Amidst terrible encounters with tragedies like disability, war, and climate change in Pakistan, I decided to look for an alternative lifestyle that would be more peaceful, humane, and secure. Having my bachelor's in political science with European history as my minor, I started romanticizing Western ideals of democracy. The ideas of Liberté, égalité, and fraternité from the French Revolution, besides various other art tools like literature and films, etc., played a more significant role in this image of the Western world in my mind. However, after five years of my experiences in Germany, I decided to undress some of the cultural realities that shattered my dreams of equality and fraternity.
My arrival in Germany was no less than a tragedy. Being alone with disability and traumatized by war, it was not easy to surmount the integration challenge in a big city like Berlin. In such a struggle for stability and integration in a new society, one often gets disappointed and lands in the house of loneliness and sadness. As I said, I came to Germany with a bleeding soul; my colleagues and people around me in Germany, unfortunately, associated different stigmas and stereotypes with my sadness and loneliness. Most of them even strangely distanced themselves and never tried to interact again. I was, however, well aware that all my sadness was because of integration challenges and misunderstandings. The most challenging part of this experience was the powerful gaze of the people, which made me suspicious about myself at first and then wholly demotivated me from all engagements in social and political activities. In short, all these experiences forced me to look into the cultural, political, and social standing of people with disability in Germany. In order to understand the status of people with disabilities in Germany, I decided to look into the films that play a more significant role in image construction.
This is my first article about cinema and disability. I would try to explain my experiences in Germany from the roles of various disabled characters in the films in different epochs of German history. I selected films because of many reasons. One reason is that art, in many cases, is considered to be innocent. It is, however, not true. Art is not just immoral sometimes but also dangerous. Another reason for selecting film is that this visual tool plays a vital role in exploring and explaining the small details of any culture. Lastly, explaining my personal story through film character is to avoid emotional reasons and to look at disability from a more rational perspective in German culture. As this journey of exploring disability in German cinema is a long and gigantic task, I will divide it into various small articles to explain small things in a more detailed way.
Human deformity, physical or mental, has proved to be a source of repulsion or abjection. When confronted by an entity that does not conform to the prescribed notion of normalcy, most of us react with fear and prejudices. Well-known writer Longmoore believes that all the things that we reject and fear , "we often stigmatize and shun and sometimes seek to destroy." Famous circus "Freak" shows, for instance, are quintessential where deformed people exploit their outwardly appearance of "otherness" in the name of shock entertainment for the uniform masses.
Kajirō Yamamoto believes that "difference is not inherent in any particular pattern of behavior or physical attribute. Society determines whether some individuals should be regarded as different by selecting certain facets of their being and then attaching to these facets degrading labels and interpretations".
This exploitation of deformity is a powerful tool found in the realm of visual media and cinema. Since its beginning, the film industry has initiated several stereotypes, which often go unnoticed or undetected by mainstream audiences. For instance, the first storytelling film with disability theme was Thomas Edison's "Fake Beggar," which made disability a source of humor. These stereotyped images, after constant repetitions, eventually become a truth in society, and the same audience treats people with disabilities with fear and prejudices in real life. The problem with this kind of treatment is the isolation of people with disabilities from different flow of events like gatherings, social interactions, and relationships besides the broader cultural and historical process.
Leonard Kriegel further explains that the image that dominated American narrative writing during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century was the individual male, healthy in mind and body, who carved a sense of self out of a chaotic environment. A pure spirit and a strong body were such requisite traits that they became inseparable. Kriegel further explained, " Physical health and moral virtue were virtually synonymous during the nineteenth century in American writing". In such an environment, people with disabilities were assigned immoral, weak, or comic roles according to their physique, while strong, muscular men were assigned heroic roles.
German cinema has had various ups and downs throughout its history. One thing that remains common even in post-WWII, however, is the role of people with disabilities and the images and stereotypes associated with them. Starting in 1895 at Berlin Wintergreen, German cinema went through various stages, from Expressionism in the Weimar Republic to Hitler's Euthanasia, followed by post WWII to modern ideas of acceptance where disability is still considered a laughing matter in cinema.
Similarly, the ideas of identity by psychologists and social theorists of that time, such as Sigmund Freud and George Simmel, and some filmmakers also develop the ideas of "otherness" and "strangeness" through deformity or disability. Based on this historical understanding of cinema, we can assume that German society still has a long way to go to include and accept people with disabilities.
Before going deeper into specific films on a critical level, one thing to know about German cinema is the intelligent set design and creative use of light and shadow in an expressionist era, which inspired the future generations of fantastic film (Horror movies) directors. The problem with this kind of movie is the depiction of physically or mentally disabled characters as either "monsters" or "people with supernatural powers." These fantastic movies not only play a more significant role in stigmatizing people with disabilities but also show them as dangerous and threatening to society.
This type of visual image production can create havoc in times like Corona when people rarely get a chance to interact in real life and can only rely on media. We need to rethink our ways of interacting with people and come out of these stereotyped images of different minority groups. Also, physical appearance has nothing to do with one's way of thinking. The next part of this essay will go deeper into the various styles, set designs, and attributes of disabled characters in different movies in different political systems starting from 1919.
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