Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

Thawing the North: Mostly Martha asa German-Italian EatopiaGisela Hoecherl-Alden & Laura Lindenfeld

The establishment of the European Union, reunification of Germany, and Germany’s

extension of dual citizenship to immigrant minorities provided challenges to the country’s

understanding of itself as a nation. In negotiating these changes, debates on citizenship

frequently centered on definitions of German culture. Using the concept of Leitkultur

(guiding culture), conservatives argued that Germany should reject multiculturalism and

stem immigration. This essay analyzes discourses on cultural policy in Germany through

a contextual and textual analysis of the film Mostly Martha. In its alignment with

aesthetic conventions of the art house food film, Mostly Martha participates in the debate

on cultural citizenship and embodies changes in the German film industry that have

moved German cinema toward increased commercialism. The film’s main character,

Martha, is transformed through an intercultural relationship and a trip to Italy. We

argue that the film’s citation of this well-known tradition of traveling south to redeem

oneself and its treatment of ethnic ‘‘Otherness’’ engages in the Leitkultur debate and

participates in the transition from national German to transnational cinema. Through

the utopian treatment of Italian food, the film fetishizes cultural difference and reaffirms

fixed constructs of nation and gender, thereby avoiding an explicitly politicized

engagement with intercultural citizenship and identity.

Keywords: Cultural Citizenship; Food; Film; Intercultural Communication; Multi-

culturalism

In Rome I have found myself for the first time. For the first time I have been in

harmony with myself, happy and reasonable. (Goethe, 1817/1989)

There were times when in the morning, gazing dreamily at the blue of the southern

sea from under the awning of his cabana . . .*he would recall his house in the

Gisela Hoecherl-Alden is Associate Professor at the Department of Modern Languages and Classics, University

of Maine, USA. Laura Lindenfeld is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism,

University of Maine, USA. Correspondence to: Professor Laura Lindenfeld, Department of Communication and

Journalism, University of Maine, 429 Dunn Hall, Orono, ME 04469, USA. Email: laura.lindenfeld@umit.

maine.edu

ISSN 1751-3057 (print)/ISSN 1751-3065 (online) # 2010 National Communication Association

DOI: 10.1080/17513051003628697

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication

Vol. 3, No. 2, May 2010, pp. 114�135

mountains, scene of his summer labors, where clouds drifted low through the

garden, violent storms blew out the evening house lights, and the ravens, which he

fed, soared to the tops of the spruces. Then he would feel he had indeed been

whisked off to the land of Elysium, to the ends of the earth, where man is granted a

life of ease, where there is no snow nor yet winter, no tempest, no pouring rain, but

only the cool gentle breath released by Oceanus, and the days flow past in blissful

idleness, effortless, free of strife, and consecrated solely to the sun and its feasts.

(Mann, 1912/1994, p. 77)

In the time-honored tradition of German art, literature, music, and, more recently,

film, the Mediterranean South has been much more than an exotic geographic

destination. It also functions as the repository of visions of the utopian exotic or

erotic Other in a quest for self-fulfillment. The imagined vivaciousness and less rigid

nature of the southern landscape and its inhabitants hold the power to transform the

more unemotional northern voyager through intercultural engagement. The South in

the German imagination is a hybrid, dialectical construct fraught with stereotypes of

easy-going sensuality and a joy of life transfused with utopian elements. Over the

centuries the South’s transformative power has become a truism in the German

cultural tradition, perpetuated by famous travelers like Albrecht Durer, Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe, Felix Mendelssohn, and Thomas Mann who all undertook an

Italienreise, a journey to Italy.

In Goethe’s Italienreise, the North is the observing subject, the geographic South its

object of study (Goethe, 1817/1989). In constructing Italians as naturally primitive

people (Naturmenschen), Goethe subscribes to a Rousseauist primitivism that

celebrated early ages of man for their nobility and liberty. The South became

synonymous with the idea of freedom and a relaxed and often also sensual way of life,

literally the mythological idyll in Elysium, that utopian otherworld where a state of

delight and a carefree, easy existence under mild and sunny skies are possible.

Goethe’s rendition of Italy was highly influential in its celebration of mythology,

eroticism, food, and a general joie de vivre, always in opposition to a cold, grey, more

rigid northern homeland. The idyllic simplicity of a quiet Italian life is suggested by

the book’s subtitle: Et in Arcadia Ego (And I am in Arcadia).

Germany’s construction of the South, and, more generally speaking, its construc-

tion of ethnic Others, continues to play a key role in the formulation of German

national identity. This conceptualization of self has historically been fraught with

complication. The classical writings of Goethe and others were intertwined with the

rise of German nationalism and self-perceptions of nationhood. Fragmented

Germany (originally unified in 1871) struggled to understand and define itself as a

nation. Divided again in 1949 into East and West Germany, two separate nations

emerged with strikingly different definitions of self. Again in the late 20th century

Germany faced the task of (re)defining itself through German reunification in

October 1990, the establishment of the European Union, and the introduction of the

Euro as formal currency in January 2002. Post-WWII, West Germany’s policy of

recruiting guest workers from the Mediterranean played a key function in the

country’s development as a Wirtschaftswunder (an economic miracle). An acute labor

Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 115

shortage led to the programmatic recruitment of foreign workers, initially from Italy,

Portugal, Spain, and Greece and more recently from Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia.

While Italians constituted the largest group of immigrants in 1969, Turkish guest

workers outnumbered all other immigrants by the 1980s (Gokturk, Gramling, &

Kaes, 2007, p. 497). Germany has simultaneously relied on and resented these guest

workers, and the intercultural engagement with these southern Others has often had

a profound impact on how Germany conceptualized itself as a nation.

As part and parcel of the changing tapestry of post-Wall Germany, the converged

nation has engaged in widespread debates on multiculturalism, intercultural

communication with its perceived ethnic Others, and German citizenship. As Rathzel

(2006) argues, ‘‘‘foreigners’ and other aliens are not a threat to the stability of a

nation, instead, they are a means by which it is constructed. The definition of who

does not belong defines those who belong and provides security for them’’ (p. 174).

The topics of immigration, naturalization, and assimilation have become especially

contentious as Germany struggles to accept and define itself as a multicultural,

multilingual society. As Gokturk et al. (2007) demonstrate, the discussion of what

constitutes German citizenship has ‘‘generated fervent public debates over the past

fifty years*debates that provide a particularly instructive case study for under-

standing the dynamics of nation and migration’’ (p. xvii).

Much of this debate has centered on definitions of culture.1 In 1999, Bavarian

Minister of the Interior Gunther Beckstein (2007) drew on Bassam Tibi’s conservative

concept of Leitkultur (guiding culture) to advocate that Germany ‘‘reject multi-

cultural ideologies’’ (p. 303). Beckstein argued for a policy of assimilation and

advocated for abatement in immigration: ‘‘Real integration is, incidentally, only

possible if the number of people to integrate is limited. No society can accept other

cultures limitlessly’’ (p. 303). The concept of Leitkultur became a central part of the

heated immigration debate. The context grew even more problematic when

Bundestag member Friedrich Merz ‘‘advocated a ‘freedom-based German guiding

culture’ [that] espouses certain values to which immigrants must assent, including

gender equity and a willingness to speak German’’ (Gokturk et al., 2007, p. 288).

