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Gender andGermanness

Conflicts In Gender Representation-Expressionist Drama, May, 1999

A thesis presented to the Department of German Literature And Languages, Reed College. Recieved commendation for excellence from the Department

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MulticulturalGermany

This multi-year collaborative research project, sponsored by the Institute of European Studies, is organized by Professors Deniz Göktürk and Anton Kaes. It includes several doctoral students and undergraduate students. It meets regularly and sponsors workshops and an international conference in October 2004. The goal of this research group is the publication of a sourcebook, tentatively entitled: The New Germany: Migration and Cultural Change.

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Narratives of Unification

Towards an Event-Based History: Chronik der Wende, Die Leere Mitte, and Good Bye Lenin

The ruptures presented in Narratives of the Fall of the Berlin Wall directly suggest the impossibility of historical telos, of a sequential narrative of historical meaning. Specifically, filmic engagements in the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the DDR enact this rupture in traditional narratives, primarily through exploration of otherness, ethnic, economic and social otherness. Ultimately, the re-focusing of events along the lines of the problematic status of ?others? in these films leads to the diegetic enactment of an event-based history. Beginning with the made-for-TV documentary, Die Entscheidenden Tage im Oktober 1989, and then moving to the film essay Die Leere Mitte and finally Good Bye Lenin I show how attempts to come to terms with the breakdown of entrenched borders leads to the instability of the traditional narrative of East vs. West. Attempts to reconfigure this narrative are initially affectively oriented around a myth of "oneness" instantiated in Die Entscheidenden Tage's documentation of the first month of unrest. The inability to maintain this myth of instant unification is explored in Die Leere Mitte, a film essay the attempts to re-view the events of 1989 and 1990 not within the hopeful matrix of together but alternately from the perspective of others.

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Weimar Republic

Reconfiguring the Hierarchy of the Senses: Der Gang in Die Nacht and the Discourses of Vision Science in Weimar Germany

Through its treatment of a blind artist/war veteran and eye doctor/blasé intellectual Der Gang in Die Nacht reframes the functions of vision, locating vision not as a passive, authoritative camera, but rather implicitly figures vision within a larger cognitive framework, in which the act of interpretation is brought into the logic of vision itself. In so much as seeing is hyper-emphasized in the film, Vision demands integration into cognition, flying against the biology and psychology of vision in the early 20th century. Within the instable balance negotiated between Opthalmologist and blind man, Murnau implicitly objects to the binaries of then raging scientific debates between nativist and empiricist ontologies of vision in which vision is either inate (Hering) or learned (Helmholtz), but always stable, and always objective.

Instead Murnau’s problematic of vision antedates and prefigures early 21st Century cognitive neuroscience’s conception of visual intelligence which, as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman writes, is the power that people use to "construct an experience of objects out of colors, lines, and motions." Far from being a passive recorder of a pre-existing world, the eye actively constructs every aspect of our visual experience-from the strut of a peacock to the nuances of light in a forest at dusk. And this process is wrought with failings, unlike the autonomous eye of Hering and even the eye/mind of Helmholtz. Instead, vision is marked by what Mack and Rock have referred to as Inattentional Blindness, the hypothesis that there is no perception without attention. What Mack and Rock implicitly argue for within the cognitive system is that the perceptual object to which attention is directed becomes an object of conscious perception only if attention is directed to it, and that this object is not a single feature but rather a complex and meaningful scene. Hence, the object may exist before attention, but only with attention does is it created as an object of perception. This split implies a constructed-ness of visual objects within what Posner (1980) has described as the spotlight of the mind. The question, then is not one of “what has the eye seen?”, but rather one of “what has captured the attention of the mind to allow it to be seen?”

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Stolen Sight: Sound Film and Transnational TechnologicalExchange

Stolen Sight: International Technology Transfer and the Rise of the Sound Film. On the 7th of September 1922, the first sound film was shown in Germany, using a film sound track built by Tri-Ergon of Berlin. The Tri-Ergon process had a patented flywheel mechanism on a sprocket which prevented variations in film speed, all but eliminating distortion of audio, the primary limitation of earlier attempts at synchronized sound reproduction by Edison, Pomerade, and Stone amongst others. Hailed as a revolution in film development, no German production company purchased rights to the technology, leaving it to Fox Studios who quickly built their empire on the foundations of the classic movie-tone newsreels. Warner Brothers, seeking to compete against the four major US studios, also adopted a modified version of the Tri-Ergon. German production companies continued to resist sound technology, actively suppressing its distribution to German theaters. Why did the German film industry resist adoption of sound technology?

I argue that the rise of the sound film was not an inevitable consequence of technological improvement, nor a manifestation of audience demands, nor merely an economic push by American industry. Rather, the rise of the sound film in Germany can only be explained as a process of contestation within competing discourses of the role of film in Germany during the Weimar republic. This debate is bounded within a problematic of economic speculation, theoretical formulations of the nation-state, and within concurrently raging debates of artistic production by the German film industry.

