Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering

Screening War is one of several recently published titles to focus on the representation of German victimhood in its various forms. [.] the volume’s strength lies in the originality of some of the discussions. Several chapters offer intriguing accounts of little-known themes [.] or film-makers whose work has received only uneven scholarly attention [.]. Other contributors provide alternative and much-needed readings of better-known films and genres. [.]Screening War is a useful and welcome contribution to a fascinating topic. ― MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW

[I]nvaluable . . . . [O]f interest not only to anyone concerned with the cultural history of twentieth-century Germany or with the relations between film and totalitarianism, but also to anyone grappling with the methodological issues involved in not judging film as a more or less unsuccessful copy of a higher art form. ― NEW CINEMAS

Through a careful scrutiny of a wide array of filmmakers and their work, Screening War offers a vivid glimpse of the cultural history of German visual media throughout the post-WWII period. . . . [A] formidable contribution . . . . ― H-GERMAN, H-NET REVIEWS

The collection presents the theme complex of ‘victim discourse’ very broadly. What is stimulating about it . . . is therefore not so much the connections it provides to the examples already intensively discussed in research . . . but instead above all the references to works that have not been looked at so extensively in the light of victimization. ― FILMBLATT

Provides a history of cultural and political discourses on German ‘victimhood,’ which counters the commonly-held belief that recent depictions of German suffering break a longstanding taboo. ― THIS YEAR’S WORK IN MODERN LANGUAGE STUDIES

BRAD PRAGER is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair of Humanities, Professor of German, and Professor of Film Studies at the University of Missouri.

DAVID CLARKE is Professor of Modern German Studies at Cardiff University, UK.

SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema.