Pepe Danquart
Schwarzfahrer (Pepe Danquart, 1993)
Danquart’s 1993 short film (12 minutes) won the Oscar for best short film, among other awards. An Afrodeutscher man sits next to an old German lady in the Straßenbahn. She launches into a very racist monologue about Black people, with racist asides about Turks and Poles. “In the old days we would have dealt with these people,” she says. A couple of things to know about the film before you watch it: 1. Riding public transportation in Germany requires a ticket, but tickets are rarely checked. Every now and then, ticket controllers will board the bus or tram or UBahn or SBahn and say “die Fahrscheine, bitte!” and everyone shows their tickets. If someone doesn’t have a Fahrschein, they have to get off the tram and pay a large fine. 2. The term for cheating on public transit, riding without a ticket, is called “Schwarzfahren.” Similarly, working without a visa, “under the table” is called “Schwarzarbeiten.” Those terms are not pejorative, but in this case the filmmaker leverages the term into a visual pun with the Afro-German man.
For more on Black Germans see, for example
