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Tragedy, Surrogation and the Significance of African-AmericanCulture in Postunification GermanyAn Interpretation of Schultze Gets the Blues1

Robert PirroPolitical Science, Georgia Southern University

The Blues are, perhaps, as close as Americans can come to expressingthe spirit of tragedy.

Ralph Ellison2

I.

Schultze Gets the Blues (2003), the critically acclaimed first feature filmand box office hit from German director Michael Schorr, who alsowrote the screenplay, tells the story of a taciturn, rotund, middle-agedbachelor and mineworker living in the small town of Teutschenthal inthe eastern German province of Saxony-Anhalt who is sent into earlyretirement. For Schultze, the end of mining work does not disrupt hislife of routine: solitary meals, meeting his pals, Jürgen and Manfred,over beers at the local pub or fishing with them from a bridge, andplaying accordion (as his father had before him) for the town band.While turning the radio dial one evening, he perks up at the unfamil-iar sound of Zydeco-style accordion playing. Getting hold of hisinstrument, he replays the tune from memory. In the following daysand weeks, Schultze begins to evince, in his own low key way, aninterest in things Cajun—preparing a Jambalaya dinner for his friends,performing his Zydeco tune to uncomprehending audiences at aseniors’ home and at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the townband, eyeing the latest fare specials to New Orleans advertised at a

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local travel agency. As he stolidly presses against the limits of hismusical-cultural imagination, Schultze increasingly finds his daily lifepopulated by offbeat characters including Frau Lorant, a theatrically-mannered, hard-drinking resident of his mother’s old age home andLisa, a flamboyant, flamenco-dancing pub waitress.

Schultze’s friends and band colleagues arrange for him to repre-sent the town at a German-American folk festival in New Braunfels,Texas—Teutschenthal’s sister city. Once there, Schultze abandons thefestivities and, in a stolen boat, makes his way to the mouth of theMississippi and thence upriver to the bayou. During his pilgrimage,he encounters people of all backgrounds, among them, bar localsplaying dominos, members of a Czech-American polka band, aCajun fiddler at a backwoods dance club, and the crew of a policepatrol boat. Ending up the unexpected guest of an African-Americanwoman and her daughter on their houseboat, he accompanies themto a local club where the band happens to be playing his trademarkZydeco tune. He dances until a coughing spasm forces him to stop.That night, seated under the stars on the deck of the houseboat, hedreams of people dancing in silhouette and breathes his last breath.(Periodic episodes of labored breathing and coughing depictedthroughout the film suggest the cause of death is congestive heartfailure.) In the film’s final scene, a funeral procession delivers hisashes to the Teutschenthal cemetery, after which, Schultze’s band-mates, striking up his trademark Zydeco tune, festively lead thefuneral party back to town.

In its attention to the details of everyday life, Schultze invites con-sideration in terms of the Heimat films of 1950s German cinema, inwhich domestic routine and local dialect are prominently on display,and the homespun values of rural life find affirmation. Unlike thosefilms, Schultze’s embrace of homespun values is multicultural, notprovincial, extending to a foreign place and people. In this regard, itis noteworthy that members of his adopted African-American familyare conspicuously in attendance at his funeral. As they are integratedinto Schultze’s community as participants in its rituals of mourning,so the music associated with them—or, better, through them to one ofits sources, the Blues—is incorporated into the repertoire of that com-munity’s musical life. At the same time, Schorr’s somewhat depreci-ating take on provincial life in eastern Germany lacks the censorious

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edge of “the critical Heimatfilm of the early seventies, which pre-sented country life as a false idyll, a breeding ground for private andcollective neuroses.”3

In terms of traditional cinematic genres, Schultze’s skillful blendingof funny and forlorn moments also resists easy definition. The manyunderstated comic moments of the film do not add up to the sort ofaccessible comedy upon which the unexpected international boxoffice success of German cinema was based in the decade after thefall of the Wall. If Schultze invites consideration alongside those Ger-man films featuring “male protagonists [who] confront their dimin-ished social or economic status … through the affirmation … of theirclass-based otherness in the context of job activities, hobbies, sportsand other recreational activities,” the downward arc of its plot andits moments of quiet melancholy resist categorization in terms ofthese “petty-bourgeois comedies of the 1990s,” whose higher profilecousins, romantic comedies such as Abgeschminkt! (1993) and Keinerliebt mich (1994), garnered the lion’s share of international attention.4

If anything, Schorr’s multifaceted involvement as writer anddirector of Schultze and his use of a small film crew seem a throw-back to the Autorenfilm associated with the New German Cinema ofthe 1970s. In a recent consideration of the Autorenfilm tradition, IanGarwood has listed, besides the employment of an “‘artisanal’ aes-thetic,” “involvement of the filmic with ‘higher,’ or more established,art forms,” and “engagement with nationally specific themes” asmajor characteristics.5 While Schultze’s incorporation of Zydecomusic as both plot element and musical accompaniment arguablyfits the second criterion, the film’s engagement with nationally spe-cific themes is less immediately obvious. In the program notes, thedirector has suggested that the performance of Horst Krause, whoplays the title role, “pays homage to life and actually celebrates it.”6

Probably a significant part of the film’s appeal to critics and popularaudiences is the understated way in which it affirms life by depictinghow a chance encounter with music impels an ordinary guy on aquest for fulfillment. That this fulfillment is preceded by a personalcrisis and culminates in the main character’s death lends a degree ofdramatic gravity to the story and indirectly gestures to its possiblepolitical significance as a vehicle for enacting individual and collec-tive quests for integration into community.

