Screening war
Subtitle: perspectives on German suffering
By: edited by Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman.
Contributors: Cooke, Paul, 1969-; Silberman, Marc, 1948-
Series: Screen cultures
Publisher: Camden House
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Rochester, N.Y
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781571134370
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945 -- Motion pictures and the war; War films -- Germany -- History -- 20th century; Suffering in motion pictures; Psychic trauma in motion pictures; Germans in motion pictures
Description: 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 miniseries 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. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: German suffering? / Paul Cooke and Marc Silberman; title: Hidden screens: soldiers, martyrs, innocent German victims. Armchair warriors: heroic postures in the West German war film / Jennifer M. Kapczynski; title: German martyrs: images of Christianity and resistance to National Socialism in German cinema / David Clarke; title: The rhetoric of victim narratives in West German films of the 1950s / Manuel Kappen; title: Projection screens: disavowing loss, transforming antifascism, contesting memories. Sissi the terrible: melodrama, victimhood, and imperial nostalgia in the Sissi trilogy / Erica Carter; title: Political affects: antifascism and the Second World War in Frank Beyer and Konrad Wolf / Sabine Hake; title: Shadowlands: the memory of the Ostgebiete in contemporary German film and television / Tim Bergfelder; title: Display screens: generational traumas, untimely passions, open wounds. Links and chains: trauma between the generations in the Heimat mode / Rachel Palfreyman; title: Resistance of the heart: female suffering and victimhood in DEFA's antifascist films / Daniela Berghahn; title: Suffering and sympathy in Volker Schlöndorff's Der neunte Tag and Dennis Gansel's NaPolA / Brad Prager; title: Split screens: ambiguous authorities; title: Decentered emotions, performed identities. Eberhard Fechner's history of suffering: tv talk, temporal distance, spatial displacement / John E. Davidson; title: The politics of feeling: Alexander Kluge on war, film, and emotion / Johannes von Moltke; title: Post-unification German-Jewish relations and the discourse of victimhood in Dani Levy's films / Sen Allan.