DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau: Orientalizing Poland in the German Cinema of the 1990s Jakub Kazecki Bates College Abstract: This article examines how German anxieties about reunification and shifting borders are represented through Orientalist portrayals of Polish women in two post-reunification films, Polish Crash , dir. Kaspar Heidelbach (1993), and My Polish Maiden, dir. Douglas Wolfsperger (2001). Building upon Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism and the idea that the concept of East-Central Europe has been invented as a counterimage of the “West” (Larry Wolff), the analysis reveals how depictions of Polish women as passive, vulnerable, and in need of German male assistance serve to reassert German masculinity in the face of perceived social and economic threats from the “East.” The article argues that these films perpetuate long-standing colonial paradigms within German discourse on Poland that cast Poland as an uncivilized other, and Polish women as feminized objects of control, reaffirming German cultural superiority. By analyzing specific narrative and visual strategies in both films, the text highlights the persistence of Orientalist representations of Poland in German post-unification cinema and their role in constructing national and gendered identities in the context of Germany’s changing geopolitical landscape. Keywords: Orientalism, Polish-German relations, German cinema in the 1990s and 2000s, Film analysis, Gender representations, Postcolonialism, Meine polnische Jungfrau , Polski Crash Since German reunification in 1989/ 90, the country’s individual, business, and cultural relationships with Poland intensified, and German audiences were also open to seeing Germany’s neighbor and its citizens on screen more frequently. The redefinition of Germany’s place in Europe in the early 2000s, the European Union’s extension to the East in 2004, and the opening of the German-Polish 416 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 border in 2007 have contributed to a steady output of big-screen pictures and TV productions that glance beyond the once well-guarded frontier located only 65 miles east of the new German capital. 1 The titles released in the late 1990s and early 2000s range from critically acclaimed films set in the German-Polish borderland, such as Grill Point [ Halbe Treppe , 2002], In This Very Moment [ Milchwald , 2003], or Distant Lights [ Lichter , 2003], to lesser-known, (especially to US viewers), lower-budget popular productions for commercial broadcasters. Poland functions in these narratives mainly as a “liminal space of self-discovery for the film’s German protagonists” that is “always ‘other’ to Germany, always a foil for existential self-reflection, offering the spectator a reworked version of Edward Said’s Orientalism ” (Cooke 132). When Paul Cooke refers to Poland in contemporary German film as “Germany’s oriental other,” he emphasizes that the Orientalizing construction of Poland is “less a geographical entity than a metaphorical space,” that is, a product of instrumentalized imagination highlighting the notions of Western European superiority and dominance (132). What Said called “latent Orientalism” (Said 206) frames the imagined East solely in terms of “its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness” (205). Orientalism places the East in opposition to the equally constructed “Occident”; the West is the reference point to evaluate the East’s progress and value, making it always inferior to the West. The following study demonstrates that the abundance of negative associations, which are affixed to the image of Poland and the Poles in the German cinema of the 1990s and the early 2000s, is the product of long-existing practices of Orientalism in the German discourse on Poland. The country’s depictions were instrumentalized within a particular system of representation that creates a false distinction between a supposedly tradition-bound “Orient” and a modernizing “West.” The main purpose of these techniques of Orientalizing Poland was to create a “source of impending threat that is […] successfully staved off by a successfully united and internally homogenized Germany” (Kopp, “If Your Car Is Stolen” 43). The cinematic portraits of Poland and the Pole were projections of the anxieties surrounding Germany’s reunification. Fears about the increase in criminal activity, the influx of illegal immigrants and cheap labor, and the worsening of the population’s economic situation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) have all found their expression in the ambiguous figure of the Pole as other. Orientalizing Poland and its population became a symbolic way to ascertain that the new German Bundesländer were a part of the Western sphere, and that the seemingly chaotic transformation forces were a manifestation of the same beneficent rationality that characterizes the Occident, as opposed to the Orient’s disorderly presence on the other side of the border. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 417 Taking Said’s description of practices of Orientalism and his note on the Orient’s “feminine penetrability” (Said 206) as my departure point, I investigate the projection of these collective anxieties about Germany’s reunification onto the land and people beyond Germany’s Eastern border and link it with the crisis of modern Western masculinity that finds its affirmation through the (re-) imagination of colonial and sexual conquest. In the example of two films, Polish Crash [ Polski Crash , 1994] and My Polish Maiden [ Heirate mir! , 2001], I demonstrate that the tactic to maintain male hegemony is to avoid German women, who are seen as economically independent, sexually demanding, and competing with males. Instead, the men in these films look beyond what is available to them domestically and find a suitable partner in Poland. Polish female characters are portrayed as passive individuals in abusive relationships; they long for intervention from German men who relish the role of finally being needed as protectors and providers. The female characters offer male protagonists a chance to prove themselves in a crisis and overcome obstacles. In both films, men reassert their position of dominance thanks to a distinct proposal of traditionally defined femininity: a domesticated exotic partner. This constellation of gender roles across borders and cultures stems from an Orientalized perspective on German-Polish interpersonal relationships. I argue that the sustenance of hegemonic masculinity can only exist against the Polish female character, as an expression of neocolonial subjugation. As I outline in the following two sections, the long-standing practices of Orientalizing Poland and its inhabitants reach back to the 18th and 19th centuries when they created a conceptual framework for actual or imaginary colonial domination. They have saturated the popular