CIAO DATE: 10/07
German Politics and Society
Vol. 22, No. 2, Issue 71 (Summer 2004)
Articles
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Screening the East, Probing the Past: The Baltic Sea in Contemporary German Cinema
Alexandra Ludewig, German, University of Western Australia
The unifying message in all these films is that the only certainty in life is change, which is especially true for Germans coming to terms with the heritage of Nazism and Socialism. For them, the backdrop of the boundless, timeless forces of nature serves as a corrective to their human plight.[56] And while the cinema that featured the alpine refuge had at its core the message that society and the individual can live in perfect harmony as integral parts of one another,[57] the ocean backdrop seems to promote a place for the individual within and outside of society and civilization at one and the same time, as an integral part of nature. In view of the infinite sea, humans realize that they are "at best marginalia in another era's fossil record."[58] This forces a reassessment of their worldview, resulting in their abandoning their position at the center of the universe. As they realize that "the sea hides and dissolves, […] translating objects from the upper to the lower world,"[59] they come to terms with their own insignificance. This trend indicates a paradigm shift in the Heimat genre in some of the better film releases from Germany that are far from revisionist and offer a fairly balanced and informed engagement with the highly political cinematic history.
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Still Connected to Home: The Politics of Immigrant Transnationalism in Germany
John Brady, San Diego, California
Betigül Ercan Argun, Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Space of Deutschkei (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Given the general reluctance of German political actors to embrace homeland political agendas, immigrant organizations who place homeland political issues in the foreground will find it difficult to move into the mainstream of politics in the Federal Republic. In other words, "including both the political system of the receiving country and the homeland complements the understanding of the extent to which immigrants and refugees cooperate with political institutions while residing in their receiving country." (84) Østergaard-Nielsen adopts this multivariable approach in her study's two other case studies- one that examines how German political actors, such as the unions and political parties, have confronted immigrant transnationalism, and another that details the attempts of the Turkish government to influence the Turkish diaspora in the Federal Republic. Both of these case studies are, like her study of the strategic repertoire of immigrant activists, descriptively rich and analytically insightful. These are both excellent studies, and each should be one of the first stops for any scholar interested in the contemporary politics of transnationalism in the Federal Republic.
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Still Yearning for the Lost Heimat? Ethnic German Expellees and the Politics of Belonging
Henning Süssner, Ethnic Studies, Linköping University, Campus Norrköping, Sweden
Today, it is no longer controversial to define Germans as victims of war. The destiny of the expellees has not been forgotten; there even seems to be a new obsession with the fate of the expellees in contemporary Germany. Popular history books on ethnic German expellees top bestseller lists; major television networks broadcast impressive documentary series on the topic; and school classes are engaged in oral history projects about the fate of their grandparents. In this respect, the new mainstream view on World War II-the new "memory regime" of contemporary Germany-and the perspective of the expellee communities seem compatible. Still, to classify huge parts of Eastern and Central Europe as essentially "German" is most certainly a controversial thing to do. And the still ongoing debate about the establishment in Berlin of a so-called National Memorial Center of Expulsions shows that the memory regime of universal suffering is still contested. In light of the struggle of expellee organizations against the general public's "forgetfulness," it may be interesting to analyze the parallels between the expellees' images of the past and the new German "memory regime." In this context, such an analysis could shed light on the expellee organizations' role within the context of contemporary German society.
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Book Reviews
Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Review by Geoff EleyEli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2004)
Review by Tobias BrinkmannKolinsky, Eva, and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds., Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany since Unification (London, Portland: Frank Cass, 2003)
Review by Katrin SiegWilliam Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (Chapel Hill/London, 2003)
Review by Clay ClemensPeter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge and New York, 2003)
Review by Henry KrischPatrick Stevenson, Language and German Disunity: A Sociolinguistic History of East and West in Germany, 1945 - 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Review by Heidi ByrnesStuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester: Camden House, 2002)
Review by Kris Thomas Vander Lugt