Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany

Ulmer, Gregory L.; Santner, Éric L.

doi:10.2307/3200171

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Something slightly different seems at work in the German context, where scholars have long offered diagnoses of the present's “pathological” relationship to a traumatic past to offer a prescription for the future. Take Santner's (1990) influential argument that Germany had been overcome with melancholia. Melancholia takes the place of Trauerarbeit , the work of mourning the loss of a cathected object for its intrinsic qualities, which for Santner, leads to the uninhibited re‐integration of the ego and the capacity to cathect new love objects.…”

Section: Parody and Popular Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…But this process was interrupted by communal defense mechanisms, not least the identification with the victim. The labor of working through this narcissistic pattern is deferred by defensive identification because “the capacity to feel grief for others and guilt for the suffering one has directly or indirectly caused, depends on the capacity to experience empathy for the other as other” (Santner 1990, 7). If these blockages of ego integration were removed, Germans could assume “postmodern, post‐Holocaust selves” (ibid., 26)…”

Section: Parody and Popular Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

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A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

Brandel

2022

Anthropology and Humanism

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The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I read the texts against the grain of its public reception by critics and scholars for whom it offers an obvious critique of Germany's contemporary susceptibility to the allure of charismatic fascism. I argue that it is this obviousness itself that comes under pressure through the two texts: if critics worry that satirizing Hitler even for the sake of such a critique will normalize memory of the Holocaust, it is the ease with which even critics accept the central science fictional device-Hitler's inexplicable return to contemporary Berlin decades after his deaththat demands critical attention. Reading a film or a novel's reception anthropologically, in this paper, I make a case for an investigation into what is taken to be obvious and what it is that blocks such an inquiry. [popular culture; Holocaust; parody; public memory; alternative history] Parsing the Trivial, Obvious, Normal, and Ordinary Timur Verme's novel Er ist wieder da (2012) opens in the voice of a befuddled Hitler coming to terms with his surroundings and the apparent collapse of the Reich while he narrates recognizing elements in the city that surrounds him.Something was absolutely unusual. I found myself evidently still in Berlin. … I remembered the city being very dusty-or else field-grey, with considerable mountains of rubble and damage. But there was nothing of the sort before me now. The rubble had vanished, or at least had been removed, the streets cleaned. Instead, there stood along the edges of the streets numerous, even uncountable colorful wagons that were probably automobiles, but they were small, and seemingly so advanced in their design the Messerschmitt plant must have had a leading role in their manufacture. 1 (Vermes 2012, 13-14) The rhythm of Hitler's words is frenetic though their tone is self-assured, a pattern presumed by many to have been modeled on the verbosity of Mein

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Section: Parody and Popular Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Parody and Popular Culturementioning

confidence: 99%

A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

Brandel

2022

Anthropology and Humanism

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“…. including screams, music, silence, and laughter" (Kristeva [1987] 1989, 99-100) Rosaldo 2014 Goffman 1981Kristeva (1974) 1984Peirce 1932 Some sources on affect, acoustics, and embodiment in lamentation: Feld (1982Feld ( ) 2013Feld ( , 1990Nenola-Kallio 1982;Seremetakis 1991;Urban 1988;Wilce 1998;Briggs 1992Briggs , 1993turning death into a purely linguistic operation"; "the possibility of distinguishing one victim from any other" (Santner 1990, 29) Crapanzano 1973 "the subject's relation to his own speech"; "the fact that he cannot listen . .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dear Dr. Freud

Briggs¹

2014

Cult. Anthropol.

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Framed as a letter to Sigmund Freud, this text weaves precariously between psychoanalytic interpretations of mourning and laments sung during an epidemic of an unknown disease in the Delta Amacuro rain forest of Venezuela in 2008. This encounter extends reflection on the ways that Freud, Klein, Laplanche, Nasio, and other psychoanalysts have characterized “the work of mourning,” urging attention to the poetics, acoustics, and bodily materiality of lamentation. Focusing on a meeting that took place just before the burial of a young man, it explores claims made by lamenters on audiences, interpellating them into particular modes of listening and demanding attention to the politics of the circulation of images of lives and deaths. This intersection between psychoanalysis and lamentation provides a challenge to rethink the nature of anthropological research and writing.

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“…The Allies' denazification programs confronted such problems as the Adenauer administration's refusal to accept, "beyond reparations to Israel, any real responsibility for the crimes in question" and the "need to make Germany a central bulwark against Communism", which would be hindered by the Allies' pressure to "work through the past"(Bathrick 2007). Santner discusses Germans' inability to mourn in relation to realist film style, which promotes resolution instead of confronting the persistence of avoidance(Santner 1990). Ebbrecht-Hartmann shows that it was not until the fall of Communism in the 1990s and the 2000 International Forum on the Holocaust that "compensation and restitution" were included in German films (Ebbrecht-Hartmann 2015, p. 144).…”

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confidence: 99%

Double Jeopardy: The Fate of Intermarriage and Justice in the Films Redemption Road and Max and Hélène

Lassner

2020

Humanities

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Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews during the Third Reich occupied a dangerously ambiguous position. Although the 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared intermarriage illegal, the Jewish wife or husband was at first exempted from anti-Semitic persecution. After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, their situation deteriorated dramatically. However, Nazi family law was applied inconsistently, leaving both spouses in states of uncertainty with regard to their marriages and children. This essay examines the representation of intermarriage in two films: the 2015 Italian film Max and Helene, and Redemption Road, a 2016 two-part German miniseries. With hybrid cinematic styles, narrative trajectories, and characterizations, these films dramatize the traumatic consequences of Nazi racial ideology and practices for two intermarried couples and their children. Spanning the years 1938 through the late 1940s, intermarriage in these films raises challenging questions about survival, reconciliation, and loss and the definition and achievement of legal, ethical, and emotional justice in the aftermath.

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Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

Dear Dr. Freud

Double Jeopardy: The Fate of Intermarriage and Justice in the Films Redemption Road and Max and Hélène

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