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An Interpretation of Schultze Gets the Blues

Community or, to put it more precisely, the rich associational lifeof Teutschenthal, seems to be a background theme of no smallimportance in the film. From one of the earliest scenes, when themineworkers express their workplace solidarity in song at Schultze’sretirement ceremony, images of fellowship and collaborative effortpredominate. Among the gatherings or meetings depicted in anunobtrusive documentary-like style are those of the organizing com-mittee for the band’s fiftieth anniversary celebration, the local chessclub, the town band, a local chorus, celebrants at the anniversarycelebration, and Schultze’s friends and band colleagues at a surpriseparty thrown for him before his trip to the U.S. The impression onegets (and the director’s decision to enlist the local inhabitants andtheir institutions—for example the band and the chorus—in the mak-ing of the film reinforces this impression) is of a community richlyand densely populated with voluntary associations whose membersare woven together, so to speak, by ties of friendship and joint par-ticipation in longstanding practices of common interest.

This backdrop of associational fellowship and collective involve-ment sets the stage for Schultze’s quest for meaning since it isprompted by problems he has integrating himself in a viable com-munity. Expelled from his community of work at the start of thefilm, he falls back on his friends, who, having also lost jobs at themine, fall to bickering with each other. It is while he is cut off fromhis work colleagues and friendship circle that Schultze chances uponthe Zydeco tune. Ironically, his passion for the music isolates him allthe more as demonstrated by the indifference of the audience ofseniors and the outright hostility (“Scheissnegermusik!”) of at least onelistener at the town band’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. The cru-cial, if unremarked upon, backdrop of Schultze’s failure to integratehimself into a viable community is the unification of Germany andthe dissolution of the East German nation of which he formerly hadbeen part. One German reviewer characterized Schultze as the “firstGerman film, that isn’t conceivable without reunification, the conse-quences of which it describes indirectly.”7 Considered against thebackdrop of a new and (for some former East Germans) problematicGerman national identity, Schultze’s decision to leave his nativecountry and pursue his quest in the United States seems especiallynoteworthy. His life finds its fulfillment and meets its unexpected

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end outside of Germany. Just as noteworthy is the fact that his inter-ment on native ground at the film’s end becomes an occasion bothfor the integration of outsiders into the ritual life of his communityand his community’s integration of an outsider form of music into itscultural repertoire.

In and of itself, the two-way transfer of a German character’squest for fulfillment to American shores and an American culturallegacy to German shores is not unusual in the history of Germanfilm. Eric Rentschler—in for example “How American Is It: The U.S.As Image and Imaginary in German Film” (1984)—and, morerecently, Gerd Gemünden—Framed Visions: Popular Culture, American-ization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (1998)—have noted how intense and highly ambivalent attitudes toward U.S.military, political, and cultural influence in Germany have left theirmark on German cinematic treatments of America in such films asLuis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934), Werner Herzog’s Stroszck(1977), Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1973), and Monika Treut’sMy Father Is Coming (1991). The United States, Rentschler writes inspecific reference to the first three of these films, has played “the roleof an imaginary (in the Lacanian sense), a set of possibilities onecontemplates and toys with … as a hall of mirrors one passesthrough while self-reflecting.”8

In the decade after the fall of the Wall, as German filmmakersembraced a more genre-oriented and popular cinema and came torely more on private sources of funding, America’s role as cinematictouchstone arguably shifted. Where it had earlier often functioned forWest German cinema as a convenient plot destination for “confused,inexperienced, and incomplete” German characters seeking to “gainwisdom and insight,” it increasingly came to stand as a viable produc-tion model (i.e., Hollywood) for how Germans might successfullymake and market their films in a privatizing global media economy.9

Also, in terms of plot preferences, the Hollywood model seemedmore in evidence in the 1990s as entertainment values and a disposi-tion to follow genre conventions took precedence over political mes-sages and avant garde artistic gestures.10 As observed by SabineHake, the high profile German films of the 1990s “fostered a newErlebniskultur (culture of diversion),” in which the values of “commer-cialism,” “individual ambition, and self-interest” found powerful

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expression and validation. These films “sought to accommodate theaudience’s contradictory desire both for less complicated narrativesof Germanness—including in terms of national identity—and for moreoptimistic visions of a multiethnic, multicultural society.”11

Paying close attention to significant elements of Schultze’s avowalof the relevance of an American folk music style to an ex-miner liv-ing in the economic backwaters of eastern Germany, I suggest herehow the film, picking up an earlier cinematic trope of West Germanencounter with America and incorporating postunification cinema’sembrace of multicultural themes, offers a vision of German identitythat navigates between the extremes of a global ideology of con-sumer individualism associated with the United States and, to asomewhat lesser degree, West Germany, on the one hand, and aninward-turned particularism associated with the economicallydepressed former East, on the other. Of particular help in delineat-ing this vision will be the concept of surrogation proposed by JosephRoach in Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), as wellas Cornel West’s theorization of an African-American tendencytoward tragic expression.

II.

In its very title, Schultze Gets the Blues announces its ambition to crossnational-cultural boundaries. Blues music enjoyed a privileged placein German officials’ early postwar evaluations of American music,according to Uta Poiger’s study of East and West German Cold Warperceptions of African-American music styles and their political sig-nificance.12 In the early 1950s, official concerns about the reputedlypernicious influence of contemporary American music and dance onthe sexual mores and social attitudes of German youth led to con-demnations of “African American-influenced musical and dancestyles, like boogie-woogie and rock ‘n’ roll, that East and West Ger-man adolescents copied from American films.”13 As anxious as Eastand West German officials were about the influence of African-Amer-ican forms of musical expression upon the behavior of Germanyouth, they did not take a position of blanket rejection, attemptinginstead to distinguish between music that was acceptable and that

