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Through a discussion of the filmic essay Die leere Mitte/The Empty Centre (1998) by Hito Steyerl, I aim to engage with the possibilities and limitations of her disruption of constructions of national as well as of diasporic and migrant memory. Acknowledging Steyerl's deconstruction of (self-) images of 'the other' in the film, I focus on the difficulties of interweaving 'other' pasts and presences in post-Holocaust Germany. I wish to explore whether Steyerl's approach and aesthetic can open up a space that would further aid the communication, but also the theorisation, of past and present experience of the 'minoritised' and/or 'migrantised' in Germany.
Die leere Mitte can perhaps be described as filmic archaeology, excavating past and presences at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and taking as its point of departure the events unfolding in the wake of the fall of the Wall in 1989. The film's project is framed by two phrases by Siegfried Kracauer. The first *[...] establishing tradition of lost causes; giving names to the hitherto unnamed' is set out at the beginning. While at the end of the film we hear: 'There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in'.1 Steyerl's film consists of seven sections, apart from the introduction and end credits, which also include some film-sequences such as closing remarks by protagonists. We first see a black screen imprinted in white with Kracauer's words in German translation: *[...]eine Tradition verlorener Prozesse begründen; dem bislang Namenlosen Namen geben'. The phrase '[...] eine Tradition verlorener Prozesse begründen' (* establishing tradition of lost causes') appears first, and a short time later, the second part of Kracauer's sentence comes onto the screen. For a brief moment, they can be read together, before the first part fades back into the black screen, leaving us to begin watching the film still seeing the programmatic 'giving names to the hitherto unnamed'. The fading out of the first part of the quote also visually emphasises a loss and prepares us for the agenda of 'giving names'. Siegfried Kracauer remains a source of reference throughout the film, as does the music of Felix Mendelssohn. Additionally the voice-over of the filmmaker herself and of another narrator, Hatice Ayten, guide us through the...