Contemporary Remediations of Race and Ethnicity in German Visual Cultures
TRANSIT vol. 9, no. 2, Special Issue Angelica Fenner and Uli Linke, Guest Editors Download PDF Acknowledgements The impetus for this Special Issue of Transit emerged out of the 6th Toronto German Studies Symposium, which took place at the University of Toronto in April 2013 and was co-organized by Angelica Fenner and Uli Linke around the […]
The New Diversity and the New Public:
Impressions of dOCUMENTA (13) Barbara Wolbert Download PDF Abstract Long before dOCUMENTA (13) opened in 2012, designated documenta director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev pledged that “her” documenta would stay clear of what she called the “Biennale-Syndrome.” What was the Biennale-Syndrome, and why did she want to avoid it? What seemed to be the challenge here? The Venice […]
A Path through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds
Bettina Stoetzer Download PDF Abstract In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that an engagement with the legacies of German nationalism requires a track through the woods: throughout German history, forests have played a key role as origin myth to found a national identity (Schama 1995). In today’s forests, these entanglements between the […]
Ming Wong’s Imitations
Barbara Mennel Download PDF Abstract The article “Ming Wong’s Imitations” analyzes the installation Life of Imitation, created by visual artist Ming Wong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Life of Imitation restages a key scene from Douglas Sirk’s 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, in which the African American character Annie […]
Remediating Fassbinder in Video Installations by Ming Wong and Branwen Okpako
Katrin Sieg Download PDF Abstract Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tackling of race, immigration, and interracial relationships in his early plays and films is often applauded for offering a prescient treatment of topics largely neglected in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His experimentation with and blending of both queer and leftist political styles appeals to contemporary […]
Hardboiled Performance and Affective Intimacy: Remediations of Racism in the Cenk Batu Tatorte
Claudia Breger Download PDF Abstract Although not around to stay, the first Turkish German detective to be featured in the Germany’s most popular television crime series, Tatort nonetheless represented a major TV event (2008–12). In his sixth episode as an investigator in a series famous for its continued engagement with topical social issues, Cenk Batu […]
Serdar Somuncu: Turkish German Comedy as Transnational Intervention
Kathrin Bower Download PDF Abstract: A reconceptualization of Germanness, combined with a reconsideration of what constitutes “Germanness” and “Turkishness” and how they are linked, is a central theme in the programs of a younger generation of Turkish German cabaret artists and comedians. As a member of the new generation of performers, Serdar Somuncu stands out, […]
Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fears Eats the Soul)
With actors Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin Available on VHS with English subtitles in USA Rainer Werner Fassbinder, already the director of almost twenty films by the age of twenty-nine, paid homage to his cinematic hero, Douglas Sirk, with this updated version of Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. Lonely widow Emmi […]
The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, by Wolfram Wette
Reviewed by Steve Choe Download PDF Wolfram Wette. The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 372. Paper, $17.95. Wolfram Wette’s The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality is a translation of the original German text published by S. Fischer Verlag in 2002. It aims to debunk the legend of […]
Jews, Ethnicity and Identity in Early Modern Hamburg
Dean P. Bell Download PDF. Abstract: During the seventeenth century a vibrant and complex Jewish community developed in Hamburg and its surrounding areas. This community was comprised of several sub-communities that varied because of social and economic factors, ethnic differences and external political pressures. Utilizing the protocol books of the Portuguese Jewish community in Hamburg, […]