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which was not. In the resulting assessments recounted by Poiger,blues invariably won praise for being “authentic.” So, for example, in1949, “at the height of Soviet attacks on jazz,” no less an authoritythan Paul Robeson had argued, in a Soviet music journal, “that spiri-tuals and blues were the only true Negro music in the UnitedStates.”14 Expanding upon Robeson’s argument in a 1952 article pub-lished in the German Democratic Republic, an East German musicol-ogist “contrasted what he called ‘authentic’ jazz, like blues andDixieland, with those musical forms, like swing, sweet, and rebop,that the American music industry allegedly produced as part of anAmerican imperialist strategy.”15 It was no small irony, according toPoiger, that many of the early attacks on “degenerate” forms of jazzcarried over rhetorical tropes from the Nazi era, including implicitlyanti-Semitic charges against the “‘cosmopolitan’ culture industry and‘cosmopolitan’ hits.”16 In the contemporary context in which Schultzeis set, the terminological flashpoint for disagreements over the desirability of outsider presence and influence would more likely be“Multikulti” rather than “Kosmopolit.” The differences between multi-culturalism and cosmopolitanism as objects of scholarly discourse—forexample, the former tending to occasion reflection on the nature ofrelations between individual citizens or groups of citizens of differentraces or ethnicities within the nation-state, the latter tending to inviteconsideration of the nation-state in relation to the global order—arenot immediately relevant to my discussion in this article.17

Poiger notes a liberalizing trend toward the end of the 1950s inWest German officialdom’s attitude toward jazz, which turned on itshead prior assumptions about jazz’s influence on the young. In linewith the rhetoric of political pluralism and consumer choice that anemerging generation of Cold War liberals increasingly favored, jazzcame to be considered a means for sublimating and depoliticizingthe rebellious impulses of the young. Tolerance for jazz in all itsforms also became a way for the liberal democratic West to promoteits ideological commitment to cultural freedom. In line with thisnewfound view of jazz as a “messenger for liberal democracy,” aninfluential West German jazz expert and radio host praised themusic, in a 1958 article, for its proven record at overcoming “differ-ences in status and education … race, religious denomination, politi-cal conviction, and even [nationality].”18

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The story Poiger relates about the evolution of official East andWest German attitudes toward jazz as a catchall category of African-American music provides one historical backdrop against which toassess the political meaning of Schultze’s ultimately successful impor-tation of Zydeco into the musical life of his hometown. One could seehis townspeople’s performance of Zydeco as marking their belatedpost Cold War acceptance of the pluralist-consumerist version ofAmerican-style liberalism with which their new compatriots in theformer West Germany had already become aligned starting in thelate 1950s. From this perspective, the political meaning of the film’suse of blues music would mainly derive from its serving as an obliquecommentary on (and symptom of) Germany’s adjustment to anemerging post Soviet world order of neoliberal pluralism and con-sumerism in which the programmatic embrace of difference or other-ness is mainly meant to serve the corporate drive for global sales (i.e.,“the United Colors of Benetton”). The theme of multicultural accep-tance of an outsider music and people to which the film devotes itsfinal scenes would, taking this view, appear more as a contrivance orinstrumentality, an “ersatz multiculturalism,” to use a term that AmyRobinson, writing in the early post Cold War years, uses to denigratethe “virtual industry of black authenticity ranging from Madonna toWhite Men Can’t Jump to Vanilla Ice to Bill Clinton.”19

For Robinson, proponents of ersatz multiculturalism affirm theperspectives and forms of cultural expression of outsider or marginal-ized groups while ignoring the structural disadvantages under whichmembers of these groups continue to struggle. “Such appropriations[of the cultural cachet of outsider groups] have earned these authorsthe liberal profit of … defin[ing] America as a place where (to quoteMadonna) ‘it makes no difference if you’re black or white.’”20 SabineHake also alludes to this problematic phenomenon in her account ofa “narcissistic” trend in German filmmaking of the 1990s, accordingto which “retrograde fantasies of family and community” were “com-bin[ed] with (superficially) liberal attitudes towards alternative sexual-ities and hybrid identities.”21 Robinson’s discussion suggests that oneof the criteria for distinguishing between appropriate and inappropri-ate forms of multicultural engagement is whether some acknowledge-ment of continuing structural inequities accompanies the “call forcommunities of common interest.”22 Another, related criterion would

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be the degree to which the nod to multicultural values is exclusivelyor mostly motivated by self aggrandizement rather than by concernfor a larger or common good.

In support of a view that discounts Schultze’s gestures of multicul-tural tolerance, one might cite the curious way in which the filmneglects the Blues as a plot element at the same time that it hypesthe Blues in its title and in its program notes:

With a title like Schultze Gets the Blues and with a storyline about alaid-off mineworker, audiences might think they’re in for a melan-choly movie. Yet the fact is that this extraordinary little film packs abig inspirational punch. For Schultze doesn’t ever really get blue; heactually gets—or understands—‘The Blues’ and all the power and pas-sion of music.23

It is, after all, Zydeco music, not blues music, that captures Schultze’simagination and propels him on his life-changing odyssey.

Associated with the Cajun people of Louisiana, whose New WorldFrench forbearers, the Acadians, had been brutally expelled fromCanada by the British, Zydeco supposedly got its name from aFrench expression, Les haricots sont pas sales, which folklorist BarryJean Ancelet has interpreted as referring to those difficult times whenthe salted meat one normally used to season bean dishes was notavailable.24 Musically, Zydeco was formed when Creole music fromsouth-central and southwest Louisiana was crossed with rhythm andblues in the years after World War II. If this genealogy puts Zydecoin an ancestral line traceable back to the Blues, their kinship remainssomewhat remote, a fact acknowledged by Schorr. In his commen-tary on the film made available on the DVD release, he explained hisneed for an American music “basically connected to the kind ofpolka accordion music Schultze plays” and his discovery that Zydeco,like polka, has “the accordion as the lead instrument.” In a sketchyaccount of the sources of Zydeco, Schorr mentions, besides bluesmusic, musette, two step, and polka, which link Zydeco to Old World(e.g., French and German immigrant musical traditions) as well asNew World origins: “the accordion is an instrument that representsthe great German migration to America in the 18th and 19th cen-turies. Many people took their accordions overseas with them … andit then became established in the American states, the classic exam-ple being Louisiana.”25 Schorr goes on in his commentary to trace his