With its focus on national culture, religion, and family values, the Leitkultur debate

has generated discussions about culture that are reminiscent of the U.S. culture wars

(Hunter, 1991). Indeed, the Leitkultur debate is part of a larger Kulturkampf in

Germany*literally, culture war*that dates back to Bismarck in 1871 (Walther, 2007,

p. 202). Conservative German politicians, who had long held fast to the idea of

immigration as reversible, were now forced to discuss not whether but how to

integrate immigrants. Rather than viewing integration as an ongoing process of

negotiation about what constitutes German society, conservative rhetoric fueled the

notion of a clash of civilizations. They advocated educational reform and the

administration of citizenship tests based on a narrow definition of German culture as

linked to Western hegemonic values, common cultural roots, and a shared history

and religion. Symbolic of pervasive anti-immigrant conservatism, Beckstein and

Merz’s positions on German culture furthered the marginalization of Germany’s

Turkish residents and citizens and thus engaged in the de facto construction of

116 G. Hoecherl-Alden & L. Lindenfeld

German cultural policy.2 Yet, the reality of German city life, where cultural hybridity

is performed daily on the streets and pedestrian zones (Soysal, 2003), neatly ruptures

this fiction of homogeneity.

As Miller points out, classical definitions of citizenship divorce the concept of the

citizen from the consumer, positing citizenship as exclusively political.3 Yet, neoliberal

economies deploy culture as a means of managing identity and citizenship, borrowing

‘‘the categories and tactics of progressive cultural politics and [trumping] it in the

process’’ (Miller, 2006, pp. 2�3). Commodities themselves have become central to the

process of constructing cultural citizenship with ‘‘good taste’’ as an arbiter of who can

claim cultural, political, and economic belonging (Miller, 2006, p. 11). Cultural studies

scholarship has argued persuasively that media play a key role in the construction and

mitigation of cultural citizenship,4 and Miller contends that television functions as the

most important site for the creation and production of contemporary cultural

citizenship in the U.S. ‘‘We need to start with television,’’ he writes, ‘‘because that is

where Yanquis learn about war, subsistence, and the environment*this nation’s major

influences on the globe’’ (p. 179). Rather than a mere reflection of citizenship issues,

media function as ‘‘purposive components of it’’ (p. 29).

Scholars have posited Germany’s long-standing tradition of film production as

central to the formation and contestation of identity and culture (Elsaesser, 1989;

Hake, 2002; Halle, 2002, 2006). As Halle writes, ‘‘Film is the most significant marker of

simultaneous economic and cultural transformations, a marker of both globalization

and transnationalism’’ (2006, p. 253). German cinema has served as a key space for the

negotiation of cultural citizenship and has functioned as an important facilitator of

the debate on multiculturalism and intercultural identity. This is not to say that

television is insignificant in contestation of German culture.5 Indeed, television has

aided the growth of cinema in Germany, driving it away from solely state-based

funding toward commercialism. As Cooke (2007) argues, television ‘‘is also currently

helping to promote the continued existence, and indeed the growth, of a tradition

of German Autorenkino, thereby contradicting the shift’’ (p. 42). Furthermore,

Germany’s commercial film industry has become increasingly reliant upon the

television industry as it is ‘‘tightly interwoven with television and broadcast

distribution’’ (Halle, 2002, p. 18).6 The relationship of television as an agent of

cultural policy and citizenship in Germany requires deeper investigation. Yet, for the

German context, film remains a key site for the contestation of cultural citizenship.

In considering the relationship of contemporary German cinema to the country’s

debate on cultural citizenship we turn our attention to the 2001 film Mostly Martha

(Baumgartner, Friedel, & Nettelbeck, 2001). Mostly Martha, the first German food

film, provides an important case to study film and cultural citizenship in the

contemporary environment of EU media production. This film sits at the nexus of

contemporary pressures to increase Germany’s participation in the transnational film

market. Mostly Martha serves as an example of the prevailing trend in German

cinema to subsume and co-opt traditional film aesthetics into commercialized

Hollywood style. Mostly Martha participates in cultural discourses that map the

struggle of Germany to understand itself as a nation and as a multicultural society,


and the film’s citation of Goethe perpetuates this tradition of nationhood, citizenship,

and culture.

Mostly Martha depicts a radical change in the life of rigid star chef, Martha Klein

(Martina Gedeck), who struggles to connect her deceased sister’s child, Lina (Maxime

Foerste), with her Italian father. In the course of the film, Martha undertakes an

Italienreise. Mostly Martha reiterates and plays with this literary trope of traveling to

the warm, utopian South to escape the rigidity of German culture and find oneself. We

argue that the film’s citation of this well-known tradition and its treatment of ethnic

Otherness engages in the Leitkultur debate about cultural citizenship through its

treatment of food, cooking, and travel. Furthermore, the film together with other films

like Lola rennt (Run Lola Run, Arndt & Tykwer, 1998) marks an important transition

from national German cinema to what Galt (2006) describes as ‘‘reimagine[d] space

and history beyond West European art cinema’’ (p. 231). In her compelling analysis of

Mostly Martha, Novero (2004) illuminates how the film straddles the ideological

framework of conventional Western narrative cinema (or what Rentschler, 2000,

p. 264, has termed a ‘‘cinema of consensus’’) and the more provocative aesthetics and

principles of New German Cinema.7 In doing so, the film questions political and

cultural shifts in post-Wall Germany and the new European Union (EU) as well as

fixed concepts of citizenship and gender, but ultimately reaffirms these selfsame

constructs and thereby avoids a deeper engagement of difference.

As Miller (2006) asserts, ‘‘somewhere below and beyond foreign policy swirls a

diurnal citizenship that is closely aligned with consumption and other practices of

making do’’ (p. 23). In its treatment of food, the film maps out the tension between

the material culture of food and cultural citizenship. Through the tools of ideological

criticism, we contextualize Mostly Martha within contemporary debates about

citizenship, intercultural communication, and culture in Germany. Furthermore,

we link the film to other food media that have traveled across the globe, especially the

recent subgenre of the food film. Drawing on textual and contextual analysis, we

study shifts in the German film industry and German citizenship policy and the

discourses and cultural practices that surround these.

