Suchergebnisse

Imperial Germany : towards the commercialization of culture / Robin Lenman, John Osborne, Eda Sagarra -- Weimar culture : the birth of modernism / Stephan Lamb, Anthony Phelan -- Culture and the organization of national socialist ideology 1933 to 1945 / Wilfried van der Will -- The failed socialist experiment : culture in the GDR / Axel Goodbody, Dennis Tate, Ian Wallace -- Reconstruction and integration : the culture of West German stabilization 1945 to 1968 / Keith Bullivant, C. Jane Rice -- The Federal Republic 1968 to 1990 : from the industrial society to the culture society / Rob Burns, Wilfried van der Will -- Unification and its aftermath : the challenge of history / Godfrey Carr, Georgina Paul

Just as Berlin as a political, social, ethnic, and material entity has undergone considerable change since 1989, so too the cinematic representations of the new capital over the last twenty years or so have projected a diverse set of images of the city. This article considers a selection of fiction films that can be grouped together under three broad thematic category headings: those dealing with Berlin's past, those addressing the city's multicultural identity and, most substantially, those films in which the capital of the new "Berlin Republic" can be read as a metaphor for postunification Germany. What all three categories have in common, it is argued, is that the image of Berlin that emerges from most of these films remains an overwhelmingly negative one, with the city portrayed predominantly as a site of either conflict or disorientation.

This article considers the development of Turkish-German cinema, situating it in relation to both the early manifestations of a diasporic literature in Germany and the attempts by filmmakers associated with the New German Cinema to represent the experience of migrants in the Federal Republic. These films were frequently criticised for reducing their protagonists to stereotypes, portraying the migrant as victim and focusing excessively on conflict of an intercultural or intracultural kind. The 1990s saw the emergence of a younger generation of Turkish directors in Germany intent on breaking away from this 'cinema of the affected' by not foregrounding the problematisation of alterity. The article concludes by examining the recent work of one of these directors, Thomas Arslan, and assesses its success in representing 'life in, as well as between, two cultures'. (German Politics / FUB)

This essay argues that Sebald's entire work is informed by a negative ontology which has gained particular force and visibility in 'modernity', a period beginning, according to Sebald, with Napoleon 'at the latest'. In a secular echo of the Bible's teaching that nature is 'fallen' Sebald repeatedly hints that Being is misconstructed and that humans, with their apparently limitless capacity to inflict suffering, are subsumed under this verdict too. As possible sources for this view, this essay makes use of Sebald's papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv at Marbach am Neckar (DLA). It then discusses some of the ways in which this negative ontology appears in Sebald's work and concludes by showing why the author finally considers that the task of art, particularly literature, is to engage in creative activity as a labour of mourning and a demonstration of solidarity with those who suffer.