‘Sagt, wie soll man Stalin danken?’ Kurt Maetzig's Ehe im Schatten (1947), Roman einer Jungen Ehe (1952) and the Cultural Politics of Post-War Germany
In Ehe im Schatten and Roman einer jungen Ehe Kurt Maetzig analyses the role of the artist and the changing conceptualisation of aesthetics at two contrasting moments of political crisis. Set during the Third Reich, Ehe im Schatten criticises any attempt to separate art and politics, and exposes the limitations of bourgeois classical drama as a form of political resistance. But despite its radical subject-matter, the film's melodramatic format highlights the difficulties post-war directors working for DEFA faced in breaking with the traditions of cinematography established by Ufa during the 1940s. Five years later, and in a very different political context, Maetzig revisits these issues in Roman einer jungen Ehe. Although the later film mobilises concepts of socialist realism in order to redefine aesthetic agendas in the early 1950s, it too relies on moments of exaggerated pathos to achieve its aims. While the film's idealisation of working-class life in the GDR of the early 1950s was soon undermined by the political events of 1953 and 1956, its presentation of works by, among others, Lessing, Seghers, Zuckmayer, Simonov and Sartre offers a detailed and distinctive perspective on the changing dynamics of cultural politics during the immediate post-war period.
Rubble Films: German Cinema in the Shadow of the Third Reich
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Dismantling the Dream Factory: The Film Industry in Berubbled Germany 2. Coming Home through Rubble Canyons: The Murderers Are among Us and Generic Convention 3. It's a Wonderful Reich: Private Innocence and Public Guilt 4. The Sword That Smote You: Jewish Filmmakers and the Visual Reconstruction of Jews in German Film 5. The Trouble with Rubble: DEFA's Social Problem Films 6. Comedic Redemption and the End of Rubble Film Discourse Conclusion: The Vanishing Rubble Film in Postwar Historiography Notes Selected Bibliography Filmography Index
Histories of leisure
Contents: Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Seeing, Traveling and Consuming: An Introduction, Rudy Koshar Part 1: Seeing 2. Museums: Leisure between State and Distinction, Nick Prior 3. The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England, Marius Kwint 4. Flaneurs in Paris and Berlin, Esther Leslie 5. Crowd Control: Boxing Spectatorship and Social Order in Weimar Germany, Erik Jensen Part 2: Traveling 6. Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian England, Jan Palmowski 7. Bicycling, Class and the Politics of Leisure in Belle Epoque France, Christopher S. Thompson 8. "Every German visitor has a volkisch obligation he must fulfill": Nationalist Tourism in the Austrian Empire, 1880-1918, Pieter Judson 9. La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire: The Touring Club de France and the French Regions, 1890-1918, Patrick Young 10. The Michelin Red Guides: Social Differentiation in Early-Twentieth-Century French Tourism, Stephen L. Harp 11. Germans at the Wheel: Cars and Leisure Travel in Interwar Germany, Rudy Koshar Part 3: Consuming 12. Confessional Drinking@ Catholic Morkingmen's Clubs and Alcohol Consumption in Wilhelmine Germany, Robert Goodrich 13. "As i walked along the Bois de Boulogne": Subversive Performances and Masculine Pleasures in Fin-de-Siecle London, Christopher Breward 14. "Jewish Taste?": Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1920-1942, Leora Auslander 15. Leisure, Politics and the Consumption of Tabacco in Britain since the Nineteenth Century, Matthew Hilton 16. Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy, Stephen Gundle Index