Marc Silberman Bücher

A historical overview of German film from the silent era to the present, presenting close readings of 14 films from five major historical periods of German cinema. Each chapter analyzes a single film, discussing filmmakers' personal styles, genre, and modes of narration, and looks at the wider contexts of film production and reception including political issues and social change. Films include a Nazi propaganda musical, Ernst Lubitsch's Passion, and Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Includes film credits for each film, bandw photos, and extensive notes. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The book explores the profound impact of the Berlin Wall's fall, highlighting its revitalizing influence on Germany and the complexities of integrating diverse minorities into a cohesive society. It delves into the challenges of forging a new European identity amidst these changes. Additionally, the volume examines the media's portrayal of this pivotal event, offering insights into how public perception shaped the narrative surrounding the Wall's collapse and its aftermath.

In the course of the 1970s, interdisciplinary German studies emerged in North America, breaking with what many in the field saw as a suffocating and politically tainted tradition of canon-based philology by broadening both the corpus of texts and the framing concept of culture. In the meantime the innovative impulses that characterized this response to the legacy of Germanistik have themselves become traditions. The essays in this volume critically examine a selection of those past attempts at renewal to gauge where we are now and how we move into the future: exile and forced migration, race and identity, humanism and utopian thought, solidarity and global inequality. A younger generation of scholars demonstrates how reviving and refining the questions of yore leads to new insights into literary and theatrical texts, fundamental philosophical and political ideas, and the structure of memory in ethnographic performance and photography. Looking back into the future is a self-reflexive gesture that asks how tradition inspires innovation, and it displays compelling evidence for the importance of historically informed cultural research in the field of German studies.

This interdisciplinary volume addresses the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, from the revitalizing effect it had on Germany to the new challenges of integrating socially and politically old and new minorities, and forming a new European identity. It also considers how the fall was represented by the media.

Motion picture production, distribution, exhibition and reception has always been a transnational phenomenon, yet East Germany, situated at the edge of the post-war Iron Curtain, separated by a boundary that became materialized in the Berlin Wall in 1961, resembles nothing if not an island, a protected space where film production developed under the protection of government subsidy and ideological purity. This volume proposes on the contrary that the GDR cinema was never just a monologue. Rather, its media landscape was characterized by constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. These thirteen essays reshape DEFA cinema studies by exploring international networks, identifying lines of influence beyond national boundaries and recognizing genre qualities that surpass the temporal and spatial confines. The international team of film specialists present detailed analyses of over fifty films, including fiction features, adaptations of literary classics, children's films, documentaries, and examples from genres such as music, sci-fi, Westerns and crime films. With contributions by Seán Allan, Hunter Bivens, Benita Blessing, Barton Byg, Jaimey Fisher, Sabine Hake, Nick Hodgin, Manuel Köppen, Anke Pinkert, Larson Powell, Brad Prager, Marc Silberman, Stefan Soldovieri, andHenning Wrage.

One of the most radical, controversial works ever created by playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a devastating critique of capitalism. This volume includes twenty-nine essays in English and German that address Mahagonny from multiple perspectives: context, text, utopia, music, and the continuing influence of this opera more than three quarters of a century after its creation. The volume also contains original material by Brecht and an essay on Brecht in India. Distributed for the International Brecht Society ISSN 0734-8665

Volume 19 of the Brecht yearbook presents a previously unpublished play for children by Margarete Steffin, as well as assessments of her poetry, her biographical background and her contribution as Brecht's editor. It also includes a section on Korea Senda, Japan's most prominent director of Brecht.