5 - How Does It Feel to Be Foreign? Negotiating German Belonging and Transnational Asianness in Experimental Video

Summary

This essay rethinks german autobiography through the perspective of several Asian transnational artists and filmmakers living and working in Germany. I am interested in both the restrictions and opportunities that shape how they occupy the self-reflexive, self-narrating subject position implicit in the German autobiographical project. None of the filmmakers I examine hold German citizenship; they have either obtained permanent residency (Wayne Yung) or an artist visa (kate hers, Ming Wong), and the works under discussion here were all produced in Germany. Although their inclusion in a discussion of German autobiographical filmmaking might seem tangential, it is precisely the seemingly natural assumptions and feelings about a particular subject’s national and discursive belonging that I would like to investigate.

When I asked the Chinese Canadian queer filmmaker Wayne Yung how he would position himself in relation to German autobiographical production after living in Berlin for more than ten years, he answered:

When I applied for film school in Cologne at the Kunsthochschule für Medien, one of my motivations was to become a “German filmmaker.” I thought that having a German diploma, and the professional connections made through school, would help. But by the time I completed my studies, I realized I would never become a German filmmaker, “und das ist auch gut so” [and that’s a good thing]. Because “being German” also requires a certain fluency in the local culture that I might never achieve.

If the possession of a German diploma and participation in the film industry do not suffice to identify as a German filmmaker, what does it take to “have” or “perform” German identity and to participate in German life and cultural production, including German autobiography? Who may claim a German self and who falls outside the normative parameters of such an identification? What does it mean in this context to have—or to lack—German blood or to be born on German soil, both of which confer citizenship?

In Nanna Heidenreich’s examination of the German Ausländerdiskurs (discourse on foreignness) as “the sum of institutional regulations, linguistic conventions, and everyday practices, in other words the idea of ‘common sense’” about the identity of self and other, she suggests that the historically loaded term “race” has been eliminated and replaced by the seemingly neutral term Ausländer, or “foreigner.”