Baltic blank space: Imagining the German Baltic Sea Coast in Christian Petzold’s <i>Jerichow</i> (2008) and <i>Roter Himmel</i> (2023)

The German Baltic Sea Coast constitutes a space of negotiation in Christian Petzold’s films. In Jerichow (2008) and Roter Himmel (2023), interpersonal relationships function as models for broader socioeconomic and political dynamics, which are negotiated in the environment of the coast, and which we conceptualize as a blank space. Both films were shot in Ahrenshoop, a former East German coastal town, reimagining the conventional tourist location as a space of alterity, geographically removed from the normal lives of the protagonists. In Roter Himmel , this is depicted through the entwining of the climate crisis and a writer’s creative struggle, while Jerichow centers on a couple and their employee in post-reunification Germany. This article argues that Petzold’s films reject the conventional depiction of their plot’s central events at the beach, instead focusing on representations of the before and after in the coastal environment. Emphasizing the liminality of the space, the coast functions as a blank space, allowing protagonists and viewers to project their desires and imaginations. Visual delay in showing the beach is accompanied by an oversupply of intermedial references to fill this blank, connecting German Romanticism, GDR history, and contemporary issues of the Anthropocene. Imagining the Baltic coast as a blank space transforms it into a space of resonance and negotiation, complicating the interplay between human, environment, and representation.