ABSTRACT:A unique collaboration between West German television journalists and the Israeli journalist Vera Elyashiv led to the production of the documentary film Mit den Augen einer Israeli: Beobachtungen in der Bundesrepublik (1962, Through the Eyes of an Israeli: Observations on the German Federal Republic). I argue that this hitherto neglected film conveys an exceptional image of West Germany toward the end of the Adenauer era that challenges the concept of "the new Germany." This article explores the film in the historical-political context of its production and screening, focusing on Elyashiv's decision to maintain the ambiguity of her biography as a Holocaust survivor while formulating an indictment of contemporary German society and its political leadership.
摘要:西德电视记者与以色列记者维拉·埃利亚希夫(Vera Elyashiv)的一次独特合作，制作了纪录片《Mit den Augen einer israel: Beobachtungen in der Bundesrepublik》(1962，通过以色列人的眼睛:观察德意志联邦共和国)。我认为，这部迄今为止被忽视的电影传达了阿登纳时代末期西德的特殊形象，挑战了“新德国”的概念。本文将在电影制作和放映的历史政治背景下探讨这部电影，重点关注Elyashiv决定保持她作为大屠杀幸存者的传记的模糊性，同时对当代德国社会及其政治领导层提出控诉。
{"title":"A Witness for the Prosecution: An Israeli Filmmaker's Reflections on Adenauer's New Germany","authors":"H. Lavie","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0021","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:A unique collaboration between West German television journalists and the Israeli journalist Vera Elyashiv led to the production of the documentary film Mit den Augen einer Israeli: Beobachtungen in der Bundesrepublik (1962, Through the Eyes of an Israeli: Observations on the German Federal Republic). I argue that this hitherto neglected film conveys an exceptional image of West Germany toward the end of the Adenauer era that challenges the concept of \"the new Germany.\" This article explores the film in the historical-political context of its production and screening, focusing on Elyashiv's decision to maintain the ambiguity of her biography as a Holocaust survivor while formulating an indictment of contemporary German society and its political leadership.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"223 - 242"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47333944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir (review)","authors":"Kathleen James-Chakraborty","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0037","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"388 - 390"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41819038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:The compositions of the Jewish-Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) are often read as responding to Wagner's music and ideas, but for Zemlinsky, his mentor Gustav Mahler was a more logical point of orientation. This paper shows how a number of works by Zemlinsky that use fairy-tale plots—the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (1905), the opera Der Zwerg (1922), and the song "Das bucklichte Männlein" (1934)—respond to models provided by Mahler. The paper focuses, in particular, on traces of the Jewish body in Zemlinsky's musical fairy tales and their relation to aesthetic modernism. Through its insistence on the deficient and damaged body and its cultural frames, Zemlinsky's music demonstrates the untenability of Mahler's modernist aesthetics when confronted with the racial politics of (early) fascism.
{"title":"Zemlinsky contra Mahler: Aesthetic Modernism, the Jewish Body, and the Violence of Fairy Tales","authors":"C. Niekerk","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0020","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:The compositions of the Jewish-Austrian composer Alexander Zemlinsky (1871–1942) are often read as responding to Wagner's music and ideas, but for Zemlinsky, his mentor Gustav Mahler was a more logical point of orientation. This paper shows how a number of works by Zemlinsky that use fairy-tale plots—the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (1905), the opera Der Zwerg (1922), and the song \"Das bucklichte Männlein\" (1934)—respond to models provided by Mahler. The paper focuses, in particular, on traces of the Jewish body in Zemlinsky's musical fairy tales and their relation to aesthetic modernism. Through its insistence on the deficient and damaged body and its cultural frames, Zemlinsky's music demonstrates the untenability of Mahler's modernist aesthetics when confronted with the racial politics of (early) fascism.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"203 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45256180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Kristin Poling’s thoroughly researched study of modernizing nineteenth-century German cities explores how urban borders became sites for debating local histories, contemporary challenges, and plans for future growth. Adopting the notion of “frontier,” a term the author acknowledges is often associated with claims of American exceptionalism through westward conquest and settlement, Poling argues that Germans, too, came to see the shifting edges of their cities to be frontiers for expansion and opportunity. The book’s five chapters analyze the transformation of Leipzig, Oldenburg, Paderborn, Berlin, and Nuremberg, illustrating broad trends in nineteenth-century urbanization as well as local conditions making each city’s growth and modernization unique. Poling has mined local and state archives and an impressive array of contemporary periodicals to reconstruct discussions among urban dwellers, planners, and authorities as they dismantled fortifications on their peripheries and then used the space