fuck this movie and its bullshit Nazi romance.

I don't know, I think it's really fresh and exciting to portray a bullshit fictional Nazi romance with a POC instead of a Jew.
posted by Joe in Australia at 1:38 AM on May 23, 2019 [3 favorites]


hugbucket, I agree with your general point that racism in the US has a particular history and we ought to consider how and if those dynamics apply outside of the United States. But I'm confused by your comment as it applies to this post. Are you saying that the criticisms of this film are very US-centric?
posted by yaymukund at 1:46 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


The director is Ghanaian British and wouldn't her experiences have led her differently to the conceptualization of this story than someone with African American heritage?
posted by hugbucket at 3:24 AM on May 23, 2019


I can sort of see what you're getting at hugbucke> but... Nazi romance? In actual Nazi Germany? I think that can be seen as gross titilation from a British perspective too, to be honest. Maybe the movie is great and thought provoking and human, but I can certainly understand a kneejerk "ugh" reaction.
posted by stillnocturnal at 4:31 AM on May 23, 2019 [1 favorite]


Assante's whole thing is interracial romances (Belle, A United Kingdom) but I can say that this is getting major side-eye in the POC social media circles I run in (mostly based in the US but many wouldn't necessarily consider themselves American, FWIW)
posted by TwoStride at 5:53 AM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


The director is Ghanaian British and wouldn't her experiences have led her differently to the conceptualization of this story than someone with African American heritage?
I'm of Austrian Jewish heritage, and I'm not super keen on my family's annihilation being used as literal set-dressing for someone's tragic love story. I think there are really interesting themes to explore here, but hoo boy is it not a great idea to make your romantic hero be a literal concentration camp guard. And for some reason, people keep doing that. What the fuck is the appeal of this narrative?

I get that Asante's thing is romantic historical dramas that speak to contemporary themes, but I really question whether a romance was the best way to tackle this particular subject. I think the best-case scenario is probably that this movie encourages people to seek out other, less-icky sources about the experiences of Afro-German people during World War II.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:19 AM on May 23, 2019 [14 favorites]


“I think it’s challenging for people to conceive of a story about the Holocaust that is not centered around the Jewish experience, but the experience of someone else,” Stenberg says in this 2018 interview about the film. Assuming she wasn’t misquoted, that’s an extraordinarily tone-deaf take on people’s misgivings about the subject matter. I agree that it’s a shame about how it seems to have been handled, because I have plenty of interest in the unique experiences of biracial Germans during the Holocaust and zero interest in seeing this movie.
posted by fast ein Maedchen at 6:23 AM on May 23, 2019 [10 favorites]


I am realizing that my attitude regarding the movie (for me it was like Schindler's List) might be obsolete from the just post Wall fall era of early adulthood.
posted by hugbucket at 7:00 AM on May 23, 2019


For anyone interested in a story about being black in nazi europe WITHOUT a nazi romance - I highly suggest the book Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan. It's fiction and was nominated for multiple awards.
posted by Gor-ella at 12:38 PM on May 23, 2019 [5 favorites]


I am realizing that my attitude regarding the movie (for me it was like Schindler's List) might be obsolete [...]

That's probably a good way to look at it. There are lots of things that I absorbed as a kid that were probably liberal and enlightened for their day which now seem insufferably condescending. I think any story of this sort needs to center the experience of African-descended Germans, and not make it about their relationship with a non-POC. This is particularly true if the non-POC is an actual Nazi, someone who presumably thinks he's committing a moral as well as a legal crime by consorting with a POC. Depicting him sympathetically mitigates the enormity of the ideology he still espoused, and by extension that of Nazis generally. I can't say it could never have happened, but it's historically improbable and not representative of the general experience.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:48 PM on May 23, 2019 [2 favorites]


« Older ‘The moment of awakening’   |   As of this date, there are 433 calendars listed... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments