Weimar Culture Revisited Heidt, Todd
German Quarterly,
04/2012, Letnik:
85, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
From the exotic locales on the silver screen directed by Joe May (Ashkenazi) to the manipulated representations of Africa and Tibet (Springman and Neuhaus, respectively), these authors argue that the ...Weimar Republic was not solely focused on resolving its crises of identity in terms of German national identity. Many of the articles are clearly concerned with the central crises of Weimar modernity as they have become standardized in scholarly literature: urbanization, postimperial identity, political and social upheaval in the newly formed republic, new media in an age of information explosion.
Texts in Context Wayne State UP, 1995; however, it does not cover the post-Wall period. Filling a significant gap in the available literature in English without necessarily contributing to the ...scholarship on German film history, then, Brockmann arguably provides a useful service to the discipline of German film studies. ... notwithstanding some of my misgivings about the canon, Brockmann's critical intervention is bound to perpetuate and, especially with respect to the post-unification period, help shape, A Critical History of German Cinema is without doubt an achievement that will become canonical in courses surveying German film history.
The eighteen essays that make up the volume (not including Evelein's introduction), range from descriptions of German exile communities in places such as Japan, Brazil, and Belgium to close readings ...of texts, films, and music produced in exile. Thomas Pekar 's in-depth description of Jewish exile in East Asia and Japan, and Susanne Utsch's skilful analysis of Klaus Mann's texts on European travel written in U.S. exile are representative for the first set of essays, which demonstrate the destabilizing and debilitating effects of the exile's spatial and temporal disorientation.
While New Austrian Film, Yost-Wende German cinema, postmodern French narratives, emerging Southeastern European film, and even independent American film have been absorbing and adapting various ...aspects of recent Central European cinematic experimentalism, this filmic vocabulary and its cultural impact has often annoyingly been misunderstood or altogether avoided in English language film scholarship. Melhus's drag impersonations of iconic personalities, which take on the slippages and subtexts of star representation and classic Hollywood film (also skewered by found film artist Martin Arnold, see Wegenstein) lead Kuzniar to consider Melhus a "child" of Warhol, the pop-artist strongly influential in Germanophone visual arts, but hardly ever mentioned with regard to experimental cinema.
Legislating National Identity, wrestles with the challenges of German citizenship illustrated by 20th-centurylaws, beginning with the 1913 lawthat based citizenship on ethnicity (ius sanguinis) and ...ending with discussions of the 2000 Citizenship Law, which reformed the naturalization process. ... liberal and conservative perspectives on citizenship are brought forth through a variety of non-legal documents, ranging from polemic to analytic, and in genres as varied as newspaper articles and political manifestos.
Once considered an enviable model of cultural-pluralism, critics judged Dutch multiculturalism a failure, particularly following the murders of Pirn Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. ... migrant writing has ...been similarly positioned in both countries: often subjected to sociological and biographical interpretations, texts are frequently mined for their representations of exotic otherness and authors valued for their "authentic" perspectives.
Zur Mühlen, who despite her aristocratic family background was a devoted socialist and member of the KPD, was among the first during the Weimar Republic to successfully appropriate genres of popular ...literature for the dissemination of socialist and communist ideas among readers of both genders and all ages. What Wallace is able to show by her choice of a comprehensive study of Zur Mühlen's oeuvre is the author 's shift away from an initial adherence to the KPD party line (which she left with the beginning of the Stalin regime) towards a more liberal and religiously-infused version of socialism, a move that is partly to blame for Zur Mühlen's exclusion from the circle of socialist writers today.
Kafka's professional writings have been available in German for many years, and the critical edition's volume Amtliche Schriften (2004,) edited by Klaus Hermsdorf and Benno Wagner, offers the most ...comprehensive collection of these texts to date. ... an English translation of selected office writings was long overdue.
The essays that follow unflinchingly attempt to address this question through detailed and original analyses of many well-known and some lesser known texts of multiple genres, including Warsaw ghetto ...photographs, Anne Frank exibits, Shoah, Schindlers List, and comedie representations of Hitler. Prager speculates that, because the narrator of The Emigrants stands in the same position vis-à-vis the location of the work camp as Genewein, Sebald chose not to include the image because "he feared the still image's power to collapse the gaps of time and space and thought that in looking at it, he might disquietingly or accidentally step into the position of Genewein" (22).
The editors argue that literary texts are best equipped to integrate German victims into a greater context of German perpetration. ... the discovery of authors up to the task is undoubtedly a direct ...cause of the acceptance of the theme noted above. ... the collection of scholarly work demonstrates the continued dissemination of this interpretive lens within the field of German Studies, as the contributors have discovered an expanded oeuvre of texts.
