A Companion to German Cinema E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: CNCZ - The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to National Cinemas
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1382

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

A Companion to German Cinema

A Companion to German Cinema regards the shifting terrain of German filmmaking and film studies against their larger social contexts with twenty-two newly commissioned essays by well-established and younger scholars in the field. While several of these focus on classic topics such as Weimar cinema, Fifties cinema, New German Cinema and its legacy, and Holocaust film, the collection is distinguished by its focus on new developments and the innovative light they may shed on earlier practices.

A Companion to German Cinema includes essays on Berlin Film, Neue Heimat Film, New Comedy, post-Wall documentaries, the post-Wende RAF genre, and Rabenmutter imagery, as well as on the persistently overlooked and under-theorized Indianerfilme, post-AIDS documentaries, sexploitation films, and new multicultural and transnational films produced in Germany under the auspices of the European Union. Organized into three “movements” representing the significance of these developments for their aesthetic theorization, A Companion to German Cinema challenges its readers to address critical gaps in the field with the aim of opening it further onto new terrains of intellectual engagement.

Leseprobe

Contents

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

First Movement: Destabilization

1 Have Dialectic, Will Travel

How the West Was Revised

The Lives of Other(Genre)s

2 Coming Out into Socialism

“The Left and the Vice”

Toward a Political Lesbisch- und Schwulsein in the GDR

“Cinema that Concerns Everyone”

Coming Out into Socialism

Conclusion

3 German Identity, Myth, and Documentary Film

The Question of German Identity

National Identity as Mythic Narrative

East–West Difference in Documentary Film

The “Othering” of East Germany

4 Post-Reunification Cinema

Horror

Nostalgia

Redemption

Conclusion

5 “Capitalism Has No More Natural Enemies”

The Berlin School in Context of the German Film Industry

Defining the Berlin School

The Social Context

Theorizing the Spatial in the Films of the Berlin School

Christian Petzold’s The State I Am In (Die innere Sicherheit, 2000) and Ghosts (Gespenster, 2005)

Ulrich Köhler’s Bungalow (2003) and Windows on Monday (Montag kommen die Fenster, 2006)

Christoph Hochhäusler’s This Very Moment (Milchwald, 2003) and I Am Guilty (Falscher Bekenner, 2005)

Conclusion

6 Projecting Heimat

Troubles with Heimat

“-isms of Propinquity”

Heimat Film

New Heimat Film

Rural Heimat in the Berliner Schule

7 No Happily Ever After

1

2

3

Second Movement: Dislocation

8 Views across the Rhine

1. Border Crossings

2. Border Criticism

3. Border Poetics

9 Contested Spaces

From Jerusalem to Köln to Visit Iraq

The Roof and the Politics of Home

Port of Memory and the Spatial Politics of Jaffa

Conclusion

10 Fatih Akın’s Homecomings

11 Lessons in Liberation

Introduction

Fassbinder’s Least Successful Film

The Historical Moment

Hollywood and Fassbinder’s “Deep South Melodrama”

Dissecting Whity’s Character

Blaxploitation: A Bad Ass Come to Collect Some Dues

Oppressed Victim or Blaxploitation Antihero?

Conclusion

12 Sexploitation Film from West Germany

Perspectives on Sexploitation

The Sittenfilm and its Influence on Sexploitation Cinema in West Germany

West German Sexploitation Film – The Formulas of the 1960s and 1970s

1950–1967: Postwar Predecessors of the Sex Film Boom

1967–1972: Semirespectable “Marriage Manuals” and Sex Education Films

The New Subgenre of the 1970s: The Report-Film

Localized Sex Comedies and Other Formulas

Production/Genre, Distribution/Nation

Producers

The Legacy of Sexploitation

13 A Documentarist at the Limits of Queer

14 Models of Masculinity in Postwar Germany

Introduction

The Sissi Trilogy – A Set of “German” Films?

Production Background and the Plot of the Sissi Trilogy

Locality, Heimat and the Model of Masculinity: Duke Maximilian Josef in Bavaria

The Nation, the Wiederbewaffnungsdebatte, and the Making of the New Man in Uniform

Affirmation of Traditional Family Structures and Nation-Building

Conclusion

Websites

15 Crossdressing, Remakes, and National Stereotypes

Viktor and Viktoria (Germany, 1933, 1957) and Victor/Victoria (USA/UK, 1982)

Fanfaren der Liebe (Germany, 1951)/Some Like It Hot (USA, 1959)

Résumé

Third Movement: Disidentification

16 The Aesthetics of Ethnic Cleansing

Definitions of Ethnic Cleansing

Judenfrei: Anti-Jewish Legislation in Prewar Nazi Germany as Ethnic Cleansing

The Palestinian Nakba as a Clear-cut Case of Ethnic Cleansing

The “Obscenity” of the Comparison of the Third Reich to the Founding of Israel

Why Is the German/Jewish–Israeli/Palestinian Analogy “Obscene”?

Balagan and the Aesthetics of Ethnic Cleansing

Perspective: Recontextualizing the Economy of Pain

Parallelism: Exposing the Similarities between German and Israeli Nationalism

Desacralization of the Holocaust

Aesthetics of Ethnic Cleansing: Juxtaposition and the Abject

17 Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse

Rosenstrasse in the Context of Historical Controversy

Rosenstrasse and the Tension between the Artistic and Commercial Aspects of Film

Rosenstrasse as “Heritage” Film

Memory, Trauma, and the Melodramatic in Rosenstrasse

Von Trotta as Feminist Filmmaker?

Trotta’s “Feminist Re-visions” and Use of Melodrama in Rosenstrasse

Masculine Identity in Rosenstrasse

Female Agency within the Patriarchy in Rosenstrasse

The Controversy of the Goebbels Scene

Closure in Rosenstrasse – The Problematic Happy End

Conclusion

18 The Baader Oedipus Complex

The Eye-Terror Principle: “Illustrated History”

From the Allegation of Feminism to Femininism: Sheer Killing is (Once Again) a Woman

19 Dislocations

The Struggle of Images, The Struggle for Images

An Aesthetics of Dislocation

Liberation through Television?

