Screening War. Perspectives on German Suffering. Screen Cultures. German Film and the Visual (review)

Since the late 1990s, the German public and academic discussions about representations of World War II have increasingly concentrated on German suffering and victimhood, as exemplified by publications by W. G. Sebald, Günter Grass, and Jörg Friedrich, as well as numerous popular TV miniseries. Academics clearly disagree as to whether a remembrance culture of German suffering has developed at the expense of the remembrance of Nazi victims (Helmut Schmitz) or whether it can work in a framework of German war memory, where the diverse memories of suffering, guilt, and resistance can coexist (Aleida Assmann; see also chapter 7 by Tim Bergfelder, 127-28). Screening War is one of currently seven volumes (the first of which appeared in 2008) in the new series Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual, edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke. Cooke and Silberman's collection shows that representations of German suffering have existed in various forms since the end of the war and explores the "changing status of German victimhood" since 1945 (2). The novelty of the project is that it chooses the lens of film as the path to analyse the thematic choices and aesthetic strategies in the representation of German suffering and the ways in which social trauma has been expressed or concealed in West and East Germany, as well as in the reunited Germany.

After a brief introduction by the editors on the discourse of German post-World War II suffering, the collection features twelve chapters, the majority of which are of high quality, by German film and cultural studies scholars, mostly from Britain and the United States. It is structured fairly loosely in four sections of three chapters each. The reader is offered numerous related insights into the changing discourse of German suffering and victimhood in feature films, TV productions, and documentaries. The articles are split between analyses that exclusively discuss the plot lines and the characters of the films and ones that focus on their composition and aesthetic strategies. The latter are usually the more convincing contributions.

One of the most striking observations of the volume is the recurrent theme of the weak heroes and the ways in which the films transform alleged inferiority under the Nazi regime and in the war into strengths, values, and virtues. Jennifer M. Kapczynski (chapter 1) reveals a "softer sensibility" of the "armchair warriors" in West German war films of the 1950s (33), for example, in Paul May's 08/15. In der Kaserne (1954). A similar turn away from fascist masculinity can also be seen in Sabine Hake's chapter on Frank Beyer's and Konrad Wolf's cinema, as well as in Daniela Berghahn's excellent analysis of performative identities in DEFA's antifascist films (chapter 8), whose "eternal values and virtues" as "resistance of the heart" have transferred into the post-reunification TV melodramas on air war and expulsion (183). This appeal to the heart corresponds to Johannes von Moltke's comparison in chapter 11 of how Alexander Kluge's films and Roland Suso Richter's Dresden (2006) evoke the viewer's emotions.

Another theoretical topic that consistently emerges from the book is identification and empathy. Brad Prager (chapter 9) analyses whether Volker Schlöndorff's Der neunte Tag (2004) and Dennis Gansel's NaPolA (2004) succeed in making identification with the protagonists uncomfortable. Prager is able to show how film can at least aim at complicating existing master narratives and national memories through a complex relationship between the viewer and the protagonists. Similarly, John E. Davidson (chapter 10) demonstrates the processes of identification and re-enactment of cultural memory in Eberhard Fechner's works, particularly in Der Prozess - Eine Darstellung des Majdanek-Verfahrens in Düsseldorf (1984). The documentary creates a space in between the "here and now" and the "there and then" (215).

Screening War offers numerous theoretical insights...