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11 - Aerial Aesthetics, Queer Intimacy, and the Politics of Repose in the Cinema of Nils Bökamp and Monika Treut
- Edited by Claudia Breger, Columbia University, New York, Olivia Landry, Virginia Commonwealth University
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- Book:
- Transnational German Film at the End of Neoliberalism
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 May 2024
- Print publication:
- 12 March 2024, pp 202-218
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Summary
Queer German cinema in the aftermath of the 1960s and 70s cultural revolutions espoused what Alice A. Kuzniar describes as a cinematic “counterpolitics,” variously deployed against what today might be called cisheterocapitalist violence burdening queer life. Queer filmmakers of this era practiced a type of political cinema that turned to the documentation of structural violence against queer people and the expression of various forms of queer life in order to challenge dominant narratives about how to be in the world. On the basis of interviews with Stefanie Jordan, Bärbel Neubauer, and Matthias Müller, among others, Kuzniar established how the work of these filmmakers pursued a type of transformative spectatorship. Their queer cinematic practices position viewers to “reframe [their] desires and transform [themselves].” Kuzniar turns to Jörg Fockele to expound this claim. Fockele, expressing a dislike of queer feel-good romances with a low threshold for political transformation, calls for a cinema featuring “outrageously queer characters who do totally abnormal things and make the audience wonder.” Such cinematic techniques of excess would stimulate among viewers reflection about their investment in the status quo and prompt them to consider other ways of being in the world.
Nils Bökamp’s You & I (2014) and Monika Treut’s Von Mädchen und Pferden (Of Girls and Horses, 2014) might at first sight appear to be restrained rearticulations of the earlier counterpolitical queer German cinema. The aesthetic-political principle underpinning their films is indeed less characterized by queer suffering and audience provocation than by rest and repose. The queer characters in these films turn away from their daily lives in the city to embrace the countryside, where they overcome obstacles that burden queer relations. This is not to say, however, that Bökamp’s and Treut’s films are devoid of political transformation. Rather, they turn to a different configuration of political commitment than that familiar to the queer German cinema of the postwar generations. Favoring relational bonds that emerge from an opting out of normative rhythms of daily life, Bökamp and Treut pursue a cinematic mediation tactic that acknowledges queer struggle while also generating new strategies to overcome the burdens endemic to queer life under neoliberalism.
12 - Senescence and Fontane's Der Stechlin
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- By Ervin Malakaj, University of British Columbia.
- Edited by John B. Lyon, Brian Tucker
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- Book:
- Fontane in the Twenty-First Century
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 31 August 2019
- Print publication:
- 24 May 2019, pp 232-246
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IN THE DRAFT of a letter to Adolf Hoffmann from May/June 1897, Theodor Fontane describes Der Stechlin (1898) as a novel with a slim plot:
Zum Schluß stirbt ein Alter, und zwei Junge heiraten sich;—das ist so ziemlich alles, was auf 500 Seiten geschieht…. Alles Plauderei, Dialog, in dem sich die Charaktere geben, und mit ihnen die Geschichte.” (17:49)
[An old man dies at the end and two young people marry. That's pretty much all that happens on 500 pages…. All chatter, dialogue, in which the characters reveal themselves and through them the story.]
Scholarship on Der Stechlin has frequently returned to this letter as a starting point for analyses centering on Fontane's extensive dialogue scenarios. It focused particularly on Fontane's own assessment of the exchanges, which, according to the same letter, the author sees as a quintessential part of the mode of the Zeitroman. That is, the parochial locale of East Brandenburg sustains cosmopolitan ties during formal and informal conversations among characters and offers readers insight into the political and social realities of the time during which the novel was written. To this end, exchanges in the novel frequently unveil the waning influence of the aristocracy against the backdrop of bourgeoning social and political transformations throughout the German Empire. This is most visible in the loss of a local election for the title character, Dubslav Stechlin, who ran as the Conservative candidate in the region. The office instead goes to a cosmopolitan Social Democrat for the first time.
Although certainly a thorn in Dubslav's side, the shifting political and social climate in the region responsible for his loss in the election only temporarily weighs on his mind. In fact, while he appears excited about the election initially, he soon expresses little interest in the office and signals relief to have lost the election in the end. Still, Dubslav regularly airs concern about a changing world: nearly every conversation in the novel thematically relates tensions about the “old” and the “new.” Remarkably, each complaint is followed by his decision not to care too much about the matter. His old age appears to temper his anxieties about the present in some moments.
