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Film and Memory in East Germany
Anke Pinkert
Anke Pinkert explores films produced in the Soviet Occupation Zone and
East Germany from the end of World War II through the early 1960s,
offering new insights into how Germans dealt with the aftermath of the
war. In her cultural analysis of the relationship between modern
historical violence, cultural memory, and cinematic representation,
Pinkert argues that the cinematic productions of East Germany offer a
corrective to misperceptions about German responses to the legacy of the
war.
Film and Memory in East Germany considers antifascist films of the
immediate postwar period, which depict the reintegration of former
soldiers into society and the crisis of masculinity that accompanied the
aftermath of the war; the socialist films of the late 1940s and 1950s,
which attempt to shape a new national imaginary through stories of
exemplary socialist womanhood; and, finally, the cinematic return to
1945 in socialist modernist films of the 1960s.
Anke Pinkert is Assistant Professor of German and Cinema Studies at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on postwar
German literature, film, and cultural history in German Quarterly,
Seminar, and Germanic Review.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Cinematic Specters of History as Memory
Part 1. Vanishing Returnees: War Trauma, Antifascism, and the Crisis of
Masculinity (1940s)
1. Flashbacks and Psyche-The Murderers Are among Us
2. Grieving Dead Soldiers-Somewhere in Berlin
3. Psychotic Breaks and Conjugal Rubble-Wozzeck
4. Suicidal Males and Reconstruction-Our Daily Bread
Part 2. Fantasmatic Fullness: Strained Female Subjectivity and Socialist
Dreams (1950s)
5. Silent Mothers: Air War as Intimate Memory-Rotation
6. Stalin's Daughters on the Verge-The Story of a Young Couple and
Destinies of Women
7. Missing Smile: Psychic Paralysis and Production-Sun Seekers
Part 3. Germany, Year Zero: Recasting the Past in the Present (1960s)
8. Postmelancholic Memory Projections-I Was Nineteen
9. Modern Loss and Mourning Plays-Born in '45
Epilogue: Vacant History, Empty Screens-Postcommunist Films of the 1990s
Filmography
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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