to chart their city’s future development. Poling emphasizes that urban inhabitants generally agreed that removing old fortifications was desired to make their communities modern. While walls, gates, and moats had defended German cities since medieval times and protected their right to self-govern, by the late 1700s these fortifications were militarily obsolete, expensive to maintain, and restrictive of growth. Between 1790 and 1815, when the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by a political system in which laws defined and defended borders rather than walls, some 350 German cities dismantled large sections of their fortifications. Poling’s illuminating case studies begin in the early 1800s when German cities removed remnant fortifications on their “urban frontiers,” debating whether to use the newly available space to increase commerce and transportation, address housing shortages, or provide access to nature. Paradoxically, Poling explains, removing fortifications also sparked interest in preserving at least parts of old walls, especially iconic gates, as reminders of distinct communal histories. By the 1890s, when William II sought to develop an official national culture, remnant walls became prized symbols of regional traditions that could be seen as forming a united heritage of the new German Empire. Poling helps readers appreciate the local conditions influencing how cities shaped their peripheries. Leipzig’s leaders and planners were most concerned with making their defortified urban edge seem open to commerce. As a result, they blurred the visible boundary between city and countryside, first by creating a promenade in English
{"title":"Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City by Kristin Poling (review)","authors":"Sandra Chaney","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0031","url":null,"abstract":"Kristin Poling’s thoroughly researched study of modernizing nineteenth-century German cities explores how urban borders became sites for debating local histories, contemporary challenges, and plans for future growth. Adopting the notion of “frontier,” a term the author acknowledges is often associated with claims of American exceptionalism through westward conquest and settlement, Poling argues that Germans, too, came to see the shifting edges of their cities to be frontiers for expansion and opportunity. The book’s five chapters analyze the transformation of Leipzig, Oldenburg, Paderborn, Berlin, and Nuremberg, illustrating broad trends in nineteenth-century urbanization as well as local conditions making each city’s growth and modernization unique. Poling has mined local and state archives and an impressive array of contemporary periodicals to reconstruct discussions among urban dwellers, planners, and authorities as they dismantled fortifications on their peripheries and then used the space to chart their city’s future development. Poling emphasizes that urban inhabitants generally agreed that removing old fortifications was desired to make their communities modern. While walls, gates, and moats had defended German cities since medieval times and protected their right to self-govern, by the late 1700s these fortifications were militarily obsolete, expensive to maintain, and restrictive of growth. Between 1790 and 1815, when the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by a political system in which laws defined and defended borders rather than walls, some 350 German cities dismantled large sections of their fortifications. Poling’s illuminating case studies begin in the early 1800s when German cities removed remnant fortifications on their “urban frontiers,” debating whether to use the newly available space to increase commerce and transportation, address housing shortages, or provide access to nature. Paradoxically, Poling explains, removing fortifications also sparked interest in preserving at least parts of old walls, especially iconic gates, as reminders of distinct communal histories. By the 1890s, when William II sought to develop an official national culture, remnant walls became prized symbols of regional traditions that could be seen as forming a united heritage of the new German Empire. Poling helps readers appreciate the local conditions influencing how cities shaped their peripheries. Leipzig’s leaders and planners were most concerned with making their defortified urban edge seem open to commerce. As a result, they blurred the visible boundary between city and countryside, first by creating a promenade in English","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"375 - 377"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44592966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Die große Mischkalkulation: Institutions, Social Import, and Market Forces in the German Literary Field ed. by William Collins Donahue and Martin Kagel (review)","authors":"Ari Linden","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"401 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44496373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
