Emma Fleischer
Let�s Talk About
Germany
In his article Talk About Germany Ernst Wilhelm Wenders discusses his personal perspective on the unique German identity, which he says is not collective; each German has a different idea of German-ness and he wishes to only talk about his own. The Germany in which Wenders grew up was in a reconstructive period after the global shunning of World War II; a place void of such vital things as fun, laughter; and adventure. (440) Wenders youth was therefore defined by a sense of never looking back and that to do so was wrong; he says, Behind us was a black hold, so everybody looked straight ahead busied themselves with reconstruction. (438) He looked to American forms of entertainment such as comic strips and music, because they were absolutely in the present. Even stories, legends, national myths, were discredited and untold; the American Western stories rooted in history became a symbol of a sense of joy and life in the present that post war Germany lacked, and they imported identity from elsewhere. This portrayal of a home country to a child does not instill much confidence or pride, only the yearning to get out and dream of the outside, which Wenders certainly did for the beginning of his life.
Wenders achieved his dream of living in America, of which he writes, it wasnt enough to live in America, you had to live like an American, act and think and speak like an American. When I first found myself groping for a word in German that I knew in English I was devastated. (437) The common thread of disdain for the American Dream throughout many of Wenders films originates from his American dream being shattered into a nightmare. Language for Wenders is the identifying characteristic of Germany; it continued after the political, historical and cultural traditions were banned and thrown out, and became his mode of nationality.
The problem of nuance, connotation, and the feelings a word evokes is not new or original; the study of Comparative Literature is based upon reconciling ideas getting lost in translation and the disparities between cultural context. However, Wenders brings up the pertinent and applicable way in which we use language to express not only our own ideas but the things we have taken away from past experience and history.
The achievement in this article lies in the articulation of a feeling of displacement both abroad and in the land of your birth, is unsettling and difficult to define. It is a human quality to find comfort in stability; in America, we have the luxury of finding it in our collective history. Wenders, a man of images, found himself and his national German-ness in words because they will always endure because there will always be the writers and poets. (443)