Call for Papers
Andres Veiel: Violent Legacies
One-day Symposium, University of Edinburgh, 5 September 2014
Andres Veiel (born 1959) is one of Germany’s most significant directors working in film and theatre today. Growing up in Stuttgart, Veiel witnessed the rise and fall of the RAF, even visiting the notorious Stammheim trials, and these events have had a profound impact on his thinking. The effects of power and violence (‘Gewalt’) constitute a kind of legacy for the director, and they are the focus of his primarily documentary work (the Holocaust in Balagan, postwar conservativism in Die Überlebenden, left-wing extremism in Blackbox BRD and Wer wenn nicht wir?, resurgent right-wing extremism in Der Kick, and the financial crisis in Das Himbeerreich). Veiel approaches his subject through a painstaking process of personal interaction with those affected and his sustained observations reveal the complex links between the personal, the social and the political. Above all Veiel attempts to record the effects of violence and power differently, specifically through the integration of perspectives which might otherwise be excluded from official accounts and which might shed a different light on Germany’s past and present.
This symposium will bring together scholars working on German cinema, theatre and culture to discuss the significance of Veiel’s work. Papers are invited on topics including, but not limited to:
• Memory and violence
• postwar legacies (the Holocaust, National Socialism, the RAF)
• theatre and performance (power play, the figure of the artist, the Lehrstück, documentary theatre, influence of Peter Weiss)
• representation of/confrontation with the other
• Veiel’s work in the context of European cinema (particularly in relation to Kieslowski)
Please send a short abstract (200-250 wds) to Dora Osborne ([log in to unmask]) by 30 June.
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