“It takes time to understand their soul”: The humanity of refuge and transnational solidarity in Frieder Schlaich’s Otomo (1999)

Introduction

Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to admit nearly 1 million refugees to Germany was met with disparate reactions. The political right raised alarm, while the left embraced the “Willkommenspolitik” (“welcome politics”) that was at the heart of Merkel’s now iconic statement “Wir schaffen das” (“We can manage this”). As critics and supporters mobilized, the discourse remained solidly situated within a context of rejection or welcome, signifying that the presence of refugees in Germany was subject to the willingness of citizens to accept them in their midst. Author Mohammed Jabur arrived in Germany in 1996—19 years before the 2015 “refugee crisis”—after a harrowing journey through 11 countries, all of which refused to take him in because none recognized his home Palestine as a country. In Germany, Jabur was, once again, denied asylum, but could not be deported because no country was willing to take him. ¹ After 4 years and 13 attempted deportations, he was granted a “Duldung,” or temporary stay, and for 4 years he had to present himself to the foreign office every week, always in fear of being denied renewal. He says, “I was emotionally destroyed” (qtd in Zimmermann, 2016, my translation). Today Jabur is a German citizen, a feat accomplished through grit, perseverance, and a successful lawsuit against the German government. He now volunteers as a translator and assists refugees as they arrive in Germany: “You have to help them quickly to allow them to settle in. But it takes time to understand their soul. You have to take this time. As a translator, you cannot just translate emotions . . . bureaucracy prevents human closeness” (qtd in Zimmermann, 2016). Jabur adds that Germans do not tend to take the time to foster such human understanding.

A troubling result of this lack of understanding is the pervasive discourse of refugees as burdens and cultural outsiders, which has fueled the recent political rise of the German extreme right and fostered increasing sentiments of xenophobia and Islamophobia. Furthermore, as long as vulnerable migrants remain firmly located in the realm of numbered “problems,” their humanity is not bound to threaten the ethics or logic of inhumane and discriminatory immigration and refugee policies. As Uli Linke (2010) aptly observes, in order to preserve the integrity of a racialized European identity and sense of unity, citizens demand and nation states reinforce external and internal border militarization to keep out “enemy-outsiders, including refugees, immigrants, asylum-seekers and non-Europeans” (p. 110). And whenever “enemy-outsiders” are already inside the European border, they become subject to criminalization, surveillance, and violence through what Linke (2010) appropriately terms “predatory state terror” (p. 112). As a result of external border militarization, migrants and refugees continue to drown in the Mediterranean.

At the same time, European nations ramp up efforts to criminalize civilian rescue efforts, emboldened by the invisibility of migrant deaths. As Judith Butler (2004) so eloquently notes: “Normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a grievable death” (p. 146). However, visibility itself is not enough. The occasional media coverage of individual tragedies, such as a dead child and grieving father, and resulting bouts of collective empathy are too fleeting to truly penetrate general complacency. Visibility can also foster homogeneity, limiting refugees to bearers of pain and suffering and thereby stripping them of subjectivity—abject bodies to be rescued. In her insightful and important discussion of contemporary films about refugees, Ipek Celik-Rappas (2017) observes: “Compassion connotes detachment, distance, and a hierarchy between the subject and the object of compassion” (p. 83). Where victimhood and rescue establish the human connection, this connection reaffirms power dynamics. Therefore, if refugees are visible at all, they are, at worst, a harmful intruder. At best, they become a “figure within a regime simplified to biopolitics who is deprived of social, political, and economic rights” (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016: 20). A powerful way of pushing against the erasure and oversimplification of migrant humanity is art, which can put the unknown within our grasp of understanding because it does not have to concern itself with the big picture and policy implications. Art can center the mundane, the fleeting moments, and the smallest fragments of life. The power of art to reveal, retell, navigate, renegotiate, deconstruct, represent, recreate, and memorialize is of vital importance in countering the erasure and misrepresentation of migrant identities.

Cinema in particular—with its mass appeal and comparatively wide reach—has the power to reaffirm personhood through telling individual stories showing that refugees are more than merely displaced people. In putting faces to numbers and thus unsettling the comfortable distance abstraction creates, cinema can disrupt official narratives and trouble reductive representations that justify exclusionary and divisive politics and violent policies. On the flipside, however, cinema can itself strip characters of multiplicity, misrepresent, affirm stereotypes, and erase layers. In 1990s European migration cinema, the majority of films by European filmmakers take stock of distinct national anxieties by featuring abject representations of vulnerable migrants (including refugees and undocumented migrants) who often function as the vehicle for a citizen’s redemption story or the nation’s xenophobia and racism: “The representation of refugees in European film productions often use tropes of suffocation and voicelessness, portrayed as the ultimate victims of globalization” (Celik-Rappas, 2017: 83). ² Celik-Rappas concedes that representing refugees as individuals in need of help creates compassion in the viewer and humanizes an otherwise abstract group experience. At the same time, however, she points out that refugee characters are then only legitimated through their pain and suffering, but are excluded from effecting global change: “The refugee who is portrayed as a victim, or as the body in need of humanitarian, serves the conscience as it safely advocates morality and compassion, posing no challenge to the established class and race hierarchies” (Celik-Rappas, 2017: 88). ³

In their discussion of refugee representations in Germany, Holmes and Castañeda (2016) dismiss the abstract concept of the “refugee” in hopes that “more responsible scholarly interventions can be made through carefully contextualized work alongside and by the diverse people who have been displaced” (p. 20). In the following, I discuss the responsibility of scholars engaging in analysis to center minor characters, to read beyond a victim narrative, and to recognize personal, global, and political personhood as it relates to their subjective and active engagement with others. As Holmes and Castañeda point out, in order to recognize the subtleties of transnational encounters of resistance, scholars must make a conscious effort to actively look for the humanity of refugee characters. We must ask, then, how the characters position themselves rather than how they are positioned by the hegemonic center.

In this essay, I turn to Frieder Schlaich’s 1999 film Otomo to demonstrate the importance of actively reading the refugee character ⁴ in their own right; in my critique of earlier discussions of Otomo and my own analysis of the film—for which I draw on Lionnet and Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism—I will show that de-emphasizing vertical power relations can unveil transnational spaces that have long been buried under a focus on the center. I use minor transnational modes of analysis in order to show how expressions of minor solidarity emerge from the refugee protagonist’s encounters with other marginalized characters who are equally disenfranchised, whether by class or otherwise. Although the film superficially revolves around the tension and eventual violence between the refugee character and the police, I suggest that an analytical (re)centering of the character of Frédéric Otomo—rather than his relationship with the hostile state apparatus—reveals a complex humanity and redefines binary modes of oppression and resistance:

All too often the emphasis on the major/resistant mode of cultural practice denies the complex and multiple forms of cultural expressions of minorities and diasporic peoples and hides their micropractices of transnationality in their multiple, paradoxical, or even irreverent relations with the economic transnationalism of contemporary empires. (Lionnet and Shih, 2005: 7)

By creating transnational moments of solidarity, Schlaich makes Otomo a part of a network of resistance rather than reducing him to an isolated figure victimized by the host nation and its citizens. The film therefore offers the possibility of connections during which citizens extend solidarity against intrusive state surveillance. If, for example, the police station serves as a critical location for revealing the bureaucratic side of Otomo’s existence, the more intimate, private, and ultimately meaningful layers of Otomo’s identity are expressed within more intimate moments. Otomo can, and should, be read as a global actor who claims political agency and who is able to connect to people around him, rather than a vehicle created to emphasize a national racist malaise.

Setting out to know

With Otomo, Schlaich cinematically recreates the last day in the life of the 47-year-old asylum seeker Frédéric Beyida-Otomo (played by Isaach de Bankolé). In 1989, following an altercation with a streetcar ticket inspector, police sought to question Otomo who had fled the scene. When five officers finally cornered him on the Stuttgart Gaisburger Bridge, he attacked them with a knife, killing two officers and injuring two more. Otomo himself was shot to death. In the national German consciousness, he then turned into the worst manifestation of the mysterious, unpredictable, and violent immigrant other who personifies the ultimate threat to the homogeneity and safety of the nation state. The German tabloid Bild was perhaps the most straightforward in expressing the general national sentiment: “Der Schlächter wollte morden” (“The butcher wanted to murder”) (Pfäfflin, 2000). Despite the mayor’s efforts at the time to de-escalate xenophobic tensions by pointing out that a person of any background could have committed these killings, Otomo still looms large in the Stuttgart consciousness as the mysterious villain who came out of nowhere and randomly killed. Commemoration events focus only on the dead police officers, and newspaper articles continue to describe Otomo with fairly overt disdain and little interest in his background. He is portrayed as strong and violent, a psychologically deviant intruder who wrote to then foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, threatening to kill if the latter would not agree to compensation for Otomo’s deportation and detention (Obst, 2014). ⁵

