Choreographing Exile: Lothar Warneke's and Omar Saavedra Santis's Blonder Tango

Abstract

Lothar Warneke's film Blonder Tango, based on exiled Chilean Omar Saavedra Santis's novel of the same title, pairs German and Chilean experiences of violence, antifascism, and exile against the backdrop of 1970s East Germany. Three aspects of the film are particularly rich points of entry into the treatment of antifascist solidarities globally, all of them underwritten by diverse practices of comparison: intermediality, translation, and rewritings of cultural and literary histories. For both the novel and the film, translative reading opens meaningful relationships among territories, conflicts, and protagonists in tandem with a contrapuntal, historical analysis. This article explores what competing assessments of the film as a project and as an artifact tell us about the kinds of cultural labor that antifascism does for different constituencies in a Chilean‐German relationship. In the process, it offers one model for rethinking the objects and methods of analysis in German Cultural Studies today.