Orientalism and Ethnic Drag in DEFA Fairy-Tale Film: Wolfgang Staudte’s The Story of the Little Mook

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the paradigm of socialist realism in East German cinema has been subject to scholarly debate, scrutiny, and academic rethinking on a global level. Few scholars, however, have examined socialist ideology in the framework of Orientalism in fairy-tale film. In his groundbreaking book Orientalism (1980) Edward Said argues that the Orient was a European invention to portray Asia as a place of romance, exotic beings, and landscapes. I analyze Said’s argument about Orientalism in Wolfgang Staudte’s popular fairy-tale film Die Geschichte vom Kleinen Muck (The Story of Little Mook, 1953), which is based on a literary fairy tale by Wilhelm Hauff, and contextualize it with the notion of “ethnic drag,” a term coined by scholar Katrin Sieg