Mostly Martha, as Novero has argued, conjoins two discourses that help to

construct the visibility of a national culture in Germany: the culinary and the

cultural. Novero (2004) writes that food constitutes a superficial ‘‘surface on which a

discussion of nation and class . . . seems to take place’’ (p. 33). While we agree that the

film does not explicitly deploy food as a means of engaging politics, food nonetheless

becomes an important site where the film negotiates and performs cultural

citizenship. Even if this performance eschews direct political referencing and

engagement, we read it as implicitly political. Indeed, in its citation of the long-

standing German cultural tradition of the Italienreise, the film reifies dichotomous

thinking that posits Germany as disciplined, ordered, and civilized while painting

Italy as chaotic, lively, and closer to nature. Mostly Martha seems to complicate and

undermine traditional concepts of gender and nationhood: Italy is represented

through a male character as sensual, feminine; Germany through a female character

as impassive, orderly, and masculine. Yet the film avoids any ironic or otherwise


deconstructive reading of traveling south and cannot, in the end, sustain a reversal of

traditional hierarchies. To develop this claim, we turn to three different aspects of the

film: Mostly Martha as a food film in the contemporary German media industry, the

literary tradition of the Italienreise, and Germany’s historical development into a

multicultural society.

Eatopia: Mostly Martha as Food Film in Europe’s Changing Media Landscape

With reunification and the consolidation of the European Union through the

elimination of national border controls and the introduction of the Euro, the German

media industry has experienced noteworthy changes that render it problematic to

even talk about ‘‘German cinema’’ any longer. Rather, as Halle (2006) argues, we

should now speak of a cinema that is ‘‘made in Germany’’ (p. 252). Films like Mostly

Martha began to emerge in the post-Wall EU. We outline this new EU media climate

before positioning Mostly Martha as a food film to demonstrate the political economy

context in which the German film industry currently functions. Impacted by the

neoliberal consolidation of media in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, Europe has

experienced both transnational horizontal integration as well as vertical integration

(especially in the area of production) with significant percentages of films

coproduced across different European countries (Halle, 2006, p. 253).

This has resulted in a body of films that favor European cultural identity over the

nationalism of earlier cinema. Films that raise the topic of transnational citizenship

within Germany proliferate and strike appeal with audiences outside of Europe.8

These films emerge during a time when EU member countries have succumbed to the

pressures of globalization and entered transnational corporate organizations. This, in

turn, has ‘‘forced states to give up public media monopolies and to enter free market

competition’’ (Halle, 2002, p. 13). Following suit, Germany has moved from a state-

subsidized industry to a model of commercialization with an emphasis on

privatization and corporate capital interests.9 Financially successful Mostly Martha

was funded by EU, national, regional, and private sources. Coproduced by Pandora

Filmproduktion, Prisma Filmproduktion, and T&C Film, it was awarded t409,000 by

Eurimages (Council of Europe, 2000) whose goal it is to ‘‘foster a common (if

necessarily very loosely defined) European cultural identity’’ (Cooke, 2007, p. 37).

Mostly Martha reiterates the transnational ideological goals of Eurimages and

embodies the new European film in both aesthetics and financing structure.

Having dropped to lows of 5% of the market in the 1980s, the EU film industry’s

financial changes fundamentally revitalized German cinema (Halle, 2002, p. 13).10

With this move toward commercialization, we see a change in filmic style and

aesthetics that aligns with Hollywood-style narrative, genre-based cinema, especially

in the form of the international art house film (Halle, 2002, p. 28). Halle (2002)

points out that these films have little relationship to the older avant-garde art house

films. The term art house cinema now ‘‘marks one of the currently most significant

routes through which European films enter the North American market. This

designation indicates little (as it once might have) about film politics but a great deal


about film economics’’ (p. 29). Mostly Martha fits firmly in this category of films

through its adherence to art house style and its generic conventions, specifically of the

romantic tragic-comedy (Novero, 2004, p. 33). Like other food films that have

emerged since the mid-1990s*Hallstrom’s Chocolat (Brown, Golden, Holleran, &

Hallstrom, 2000) is emblematic of this paradigm*European art house films allow

viewers to ‘‘distinguish their tastes from mainstream productions and position

themselves as cinephiles appreciating exotic images and ‘authentic’ scenes of foreign

cultures’’ (Halle, 2002, p. 29). Mostly Martha serves as a prime example of these key

trends in new European cinema.

Several scholars (Bower, 2004; Keller, 2006; Poole, 1999) assert that the newer body

of food films comprises an emerging genre or subgenre to which Mostly Martha

belongs. The relationship of food and media has also received growing interest from

cultural studies scholars, especially as it relates to cultural citizenship. Miller (2006)

points to food television as a ‘‘key site of risk and moral panic, a space that physically

forms and maintains citizens, gives them pleasure, and makes them vulnerable to

medical hazards’’ (p. 121). Other recent scholarship considers media representations

of food as cultural signifiers and sites of ideological contention (Bower, 2004;

Johnston & Baumann, 2007; LeBesco & Naccarato, 2008); sites for vicarious

consumption (Adema, 2000; Girardelli, 2004; Ketchum, 2005; Probyn, 2000);

performances of cultural work (de Solier, 2005); forms of culinary tourism and

exoticism (Ashley, 2004; Finkelstein, 1999; Gallagher, 2004; Lindenfeld, 2007; Negra,

2002; Shugart, 2008); and part of debates on multiculturalism and feminism

(Brunsdon, 2005; Mannur, 2005; Pearson & Kothari, 2007). Scholarship focused on

the cultural politics of food provides a particularly important glance into neoliberal

politics. Watson and Caldwell (2005) write, ‘‘continued attention to the most

mundane and intimate aspects of people’s ordinary lives*in this case, how they

relate to food*can help us understand the big issues of twenty-first-century politics:

State formation and collapse, global flows, and anti-global reactions, and new notions

of identity and the rebirth of nationalism’’ (p. 2). Food is a key site for the study of

(inter)cultural identity, media, and policy.

Mostly Martha belongs to a newer group of food films that have appeared in the

U.S., Europe, and Asia since the late 1980s.11 Previous food films frequently

positioned food and eating through a critical rather than fetishistic lens.12 Starting

with Tampopo (Hosogoe, Itami, & Tamaoki, 1987) and Babette’s Feast (Betzer,

Christensen, & Axel, 1987), food drives the narrative and becomes sexualized and

intertwined with desires for an idealized utopian setting. Newer food films, e.g., Like

Water for Chocolate (Arau, 1991), Eat Drink Man Woman (Hsu, Hsu, & Lee, 1995),

and Chocolat constitute a generic formation where food appears as beautiful, erotic,

and utopian and serves as a vehicle for social change. Food becomes a character that

receives heavy coverage, eroticizing lighting, and elaborate musical scores. The

camera devotes much of its time to images of strikingly beautiful edibles, reproducing

normativity through aestheticization (Bower, 2004). As is the case with Mostly

Martha, food films in the late 20th and early 21st century tend to focus on characters

who are domestic or professional chefs. Several of these characters are, like Martha


Klein, women (Babette’s Feast; Like Water for Chocolate; Eat Drink Man Woman; Soul

Food [Edmonds, Teitel, & Tillman, 1997]; Simply Irresistible [Amiel, Caracciolo,

Fiedler, & Tarlov, 1999]; Tortilla Soup [Manulis & Ripoll, 2001]; Woman on Top [Poul

& Torres, 2000]), and many of them depict intercultural relationships.