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first encounters with Zydeco to a trip he took to Louisiana where heattended impromptu dance gatherings whose vitality and familyambience left a lasting impression upon him.26

In spite of his decision to make Zydeco the musical impetus forkey plot developments, Schorr chooses not to make Cajuns the cul-tural interlocutors of his film. That role is reserved for African-Amer-icans who occupy strategic places in the film narrative. Notable, inthis regard, is the fact that the Zydeco band playing Schultze’s tunein one of the film’s concluding Louisiana scenes, is composed ofAfrican-American players. While the music that accompanies thefirst American location shot is a Cajun song (one of the first to bemechanically recorded, according to Schorr), the first scene in whichSchultze encounters an American is one in which he unexpectedlymeets an African-American woman in a parking lot hot tub at theEdelweiss Inn in New Braunfels. When he hesitates to join her, shesuccessfully persuades him to share the hotel’s amenity. In theLouisiana houseboat encounter, Schultze arrives unannounced as theAfrican-American houseboat resident is cooking dinner. Asking for aglass of water, he is invited by her to stay and eat. After the visit tothe dance club and while Schultze sleeps on the houseboat deck, shetucks a blanket around him. These arguably maternal gestures onthe part of African-American women characters raise the possibilitythat notions of the nurturing and caregiving “mammy,”27 broadlycirculating among privileged whites of the United States and implic-itly supporting ideas of unconditional black service to white needs,may have, in some measure, been at play in Schultze’s making. Ofcourse, the relevant scenes invite other, less politically-questionable,readings. The hot tub encounter, for example, can be read as animplicit repudiation of a system of racial segregation in the Ameri-can South that, in the not-so-distant past, strictly prohibited racialmixing in public swimming pools.

It may be that the strategic presence of African-American womenreflects an inadvertent appropriation of politically suspect notions ofblack service from American culture. It may also be that the film’ssubstitution of African-Americans as agents of cultural exchange andthe avowal of African-American music in the film’s title despite theabsence of blues music in the film’s plot merely reflect the long-standing authority in postwar German culture of the Blues as an

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“authentic” American folk music. There is, however, another way toread the branding of Schultze as a film about the Blues and its seem-ingly suspect privileging of African-American characters. On this,more generous, reading, the film will be interpreted as reflecting asubstantive agenda of transcultural engagement and multiculturalaffirmation, one of whose significant effects is the promotion of apostunification German identity that recognizes the distinctivesocial-cultural virtues of the inhabitants of each of the former Ger-man states, namely, East Germans’ appreciation of the advantages ofcommunity and West Germans’ willingness to engage with, andincorporate, outsider cultures.

III.

In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin orend but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the networkof relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created byloss through death or other forms of departure … survivors attempt to fitsatisfactory alternates.

Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead28

A student of the encounters and exchanges of the “many peoplesalong the Atlantic rim … [including the] Bambara, Iroquois, Span-ish, English, Aztec, Yoruba, and French,” Joseph Roach has devel-oped the notion of surrogation in order to describe the hybridity andfluidity of cultural meanings and practices. Holding that a “fixed andunified culture exists only as a convenient but dangerous fiction,”Roach’s work opens a theoretical space for better understandinghow marginalized or oppressed groups maintain a sense of corporateidentity, exercise agency, and refashion social meaning throughengaging in performance practices.29 New Orleans serves Roach as aparticularly resonant case study of surrogation not only because ofits rich traditions of popularly enacted performance traditions,including Mardi Gras float parades and jazz funerals, but alsobecause of Louisiana creole culture’s role as “‘the most significantsource of Africanization of the entire culture of the United States.’”30

Among the flamboyant and vibrant performance practices of NewOrleans described by Roach are the Mardi Gras Indians, neighbor-

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hood-based African-American Indian masqueraders in elaborately-crafted beadwork costume, who engage in unscripted running exer-cises of one-upmanship that are unsanctioned by city authorities.“[T]he extraordinary artistry and craftsmanship of the costumes,which may take a year to build, taken together with the many-layeredprotocols of Sunday rehearsals, parade-day tactics and strategy, andmusic-dance-drama performance, make the honor of ‘maskingIndian’ a New Orleanian way of life.”31 While the sources of the prac-tice are not altogether known—but are thought to include West Africantraditions of musical performance and traditional African mutual assis-tance societies—Roach takes up the suggestion of some scholars thatthe visit of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show to New Orleans in 1884-1885 was a key catalyst. Of particular note, in Roach’s view was “thespectacle of costumed and armed Plains warriors, some of them recentvictors over Custer, striding proudly through the streets of NewOrleans on the days before Christmas 1884.”32

The appearance of Plains Indians inside and outside the Wild WestShow’s arena evoked a “theme of frontier space” that, according toRoach, “illuminates the importance of the border skirmishes andalarums enacted by Mardi Gras Indians.”33 In the setting of modernNew Orleans, the performative evocation of frontier space byAfrican-American neighborhood residents helped to preserve a senseof collective agency and fellowship: “On Mardi Gras Day, Indiangangs could claim the space through which they move, like a passingrenegade band … They perform a rite of territory repossessed toassert not sole ownership, perhaps, but certainly collective entitlementto fair use.”34 The experience further worked to unsettle flattering selfimages of the dominant political and social authorities: “the truth thatMardi Gras Indians seem to alter by reenacting African-Americanmemory through the surrogation of Native American identities is theinfinitude of Anglo-American entitlement.”35 The practice of MardiGras Indians thus marks a dynamic by which one group’s history ofstruggle against oppression can become a resource for another groupencountering their own set of challenges through the latter’s creativeappropriation and reworking of past performance rites.

