Reworking the German Past: Adaptations in Film, the Arts, and Popular Culture (review)

With its unique yet wide-ranging focus, Reworking the German Past manages not only to expand the slender body of work on adaptations in the German cultural context, but also contributes amiably to specific studies on topics as diverse as feature film, literature, photomontage, Schlager, and urban exhibitions. How appropriate, then, that this cohesive and well organized volume is preceded by a foreword by Linda Hutcheon, whose Theory of Adaptation (2006) informs many of the individual chapters. Hutcheon’s engaging foreword adds theoretical and conceptual insights into how retellings of stories remediate the past and embed it in a context, and moreover considers the act of adaptation in the German perspective. Thus, the foreword helps to create a framework that is expertly substantiated in the book’s introduction. Susan G. Figge’s and Jennifer K. Ward’s forceful and exceptional collaboration emanates from these pages, but is also visible in the book’s coherent and tight structure and their cowritten chapter, “‘Ich möchte einmal alles erzählen’: The Nazi Era in three Fictional Tellings and Their Cinematic Retellings.” Reworking the German Past is organized according to the primary historical moment, addressed in three parts on Weimar Germany, the Nazi and Cold War era, and post-Wende culture, spanning the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. While all chapters are consistently of high quality, testifying to the authors’ as well as the editors’ care and quality, space permits here only to elaborate on a few exemplary essays from each part.

Cary Nathenson’s first chapter sets an impressively high standard: his analysis of the less-obvious remake of F. W. Murnau’s classic Der letzte Mann (1924) into the melodrama Die Degenhardts (1944) brings into sharp focus Nazi attempts to rewrite the Weimar past. Examining the films’ respective messages, character constellations, and family dynamics, Nathenson contends that Die Degenhardts remediates Nazi anxieties about gender, race, and class during the Weimar period. Specifically, he suggests that Die Degenhardts offers a redemptive revenge fantasy, in which fathers redeem their sons by taking their place in society and ultimately sacrificing Weimar’s “lost generation.”

Sunka Simon critically evaluates the resurgence of Weimar and Nazi Schlager in post-Wende Germany. In her careful analysis, she looks at Schlager recently recorded by Manfred Krug and Ulrich Tukur, to maintain that the songs tend to reappropriate the Nazi era by depoliticizing the Third Reich and simultaneously politicizing the present. Elizabeth Baer’s informative chapter on W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz reads the work as an imaginative and much-expanded adaptation of Susi Bechhöfer’s story, Rosa’s Child. Refuting Bechhöfer’s accusations of plagiarism, Baer convincingly argues that Sebald created prose fiction that, by using the notion of Primo Levi’s “gray zone” and what his interviewer Maya Jaggi termed “uncertainty,” poetically communicates loss and mourning.

In yet another outstanding essay, Mareike Herrmann examines Doris Dörrie’s 1998 film Bin ich schön? as a reworking of Dörrie’s collection of short stories of the same name, but also of Dörrie’s stories Für immer und ewig: Eine Art Reigen and Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen. Herrmann not only proposes that Dörrie moves from an internal, one-dimensional perspective in the stories to an external, multifaceted perspective in the film, but also discusses the film’s themes of emptiness and alienation in the context of Schnitzler’s play and Max Ophüls’s film adaptation of the latter. The six other essays are equally intriguing and wide-ranging. In sum, this book is a must for scholars working on issues of reworking and adaptation, and highly recommended for anyone interested in German cultural identities from Weimar to the present.