CIAO DATE: 12/2008
Volume: 25, Issue: 4
Winter 2007
Gerald Feldman—In Memoriam
Andrei S. Markovits
Germany's Involvement in Extraordinary Renditions and Its Responsibility under International Law (PDF)
Laura Tate Kagel
This article investigates Germany’s role in CIA “extraordinary renditions” of terrorist suspects, focusing on two cases involving German citizens of Middle Eastern descent (Khaled el-Masri and Mohammed Zammar), and one case of an Egyptian cleric who had resided in Italy and was likely transferred to Egypt via a U.S. military airport in Germany (Abu Omar). Amid recent revelations about the extent of the CIA program for transferring and interrogating terrorism suspects, the question of Germany’s potential responsibility under international law has gained public attention. Against the background of international legal rules governing responsibility of assisting states, this article examines what was known in Germany about human rights abuses in the above cases and evaluates official steps taken by the government to prevent or uncover violations. In the conclusion, the article addresses the need for increased institutional safeguards to hinder German involvement in questionable U.S. counterterrorism practices.
Introduction: The Denk ich an Deutschland Television Film Series
Margit Sinka
Entertaining Auteurism: Popular Filmmakers Think About Germany
Margaret McCarthy
German popular filmmakers who participated in the Denk ich an Deutschland series brought a range of conflicting impulses to their meditations on Germany, including the universalizing tendencies of popular culture, together with the personal and political strains often present in documentary films. With varying degrees of success, each director agitates national identity via an idiosyncratic selfhood, a process which in turn expands our notions of Germany beyond generic convention. The best of the five films discussed in this essay—directed by Doris Dörrie, Fatih Akin, Katja von Garnier, Sherry Hormann, and Klaus Lemke—feature their creators’ struggle to box themselves out of a larger collective identity. By modeling their own existential Bildung, they chip away at an otherwise implacable German identity and provide a psychic service for Germans potentially more salutary than the way Hollywood films sustain American identity.
The Denk ich an Deutschland Films of the Two Andreases from the East: Kleinert's Bewildering Berlin and Dresen's Stagnating Uckermark
Margit Sinka
Launched in 1998 on the eve of the eighth Day of German Unity, the Denk ich an Deutschland television film series was intended to reframe discourses on national identity formation in a positive light through documentaries focused on the present rather than on the dark German past. While Andreas Kleinert’s Niemandsland (No Man’s Land, 1998) and Andreas Dresen’s Herr Wichmann von der CDU (Vote for Henryk!, 2003), the first and last films televised, do center on the present, they highlight dissonances between personal and national concerns. Still, Kleinert deconstructs the dissonances and artificial syntheses he himself invents in order to reveal them as constructs to be reconfigured by viewers. By showing the inability of politicians to bridge the gap between personal and national concerns due to the erosion of their private identities, Dresen also appeals to viewers to initiate needed societal changes themselves.
The Politics and Policies of Immigration in Germany: A Rearview Look at the Makings of a "Country of Immigration"
Sara Wallace Goodman