The recent "discovery" of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television mini-series Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the now-unified nation have attempted to face the trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world.
Contributors: Seán Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, Jennifer Kapczynski, Manuel Köppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke.
Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.
Details
First Published: 30 Jul 2010
13 Digit ISBN: 9781571134370
Pages: 312
Size: 9 x 6
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: Camden House
Series:
Screen Cultures: German Film and the VisualSubject:
German LiteratureBIC Class: DSB
Details updated on 02 Sep 2010
Contents
- 1 Introduction: German Suffering?
- 3 Armchair Warriors: Heroic Postures in the West German War Film
- 4 German Martyrs: Images of Christianity and Resistance to National Socialism in German Cinema
- 5 The Rhetoric of Victim Narratives in West German Films of the 1950s
- 6 Sissi the Terrible: Melodrama, Victimhood, and Imperial Nostalgia in the Sissi Trilogy
- 7 Political Affects: Antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf
- 8 Shadowlands: The Memory of the Ostgebiete in Contemporary German Film and Television
- 9 Links and Chains: Trauma between the Generations in the Heimat Mode
- 10 Resistance of the Heart: Female Suffering and Victimhood in DEFA's Antifascist Films
- 11 Suffering and Sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff's Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel's NaPolA
- 12 Eberhard Fechner's History of Suffering: TV Talk, Temporal Distance, Spatial Displacement
- 13 The Politics of Feeling: Alexander Kluge on War, Film, and Emotion
- 14 Post-unification German-Jewish Relations and the Discourse of Victimhood in Dani Levy's Films