Bothered by the lack of self-reflection on the part of German authorities, Schlaich strove to know more about Otomo and to find out how a tragedy like this could happen. He began extensive research into the events that transpired on that fateful day in August 1989: “I found it disturbing that in all the reports, nothing was said about the African, except speculation” (qtd in Jacobson, 2000). For his pre-production research, Schlaich set out to speak to the surviving police officers, church officials, social workers, and other individuals who could help him understand what had driven Otomo to the violent attack. Schlaich’s access to official documents and reports, often granted only reluctantly, allowed him to gradually piece together a loose sequence of events, but the person Frédéric Otomo remained elusive.

In his film, Schlaich recreates the actual events that had led to the tragic incidents on Gaisburger Bridge as related by witnesses and police records; however, the majority of the film, namely the parts about Otomo himself, relies on conjecture. This raises questions about why Schlaich, in this re-enactment, decided to include some real events, but not others. He invents the sympathetic character of Gisela (played by Eva Mattes), a German citizen who takes an overt interest in Otomo, invites him to her daughter’s apartment (the first German apartment he has ever seen), gives him money, and helps him evade the police. They even exchange a kiss which, as Angelica Fenner (2004) argues, “serves as a symbolic if somewhat implausible gesture of solidarity among marginalized groups in Germany” (p. 262). Fenner’s interpretation of the kiss as a gesture of solidarity is presented in passing, but I suggest that this moment, in fact, carries greater meaning in that it shows the possibility of transnational solidarity, interest, and affection. Otomo features several friendly encounters of this nature, but interestingly, Schlaich chose not to include Otomo’s friendship with Caritas social worker Krystyna Schweizer who probably knew him best (the exclusion of her rather close relationship with Otomo is probably an attempt to protect her). As for Schweizer, she also kept silent about knowing Otomo for 10 years in light of the public hostility against him. Later, however, she recounts their final meeting, 4 days before his death. She remembers that they were in good spirits because of the prospect of an apartment for him, as well as an application for a new Ausländerpass (passport for foreigners), ⁶ a document that would have alleviated some of the challenges of being stateless (Burger, 1999).

Ultimately Schlaich’s Otomo is a product of his desire to put a face and a story to the dead refugee while at the same time recovering the personhood of a man who has been reduced to the ghostly specter of a killer: “After all, we don’t know anything about the life of an asylum seeker and we don’t try to learn more about it” (qtd in Pfäfflin, 2000, my translation). Schlaich hypothesized that “Otomo’s aggression was a product of constant uncertainty of being deported and the fear to lose the temporary visa which was only ever issued for a few months at a time and had to be applied for all over again. The people are being demoralized” (qtd in Pfäfflin, 2000, my translation). ⁷ Maria Garcia (2004) observes in her review of the film that “Schlaich [makes] the case that there are no random acts of violence, that the confrontation between Otomo and the police was eight years in the making.” To prepare for the role of Otomo, Isaach de Bankolé visited shelters in Germany and spoke with refugees. His observations echo Schlaich’s: “We all carry violence within us. But when the rage becomes too great, we are no longer in control. Once you cross that line, there is no turning back” (qtd in Jacobson, 2000).

Schlaich initially intended to make a documentary, then considered an essay film, until settling on the final format of docudrama (Pfäfflin). The film uses parallel narratives, alternating between Otomo himself and the two policemen looking for him. ⁸ The stark realism, or what reviewer Elvis Mitchell (2001) describes as “the director’s cold-blooded minimalism” with its desaturated colors and low lighting, creates a subdued, anxious mood. When characters interact, medium and close-up shots dominate, but when Otomo is alone, he is often captured in a long shot, framed by a dreary, empty cityscape. This juxtaposition of intimacy and proximity to the characters and distinct isolation of Otomo embodies the challenges of making the film: how do we get close to a character who is based on someone who was so isolated and unrecognized?

The ethics of reading

In the only other scholarly engagement with Otomo to date, Angelica Fenner (2004) argues that “Schlaich’s re-enactment of Otomo’s trauma is really a re-enactment of a traumatic and traumatized culture, one struggling to come to terms with signs of alterity within its fold” (p. 264). Fenner thus situates the film within a historical context of New German Cinema and its engagement with the trauma of the Holocaust. Through its form as a realist docudrama and its casting of prominent actors of the New German Cinema period, Otomo, Fenner argues, “straddles both the historical moment of the original crime in Stuttgart and the decade that passed until Schlaich’s film could be realized, which ultimately renders the film more a cultural product of its own historical moment” (p. 270).