symbol of resistance against regimes of flexibility and conformity—powerfully paint a portrait of a society in which feminist values are hopelessly neutralized under neoliberalism. This feminist-queer approach is discernible throughout the book, although it is most consistently and convincingly instrumentalized in the later chapters. In her reading of the underresearched film Fremde Haut (2005) directed by Angelina Maccarone, Baer productively builds on Halberstam’s labeling of the lesbian migrant Fariba who “passes” as Siamak as a trans* character and the theoretical framework this affords her. With an insightful and original focus on indebtedness in the film—that is, the different debts owed from each character to another—Baer exposes how precarity defines every person in the film, creating hierarchies, and reinforcing economies of exchange, while acknowledging the specific ways that these debts are particularly burdensome for minoritized genders and ethnicities. Baer further links economies of debt with the economies of looking that operate in the film, where reciprocal gazes or the exchange of a glance do not represent mutuality or understanding but are instead sexist or objectifying. This illuminating section left me wondering where the gaze of the spectator is focused in this film. Are we complicit in these neoliberal economies of debt as symbolized by the gaze? Or might the idea of the trans* gaze as theorized by Halberstam open up unexplored potential for challenging gendered and racialized gazes? German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism will be of great interest to scholars of cinema and of German, not least because of its forceful recasting of German cinema as saturated in money, i.e., the economization of society and its effects permeate filmmaking at every level. In this book, Baer lends us the language to examine further the unique ways in which films have the capacity to simultaneously exist within, reflect on, and challenge the neoliberal status quo. Leila Mukhida, University of Cambridge
{"title":"The Tender Gaze: Compassionate Encounters on the German Screen, Page, and Stage ed. by Muriel Cormican and Jennifer Marston William (review)","authors":"Maria Stehle","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0039","url":null,"abstract":"symbol of resistance against regimes of flexibility and conformity—powerfully paint a portrait of a society in which feminist values are hopelessly neutralized under neoliberalism. This feminist-queer approach is discernible throughout the book, although it is most consistently and convincingly instrumentalized in the later chapters. In her reading of the underresearched film Fremde Haut (2005) directed by Angelina Maccarone, Baer productively builds on Halberstam’s labeling of the lesbian migrant Fariba who “passes” as Siamak as a trans* character and the theoretical framework this affords her. With an insightful and original focus on indebtedness in the film—that is, the different debts owed from each character to another—Baer exposes how precarity defines every person in the film, creating hierarchies, and reinforcing economies of exchange, while acknowledging the specific ways that these debts are particularly burdensome for minoritized genders and ethnicities. Baer further links economies of debt with the economies of looking that operate in the film, where reciprocal gazes or the exchange of a glance do not represent mutuality or understanding but are instead sexist or objectifying. This illuminating section left me wondering where the gaze of the spectator is focused in this film. Are we complicit in these neoliberal economies of debt as symbolized by the gaze? Or might the idea of the trans* gaze as theorized by Halberstam open up unexplored potential for challenging gendered and racialized gazes? German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism will be of great interest to scholars of cinema and of German, not least because of its forceful recasting of German cinema as saturated in money, i.e., the economization of society and its effects permeate filmmaking at every level. In this book, Baer lends us the language to examine further the unique ways in which films have the capacity to simultaneously exist within, reflect on, and challenge the neoliberal status quo. Leila Mukhida, University of Cambridge","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"392 - 394"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66416958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vanderbeke). Among these chapters, the essays on films offer the most convincing application of the analytical framework; the tender gaze, however, also proves to offer productive insights into the politics of representation in literary works. In some cases, the authors struggle to illustrate how the tender gaze functions as a political intervention. Doris Dörrie’s film Keiner liebt mich (1994), for example, offers great examples of how the tender gaze creates spaces for empathy across racial, sexual, and gender divides. One wonders, however, how the tender gaze might obscure or fail to address some of the uncritical appropriations in the film that also perpetuate certain racist stereotypes. As the authors state at various points in the book, the reception of artworks is not homogenous. Thus, the question is not only whether or not the artworks are “moving” (89), but also of whom they move and in what way. This is where the concept becomes more complicated to apply: while analyzing the tender gaze as enacted on-screen between characters or within narrative structures proves very insightful, it remains more ambiguous and possibly even contradictory when it is applied to the process of reception. Overall, the examples in the volume convincingly show that theater, film, and literature manifest a new relationship to the political by depicting and eliciting tenderness, compassion, care, and “perspective taking” (41); it is challenging to assess how this might translate into broader shifts in political perspectives and action. The volume impressively and convincingly illustrates how productive the concept of the tender gaze is to analyze complex political interventions in film, literature, and art; it also inspires scholars to explore the concept further. One wonders, for example, how one might read social media with the tender gaze in mind? There also might be analytical value in creating contrasts and examining tensions: What, for example, is the opposite of a tender gaze and what does it mean when a gaze merely pretends to be tender? Beyond the gaze, it could be productive to think about tender touch, sound, images, and narratives circulating in different cultural spheres. Maria Stehle, University of Tennessee Knoxville