Bigger Pictures

20 Germany Welcomes Back Its Jews

21 Screening the German Social Divide

Introduction

Aelrun Goette: “Enduring the Balance”

Motherhood and the German Social Divide: Die Kinder sind tot

Conclusion

22 A Negative Utopia

Negative Utopianism

Communication that Doesn’t Communicate

The Film in the Mind of the Spectator

Growing Wings

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A companion to German cinema / edited by Terri Ginsberg, Andrea Mensch. – 1st ed.p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell companions to national cinema)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-9436-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Motion Pictures–Germany. 1. Ginsberg, Terri.II. Mensch, Andrea.PN1993.5.G3C6455 2012791.430043–dc23

2011041275

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs (ISBN 9781444345575); Wiley Online Library (ISBN 9781444345605); ePub (ISBN 9781444345582); Mobi (ISBN 9781444345599)

Notes on Editors and Contributors

Editors

Terri Ginsberg earned her PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University. She is coeditor (with Kirsten Moana Thompson) of Perspectives on German Cinema (G.K. Hall/Macmillan, 1996), author of Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), coeditor (with Chris Lippard) and contributor to Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (Scarecrow/Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), editor of a special issue of International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies on film and media (2009), coeditor (with Dennis Broe) and contributor to a special issue of Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination on global cinema (CUNY, 2011), and coeditor (with Tareq Ismael) and contributor to a special issue of Arab Studies Quarterly on Middle East teaching (Pluto, 2011). She has taught film, media, and cultural studies at numerous institutions of higher learning, among them New York University, Rutgers University, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, and Brooklyn College – including courses on German film and international cinemas. She is presently a director and programmer at the International Council for Middle East Studies in Washington, DC.Andrea Mensch did her graduate work in English and German at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and doctoral work in English and Film Studies at Wayne State University. As well as being a senior lecturer in the English Department at North Carolina State University, she has taught film and literature courses in London and the NCSU Prague Institute. She was associate editor as well as book reviews editor for Jouvert: A Journal of Post-colonial Studies.

Contributors

SavaşArslan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television at Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey. In addition to contributing articles on cinema, the arts, and culture to various journals, magazines, and edited volumes, he has published three books: Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History (Oxford University Press, 2011), Media, Culture and Identity in Europe (coeditor; Bahçeşehir University Press), and Melodrama (in Turkish; L&M).Dennis Broe’s latest book, Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/The American Style in a Global Perspective, is forthcoming. His previous book, Film Noir, American Workers and Postwar Hollywood, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2009. His articles on film, politics, and culture have appeared in Situations: Journal of the Radical Imagination, Cinema Journal, Framework, Social Justice, and Science and Society. His work as a film critic and commentator has appeared in Newsday, The Boston Phoenix, and on Pacifica Radio in New York City. Dr Broe was the Graduate Coordinator in Media Arts at Long Island University.David Clarke is Senior Lecturer in German at the University of Bath. His research interests include contemporary German film and literature, and the literature of East Germany. He is editor of German Cinema since Unification (Continuum, 2006) and coeditor of The Politics of Place in Post-War Germany: Essays in Literary Criticism (Edwin Mellen, 2009).David Brandon Dennis is a doctoral candidate in modern European history at the Ohio State University. His primary research interests lie in examining formations of masculinity and sexuality in modern German history. He has been awarded fellowships for dissertation study in Germany through the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst and the Fulbright Commission. Currently, he is completing a doctoral thesis on masculinity, labor, and the nation in the Wilhelmine merchant marine.Gayatri Devi is an Assistant Professor of English at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania where she teaches world literatures. She was co-chair of the Middle Eastern Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and is a contributor to the Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (Scarecrow 2010). She writes frequently on South Asian and Middle Eastern literatures and films.Anthony Enns is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Culture in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His books include Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability (2001), coedited with Christopher R. Smit, and Sonic Mediations: Body, Sound, Technology (2008), coedited with Carolyn Birdsall. His essays on film and media have appeared in such journals as Screen, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Popular Culture Review, Studies in Popular Culture, The Senses and Society, and Culture, Theory and Critique.Tara Forrest is Senior Lecturer in Screen and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the author of The Politics of Imagination: Benjamin, Kracauer, Kluge (2007), coeditor of Christoph Schlingensief: Art without Borders (2010), and editor of Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination (forthcoming, 2012).Robert M. Gillett is Senior Lecturer in German at Queen Mary University of London, UK. His wide-ranging research interests cover German, Austrian, and comparative literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, with a special interest in the intersection of cultural studies and gender studies. He has made a particular study of the German author, ethnologist and filmmaker Hubert Fichte. His published interest in queer cinema goes back to 2003, with an article in Moderna Språk on “explaining queer through film,” and he has recently coedited the book Queer in Europe: Contemporary Case Studies (Ashgate, 2011).Frances Guerin teaches in Film Studies at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and coeditor of The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (Wallflower Press, 2007). Her articles have appeared in international journals, including Cinema Journal, Screening the Past, Film and History, and Cinema e Cie.Jennifer Ruth Hosek took a PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley, then spent two years as a Stanford Fellow in the Humanities before accepting a position as an Assistant Professor of German at Queen’s University, where she is crosslisted with Film and Media Studies. She has published on contemporary literature and film, critical theory and neuroscience, and on the women’s movement. Her book entitled Sun, Sex and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming) was supported by the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, DAAD, Humboldt, Mellon, Berkeley, and Queen’s. Jennifer’s next project treats urban identity through filmic manifestations of Berlin and Havana and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is also running an SSHRC-supported voiceover IP tandem learning project, WhirledPeas.ca. She has been on the Women in German steering committee and helps produce the WiG Bibliography.Julia Knight is Professor of Moving Image at the University of Sunderland (UK), an Associate Director of the university’s Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, and coeditor of Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. She is author of Women and the New German Cinema (Verso, 1992) and New German Cinema: Images of a Generation (Wallflower, 2004), but has more recently led a series of AHRC-funded research projects examining independent film and video distribution in the UK (see http://alt-fv-distribution.net).Nadja Krämer received her PhD from Indiana University, focusing on the German colonial imagination and national identity through the construction of colonial space. Her research centers on issues of race and identity as well as minority and popular culture. She is interested in film studies, urban studies and the practice of place and works currently on völkisch concepts of urban planning in the early twentieth century. She is Assistant Professor of German at Minnesota State University, Mankato.Priscilla Layne is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her main interests are race, gender and rebellion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century German literature and culture. She has presented papers at Westfälische-Wilhelm-Universität in Münster, the German Studies Association, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her coedited volume, Rebellion and Revolution: Defiance in German Language, History and Art, was recently published by Cambridge Scholars.Peter Limbrick is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010) and his work has previously appeared in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Journal of Visual Culture, and Screening the Past. His current research, teaching, and curation activities are focused on Arab film and video.David James Prickett is an academic staff member of the English Philology section at Universität Potsdam’s Center for Languages and Core Competencies (ZESSKO). He also teaches courses in German culture and language at the Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUBiS). At the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, he is an associate member of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies (ZtG). He has published articles on topics including gender in the Early Modern Period (Wahrnehmung und Herstellung von Geschlecht: Perceiving and Performing Gender, 1999); literature, visual culture, and spatiality in Weimar Berlin (Women in German Yearbook, 2005; Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle, 2006; Edinburgh German Yearbook, 2007; Leisure Studies, 2011); and the image of women in post-Wall Germany (Hat Strafrecht ein Geschlecht?, 2010).Claudia Pummer is currently completing her PhD in Film Studies at the University of Iowa on the work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. In addition, she teaches courses in film studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.Silke Arnold-de Simine studied at Munich, Karlsruhe, Oxford, and Mannheim, and was a DAAD-Lektorin at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Since 2006 she has been a lecturer in German Studies at the Department of European Cultures, Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests lie in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German literature and early film, gender studies, cultural memory, and museum studies. She is the author of Leichen im Keller. Zu Fragen des Gender in Angstinszenierungen der Schauer- und Kriminalliteratur, 1790–1830 (St Ingbert, 2000) and editor of Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity (Oxford, 2005). Currently she is working on a coauthored monograph on Crossdressing in der deutschen Filmkomödie.Harald Steinwender, MA, DPhil, wrote a doctoral dissertation on the Italian director Sergio Leone with the publication title Sergio Leone. Es war einmal in Europa (Berlin, 2009). From 2007 to 2008 he was Lecturer for the Institute for Film Studies Mainz. He is currently working for the film department of the Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bavarian Broadcasting) in Munich.Domenica Vilhotti, a graduate of North Carolina State University’s Masters Program in American and British Literature, studied Holocaust cinema with Terri Ginsberg at the NCSU Film Studies Program in 2007. A former Teach for America teacher in eastern North Carolina, she presently teaches American Literature and Advanced Placement Literature at Mastery Charter School in West Philadelphia.Vojin Saša Vukadinović, MA, studied modern history, German literature, and gender studies at the Universities of Freiburg and Basel before entering the doctoral program “Gender as Category of Knowledge” at Humboldt University, Berlin. He is currently a research assistant at the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Basel. His PhD project, tentatively entitled “Antifeminismus, Homophobie, Linksterrorismus: BRD 1970–1982,” concerns the relationship between the antifeminist and homophobic reception of the RAF (Red Army Faction) in the first decade of its activities as well as the antifeminism and homophobia within the RAF itself. He has published on the history of antiracism, feminism, and leftist violence.Sally Winkle received her PhD in German literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is Professor of German and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University. She teaches German language, culture, film, and literature as well as women’s and gender studies. She is the author of Woman as Bourgeois Feminine Ideal and coeditor of The Nazi Germany Sourcebook.Alexander Zahlten, DPhil, is an Assistant Professor at Dongguk University, Seoul. From 2002 to 2009 he was a coorganizer of the Nippon Connection Film Festival in Frankfurt am Main. He is currently writing a book on media divergence issues with anime as a case study.