While Fenner’s analysis provides a compelling argument about Otomo’s connection with German cinema genre history, it also raises important questions about the responsibility of scholars to pay attention to details and nuances in the representation of minor characters. Fenner contends that “in its fealty to the social realist genre . . . Schlaich’s film leans towards the hypostatization of identities, presenting them as unified subjectivities that conform to reified character profiles” (p. 272). The observation that characters fall into stereotypical, racialized, and binary patterns is shared by several reviewers of the film. I would respond, however, that this assessment glosses over pertinent details Schlaich weaves into the film. Indeed, it seems as if Fenner herself reduces Otomo to a stereotypical representation of the monstrous, brutish other, although the film script and de Bankolé’s performance provide a far more complex portrayal of who Otomo might have been. In her section titled “Screening the spectral: of ghosts, monsters, and ventriloquists,” Fenner refers to the character of Otomo as ghostly, whose “ventriloqual performance” (p. 263) constitutes “an instrumentalization of the dead” (p. 263). She argues that the film portrays Otomo’s behavior as “brutelike,” albeit carried out by “a gentle giant.” She writes:

For just as Frankenstein was the product of human tinkerings, the screen character of Otomo becomes the product of directorial imagination and de Bankolé’s inspired acting an approximation of a human life necessarily condensing various cultural tropes. As such, his racialized profile and certainly the script as such reveal more about the surrounding society that hosts these perceptions than about any putative biographical figure. (p. 264)

The representation of any marginalized person by a White, Western filmmaker is certainly always fraught with problems, and I would concede that Schlaich’s film is not free from essentialist elements and stereotypical tropes. I feel compelled to question, however, if Fenner has truly looked beyond the tropes to recognize Otomo’s personhood in the film. For example, she, along with other reviewers, misrepresents Otomo’s Cameroonian background as Liberian. She writes, for instance, that Otomo’s father “fought in Liberia on the German side during the colonial wars” (p. 274). German colonial history aside, Schlaich’s film addresses Otomo’s national background in several places. In a conversation with his new acquaintance Gisela, Otomo first names Cameroon as his home country and then tells her that he learned German in Douala, Cameroon. At another point, the police discuss his father’s involvement in the German colonial army in Cameroon. Obviously, this mistake is problematic in that it represents a general failure to differentiate between African national contexts, but Fenner’s mishap also erases a significant aspect of Otomo’s political self-determination from the film. Following the conflict on the streetcar, Otomo leaves his bag behind and the police retrieve a letter which he wrote to the German president, in which he asks for help while relating his father’s military service for the German colonial army: “My father fought with the German army in Cameroon between 1910-1918. After the Germans left, it became too dangerous for him because he was known as a German sympathizer.” ⁹ Here, Schlaich complicates notions of nationhood, legitimacy, and the set of eligibility criteria associated with citizenship. The reference to German colonial history works as an indictment of the contemporary erasure of colonialism as a critical factor behind migration movements.

Otomo’s claim to be legally admitted to Germany based on his father’s involvement with the German army uncovers the historical palimpsestic layering of contemporary migration with the German colonial context (a historical specter which looms much larger in French or British migration cinema). As a soldier for the German colonial army, Otomo’s father would have aided in the colonial expansion and protection of the German colonies in Africa. This involvement—whether forced or voluntary (the film does not provide information beyond the above-mentioned letter)—creates a link between Otomo and Germany, justifying, at least in his mind, his claim to legal status in Germany. More importantly, in including this information in the film, and by having the police officer read the letter, Schlaich openly challenges German immigration and asylum law. By taking ownership over his legitimacy, Otomo positions himself not as someone asking for help, but as someone demanding what he deems rightfully his. Misrepresenting Otomo as Liberian therefore erases both Otomo’s political voice and the German colonial legacy in Cameroon.

