Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Film [Hardcover]

Mothers, Comrades, and Outcasts in East German Women's Filmmerges feminist film theory and cultural history in an investigation of women's films that span the last two decades of the former East Germany. Jennifer L. Creech explores the ways in which these films functioned as an alternative public sphere where official ideologies of socialist progress and utopian collectivism could be resisted. Emerging after the infamous cultural freeze of 1965, these women's films reveal a shift from overt political critique to a covert politics located in the intimate, problem-rich experiences of everyday life under socialism. Through an analysis of films that focus on what were perceived as women's concerns marital problems, motherhood, emancipation, and residual patriarchyCreech argues that the female protagonist served as a crystallization of socialist contradictions. By framing their politics in terms of women's concerns, these films used women's desire and agency to contest the more general problems of social alienation and collectivism, and to re-imagine the possibilities of self-fulfillment under socialism.

Jennifer L. Creech is Associate Professor of German at the University of Rochester, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Film and Media Studies, and Associate Faculty at the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies. She is editor (with Thomas O. Haakenson) ofSpectacle.Her research and teaching interests include late 20th-century German literature, film, and culture; cinema studies; and Marxist and feminist theories.

Not only is this monograph sure to become an essential resource for Germanists and historians of socialist media and East German culture, but it will also make rewarding reading for feminist scholars keen to explore the implications of the public/private dichotomy and possibilities for women's emancipation under socialism. With this well-researched and skillfully argued study, Creech undertakes the criticall1