Acknowledgments

The editors thank the following persons and organizations for permission to reprint material that appears in this volume: Kamal Aljafari; Aelrun Goette; TAG/TRAUM; and zero one film. We would also like to express gratitude to Dora Apel, Burkhard Engelmann, and Roy Grundmann for their intellectual assistance, and to Jayne Fargnoli, Margot Morse, Allison Kostka, Lisa Eaton, Felicity Marsh, Martin Noble, Annette Able, Jana Pollack, and Emily Howard at Wiley-Blackwell for their professional, editorial, logistical, and technical support and guidance. Appreciation also goes to Steven Edelstein, Alexander Eisenstein, Elaine Ginsberg, Joseph Gomez, Robin Mendelwager, and Heike Mensch for providing invaluable material and emotional sustenance throughout the course of this project.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

Abbreviations

AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome

ARD

Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland/Consortium of Public-law Broadcasting Institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany

BBC

British Broadcasting Corporation

BFI

British Film Institute

BMW

Bayrische Motorenwerke

BRD/FRG

Bundesrepublik Deutschland/Federal Republic of Germany

CCC

Central Cinema Company

CCTV

Closed-Circuit Television

CDU

Christlich Demokratische Union/Christian Democratic Union

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CNC

Centre national du cinéma/National Center for Cinema

DAAD

Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst

DDR/GDR

Deutsche Demokratische Republik/German DemocraticRepublic

DEFA

Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft/German Film Corporation

Dffb

Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin/German Film andTelevision Academy Berlin

EU

European Union

FDJ

Freie Deutsche Jugend/Free German Youth

FDP

Freie Demokratische Partei/Free Democratic Party

FIDMarseille

Festival International du documenataire de Marseille/International Documentary Film Festival of Marseille

FLN

Front de Libération Nationale/National Liberation Front

FRG

Federal Republic of Germany

FSK

Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft/Organizationfor Voluntary Self-regulation (Film Classification Board of theGerman Film Industry)

GAYVN

Gay Video News

HFF

Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen/College for Film and Television

HIB

Homosexual Interest Community of (East) Berlin

HIV

human immunodeficiency virus

KHM

Kunsthochschule für Medien/Academy of Media Arts

MEDIA

Mesures d’encouragement pour le développement de l’industrieaudiovisuelle/Measures for Encouraging Development of theAudiovisual Industry

MFA

Master of Fine Arts

MoMA

Museum of Modern Art

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NRW

Nordrhein-Westfalen

OED

Oxford English Dictionary

ORF

Österreichischer Rundfunk/Austrian Broadcasting Corporation

PFLP

Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

RAF

Rote Armee Fraktion/Red Army Faction

RAI

Radiotelevisione Italiana

RTL

Radio Television Luxembourg

SDS

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund/Socialist GermanStudent Union

SED

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/Socialist Unity Party ofGermany

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands/Social Democratic Partyof Germany

SPIO

Spitzenorganisation der Filmwirtschaft

SS

Schutzstaffel/Protection Squadron

SSHRC

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

Stasi

Ministerium für Staatssicherheit/Ministry for State Security

UAE

United Arab Emirates

UFA

Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft/Universum Film Corporation

UK

United Kingdom

UN

United Nations

UNRWA

United Nations Relief and Works Agency

US

United States

USSR

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

WiG

Women in German

ZDF

Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen/Channel Two German Television

ZIJ

Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung/Central Institute for Youth Research

Introduction

Terri Ginsberg and Andrea Mensch

If local war and global immiseration have now become the grossest manifestations of nation, race, gender, and class – note the continuing dismemberment of Bosnia/Herzegovina and the sustained decimations of Haiti, Rwanda, and Iraq – then the polis of postnational disorderliness has already become the site of a violent and bloody graveyard. In view of this social fact, we conclude our introduction by stressing our belief that a public, political reengagement of these issues by the German cinema studies reader and the postmodern academy is eminently necessary at this time, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II and the liberation of Auschwitz – July 1995 (Ginsberg and Thompson, 1996: 15)

By the time anyone is able to read the present volume, more than fifteen years will have passed since the above words were written as concluding remarks to an editorial collection on German cinema which stands as the authorial precursor to A Companion to German Cinema. Largely an arranged compilation of reprinted, canonical articles and essays, Perspectives on German Cinema (1996) served at once to consolidate what until that moment, with few exceptions (e.g. Kracauer, 1947; Elsaesser, 1989; Fehrenbach, 1995), had been a generally undertheorized mélange of journal articles and book chapters concerning one of history’s most important and challenging national cinemas. German cinema studies, like the New German Cinema on which it had come centrally to focus and in which it was institutionally and politically invested, shared no consistent ideological orientation or discursive framework, while offering often conflicting and contradictory analyses of the aesthetic, philosophical, historiographic, and political-economic structures and implications of films made by persons self-identified as German, usually with the support of German public and, especially during earlier years, private industry funding, primarily in Germany but often for international more than local audiences.

Notwithstanding their discursive and ideological inconsistencies, these analyses had come veritably to define and delineate an academic-institutional field with certain disciplinary assumptions which Perspectives on German Cinema aimed to locate, grapple with, and problematize with respect to new and entrenched scholarly practices articulating variously and contradictorily to the “German.” The volume assembled 43 articles – seven of them newly commissioned – along a contestational, or “differential,” axis conceptualized in the tradition of ideology-critique and updated in postmodern context, calling for a “stereoscopic reader” who, as one reviewer (Knapp, 1997: 427) put it, “will be able to recognize the totality of meaning within the seemingly contradictory array” and in turn might be prompted to ask some anticipated difficult questions about the nascent field: What, after all, has “German cinema studies” come to mean for the US academy that is its institutional origin and platform? Who “speaks” this field, to whom, and for what purpose? Which perspectives are lent centrality within its disciplinary interpellation, which have been marginalized – and how? How might the contemporary film scholar theorize these implied enabling and constitutive conditions and their structuring absences? In effect, insofar as it was interested in “a more ideologically interventionist, socially critical configuration of scholarly inquiry” (Ginsberg and Thompson, 1996: 15), Perspectives on German Cinema pleaded that German cinema studies should not ignore or marginalize the social legacy of global conflagration – Imperialism, World War One, National Socialism, World War Two, the Holocaust, and the Cold War – for which German cultural scholarship more broadly speaking had long taken critical responsibility in a variety of useful, if limited ways.

Perspectives on German Cinema could only begin the daunting task of eliciting, much less answer such questions. As a scholarly compendium, moreover, it faced and symptomized ineluctable structural contradictions – the real and ideological limitations of academic centrism (e.g. Hake, 1998; cf. Fisher and Prager, 2010). Although its editors were criticized superficially by an H-Net review (Denham, 1998: para. 3) for apparently “not lik[ing] German film very much,” their call, explicated succinctly by Gerhard Knapp in a prior review (1997: 426–427), was taken up within the field by serious scholarly endeavors (e.g. Reimann, 2003: 177) that have evidenced a determined pursuit of the volume’s suggestion to register and reengage the “silent zone” (Ginsberg and Thompson, 1996: 15) of German cinema studies’ disciplinary meanings and social import.

A good number of these key works are referenced, integrated, and critiqued by and within the contributions to A Companion to German Cinema, the aim of which is to rehearse while intellectually resituating the critical developments that have occurred in and around this field since the turn of the twenty-first century, a moment when German cinema studies, in its historically uneven relationship with German film production, began to experience a first post-Wall reinvigoration and institutional expansion beyond the US academy. Whereas the latter has seen a relative decrease in German studies generally,1 the albeit belated establishment and acceptance of cinema studies as a legitimate area of academic inquiry within German higher education (in addition to its longer presence in the vocational Hochschulen für Film und Fernsehen) has led to a growth of inquiry there, where scholarly publishing on German film has also noticeably increased.

A Companion to German Cinema also emerges at a moment in which the global conflagrations marking, but certainly not confined to, the German social legacy have not diminished, as Ginsberg and Thompson (1996: 15) had hoped they would when stressing a belief in the potential role scholarly inquiry could and should play in signaling “the formation of intellectual alliances along lines drawn toward ending (neo)fascism and (neo)nationalism, and toward ending prevailing assumptions that a radical theory of culture is no longer possible.” Instead the world has seen – literally by means of new digital media as well as film and television – the totalities of nation, race, gender, and class manifest in many additional local wars and greater global immiseration than might previously have been imagined. Indeed, the decade preceding the present writing is marked by casualty and death far outstripping that which marred the years that produced the New German Cinema, its often avant-garde aesthetics and its critiques of US-led Western imperialism and neocolonialism. As the newly minted European Union has proceeded with much difficulty, and in the face of ongoing resistance, to consolidate economically in relation to these developments (see Habermas, 2010; Krugman, 2011), the neoliberal interests it represents as well as caters to and fosters, more often than not with the full backing of the United States, have redirected cultural and scholarly practices toward areas more fully concentrated on postcolonial regions. The ensuing sociocultural embrace of “otherness,” to which Kira Kosnick (2007: 14) writing on Turkish-German media refers, quoting AyşaÇağlar, as “ethnomarketing,” has been a belated yet in many respects reductive and exploitative immersion by Europe, and the West generally, in renewed orientalisms and xenophobias disguised as benevolent multiculturalism.2