By highlighting Otomo’s connection with German colonial history and his subsequent demand for rights, Schlaich also departs from the latent erasure of migrants’ backstories and countries of origin on screen, thereby subverting national and global debates about citizenship, global mobility, and the legitimacy of stay. Discussing the importance of this issue in the context of refugee rights struggles, Cameroonian Refugee Rights Activist Mbolo Yufanyi Movuh (2016) addresses the importance of colonial connections:

I want left-wing organisations to know the history of our struggles before they open their mouths to talk about today’s fights . . . I came here because of the historical colonial and neo-colonial connections between the Cameroons and Germany. I had a lot of social contacts here. Politically, I was persecuted in the Cameroons after taking part in a strike at my former university in Yaoundé, in 1995-96, demanding better studying conditions, especially for English-speaking students. I was arrested and persecuted since then and I had to flee through my social connections. That is how I came to be here.

Trajectories and mobilities

The film begins in Otomo’s dark room in a boarding facility in Stuttgart. Through the drawn curtains, headlights of passing vehicles pierce the darkness until a lit match illuminates the scene. Otomo lights a candle while the clock indicates that it is four in the morning. Another passing vehicle shines its light onto the poster of a helicopter on a yellowing wall, before the camera lingers on Otomo’s contemplative face in a close-up. The scene cuts to another close-up, this time of Otomo’s hand throwing snail shells in a divination ritual. Otomo does push-ups and takes clothes from a clothes line, a moment during which a smaller picture of a helicopter comes into view. After a shower, he cuts up a tomato with a large knife ¹⁰ (the same knife he will later use in his attack on the police officers). ¹¹ He then moves around the room with an obvious purpose, selecting items to pack into a suitcase. On the side of his wardrobe is a third picture of a helicopter. Otomo adds a few books to his luggage; among them is a French-English dictionary. In one of the most revealing shots of this initial scene, Otomo stands in front of a wall. Below an idyllic picture of a German family on a farm is a postcard issued by the German airline Lufthansa featuring a passenger aircraft. Next to this picture, several postcards show images of Strasbourg, France, San Antonio, United States, and Stuttgart. As Otomo removes the postcards from the wall, he turns over the one from Strasbourg, revealing his assumed name, Albert Ament. ¹² He takes out a box from the wardrobe and puts the postcards inside. He sharpens the knife, wraps it in newspaper, and shoves it into his inner coat pocket. After looking at himself in the mirror with an expression of optimistic determination, he finally leaves the room.

I describe the first 3 minutes of the film in detail because they offer a fascinating yet subtle portrait of the protagonist and his position within contemporary globality. The frequent close-ups and extreme close-ups in the small room create proximity and intimacy, as if we move around the cramped room beside Otomo. Although alienated in several regards throughout the film, Otomo is connected to many outside global localities—something that defies a prominent feature of 1990s European clandestine migration cinema, namely, the absence of the migrants’ home space or migration trajectory. In most of these films, migrant characters’ home nations—along with the cultural, economic, and personal pressure that have led to migration movements—remain secondary, if not entirely absent. Schlaich, however, weaves subtle clues into his narrative: the French-English dictionary suggests a linguistic context located outside of Germany; the reference to French reminds us of Otomo’s home country Cameroon and of a previous stay in and ongoing personal connections to Strasbourg. Otomo’s travels are traced through fleeting images: before coming to Germany, Otomo lived in France and the United States. ¹³ His geographical movements, as well as his passion for helicopters and his desire to become a helicopter pilot—something he later confides to Gisela—are mapped out in this first scene. ¹⁴ He has passions and dreams, and is a global traveler. He is organized and is a reader, as the novels in his possession indicate. These include Aimez-vous Brahms? by Françoise Sagan—a novel about unconventional love.

Otomo’s global movements indicate that, throughout his life, he has always claimed mobility. Even during his stay in Stuttgart, as Schlaich discovered, he made active efforts to either leave again for the United States or to legitimize his stay in Germany by requesting citizenship. The film also points to his desire for freedom of movement by making his last walk from the room a planned final departure. Otomo does not merely leave the house to find work on the fateful day of the attack. Schlaich elaborates a subtext of agency by showing Otomo’s preparations and by suggesting that he is walking out of the boarding house with a destination in mind. As he turns into the dilapidated hallway, the door to his room loudly slams shut behind him, as if to suggest finality. He walks toward the end of the hallway and turns on the lights as he goes, but they go dark again as soon as he turns left and out of the frame. Otomo then enters the cafeteria (Figure 1) and flips a switch. The lights come on with an industrial buzzing sound. The space is sparse and functional. Tables and chairs are curiously surrounded by wire mesh, reminiscent of a cage. It is quiet and Otomo’s footsteps sound loud and determined as he crosses the room. Upon his exit, the lights once again turn dark.

