Publication Title
Copernico: History and Cultural Heritage in Eastern Europe
Document Type
Article
Department or Program
German and Russian Studies
Publication Date
9-18-2024
Abstract
Articulating Poland in colonial terms in German literature and visual media in the 19th century laid the groundwork for the long-standing framing of the relationship between Germany and its neighbor, the colonizer and the colonized, until today, especially in German popular culture. My contribution explores the reection of the anxieties in German popular culture by analyzing the images of Polish migrant women in feature lms and series made for German television in the 2010s, in the first years after the opening of the German job market. I focus on the representations of the work of female migrants from Poland who perform domestic tasks and care work for children and seniors. My goal in this contribution is to examine popular images of Polish women as‘exotic’ maids, babysitters, and caregivers that discursively position Polish women as colonially-coded subalterns. My study focuses on the two TV productions, … und dann kam Wanda (...and then Came Wanda), dir. Holger Haase (2014) and the RTL’s 4-season series Magda macht das schon! (Magda Is Gonna Do It!) created by Sebastian Andrae (2017-2021).
Recommended Citation
Kazecki, Jakub. “Are the Polish Housekeepers ‘willig und billig’? The Image of Polish Migrant Women Workers in German TV Productions of the 2010s." Copernico: History and Cultural Heritage in Eastern Europe. Thematic Focus “(Post)colonial Eastern Europe.”
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Copyright Note
This is the publisher's version of the work. Published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (illustrations see picture credits)
Comments
Original English version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.25355/fm9g-ca32
For the German language version: https://www.copernico.eu/de/link/66bb429ec654c8.63337586