{"title":"Sensitive Subjects: The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema by Leila Mukhida (review)","authors":"Simone Pfleger","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0040","url":null,"abstract":"Vanderbeke). Among these chapters, the essays on films offer the most convincing application of the analytical framework; the tender gaze, however, also proves to offer productive insights into the politics of representation in literary works. In some cases, the authors struggle to illustrate how the tender gaze functions as a political intervention. Doris Dörrie’s film Keiner liebt mich (1994), for example, offers great examples of how the tender gaze creates spaces for empathy across racial, sexual, and gender divides. One wonders, however, how the tender gaze might obscure or fail to address some of the uncritical appropriations in the film that also perpetuate certain racist stereotypes. As the authors state at various points in the book, the reception of artworks is not homogenous. Thus, the question is not only whether or not the artworks are “moving” (89), but also of whom they move and in what way. This is where the concept becomes more complicated to apply: while analyzing the tender gaze as enacted on-screen between characters or within narrative structures proves very insightful, it remains more ambiguous and possibly even contradictory when it is applied to the process of reception. Overall, the examples in the volume convincingly show that theater, film, and literature manifest a new relationship to the political by depicting and eliciting tenderness, compassion, care, and “perspective taking” (41); it is challenging to assess how this might translate into broader shifts in political perspectives and action. The volume impressively and convincingly illustrates how productive the concept of the tender gaze is to analyze complex political interventions in film, literature, and art; it also inspires scholars to explore the concept further. One wonders, for example, how one might read social media with the tender gaze in mind? There also might be analytical value in creating contrasts and examining tensions: What, for example, is the opposite of a tender gaze and what does it mean when a gaze merely pretends to be tender? Beyond the gaze, it could be productive to think about tender touch, sound, images, and narratives circulating in different cultural spheres. Maria Stehle, University of Tennessee Knoxville","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"394 - 396"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49114562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Berlin-based photographer Gerrit Engel was the last to shoot the Palast der Republik, GDR government seat and cultural center, during the final phases of its state-ordered dismantlement (2006–2008). The resulting photographs contrast sharply with his photobook Berlin (2009), shot simultaneously and published twenty years after German unification. Whereas Engel's photobook is stylistically indebted to the New Objectivity of Weimar industrial photography and its successors, his subjective approach to the Palast elegizes its erasure. Although many accounts of GDR legacies turn on Ostalgie, Engel's Palast photos demonstrate the futurity of erasure through an aesthetic critique of monumentality as such.
{"title":"Dismantled Monumentality: Capturing Postsocialist Erasures in Berlin","authors":"Katrina Nousek","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0025","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Berlin-based photographer Gerrit Engel was the last to shoot the Palast der Republik, GDR government seat and cultural center, during the final phases of its state-ordered dismantlement (2006–2008). The resulting photographs contrast sharply with his photobook Berlin (2009), shot simultaneously and published twenty years after German unification. Whereas Engel's photobook is stylistically indebted to the New Objectivity of Weimar industrial photography and its successors, his subjective approach to the Palast elegizes its erasure. Although many accounts of GDR legacies turn on Ostalgie, Engel's Palast photos demonstrate the futurity of erasure through an aesthetic critique of monumentality as such.","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"307 - 327"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49306999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After the Holocaust: Human Rights and Genocide Education in the Approaching Post-Witness Era ed. by Charlotte Schallié, Helga Thorson, and Andrea Van Noord (review)","authors":"Avril Alba","doi":"10.1353/gsr.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43954,"journal":{"name":"German Studies Review","volume":"45 1","pages":"382 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45220874","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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