discourse on Poland ever since; they manifest themselves in the German mass media after 1989. Next, in my analysis of the films, I demonstrate that patterns of Orientalizing Poland and Polish women transpire through specific narrative solutions and by visually accentuating the difference in the portrayal of German and Polish female characters. The abundance of negative cinematic depictions of Poland in the first decade after the Wende plays into a long-existing colonial paradigm in German culture that derives from the history of German settlement in East-Central Europe, defining its lands and the people through an Orientalist vocabulary. In his influential study Inventing Eastern Europe (1994), Larry Wolff points out that this perspective was adopted already by prominent German and French intellectuals during the Enlightenment, including Fichte, Herder, Voltaire, and Rousseau. These 18 th -century travelers to Eastern Europe published accounts of their journeys popularized later by the era’s leading humanists. They were instrumental in paradigmatically orientating East-Central Europe and its people 418 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 in a subordinated position to the West as an immature, underdeveloped, and uncivilized other. Scholars have since challenged the notion of deliberate invention of East-Central Europe as an identity project in the 18th century and pointed out the multiplicity of standpoints and perspectives in the othering discourses at the time. 2 However, they don’t contest the existence of specific perceptual patterns that influenced and keep influencing the image of the “normatively charged transition zone between a progressive West representing the highest stage of civilization […] and the stagnant East” (Hewitson and Vermeiren 3). In explaining the dynamic between the ‘West’ and ‘East,’ Wolff, and others, adopted Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism and his concept of “imaginative geographies” that underscores the political practice of world-making through specific techniques of representation that both reflect and enable relations of power (Said 49—73). The processes of mental mapping described by Said were represented and produced through a network of institutions and shaped the perception and modes of encounter between the East and the West. They also contributed to Western discourse on the intersections and similarities between a more distant, colonial, and exotic Orient and a more immediate ‘East’ within Europe that included the regions of East-Central and Eastern Europe. The continuous practice of comparisons and contrasts made the discursive space of East-Central Europe to an ambiguous entity with imprecise boundaries, which Wolff describes as “a paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe.” The author argues that “Eastern Europe defined Western Europe by contrast, as the Orient defined the Occident,” but he sees the function of the construct of Eastern Europe to “mediate between [Western] Europe and the Orient” and calls it “an intellectual project of demi-Orientalization” (Wolff 6—7). 3 This mental mapping created the dominant narrative framework for the region in the 19th and 20th centuries, preparing the groundwork for a potential civilizing mission in Poland as projection of Germany’s “adjacent colony” (Conrad 154—59). As Susanne Zantop argues in Colonial Fantasies (1997), Germany’s drive for colonial possession of territories, resources, and human labor, present in the public sphere since the late 18th century and particularly strong in the late 19th century, articulated itself primarily not in the political policies and actions but rather in literary narratives of conquest and surrender set in colonial territories, linking “sexual desire for the other with desire for power and control” (3). These narratives were a substitute for an actual conquest, establishing “imaginary testing ground for colonial action” (6) that eventually eclipsed Germany’s colonial reality. The imaginary realm to be dominated, in addition to the lands in Africa and Asia, included parts of South America and East-Central Europe that were subjected to similar representational practices, despite their DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 419 absence from the formal group of German colonies. German historians as well as cartographers picked up on these narratives to create a “negative appeal onto the colonizer […] [that] existed in the imagination,” and to highlight the assumed special role of German Kulturträger , “culture carriers,” who brought civilization to East-Central Europe (Kienemann 168). 4 The German literary contributions to the project of Orientalism in the 19th century were a symbolic gesture of joining the group of established European powers and assuming the position of cultural and racial superiority. 5 Considering the overarching European colonial idiom, many critics also note the particular persistence with which the Orientalist representational models keep saturating contemporary German and Western European literature and film (see Newsome; Dupcsik; Kopp, Germany’s Wild East ; Kopp, “Gray Zones”). These models - as I will argue next - are repurposed to depict the Poles and Poland in terms typical for Orientalist discourse. They aim to establish a sense of German cultural and political dominance by recreating the dichotomy between the progressive West and the socially and economically belated East. The growing number of negatively coded appearances of Polish characters and narrative elements in the German cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s did not emerge in a historical and discursive vacuum. They mirror the widespread concerns about the rapid economic transformation across Germany’s Eastern border and its impact on the domestic job market and safety in German cities. A representative example of the predominant perception of Poland is its image in the German press of the time. As Piotr Zariczny commented in 2011 on the perception of Poland shortly after 1989, “Poland remain[ed] a country largely unknown to Germans, and the main source of information about it [was] still media” (168), and it was press and TV news reports that painted a rather unfavorable and enduring picture of the country not devoid of Orientalizing features. In the first years following German reunification, a large segment of the German press, including leading mainstream newspapers and weekly magazines such as Die Zeit or Der Spiegel , presented the image of post-1989 Poland as a backward nation descending into economic and social chaos (Loew and Pfeifer 72). Fears that such disorder might spill over the border were amplified by articles in the Berlin press which warned the readers against the “barbarian invasion” from the East if the visas for Polish visitors were to be abolished in 1991 (Kosmala). While it has to be noted that the press image of the Polish intellectuals and