Roach concludes his book, Cities of the Dead, with a descriptiveanalysis of a jazz funeral held in 1992 for an acclaimed rhythm andblues musician, who was, as the saying goes, “buried with music.”36 In

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this loosely choreographed event, the musicians, playing in cadencedrhythm, follow in procession after the hearse with family memberswalking in the lead. When the time comes for “cutting the bodyloose,” the family members embark in limos to accompany the hearseto a distant cemetery while the band breaks into an “uptempo num-ber” and continues the parade along with other celebrants, “some ofwhom dance, others of whom add counterrhythmic accompanimenton improvised instruments.”37 This account of funereal ritual evokesthe meaning of surrogation in a particularly powerful way. Death is,after all, one of the more concrete examples of the sort of “vacancy”or “cavity” in the social network that calls forth attempts at repair inthe form of communal rituals which mourn loss at the same time thatthey affirm community.

In any funeral, the body of the deceased performs the limits of thecommunity called into being by the need to mark its passing. Unitedaround a corpse that is no longer inside but not yet outside of itsboundaries, the members of the community may reflect on its sym-bolic embodiment of loss and renewal.38

To be sure, the notion of funereal ritual as an occasion for partici-pants both to mourn loss and to feel a revitalized sense of commu-nity is not new. One need only read Pericles’ Funeral Oration astransmitted in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War or Lin-coln’s “Gettysburg Address” or recognize their continuing relevanceas occasions of political theoretical reflection—for example, GarryWills’ Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)—toappreciate the importance of ritual acknowledgment of the dead inshaping collective identity and self understanding.

Still, New Orleans jazz funerals stand out as remarkable examplesof ritual mourning, not least because of the central role played inthem by music and movement. Other distinctive aspects include thebroad and active involvement of participants, and the ritual promi-nence of celebratory modes of expression. What makes the NewOrleans tradition of jazz funerals an especially fitting touchstone ofanalysis in the particular case of Schultze is the fact that the film’sconcluding enactment of the interment of Schultze’s ashes unfolds inthe form of a jazz funeral. Thus, one sees the procession of mourn-ers, including the African-American daughter, moving onto thecemetery grounds led by the local clergyman and the urn containing

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Schultze’s mortal remains. Band musicians are also present, playinga mournful tune heard in a previous scene when Schultze performedat Frau Lorant’s interment. After his ashes are laid to rest with dueceremony, lightened by a moment of comic relief, the processionleaves the cemetery grounds to the musical accompaniment ofSchultze’s Zydeco tune. In the film’s final shot, we see a repeat of thefirst shot, a bare countryside with a wind turbine to one side. In theopening scene, Schultze had biked across the expanse. In the closingscene, the funeral band parades by, still playing Schultze’s Zydecotune, accompanied by the other mourners-turned-celebrants.

Schultze’s mortal end thus becomes the occasion for the transfor-mation and revitalization of public life through the integration of anoutsider form of music and people into his provincial eastern Ger-man community. Attesting to the benevolent vitality of Schultze’sinfluence even in death is the comic moment initiated when a cell-phone ring-tone interrupts the graveside ceremony. In some embar-rassment, Manfred digs his phone out of a coat pocket and puts it tohis ear only to utter “Schultze!?” in mock surprise as though thecaller at the other end were the departed himself. To the extent thatthe cell phone has become one of the icons of globalization,Schultze’s “call” evokes his community’s newfound capacity to man-age the intrusive presence of global technologies and even integratethem into local practices. That it is Manfred’s cell phone is no acci-dent. His identification with an American-style self-aggrandizingindividualism is indicated in earlier scenes where he encourages hisdirt bike-riding son to compete in a U.S.-sponsored motor crosscompetition with big prize money and attends a motor cross eventholding a mini-American flag.

Even more telling in regard to Schultze’s role as a benevolentspirit mediating the local and the global, the particular and the mul-ticultural, is the parallel we have drawn between a burial ceremonyin a provincial town in former East Germany and the practices asso-ciated with New Orleans jazz funerals. This parallel provides animportant context for understanding the deeper significance of thestrategic presence of African-American characters and the use of theBlues as a brand name for the film. On our interpretation, whatSchultze “gets” about the Blues is not merely or primarily a genericsense of the “power and passion of music.” More significantly, what

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he gets about (or, more precisely, achieves in the name of) the Blues istransformative contact with a culture of tragic expression that holdsout the promise of resisting two sorts of postunification temptation:the universal “end of history” state of consumerist individualismproffered by cheerleaders of globalization, on the one hand, and theresentment-driven particularism to which some former East Ger-mans were initially drawn as they faced conditions of massive eco-nomic, social, and political dislocation.

IV.

The tragic view—of Unamuno or Melville or Faulkner or Morrison orColtrane—is a much more morally mature view of what it is to be human.The triumphant view of good over evil, which is Manichaean, is sopho-moric, childish. It has been dominant in America because our civilizationhas been spoiled.

Cornel West, “On Black-Brown Relations”39

It has long been recognized that African-American styles of music,including the Blues, form part of a larger complex of salutary cul-tural responses to life under the emergency conditions of slavery andJim Crow. The terrible conditions experienced by enslaved NewWorld Africans and their exposure, even after formal emancipation,to pervasive discrimination and episodes of mob or state violencecalled forth various forms of cultural resistance and resilience,among which noted public intellectual Cornel West significantlycounts a “black sense of the tragic.”40 As West recounts it, enslavedAfricans and their descendants in British North America faced hor-rendous living conditions with few cultural resources to make senseof their suffering.

