Film and Memory in East Germany
Author: Anke Pinkert
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 578
ISBN-13: 0253351030
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Rethinks the politics of public memory in East German film
Lanterna Rally
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East German Film and the Holocaust
Author: Elizabeth Ward
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2021-04-01
Total Pages: 259
ISBN-13: 1789207487
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →East Germany’s ruling party never officially acknowledged responsibility for the crimes committed in Germany’s name during the Third Reich. Instead, it cast communists as both victims of and victors over National Socialist oppression while marginalizing discussions of Jewish suffering. Yet for the 1977 Academy Awards, the Ministry of Culture submitted Jakob der Lügner – a film focused exclusively on Jewish victimhood that would become the only East German film to ever be officially nominated. By combining close analyses of key films with extensive archival research, this book explores how GDR filmmakers depicted Jews and the Holocaust in a country where memories of Nazi persecution were highly prescribed, tightly controlled and invariably political.
Screening the East
Author: Nick Hodgin
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011-05-30
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780857451293
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Screening the East considers German filmmakers' responses to unification. In particular, it traces the representation of the East German community in films made since 1989 and considers whether these narratives challenge or reinforce the notion of a separate East German identity. The book identifies and analyses a large number of films, from internationally successful box-office hits, to lesser-known productions, many of which are discussed here for the first time. Providing an insight into the films' historical and political context, it considers related issues such as stereotyping, racism, regional particularism and the Germans' confrontation with the past.
Tailoring Truth
Author: Jon Berndt Olsen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2017-06
Total Pages: 278
ISBN-13: 1785335022
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →By looking at state-sponsored memory projects, such as memorials, commemorations, and historical museums, this book reveals that the East German communist regime obsessively monitored and attempted to control public representations of the past to legitimize its rule. It demonstrates that the regime’s approach to memory politics was not stagnant, but rather evolved over time to meet different demands and potential threats to its legitimacy. Ultimately the party found it increasingly difficult to control the public portrayal of the past, and some dissidents were able to turn the party’s memory politics against the state to challenge its claims of moral authority.
DEFA After East Germany
Author: Brigitta B. Wagner
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 367
ISBN-13: 1571135820
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Paints a complex portrait of East German film art and representation through examining eighteen key DEFA films following the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, East Germany's DEFA filmmakers had a brief window in which to critique GDR society on either side of the Wende, the sweeping political turn that surrounded the fall of the Berlin Wall andthe opening of the border. Building on the DEFA Film Library's retrospective Wende Flicks series and Indiana University's DEFA Project, this study examines the newly rediscovered filmic artifacts of this transitional cinema, introducing eighteen key films from 1988 to 1994 in essays by German scholars, film professionals, and cultural figures. Accompanying interviews and historical film reviews present a complex portrait of East German film art, itscommunist bloc influences, and its legacy for contemporary German film culture. The resulting anthology combines historical, autobiographical, cultural-political, and journalistic discourses to explore the tension between the hopes and frustrations these films express, the historical exigencies that overshadowed their production and reception, and the politics of their revival. Contributors: Skyler J. Arndt-Briggs, Peter Blank, Claudia Breger, Barton Byg, Knut Elstermann, Peter Kahane, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Thomas Krüger, Helmut Morsbach, Benjamin Robinson, Katrin Schlösser and Frank Löprich, Nicholas Sveholm, Johannes von Moltke, Brigitta B. Wagner. Brigitta B. Wagner is an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Film Studies at the Freie Universität and in Time-Based Media at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
Stated Memory
Author: Thomas C. Fox
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 196
ISBN-13: 9781571131294
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →It also argues that authors and filmmakers at times undermined the state-sponsored orthodox discourse, and that they created some of the most important postwar German confrontations with the Holocaust."--BOOK JACKET.
Re-Imagining DEFA
Author: Séan Allan
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-09-01
Total Pages: 378
ISBN-13: 178533106X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →By the time the Berlin Wall collapsed, the cinema of the German Democratic Republic—to the extent it was considered at all—was widely regarded as a footnote to European film history, with little of enduring value. Since then, interest in East German cinema has exploded, inspiring innumerable festivals, books, and exhibits on the GDR’s rich and varied filmic output. In Re-Imagining DEFA, leading international experts take stock of this vibrant landscape and plot an ambitious course for future research, one that considers other cinematic traditions, brings genre and popular works into the fold, and encompasses DEFA’s complex post-unification “afterlife.”
Dis-membering and Re-membering the GDR
Author: Wendy Catherine Graham Westphal
Publisher:
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 266
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This dissertation examines the contemporary portrayal of the GDR in German "Wendeliteratur" and "Wendefilm ". Specifically, I investigate what techniques are used to claim a collective identity and how real and fictional memories are constructed and authenticated. The memory of East Germany is currently undergoing a formative process as past events are being re-evaluated in the context of a Post-Unification society. These emerging collective memories will shape the Post-Unification German identity. Based on current theoretical discussion of cultural memory (i.e., Jan and Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs) in conjunction with detailed literary analysis, I examine the complex and often ambiguous nature of these processes. Both semi-autobiographical narratives like Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (2003) and fictional texts like Thomas Brussig's novel Sonnenallee (1999) are intended in part as stable "Identitatsangebote ", offering an identity framework for a generation of disoriented East Germans. I show, however, that through narrative instability, these texts undermine their own intentions, both creating and reflecting a volatile and insecure East German identity. Furthermore, while these and other works (like the films Good Bye, Lenin (2003) and Das Leben der Anderen (2006)) make vigorous claims to authenticity, I illustrate how they simultaneously negate these assertions by questioning the validity of personal memories and emphasizing the fluid border between fact and fiction.
Comrades of Color
Author: Quinn Slobodian
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015-12-01
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1782387064
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.
Becoming East German
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-09-30
Total Pages: 314
ISBN-13: 0857459759
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.