Mostly Martha reproduces precisely these trends that appear transnationally in the

new subgenre of the food film. It comes as no surprise that Mostly Martha was

remade into a U.S. production, No Reservations (Aguero, Heysen, & Hicks, 2007).

Nettelbeck co-wrote the screenplay for this remake that recontexualizes Martha as a

White American woman who dates an easy-going White American man, removing

the intercultural tension of the original film. Nettelbeck’s recipe for success more or

less translated across the ocean. This reiterates a pattern of remaking international

food films into Hollywood productions.13

Like the new era of European art house cinema, food films like Mostly Martha and

its remake are produced for commercialization. Holding fast to the trappings of

Hollywood narrative cinema, their treatment of gender, race and ethnicity, and class

often allows the viewer to evade the actual politics of identity through an idealized,

utopian treatment and revel in the seemingly ‘‘authentic’’ culture of exotic or erotic

Others. While these films present food in a different and even challenging fashion,

they gloss over more difficult questions of identity, politics, economics, and society.

Often, the films utilize the bodies of women and people of color to mark a space of

difference that is easily consumable and nonthreatening to the hegemonic viewing

population. In this manner, the spectator can work through social anxieties about

Otherness without having to face some of the harsh realities of the embodied

experience of raced and gendered bodies (Lindenfeld, 2007).

Like Mostly Martha, many of the films play out cultural anxieties about

immigration and assimilation, fears that circulate in contemporary Germany as in

the U.S. These films frequently exotify and commercialize ethnicity and race,

positioning ethnic identities as objects of consumption, simultaneously providing

a space where viewers can vicariously immerse themselves into the film’s narrative

world. People of color become both the bodies and the site for racial consumption,

‘‘the spice,’’ hooks (1998) writes, that adds seasoning to whiteness (p. 181). Halter

(2000) uses the term ‘‘shopping for identity’’ to label the U.S.’s multibillion dollar

industry that sells food, vacations, events, and other objects of material culture to

market ethnic identities. Like other contemporary food films, Mostly Martha

participates in the commercialization of ‘‘world beat multiculturalism’’ that hooks

(1998) calls a ‘‘superficial assimilation through consumerism and tokenism [that] can

be lauded as a sign of the mainstream’s acquiescence’’ (p. 181).

Although, as Novero (2004) argues, Mostly Martha does offer moments of

upheaval, the film widely conforms to the generic conventions of the food film

(sub)genre. As in other food films, the film’s narrative focuses on food, cooking, and

identity. Martha is introduced as a prominent but uptight chef in an upscale

Hamburg restaurant who visits a therapist to deal with her obsessive compulsiveness.

Instead of participating wholeheartedly in the therapy treatment, Martha describes

recipes to her therapist and brings him dishes to try. When Martha’s sister dies in


a car accident, her daughter, Lina, is left to live with Martha. Martha struggles to

accommodate the girl: her work is slipping, and the restaurant owner brings in a

second chef to support her, Mario (Sergio Castellitto), a lively Italian man who

upends Martha’s world. Once Martha has managed to reunite Lina with her Italian

father, the intercultural experience with Mario thaws Martha’s cold exterior.

Eventually, the two marry. We see Martha progress from a controlling, lonely

obsessive compulsive to a warm engaged woman who learns to integrate others into

her life. Many of the scenes take place in the chic Hamburg restaurant Lido. This

choice of name is highly ironic for two reasons. First, this is an upscale French

restaurant with an Italian name. Second, Lido signifies the name of the famous beach

in Venice that Thomas Mann’s rigid bourgeois Germanic antihero Gustav von

Aschenbach frequents in his quest for the youthful male object of his sexual desire,

Tadzio. Here the film makes a deliberate, recognizable reference to the tradition of the

Italienreise, but as we argue, the film does not sustain its ironic tone. Rather, it

celebrates the trip south as a form of personal redemption.

As in other food films, the extraordinary dishes seem to appear effortlessly on

plates. We see faceless food preparation in close-up with hands cutting, dicing,

sauteing, and arranging, as if the food were preparing itself. The gentle contemporary

soundtrack and the focus on the food imbue the kitchen with a sense of lighthearted

playfulness and an air of the sublime. The film’s opening scene features a two-and-a-

half minute expose of the kitchen staff preparing stunning dishes. Like many other

food films, Mostly Martha erases the traces of production and focuses on the end

product of an upscale kitchen preparing haute cuisine in a manner that recreates the

aesthetic normativity of the food film.

Martha’s character and her relationship to food are inseparable. Throughout the

film, Martha intermittently serves as a first person narrator, often using recipes to

describe her inner feelings.14 She performs her fragile sense of self through

descriptions of food. Like the delicate quail she prepares in a protective layer of

pork bladder, Martha hides beneath a seemingly impenetrable outer shield of iciness.

After her sister’s death, Martha produces a metaphor for herself:

In a tank a lobster will slowly consume itself from the inside out. That’s why you haveto check its weight when you buy one. If it’s lighter than it looks then that means itwas in the tank for too long. There are still people who kill a lobster by throwing itinto boiling water. But you must know that this is the most painful way for theanimal to die because it takes so long until it’s really dead. It’s best to kill a lobsterwith a targeted, quick cut into the neck. This is the fastest way. (Translation ours)

Neurotic, lonely Martha, like the lobster in a tank, slowly consumes herself from the

inside out. She connects only to her sister and her kitchen. Emotionally anorectic, she

can only cope with trauma and loss through the preparation and discussion of food.

Ironically, Martha is able to express her bottled-up emotions in the mise-en-scene of

the restaurant’s cooler, a claustrophobic, frigid bluish space to which she turns when

she can no longer cope. For Martha, food is about control and consistency, not about

intimacy. Although her food is beautiful, it is soulless. While the first half of the film

repeatedly represents food and cooking, the act of eating rarely transpires. Only with


the entrance of Mario into Martha’s inner sphere do we see her embrace eating as

a soulful, passionate, life-affirming act.

Martha is transformed through her interaction with the Italian Other, Mario. In

one of the film’s pivotal scenes Mario feeds blindfolded Martha a sauce, and she must

guess what ingredients it includes. Mario, taking on the work of feeding the

restaurant family, seems to assume a classically feminine role.15 He feeds pregnant

Lea, entices Lina to eat for the first time since her mother’s death, and introduces*much to Martha’s disdain*new Italian dishes (e.g., gnocchi) to Lido. Although she

still holds on to some of her rigidity, Martha is fundamentally changed by the film’s

end through her encounter with Mario and his Italian food. With her tightly wound

bun of hair finally undone, the film shows Martha marrying Mario, visiting her

niece’s family in Italy, and opening up their new restaurant. Like most recent food

films, the film produces a classic heterosexist Hollywood ending, complete with white

wedding dress and all.