political elites was more affirmative, 6 such highly negative opinions about Poland’s general population were ubiquitous. Helga Hirsch, the correspondent of Die Zeit in Warsaw in the 1990s, quotes a survey prepared by the German public opinion research organization EMNID - Institut für Meinungsforschung 420 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 und Sozialforschung in the mid-1990s. According to the survey results, 87% of Germans had a distinctly negative opinion of Poland and its citizens, associating the country primarily with criminal activities, corruption, lack of efficiency, bureaucracy, and undue influence of the Catholic Church. The long-existing pejorative stereotype of a polnische Wirtschaft , or “Polish-style management,” 7 was replicated not only in the press but also in television. Among the examples of such treatment of Poland in commercial TV are degrading Polish jokes popularized by Harald Schmidt on his hit SAT.1 show Die Harald Schmidt Show until 1997 (Zeslawski 229). This deprecatory perception did not change fundamentally over the next decade. The historian Edmund Dmitrów notes in an analysis of national stereotypes on both sides of the border, conducted between 1998 and 2004, that the perception of Poles in Germany and their image in the media was split between national and local broadcasters. The German commercial TV stations focused on medially attractive, controversial, and conflicting issues related to Poland, taking advantage of negative associations connected with the country (493—500). As empirical studies have shown, a more permeable territorial state border “has not at all led to a less rigid stereotyping between the adjacent neighbors” (Dürrschmidt 126), and prejudices prevailed. The studies of German public opinion conducted from 2000 to 2008 indicated that Germans still looked down at Poland as a country “deviating from the West European standards in the political, economic, and social dimensions” (Kolarska-Bobińska and Łada 172). While the negative image of Poland in Germany didn’t go unnoticed by the Polish public, there were also voices in the Polish press that admitted that the unfavorable depictions of the Poles were, in part, self-inflicted, especially those of the new entrepreneurs venturing into the markets of the post-unification Germany. In 1999, the journalists of the influential Polish weekly Wprost observed that in the German consciousness, the dark side of the turbulent transformation in the former GDR had been firmly linked to the synecdochical Pole. For an average consumer of German media, it was a Pole who was standing at the “Polish market” in Berlin (a massive open-air market near today’s Potsdamer Platz visited by thousands of small-time Polish traders in 1989/ 90), a Polish drug dealer was selling “Polish soup” (heroin from the poppy straw) on the city streets, a Polish thief was conducting business for the “Polish car mafia,” and a Polish construction worker was hunting for jobs on the black market. The landscape of the criminal underworld in Berlin was painted with depictions of Polish prostitutes, young boys from Poland making money off the German pedophiles at the Zoo Station, and street vendors peddling cartons of cheap cigarettes from Poland (see Kot et al.; Rodzeń). It is not surprising in this context that several films made in the first decade after German reunification include characters or narrative elements associated DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 421 with Poland’s wildly imagined crime scene, which hinder or jeopardize the chances of protagonists to navigate the turbulent times in the new German Bundesländer successfully. For example, in Eastern Crossing [ Ostkreuz , 1991] by Michael Klier, a petty criminal from Poland involves the German teenager in his schemes by using her as a front to push counterfeit money and taking her to Poland as an interpreter during the sale of a stolen car to the Russian mafia. In Little Angel [ Engelchen , 1996] by Helke Misselwitz, the cigarette smuggler from Poland awakens the wish of the main female character to start a family, and the same desire causes the protagonist’s demise. In Forget America [ Vergiss Amerika , 2000] by Vanessa Jopp, the German wannabe car dealer engages in shady business with Polish criminals and, after an initial period of prosperity, gets in trouble with his new partners. The two films analyzed below, Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden , don’t deviate from this paradigm. Kaspar Heidelbach’s Polish Crash (1993) tells the story of Tom (Klaus J. Behrendt), an entrepreneur from Dortmund, who learns that his younger brother Piet ( Jürgen Vogel) urgently needs his help in Poland. Piet is a professional car thief: he selects luxurious vehicles in Germany and brings them over the border to sell to the Polish mafia. Tom follows his brother to Poland and discovers that Piet is hiding from a vicious Polish gangster, whom Piet double-crossed, and the Polish and German police. The audience soon learns that Tom’s brother is preparing the heist of his life: he wants to kidnap a transport of German cars smuggled by the Russian soldiers on the train traveling through Poland to the home base in Russia. Tom wants to save his brother from completing the risky plan and, with the help of Piet’s Polish girlfriend Alina (Clotilde Courau), reveals Piet’s intentions to the authorities. In the dramatic finale, Piet confronts Tom and tries to kill him. He is shot by the police and dies in Tom’s arms. While Polish Crash is primarily a story about the relationship between brothers that has been put to the test, the film’s setting is not arbitrary. Several elements contribute to the exoticization of Germany’s neighbor and highlight the West-East dichotomy in which the East is dangerous yet alluring. It is first articulated clearly in the scene when Tom goes to Poland. The audience sees the train rushing from left to right, mimicking Tom’s movement on the map from West to East (10’05”). The train’s name displayed on the screen, “Ost-West-Express,” was never used to connect Cologne (and Tom’s hometown Dortmund) and Warsaw, although a direct night train service between the cities existed until 2017. The name of the fictional Ost-West-Express in Polish Crash resembles another well-known line connecting Western and Eastern European cities, the Orient Express. Warsaw, the last stop of the Ost-West-Express, corresponds here with the role Istanbul played in the imagination of Western travelers in the late 422 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 19th and early 20th centuries. For Tom, who intends to save Piet from trouble with the mafia, going to Warsaw is not as much a trip in space but in time: it is a nostalgic journey back to childhood when their brotherly relationship was not spoiled by greed. Warsaw epitomizes Tom’s romanticized vision of an existence guided by values other than money, similar