The Place of Politics in German Film

This collection of essays offers a discussion of film and its relation to the political in the broader sense. Encompassing roughly ten decades of German history, it touches on such pressing political themes as immigration policy, surveillance, war and terrorism. While these issues have stimulated considerable thought and debate in recent decades, this collection distinguishes itself by asking to what degree each film’s mode of presentation, its cinematic qualities and aesthetic specificities, complicates the issues explicitly discussed. The Place of Politics in German Film thus shows the way in which key German filmmakers challenge and disturb the relation between filmic form and politics, medium and message.

Martin Blumenthal-Barby is Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies at Rice University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2008. His current book project is entitled The Asymmetric Gaze: Cinema and Surveillance. He is author of the monograph Inconceivable Effects: Ethics through Twentieth-Century German Literature, Thought, and Film, which was published by Cornell University Press in 2013.

Acknowledgments Martin Blumenthal-Barby Topologies of Film and Politics: Introduction Nicholas Baer Messianic Musclemen: Homunculus (1916) and Der Golem (1920) as Zionist Allegories Kata Gellen Real Estate, Residency, and Mobility: Circulation in Nosferatu Anton Kaes Urban Vision and Surveillance: Notes on a Moment in Karl Grune’s Die Straße Valerie A. Weinstein Third Reich Film Comedy as a Place of Politics: Masculinity, Marriage, and Mayhem in Karl Ritter’s Capriccio (1938) Jaimey Fisher The Scales of War (Films): The Sounds of Combat and Politics of Genre in Frank Wisbar’s Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever? (1959) Thomas Elsaesser Antigone Agonistes: Urban Guerilla or Guerilla Urbanism? The Red Army Faction, Germany in Autumn and Death Game Christina Gerhardt The RAF as German and Family History: Von Trotta’s Marianne and Juliane and Petzold’s The State I Am In Larson Powell The Spectral Politics of DEFA Jennifer Ruth Hosek Geographies of Power and Surveillance: Christian Petzold’s Gespenster Trilogy Carsten Strathausen The Space of Subjectivity in Berlin School Cinema Angelica Fenner The Gen(t)rification of Heimat: Framing Hamburg’s Creative Class in Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen (2009) Brad Prager Lars Kraume’s The Coming Days (2010) and the History of Tomorrow: Apocalypse Not Yet Notes on Contributors Index