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Figure 1.

Otomo leaves the boarding house.

The juxtaposition of Otomo’s far-reaching travels and the cramped, cage-like mood of his German accommodation emphasizes the claustrophobia he must have felt during the 8 years of living there, dependent on the goodwill of the Catholic church, barred from attaining legal employment. Through the imagery of cage-like partitions, the film conveys the entrapment of asylum seekers not through literal imprisonment, but through the government-created dependence on stipends and charity. Schlaich addresses this dilemma through the shelter manager in a later conversation with the police: “The worst for me, as manager, are the asylum seekers who are not sent home because of course they will get frustrated here. I believe you can live in such a limbo state for a while, but that they cannot work, and can’t do this and can’t do that.” Ultimately, the prison from which Otomo attempts to escape is the limbo state of waiting for papers or deportation.

Minor solidarity

In her review of the film, Jessica Winter (2002) laments that “[the] film allots far too much time to the cultural exchange program between the fugitive and his aide, in which Otomo can recap his sorrowful biography to a sympathetic audience surrogate.” Yet, she also expresses appreciation for the film’s representation of “Otomo’s everyday life as a chilly labyrinth of gaping stares, snide condescension, and no-exit desperation” (Winter, 2002). In other words, Winter’s appraisal of the film’s significance is grounded in an expectation that European films about refugees and undocumented immigrants must, first of all, take the racist nation state to task. Her reservation about the film’s frequent escape from racial and xenophobic tensions into more humane, personalized, and individualized interactions raises questions of what is at stake during these cinematic migrant–citizen encounters.

Alongside many examples of overt racism and hostility, Otomo experiences several brief moments of friendliness with citizens. As he exits the boarding house, he approaches the reception booth and knocks on the window. The doorman (played by Andrej Kritenko) jerks awake, nervously smooths his hair, and, after seeing him, remarks with relief: “Oh, I thought it was Jeschke [the manager].” Otomo smiles knowingly and they shake hand, obviously on friendly terms. ¹⁵ Interestingly, Schlaich visually marks the doorman as different. He appears disheveled and one eye is cloudy—a conscious choice by Schlaich since the actor has two healthy eyes. Otomo informs his friend that he is “as good as gone from here. Today or never,” to which the other responds, “I would like to do that, too, some day. Get away from here. But where to?” Citizenship alone does not supersede the limitations of class or the imagination of mobility and subsequent movement as suggested by the postcards in the first scene. Rather, the kind of subversive mobilities—as the one revealed through the encounter between the two characters, each with limited access to the full set of possibilities of the nation state (whether because of migration status or class)—suggests that both citizens’ and migrants’ mobility is far more complex and layered than what the North–South divide would indicate.

The conversation also complicates both the idea of the host nation as a desired space in which the migrant wants to settle and the imagination of the global North as the invariable destination in contemporary migration movements. Indeed, in response to Otomo’s departure, the marginalized citizen expresses his own desire to leave, making clear that he is only hindered by not having anywhere to go. This subtle allusion to the eventuality of “citizen entrapment” versus migrant mobile agency also plays out visually: the doorman remains seated behind the glass panel as if in another cell within the prison of the boarding house, except that his personal prison is a dead-end, underpaid job with no chance of upward social mobility. While the men shake hands through the window, their faces are brightly lit, emphasized through the low key lighting of the scene, as if illuminating a mutual recognition of humanity and personhood (Figure 2). The over-the-shoulder shot from the perspective of the doorman makes Otomo appear tall and in control, like someone setting out to better his fate. This is also one of the rare moments in which he smiles.

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Figure 2.

Otomo says goodbye to the doorman.

The extension of this seemingly mundane human interaction allows for the possibility of an even greater level of connection than just a daily passing by. Following the cordial handshake, Otomo hands the doorman his postcard box and tells him: “This is a gift.” After the latter replies that he cannot accept the box, Otomo responds: “Take it! It is my birthday today.” This gesture constitutes a subversive nod to claims that asylum seekers “drain” the nation state of resource and “take away” from citizens. More importantly, however, gifting the box implies a transfer of mementos that define Otomo’s connection to other places, effectively giving the German citizen, who himself cannot travel, a way of accessing the world. On a more personal and intimate level, Otomo figuratively leaves his life memories with a trusted friend, the same friend who will later protect him from police and make up one of the four people who attend his funeral. Ultimately then, the passing on of the box points to the transnational imprint which Otomo leaves on Germany beyond his legacy as a killer. Leaving behind the traces of his journey manifests his personhood in that he will be remembered, at least by one person, on his terms. In other words, by gifting his life memories, Otomo is simultaneously asking for the gift of remembrance.