to what Radha Jagad Dalal writes about passengers going to Istanbul on board the Orient Express: “As the final destination of the Orient Express, Istanbul is where the traveler expects to find the Orient, exotic and unsullied by the ‘secularization of life under capitalism’” (Dalal 11). While sitting on the train, a flashback from Tom’s childhood illustrates the defining moment of his relationship with Piet. Tom has been driven by guilt and a feeling of responsibility for his younger brother after the traumatic experience of their parent’s death. The motif of revisiting the past on the train is also intensified when Tom meets his old love interest Susi (Susanne Wilhelmina), who travels to Warsaw on business. An encounter in the onboard restaurant and a night together in the sleeping compartment seems like a promise to rekindle the romantic connection in Warsaw. As the audience soon learns, it is an elusive image because Susi’s motives are pragmatic: she works for the German police and wants better access to Piet through Tom. The underlying story of Polish Crash is anchored in the archetypal tale of brothers turned against each other. The source of their conflict is Piet’s greed and opportunities for making easy money in a country in which, as Alina puts it, “everything is possible” (38’52”), and law and order are suspended. Private investigators with shotguns openly stride on the street and stop individuals for a quick search (39’41”), and kidnapping someone in broad daylight is, to say the least, not surprising to pedestrians in Warsaw (28’43”). The image of Poland in the film is a blend of cinematic conventions that derive from the genres of Trümmerfilm and the Western: a bleak and gloomy landscape of run-down buildings with grim facades and abandoned or neglected industrial sites, filmed primarily in chiaroscuro lighting that creates a visual connection with the portrayal of the destroyed German cities in 1945 in the rubble films. The nod to the “year zero” in German history and the moral ambiguity of the characters taken from the rubble films is further emphasized by shots of monumental structures of the Communist era that stand as a memento of the past but not a distant regime. For German viewers in the early 1990s, it is a familiar sight: the buildings from the Stalin era in Warsaw resemble the architecture of the GDR with a visual nod to Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. The remnants of the Communist past visible on the screen create a symbolic connection between the situation in the new states in Germany and the transformation in Poland. At the same time, the elements of the Western genre, such as the film soundtrack and the motif of a train robbery in open (and seemingly empty) spaces of the Polish province, hint at the oppor- DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 423 tunities awaiting the brave pioneers in the Wild West: the Wild East, as the film seems to suggest, is equally suitable for colonial encroachments. This mixture of generic characteristics of the rubble film and the Western is purposefully employed to create a vision of a space that is ready for conquest and the establishment of new rules, similar to the fallacy of claims of ‘empty,’ ‘dead,’ or ‘pristine’ land in settler colonialism. The blend of diverse cinematic genres thus serves the goal of Orientalizing Poland by associating it with openness, lawlessness, and with a need for rebuilding, or other forms of civilizatory intervention. It forms a canvas on which the characters from the outside navigate the perceived exoticism of post-1989 Poland. To the Poles in the film, the German is a source of “goods” that can be traded for profit. When Tom arrives at the hotel, the small-time crook forces himself into Tom’s room and wants to buy dollars from the German visitor. He presents a card catalog of prostitutes to order for the evening (17’40”). Eventually, he offers Tom access to a gun “from Sarajevo,” which can be read as a shorthand for a product of Western Orientalism that approaches the Balkans with the same superiority as Poland. Yet, it is also a manifestation of “nesting Orientalism” 8 that labels the Balkans as more chaotic and threatening than Poland. The mafia boss, the chief of the criminal police unit, and the private detective working for a car insurance company are only interested in Tom as a provider of valuable information about his brother. Poland in Polish Crash seems corrupted by greed and ruled solely by physical violence. The main principle appears to be the survival of the most brutal agents of the emerging capitalist economy, where most participants started from scratch. Even more so, just being in Poland corrupts and changes the characters’ behavior. The perspective of getting rich fast blinds Tom’s brother Piet. After hearing Piet’s plan to rob the train, Tom observes that Piet has transformed; he is “crazy,” and Tom has never seen him act like that (1h 01’15”). Tainted by Poland, the new Piet is ready to kill his brother for a quarter of a million Deutschmark . Tom himself temporarily loses his moral compass in Poland, becomes more brutal and violent, and at one point, sexually assaults Alina. He then promptly apologizes to her by explaining: “I don’t know what I am doing anymore; I am like in a jungle here” (49’53”), which can be read as a double allusion; first to the cinematic trope of the urban jungle characterized by moral ambiguity and violence, 9 and second, to the primal environment where the civilization does not reach. The portrayal of Poland in the film, as much as it is an exaggeration of the Polish economic and social situation of the time, is also a comment on German realities in the early 1990s. It is a warning of what a post-Communist country can become without the civilization forces of the West; it is a convenient image of the Other that can caution about the potential developments in the 424 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 former GDR and the risks of the economic and social transformation. As Kaja Puto notes, “Poland on film is a vision of what liberal democracy could become without a multilateral social contract, without the learning experience of guilt carried from World War II, and without the accumulated capital that helps to overcome the crisis periods. In other words: what Germany would have become if it wasn’t as lucky as it was” (Puto 33). What is worth noticing is that, unlike Poland, Germany has the ability to symbolically cleanse itself in Polish Crash and thus expel the dangerous elements emanating from the East. The menacing Soviet military transport from Potsdam that smuggles the stolen cargo is part of a scheduled Russian troops departure from the former GDR in 1993/ 94. The German Mercedes and BMWs do not return to their rightful owners and disappear in “Asia” (as one of the Polish gangsters scorns), but that is a price to pay for the departure of the Russians from