Unanswered Questions of German Culture I - Why are Foreign Films Still Dubbed for the German Viewer?
The cast of Parasite, (Photo: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International via Wikimedia Commons)
Why do Germans refuse to watch films with subtitles? How well integrated are Syrian refugees into German society? Why is there a stereotype that Germans are always on time, when the trains never actually are? A year abroad is an enlightening experience for many language students, but here Miranda Stephenson investigates the questions of German culture her time abroad has left unanswered. In this installment she investigates why foreign films are not shown in their original language with subtitles, but instead dubbed into German.
What do Shrek, James Bond, and the cast of Peaky Blinders have in common? They all speak with the same accent, of course! Or at least, they do in Germany. This is called Hochdeutsch. It’s a form of the German language that is fairly comparable to Standard English, spoken mainly in formal contexts or as a common ground between different dialects. Think of German in its most general (some would say pure, or “accent-free”) form, safe from the difficulties of regional dialect or twang. That’s Hochdeutsch. It’s used for textbooks, it’s used for the news, and it’s used for dubbing over foreign films for the German public.
Germans consume the largest amount of dubbed media in Europe. Prime Video user data revealed that around 90% of German customers watch dubbed films and series, whilst in cinemas, films are almost exclusively released as German dubbed versions. Germans are not alone in their preference for dubbed media: Spain, France, and Italy are prolific dubbers too. However, whilst the English proficiency level of these latter nations is relatively low, in contrast, German-speakers’ English-proficiency is impressive. Austria ranked 2nd and Germany 11th of 112 nations in the EF English Proficiency Index (2021). Other nations that rank similarly high in English-proficiency – for example, the Netherlands or Finland – typically shun dubbed media for detracting from the original actors’ artistry, preferring to watch foreign films with subtitles. It feels somewhat surprising, then, that subtitled media isn’t more popular in Germany – in any case, their preference for dubbing has little to do with their foreign language skills.
Whilst some people might judge the preferences a simple matter of population size – Germany, unlike the Scandinavian countries, has the population to sustain a thriving dubbed film industry – this feels a little crude. Even in the UK and the United States, foreign films in their original language have found astonishing success. Just think of Parasite, Amélie, or Pan’s Labyrinth. (In Germany, all three films were released primarily as dubbed versions.) Furthermore, the difference in cost between dubbing and subbing is really quite staggering: in Germany, dubbing a film can cost anywhere between €25,000 and €150,000, whilst the most expensive subtitles cost only around €5,000.
Dubbing is also somewhat controversial within Germany itself. The practice is useful because it provides the whole German-speaking world with films in a version of German that everyone can understand. However, sceptics argue that this Hochdeutsch is a strand of dangerous, homogenising nationalism, erasing the diverse variety of German voices from the silver-screen. For instance, although Arnold Schwarzenegger is probably Austria’s most famous international star, his Austrian accent meant that he wasn’t allowed to dub any of his own films into German. That task went to the Hochdeutsch-speaking Thomas Danneburg instead. This feeds into a wider problem of accent-erosion: Katrin Sperling notes that you barely hear a word of Berlin dialect in Goodbye Lenin (2003), a film which revolves around the fall of the Berlin wall. Perhaps stranger still is Russendisko (2012), a film about newly arrived Russian immigrants – who all somehow speak with flawless German accents.
Critics of the practice have also argued that dubbing actors’ voices into generic Hochdeutsch loses some of the nuances of the original film. For example, in the TV show Game of Thrones, the spread of accents in Westeros corresponds to English geography. Ned Stark – Lord of the northern Winterfell – speaks with a Sheffield accent. Catelyn is from Riverrun, in the south midlands, so her northern Irish actress adopted a southern English accent for the role. In German, Hochdeutsch’s generic uniformity excludes this artistic touch. Dubbing also lends itself to censorship: Karin Wehn analysed the German dubbing of Magnum P.I., an American crime series, in which an original plotline involving German Jews and Nazis was replaced with a story about Israel and the Arab countries.
If dubbing is associated with expense, cultural homogenisation, and potential for censorship, then, this all begs the question: why are foreign films still dubbed for the German viewer?
Back in the 1930s, where the history of dubbing began, dubbed films were hardly an instant hit. At the time, Multiple Language Versions were still popular, in which the original director shot several versions of the film in different languages. Critics of dubbing described this rival new practice as a form of “witchcraft”, equivalent to an “amputation”, in which an “artificial prosthetic voice” was fixed to the “bloody stump”.
Following WW2, however, the allied forces commandeered the German cinema industry, promptly banning any German films. The goal was to teach democratic values by airing exclusively American, British, French, and Russian films. At first, these allied movies were shown in the original language with subtitles, but failed to become the runaway box office successes that the allies had hoped for. Eventually, it was decided that the films would be more effective Trojan horses of democracy if they were re-dubbed into the German language. And so it was done – and since around 1950, dubbing has been the norm.
Now, in today’s world of German dubbing, the dubbed dialogue and actors’ lip movements are often so perfectly synchronised, it’s practically impossible to tell that the movie wasn’t originally German. Long gone are the days of reviled “prosthetic voices”; nowadays, Germany honours its best voice actors with the regularly-held Deutscher Synchronpreis (Dubbing Awards). Dubbing has become valued in itself as a form of art.
Furthermore, although critics may complain that dubbing represents a homogenisation of other cultures, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe has highlighted dubbing’s function as a means of translation, where some loss of original meaning must always be expected. A particular British dialect will never have a direct German equivalent, making any attempt to accurately map that dialect into German fundamentally problematic. Were a German to hear the various different English dialects within an original British film, it is probably over-confident to assume that they would be able to pick out the different dialects (and cultural meanings of those dialects) with the ease of a native speaker.
Dubbing has become an integral part of German cinematic culture, with a history that stretches back almost a century. Whilst some original nuances of film are lost in the process of dubbing, it is likely that Germans are able to find newer, more personal meanings in hearing foreign characters speak their own familiar language. In any case, one thing is for certain: whether it’s a mainstream American blockbuster or an arthouse film from France, there’s probably a German dub for it.