Initially film debate on the potentials of sound technology were framed aesthetically, sound was viewed as a threat to the universality of the visual image, and was resisted not by the studios but by the artistic producers of German cinema. However, with the adoption and investment in sound technologies by U.S. production companies the focus of the debate shifted from the artistic challenges of sound onto terrain of far broader significance. No longer was the sound debate aesthetic, it was transformed by production companies and public media into a debate of globalisation, a contestation within the filmic arena on the very endurance of the German film industry. Whereas Ufa had been able to rely on film equipment and stock produced within Germany, the heavy investment in sound technology by US industry and its push into Europe de-centered the German film industry, relegating it theoretically to the periphery of artistic production.

As such, when Rene Clair wrote in 1929 that “Today there is no individual, no company, no financial coalition capable of stopping the triumphant march of the talking film” this inevitability signaled not just the fall of the silent film, nor the fall of Germany’s artistic uniqueness within the film industry, but also the fall of the vitality of German film industry. What appeared as a technological development worthy of praise at its first showing in 1922, by 1928 signaled to the German public the failure of the German film industry, even before the Jazz Singer was shown to a Berlin audience. The confluence of economic, aesthetic, and social discourses thereby coalesced to create the myth of the Americanization of film, a myth that preceded the decline of German production companies.

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Removing The Hypen: German Immigrants in America through the World Wars.

By all accounts, German immigrants maintained strong cultural ties with Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, developing their own newspapers, cultural institutions, holidays and schools in the Northeastern, Central and Mid-western part of the country where the majority of German’s settled upon emigrating from Germany (Bade, 172). The continued migration of Germans America and the high percentage of foreign-born German residents incontributed to the growth of these institutions up until the second decade of the 20th Century. However, with the advent of the First World War, there were a number of changes in the structure of the cultural institutions and in this group’s relationship with German and American society that led to a decline in the importance of German immigrants’ cultural associations with their former country. Furthermore, political divisions came to the forefront during this period, revealing the distinctions and heterogeneity of Germans in. Furthermore, it was no longer acceptable to reveal one’s German ethnicity publicly, as in the folk festivals and the beer gardens, which resulted in a further weakening of the foundations that helped German-American ethnicity perpetuate.

The rise of Nazism in Germany and America and the subsequent outbreak of the Second World War, led to more radical changes in the status of Germans in America and in their own identifications with their past roots. The extremes of the Second World-War ultimately splintered what remained of German-American culture, polarizing its constituents across national, religious and class as well as political lines. Many of these antagonisms were never fully removed permanently pushing apart groups of people that had once associated as German-Americans. The war period furthermore shifted the very notions of what it meant to be German, further complicating these immigrants relationships with their past. These changes, along with the decline of a German- American community ultimately forced many German immigrants to try to make what they perceived as a choice between Germany and. Hans-Peter, who emigrated from Germany in 1952 reveals this tendency in his interview with the novelist Ursula Hegi: “I still have an ingrained fear: heaven help me if he ever finds out I’m a German. It’s stupid. But it’s there and it’s alive and well It’s this big secret” (Hegi 1997, 138).

This paper therefore explores the effects of the World Wars on German-American culture and suggests that the legacy of these effects helps prescribe the trajectory of present German immigrants’ and their offspring’s’ relationships with Nazism, Jewish culture and Germany. This is not to say that German-Americans ceased to exist, and became fully “Americanized” as a cultural group, but rather that their identities were complicated by their own attempts to deny or hide the traditions and histories of their past.

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New Media

Strategies of Resistance: Munch's Odyssey and Environmental Activism

:Collaboration, Coercion, Karma." In a video game industry largely built around narratives of individual agency and militaristic leadership, these concepts are rarely implemented principles of gameplay. With first person Shooters, Drive-by games of violence and strategy games that require systematized governance to obtain success dominating bestseller lists and retail shelves, a game like Munch's Odyssey stands out. Combined with a narrative based upon resistance to industrial hegemony, the Oddworld Inhabitants gaming oevre appears truly radical in its aims. However, despite highly visible rejections of video-game norms pressures of conformity deeply restrict self-professed aims to create an alternate gaming world that the game's creator has so vocally argued for. Ultimately, the Oddworld Inhabitants games become a case study in the limitations of engaging environmental philosophy and activism with industry.

Ironically, while apparently rejecting all-encompassing corporate dominance within their diegetic content, Oddworld Inhabitants reveals a cultural split that confounds mass-market engagement with the individualistic patterns of environmental activism. In response there is a break in the extant trilogy of games, shifting the directly radical politics of the initial game Abe's Odyssey's diegetic content, or back story, onto the body politics of Abe, Munch and his Fellow Mudokons. In Munch's Odyssey, this shift pacifies the shock to the corporate systems that Oddworld Inhabitants has offered in previous games. Exploring Munch's odyssey as a case study that pushes the boundaries of Video-game as art form yet still remains locked into market structures characteristic of the high-stakes, high capital practices of modern game-development shows how Economic and Artistic pressures compete to create the contested, bounded space of early twentieth-century video game art.

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Seminar Resources

Literary Theory Reviews

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