Germany. The soldiers’ advancing Orientalization is highlighted in the choice of music in the train car the farther they are from the West: from Western heavy metal on the boombox in Potsdam to Russian folk songs with accordion accompaniment in Poland while they are moving East. When the criminal Piet dies in the confrontation with his brother Tom, it is also a symbolic end of the allure and danger of the German ‘dark side,’ when the ‘what-if ’ scenario finds its satisfying ending, although not bereft of ambiguity caused by the loss of a beloved brother. Polish Crash doses the message that the instability in Germany originates from Poland at regular intervals by associating various facets of criminality with Polishness. The character of Tom is introduced in a scene when he is confronting dishonest car junkyard owners, the Kosinski brothers (4’19”), connoisseurs of alcohol and pornography. On the train to Poland, Tom reads a newspaper article about the Polish mafia in Hamburg setting off a car bomb (11’17”), and at the German-Polish border, the criminals in stolen cars break through the gate and rush into Poland with no resistance from the border guards (40’35”). The purposeful employment of the stigmatized elements associated with Poland sets up the East/ Poland as a black mirror to the West/ Germany. In this mirror, Tom can see who he could become if he does not stay on the straight and narrow. The film’s narrative elements follow the logic of the East/ West dichotomy. Piet is Tom’s ugly reflection, fascinated by Poland’s underworld and criminal opportunities in the country. Piet remains in the East while Tom returns from the trip. Experiencing the East and shaking off this experience, symbolized by Tom’s rescue mission and Piet’s death at the side of the train tracks, becomes a vehicle for Tom’s liberation from the past and enables him to move forward with his life. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 425 The main Polish character on screen, Alina, exemplifies the coding of a Polish female as exotic. She is a student who has sexual relations with Western visitors in exchange for money, including an affair with Piet. However, it is emphasized in the story that Alina is not a professional prostitute to allow the morally principled Tom to be attracted to her. Like other Polish characters, she is motivated by the perspective of obtaining material goods, but she also has a chance for redemption created by the German male. And at the end of the story, Alina boards the train and joins Tom, who returns to Dortmund. The final train ride, apart from the implicated transfer to a better existence, is also an allusion to Alina’s big dream shared with Piet and the return of the Orient Express motif. While sitting in the abandoned train wagons, she imagined traveling East on the Orient Express to see a sunrise in the desert, “like in Lawrence of Arabia ” (53’45”). Her phantasy of a better life also places her within the Orientalist discourse on Poland. Even seemingly controlled in the end by her German counterpart, she is still an unstabilizing and unpredictable element; even moving West, she dreams of the East. Alina can be seen, in Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu’s words, as “not fully Other, as Islamic or African women have been perceived.” Western Orientalism labels Eastern European women as strangers within who, like Alina, “are endowed with an aura of familiarity, or of Europeanness, and yet they are not fully familiar, or European, either, as they come from the most remote regions of Europe, perceived as almost Oriental, as almost exotic, yet not fully so” (Glajar and Radulescu 3—4). The ambiguity of Eastern European women is possible because the issues of race and ethnicity “figure very differently in the social realities and in the imaginary of Europe than they do elsewhere” because in Europe “[r]ace and ethnicity […] are not only about the ‘visibly other’ […] but are further, and intensely problematically, about the active othering of those who are not ‘visibly other’; about the ‘stranger in our midst’ whom we cannot, in fact, discern as a stranger unless we brand her as such” (Griffin and Braidotti 21). 10 The visual exoticization of Alina is achieved in multiple ways: first, her character’s primary costume is a leopard faux fur coat, an unusual piece of clothing that stands out, especially against Susi’s toned-down business attire, but also against the street fashion in Warsaw the audience sees on screen. Alina’s clothing choice may be interpreted as Alina’s rejection of society’s conventions and sexual emancipation. She is, after all, operating in the grey zone between full-time work in the sex industry and being in romantic relationships with Western men who occasionally support her financially. The leopard coat can also signify Alina’s status as prey: a target for a male hunter. Second, Alina’s brown hair and hazel eyes are distinctly darker physical features compared to blue-eyed and fair-haired German women Susi and Karla, accentuating her 426 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 position as other. In addition, unlike other Polish characters in the film, Alina (played by French speaker Courau) is dubbed with the voice of a Polish actress (Agnieszka Krukówna), which creates an aura of estrangement around her character induced by diminutive synchronicities between the audio and visual messages. On the narrative level, Alina’s exoticization is also exemplified in her role as a victim of male hegemony. As a “not professional prostitute,” she is perceived as available for exploitation by men. She is insulted by the police detectives, tortured and sexually abused by the mafia boss Malik (Mirosław Baka), and manipulated into submission by Piet. In the colonial mindset, Alina is set up as a subject ready for intervention by a good Westerner, Tom. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak? ”, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described the abolition of suttee, an ancient Hindu custom of self-immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre, by the British authorities in colonial India in the 19th century. Spivak’s phrase, “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 296), sums up this intervention as one of the emanations of the civilizing mission of the colonizers, effectively presenting femininity as a metaphor for colonization. Alina, Susi, Piet’s wife in Germany, Karla (Claudine Wilde), who unsuccessfully tries to seduce Tom before his departure, are all interested in him. This triangular constellation of women creates the reference point for his positioning as a man. He is desired and has available partner choices but ultimately rejects the autonomous and outspoken women Susi and Karla. By defending Alina and returning with her to Germany, Tom is not only constituting himself as representative of the morally superior order and defining his masculinity