Media and Minorities

German Television Crime Films and German Emotions  99
acters’ motives and emotions — “I share X’s concerns.” Therefore, emotions
can be understood and shared.22 If emotions are understood as the result of a
cognitive performance, then one can also argue, as I explain above with reference
to Adam Smith, that shared emotions point to shared values and thus
to morality.
In our two episodes, emotions and, bound up with them, morality are
present on three levels. Firstly, we confront an emotional and moral setting
that condemns antisemitism, in both the diegesis — the depicted world of the
film — and the clear intention that the viewer should adopt this position. It
is very difficult to find the prosecutor Bux sympathetic or to laugh at Schimanski’s
jokes. Secondly, we encounter an emotional setting that oscillates
between approving and rejecting certain actions. This setting is part of the
diegesis and also a version suggested to the audience, for instance Wolfgang
Rodammer, the campgrounds owner, or, in an even more complex fashion,
the detective superintendent König. König’s family breaks apart, and
he is deeply in debt. With the money from Switzerland, he wants to pay his
debts and bring his family back together. König does tell antisemitic stories,
and he does kill Rosenfeldt, but in the last action scene — at night at a freight
train station — , he dies a morally good death: walking erect, he shoots himself
with his service weapon. His opponents do not arrest him and so also do
not initiate a trial, which would be humiliating for him; instead, they allow
him to judge himself. König is morally bad, but he dies “with his head held
high.” The visual and dramaturgic staging — the granting of suicide, the slowness
with which König carries the act out, his posture, the camera, which is at
eye level with him – allows this act to appear as a heroic, justified, and therefore
morally good death. While we clearly reject his criminal actions — or so
one could interpret the point of view suggested to the audience — we now also
feel a certain empathy for him. Thirdly, we find the episodes’ antisemitic morals
in their visual and acoustic staging of the Jewish characters, in their language,
their bodies, their clothing, and their spaces.23 Antisemitic, because it
is based on negative images of Jews and relays these images, not in an unbroken
way but also not clearly contradicting them. Morals, because this staging
mobilizes emotions that the viewer in particular is supposed to understand
and share. Or, as the wish for the readability of the visual staging of Jewish
figures is justified in the press booklet for “The Secret of the Golem”: “Since
many Germans are guided by the idea that all Jewish men have long beards
22 See Smith, Engaging Characters, 142–227.
23 On this question, see also Matthias N. Lorenz, “Im Zwielicht. Filmische Inszenierung des
Antisemitismus: Schimanski und ‘Das Geheimnis des Golem,’” Juden.Bilder. Text + Kritik.
Zeitschrift für Literatur 9 (2008), 89–102.
© 2016, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
ISBN Print: 9783525300886 — ISBN E-Book: 9783666300882