Kafka and Photography Bauer, Esther K.
German Quarterly,
04/2009, Letnik:
82, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
Oriented by studies on photography by Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, Barthes, and Sontag, Duttlinger 's close readings of personal and fictional writings explore Kafka's preoccupation with photography ...within the social and historical context of the turn of the century. ... Duttlinger 's readings open new perspectives on Kafka's texts as well as the actual writing process.
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.
Halle connects discussions of these far-reaching changes to how they have impacted the aesthetics of contemporary films. Because of their opaque funding scenarios, transnational films must open up to ...larger European and American markets; while they cease to be recognizable national products, they often do highlight a sensitivity to cultural specificity - the national not as the opposite of globalization but rather as its effect.
Firchow reads this poem as a parable of what might have been, that is, the beauty of a potentially fruitful relationship between Britain and Germany, as told against the brutality of the actual case, ...not only in the period under consideration, 1910 to 1960, but also, as his introduction and conclusion suggest, in the early 21st century present when even British observers are puzzled by the degree of hostility towards Germany still expressed in, for instance, British mass media. Firchow's book does not offer a coherent narrative of Anglo-German cultural relations from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, but provides, as may already have become evident, a series of case studies, mostly based on articles which were first published in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the introduction, Dagmar Lorenz, who organized and led the seminar, provides a succinct overview of writing by Jewish authors in Germany and Austria since 1945, noting that the most recent ...Germanophone Jewish literature "has become increasingly political and activist, responding to domestic and international political and social issues" (5). Richard Bodek argues for a more nuanced reading of Stefan Heym's works and provides a thought-provoking study with his point of departure the negative obituary of Heym in the New York Times.
Norbert von Hellingrath's influential mythologization of Hölderlin for the German nation, the increasingly patriotic status that the songs and hymns acquired during the Third Reich, the problematic ...evolution of the Hölderlin Society, lyric meditations on "Andenken" by Günter Eich and Paul Celan, and finally post-1968 reassessments of the putative political upstart whose deep-seated Jacobinism was cut short by mental decrepitude and physical isolation in "the tower." Savage carefully probes the layers of Heidegger's postwar Gespräch, highlighting its covert dialogue with Plato as a fellow participant in the occidental history of being and its more immediate goal of reorienting Germany toward its true cultural epicenter Swabia, the native soil of both poet and thinker.
Because conference presentations are necessarily short, the individual papers tend to raise more questions than they answer, although the virtue of a collection is that in conversation with each ...other some interesting debates begin to emerge. Cynthia Wachtell complements this examination of official propaganda with an inquiry into literature produced by pacifists - "war opponents offered a form of counterpropaganda that emphasized the common humanity of the enemy" - and front-line soldiers, who used their direct experience to similarly personalize the enemy, empathizing and welcoming encounters with him (75).