through his actions but also symbolically establishing Poland as a colonial subject. The trope of the ambiguous Polish female character entering Germany connects Polish Crash with Douglas Wolfsperger’s comedy My Polish Maiden [ Heirate mir! ], also known in Germany under the alternative and equally condescending title Meine polnische Jungfrau . The film was produced in 1999 but first presented to the audience on the commercial TV channel ProSieben in May 2001. My Polish Maiden opens with a bus trip to Poland organized by a marriage broker: each male passenger on board intends to find a life partner in a small town in the Polish province and bring her back to Germany. Among the visitors is Eugen (Ulrich Noethen), an undertaker from Konstanz in his mid-30s who still lives with his despotic mother (Ingrid van Bergen) and hopes to find love outside his limited social circle. When Eugen is about to return home empty-handed, he accidentally meets Gośka (Verona Feldbusch), who runs from the Polish police and welcomes the opportunity to join Eugen on his trip back to Germany. Upon their arrival in Konstanz, Eugen’s work colleagues at the funeral home die one DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 427 by one. They are stabbed, castrated, and bleed to death. The suspicion falls on Gośka, accused of the killings by Eugen’s jealous mother. Gośka feels pressured to leave, and Eugen’s best friend Fritz (Michael Schiller) convinces her to take on an illegal job in a folksy-themed nightclub, where she is sexually abused and rescued by Eugen. My Polish Maiden utilizes the idea of agency-arranged marriage as a lastchance effort to find a companion and caregiver for a socially unattractive German man. By employing caricature, the film appears to examine the relationships between German men and Polish women through a critical lens to reveal the embedded socio-economic differential of such connections. However, the criticism misses the mark as the comedy neither offers an original look at the reasons for entering intercultural relationships nor does it present an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of such connections. Bernadetta Matuszak-Loose sarcastically credits My Polish Maiden for gifting the history of German cinema with “the motif of the Polish cleaning lady regularly returning ever since” (226). The narrative replicates popular conventions representing Poland and its citizens and induces the viewers’ laughter at clichés with evident Orientalist characteristics. One of the most exaggerated moments of My Polish Maiden, which packs several stereotypes about Poland, is the sequence of the arrival of the German travelers at the Polish farm where the marriage agency arranged a display of the potential local life partners. The men disembark from the bus in a military-like formation at the whistle signal from the trip guide Overstolz (Hubert Mulzer), who calls himself their leader (“Führer”). He issues a warning to the visitors: “Even if we’re in Poland now, there will be no thefts. At least as long as I’m here with you” (5’36”). While it is unclear from the way Overstolz phrases his words of caution (in the passive voice, “Es wird hier nicht geklaut”) whether he means that the Poles are stealing, or whether the visitors would be tempted to loot while in Poland, the scene establishes, first, an association with a WWII military invasion of Poland. It also evokes the colonial concept of Drang nach Osten , the conquest of the East, which became a core element of Nazi ideology. Second, the reference to thefts reminds the viewers of Poland as a lawless terrain where only discipline brought from the outside can help maintain order. The ambiguity of Overstolz’s remark about stealing also emphasizes the corrupting nature of the location: Poland brings out the thieving instincts in everybody. The matchmaking scene between German men and Polish women doubles down on the commodification of the exotic allure of Polish feminitity. The visitors enter a run-down cattle barn, jumping over puddles of water and manure to line up facing an improvised podium. A conveyor belt carries the women, labeled with numbers and static as mannequins, through a hole in a wall. Over- 428 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 stolz explains that the women’s keen interest in Western men completes the men’s desire to have a Slavic companion because, “as we know, the word ‘Slavic’ derives from ‘slave’” (6’59”). Then, the German customers race to pick their female counterparts. Mistakes are expected since all women have a “14-day return warranty” (7’13”). The process of selecting a bride is entirely transactional, devoid of any romanticism Eugen hopes to encounter. It is grounded in colonially coded juxtapositions: men are deemed desirable just because they are German, not because of other attributes they possess, for example, their looks or socio-economic status. They are explorers and hunters on unknown terrain, and women are exotic prey, immobilized and passive, subjected to the male gaze. Further, one of the film’s titles used in the domestic distribution, Meine polnische Jungfrau , amplifies this message. The word Jungfrau is used to deliberately associate Gośka (dressed in white when Eugen meets her for the first time) with images of virginal and inexperienced women. It reduces the complexity of the character to one adjective, polnisch . It connects these descriptors with the possessive determiner meine , creating conditions for male fantasies of domination and colonial ownership, not only of a commodified young female but also, by extension, of the ‘untouched’ territory in the East. Anne McClintock notes about the beginnings of imperial discovery that “[a]s European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known worlds, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries. Female figures were planted like fetishes at the ambiguous points of contact, at the borders and orifices of the contest zone” (24). The presented image is of Gośka’s gendered body as something to be harvested or conquered and the colonial land, here Poland, as inherently feminine. The bride selection scene in My Polish Maiden replicates not only gender prejudice (women seeking financial support from men) but also takes advantage of the dynamic between Poland and Germany’s socio-economic conditions and exoticized erotic fantasy. The film presents a specific image of relationships between German men and Polish women which, in turn, reinforces the audience’s perception of the country as inferior. It is because, as Bonnie Zare and S. Lily Mendoza observe in the case of the tendentious way of presenting mail-order brides in the media, “the continued peddling of reductive/ stereotypical images of Third World women seeking marriage with Western men serves to perpetuate a regime of colonialist and patriarchal relations not only between the immediate contracting parties, but in the