Like other international food films, Mostly Martha glosses over much of the

tension surrounding gender and nationhood and embraces implicit but significant

politics. While the film references how the world of cooking has changed (people

prefer ‘‘lighter’’ dishes as opposed to Martha’s traditional French haute cuisine),

imagery of food helps to evade larger cultural and social issues. Instead, the spectator

is led to focus on Martha’s usage of food to escape the world of emotions. Mario’s use

of food brings both Martha and Lina emotionally back to life. In its display, the food

becomes elegant, erotic, and enticing. The film equates Martha’s traditional French

cooking with her German stolidity and offers Italian cooking as the remedy to

Martha’s, and thus Germany’s, historical severity. Intercultural engagement appears as

an important solution to post-Wall Germany’s cultural crisis. This is especially ironic

given Germany’s historically problematic relationship to France and the reputation of

German cooking as hefty, hearty, and pork heavy.16

Mostly Martha is the first German production to be counted among the growing

body of international food films, and the changes in Germany’s film industry

demonstrate that its production and release in 2001 are far from coincidental. As a

food film, it is in dialog with other contemporary food films, many of which are

transnational productions that have the goal of participating in the global market.

The film’s production notes (Drei Sterne, 2002) even celebrate it as a food film:

‘‘Mostly Martha continues a tradition of ‘foodie films’: films that combine the joys of

the culinary arts with the lessons and ultimate delights of the heart’’ (‘‘Preparation,’’

para. 1). Mostly Martha’s production echoes changes in the EU media industries.

First-time director and screenplay writer Sandra Nettelbeck, who studied film at

San Francisco State University, describes the situation in Germany that supported

the film’s development: ‘‘I think we have the resources and at the same time we have

the liberties to make movies for a lot less money than it takes to make movies [in the

U.S.] generally’’ (Judell, 2002). Heavily influenced by U.S. cinema, Nettelbeck worked

with a cast and crew from four different countries, seven coproducers, and six

television stations on a project that*originally destined for television*was

ultimately produced for the large screen (Drei Sterne, 2002). The film’s production


history, its reiteration of generic conventions, and its remake into No Reservations

situate it within the context of transnationally oriented contemporary German film.

The film embodies the ideals of the contemporary European art house that has the

goal of commercial success in Europe and abroad.

Redemption through the South: The 21st-Century Italienreise

Since reunification, numerous German films have depicted Germans traveling south,

perpetuating an over 600-year-old tradition. In Go Trabi Go! (Klooss & Timm, 1991)

the former East German characters read and explicitly quote Goethe’s Italienische

Reise as they travel to Rome. In other recent films, Spain and Turkey stand in for Italy

as a southern destination. Frau Rettich, die Czerni und ich (Mrs. Rettich, Czerni, and I,

Reich & Imboden, 1998) and Bin ich schon? (Am I Pretty?, Eichinger, Moszknowicz,

Preuss, & Dorrie, 1998) depict female characters traveling to Spain to seek romantic

or erotic encounters, a playful variation of famous male voyagers seeking temptresses

and inspiration from the South. As Halle (2002) writes, Dorrie’s ‘‘portrayal of

Germany and Spain in the new Europe without borders, cannot resist romantic

cliches about the warm South’s capacity to melt the coldness of the German soul. The

film is filled with tourists and immigrants, and the images are not meant to appear

as either ironic or cynical’’ (p. 39). On the other hand, Im Juli (In July, Schubert,

Schwingel, & Akin, 2000) parodies the Italienreise tradition, upending the rational

German’s worldview through his trip to Turkey and adding an ironic twist to the

tradition through the subversive use of magical realism.

Traveling south functions as a frequent leitmotif in contemporary German cinema

to question, problematize, and modify notions of post-Wall EU citizenship. These

filmic journeys also engage the contentious issues explored in the Leitkultur debate

and provide further commentary on it. By focusing on Germans who travel outside of

their own territory into the realms of their southern Others, the films reenvision the

Italienreise within the context of who is authorized to determine the shape of

citizenship and culture. In this section we position Martha’s trip within the tradition

of the Italienreise*especially that of Goethe*as part of the debate over who owns

and creates culture.

A notion of cultural superiority underlies the imagined dichotomy of the

intellectual and more cerebral Northerner who lacks the emotion and intuition of

the Mediterranean Southerner, and the cultural difference is all but fetishized. Goethe

wrote at a time when Germany was grappling with its national identity. Mostly

Martha engages this tradition after the period of reunification when Germany

struggled to reinvent itself, revisit its concept of nationhood, and define its position

in the new EU. The contemporary Leitkultur debate affirms the centrality of

multiculturalism to contemporary German identity. In the past, the southern Other

served as the yardstick by which German culture was measured. The system of

thought surrounding the literary, artistic, and filmic South is based upon ontological

and epistemological distinction made between the Mediterranean and Germany. This

dichotomy also insinuates a basic distinction between the North and South as a


starting point from which to analyze the Mediterranean, its people, customs, mindset,

and food. Thus, there is a correspondence between the literary Italy and ideas about

Italy, but not the genuine, existing country. This allows for the easy substitution of

Spain, Turkey, and other southern destinations. This discourse situates German

culture in opposition to this imaginary Other via a relationship of inequality and

reiterates the notion of a guiding culture rooted in the Classics.

It is precisely through food and cooking that this opposition is performed anew in

Mostly Martha. Italian food, as we see via Martha’s trip to Italy, embodies the utopian

vision of the South as carefree, sumptuous, and relaxing. The flow of food and wine

shot in the warm light of an outdoor meal at sunset remind us of Sebastian Brant’s

parody of paradise, Das Schlaraffenland (The Land of Cockayne, 1494), the legendary

land of milk and honey of medieval tradition, in which food itself embodies utopia

(Wunderlich, 1986). As if traveling from Kansas to Oz, the film alters its lighting and

film stock, and long shots frame the openness, sensuality, and opportunity that Italy

has to offer. Germany, in contrast, appears as cold, wet, and colorless, and the film

often uses tight framing and closer coverage to express the constraints that traditional

German culture poses. In this dichotomous depiction, nature, emotion, and intuition

seem to prevail over the disciplined rigidity of traditional Germany, and the film

appears to support a newer, multiculturally infused definition of culture.

The mise-en-scene of Martha’s home kitchen functions as a symbolic space for the

negotiation of how one belongs to the new German multicultural citizenry,

contrasting traditional blood-based notions of citizenship with more progressive

multicultural discourses. The film enacts a critique of Leitkultur. In preparing a meal

for Martha, Mario leaves Martha’s otherwise obsessively organized and immaculately

clean kitchen in a state of utter disarray. The soundtrack plays Louis Prima’s Angelina

Zooma-Zomma, a reference to a popular and influential U.S. food film that featured

Prima’s music, Big Night (Filley, Tucci, & Scott, 1996), affirming Mostly Martha’s

positioning as a food film. The use of the soundtrack insinuates that Germany has

embraced multiculturalism and thrown out older definitions of Germanness. Martha,

as the embodiment of the older, conservative concept of German citizenship, is

literally shut out of her own kitchen by Mario and Lina, who*with her mixed Italian

German heritage*functions as a bridge between old and new Germany. The

cinematography and editing neatly exclude Martha from her own space and reclaim it

as part of the new rhetoric of citizenship. Inviting the spectator to identify with

Mario, we laugh at Martha who, in a state of hysteria, must breathe into a paper bag

to avoid hyperventilation: the Other has already invaded and ruptured German

culture, forever rendering it hybridized and multicultural.