This reciprocity of gestures reaffirms the common humanity within the margins and culminates into a direct act of defiance against the authorities: when police officers arrive at the boarding house to inquire about Otomo’s whereabouts following the scuffle on the tram, the doorman looks timid and nervous, but evasively responds with “don’t know,” clearly in an attempt to protect Otomo. The German citizen, stereotypically aligned with the nation state, actively resists the oppressive state surveillance of the criminalized migrant and relates to Otomo along lines of common experiences of marginalization (most notably class) and a mutual recognition of a common humanity. As soon as the officers step away to find the manager, the doorman quickly closes the window as if to shut out the threat, his mistrust visible on his face. At this point, the camera lingers for a moment as he looks on with a worried expression (Figure 3). Visually, he is locked in a glass cage and pushed to the margin of the frame. To the right is the wire mesh wall again, signifying that not only the inhabitants of this charitable shelter end up there for lack of other opportunity, trapped. Within this space, however, the doorman has carved out a possibility of connection with an equally marginalized friend and has protected this friend through active defiance.

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Figure 3.

The doorman looks on after police leave.

Another moment of solidarity against authority takes place shortly after in a scene following Otomo’s departure from the boarding house, right before the tram incident. As he joins a group of men outside a temporary employment agency, his presence is met with inquisitive stares. One man in particular (played by Waldemar Kobus) notices Otomo and silently watches him amid the activities of people scrambling for day jobs. In the film’s credits, the character is referred to as “Buckliger in Jobbörse” (literally “humpback in employment agency”). Yet, this assigned physical condition is not obvious on screen, which makes the description all the more significant, especially when paired with the doorman’s eye condition. It appears as if Schlaich deliberately assigns these two characters physical conditions that would visually mark their respective marginal positions. Furthermore, the worker’s unkempt hair and clothes mirror the appearance of the boarding house doorman. When Otomo volunteers for a construction job, he is met with racist jokes, and the “humpback” character smirks in amusement. However, when the employer—hard-pressed to find workers—promises new, sturdier shoes fit for the job, Otomo’s observer steps closer and whispers into his ear, “I have seen those, his ʻproper’ shoes. They are too small. He got them from Poland. They are not allowed here, for safety reasons.” He then nods insistently. Otomo ignores the advice and walks away to fill out the paperwork, only to be told that as an asylum seeker with a “Duldung” (temporary permission to stay) he cannot legally work. He leaves the agency, visibly frustrated, with his new acquaintance beside him, looking on. A medium long shot follows the two men walking down the street, the “humpback” character repeatedly speeding up to catch up with Otomo, then apparently changing his mind and slowing down again. As they finally get to a tram stop and sit for a moment (Figure 4), the man steps out of the frame behind an incoming tram. I read this scene as a moment of bridging “foreignness” and creating a space of citizen–migrant solidarity against an exploitative establishment. On the one hand, the man is entertained by racist jabs at Otomo’s expense. On the other hand, he aligns with Otomo by sharing his knowledge of higher-up corruption. Despite Otomo’s refusal to acknowledge him, he is looking for a connection with Otomo who stoically ignores him in self-imposed isolation.

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Figure 4.

Otomo ignores attempts to connect.

If the boarding house signifies a space that has connected the citizen and the migrant through social entrapment and the employment agency unites on the basis of class, one of the most compelling moments of migrant–citizen bonding and solidarity occurs in a space most stereotypically German. During his flight from the police, Otomo finds temporary refuge in a Kneipe (pub) during the early morning hours. He sits down at the Stammtisch. ¹⁶ The waitress initially appears taken aback upon seeing him, but then asks whether he pulled an all-nighter and smiles conspiratorially. He chuckles and responds “yes,” then, as if catching himself, turns serious and adds: “No. A coffee please.” To her question of whether or not he wants breakfast, he says, “Coffee.” The response seems brusque, almost rude, and the waitress is visibly confused. She asks, somewhat agitated, “Would you mind sitting over there? The dog doesn’t like you sitting here,” and adds after a brief pause in a more conciliatory tone: “The dog is the better person. You know how it is.” Otomo moves tables and she brings him the coffee he ordered and a breakfast roll with cheese and cold cuts, encouraging him to “eat up.”