imagination of the public at large” (367). Depiction of Gośka in My Polish Maiden, which corresponds with the presentation of mail-order brides from the global South, fits into the discursive structures of colonialist thinking about women from impoverished countries seeking economic opportunities abroad. As a result, it effectively installs them as the other in relation to the mainstream. In their analysis, Zare and Mendoza point out the DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 429 duplicity of these images: on the one hand, they portray the mail-order brides as victims who need saving from their backward setting. On the other hand, they are overtly sexualized, deceitful, and suspected of victimizing men by going after their wealth and resources. The figure of Gośka in My Polish Maiden is the other with the mercurial ability to be simultaneously a victim and a victimizer as she stands in the center of intersecting agendas in Eugen’s social circle. When alone with Eugen, she wears scanty revealing clothes, is subdued, and behaves in a childlike manner, which makes her less threatening sexually. Her inflection and German idiom resemble a child’s language, which most overtly manifests in mixing up the “mir” and “mich” pronouns. She shares with Eugen that her only chance to escape her abusive marriage in Poland was coming to Germany after she read a newspaper ad for the marriage agency, “Germany: your love and future” (1h 7’24”). In another story, she tells Eugen that her longing for family life is attached to the image of her grandmother’s house at the lake in Upper Silesia. This nostalgic vision coincides with what Eugen can offer her in her future in Germany: a residence at Lake Constance. Gośka satisfies Eugen’s need to protect and provide for, giving him a convenient object to redefine his masculine role. Eugen’s male gaze directed at Gośka is an example of the patriarchal perception of woman as a “signifier for the male other, bound by the symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of women still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning” (Mulvey 7). Eugen’s infatuation with Gośka is nothing else than an attempt to transform the relationship with his mother, Regine, an act of rebellion against matriarchal dominance. After returning from Poland, Eugen instrumentalizes Gośka to assert his position as the head of the family and remove his mother from the parental bedroom of their tiny house. Regine hangs on to the role she plays in her son’s life (and their codependency). Her resistance expresses itself in the obsessive preservation of the extensive collection of coffee pots gathered by her deceased husband: they are not only a memory of her partner and Eugen’s father but also a symbolic gesture of resistance against the changing world. As a rendition of the theme of dominant women and subordinated men, My Polish Maiden takes the fear of castration literally. Gośka is first suspected to be the Pimmelmörderin (weenie killer) because she is the other: naive, subdued, unaware of the rules, but also younger than the women around her and perceived as an available sexual object that changes the delicate power balance in the funeral home. The murder mystery is finally revealed to the viewers. Fritz’s frustrated wife, Traudl (Roswitha Schreiner), mutilates and kills the participants of the sexcapades to Poland as revenge for the attention they give to the Polish women they bring back. Traudl’s sexual unfulfillment and frustration with 430 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 her husband’s infidelities are literally “canned” in pickle jars (which Traudl passionately produces) until the Pole appears in town. The blond Traudl, cast similarly to the German female characters in Polish Crash as the counterpart to dark-haired and hazel-eyed Gośka, feels unappreciated and stands pars pro toto to economically independent German women (Traudl owns the house and sustains her husband financially). The physical emasculation in the film is another projection of how the German males suffer from women’s empowerment which causes their identity crisis. The trips of the German men to Poland, and the subsequent arrival of Gośka, the other from the East, magnifies the issue and induces a radical change. While meant as a not-too-subtle satire on the mail-order bride phenomenon, My Polish Maiden also touches upon real anxieties of German audiences in the 1990s regarding the perceived porosity of the border that is no longer a barrier between East and West. Unlike Polish Crash which explores the negative impact of the Polish setting on the German character and only concludes with the Polish woman moving to Germany, My Polish Maiden addresses the situation when a Polish character has the potential to upend the existing social fabric in Germany. It is a warning that polnische Wirtschaft can even reach as far as Germany’s Western border with Switzerland. As Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden exemplify, Polish characters, and Polish women figures in particular, are not readily categorized as a visible minority but are still a product of discursive practices of Orientalism. Whiteness, a characteristic shared with other East European women, define their position between familiarity and Otherness. Together with the emphasis on heterosexuality and readiness for relationships with German men, they construct erotic fantasies about Polish women on screen. They are successful competitors of emasculating German women because of their ability to prioritize the needs of the men over their own, which enables the German men to reestablish their dominance. A typical narrative solution that addresses the fear of the other is the symbolic taming of the woman by envisioning a domesticated exotic partner: an Orientalized fantasy of a subdued woman who, through her imagined exoticness, is something new and unfamiliar but at the same time also domestic, something local and familiar, associated with the Western ideology of family and home. 11 In Polish Crash, it is a promise of a relationship that survives the turbulent time in Poland and continues in Germany. In My Polish Maiden, it is a wedding and the establishment of a new family business. An essential part of constructing a domesticated exotic partner as the outcome of the masculinity crisis is the introduction of sexual exclusivity that achieves two objectives: it dispels the aura of an exotic seductress and stabilizes the notion of colonially coded male conquest. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 431 A similar construction can also be seen in other films of the time, most notably in Heart over Head [ Herz über Kopf , 2001], which tells the story of the romance between a Polish au-pair and a German teenage rebel. The story ends with the unconditional submission of the Polish female to the socially dominant German male (see Kazecki 139—40). The result is the symbolic diffusion of any danger arising from the fear that “Eastern values” can be brought to “German lands,” including dispelling anxieties surrounding the unknown outcome of Germany’s reunification. By personalizing the undefined threats from the outer side of the new EU border and giving them an exoticized, attractive body of a Polish woman, Polish Crash and My Polish Maiden suggest that the East should not be feared but conquered. Notes 1 By my own calculation, the inventory of feature films and TV film productions in which the German-Polish relationships, Polish-coded spaces or Polish characters play a notable role in the narratives has grown to over fifty titles in the last three decades. 2 See, for example, Wolfgang Schmale’s discussion of the concept of Eastern Europe in Gender and Eurocentrism (2016) (Schmale 77—95). 3 Wolff notes that the lands of East-Central Europe, despite their diverse character and populations, were conceptually combined into a coherent whole and ultimately took a subaltern position to similarly conjoined lands of Western Europe. Bundling up the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and social diversity of the area behind the Iron Curtain, as Dariusz Skórczewski observes, also offered a “pedagogic convenience” in explaining Europe’s division after the Second World War that survived the actual Cold War geopolitical circumstances: “East-Central Europe has indeed provided an ideal training ground for the ideas of successive generations of Western European ‘orientalists’ up until today” (178). It must be noted, however, that while trying to deconstruct the idea of Eastern Europe, Wolff’s work sometimes reifies certain stereotypes by assuming a unified Eastern European experience in contrast to the West, therefore essentializing Eastern Europe without further developing on the complexities and nuances within the regions, and how they relate to the East/ West binary. Nuancing Wolff’s argument, other scholars have outlined similar processes of the discursive invention of the Balkans by the Western European imagination (see Todorova; Bjelić and Savić; Kovačević). Similarly, scholars emphasize that the “East vs. West” dichotomy is not monolithic. Instead, there are multiple, layered “Orients” within regions of 432 Jakub Kazecki DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 East-Central Europe, each with varying degrees of perceived “otherness” and Orientalist projections that do not necessarily have to point to the geographic east (see Bakić-Hayden, outlined in a different section of this contribution; or discussion of the location of the “East” in the contemporary Polish literature in Czapliński). 4 For a more complex description of the discursive construction of East-Central Europe in the 19th century, see Christoph Kienemann’s contribution to the volume Europe and the East: Historical Ideas of Eastern and Southeast Europe, 1789-1989 , edited by Mark Hewitson and Jan Vermeiren. 5 See the discussion on the emergence of German Orientalisms in the 18th century in Todd Kontje’s study on literary images of the East, German Orientalisms (2004): “By participating in the intellectual project of Orientalism, Germans sought to overcome their sense of cultural and political subordination to other European powers, suggesting that although they had neither nation nor empire, they nevertheless belonged to modern European civilization” (Kontje 5). 6 Positive images of Polish political and intellectual leaders reflect the willingness of the elites in both Warsaw and Berlin to initiate discussions about the complicated German-Polish relations and memory of WWII and the Holocaust. See, among others, Piotr Zariczny’s description of the public discourse on the German-Polish reconciliation after 1989 (Zariczny 166-67). 7 One of the projections behind Germany’s cultural mission in the lands to the East in the 19th century was the image of social and economic backwardness of the local population. Starting in the 1830s, it was expressed through the recurring trope of a polnische Wirtschaft , used to describe the disorder and bad organization in the new provinces incorporated into the Prussian Hohenzollerns’ monarchy as a result of the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. For a detailed discussion on polnische Wirtschaft see Orłowski; Surynt, Das “ferne”, “unheimliche” Land; Surynt, Postęp, kultura i kolonializm; Gatzke; Kordel. 8 Nesting Orientalism(s) is a concept proposed by Milica Bakić-Hayden (1995) who claims that the West/ East dichotomy (the Occident/ the Orient) has a more nuanced character. And so, within the groups in East-Central Europe, we can observe the presence of nesting Orientalisms, whereby groups within the region identify an other to the ‘East’ or ‘South.’ Setting themselves apart from what they perceive as more Oriental populations, they define themselves as the ‘West’ of that other (see Bakić-Hayden). 9 The nod to the ‘urban jungle’ and the overwhelming tone of hopelessness and despair connect Polish Crash with yet another film genre, film noir . The multidirectional referencing to different genres (Western, film noir, rubble DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0020 From Polski Crash to Meine polnische Jungfrau 433 film) is instrumentalized to construct an othered cinematic space: lawless and full of opportunities for brave individuals, also visually darker and filmed using low-key lighting and low camera angles to create an atmosphere of looming threat. The purpose is to contrast Poland with equally imagined Germany, located somewhere outside the danger zone. 10 As Kris Van Heuckelom points out, the representational practices of not labeling Poles as a visible minority but attributing them with othering characteristics express the “ambivalent status of Polish migrant characters in European filmmaking of the past hundred years” (Van Heuckelom 7). Van Heuckelom ties the ambiguity with what the author calls “close otherness,” the phenomenon of “cultural similarity and geographical proximity as opposed to the more distant position of postcolonial migrants.” “Close otherness” plays on the duality of Poland’s perception in Western Europe, as the Polish characters on screen are “coming from a part of Europe that has been perceived as being peripheral in space and backward in time” (31) and require a colonial intervention. 11 See also the discussion on the mail-order brides’ presentation on international dating sites by Emily Starr and Michele Adams (2016), who call the construct of modern mail-order bride a “domestic exotic.” Films Engelchen. Dir. Helke Misselwitz. Perf. Susanne Lothar, Cezary Pazura, and Sophie Rois. Thomas Wilkening Filmgesellschaft/ Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), 1996. Film. Halbe Treppe. Dir. Andreas Dresen. Perf. Steffi Kühnert, Gabriela Maria Schmeide, Thorsten Merten, and Axel Prahl. 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