It is Martha who lags behind and must be inaugurated into 21st-century German

multicultural society; her colleagues in the restaurant and neighbors have already

comfortably made this leap. Much like Rick’s Cafe Americain in Casablanca (Wallis &

Curtiz, 1942) becomes a haven for locals, refugees, and Nazis alike, forcing Rick

(Humphrey Bogart) to discard American isolationism and take sides, Lido’s

multicultural workforce confronts Martha with the new Germany. The film’s

multinational cast of characters and crew from Italy, Denmark, Switzerland, and


the U.S. renders the concept of a strictly Teutonic Germany problematic. Similarly,

the characters have multicultural names (Sam, Mario, Carlos, Jean, Bernadette, and

Giuseppe) that mark Lido and Martha’s world as an interstitial space where world

communities converge. Culture in this new Germany emerges out of the combina-

tions of different cultures and identities that contribute to it. As Martha is confronted

with this southern Otherness in her professional and personal life, we see repeated

medium shots of her retreating to the restaurant’s cold room. Here, she finds

refuge from change and is able to recollect her composure, the coolness of this space

replicating the construction of Germany (and Martha) as (f)rigid. Retreat to the

freezer, control of the immaculately organized restaurant kitchen, and a tight hold on

Lido’s menu ritualize food as the primary arena through which Martha maintains her

sense of social class and national and cultural superiority. Martha’s attitude mirrors

the conservative rhetoric that Germany must maintain its guiding culture in the face

of rising immigration and ethnic diversity.

It is precisely through the upheaval of food and cooking that Martha is able to

encounter the ethnic Other that the remainder of Germany has apparently already

embraced. Martha wins new-found respect for Mario, whom she nonetheless

continues to view as a competitor and a threat. The film’s editing and cinemato-

graphy carefully align the spectator to identify with the multicultural community and

humorously to question Martha’s cultural chauvinism (and thus the chauvinism of

the conservative wing of German politics). The trip south helps her embrace the new

rhetoric of citizenship to which all others in the film appear already to have adapted.

Through her encounter with Italy and Mario, Martha is transformed. However, rather

than questioning the German tradition of configuring the South as a vehicle to

relaxed sensuality and sexual freedom, Mostly Martha reifies it as such, especially

through its aestheticization and sexualization of Italian food. As a citizen whose name

is Klein (literally, small in German), Martha embodies the petite bourgeoisie from

which Goethe attempts to escape via Italy. As a Kleinbuerger*a narrow-minded

citizen*Martha can only redeem her sense of German culture by updating it with an

erotic or exotic intercultural engagement with the Other and its sensuous foodways.

The film assumes the rhetorical position of diversity by digestion. Mostly Martha

seems to challenge the notion of Leitkultur, but ultimately its treatment of ethnicity

and food reaffirm the mediating South’s position as Other against which German

culture can define itself.

To appreciate the political implications of this representation, it is important to

consider immigration policies and discourses of nationhood that circulate in

contemporary Germany, especially those that consider the relationship of guest

workers to German national identity. These, as we demonstrate in the following

section, are intricately tied to German cultural citizenship and multiculturalism.

Embracing Difference? Germany’s Shift to a Multicultural Society

Through the Wirtschaftswunder in the 1950s, Germany’s economy had been

stimulated to the point that Germans suddenly had more disposable income to


purchase luxury items and travel. Italy, one the first countries targeted for guest

worker programs, became Germany’s preeminent tourist destination. Even today,

Germans constitute the largest group of foreign tourists to Italy. The construction of

Italy and other southern countries as a repository of the utopian erotic or exotic

Otherness helped to frame German attitudes about its southern neighbor and itself.

Guest workers remained precisely that in the nation’s self-construction: visitors rather

than citizens. Many of these immigrants were widely assimilated into German society,

while some*especially Turks*held fast to their cultures of origin: their foodways,

religion, and language.

This created significant conflict for conservative factions in Germany. On the one

hand, these workers provided cheap labor for jobs that Germans did not wish to take.

On the other, they brought with them their culture and identity, and many made

Germany their permanent home. The Leitkultur debate arose out of this historical

conflict. Mostly Martha appeared at precisely the time when reunified Germany

altered its citizenship policy. With a legal shift from a policy of ius sangiuinis to ius

solis, definitions of citizenship have moved from birthright by blood*an essentialist

policy that defines citizenship through parental Germanness*to a ‘‘right of soil’’

policy that acknowledges birthright as grounds for citizenship. Now, children of

immigrants can legally claim German citizenship.

More recent groups of immigrants from Turkey, Southeast Asia, and Africa are

often less assimilated than the older European immigrant groups. Virulent debates

about religion and culture circulated with the arrival of large numbers of Muslims

who were perceived as racially and religiously different. From fatal attacks on Turkish

German citizens to policy debates about headscarves,17 cultural tensions flared as

Germans struggled to define their relationship to these groups. Not surprisingly,

religion*often functioning as a code word for race*became one of the central

components of the Leitkultur debate.

These tensions reflect themselves in Mostly Martha’s blending of the Italienreise

tradition with issues of labor immigrants’ assimilation into German society. Not

coincidentally does the film focus on an already accepted and nonthreatening Italian

rather than on a Turk. With 8% of the population consisting of foreigners and

foreign-born individuals (6.8 million), the largest group consists of Turks (25%)

compared with only 8% Italians (Statistiches Bundesamt Deutschland, 2008).

Gokturk (2003) argues that the word Turk has become synonymous with the

concept of ‘‘foreign worker’’ in Germany (p. 183). The choice to focus on Italy

replicates a Eurocentric value system: the move to incorporate Italian guest workers

into contemporary concepts of nationhood is far less threatening than groups that

mainstream German culture does not deem equally assimilable. In its positioning of

Mario as the ethnic Other, Mostly Martha skirts touchier and more volatile issues of

immigration and nationalization. Instead, the film engages in the mainstream debate

on eating and culture that Probyn (2000) describes as ‘‘a nostalgic return to

authenticity’’ that ‘‘appeals to ‘the real’ . . . as a way of covering over many of the

massive changes in terms of families, gender and sexual orders, local and global

economies’’ (p. 8).


Italian food is widely accepted by Germans and often holds higher class status than

other immigrant cuisines. Turkish food, in particular, is conceptualized as cheap

ethnic food with kebab outselling all other types of fast food. As Gokturk et al. (2007)

write, ‘‘the widespread consumption of kebab and falafel is probably the most

ubiquitous sign of the ‘Orientalization’ of Germany’’ (p. 427). Martha’s transforma-

tion happens through an assimilable foreigner and his cuisine rather than through

a more threatening one. In the film, foreign influence*via food*revitalizes

Germany. Mario, who appears only with a first name as the quintessential Italian,

is the agent who negotiates and facilitates this cultural change. While food appears to

be a site for political struggle, its utopian representation overrides any overt political

potential that cooking and eating ethnic food might possess.

The film’s treatment of gender parallels its Eurocentric value system. Martha’s

authority as female chef and artist cannot stand on its own. The film’s rhetorical

configuration suggests that it is only through Mario’s culinary and erotic intervention

that Martha (and thus, German culture and nationhood symbolized through Martha)

can sustain herself and flourish: multicultural society and intercultural engagement

appear not only as inevitable, but also as valuable to German identity. But, the

configuration of that multiculturalism is limited to value systems that do not threaten

hegemonic German society. The film’s visual structure reinforces this. Before Martha

accepts Mario into her life, we often see her framed in tight medium shots on the far

right or left of the image with the remainder of the screen filled with snow or rain.

During her trip to Italy, Martha sits comfortably beneath Mario as he raises his glass

to a toast. The lush Italian landscape frames Mario and Martha as they relax at an

outdoor family meal in the warmth of the Italian sun. While the film suggests that

Italian influence can help to revitalize Germany, it reifies this order as a patriarchal

and heterosexual one that sweeps women into the parameters of a traditional

marriage to negotiate change.

Italian food offers the possibility of redemption from Martha’s dystopic world, an

eatopia of sorts. While the film appears to challenge traditional hierarchies of gender

(Martha, for example, is configured as the Chefkoch, the lead chef who, although

reserved, is able, competent, smart, and organized), it is through Mario’s cuisine that

she and Lina are revitalized. The film suggests that Germany can and should

reconstitute and understand itself through foreign influence, but a certain type of

acceptable foreignness that is willing to assimilate to mainstream German values. The

film favors a rhetoric of assimilation over one of cultural pluralism. Indeed, even its

use of Hollywood classical narrative style aligns the film with dominant representa-

tional systems that privilege verisimilitude, catharsis, and identification. As Novero

(2004) argues, Mostly Martha does not attempt to replicate Hollywood cinema, yet

it uses the language and style of mainstream American film to create an ‘‘ode to

narrative cinema and its cathartic function’’ (p. 19). The film embraces an

unconscious politics that privileges consumerism and hegemonic values.

Mostly Martha allays and softens the immigration experience through its narrative

and its formal elements. Sergio Castellitto, the actor who plays Mario, does not speak

German. Rather than showing the struggle of acquiring a new language and culture,


the film simply overdubs his voice with that of German voice actor Frank Glaubrecht.

As Halle (2002) writes, ‘‘dubbing becomes increasingly prominent, both to overcome

linguistic differences among the cast and to appeal to the various audiences as well.

Dubbing ceases to occur as part of post-production and becomes instead part of the

filming process itself ’’ (p. 29). Mostly Martha participates in trends across Europe to

render film internationally palatable and marketable.

Outlook: Germany’s Treatment of Otherness

As we developed this essay, we could not help but think more generally about

Germany’s historic treatment of ethnic Others, especially of its historical and

contemporary treatment of Jewish citizens. What struck us was the deep irony that

the conceptualization of Jewishness in contemporary Germany has undergone a

transformation that now often positions Judaism and Jewish culture as part of

guiding culture. Some of Germany’s most prolific writers, thinkers, musicians, artists,

and filmmakers were Jews who have contributed to its self-conceptualization as a

nation of intellectuals. What was considered degenerate art under Hitler, now stands

as one of the central pillars of contemporary conservative Leitkultur.

Compared to its historical treatment Judaism came to play a different symbolic

role in Germany’s cultural imagination during the 1990s that parallels the acceptance

and commercialization of Italian culture. Jewishness has become, as Wohlert (2007)

writes, ‘‘the latest fashion’’ with ‘‘Jewish restaurants, shops, clubs, and cultural

establishments . . . cropping up all over Berlin. . . . Bagels must be included on the

menus of the trendy cafes; tours through ‘Jewish Berlin’ enjoy long-running success’’

(p. 209). This echoes the commercialization of multicultural Otherness that Halter

(2000) calls shopping for identity. This philo-Semitism signifies a shift not just in the

German imagination of Judaism and Jewish culture but of Otherness altogether.

Sanitized images of multiculturalism and intercultural communication sell.

What is significant about this shift is that Jews, who once constituted Germany’s

largest non-Christian minority group, are, as opposed to Turks, now emblematic of

cultural sophistication. Jewishness, like Italianness, is highly commodifiable and

signals an acceptable type of assimilable citizenship. We do not wish to create the

impression that anti-Semitism in Germany is dead. It certainly is not. In fact, Schoeps

argues that this new philo-Semitism constitutes the flip side of the anti-Semitic coin

(cited in Wohlert, 2007, p. 210). In his discussion of the Jewish minority’s role in

guiding culture, Brenner (2007) bemoans the treatment of Turks: ‘‘it is easy to

imagine a synagogue in the cityscape, but a mosque? Luckily one can now become

well informed about Jewish culture at German universities, but where can one gain

sound knowledge about Turkish culture and history?’’ (p. 218). The commercializa-

tion of identity should signal concern rather than celebration.

In its neoliberal, feel-good multicultural rhetoric, Mostly Martha privileges

Italianness as a safe, consumable form of diversity much in the way that Jewishness

sells in Germany. In doing so, the film reiterates cultural privileges of whiteness that

Italians, as Christian Europeans and members of the EU, tend to enjoy. Turks, on the


other hand, embody the new cultural Other, especially through their linguistic,

religious, and racial or ethnic difference. The film’s choice to focus on food is especially

telling: Italian food becomes a stand-in for palatable difference, even though Italian

foodways are widely assimilated. The study of food as a form of consumption forces us

to connect various realms of cultural practices with constructions of citizenship.

Garcıa Canclini (2001) calls for the ‘‘[reconceptualization of] consumption, not as a

mere setting for useless expenditures and irrational impulses, but as a site that is good

for thinking, where a good part of economic, sociopolitical, and psychological

rationality is organized’’ (p. 5). Shifts in Germany’s media industries increasingly

privilege commercially oriented film and television, supporting the close alignment of

cultural citizenship with consumption. Although Germany’s film industry has success-

fully produced many outstanding films by Turkish Germans, we fear that the industry’s

new structure will continually give fuel to neoliberal ideological underpinnings.

