Lost Children: Images of Childhood on the German-Polish Border in Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment (2003) and Robert Gliński’s Piggies (2009)
Original version is available from the publisher at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/border-visions-9780810890503/
Abstract
The chapter focuses on German and Polish films produced in the 2000s that explore the juxtaposition of the romanticized notion of childhood as a time of innocence and images of borderlands as a frontier and an area of shifting values, demoralization, and constant threat, and not as a place of hybridity and positive exchange. The article examines the films that place children as their protagonists on the German-Polish border in the 2000s, in the time of intensified contacts between the populations of the two countries, a decade after the reunification of Germany in 1990, and before the complete border opening in 2007. In the film narratives examined in this article, children become involuntary victims of the social and cultural dynamics in the border areas. The stories of their abuse and abandonment and their revenge on adults become the creators' commentary on the negative aspects of the borderland existence. One of the most prominent examples of such border treatment and the central point of the analysis is Milchwald (This Very Moment, 2003) by Christoph Hochhäusler. The article places This Very Moment in the context of other contemporary German and Polish borderland films with child protagonists, Lichter (Distant Lights, 2006) by Hans-Christian Schmid, and Ich, Tomek (Piggies, 2009) by Robert Gliński, and explores the ways in which the directors of these films exploit the metaphor of childhood projected into the particular geographical, cultural, and social spaces.
Hochhäusler's This Very Moment is a modern variation on the Hansel and Gretel fairytale theme set in the borderland. The film tells the story of two children who go on a quick shopping trip from Germany to neighboring Poland with their stepmother who abandons them on the side of the road after crossing the border. The abandonment reveals the children's resourcefulness in dealing with threatening circumstances but also—contrary to the conclusion of the Grimm's fairy tale in which the children come back home enriched by the experience and prepared for adult life—the children's detachment from and disappointment with the world of adults. The director's comment about childhood as a period of negotiation of adult agendas and interests to which children can only respond but which they cannot shape is amplified by placing the narrative in a borderland area where different languages, cultural attitudes, and landscapes (social and natural) confront each other. In opposition to other contemporary German filmmakers who deal with the same borderlands (Michael Schorr, Andreas Dresen, and others), Hochhäusler draws a very strong divide between Germany and Poland and their cultures and does not allow for any cultural or social exchange. Following the paradigm of the frontier, the director of This Very Moment takes advantage of both the intertextual echoes of his narrative (the Grimm brothers' story) and the linguistic and cultural otherness of Poland to offer a metaphor of childhood as a borderland, a crossing line between many oppositions: innocence and corruption, victimhood and victimization, self and others.