And yet another Deutsche Welle
This time it’s TV. The natives are not only embracing extravagant native television productions with “a global aesthetic” (i.e. Hollywood aesthetic), they are also successfully producing and exporting these films all over the world.
German film producers are getting better and better at marketing their made-for-TV-movies for international audiences. The recent and very successful Deutsche Welle (German Wave) of “event movies” like Der Tunnel, Stauffenberg and the Die Luftbrücke (The Berlin Airlift) are being followed up with the next batch; Die Sturmflut (The Flood – a film about the devastating Hamburg flood of 1962) and Dresden, a story about the legendary Allied destruction of Dresden. Tons of other films are in planning now too, among them a “German Gone with The Wind” about the German evacuees from the East at the end of World War II.
Who watches these films? Everybody, it seems. The rights to several of these movies have been bought in France, Italy, Spain, Singapore, Island etc. Even HBO is interested, for goodness sakes!
At any rate, the time for home-grown, German characters seems to be over. Now you’ve got somebody like a German Bruce Willis (Heino Ferch). “We need ideal characters, authentic hero figures. Not just a character type that is loved in your own country.” Hey, it was news to me that any German character type was loved in this country. And I certainly wasn’t ready for any broad acceptance of authentic hero figures here, wherever they might come from.
But that part about the successful export (making money) doesn’t surprise me one bit. The natives have always been really good at that one.
Have a look at "Die neueste deutsche Welle" in Die Zeit from Georg Etscheit (can’t find the damned Link).
Meine nationale Mythen sind besser als deine!
Deutsche Kommentare? Ich bitte darum!
