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A wide-ranging, insightful history of culture in West Germany—from literature, film, and music to theater and the visual arts After World War II a mood of despair and impotence pervaded the arts in West Germany. The culture and institutions of the Third Reich were abruptly dismissed, yet there was no immediate return to the Weimar period’s progressive ideals. In this moment of cultural stasis, how could West Germany’s artists free themselves from their experiences of Nazism? Moving from 1945 to reunification, Michael H. Kater explores West German culture as it emerged from the darkness of the Third Reich. Examining periods of denial and complacency as well as attempts to reckon with the past, he shows how all postwar culture was touched by the vestiges of National Socialism. From the literature of Günter Grass to the happenings of Joseph Beuys and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s innovations in electronic music, Kater shows how it was only through the reinvigoration of the cultural scene that West Germany could contend with its past—and eventually allow democracy to reemerge.
Wulf Kansteiner shows that the interpretations of Germany's past proposed by historians, politicians, and television makers reflect political and generational divisions and an extraordinary concern for Germany's perception abroad.
This anthology offers an account of German cinema in the fifties, focusing on popular genres, famous stars and dominant practices, taking into account the complicated relationships between East and West Germany, and by paying attention to the economic and political conditions of film production and reception during this period.
This book offers a comparative study of historical television genres in Europe, with a special focus on Germany and Great Britain and their way of narrating twentieth century European history. The book analyses our common European past and memory through central historical television narratives. Each chapter looks at how historical TV genres, fictional and documentary, have dealt with the most salient and defining periods, events and changes in the twentieth century— an age of extremes. Bondebjerg offers unique theoretical and analytical insight into the role of television in mediating and shaping the past. The book explores television’s creation of transnational cultural encounters across Europe in relation to our common and national past. The book addresses how television has influenced our understanding of history, collective memory and public debate over the twentieth century. It is fundamentally a book about the importance of the past in present day Europe and the centrality of media for transnational understanding.
Publisher description
An illuminating exploration of the cultural politics of the East-West unification and its subsequent impact upon German filmmaking
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: »Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.« In the 1990s, nobody fell deeper than O.J. Simpson. Once considered a national treasure, the athlete was accused of brutally slaying his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ronald Goldman on June 12, 1994. Within days, the media and public developed an unprecedented obsession with the story, turning a murder investigation and trial into a sensationalized reality show. Tatjana Neubauer examines the mediatization, deliberate manipulation, and the simplification of popular criminal trials for profit on television. She demonstrates that TV conflated legal proceedings into entertainment programming by commodifying events, people, and places.