AFTER GERMAN UNIFICATION in 1990 and in the wake of the European Union's eastern expansion over the past two decades, the border region between Germany and Poland has become a crucial space for tracing the development of European cooperation and unification. It is also a region where economic globalization and global migration have greatly altered the social fabric of a more or less rural population. Hans- Christian Schmid's 2003 feature film Lichter (Distant Lights) comments on this socioeconomic transformation by depicting life and trade on the Polish-German border, as well as the plight of two Ukrainian immigrant groups planning to cross the border between Słubice in Poland and Frankfurt an der Oder in Germany, which was the European Union's securely guarded eastern border until 2004. Schmid's more recent, 2009 documentary film Die wundersame Welt der Waschkraft (The Wondrous World of Laundry) reveals what life is like for Polish workers on their side of the Polish-German border after Poland joined the EU. In snapshots that span roughly a few weeks, Waschkraft peers into the lives of a group of workers who wash, press, and deliver linens back and forth from luxury hotels in Berlin on a 24-hour cycle in a laundry facility in the town of Gryfino.

Analyzing Schmid's films about the Polish-German borderland not only offers new insights on patterns of European migration (Halle 92), but it can also serve as a springboard for a discussion about European identity constructions and the struggle for socioeconomic justice in the neoliberal age. In this context, socioeconomic justice can be understood as defined by safe work environments, fair wages, and equal opportunities in spite of gender, racial, or national differences. Neoliberalism, as “a theory of political economic practices” (Harvey 2), has dominated economic policies and their implementation in the expanding European Union since the 1980s and into the twenty-first century. Neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2). Critics of neoliberal practices have argued that neoliberalism, while not by definition contradictory to notions of socioeconomic justice, in effect often leads to greater social and economic inequality: some people become richer while many become—or remain—poor.