While German cinema studies throughout this period has by no means abandoned – infact it has increased critical attention to – Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mourning and coming to terms with the Nazi past),3 the late 1990s and 2000s have seen a modest growth in the field’s engagement with cultural studies areas such as feminism;4 (homo)sexuality;5 class politics, economic structures, and the former East Germany;6 and race, (post)colonialism, globalization, and transnationalism.7 These multi- and crosscultural foci have occasionally been addressed, if sometimes less directly and forcefully, in the context of more generic concerns, for instance reunification,8 the ongoing legacy of West German film traditions and Autoren,9 Weimar cinema,10 and German cinematic/cultural relationships with Hollywood11 and Austria.12 Many of these investigations reflect a contemporary shift in German filmmaking away from international art-house and independent vehicles toward more sustained commercial-industrial, locally and regionally directed production. However, as several contributions to the present volume indicate, this turn to the local nonetheless articulates and implements larger structural shifts in the European film and media spheres to transnational schemes and collaborations. Based upon the principle of subsidiarity “borrowed from the practices of Catholic Canon Law” (Norman Davies, quoted in Rivi, 2007: 28), these collaborations reenvision post-reunification Germany as a “heterogeneous, hybrid, and polycentric space” (Rivi, 2007, 6, 36) that stands ostensibly to overcome previous monolithic national configurations through the proliferation of popular regional markets.

In her analysis of contemporary European cinema’s relationship to transnationalism, Luisa Rivi (2007) argues against such visions and practices, for instance those proffered by Tim Bergfelder (2005) writing on 1960s popular European co-productions. For her, these shifts toward localization have simply entailed further disenfranchising European culture’s traditional “others.” Recalling Thomas Elsaesser’s (2005) concern that Germany’s contemporary focus on (multi)culture, which was mandated by Article 151 of the revised Maastricht Treaty of 2001, is serving to position cultural production as a primarily commodificatory enterprise, Rivi (2007: 48, 56–57), following Foucault, sees the transnational turn not as a means of European “opening” but of its retrenchment. On her argument, dominant power structures and practices persist and proliferate by very way of their “decentralization and ubiquitous occupation” (p. 29); because, that is, they acknowledge otherness only to contain it (p. 48), they actually “safeguard … nationality at the core of supranationality” (p. 63) and therefore reinforce the very borders and exclusivisms which the so-called postnational, “deterritorialized” (Davidson, 1999) system purports to overcome.

The recent publication of several Germanophone books concerning animation, cinema technology, and digital media (DEFA-Stiftung, 2006; Kohlmann, 2007; Schenk, 2007; Brandlmeier, 2008) is conceivably related to this veritable postmodern systemics, even as philosophical interest continues in traditional German film aesthetics and avant-garde praxis and their legacy.13 The increasingly transdisciplinary composition of German cinema studies, as evidenced by the bibliography to this Introduction and symptomatized by the departmental mergers referenced in note 1, likewise attests to this problematic structural turn. The transnational shift in post-Wende Germano-European film production has itself been enabled by sophisticated structural mechanisms of the new economic order. These include Mesures d’encouragement pour le développement de l’industrie audiovisuelle (Measures for Encouraging Development of the Audiovisual Industry) (MEDIA), which operates under the auspices of the European Commission of Cinematographic Co-Production and funds Europa Cinemas, an inter-European exhibition network promoting European films, the European Film Academy, an award-granting body modeled after the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and Euromed Audiovisual, an uneven “partnership” between the European Union and ten “Mediterranean” countries/regions, including Turkey, the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and Algeria (Rivi, 2007: 60). This EU-based restructuring also includes Eurimages, a cinematic funding mechanism commonly decried for having fostered so-called “Europudding” films, well-intentioned popular-commercial fare that tends nevertheless to “replace national conflicts with a sweet but ultimately bland narrative than can only appeal to a least common denominator of culture” (Halle, 2008: 48; see also Wayne, 2002: 13–19; Galt, 2006: 103–105; Rivi, 2007: 64). Whereas these mechanisms have enabled a noticeable increase in the production of films addressing Germany’s social and political-economic peripheries and their popular (re)locations within national borders (re)defined as “European” and endowed with “European values” (Kosnick, 2007: 13),14 the imperative to turn a profit through mass appeal has frequently served to reproduce violently abstract cultural tropes and formal structures that encourage reactionary spectatorial positionings and ideological irredentism. In effect, the new Germano-European cinematic funding system is premised – as are some of Rivi’s (2007: 9, 35) Jamesonian assumptions – upon the Euro-Western nation-state as the very foundation of culture, and thus upon measuring the success of multicultural integration on the degree to which immigrants assimilate and “become locals” within the so-called European value-system (Kosnick, 2007: 18; see also Milward, 2000). As Mike Wayne (2002: ix, 2–3) remarks in his political critique of new European cinema, these premises serve to confuse and conflate the systemic proliferation of local and regional media with the very differences such media presume to represent. As a result, what Guido Rings and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas (2003: 15), writing on European film and identity, refer to as “other definitions of the ‘postcolonial’ developed by the periphery,” for example the “subaltern oppositional practices” which Kosnick (2007: 19, 183) argues entail “actual minority participation and sharing of power,” are implicitly excluded.

Although post-Wende German cinema studies has concerned itself more consistently with sociocultural “otherness,” the revision of theoretical frameworks necessary to the genuine integration of intellectual differences entailed by such concerns has been less forthcoming (Rings and Morgan-Tamosunas, 2003: 15; see also Wayne, 2002: vii, 3–4; Galt, 2006: 3–7). As a partial antidote, Kosnick (2007: 6) proposes that German cultural scholarship link semiotic analysis, political and economic data-gathering, and historiographical investigation rather than continuing to separate them methodologically. The effect of this persisting nonintegration, echoing film production tendencies, is a plethora of lip-service paid to differences understood implicitly as capital surplus rather than, more constructively we believe, as genuinely transformative intellectual resources.