14 - Cruel Optimism, Post-68 Nostalgia, and the Limits of Political Activism in Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand
- Edited by Christina Gerhardt, Marco Abel
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- Book:
- Celluloid Revolt
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 237-252
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The critical reception of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand (Under the Pavement Lies the Strand, 1974/75) already categorized the film as a “a delayed debate about the political positions of the student movement and feminism” early on.Such criticism responds primarily to the film’s depiction of the theater performer couple Grischa (Grischa Huber) and Heinrich (Heinrich Giskes) in their struggle to reconcile the two competing impulses informing their daily life. Heinrich’s disenchantment with the failed promises of the broader antiauthoritarian movement, which activates his depression, clashes with an ardent desire to connect to the personal and political work of other women in West Berlin developed by Grischa over the course of the film. While portraying Heinrich as an emblem of the failed masculinist political energies of the 1968 movement, Grischa is shown ardently trying to achieve a livable future by learning from the women around her. The film is not, however, fully celebratory of Grischa. She gives in to the social and personal pressures to have a child in the midst of a self-actualizing mission partly inspired by the Women’s Movement. In this regard, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand advances a criticism against the changing landscape of activist work, as it connects to personal lives structured by pervasive unequal hetero-patriarchal power dynamics in the immediate aftermath of 1968.
Building on Renate Möhrmann’s assessment of Sanders-Brahms’s treatment of post-1968 sentiment in the film as a delayed response to the movement in comparison to her contemporaries, this chapter focuses on the presentness of 1968 energies in the film. Even though it was written and directed in the years 1974/75, Unter dem Pflaster ist der Strand firmly relates to the intellectual, political, and social histories of the 1968 antiauthoritarian movement. 1968 is captured as a point of reference in the film, whereby the political climate of 1968 continually informs the subject position of those inculcated by the movement’s global reach.In this light, the contested 1968 presentness, as characterized by the private and public political fragmentation regularly cited by Heinrich and critiqued by Grischa, solidifies two impulses in the film: on the one hand, a utopian backwardness fueled by nostalgia and, on the other hand, a “cruel optimism” registered in the potentials of self-liberation at the cost of personal relations.
Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes, ed. Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 2016. 431 pp.
- from Book Reviews
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- By Ervin Malakaj, Sam Houston State University
- Edited by Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 25
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2018, pp 322-323
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Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes have edited an exciting volume with a focus on literary cultures of the long nineteenth century. Their primary concern is to deploy the concepts “archive” and “archiving” as interpretive tools for texts produced in the context of the nineteenth-century media revolution as well as its concomitant expansion of information and knowledge networks. Drawing on classical works theorizing the archive (Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida), as well as established and emerging scholarship in media theory and history, the volume frames texts as depositories of information, on the one hand. On the other, the volume seeks to outline how texts themselves perform archiving of information thematically or formally. Here, Archiv/Fiktionen considers how the documentation and storage of information presented in texts fosters literary self-reflectivity in which literature's own awareness as archive of knowledge or as mode permitting a deep engagement with archiving at a time of information excess emerges.
Archiv/Fiktionen is comprised of a comprehensive introduction and nineteen chapters divided into four sections. Section one, “Institutionen,” considers an array of techniques of archiving articulated through institutions such as the museum, the private collection, an Universalbiliothek, and collected works of authors. Contributions by Ulrike Vedder, Christine Weder, Michael Niehaus, and Philip Ajouri examine how such institutions instantiate an archive as much as they offer moments to critically reflect the process of archiving as, for instance, Niehaus does in his assessment of the fictive concept of a universal library. The universal library may contain all the knowledge of the world, but the necessity to present it as a non-functional archive articulates a futility of narrating archival fiction because of the impossibility to convey individual (his)stories. Section two, “Fiktionen,” expresses in which ways narrative strategies resemble archiving processes in select texts and to what end. The section features work by Stefan Willer, Nicolas Pethes, Torsten Hahn, Claudia Liebrand, and Rolf Parr, whose chapters offer examples of narrative texts preoccupied with the thematic of the archive. For example, Liebrand explains how Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's narrative approaches in select texts depend on a reimagining of an existing archive to form another, which, through this narrative transfiguration, (productively) distorts the aura of the original.