FREAK ORLANDO: Kleines Welttheater in fünf Episoden (Freak Orlando: Little Theater of the World in Five Episodes, 1981, in English premiered as Freak Orlando) is the second film in Ulrike Ottinger's Berlin Trilogy. Together with the other two films of the trilogy, Bildnis einer Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979) and Dorian Gray im Spiegel der Boulevardpresse (Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press, 1984), as well as the film Madame X—Eine absolute Herrscherin (Madame X—An Absolute Ruler, 1977), Freak Orlando positioned Ottinger as a queer filmmaker whose movies, according to Michael Koresky, “are so dogged in their refusal to fit easy categories—even within cinematic subgenres that thrive on excess—that they’re unlikely to fully satisfy anyone looking for easy political directives.” While in all her early films those “at the margins come to the centre … often through a subversive take on beauty itself (and often resulting in non-heteronormative forms of attraction,” Freak Orlando focuses in five episodes on the life of the eponymous figure from antiquity to the late twentieth century, highlighting time and again the exclusionary structures in Western societies. On the one hand alluding to Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the film title on the other hand marks the non-conformity of its characters as “freakish.” If, ever since the sixteenth century, “freak” has denoted a “sudden causeless change or turn of mind; a capricious humour, notion, whim, or vagary,” it also has signified since the nineteenth century in the formulation “freak of nature” (lusus naturae) “an abnormally developed individual of any species; in recent use (esp. U.S.), a living curiosity exhibited in a show.” Freak Orlando centers on these “freaks” who signify that which was and is stigmatized and excluded in Western societies on the basis of their extraordinary bodies.

In Freak Orlando, the main protagonist Orlando is an ever-changing figure, living through centuries: Orlando is in the frame story an unnamed pilgrim who enters Freak City; in the first episode, which plays in ancient times, she is the three-eyed Orlanda Zyklopa, who works in a department store setting the pace for cobblers by hammering on her antique anvil, and who falls in love with the store announcer Helene Müller; in the second episode, which is situated in medieval times, she is the Siamese twin Orlando Orlanda whose life is defined by either being called a “Wundergeburt” or “Mißgeburt”;

ABLEISM REMAINS THE most socially acceptable form of intolerance, with pejoratives referencing disability—and intellectual disability in particular—remaining largely unquestioned among many. And yet the understanding, depiction, and representation of disability is also clearly in a process of transformation. Indeed, we have seen the beginning of a major shift over the past decade. The depiction of disability in comedy is illustrative. Ten to fifteen years ago, mocking disability in comedic television and film was still common internationally. Now it is taboo, something an eponymous Swiss TV show tackles directly. Hosted by the comedian Renato Kaiser, Tabu explores the question of whether and how to joke about topics one isn't supposed to laugh about. Kaiser spends four days in a mountain hut with three people from marginalized groups (people with physical disabilities, obesity, or terminal illnesses, people living in poverty, and LGBTQI people). They hang out, crack jokes, go on outings, cook together, and also have more serious conversations. He then preforms a stand-up routine based on the experience, with his guests present in the front row of the audience. Similarly, journalist Micky Beisenherz and comedian Oliver Polak host a German show, Das Lachen der Anderen (The Laughter of Others), in which they visit individuals from marginalized groups and observe their living and working lives. The two shows use slightly different definitions of marginality and their formats differ, but both are examples of a shift away from othering disabled people and instead engaging with them as individuals who are part of the community. Both shows give their guests agency in the way they are depicted; guests control the narrative—there is no offscreen narration and no framing or explanation from the hosts that tries to control the message. Both shows also include awkward moments (for example, when the comedian asks a person with disabilities in what way they are ill). Yet, as Frederic Valin points out, ultimately these shows do not go too deeply into the everyday obstacles, affronts, and aggravations that people with disabilities contend with in an ableist society. Their first concern, he notes, is to figure out what jokes work and where the boundaries of humor lie at any given moment. And they seek first and foremost to diffuse the nervousness that non-disabled comedians feel about jokes concerning marginalized people.

WHEN I BEGAN TO CONCEPTUALIZE this chapter, I came across a film that does not deal at all with disasters, but then again, maybe it does. To quote a short dialogue from the film without contextualizing it:

What is at stake in this scene? A scorned woman (with a machine gun in her hands) confronts the man who didn't show up for their wedding, and the man pleads innocent because, at least so runs his argument, one incident after the other, one natural catastrophe bigger than the other, prevented him from arriving at their wedding. The quoted scene is from The Blues Brothers(1980). I am neither interested in the film nor whether the different occurrences that Jake narrates as disasters really prevented him from making it to his own wedding. What I am interested in is how the film uses in this sequence natural disasters as alibis or excuses for a particular behavior. Clearly these excuses cannot be taken seriously because the film follows its genre's conventions as a musical comedy; nonetheless, they employ a narrative strategy that is worth examining: the viewer faces in this scene the breaking off of a wedding as so dramatic an event that it can only be excused owing to an earthquake or a flood (or even better, both). But if natural disasters can become narrative tropes that follow a logic of accumulation or escalation that are then used to cover up something (the reality of Jake fleeing the wedding in The Blues Brothers), I wonder if disaster films can therefore be interpreted as narrative excesses that hide something else.

CATASTROPHE CALLS FOR INTERPRETATION. Over two thousand books pertaining to catastrophe or disaster have come out in the United States alone since 2000, ranging from popular genres to scientific volumes in fields as different as ethnography, geology, history, gender studies, literature studies, media studies, sociology, and philosophy. Disaster movies entertain large audiences with gripping plots and spellbinding images. Our volume investigates this fascination with catastrophes or disasters. Catastrophe and Catharsis: Perspectives on Disaster and Redemption in German Culture and Beyond explores approaches to catastrophe and its representations in Germany and neighboring countries from a variety of disciplinary perspectives within the humanities and the social sciences, drawing on literary texts, films, visual images, as well as historical documents. Cultural and political contexts determine the meaning of disastrous events and the narratives we create about catastrophe therefore change over time. Whereas the 1883 eruption of the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa is commonly considered to be the first catastrophe whose effects could be measured around the globe, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster marks a shift away from local or national frameworks toward a global or transnational reception of catastrophes and their sociopolitical impact. Scholars, in turn, increasingly focus on larger historical and sociopolitical contexts as they analyze how we represent and cope with disaster in a global world. But even centuries before international disasters such as the Chernobyl reactor accident, catastrophes like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake inspired the literary and visual imagination beyond cultural or national borders. The majority of catastrophes discussed in this volume did not take place in Germany but had a strong resonance within German-speaking culture, underscoring the significance of disaster discourse at the intersection between the national and the global.

For the scholar of catastrophe and its representation the ubiquity of the disastrous presents rich material but also significant classificatory challenges, beginning with questions of definition. Following common practice in the English language, we use the terms “disaster” and “catastrophe” synonymously in this volume. What qualifies as a catastrophe, furthermore, very much depends on the context and the rhetorical intent. The terms “catastrophe” and “disaster” show up frequently in a variety of frameworks and genres, ranging from everyday speech, where they are often used in the hyperbolic referencing of comparatively minor incidents, to events resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of lives or quantified by an economic cost in the millions or billions of dollars.