Outsiders, foreigners, and aliens in cinematic or literary narrative by Bohm, Dische, Dorrie, and Oren

Yet the political successes of a conservative backlash against such ideas demonstrate that a sizable portion of the population still retains a desire for a stable sense of ethnic or "racial" Germanness.1 Although the tradition of constructing German identity around a mythical Germanic past or German "blood" is yielding to the reality of Germany's increasingly multicultural social make-up (Dirke; Jarausch; Zeit; Leggewie/$Senocak 131-36), almost half of German youth claim to be suspicious of "foreigners" (Williams) and some assert the primacy of their own ideas of Germanness violently and adamantly. "Culturally displaced" (Barron), he remains an uneasy mix of old and new worlds: he speaks fluent German and English with a German accent; he compulsively checks the latest baseball scores throughout his existential adventure, and he turns to the Catholic church in search of solace. [...]Charles and Esther's efforts to be Jewish, Esther trying intentionally and Charles at first unconsciously, cannot obliterate the other competing aspects of their selves. [...]to a different extent, but more significantly, their differences from their "own kind" also persist underneath the mask of their cultural identity, thereby refuting any assumptions of essential affinity.14 The film Yasemin takes another tack to the Turkish-German divide by incorporating it into the figure of Yasemin, a Turkish teenager born in West Germany and growing up in Hamburg under the watchful eyes of her extended family. [...]an outsider among Germans, she becomes an alien among Turks, doubling her foreignness. [...]the scenes of violence-Jan beating the cousin, Dursun, with a pole, Yasemin and then Dursun pinning Jan to the mat during judo practice, Susanne accidentally cutting herself on Dursun's knife--evoke the dangerous undercurrents of a cultural interchange based on monolithic notions of identity.16 The past does not constrain the figures in Dorrie's Keiner liebt mich. Since Dische originally wrote her story in English, even though the German version was the first to appear in print, the parenthetical page references will refer to the English edition. $For different readings of this scene, see Remmler 200-03; Gilman, "Male" 223-24; Herzog 12-13.