Summary Little Women: Where is the German Friedrich Bhaer?
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English literature
Institution
English Literature
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Little Women
This time Christina and I are chatting about the fact that Friedrich Bhaer has never been played by an actual German actor in a major Little Women film adaptation, even though Louisa May Alcott was nuts about Germany. We are chatting about Daniel Brühl and the presentation of Germans in the modern...
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Where is the German Friedrich Bhaer?
Niina Niskanen/ Little Women Podcast
Summary:
This time Christina and I are chatting about the fact that Friedrich Bhaer has never
been played by an actual German actor in a major Little Women film adaptation,
even though Louisa May Alcott was nuts about Germany. We are chatting about
Daniel Brühl and the presentation of Germans in the modern media.
Guten Tag Little Women fans!
Today´s comment shoutout goes to a fellow Finn. This is a quote from the blogger
@loveformovingpictures
”Nowadays any kind of racism towards someone´s nationality should not exist, how
is making fun of someone´s German accent any different than making fun of
someone who is for example on the autism spectrum since in both cases a person
has no control over it? It seems that Gerwig uses all the possible excuses trying to
convince the audience that Friedrich is not the right man for Jo, but that Laurie is a
better option A decent director or someone who wants to adapt a story should be
able to separate themselves from the feelings of the characters. Perhaps Gerwig
hates Germans and German accents but she should have allowed Jo to have a
different opinion since her character has existed for over a hundred years and she
says that she is respecting Alcott by leaving Jo as a spinster or even suggests that Jo
wants to be with Laurie, goes against that she makes fun of those qualities in a
person, that Louisa May Alcott herself was attracted to.”.
Earlier in this podcast, we did an episode about Laurie being half Italian and having
brown skin and what it meant in 19th-century America. It´s only fair that we discuss
Friedrich´s character as well and the fact that he comes from Germany and the
same ways as Laurie has never been played by a brown skin actor in a major
adaptation, Friedrich has never been played by a German actor and for this, I am
joined by Little Women blogger Christina Scott.
I used to study German in school and when I was 17 I was in exchange in Berlin, of
all cities and I remember that before I left I had re-read the Little Women series and I
was so inspired by the part where Jo was learning German. It was my first time
travelling alone abroad and I was like ”if Jo, who is one of my heroes, can manage to
study German I can manage to live abroad and speak German. That Jo wanted to
study another language gave me confidence.
, Then some years later when I went back to read Little Women again, I realized that
the reason why Jo wanted to study German in the first place was that she was
crushing on Friedrich, and then I just had to think that maybe somewhere in the back
of her mind she was unconsciously thinking that she wants him to be a part of her
life, because why else would she bother. One of the scenes I remember very vividly
is the one when Friedrich comes to court Jo and Jo suggests that they perform a
German song together just the fact that Jo knows what his favourite song is, shows
how not only how much she loves him, but how much she respects his culture.
I was really surprised that when I started to research Friedrich´s character I would
come across some highly respected Alcott scholars (maybe not so respected after
this episode comes out) who would have lots of hostility toward Friedrich being
German and having a German accent. It was such a huge contrast to all the other
studies that I found that handled Louisa May Alcott´s admiration and love for
German culture and literature, which were a lot closer to the truth and then even
just as recently as the 2019 film tour Greta Gerwig was saying how much she was
horrified that Jo would marry an old German guy who speaks with a terrible German
accent and I´m like, first of all, he is 39 years old, Gerwig herself is about the same
age, so why you are calling him old and one of the first things that Jo says about
Friedrich in the novel is that she found his accent very attractive and even calls it
musical.
I would not call myself a Germanophile the same way as Louisa May Alcott was, but I
think my fondness for German culture and history actually might have started from
Friedrich´s character because I was always very fond of him, even as a child. If I
think about the way American media portrays Germans it is mostly rather negative.
In Europe relating to other cultures tends to be a lot more neutral, because it is a lot
easier to travel between countries, and there are over 50 countries in Europe, so
there is more exposure and in most countries, you study at least 2 or 3 other
languages in school. Here in Finland, we tend to take our free education system for
granted but by the time when I was 13, I could say something in three different
languages, English, German and Swedish in my case, that´s impressive.
Germany as a country, they have worked a great deal with its past and in Germany,
at least in Berlin, it´s illegal to make any references to Nazis or things of that sort
and Hitler wasn´t even born in Germany. He was born in Austria and he had
difficulties getting German nationality because he had such a long criminal record (I
just watched a documentary about this).
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