During the colonial stage of American culture, Africans were worsethan slaves; they were also denuded proto-Americans in search ofidentity, systematically stripped of their African heritage and effec-tively and intentionally excluded from American culture and its rootsin European modernity.41

Suffering that cannot be made sense of fosters despair and hope-lessness, states of mind and spirit that undermine solidarity and pre-vent effective agency. One way that African-Americans as a peoplemanaged to save themselves from a, excessively debilitating expo-

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sure to despair and hopelessness was to “creatively appropriate aChristian world view and thereby transform a prevailing absurd situ-ation into a persistent and present tragic one, a kind of ‘Good Friday’state of existence in which one is seemingly forever on the cross …yet sustained by a hope for a potential and possible triumphant stateof affairs.”42 Folk music forms that developed from within the matrixof African-American Christianity (e.g., Gospel) or outside of it (e.g.,blues) conveyed more widely and amplified further the tragic mes-sage of endurance and affirmation through which an oppressed peo-ple could, in the face of serious setbacks and harsh disappointments,maintain hope in the future advent of a more just state of affairswhile remaining open in the present to the joys of existence. Inacknowledgment of African-American music’s role as a key transmit-ter of the tragic sensibility, West designates the tenor saxophonistand jazz composer John Coltrane as a significant disseminator of atragic sensibility, grouping him with more conventional literary andphilosophical figures of tragic reflection and expression, includingthe novelists William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, as well as theauthor of The Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel de Unamuno.

As West’s analyses of the social and psychological challenges fac-ing contemporary middle class African-Americans and African-American members of the underclass make clear, issues of politicalagency and solidarity drive his theoretical concern for describing thenature and significance of New World Africa’s tragic sensibility.Members of the black middle class, on his view, are prone to a stateof political passivity because the term on which American societygrants them economic success is a psychologically demoralizing andpolitically demobilizing repression of their sense of self. “They mustnot be too frank and outspoken and must never fail to flatter and bepleasant in order to lessen white unease and discomfort.”43 Assimila-tion, the quintessential middle-class goal, therefore poses specialchallenges to African-Americans. The achievement of middle-classstatus tends to make them “highly anxiety-ridden, insecure, willingto be co-opted and incorporated into the powers that be.”44 Collec-tively speaking, this orientation undermines the basis for politicalsolidarity and the possibility of group action for the purpose of trans-forming American society. Individually speaking,

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this suppression of black rage … backfires in the end. It reinforces ablack obsession with the psychic scars, ontological wounds and exis-tential bruises that tend to reduce the tragic to the pathetic. Instead ofexercising agency or engaging in action against the odds, one maywallow in self pity, acknowledging the sheer absurdity of it all.45

West’s allusion to “tragic” and “pathetic” states is no mere rhetoricalflourish—here, as elsewhere in his writings, loss of the tragic corre-lates with reduced possibilities of human agency.46 Problems of defi-cient or defective agency plague the African-American underclass aswell, only in this case the costs are more dire. In a 1987 interview,West thus laments the varieties of self-destructive behaviors afflictingthe inner city black underclass: drug addiction, alcoholism, homi-cide, and suicide.47

If it is, in general, the work of tragedy to acknowledge and channelthe existential dread or anxiety people feel as they contemplate thefundamental fragility of mortal life, it is no wonder, given the prevail-ing social conditions in which they have historically found them-selves, that African-Americans have evolved a rich culture of tragicexpression. In that culture, West sees one important means by whichAfrican-American individualities have been fostered and maintained,husbanded for collective deployment during those rare moments inAmerican history when political and social arrangements have beenopen to major change. If the conditions of social life facing the neweastern citizens of Germany after the fall of the wall were not nearlyso drastic, they were challenging enough, especially for a populationaccustomed to the working of a comprehensive (if increasingly cor-rupt and inefficient) state system of welfare paternalism.

In a key early scene, Schultze and his friends collect their per-sonal belongings from work and go on to attend, in uncomfortablesilence, a peremptory ceremony of farewell organized by their work-mates. Judging from their state of befuddlement at the tacky retire-ment gifts, these men did not choose to retire early—they had toaccept early retirement from company managers presumably inter-ested in cutting labor costs. The same calculus of economic rational-ization had in the early years of unification resulted in the sheddingof hundreds of thousands of jobs in the East. These conditions ofsocial disorientation and newfound economic dependence on thefinancial largesse of West Germany were alienating to many former

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citizens of the German Democratic Republic, some of whom likelyfelt pressure to assimilate on the sort of humiliating psychologicalterms that, according to West, have long held for middle classAfrican Americans—expressing unconditional and cheerful accep-tance of, and attachment to, all of the values and practices of main-stream (in the German context, West German) society. To illustrate,East German novelist and public intellectual Christa Wolf, who hadinitially hoped that the collapse of the German Democratic Republicmight lead to the founding by her eastern co-nationals of a genuinelyparticipatory social democracy, expressed her sense of the psycho-logical toll entailed by West Germany’s assimilation of the East in aparallel way. If the terms of postunification adjustment were to bethat “East Germans self-sacrificially devote themselves to trying to fitin, while West Germans act out feelings of superiority and victory,”the likelihood was that her fellow citizens would undergo a “processof estrangement” whereby “East Germany’s history is publicly sup-pressed … and is driven inside the people who made, experienced,and endured it.”48 For people living in areas of mass unemploymentand feeling deep uncertainty about future prospects, the temptationwould have been great to retreat to a stance of defensive parochial-ism and resentment-ridden nostalgia for the old order.

