No place like home

Introduction

The sun shines brightly in Mallorca. We see blue sky and palm trees swaying in the wind. Then, the camera descends to show an exhausted-looking German family and their dog leaving the airport. Ina Parlow, her husband, two daughters and chihuahua have just landed in Palma de Mallorca to start a new life. The voice-over informs us that the couple have quit their jobs, sold their house and taken the children out of their school in Germany. Now a new life awaits them and Ina gushes to camera: ‘I am so happy. I couldn’t be happier!’ (‘(Alp)-Traumhotel auf Mallorca’, 24 June 2014). For their new life in Spain, they have rented a house in the countryside and are planning to open a small hotel which is intended to provide the family income. But soon the viewer in Germany will learn why this idea of a better life abroad is bound to fail. Ina, who suffers from depression and initiated the move to this sunny island, does not speak Spanish. She has no idea of Spanish laws and regulations or of how to run a hotel. The viewer will shortly witness the Parlow family in tears, deeply regretting their decision to leave Germany.

This is how most episodes of the reality television show Goodbye Germany unfold. The initial euphoria of the future emigrant is contrasted with the harsh reality that people experience once they have left Germany and moved to their dream destination. Faced by problems such as homesickness, language inadequacies and difficulty in finding employment, we see the protagonists often failing miserably and returning to Germany. The show alternates between entertaining a utopian vision of emigration and dramatising the failure of this very vision in order to communicate one final moral lesson: there is no place like home (Frey, 2010). Fittingly, a German TV guide describes the show:

Goodbye Deutschland! Die Auswanderer – those looking for a new home abroad – had better be well informed before leaving Germany. Many countries in Europe and overseas have been severely struck by the financial crisis. Often the disappointed and bankrupted emigrants have to return to Germany. (HÖRZU, 2015, author’s translation)

Even though Germany often appears to have survived the financial crisis in significant financial health, it is important to point out that the recession started in Germany as early as 2003, when the ‘red-green’ government initiated harsh labour market reforms. These lowered welfare payments, weakened labour protection and pushed the privatisation and marketisation of public enterprises and services, resulting in rising poverty levels and a dramatic increase in precarious, low-waged employment (creating what are often known as the ‘working poor’); 34.1% of working women (mostly mothers) are in such jobs, compared with only 12.3% of working men, which makes women particularly vulnerable to poverty (Wahl, 2013). Women in Germany earn almost 25% less than men on average, and only 29% hold management positions, which puts Germany below the European Union average of 36% (Dribbusch, 2013; DW, 2016). Despite having a female chancellor, Germany is still marked by significant gender disparities, underpinned by the public belief that children should spend as much time as possible with their mothers and the labelling of women who deviate from this ideal as bad mothers or Rabenmutter (raven mothers). Thus, even though Goodbye Germany portrays mainly working-class ¹ couples and families, I focus here on the affective representation of women (often mothers), since women in Germany, as in many other European countries, are disproportionally impacted by the recession (Padovani and Ross 2015).

Emigration shows such as Goodbye Germany are interesting expressions of recessionary media culture because they tap into anxieties about economic stability and mobility as well as into a heightened consciousness of national identity and citizenship. Even though the global language of reality television is often seen as prime evidence of a loss of national distinctiveness, many have shown that reality television is an important site of nation-making (Negra et al., 2013). This is not only because it allows for ‘national colouring’ through the representation of a national way of life and performance of national identity but also because it plays a crucial role in fulfilling the need for locally produced shows which are usually preferred by domestic audiences (Cann, 2013). Even though Germany is the largest TV market in Europe, it has always been an importer of television programming, and it imports more formats in the fiction and entertainment segment than it exports. The British and US TV markets are the main sources for German television (Mikos, 2015). Thus, the country fulfils its demand for domestic productions through licensing and adapting international formats such as America’s Next Top Model (since 2003; Germany’s Next Topmodel, since 2006) or Wife Swap (2003–2010, 2017; Frauentausch, since 2003) for German audiences. Private channel VOX, for instance, draws successfully young audiences by adopting programmes such as Come Dine with Me (since 2005; Das perfekte Dinner, since 2006) or Money Tigers/Dragon’s Den (2001–2004; Die Höhle der Löwen, since 2014). ² Furthermore, local production companies such as Filmpool or 99pro Media produce a host of low-cost reality television programmes that provide space for national specificity. Besides popular daily reality soaps such as Berlin Tag und Nacht (since 2011), makeover shows such as Shopping Queen (since 2012) or matchmaking programmes such as Bauer sucht Frau (since 2005; Famer Wants Wife, 2001–2009), German reality television programming has by now a short history of emigration shows that resembles to some extent international formats like Wanted Down Under (since 2007), while participating in particular German public discourses and sentiments. Goodbye Germany is but one of a whole host of emigration programmes. These include Mein neues Leben (My New Life, since 2011), Mein neuer Job ( My New Job, 2007–2009), Auf und davon (Up and Away, since 2007), Grenzenlos verliebt (Love Without Borders, 2008), Tränen am Terminal (Tears at the Terminal, 2008) and Die Yottas! Mit Vollgas durch Amerika ( The Yottas! With full speed through America, 2016).

Volcic and Andrejevic (2011) refer to the alliance of old conservative attachments to nation, racial homogeneity and tradition with neo-liberal free market rationalities as ‘commercial nationalism’, whereby nationalist appeals migrate from the realm of political propaganda to that of commercial demand. From this perspective, Goodbye Germany harnesses the affective appeal of national identification, prejudices and stereotypes in light-hearted ways and sells them back to domestic audiences, which are thus positioned and produced as nationalist(ic) consumers who participate in processes of ‘nation making’ through their reiterated practices of consumption. Volcic and Andrejevic suggest that commercial nationalism is thus a neo-liberal form of ideological identification, a kind of propagandising ‘at a distance’. Rather than the state imposing nationalist ideas on subjects, these ideas are now incorporated into products consumed by free ‘choice’ (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2011). Such ‘commercial nationalism’ is highly successful in a recession, when Germany considers itself under threat, with people suffering from Überfremdung (anxiety about excessive immigration) and social scroungers subsisting on the public purse (Frey, 2010; Imre, 2014).

Goodbye Germany can be seen as an expression of this ‘commercial nationalism’, participating in processes of nation-making by producing its female protagonists as failed national subjects worthy of social derision and contempt. The programme abjects these female protagonists by equating departure from Germany with departure from coherent feminine respectability. In a recessionary era, German feminine respectability is often associated with the Hausfrau, a classed figure, as discussed below, of maternal thrift and female resourcefulness representing the capacity to thrive through times of hardship and used in political rhetoric and journalism as a shorthand for Germany’s resilience in the financial crisis. Although a nostalgic caricature, this still impacts on how femininity is taken up, read and judged in contemporary Germany and those who deviate too far from this national ideal of an austere feminine domesticity are understood as weakening the nation and needing to be symbolically expelled.

Figurative methodology

Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood argue that reality television is an affect-producing technology deeply invested in shaping our ideas about what it means to be a ‘proper’ social individual in current society (Skeggs and Wood, 2012: 68). Thus, rather than merely representing identity markers such as gender, race, class and nation, reality television is fundamentally constitutive of these. Its constitutive power lies in its affectivity or ability to communicate ideas by making them not merely sensate but visible. Following their argument, I focus specifically here on the affective and ‘sticky’ dimensions of Goodbye Germany. Why do certain representations of femininity invite affective bodily responses: a turning away in disgust and contempt or a distancing through laughter? And how may these figures arousing affect help to constitute the foundations of a national imaginary?

To answer these questions, I analyse the programme through a figurative methodology (Tyler, 2008). This approach to media analysis centres on a close reading of certain figures generated and circulated by the media. Tyler uses the term ‘figure’ to describe ‘the ways in which at different historical and cultural moments specific “social types” become over determined and are publicly imagined (figured) in excessive, distorted, and caricatured ways’ (Tyler, 2008: 18). According to Tyler, the emergence of these figures is always expressive of an underlying social crisis or anxiety: they are mobilised in ways that attribute superior forms of social capital to the subject positions and social groups from which they are implicitly or explicitly differentiated. In the context of my analysis, this means that female protagonists of Goodbye Germany such as Ina Parlow, Petra Koch or Janina Wilhöft are produced as figures of ridicule, shame and pollution because they stand in opposition to the figure of the austere, ‘good’ German Hausfrau.

This is a material-discursive approach that understands representations not merely as representing the world but as constitutive and generative. It focuses on the repetition of figures across different media sites, since it is precisely this reiteration and circulation which imbues them with affect so that they seem to take on a life of their own. Thus, it is only over time and through habitual repetition that affects come to ‘stick’ to certain bodies and representations.

I explore three figures representing deviations from the idealised figure of the Hausfrau: the ‘spendthrift’, the ‘Rabenmutter’ and the ‘improper White woman’. To establish these three figures, I focus on their repetition and materialisation within the 83 episodes currently available to watch online on the TV channel’s webpage under the rubric ‘aktuell’ (most recent). Because this category contains many reruns, my sample includes episodes first broadcast between 2012 and 2016. The figurative methodology allows me to explore what discourses surround these representations and how these determine the affective and emotional qualities attributed to them. This enables me to illustrate how Goodbye Germany participates here in an ‘affective economy’ (Ahmed, 2004) of nation-making by mobilising figures that attach moral worth to specific lives and subjects through ridiculing and pathologising others.

The figure of the Hausfrau

Recessionary images of female resourcefulness have proliferated in forms that seek to retain traditional femininity under conditions of financial exigency, leading to the proliferation of figures such as the ‘happy housewife’ in the United Kingdom and the United States as well as in Germany (Bramall, 2013; Negra and Tasker, 2014). The Hausfrau has long been used as a figure through which the well-being of the German nation may be imagined and sustained (Reagin, 2008; Vinken, 2011). At a time when the excessive consumption of affluent, post-feminist women needs re-adjusting, this figure reoccurs as a meaningful response to the global financial crisis. In journalism and political rhetoric, the figure of the Hausfrau serves to align national ‘solvency’ with the responsibility, thrift and temperance of the individual household and to justify a harsh austerity regime within the nation state as well as in policies towards other, ‘debt-based’ European states (Mura, 2015). In the context of the financial crisis and the European debt crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel has noted that ‘[o]ne should simply have asked a Swabian housewife, she would have told us her worldly wisdom: in the long run, you can’t live beyond your means’ (cited in Mura, 2015: 35). Although many economists have previously stressed the shortcomings of the (Swabian) housewife logic (King, 2015; McQuinn and Whelan, 2015), the figure never seems to lose its public appeal and continues to be touted – also in the international press – as Germany’s secret of success in tough times. An article published in The Guardian in September 2012 reads:

The schwaebische Hausfrau – southern Germany’s thrifty Swabian housewife – is frequently invoked by Angela Merkel. The German chancellor argues that Europe has been living beyond its means and can learn from these women’s frugal housekeeping and balanced budgeting. Heide Sickinger and Waltraud Maier, two housewives from Gerlingen, near Stuttgart, agree. ‘A housewife keeps the family together and the money’, says Maier. ‘I don’t buy on credit. People never used to live beyond their means here’, she adds, before noting that the younger generation are more cavalier. She and her friend only use credit cards when they go on holiday, and make sure they have enough money in their accounts to pay off the debt immediately. Both believe that ‘southern Europeans are a different breed. They are more easy-going’. (Kollewe, 2012, my emphasis)

The figure of the Hausfrau is imagined as exemplifying a ‘good’ femininity that regenerates the morality of the nation. Her self-discipline and middle-class view of family life mark her as a respectable femininity through which the normative ‘good’ life of the nation is imagined. Her proximity to ‘happy objects’ (Ahmed, 2010) such as home, femininity and family presumes a heteronormative, middle-class nation and invests her with moral status and positive affect. She becomes a point of orientation amidst the recession, a prominent symbol to which national female subjects may aspire. Therefore, the Hausfrau is a figure we turn towards while simultaneously turning away from the ‘spendthrift’, the ‘Rabenmutter’ and the ‘improper White woman’.

The spendthrift

The figure of the frugal Hausfrau is haunted by its opposite, the figure of the spendthrift. In Goodbye Germany, the spendthrift is a highly classed figure whose excessive femininity does not have enough social and cultural capital to manage her finances with prudence, thereby risking financial bankruptcy. In a culture that locates the cause of the financial crisis in public overspending and lack of fiscal restraint, these figures are judged harshly, exposed and punished. Goodbye Germany is rife with representations of women who spend all their money on emigrating (e.g. ‘Heike und Josy erleben ein finanzielles Desaster’, 8 November 2016; ‘Trotz Krise nach Kreta’, 23 August 2016; ‘Träume auf Kreta’, 29 December 2013; ‘Böse Überraschungen in Italien’, 24 July 2012). Most are represented as working class, uneducated and/or unemployed, and as lacking the right knowledge, education and skills to manage their finances responsibly. Ina Parlow is a case in point.

At the beginning of the programme, we see an overweight Ina in sweat pants and nervously smoking a cigarette in a messy living room in Germany, packing up her family’s belongings. Piles of clothes and boxes cover the floor. Her blond hair is messy and her skin shiny with sweat. ‘Now it’s really time to get ready’, she explains in accented German. Thus, from the onset, the audiovisual framing of Ina ensures that we read her as an ‘unfit’ version of the Hausfrau: she is not neat and well-groomed, not appropriately dressed to get the job done, but ‘unready’ and ‘unkempt’, like her living room. Next we see an exterior shot of the house, while the voice-over explains that Ina and her family have nearly paid off the mortgage and father Gunter can provide for them with his generous wage. This information is not neutral but included to make the difference between financial security in Germany and potential bankruptcy in Mallorca more pertinent.

As the programme continues, we found out that Ina has invested most of the family’s savings in a Mallorcan villa with pool, which is intended, once turned into a small hotel, to be their only source of income. The omniscient male narrator explains why Ina’s business plan is faulty: besides the fact that the house does not provide enough rooms for a lucrative business, ‘Ina did not inform the landlord of her plans to convert the villa into a small hotel, which is a fatal mistake!’ In the next scene, we see Ina stubbornly justifying her decision: ‘But why should I tell him? Why not let sleeping dogs lie? He’ll let me know if he wants more money’. Then the viewer is introduced to a male expert, Martin Koslik, a German entrepreneur living in Mallorca who explains to us why planning permission is essential and how strict are the rules and regulations in Spain for opening a hotel. And so the crisis takes its course. The camera follows the Parlow family as they discover that the villa is in a very poor state of repair, with clogged drains and mould on the walls, and Ina’s culpable negligence with regard to securing permission for building work puts an end to the renovations. All this threatens her plan to open a hotel, their savings are nearly spent and the family is in tears. Even though Ina explains numerous times in the episode that they were tricked, clever editing and an ironic voice-over make the viewer believe that it is Ina’s incompetence and poor planning that have caused their financial ruin. The viewer is led to think that if the narrator and expert Martin Koslik knew the facts and therefore predicted the failure, Ina could have done so too and must be simply too ignorant to realise her mistakes.

In this and many other instances, Goodbye Germany manufactures through formal means this sense of the subjects’ culpability for failure, intensifying Schadenfreude on the part of the viewer lest they feel sympathy or pity. Frey argues that ‘the consumption of Schadenfreude encourages our sense of intellectual and moral superiority over the documented subject’ (Frey, 2010). Thus, Schadenfreude functions here as a tool to contain our potential dissatisfactions in a country where only privileged subjects can afford to emigrate (Stk, 2015). Pleasure in another’s failure enables the viewer to feel better about herself for staying at home. Furthermore, Schadenfreude operates here as a tool of distinction. It is an emotive response that is boundary-forming in that it creates a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with ‘us’ in the superior position (Cross and Littler, 2010). This distinction between austere and ‘good’ middle-class femininity and the ‘bad’, excessive, working-class femininity of the immoral spendthrift is particularly necessary in times when boundaries are blurred and debt no longer a marker of the working classes (Frey, 2010; Jensen, 2012; Jensen and Ringrose, 2013; Tyler, 2013).

To distinguish oneself from the immoral spendthrift becomes especially vital in a sociopolitical climate where those living in debt are scapegoated for the financial crisis and the weakening of the nation state (Forkert, 2014). In such a climate, debt contaminates feminine respectability and becomes a marker of moral failure. Mario Lazzarato (2012) explains this contemporary stitching together of debt and morality when he argues that in neo-liberal capitalist times, ‘being in debt’ is not only a financial status but a subject position with a moral dimension. ‘Debt produces a specific “morality”’, he writes, ‘the morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the fault (of having entered into it)’ (2012: 30). Such an understanding of debt does away with the influence of structural inequalities on an individual’s economic position. It frames poverty as a result of social pathologies, rather than of structural inequalities (Jensen, 2012). This results in moral disapproval of the unemployed, of users of public services and of those who enter into debt by not acting in a financially responsible manner (Clarke and Newman, 2012; Forkert, 2014). The perceived immorality of debt consolidates the way in which femininities such as Ina Parlow are perceived: a working-class woman like Ina is not read as a self-fashioning neo-liberal individual taking a risk and aiming to improve her situation. Rather she comes to be read as irresponsible and even immoral because this badly planned emigration not only endangers her family’s wealth but may also weaken the nation (when she returns to Germany bankrupted). Because she has rejected the careful planning that would have shown that she could not afford to emigrate and that a villa with a pool was far beyond her means, she is marked as pathological and at odds with the moral code of the ‘good’ Hausfrau.

Aniko Imre argues that reality television programmes such as My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding:

activate a gendered synergy between the political management of the European debt crisis and its symbolic management in popular culture. They visualise the reasons and solutions for the current crisis of European identity and economy in ethnoracial, gendered and class terms. (Imre, 2014: 247)

Through this affective production, leaving Germany is no longer read as an attempt at (upward) mobility, but as a reckless and irresponsible act that threatens the well-being of the family and the nation. By contrasting past financial security (in Germany) with present out-of-control indebtedness (in Spain), Germany can produce itself – despite all the social cuts carried out since 2003 – as a soft, caring welfare state where even ‘ignorant’ and ‘immoral’ women such as Ina Parlow can have a good life.

The ‘Rabenmutter’

The recurring trope of the Rabenmutter (raven mother) in Goodbye Germany (‘Heike und Josy erleben ein finanzielles Desaster’, 8 November 2016; ‘Auswandern für die Liebe’, 20 October 2015; ‘Erneuter Umzug bei Familie Coffee’, 23 October 2015) is a ‘loveless, cold-hearted mother who neglects her children’ (Duden, 2016). This stigma is quickly attached to mothers who work or for any other reason do not spend as much time as possible with their children (Borck, 2014; Evans, 2011). The Rabenmutter is such a strong motif in the German imagination that even women who do stay at home and look after house and children often label themselves as Rabenmutter when they haven’t fulfilled a task to perfection. In Goodbye Germany, we have references to the ‘selfish’ mother who threatens, through her desire to leave Germany, the happiness and well-being of her children and family. The women featured in the programme, and audiences at home, are encouraged to worry about what emigration means in terms of emotional ties to home and also crucially of their role in ‘doing the right thing for the family’.

A good example of this is the story of Petra Koch (‘Spezial: Viva Mallorca!’ Teil 2, 28 April 2015), a mother of two who decides at the age of 43 to move to Mallorca and open a nail salon. Petra speaks in a loud, husky voice. Her fake tan, excessive make-up and revealing clothes transgress the borders of middle class, tasteful femininity and mark her as working class. Close-ups of her glitter-decorated green fingernails show her professional skills, but also signal to the viewer that Petra is not willing to get her hands ‘dirty’ with housework. Thus, she is constructed as an antidote to the industrious, White, middle-class Hausfrau. Even though she has been separated for years from her husband, the voice-over repeatedly tells us that it is Petra’s selfish decision to leave Germany which ultimately rips the family apart. This idea is established within the first few minutes of the episode: it is the birthday of Petra’s daughter Lorena (16) and the whole family sits around the table singing Happy Birthday. Then the interviewer asks Lorena how she feels about moving to Mallorca and the teenager openly shows her disapproval. We learn that Petra’s 8-year-old son Louis is also not happy, and their father, Michael, who will be staying in Germany, is close to tears. Later in the episode, the narrator explains that Petra plans to open her nail salon in the lively tourist area of El Arenal, known as a party zone for German tourists. To highlight how irresponsibly she is acting by moving with her two minor children to this area, the camera accompanies them on their way to the beach through the longest ‘party mile’. Shots of drunken German men, blow-up dolls and singing tourists complement this section and give the shocked viewer a vivid impression of this environment. ‘Are you shocked by what you see here?’ the interviewer asks daughter Lorena. She is unsure what to say, but her discomfort is highly visible. By now Petra’s image as a Rabenmutter is firmly established: she may be with her children, but she is presented as neglecting their needs and merely focusing on her own interests. Even though she is heard trying, in short interview sections, to justify her decisions and to wrestle back her representation as a bad mother, she attracts contempt and derision for violating the golden rule of the Hausfrau: she may be trying to ‘keep the money together’, but she is not ‘keeping the family together’. She is seen as putting her own interests first by moving to Mallorca and to El Arenal, a place that is good for business but seemingly damaging to children.

Representations like these hint at the political relevance of mothers for the nation state in a recession. Recent research on the rise in Europe and the United States of ‘austerity nostalgia’ (Bramall, 2013) and thrift culture (Jensen, 2012; Littler, 2013; Negra and Tasker, 2014) suggests that middle-class women as full-time housewives are being romanticised and idealised as part of a nostalgic ‘retreat’ to the patterns that characterised the post-war period, especially domesticity, passive femininity and ‘maternal thrift’. Bramall (2013) argues that concurrently with historical austerity discourses, recent UK discourses legitimise women’s return to the domestic setting as rational and valuable. Similarly, Akass (2012) argues that UK and US news reporting and popular media representations promote a backlash, restoring an old-fashioned familial model of male breadwinner/dependent female carer and emphasising women as ‘willingly returning to their “traditional” roles in the home’ (2012: 2). Referring specifically to the British media, Akass (2012: 3) observes that ‘women’s job losses, particularly those of mothers, is [sic] described as “positive choice” with women returning to a more “natural” state of domesticity’. Similar discourses and representations circulate in Germany. Barbara Vinken shows how historical discourses of the ‘good’ mother who retreats from public life still shape public views in Germany today: ‘The most German of all German convictions is that childrearing is a private matter, and is the duty of mothers’ (Vinken, 2011: 22). The idealisation of the dedicated, self-sacrificing mother not only produces its opposite, the Rabenmutter, as a figure of shame, but also becomes one gendered way in which Germanness is understood. The ‘good’ mother functions as guarantor of a strong German society because her work in the private sphere changes the public sphere for the better. Through her caring and emotional work in the home, she rears her children in the ‘right’ way, thereby shaping the moral fabric of tomorrow’s society. Only she can keep society from moral corruption and wrong values (2011: 27), thereby leading the nation to success and strength.

This is especially important in times of economic crises and their aftermath. Tracey Jensen and Imogen Tyler (2012) argue that in contemporary public narratives of austerity, there is a focus on parents and on the construction of parenting as the reason for and solution to socio-economic crisis in late capitalism: ‘Being a parent makes one more vulnerable to economic austerity, whilst at the same time parents are being held more accountable than ever for the social (im)mobility of themselves and their children’ (Jensen and Tyler, 2012). While all parents are vulnerable in periods of austerity, those continually depicted by the media and by political rhetoric as failing, deficient and reckless are mothers from traditionally disenfranchised social groups. Petra Koch’s representation as a Rabenmutter thus reflects the prevalent and intensifying demonisation of the working-class and single mother which casts her as a pathological Other (Jensen, 2012; Orgad and De Benedictis, 2015), as opposed to a ‘responsible, resilient, middle-class mother who represents “quality mothering” (McRobie, 2012) and reflects the norms of contemporary citizenship’ (Allen and Taylor, 2012: 5). In this narrative, ‘good’ mothers are able not only to withstand the consequences of the recession, but to help reinvigorate the economy and society by governing themselves and their children in the ‘right’ way.

Femininities such as Petra’s are likely to invoke negative affective responses from audiences because she symbolises the disconnect between these idealised forms of domestic, maternal femininity and the material realities of mothers who have to work or want to work. She makes visible how this hardly attainable ideal may not be desirable for women after all. This makes Petra a potential site of danger for the heteronormative, middle-class nation that rests upon a gender order requiring women to stay at home and to be selfless, thrifty and consumed by labouring over others. Petra is therefore symbolically expelled, as the whole episode not only highlights how leaving Germany damages her respectability but turns her into an object of shame and contempt against which audiences at home can construct themselves as proper national subjects. Goodbye Germany produces many Rabenmutter figures, seeking to move audiences affectively in ways that align them with hegemonic ideas of ‘good’ motherhood. The programme thereby offers the supposedly emancipated German audience an exercise in community-forming and self-affirmation based on the shared distaste for the spectacle of the Rabenmutter.

The ‘improper White woman’

Reality television programmes such as Goodbye Germany participate in processes of nation-making by constituting certain femininities as ‘proper’ and others as ‘improper’ and by inciting audiences to make moral judgements. Nation-making happens here through reiterated practices of consumption that provide pleasure for domestic audiences. This section demonstrates through the figure of the ‘improper White woman’ how these forms of commercial nationalism leak into racism.

Many episodes of Goodbye Germany cluster around an emigration ‘love story’ (e.g. ‘Für die Liebe in den Sudan’, 2 August 2016; ‘Wenn Liebe blind macht’, 3 November 2015; ‘Absturz von Wolke 7?’, 29 November 2016), depicting women who leave Germany to be with a lover from a faraway country. Not only do these women confound generational boundaries by choosing significantly younger partners (‘On vacation 52 year old Renata from Bremen falls in love with Paul who is 27 years younger’ (‘Für die Liebe in den Sudan’)), thereby invoking anxieties about the figure of the so-called ‘cougar’, but they also confound racial boundaries through their intimacy with a ‘Latin lover’ from Southern Europe or a ‘backward’ Muslim man from a country such as Turkey or Sudan. A good example of this kind of narrative is the episode ‘Head over Heels’ (21 August 2012), where we are introduced to Janina Wilhöft from Düsseldorf, about to move to Side in Turkey to be with her Turkish lover, Fatih (25), who she met on vacation, a holiday rep from the Turkish Riviera and 10 years younger than Janina. They have only spent 10 days together, but Janina is determined to ‘leave everything behind’ – her secure job as a social worker, her apartment and her family – to be with him. ‘Yes, I am completely head over heels’, she gushes and giggles in an interview recorded in her apartment in Germany before her departure. The camera cuts to where Janina has written Fatih’s name, graffiti-style, on her bedroom wall. We hear her in the background talking: ‘Yes, I know it’s crazy to go there after only ten days, but I love him’. Janina’s colourful clothes, her obviously dyed red hair visible under her bobble hat and her teenage-flavoured language mark her as immature for her age. Shrewd editing depicts her as often lost for words and apologetically grinning. When she arrives at the Turkish airport at night, Fatih is nowhere to be seen, but Janina grins as she pushes her luggage across the parking lot. Out of her suitcase pokes a teddy bear, another reminder of her childishness. Since Janina is depicted as immature for her age and generally clueless, her repeated insistence on love as a strong basis for a new life with a stranger in a foreign country sounds hollow and intimates eventual disaster. Towards the end of the episode, we see her devastated: only 3 weeks after her arrival in Turkey, Fatih has broken up with her. Close to tears she confesses in an interview that she only has one wish: ‘a place that I can call home and where I can go’.

Episodes such as ‘Head over Heels’ allow audiences to play out the romantic fantasy of living in a faraway country with a foreign lover, but ultimately operate to contain this fantasy by illustrating that such cross-cultural relationships are bound to fail. This failure is never attributed to the visa and other institutional and political regulations that complicate situations and can put enormous pressure on new couples. Rather the break-up is always attributed to cultural and racial differences between the German woman and the foreign male partner. Women such as Janina become figures of scorn, portrayed as too ignorant to recognise these ‘inherent’ differences.

Goodbye Germany draws on a full set of racist and orientalist discourses that make these differences sensate for viewers. Fatih, for instance, is portrayed as uneducated, poor, backward and dangerous. Right at the beginning of the show, the voice-over explains that he has been convicted of possession of drugs and of driving without a valid license. Shots of his rundown, messy, half-furnished apartment mark him as poor, and his ‘backwardness’ comes to the fore when the show touches on topics such as gender equality and sexuality: Fatih does not want Janina to work. He is also very jealous, but – it is implied – unfaithful to her. These representations offer a prism through which the difference between West (modernity) and East (tradition) is communicated (Said, 1978). The central tropes of this orientalist discourse – modernity versus tradition, tolerance versus fundamentalism – animate Fatih’s representation and our reading of it. To paraphrase Sarah Ahmed, how we feel about him is shaped by the ‘histories that come before the subject’ (Ahmed, 2004: 6). This means that Fatih first appears in the show complete with affective qualities that in turn shape how he is perceived and experienced: he is untrustworthy and possibly dangerous, and therefore the viewer is not surprised to see Janina hurt and in tears. He and many other non-Western men are fetishised in the show as figures of fear who not only stand in opposition to Western values and morals but threaten them.

Women such as Janina, who are open to the racialised Other, are experienced as potential sites of danger because such openness enables bodies and worlds to meet and leak into each other. These women are perceived as bringing about the disintegration of an idealised, homogeneous national body. In this sense, they externalise Germany’s Angst der Überfremdung: this anxiety about the perceived dwindling of native, White, national populations and the proliferation of foreigners (Imre, 2014) produces an image of Germany as endangered by imagined Others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the nation (jobs, security, wealth) but to take it over and destroy its future (Ahmed, 2004). The anxiety about being ‘overwhelmed’ by the actual or potential proximity of Others who are constructed as backward, dangerous and unwilling to assimilate imbues the affective production of Janina as abject. Through her sexual encounters with the poor and racialised Other, Janina ‘contaminates’ her respectable whiteness. She crosses symbolic boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, which marks her as abject, as that which is impure and polluted and must be ejected from the (nation) body (Tyler, 2013; Kristeva, 1982). Yet, Janina’s abject position is paradoxically essential to the making of the nation. Kristeva (1982) reminds us that the abject cannot fully be expelled that it ‘hovers on the fringes’. Thus, abject femininities such as Janina constitute the very boundaries of the state and operate simultaneously to legitimise the prevailing order of power. As Stallybrass and White argue, ‘[t]he low-Other is despised and denied the level of political organisation and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture’ (Stallybrass and White, 1986: 5, 6, cited in Tyler, 2013: 20). In this sense, it can be argued that the figure of the ‘improper white woman’ disrupts the illusion of the White nation’s ethnic homogeneity, while at the same time reinforcing it.

Such a reading of Janina’s story illustrates how Goodbye Germany invokes in some episodes nostalgia for a more militant and even eugenicist construction of nationality, by expelling women who ‘contaminate’ their respectable whiteness. Racist stereotypes are mobilised and performed on the show for commercial purposes, but also in order to construct Germany as a safe home (for women) that must be defended against a hostile and dangerous ‘outside’, symbolised by the foreign lover who hurts women. The ‘improper White woman’ operates here as a constitutive limit on the clean, White, middle-class, feminine respectability that marks the proper national subject. The programme thereby reanimates traditional gender norms according to which women, if they are to have access to feminine respectability, must stay at home (femininity as domestication), or be careful how they move and appear abroad (femininity as constrained mobility).

Conclusion

This article has explored the gendered dimensions of Goodbye Germany. Through the figure of the ‘spendthrift’, the ‘Rabenmutter’ and the ‘improper White woman’, I illustrate some of the ways in which Goodbye Germany affectively participates in processes of ‘nation making’ by producing its female emigrants as examples of a failed national femininity. I also illustrate how the programme has emphasised the financial and emotional ‘costs’ and risks of emigration, thereby producing an image of Germany as the better place to live. Through this analysis, the article aims to demonstrate how media productions that are commonly perceived as products of a global media industry and therefore bare of any national context work relentlessly to create and appeal to patriotic and nationalist sentiments. In this sense, we can understand Goodbye Germany as resurrecting patriotic feelings by identifying ‘good’, responsible femininities (the Hausfrau) and disciplining, shaming and punishing those who refuse to act responsibly and frugally because this incurs costs for the nation.

Such a reading has, of course, its limitations. Feminist media scholars have long argued that television is a technology that not only reinforces dominant ideologies and sentiments in the heads of viewers as passive dupes but also provides a site of fantasy and political struggle (Ang, 1985; Jensen and Ringrose, 2013; Wood, 2009). Thus, the ‘spendthrift’, the ‘Rabenmutter’ and the ‘improper White woman’ are all figures of liminality and ambiguity, marked as pathological, immoral and polluted, and yet also providing a space where powerful fantasies of feminine disobedience can be played out and experienced. However, I would argue that Goodbye Germany seeks to contain these fantasies and dissatisfactions with being an austere Hausfrau. Anger and frustration towards a gender order that requires one to be selfless, orderly, thrifty and ideally stay-at-home are projected onto the femininities of emigrant women who refuse to be contained by these norms. In this sense, the programme participates not only in nation-making but also in determining what kind of wanting and desiring is permissible and possible at this moment. It is telling that a show which ridicules women who want more and desire a better life abroad is so popular at a time when there are minimal opportunities for economically marginalised groups to escape their financial and social position. A recent study by the Stiftungen für Integration und Migration (SVR) (Foundation for Integration and Migration) demonstrates that the majority of emigrants are not financially marginalised people but managers, scientists and academics (Stk, 2015). The top five emigration countries for this privileged group are Switzerland, the United States, Austria, Poland and the United Kingdom, and not sunny places such as Spain or Thailand, as Goodbye Germany suggests.

In the face of these facts, we have to ask what this show actually does. If we understand television as a technology of the social that works through encouraging feelings of intimacy and belonging, but also of disassociation and contempt, then we can see how the show affectively produces an image of Germany as a ‘good’ place. It enables the mainly German audience to participate in a form of voyeuristic tourism in which they can play out the fantasy of living abroad. And yet viewers can use the unpleasant experiences of these emigrant women to vindicate their own ‘responsible’ decision to stay at home. This viewing experience not only encourages feelings of superiority in viewers but also calls on them to feel differently about Germany: it might not be perfect, but is better than other countries where – according to the morale of the show – it is much harder to get by. From this perspective, it becomes clear that we can understand Goodbye Germany as a contemporary cultural expression of Germany’s response to the financial crisis and its aftermath. As part of Germany’s popular media culture, the show does not problematise such issues as rising poverty levels, the normalisation of precarity and the hardship of living with austerity, but works relentlessly to present Germany as a success story.