Perhaps most symptomatic of this problem is the array of above-referenced scholarly texts circulating on the state-run East German film studio, DEFA (Deutsche Film Aktionsgesellschaft). According to Dennis Broe’s contribution on East German Westerns, or Indianerfilme, which launches the present volume, and as David Brandon Dennis’s ensuing paper on Heiner Carow’s cinematic oeuvre stands to counter, contemporary DEFA scholarship has for all intents and purposes tended to throw out the socially emancipatory baby with the politically oppressive bathwater. As Meta Mazaj (2011) suggests in another context, Western European critics have continued to position Eastern European films as relatively transparent allegories of Communism and its legacy, thereby eliding through a process of metonymic projection the indigenous value of such films as well as the myriad forms of oppression and exploitation visible in and promoted by Western cinema that are critiqued variously, in often noteworthy fashion, by Eastern European cinema. While Broe questions Western scholarly resistance to the Indianerfilme’s critiques of European colonialism and racism in the Americas, and as Dennis theorizes Carow’s protoqueer cinema as a call for more genuinely democratic configurations of socialism, Julia Knight’s contribution on immediate post-Wall documentaries regarding the effects of the Wende in Eastern Germany carries the tenor of such critiques into the post-reunification era, asking further, if implicitly, in relation to filmic examinations of nationalist identity formations on both sides of the former Berlin Wall, whether it is even possible any longer to answer such a call in light of the dire economic conditions faced by Eastern residents, their ongoing experiences of trauma, and the West’s continued selective, veritably mythological viewing of their deteriorating situation.

For Anthony Enns, the answer to this implied question is a qualified “yes.” Enns sees critical resistance to the failures and limitations of reunification inscribing the recent wave of German Ostalgie (postsocialist nostalgia) films. In contrast to widespread views deriding these films primarily as commercial compromises, Enns examines how they nonetheless illustrate the moral bankruptcy of a capitalist system that has been unable to address current economic and cultural challenges and a desire to reevaluate the state of a country still in flux fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Similarly David Clarke’s analysis of interstitial space within films of the post-Wende “Berlin School” demonstrates the extent to which these likewise popular, often internationally successful films undertake a critique of the post-reunification social and economic order by in some respects returning to the kind of political auteurism that characterized the New German Cinema and now is characterized by modes of territorial – and ideational – reappropriation. By the same token, but on the other hand, Jennifer Ruth Hosek’s critique of post-Wende “Neue Heimat” (New Homeland) films, including but not limited to Berlin Films, locates and historicizes nostalgic “spaces of belonging” in this nascent genre in terms of their “-isms of propinquity,” that is, their venerations of sameness which hearken to uncannily familiar nationalisms, racisms, sexisms, and classisms from within contemporary neoliberal conditions of crossborder capital flow and (de)regulation.

The prevalent, hotly contested issue of (post)national border-crossing is taken up in this context. While Hosek demonstrates the reinscription of neonationalist Heimat in popular German films of the post-Wende era, Gayatri Devi’s appreciation of one such film, Unveiled (Fremde Haut, Angelina Maccarone, 2005), implicitly extends David Clarke’s thesis to the register of critical spectatorship, in turn deconstructing and resituating Heimat as a matrix of radical social transformation in the era of neocolonialism. Likewise rethinking the cinematic articulation of national (un)homeliness is Claudia Pummer’s critique of the canonized critical reception of the Alsatian avant-garde filmmaking team Straub–Huillet. Pummer retrieves and revisits the French auteurism that has begun to be mined by scholars in relation to Straub–Huillet’s “German” cinematic oeuvre, in turn arguing for an anticolonialist as well as antinationalist allegoricality at its experimental core, and furthermore rejecting abstract formalist claims that these directors’ biographical narratives and discursive-historical conditions are without significance for their materialist aesthetic concerns.

Not unpredictably, these investigations converge at the theoretical intersection of transnational cultural and economic conditions within post-reunification Germany and their implications for the country’s public and intellectual spheres. How, in effect, they ask, to recall Rivi (2007: 1), does German totality “break down”? Implied, that is, by several of this volume’s contributions is the radical potential of grounding the fetishistic mise-en-abyme of “otherness” promoted by European ethnomarketing in the situated coordinates of material history. Hence Peter Limbrick analyzes the experimental documentary work of Kamal Aljafari, whose cinematic critiques of national home extend from Germany to Iraq to Palestine/Israel, at once symptomatizing and critically negotiating the Germano-European training and funding enabling and overdetermining such revisioning in the context of exilic diaspora. Similarly Savaş Arslan reunderstands the Turkish-German films of Fatih Akın as delineating a new, if evidently less oppositional post-reunification subjectivity located within, and to some extent against, predominant (trans)national formations because traceable historico-aesthetically to a really existing “other” home whose im/possible attainment stands to challenge the interests of the German self-same. For Priscilla Layne, such a critical redirection of the transnational marks a crucial missing link within Fassbinder scholarship. Layne argues that predominant privileging of the paradigmatic New German Cinema Autor’s reappropriation of Hollywood melodramas directed by exiled German filmmakers has served to neglect his appropriation of the popular genre’s critique by the US Blaxploitation genre, as epitomized by Fassbinder’s “least successful film,” Whity (1970) – like the Indianerfilme a critical take on both Hollywood and revisionist Westerns and their nostalgic quests for racialized Lebensraum.

By contrastive extension, the relative dearth of sustained scholarly attention to historical German popular-commercial cinema is lent redress by Harald Steinwender and Alexander Zahlten’s critical survey of the 1960s–1970s German sexploitation genre. Steinwender and Zahlten explore the contours of this underexamined genre, revealing its limited deconstruction of Germany’s post-Marshall Plan, Cold War-era attempts to invigorate European national film cultures via intracontinental co-productions funded by television. Sexploitation’s ironical destabilization of Euro-Western nation-statism marks the dialectical center of this ostensibly international and undeniably taboo-breaking endeavor, whereupon it serves as an instructive occasion for gauging the ideology-effects of popular-commercial cinematic innovation transnationally. On the other hand, the critically sidelined documentaries of Jochen Hick, made largely in and about gay male and transgender sex cultures in the post-AIDS United States and former Soviet bloc, break the ideological boundaries of their filmed subjects, even while arguably appearing structurally and stylistically rather conventional. According to Robert M. Gillett, these independent, internationally interested films at once historicize and problematize erotic and sexual exposure and the desire for it, its often simultaneous exploitation and suppression, while, recalling David Dennis on Heiner Carow’s “third way,” acknowledging the basic human need for sexual expression in its recognized manifold forms.

