Film and Memory in East Germany [Paperback]

Anke Pinkert explores films produced in the Soviet Occupation Zone and East Germany from the end of World War II through the early 1960s, offering new insights into how Germans dealt with the aftermath of the war. In her cultural analysis of the relationship between modern historical violence, cultural memory, and cinematic representation, Pinkert argues that the cinematic productions of East Germany offer a corrective to misperceptions about German responses to the legacy of the war.

Film and Memory in East Germany considers antifascist films of the immediate postwar period, which depict the reintegration of former soldiers into society and the crisis of masculinity that accompanied the aftermath of the war; the socialist films of the late 1940s and 1950s, which attempt to shape a new national imaginary through stories of exemplary socialist womanhood; and, finally, the cinematic return to 1945 in socialist modernist films of the 1960s.

[F]or advanced scholars in the fields of film history and cultural theory Pinkert's study opens up a range of new and important perspectives. 27. 4 2009

Anke Pinkert is Assistant Professor of German and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has published on postwar German literature, film, and cultural history in German Quarterly, Seminar, and Germanic Review.

[Film and Memory in East Germany] will appeal to specialists on East German cinema who will discover here challenging and new readings of familiar films, but it will also appeal more generally to those in German studies who are grappling with issues of postwar culture as well as to those in culture studies who will be interested in the strategies Pinkert develops for reading trauma and memory in visual culture.. . . These accounts give rise to new psychoanalytical approaches to the study of post-WW II German cultural identity and East German film. The book concludes with a critical reexamination of altered patterns of loss aftel&