Germany, cargo 200 Taking a tour of Germany’s recent past – as if between the ruined topos of the consequences of World War II and the sparkling high-tech of the First European Union – Wolfgang Becker shows a small village where his minor protagonist lives. The world of the village is not that of lumpenized residents, but rather it is very far from both real and social elevators. Comparing “Children’s Games” with the perestroika “black”, which still took place in the domestic cinema of the early 1990s, you clearly understand that the standard of living of German heroes is too high compared to our compatriots. It's not even a gentleman's set of TV-fridge-vacuum cleaner, but just private housing. There is no hint of cramped communal and small-sized women, but this private housing will not develop sleepy and well-fed well-being of the middle class. Intentionality seems impossible in this place.
Starting with school (in which you can just learn, and you can sabotage, not because of stupidity, but rather because of a lack of understanding why it is needed in later life, as a friend of the main character who is both stupid, but gifted with the talent of acting in his own way), continuing his work (not the most dusty, but some hopeless in terms of prospects) and ending with old age (pictured completely ugly, with a slow decay of consciousness and a faster physical extinction of the organism), this place keeps its inhabitants “iron” any prohibitions. It remains only to channel existential emptiness into relationships with loved ones and relatives. Characteristic in this sense is the image of the father, not a sadist, but weighing slaps and handing out blows to his children, because he “works so hard” that this, in his view, makes violence against loved ones an obligatory attribute of family behavior.
In other words, Becker does not propose the depicted world as a conceptual symbol of the entire German reality at once (a similar move is peculiar to our black woman), but rather hints at the fact that violence, which after the end of the world war was again forbidden for Germans political, at the everyday level has not disappeared and cannot disappear. It degenerated into causing inconvenience to loved ones due to the boredom of the constancy and routine of local family dramas. In such a world there are neither angels nor monsters, but there is only a fundamental recurrence of fates with a slight variation, so nothing good awaits everyone at once.