In this critical spirit, Nadja Krämer’s critique of the post-Nazi era remasculization of German culture via the immensely popular and successful 1950s Sissi films exposes the ideological role these studio products played in advocating Cold War-era German rearmament. In turn Silke Arnold-de Simine supplies a crosscultural analysis of well-known German crossdressing films of the 1930s (Weimar period) and 1950s, and of their immensely popular and successful US remakes by European directors during the 1950s and 1980s. Both essays stand to recognize the contemporary tendency, marked by the post-Wall scholarly turn to popular-commercial German films, toward normalization, while proposing, apropos of Jennifer Hosek on Neue Heimat films, to critique it. The significance of feminism and queer theory for and within these endeavors cannot be overlooked, nor should their developing relationship to critical race and post-/anticolonial theories – which Krämer in turn exemplifies when highlighting the role played by enforced postwar family formations in facilitating German hegemony within the Western Germanophone bloc (in this instance Austria), and which Arnold-de Simine pursues when revealing the relative limits of cinematic gender-bending in comparative (inter)national contexts.

These issues are also of import to contemporary German cinema, whether commercial or art-house, where they have prompted public debates over key, ongoing German concerns about the Nazi period. Sally Winkle tests former New German Cinema Autorin Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse (2003) against critical claims that this film’s portrayal of “Aryan” women’s resistance to the Nazi-era arrests and deportations of their Jewish husbands instances a co-opted feminism in the service of apologetic right-revisionism. By contrast, Domenica Vilhotti discusses post-New German Cinema Autor Andres Veiel’s post-Holocaust documentary, Balagan (1994), with respect to that film’s provocative simulation of the “femininized” (see Vukadinović, Chapter 18, in this volume) abjection performed critically by Israeli/Palestinian avant-garde stage actors likewise engaged in reunderstanding the Holocaust for and in the present day. The abiding questions here of historical German violence and its cinematic inscriptions extend in turn to the post-Wall wave of RAF films, a veritable genre propagating revisionist views of the now-defunct Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction) and its controversial policy of Linksterrorismus (“leftist terrorism”). In his paper on the international box-office hit, The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008), Vojin Saša Vukadinović offers an immanent critique of mainstream/centrist criticisms of this phenomenon, especially its tenuous relationship to feminism and the popular mass base, thus contributing to current debates in the German public sphere, and across the political spectrum, over these issues and the function of moving-image culture in fostering critical thinking about political activism and social change.

Indeed the possibility that moving-image aesthetics and their modalities of (re)production are effective public intellectual occasions and vehicles for transformation in the transnational era comprises the problematics of Frances Guerin’s appreciation of Harun Farocki’s avant-garde documentary, Videograms of a Revolution (Videogramme einer Revolution, 1992), which supplies an aesthetic analysis of the televisual (mis)representation of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. The possibility that images are conceivable as nonlinguistic forms of communicative expression wielding objective power bespeaks rationales for their containment and censorship, as Terri Ginsberg discusses further within the context of critiquing a German academic feminist listserv debate over the “Jewish-German” film comedy, Go for Zucker! (Alles auf Zucker! 2004). Ginsberg’s concern that objectivity not be misrecognized as ideology, and hence foreclosed, echoes an ironical comment by Michael Haneke, the internationally most renowned and celebrated of the post-Wende Autoren, who states in an interview that

The demand for “objectivity” is quite strange in a medialized world in which the majority is concerned simply with reassuring and glossing over. Why not allow cinema to speak about the neglected areas of reality? Violence and emotional coldness are dominant characteristics of our neoliberal dog-eat-dog society – is it really one-sided to portray them in an exemplary way accordingly? We are living in a violent world. (Grabner, 2010: 19; our emphasis)

Via his contribution on the viscerally disturbing films of Eastern German filmmaker Aelrun Goette, whose oeuvre focuses a materialist feminist lens on violent mothers and their neglected children, David James Prickett fittingly reminds that cinema can – indeed must – intervene literally into a dysfunctional public sphere in order to prevent or ameliorate social injustice. This possibility may be what Tara Forrest likewise means to suggest as she extends Critical Theory to a reading of “utopianism” in Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (71 Fragmente einer Chronologie des Zufalls, 1994); it is at least what we mean to suggest with the present anthological compilation.

In fact the socially transformative potential signified by the present volume’s attention, by way of its 21 newly commissioned contributions, to marginalized, misunderstood, and neglected films, genres, directors, discourses, and theories marks what we believe is a necessary shift in the field away from overriding concerns with internal subjective states and spectator-effects toward reclaiming and (re)theorizing the objective orientation and significance of the larger moving-image apparatus and its filmic (and video and digital) occasionings. While by no means abandoning textual analysis, for instance – the majority of the contributions to this volume engage in this essential practice, through formalist and/or thematic methodologies – and while recognizing as well the nontextual determinants of any cinematic reading – all of the volume’s contributions supply some form of contextual and/or structural historiography – A Companion to German Cinema aims to redirect the study of German cinema toward the question of its social-material vanishing point, a horizon-tal location through whose spectral scope the field may be repositioned to perform what Rivi (2007: 1) has called “Europe ‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown,’ ” that is, to ramify a radically unsettled reenvisaging of that persistently contested geocultural place.

With this in mind, we have organized the contributions to this volume, with a nod to Michel Pêcheux (1982), into three barely marked, chronologically unordered “movements,” each meant to signify a relative ideational moment in this proposed dialectics of objective vanishing: (1) destabilization; (2) dislocation; (3) disidentification. The reader will note in this respect that the contributions have not been selected in strict conformity with the disciplinary boundaries or protocols typically associated with the study of German cinema and culture; A Companion to German Cinema introduces several new scholars, some from fields traditionally not centered, conceptually or historically, upon the study of German cinema or visual culture. Whereas we do not necessarily agree with or condone all of their premises, approaches, or conclusions, we aim for each of these contributions to be judged, together and apart, on the basis of the potential it brings to exemplify and elaborate the delineated moments of German cinema’s suggested reenvisaging and thus to transpose the theoretical vanishing point, structured by the volume, into its transformative reprise: a requiem for cinematic voices previously unheard and for cinematic images previously unseen, now at l(e)ast (re)emergent and projecting loudly and clearly from the vantage of their objective (un)timeliness – what Walter Benjamin might have called their Jetztzeit.

July 2011

Notes

1 An evident symptom of this decrease is the spate of German departmental and program closures and interdisciplinary mergers – or plans for such – across the United States in recent years. Affected institutions include Illinois Wesleyan University, Minnesota State University–Mankato, University of Iowa, University of Nevada–Reno, SUNY–Albany, and Virginia Commonwealth University – and numerous others.

2 Perhaps the public height of this sociocultural arrogance was reached in October 2010 by German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, who, shortly following the release of a study by a German think-tank which revealed that more than 30% of Germans believe their country is “overrun by foreigners” (Christian Science Monitor, 2011), declared that multiculturalism in Germany “has utterly failed” (Weaver, 2010) – and blamed this purported failure on immigrants themselves for allegedly not having learned enough German to justify their sustained employment in the country. For another, by now notorious example of concomitant anti-immigrant discourse in the German public sphere, see Sarazzin, 2010. For a critical review of Sarazzin, see Ash, 2011.

3 E.g. Schulte-Sasse, 1996; Bonnell, 1998; Linville, 1998; Lungstrum, 1998; New German Critique, 1998; Thompson, 1999; Fox, 2000; Moeller, 2000; Reimer, 2000; Welch, 2000; Fox, 2001; Hake, 2001; Hoerschelmann, 2001; Romani, 2001; Shandley, 2001; Ascheid, 2003; Hake, 2002; Koepnick, 2002; Kansteiner, 2003; Moltke, 2003; Schoeps, 2003; Winkel, 2003a,b; Carter, 2004; Culbert, 2004; Lubich, 2004; Peukert, 2004; Dickie, 2005; Currid, 2006; Bendix, 2007; Gelbin, 2007; Horbrügger, 2007; New German Critique, 2007; Paver, 2007; Pelzer, 2007; Schmitz, 2007; Strobl, 2007; Fisher, 2008; Fuchs, 2008; Pages, Majer-O’Sickey, and Riehl, 2008; Prager, 2008.

4 E.g. Creech, 2008; Linville, 1998; Majer-O’Sickey and Zadow, 1998; Dassanowsky, 1999; Wager, 1999; Fox, 2000; McCarthy, 2000; Mennel and Onigiri, 2000; Müller, 2000; Wilke, 2000; McCormick, 2001, 2002; Specter, 2001; Mayne, 2004; Rupprecht, 2006; Stoicea, 2006; Pinkert, 2008.

5 E.g. Halle, 2000; Kuzniar, 2000; Davidson, 2002; Kaplan, 2002; Mitchell, 2004; Gelbin, 2007.

6 E.g. Müller-Bach, 1997; Allan and Sandford, 1999; Gemünden, 1999; Meurer, 2000; Fox, 2001; Feinstein, 2001; New German Critique, 2001; Naughton, 2002; Petrie, 2004; Pike, 2004; Steinmetz and Viehoff, 2004; Dittmar, 2005; Imre, 2005; Berghan, 2006; Stoicea, 2006; Dewald, 2007; Enns, 2007; Pinkert, 2008.

7 E.g. Davidson, 1999; Fenner, 2000; Koepnick, 2000; Betz, 2001; Oksiloff, 2001; Anderson, 2002; Jacobsen, 2003; Jones, 2003; New German Critique, 2004; Lieberfeld, 2005; Zwick, 2006; Benbow, 2007; Blumenrath et al., 2007; Gerhardt, 2007; Halle, 2008; Kosnick, 2007; Bouchehri, 2008.

8 E.g. Costabile-Heming et al., 2001; Majer-O’Sickey, 2002; New German Critique, 2002; Preece, 2003; Hantke, 2004; Lieberfeld, 2005; Clarke, 2006; Cormican, 2007; McAllister, 2007; German Politics and Society, 2007, 2008; Screen, 2007; Horn, 2008.

9 E.g. Cook and Gemünden, 1997; Lutze, 1998; Gunning, 2000; Jesinghausen, 2000; Lutze, 2000; Graf, 2002; Skidmore, 2002; Flinn, 2003; Halle and McCarthy, 2003; Praeger, 2003; Arnold-de Simine, 2004; Bergfelder, 2004; Birgel and Phillips, 2004; Robertson, 2004; Thomson, 2004; Hofer, 2005; Koestenbaum, 2005/2006; Silvestra, 2005; Langford, 2006; Moeller and Lelli, 2006; Davidson and Hake, 2007; Hosek, 2007; Praeger, 2007; Fujiwara, 2008; Hirsch, 2008; Horvath and Omasta, 2008; McIsaac, 2008; Rickels, 2008.

10 E.g. Levin, 1998; Robinson, 1998; Gleber, 1999; Steakley, 1999; Wager, 1999; Elsaesser, 2000; Calhoon, 2001; Ward, 2001; Aspetsberger, 2002; McCormick, 2002; Prawer, 2002; Kester, 2003; Knight, 2003; Mennel, 2003; Roper, 2003; Scheunemann, 2003; Winkler, 2003a; Pike, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Currid, 2006; Jelavich, 2006; Cowan, 2007; Ganeva, 2007; Ascárate, 2008; Ashkenazi, 2008; Hall, 2008; Richter, 2008; Roberts, 2008.

11 E.g. Dassanowsky and Steiner, 1997; Dimendberg, 1997; Dassanowsky, 2001; Latham, 2003; Petrie, 2004; Bahr, 2007; Gelbin, 2007; Haase, 2007; Fay, 2008.

12 E.g. Gemünden, 1998; Maske under Kothern, 2001; Dassanowsky, 2003, 2005; Krenn, 2007.

13 E.g. Wedel, 1999; Wege and Böger, 1999; Welsch, 1999; Koch, 2000; Strathausen, 2000; Szaloky, 2002; Halle and Steingröver, 2008; Elsaesser, 2004; Hansen, 2004; Nieberle, 2004; Claussen, 2005; Guerin, 2005; Vollmer, 2006; Bernhard, 2007; Ostermann, 2007; Schönfeld and Rasche, 2007; Stilwell and Powrie, 2007; Wheatley, 2009; Grundmann, 2010; Ornella and Knauss, 2010; Price and Rhodes, 2010; Speck, 2010.

14 Kosnick here avers, quoting Dominic Boyer, that such values are designated and promoted as “European” rather than “German” due to the perceived persisting need by Germany to shed its Nazi (violent racist) associations. For Kosnick, such “shedding” has become little more than disavowal in the context of multicultural ethnomarketing.

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