In Schultze, moments when the harsher legacies of unification arefelt and expressed are few. Arguably, the dispute between the newlypensioned Manfred and Jürgen over a chess game, which results inthe hotheaded Manfred sweeping the pieces off the board andangrily stalking off, is one. The argument is set off when Manfredtries to take back a bad move and Jürgen insists on abiding by therules, declaring, “This isn’t the Wild West, after all!” The larger,more significant game the two men (and their fellow East Germanex-nationals) are arguably engaged in playing is how to adapt to the“Wild West” conditions of the new post Cold War order, in whichthe expectation increasingly is that individuals will fudge the rules inpursuit of their narrow self interest. (One might think here of thebreathtaking financial success of many Communist apparatchiks,who did very well for themselves in the post-Communist transition.)In any case, after Jürgen announces his disgust with the situation andalso departs, Schultze is left sitting uncomfortably alone at the table,chess pieces scattered before him. Neither of the responses to postu-

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nification pressures enacted by his friends in this scene—Manfred’saping of neoliberal individualism, Jürgen’s stubborn insistence onsticking by the rules of preunification life—will ultimately determinehis path.

Another, more significant reference to postunification socialquandaries occurs in the film’s one scene of physical menace. Themoment comes after Schultze performs his Zydeco tune at the townband’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. In the lead up to his soloaccordion performance, Schultze is uncharacteristically anxious andself-doubting. As it turns out, he has reason to be. For when he fin-ishes, audience members, seated at two long tables in front of thestage, remain mostly silent. His colleagues had been expecting atried-and-true traditional polka from the stalwart Schultze—instead,they hear something unexpected and unfamiliar and seem stunnedby it. As Schultze’s friends at one table begin to applaud support-ively, a man from the other table cries out in a tone of aggressivecontempt: “Scheissnegermusik!” In response, Manfred, at the othertable, stands up as if to intimidate the naysayer into silence. Where-upon, he is, in turn, challenged by someone at the first table whorises menacingly and glowers at Manfred until he backs down. Thetension is then broken when Lisa, the flamenco-dancing pub wait-ress, suggests a toast to “Negermusik,” which is heartily taken up bythe rest of Schultze’s friends.

In his film commentary, Schorr makes nothing of this symbolicscene of communal rupture. (He is more interested in describingthe complexity of the camera movement in the shot of Schultze’sperformance, which stands out in a film whose scenes are mostlyfilmed with a single stationary camera.) From our perspective,which foregrounds issues surrounding the German reception ofAfrican-American music, this scene is a critical one for our under-standing of the film’s larger political meaning. Simply put, the con-frontation frames Schultze’s idiosyncratic change of musical tastewithin a larger public context of contention over multiculturalism.That public dispute pits those in Teutschenthal who are willing towelcome foreign influences on local cultural practices against thosewho are not. And, judging from the flare up of tempers, the dis-agreement is one that is deeply felt.

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It is no small irony that even as they disagree in their responses toSchultze’s performance of Zydeco, the two “factions” share a misap-prehension about its character—namely that it is an African-Ameri-can music. Strictly speaking, its ties to blues music are distant andderivative. Yet, if we take the inclusion of African-Americans in keyplaces in the film as reflecting an insistence on their role as U.S.-Ger-man cultural interlocutors, this misapprehension can point towardan interpretation of what plausibly is the film’s larger political theo-retical meaning. The promise of the film’s title invites us to considerthe significance of African-American tragic culture to postunificationGerman social and political challenges.

Considered from the perspective of Roach’s work, the history ofAfrican-American life and struggle reveals a powerful nationaldynamic of surrogation. Notwithstanding systematic attempts to seg-regate or close off (“white”) American culture from New WorldAfrican participation and influence, American culture has been sub-ject to the effects of hybridization as substantial cavities or vacanciesin American social relations worked by slavery and Jim Crowinvited efforts at compensation. Following West, we would see asone of the more significant results of New World African compen-satory efforts to be forms of tragic expression—e.g., the Blues—thathad the capacity to challenge major aspects of mainstream Americanculture, including its dogmatic market-driven individualism.

To the radically individualistic self-perception of mainstreamAmericans, the African-American tragic sensibility has urged agreater recognition of the limits of individual agency, a finer appreci-ation for the vulnerability felt by members of marginalized andoppressed groups, and increased sensitivity to the merits of alterna-tive ways of envisioning social life. In short, the African-Americantragic sensibility has brought the example of a socially minded, sub-altern, self-critical perspective to bear on a dangerously narrow andsmug form of individualism. The influence of this example hasarguably become all the more urgent in a post Cold War ideologicalenvironment in which the institutions of global capitalism have beenassiduously promoting a consumerist ethos of American-style indi-vidualism as the only worthy or viable goal of societal development.

On a cursory viewing, Schultze’s engagement with outsider musicand cultures might appear simply to be a manifestation of “ersatz

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multiculturalism,” of Schorr’s knowing or unknowing attempt tocash in on the cachet of the Blues or Zydeco or New Orleans as atravel destination by uncritically and self-interestedly offering appro-priations of outsider culture for consumption by German and inter-national movie audiences. A closer look at the film revealssomething different and more valuable. In so conspicuously gestur-ing to the Blues background of Zydeco and choosing African-Ameri-can characters rather than Cajun as cultural interlocutors, it achievescritical distance on its multicultural sympathies.

Schultze adopts a multicultural message that is specifically respon-sive to the challenges of provincial life in the economic backwaters ofunified Germany. Its response is grounded in real parallels betweenchallenges facing members of postunification eastern German societyand middle class African Americans. For members of both groups,assimilation into the mainstream comes at the cost of forgetting orrepressing a painful history and foregoing the benefits of solidaritywith one’s in-group. The point of the Blues references and the surro-gation of African-American identities in this film is not merely toavoid the danger of permitting a Heimat-like parochialism to morph,under the disorienting and stressful social conditions of postunifica-tion eastern Germany, into a resentment-driven particularism that isreflexively hostile to outsider people and cultures. The point is also toacknowledge the virtues of noninstrumental social ties and devotionto the collective good in a world where the champions of neoliberal-ism have instrumentalized the rhetoric of multiculturalism in the ser-vice of a global ideology of consumer individualism.

