FS30EA: CONFRONTING THE NAZI PAST IN GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN FILM - A (2020-2021)

The process of confronting the crimes and legacy of the Third Reich in Germany and Austria has been a long and difficult one. In West Germany this process began in earnest following the 1968 student revolution, with a younger generation questioning the role that their parents had played in the Second World War. In Austria, the process of coming to terms with the Nazi legacy took substantially longer to get underway, and it is only over the past thirty years that the country's view of its role during the Third Reich has shifted decisively from that of victimhood to complicity. The discussion about the Nazi past in Germany has further evolved following German re-unification in 1990. This course will look at a number of key films and directors from the past seven decades to examine the changing discourse and shifts in representation of the Nazi legacy in Germany and Austria. The course will proceed chronologically, encompassing both fiction and documentary film, offering the opportunity to compare and draw connections between films from different periods and of diverse genres.

We will begin by looking at the first film made in postwar Germany, Die Mörder sind unter uns (The Murderers Are Among Us, 1946) by Wolfgang Staudte, and its depiction of the immediate aftermath of the war. We will proceed to analyse Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and its portrayal of the pervasive culture of forgetting in postwar Germany. In the Austrian context, we will examine Axel Corti’s seminal trilogy Wohin und zurück (Where to and back, 1982-86), focusing particularly on the concluding part, Welcome in Vienna, which documents the problematic return of the protagonist to his hometown at the end of the Second World War. We will consider two exemplary Austrian documentary films, which explore the climate of silencing and repression surrounding personal involvement in the Nazi war machine and in the Holocaust: Ruth Beckermann’s Jenseits des Krieges (East of War, 1996), and Eduard Erne’s and Margareta Heinrich’s Totschweigen (A Wall of Silence, 1994). The treatment of the Holocaust in the new Berlin Republic will be examined through Margarethe von Trotta’s Rosenstraße (2003). We will proceed to look at documentary films which detail the fraught endeavour of confronting a family legacy of National Socialism: Malte Ludin’s 2 oder 3 Dinge, die ich von ihm weiß (2 or 3 Things I Know About Him, 2005) and Marcus J. Carney’s The End of the Neubacher Project (2006). The phenomenon of the “comedic turn” in German fiction films about the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler will be explored through Dani Levy’s Mein Führer (My Führer, 2007) and David Wnendt’s 2015 adaptation of Timur Vermes’s bestseller Er ist wieder da (Look who’s back). The course will conclude with two recent treatments of the Nazi legacy, Christian Petzold’s film Phoenix (2014) and Giulio Ricciarelli’s Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (Labyrinth of Lies, 2014), films which offer a commentary on the insufficient confrontations with the Nazi legacy in early postwar Germany.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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There are no assessments for this course.