Notes

[1] Lewis (2006) illuminates the construction of national identity in post 9-11 Germany: ‘‘The

lament about the failings of Germany’s poets and philosophers stands out much like a major

chord in the postwar (West German nation’s theme song, running like an insistent trope

through the story the German nation habitually tells about itself). It is this recurrent refrain

of failure and insufficiency that has effectively supplanted older, more positive, and self-

congratulatory foundational narratives of the German nation. One myth of origin that has

been drowned out in the current rhetoric of crisis, which has its roots in German

Romanticism and the Enlightenment, in particular in Herder’s notion of the Kulturnation, is

the belief that Germany is a nation of Dichter und Denker, of writers and thinkers, poets and

philosophers. In modern times, Germany has drawn much of its sense of identity and self-

worth from its rich intellectual traditions and this foundational narrative’’ (p. 70).

[2] See the slogan ‘‘Kinder statt Inder’’ (children instead of Indians) utilized by Germany’s

conservative parties in the 2000 elections to mobilize voters against the Socialists’ plan to fill

vacant information technology positions through issuing German residence permits to

technology workers from India and other Asian countries.

[3] In his analysis of different definitions of cultural citizenship, Miller (2006) concludes that,

although influential, ‘‘all of them neglect the political economy of cultural citizenship in

favor of its political technology. We need to combine the two’’ (p. 73).

[4] We conceptualize cultural citizenship through Miller’s definition that considers the ‘‘uneasy

interdependence of citizenship, consumption, and politics’’ (2006, p. 28). Miller outlines

three ‘‘zones of citizenship’’ that overlap with each other, yet have specific histories: the

political (the right to reside and vote); the economic (the right to work and prosper); and the

cultural (the right to know and speak) (p. 35). For Miller, the shift to a service-based

economy is intricately related to contemporary cultural citizenship (p. 51). Thus, analysis of

the economy and of the media industries becomes imperative to the understanding of civic

participation and cultural belonging (Miller, 2006, p. 73). See also Appadurai (1996),

Appadurai and Society for Transnational Cultural Studies (2000), Garcıa Canclini (2001),

Gordon and Newfield (1996), Hesmondhalgh (2002), Miller and Yudice (2002), Shohat and

Stam (1994), and Yudice (2003) on the relationship of citizenship and media.

[5] The recent hit series Tuerkisch fur Anfaenger (Turkish for Beginners, Dagtekin, 2006�2008)

preceded Canada’s Little Mosque on the Prairie (Brunton & Snook, 2007�2009) and expressly

deals with the topic of Muslim integration into mainstream culture through humor.


[6] Halle (2002) writes, ‘‘television becomes an organizing force in the audiovisual market’’

(p. 18). In concert with Rentschler (2000), Halle (2008) notes the ‘‘increased presence of

television officials on film boards, the increased role of television as a source of financing,

and new arrangements between film schools and television as markers of a shift in the film

industry’’ (p. 175).

[7] The term refers to a period in German cinema that was heavily influenced by the French New

Wave. In 1962, a new generation of filmmakers issued the Oberhausen Manifesto and declared

the death of commercial cinema. From the 1960s through the 1980s, directors like Rainer

Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Helma Sanders-Brahms, and Werner Herzog revitalized

the German film industry and produced a number of low-budget art house films, some of

which received worldwide acclaim. This cinema was avant-garde, highly political, and deeply

critical of past and current German society, especially of the fact that many ‘‘de-Nazified’’

individuals took on prominent positions in government, education, and society post WWII.

[8] Kebab Connection (Schubert, Schwingel, & Saul, 2005), Im Juli, the internationally acclaimed

Gegen die Wand (Head On, Schubert, Schwingel, & Akin, 2004), and Auf der anderen Seite

(The Other Side of Heaven, Akin, Maeck, Thiel, & Wurl, 2007) are multilingual and depict the

lives of transnational individuals. Kebab Connection is in Greek, Turkish, and German; Head

On is in Turkish and German. Gokturk et al. (2007) describe the latter film as portraying

characters who ‘‘show little concern for assimilation for either Germany or Turkey; instead,

they challenge binary oppositions between native and foreign, here and there, them and us’’

(p. 15).

[9] The country’s film industry receives significant support from German national and regional

funding bodies as well as from two main EU level funds: MEDIA (the EU’s Measures to

Encourage the Development of the European Audiovisual Industry) and the Council of

Europe’s Eurimages. Both EU funding sources have the goal of strengthening Europe’s ability

to compete ‘‘as a global player in the face of Hollywood domination’’ (Cooke, 2007, p. 37).

[10] Halle (2006) notes that Germany’s attempt to reach the ‘‘broadest possible audience in the

global film market’’ expanded the German film industry’s share of its national box office ‘‘by

over 10%, reaching up to 30% in some quartiles’’ (p. 251). Halle (2002) discusses three major

shifts in film financing. First, the definition of what constitutes a ‘‘German film’’ has

expanded and opened up German film production to transnational EU coproductions. The

Filmforderungsanstalt (The German Film Board [FFA]) changed its definition of a ‘‘German

film.’’ A film now qualifies as German if ‘‘the film script author or leading actor is a German

citizen and if the film premieres in German in the territory of the FFA, or if it premiers in an

A-level film festival as a German entry.’’ Second, regional joint public and/or private funding

organizations now provide seed money for the film industry and have shifted German film

toward ‘‘marketability.’’ The third shift ‘‘results from the substantial involvement of private

interests’’ (Halle, 2002, pp. 12�17).

[11] See Bower (2004) and Poole (1999).

[12] Food is conspicuously absent in films like La Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (Silberman &

Bunuel, 1972), and it expresses social criticism in food films like La Grande Bouffe (Malle,

Rassam, & Ferreri, 1973).

[13] Eat Drink Man Woman, for example, was remade into Tortilla Soup.

[14] A recent independently produced U.S. film, Waitress (Roiff & Shelly, 2007), uses a similar

strategy to illustrate the internal conflicts of the film’s main character.

[15] DeVault (1991) demonstrates that even though more men have begun to cook, the work of

feeding the family remains women’s work.

[16] Falwell’s (2008) analysis of German travel guides discusses the relationship of foodways,

guidebooks, and politics. She determines, ‘‘the more critical the view of the country’s history

as violent and bloody, the less positive the depiction of its traditional cuisine’’ (p. 144). Both

positively and critically inclined guidebooks tend to represent German cooking as heavily

based in animal protein, especially pork (p. 139).


[17] The Leitkultur debate acquired political urgency after the deadly neo-Nazi attacks on Turkish

homes in the cities of Molln (November 1992) and Solingen (June 1993). In 1995, the

controversy surrounding the dismissal of a Muslim teacher from a public school for wearing

a head scarf revealed deep-seated fears of the perceived dangers of Islam to German culture.

While the German Federal Court upheld the right of female Muslim employees to wear head

scarves in public institutions in 2003, individual states have the right to pass their own

legislation. In view of the fact that church and state are not strictly separated in Germany*students can receive religious instruction in public schools, and citizens professing a religious

affiliation are taxed to finance their churches*this ruling is not inconsequential. With

education and the transmission of cultural values at stake, at least one German state has

already banned teachers from wearing head scarves in public schools.

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Thawing the North: Mostly Martha as a German-Italian Eatopia

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