Mixed Race Studies

Blackness in Germany: Locating “Race” in Johannes Schaaf’s 1986 Film Adaptation of Michael Ende’s Fantasy Novel Momo

Focus on German Studies
Volume 19 (2012)
pages 133-148

Benjamin Nickl
Georgetown University

Michael Ende’s 1973 fantasy novel, Momo first became popular in West Germany. Decades later, the book remained successful in the unified Republic. Intended as a piece of alternative literature for children, the story advocates resistance to consumerism, capitalism, and the time bind, in which free market economies situate members of the working population. The novel’s protagonist is the titular character, a small girl named “Momo.” She fights her adversaries, the “Gray Agents,” who are sent by the “Timesaving Bank” to steal mankind’s unused time and use it to sustain their lives. What allows for Momo’s resistance to the time-thieves is her state of innocence, a natural purity which prevents the young heroine from falling prey to Western civilization’s dogma of capitalism.

Ende’s original text, which is now in its 47th edition, never explicitly connects Momo as a symbol of pristine nature to non-white notions of race. However, the cinematic adaptation does exactly that. Cast in the role of Momo, then eleven-year-old Afro-German actress Radost Bokel was the visibly “exoticized” female lead. Her race set Bokel apart from her white cast members in the German-Italian production. Director Johannes Schaaf chose to define Momo in the context of a racial discourse to construct knowledge about otherness as ethnic difference. I read this as an exclusion of ethnic minorities in Germany, underscored by German film’s long tradition of nationalism based on ethnic affiliation.

Schaaf’s adaptation perpetuates a racial bias, which occupies a large part of the country’s ethnic history. The film exemplifies the projection of identities on the black body and performative manifestations of (black) identity, which were authored by a white majority despite the actual presence of individuals who identify as black. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, “becoming black” was a widespread phenomenon in West Germany. In the wake of the nation’s politicized student movement in 1968 (“68’er Studentenbewegung”), a great part of the white population imagined “blackness” as a way to express (national-political) innocence and justified anger over being the victim of capitalist rule. White people appropriated racial features of the black body, which they believed was unrightfully oppressed by the establishment; hence they made claims to socio-cultural aspects of both Afro-German and Afro-American identity. Especially the German youth expressed their white afrophilia in terms of fierce socio-politic engagement and wide circulation of cultural products branded as “Afroblack”…

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