In his unexpected encounter and life-changing engagement withZydeco music, Schultze finds personal compensation for the vacancyopened in his own life by an unwelcome retirement. In present-ing Schultze as the subject of a quest for fulfillment that results in his becoming the subject of a communal form of compensation(Teutschenthal’s first jazz funeral), Schultze gestures to the presence ofa larger, regional vacancy in post-reunification Germany, a vacancyopened by the German Democratic Republic’s longstanding abuseof the ideals of democratic egalitarianism and social solidarity andheld open by western pressure to dismiss the East German politicaland social experience in toto (including the stated ideals according towhich it was officially measured) in favor of a narrow definition of

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freedom as consumer individualism. Schultze also gestures to anAfrican-American culture of tragic expression that remains availablefor surrogation by Germans interested in maintaining a vision ofdemocracy and freedom that acknowledges the legitimate claims ofsolidarity as well as individuality, of localism as well as globalization.

ROBERT PIRRO is an Associate Professor of political science at Geor-gia Southern University, specializing in political theory. Focused onthe political significance of works and theories of tragedy and ordi-nary language uses of “tragedy” and related terms, his work hasbeen published in academic journals, including Political Theory,New Political Science, and Soundings, as well as in a monograph,Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (2001). His work on thepolitical uses of tragedy in postunification German public intellectualdiscourse has been published in German Politics and Society (Spring2004) and Southern Humanities Review (forthcoming).

Notes

1. The first version of this argument was presented at a June 22, 2004 meeting of aresearch colloquium at the John F. Kennedy-Institut, Free University Berlin.Thanks to Dr. Thomas Greven for making this presentation possible. Manythanks as well to the anonymous readers and managing editor of this journal fortheir helpful comments.

2. Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” in Shadow and Act (New York, 1966),140.

3. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge,1989), 167.

4. Sabine Hake, German National Cinema (London, 2002), 184.5. Ian Garwood, “The Autorenfilm in Contemporary German Cinema,” in The Ger-

man Film Book, eds., Tim Bergfelder, Erica Carter and Deniz Göktürk (London,2002), 203.

6. See http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache!5QxnBzYuHncT:Media.movieweb.com,2.

7. Anke Westphal, “Der Mann der Zukunft kommt aus dem Osten: MichaelSchorrs Film ‘Schultze gets the Blues,’” Berliner Zeitung 21 April 2004.

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8. Eric Rentschler, “How American Is It: The U.S. As Image and Imaginary inGerman Film,” in Perspectives on German Cinema, eds., Terri Ginsberg andKirsten Moana Thompon (New York, 1996), 287.

9. Ibid.10. Randall Halle, “German Film, Aufgehoben: Ensembles of Transnational Cinema,”

New German Critique 87 (2002): 11.11. Hake (see note 4), 182, 180.12. Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a

Divided Germany (Berkeley, 2000).13. Ibid., 85.14. Ibid., 158.15. Ibid., 153.16. Ibid., 153-4.17. Robert Fine and Vivienne Boon, eds., “Special Issues: Cosmopolitanism: Between

Past and Future,” European Journal of Social Theory, 10, no. 1 (2007)—offer a fine sur-vey of the contemporary agenda of cosmopolitan thought. Thanks to Steve Engelfor this reference. For a historical analysis of cosmopolitan thought in Germanysee Pauline Kleingeld’s “Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late-Eighteenth Cen-tury Germany,” Journal of the History of Ideas (1999): 505-524.

18. Poiger (see note 12), 163, 165.19. Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Com-

mon Interest,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 735.20. Ibid.21. Hake (see note 4), 182.22. Robinson (see note 19), 735.23. See http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache!5QxnBzYuHncT:Media.movieweb.com,

8.24. See http://www.bme.jhu.edu/~jrice/NewFiles/beginners.html.25. See http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache!5QxnBzYuHncT:Media.movieweb.com,

8.26. Director commentary, Schultze Gets the Blues DVD (Paramount Pictures, 2005).27. Recent additions to the voluminous literature on cinematic images of “mammy”

and their political significance include Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes,Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks (New York, 2001) and PatriciaTurner Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence onCulture (New York, 1994).

28. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York, 1996), 2.29. Ibid., 5.30. Ibid., 22.31. Ibid., 194.32. Ibid., 203.33. Ibid., 205.34. Ibid.35. Ibid., 207.36. Ibid., 277.37. Ibid., 278-9.38. Ibid., 14.39. Cornel West, “On Black-Brown Relations,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York,

1999), 510.

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40. Cornel West, “On Black Nationalism” in Ibid., 521.41. Cornel West, “Race and Modernity” in Ibid., 59. 42. Cornel West, “Prophetic Christian as Organic Intellectual: Martin Luther King,

Jr.” in Ibid., 427.43. Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization” in Ibid., 105. The spe-

cific context of this observation is a discussion of W. E. B. Dubois’s analysis ofthe challenges facing educated blacks in the era of Jim Crow, whose main points,West believes, continue to hold at the end of the twentieth century.

44. Cornel West, “The Political Intellectual” in Ibid., 284.45. Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization” in Ibid., 10546 For a comprehensive analysis of West’s writings on the tragic, see Robert Pirro,

“Remedying Defective or Deficient Political Agency: Cornel West’s Uses of theTragic,” New Political Science 26, no. 2 (2004), 147-170.

47. West (see note 44), 284.48. Christa Wolf, “Momentary Interruption,”, in Parting From Phantoms: Selected Writ-

ings tr. Jan van Heurek (Chicago, 1997), 9.

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