DACH

German Sci-Fi - the Final Frontier?

As part of her work on a forthcoming BL science fiction exhibition, a colleague asked me yesterday about examples of the genre from Germany. To be honest, I was stumped. I couldn't think of any internationally-known German sci-fi writers, and didn't remember ever coming across references to authors known within DACH but not abroad.

The only thing that immediately sprang to mind was Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927). I didn't realise that this was adapted from her own novel by Lang's then wife Thea von Harbou. She wrote at least one other sci-fi novel, Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), also filmed by Lang. But colleagues in Exhibitions were ahead of me there and are already examining our copies of both novels and of an English translation of Metropolis with pictures from the film.

So I then turned my mind to literary fiction. I suppose it could be argued that Kafka's novels – and in particular his short story 'In der Strafkolonie' (In the Penal Colony) with its torture machine – share elements of science fiction, portraying encounters between 'ordinary' people and societies governed by alien and arbitrary rules. Similarly, Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), although lacking the technological trappings usually associated with sci-fi, nonetheless offers a vision of a future society which is part utopia, part dystopia, a typical theme of the genre.

Perhaps more on the 'forgotten classics' shelf are Paul Scheerbart, author of the 'Asteroid Novel' Lesabéndio (BL shelfmark: 12552.v.3), and Alfred Kubin who illustrated Lesabéndio as well writing and illustrating as his own strange dystopian fantasy Die andere Seite (The Other Side).

But these are all borderline cases and concerned more with philosophical allegory than with social and technologial speculation, let alone with pure entertainment. Surely there are examples of more popular German science fiction? Some secondary literature about the genre in fact provided me with the names of many writers, both popular and more literary, from Kurd Lasswitz, the 'father of German science fiction' in whose name an annual science fiction prize is awarded in Germany, to Andreas Eschbach, the most recent winner of that prize.

However, in terms of sheer scale if nothing else, the titan of German sci-fi must be Perry Rhodan, the hero of weekly serial stories first published in 1961 and still going strong after more than 2,500 weekly editions plus additional spin-offs. Although best known in DACH, Perry has followers worldwide (some English translations appeared in the UK and US in the 1970s, e.g. BL: Nov.34072). A Perry Rhodan Lexikon (BL: YA.1983.a.3370) was published back in 1983, and there’s now an online 'Perrypedia' where fans (and curious librarians) can find out about all aspects of the 'Perryverse'.

So, there's more German sci-fi than I thought; I hope there'll be room in the exhibition for some of it!

[SR]

The Third Man, or the last post

This is not about Peter Mandelson and his memoirs; I wouldn’t dare to write about power games here, but since I mentioned it, I might as well plug the current major exhibition called Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art.

The reason for choosing this title is that I remembered an interesting line from The Third Man  (1949) in which Orson Welles says as a criminal on the run: In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock! 
If you’ve never seen the film, you can watch the extract here, or - if you have a valid reader pass - you can come and read the script, @ BL X.989/29277.

(Photo by iamaruntimeerror ; some rights reserved)

In my last post for this blog as German-Swiss curator, I do wonder what people think about Switzerland. Surely Welles was wrong - not least because the cuckoo clock was most probably first made in the Black Forest (you can follow that lead, if interested, by looking at: Kochmann, Karl. Black forest clockmaker and the cuckoo clock [1987 ed.] ([Concord, Calif.] : Antique Clocks Publishing, 1987.) , @ BL (B) PK 51). So the cuckoo clock is not the "only" invention of note from Switzerland (apart from 500 years of democracy). There are so many significant contributions from this country of the Alps that I could write a very long post here.

However, it is clear that for those who don’t know, say, Paul Klee, they will not be convinced that either he or Switzerland are important to this world. Therefore, to them, he would not feature as an innovative Swiss person. When I went to Bern last December (a short break whilst going to see family in Germany anyway; no worries, no public money was used for this), I went to the Zentrum Paul Klee. This Centre is in two ways extraordinary: a modern yet pleasant building which progressively combines exhibition, research and outreach in three seamlessly connected buildings, and a thorough as well as edutaining and scholarly engagement with Klee’s work. Some people might argue, but one could say that Klee was the third man (after Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc) in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (for a pamphlet suggesting this, see BL MFE 48 *1741* 1.003.003 DSC).

Of course, you might say that modern art (or any art) is not an interest of yours; in this case, please go to Wikipedia’s list of famous Swiss people  and pick an area in which you have an expertise or interest. Roger Federer? Martina Hingis? Henri Nestlé? Ferdinand de Saussure?

However, famous Swiss men and women are only one side of this story. For some, the dominance of German and Austrian culture has led to belittling Switzerland as the "smaller German" brother (of course disregarding the rich contributions by French and Italian Eidgenossen). Let me blow a final fanfare for all-things Swiss. The last bugle call, at the last post.

[CG]

Anyone for dubbing?

Over Easter I saw a television advert for Swiss chocolate featuring a small girl whose voice had been (rather badly) dubbed into English, presumably from a German-language original. Watching it reminded me that adverts are about the only place where we now experience the dubbing of foreign voices on British television. 

That wasn’t always the case. Most people of my age remember with mixed affection and bemusement the dubbed children’s drama serials which were shown year after year on school holiday mornings. Oddly, many came from Eastern Europe, then firmly behind the Iron Curtain. Even the most famous German import fell into this category: Das singende, klingende Bäumchen (The Singing, Ringing Tree) was an East German production, although the other best-remembered dubbed German children’s serial, Silas was West German. That was shown in the early 1980s and must have been among the last dubbed live-action series shown on British television.

By then children were either more sophisticated or less tolerant, and even adults who had grown up with dodgy dubbing were unenthralled by Channel 4 dubbing the medical drama Die Schwarzwaldklinik (Black Forest Clinic) in the mid-1980s. Dubbing eventually disappeared, and has never really come back in the UK, although it’s still common in many European countries, including DACH. As well as many academic studies on the topic, there’s even a German reference book devoted to the art, Lexikon der Film- und Fernsehsynchronisation (BL: YA.2003.a.16376), which lists the German voice casts of dubbed films – who’d have guessed that Klaus Kinski voiced the character played by Sabu in Black Narcissus! – and includes brief biographies of famous dubbing artists.  

When I lived in Germany I got used to dubbing again, and the only time it really jarred was when I started watching the British film Mona Lisa on television. I found it impossible to carry on because to me it felt so wrong to hear the very different and distinctive accents of Robbie Coltrane and Bob Hoskins both dubbed into more or less standard German (by Joachim Kerzel and Wolfgang Kuehne respectively, the Lexikon informs me). But conversely, having first seen the film Rain Man dubbed into German, I found the English original jarring, again because of a very distinctive speech pattern, this time the monotonous phrases repeated by the autistic savant character. And a couple of years ago we had a German intern who was disappointed when he first watched The Simpsons un-dubbed because ‘the voices sounded all wrong’.  

In a way it’s a bit sad that we’re too sophisticated now for dubbing. While as an adult I’d rather watch a foreign film or TV series with subtitles, I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to do so as a child. Those old foreign children’s serials are remembered as a bit of a joke now, but laughing at a bit of bad dubbing wasn’t their only appeal back in the day. They offered a window – however bizarre or fantastic at times – into a culture other than that of the English-speaking world, which today’s children, for all our global media, don’t seem to get through TV and films.

[SR]

'The Producers' in Berlin

According to the blogger Henryk M Broder in May this year, 'de-nazification has been sucessfully completed' with the staging of Mel Brooks's The Producers in Berlin's Admiralspalast.

Much has been made of the fact that this is the very theatre in which Adolf Hitler attended performances of operettas in the 1940s. But in a country with laws against the public display of Nazi symbols, it's unusual to say the least to see dancers, actors and the stage itself draped in such symbols.

To understand fully how far the public debate, and the feelings of the Volk, have come, you need to look back a bit. In 2004, the German film Downfall came to cinemas in Germany. Some commentators were highly critical of the depiction of Hitler, not because of a lack of realism or possible glorification of the character; no, they were concerned that this adaptation of German historian Joachim Fest's book (@ BL: YC.2005.a.12316) ran the risk of revisionism.

Like the book, parts of the film depict Hitler as a human being (eating, chatting or even admitting minor mistakes), with a friendly manner to some and expressions of weaknesses to others. Such a humanising depiction could be seen as to ignore and deny the facts of the Holocaust and other horrible deeds of this Austrian man who became the most powerful German politician in the 20th century (according to the critics).

Fast forward to 2007, when another film attempted the unspeakable. Mein Führer - Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler ('My Leader - The truly truest truth about Adolf Hitler'), a film by the Swiss director Dani Levy, is meant to be a comedy: the postmodern, tongue-in-cheek, relation between the title and the completely fictional story is arguably the most convincing and funniest aspect of this film. The depiction of Hitler in this film was seen by some as a 'transfiguration' of the evil to a man who pronounces himself as a weak guy - not necessarily funny, but a different way to present the Führer.

Back to The Producers in Berlin in 2009: with the two previous cinematic depictions of Hitler, one assumes that they paved the way to this US musical. I disagree: I believe that the two films of Mel Brooks's concept of how to present Hitler (1968 with Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, and 2005 with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick) and the fact that this is now a musical are much more important as to why such a musical is now possible in Berlin.

Also, even though Hitler is depicted as a camp NAZI leader, this is contextualised in a version of this story which ups the double entendre and sexual content: the German version contains lines such as 'Kopulieren auf allen Vieren' [to copulate, down on all fours] - the German rhyme making this image even more surreal when talking about a stern-faced image of a strong Nazi.

Another important difference is that this musical, though about and depicting Hitler, is actually also about the need of the producers of a Broadway musical to fail in order to call themselves bankrupt - that's just one of the absurdist intentions one can imagine, especially in times of a recession.

So, the actual surprise should not be that this musical is shown now in Berlin, and that it is successful. One gets over that initial shock quickly. The surprise is why was it not a hit with folks in Vienna, where this very German version of the musical was praised by critics but flopped.

I'm tempted to travel to Berlin, not for the sense of occasion, but for seeing whether the German translation works, of course.
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