‘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
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited