Mixed Mediation: German Postwar Film, Documentary Images and the Problematic Past
Session Organizer: Dr. Brad Prager
University of Missouri, Columbia
Department of German and Russian Studies
443 GCB, Columbia, MO 65211-4170
pragerb@missouri.edu
The Holocaust without Jews: Kurt Maetzig's Rat der Götter (1950)
The fact that most discussions of DEFA films, films produced in the official film studio of the now defunct German Democratic Republic, focus on their socio-political and historical context could be read as a continued success of the films' agendas of privileging history over aesthetics and the collective over the individual. Kurt Maetzig's Rat der Götter is a narrative feature film that works through the history of the Third Reich by focusing on the intertwined fate of two families, one of which owns the company IG Farben, which produced the gas used in the gas chambers of the concentration camps, and the other who works in that factory. Professor Mennel's paper integrates a discussion of the narrative and aesthetic features of the film with an analysis of the economic politics evoked by its topic. She focuses on two aspects of the film that allow her to discuss the film's political ideology: one, the incorporation of documentary footage from the Third Reich into the film's narrative, and, two, the narrative and the visual depiction of an explosion at the factory that turns the German workers at IG Farben into victims, and thus displaces Jews as the victims of the Holocaust. I conclude that it is precisely a discussion of the aesthetics of DEFA films that allows us to articulate a political critique of anti-fascist DEFA films.
Barbara Mennel
University of Florida, Gainesville
mennel@umbc.edu
Picturing the Past in Alfred Weidenmann's Der Stern von Afrika (1957)
Jennifer Kapczynski's paper looks at two key issues in Alfred Weidenmann's representation of the Second World War. First, she explores how the film employs documentary footage as a means to narrate the past, arguing that the insertion of found footage serves to separate the film's heroic main character, ace fighter pilot Hans-Joachim Marseille, from the "grand historical narrative" of the war. This documentary footage is paired with an anonymous, disembodied voiceover, and, as she argues, it is this voice that assumes authorial control at the very moment when the film depicts the onset of World War Two. As a result, Marseille appears not as an historical agent, but rather a voiceless victim of a massive (and not especially German) war machine. She then goes on to explore the film's representation of the relationship between German fighter pilots and the "native" African population where the pilots are stationed, contending that the film-through its depiction of the relationship between Marseille and his devoted black servant-attempts to rewrite the story of German racism. As Kapczynski shows, Weidenmann's film imagines the German pilots as appreciative of racial difference. She concludes that according to the film's logic, the War was not a war of racial extermination, but rather a lofty and heroic battle of wills.
Jennifer Kapczynski
Washington University in St. Louis
jkapczy@artsci.wustl.edu
A Ruined Landscape: The Air War and the Allegorical mise-en-scène
Films such as Somewhere in Berlin [Irgendwo in Berlin, 1946] and the well known The Murderers are Among Us [Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946] were filmed in the real rubble of Berlin immediately following the war. Robert Shandley has referred to these spaces as the "berubbled mise-en-scène" of postwar film. Prager's essay explores the use of grave-markers and destroyed Cathedrals in their function as set pieces in the context of recent debates around the Air War, especially those discussions that have been set in motion by W.G. Sebald's Air War and Literature and Jörg Friedrich's contentious The Fire [Der Brand]. Prager's central argument is that the very real images used in postwar films (in the very opening shot of The Murderers Are Among Us, for example) and those which are used to compliment the writings of Sebald and Friedrich rely on viewer's recognition of these iconographic images. Prager makes his point with particular reference to visual tropes employed by Germany in its war against Napoleon, such as the Romantic paintings of C.D. Friedrich. Prager argues that not only is this resonance clear in images of the rubble, but that the employment of the trope of a distant, idyllic past (to which Germany would return) had specific political consequences for both Germany's forward economic movement, as well as for the complicated process of working through the recent past.
Brad Prager
University of Missouri, Columbia
PragerB@missouri.edu