Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold's Yella and Jerichow in Comparison

This article explores Christian Petzold's cinematic contribution to processes of identity-formation in a unified Germany by comparing the treatment of migration in his films Yella and Jerichow. In these two films, Petzold suggestively crosses the East-West divide of the nation with ethnic, gender, and class difference to expose lingering fault-lines in German society. By focusing on Petzold's correlation of East-West German with German-Turkish tensions under the rubric of an expanded conception of ethnicity, the political content of Petzold's works is described in terms of their negative finding: that it is as impossible to be an East-West German as it is to be a German-Turk in the new nation. In a redress of the limits placed on hybrid forms of identity, Petzold subtly confronts his spectators with their own complicity in the mechanisms of identitarian restriction. This constitutes the political impact of his films.