Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent by Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien (review)

With the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989, the already charged debates about Germany’s national identity became even more complicated. In her recently published monograph, Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien argues that through the events that brought the postwar era and the Cold War world order to an end, 1989 replaced 1945 as the primary caesura in modern German history. Hence, she takes 1989 as the starting point for her investigation of history films produced over the next 20 years until 2009 and approaches them as a crucial discursive network with a decisive impact on the ongoing construction of national identity in Germany. Expanding Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. [2004]), O’Brien sets out to investigate “how history films help viewers to comprehend the dynamics of change, agency, and passivity that play an equally important part in historical understanding” (16). Based on her extensive research of post-wall German cinema, she arrives at the conclusion that utopianism and dissent function as prominent models for the creation of a German identity after 1989.

O’Brien’s monograph contributes to a growing number of publications in the field of German Studies that all approach contemporary German cinema as a crucial cultural institution that actively shapes and participates in the creation of a national identity tied together through overarching historical narratives. Despite some overlap with regard to movie selection with recent publications such as Nick Hodgin’s Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in Film (2011) or Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s edited volume New Directions in German Cinema (2011), O’Brien leaves these predecessors unaddressed. This is especially noteworthy, since Cooke and Homewood share a similar starting point with O’Brien in that both publications challenge Eric Rentschler’s claim that post-Wall cinema is a “cinema of consensus” (“From New German Cinema to Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 260–77 [2000]).

A possible reason for these publications’ absence among O’Brien’s otherwise extensive disciplinary and interdisciplinary references could be that Cooke and Homewood’s movie selection is limited to films produced in the 2000s, thus starting significantly later than her own selection, and that Hodgin’s analysis focuses on the notion of nostalgia. In contrast, in her first chapter O’Brien argues for the concept of anamnesis over nostalgia, arguing that in approaching the immediate aftermath of 1989 and the collapse of socialism movies employ tropes of amnesia and imprisonment to address sudden historic change. The four chapters of the monograph are organized around conceptual clusters that guide and establish coherence between O’Brien’s expert readings of individual movies. In addition to amnesia and anamnesis, the chapters circle around political oppression and resistance, terrorism in East and West Germany, as well as utopianism and violence. While the well-written individual chapters are convincing on their own, these thematic and theoretical clusters connect the cinematic analysis throughout the book and create a narrative and argumentative flow that underscores the thoroughness of O’Brien’s scholarship. Throughout the four chapters she convincingly demonstrates how the GDR and its sudden collapse, the student movement of 1968 as well as German Terrorism, most famously embodied by the RAF, are all equally unresolved episodes of Germany’s national history. By bringing these historic flashpoints and their filmic representations in dialogue with each other, O’Brien successfully points to cinematic trends and shifts and highlights the thematic interplay between individual historic events and their cultural conversions. As O’Brien shows, the void of utopianism after multiple failed experiments with social and ideological alternatives to capitalism have left Germany with yet another challenge in the already difficult undertaking of creating a national identity.

The strength of O’Brien’s monograph is twofold: firs of...