In this rare moment of hospitality (even the dog stops barking as soon as Otomo moves to another table and away from the dog bed), Schlaich turns the German pub into a space where kindness takes place on its own terms. The sympathetic demeanor of the waitress belies the stereotypical White German exclusionary space we would expect the pub—and especially the Stammtisch—to signify. In other words, Otomo is not merely tolerated in this space; he is rather invited by moving into a more convenient spot and provided with free food. Two White German patrons look up when Otomo enters, acknowledge his difference with a startled look, but continue their conversation. A few minutes into the scene, one of the men holds out a pack of cigarettes. Otomo declines the offer politely; when he leaves the pub, the men and Otomo exchange friendly waves and nods goodbye.

While the specter of White German citizen exclusivity lingers, it is subverted, even ridiculed through Elvis’ claim to the Stammtisch (the symbol of exclusive belonging has literally gone to the dog). Shortly after Otomo’s departure, one of the investigating police officers enters the pub. The two men are still seated at the corner table. Elvis viciously barks at the officer, encouraged by the now less welcoming waitress: “Just keep barking. He will leave soon anyway.” When asked whether she has seen a Black man that morning, she briefly glances over to the men at the corner table as if to signal them to be quiet and then responds curtly: “A Negro?” The officer asks again “have you seen one?” to which she replies, in ironic exasperation: “Heaven forbid! Have we not paid attention? Elvis, did you see anything?” Fenner (2004) reads this reaction as an “example of guiltless guilt, of individuals who exhibit compassion in the same breath as they perpetuate racist discourse” and argues that German empathy is steeped within cultural racism (p. 271). In light of the waitress’s interaction with Otomo, I would, however, rather suggest that the racist lingo is used as a diversion tactic. In other words, the scene represents yet another example of defiant citizenship in which a citizen lies to the authorities, this time using a racist discourse as weapon to shield the persecuted migrant. The waitress’s act of resistance through deceit mirrors the earlier scene in which the doorman lies to the police about Otomo’s whereabouts. In contrast to the earlier scene, the urge to protect Otomo does not stem from a sense of friendship, but from the sense that here, where people from the working class and its fringes escape reality for a while to drink, talk, commiserate, and form a transient community, the police is not welcome.

Conclusion

Klaus Pohl, who co-wrote the screenplay with Frieder Schlaich, summarizes the importance of the film in a letter to Schlaich: “It is up to each of us to ask what a person is—and to act accordingly. After all, the concept of the ʻstranger’ is used with the most despicable of motives: to render a person a thing” (Otomo, n.d., my translation). With their film, Pohl and Schlaich push the viewer to look beyond a killer and see a man who navigates complicated transnational spaces and forms meaningful relationships along the way. By doing so, they demonstrate the power of minor relations in sustaining humanity and agency. Otomo is a Cameroonian, a migrant, a refugee, a traveler, a friend, and a son. To Gisela, he speaks of his late father Sergio—a fisherman who “always caught the biggest fish”—and his mother, Maria, whom he has not seen in 20 years at the time of his death. His parents wanted him to be a sailor, but, as he notes dryly, “I have only ever made it to stowaway.” He reads novels, dreams of becoming a pilot, and dances with Gisela to the music of Youssou N’Dour. He writes to politicians, speaks against mistreatment, and demands rights. If Germans had taken the time, perhaps they would have recognized the refugee’s soul, as author Mohammed Jabur strives to do when he assists asylum seekers.

The recognition of the refugee’s complex humanity is essential not only for understanding a human experience, but also for productive, collaborative political activism. Mbolo Yufanyi Movuh (2016) addresses the importance of true solidarity grounded in a sense of mutual benefit through the establishment of an equal community: “[There] must be a different understanding of equality and justice on the part of the White German left or NGOs. Only with this perspective can we begin to strengthen the anti-imperialist revolutionary grass roots solidarity culture—from below and not from above.” Movuh therefore challenges the stereotypical image of refugees as “ʻbare life’ removed from the realm of the political” (Holmes and Castañeda, 2016: 20). I would like to end with Movuh’s words:

Solidarity has nothing to do with the fact that someone is weak and has to be protected—it has to do with myself. It must be an issue that comes from within: My liberation is connected with the person next to me. My liberation becomes reality, only if this person next to me is also liberated. This is how I understand solidarity.