Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth ce…[Read more]

A syllabus for an undergraduate course, taught in English, on the visual culture (primarily film, photography, and aesthetic theory) of the Weimar Republic. The course is housed in German Studies and crosslisted with Art History, Cinema, and other departments.

In its encounter with James Baldwin across form— “Letter to my nephew,” “Sonny’s Blues,” and archival footage of Baldwin being interviewed by the psychologist Kenneth Clark— this article offers an exploration of how Baldwin’s figuration of children and his own acts of care illuminate the political possibilities of both filiation and aff…[Read more]

This essay explores how Pierre Nora’s sites of memory work a specific cultural function through what Melvin Dixon refers to as “a memory that ultimately rewrites history.” I look at two of the most well-known poems of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and Countee Cullen’s “Heritage,” one of which reveals a…[Read more]

This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better…[Read more]

Archives and libraries operate within a complex web of social, political and economic forces. Digital technologies, globalization, the corporatization of the academy, and increasing commercial control of the scholarly record are just some of the myriad forces shaping their evolution. Libraries and archives in turn have shaped the production of…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

The Romanian political scene at the end of 1989 calls for a critical rhetorical perspective to understand how totalitarian politics clash with revolutionary changes and how communist space, so ambitiously crafted to cover an entire country’s public sphere, influences, if at all, a free(d) discourse on national unity. Examining official discourse o…[Read more]

The article examines the Romanian and American reception of Cristian Mungiu’s 4 weeks, 3 months, 2 weeks (2007), arguing that the film’s representational minimalism indirectly caused an excess of interpretation across cultural contexts. This overinterpretation was possible because the film’s aesthetic minimalism encouraged viewers to decode the s…[Read more]

“Unter Männern” weaves together three threads of, first, historically relevant memory recited by its chosen protagonists; second, some personal history on the part of the primary filmmaker (i.e., director Ringo Rösener); and, third, between and among them, filmic artifacts or evidence of life in the GDR. This documentary presents the a…[Read more]

This chapter introduces the volume on East German film. The chapter and the volume it introduces surveys a range of depictions of gender and sexuality in East German film and television, from stereotypical and ideologically compliant understandings of femininity and homosexuality to more ambivalent constructions of androgyny, gendered agency, and…[Read more]

The 31st bibliography for 828 volumes added to Washington University Libraries’ Contemporary German Literature Collection. All published in 2017, these acquisitions include novels, poetry, short story collections, essays, autobiographical works, and literary and cultural periodicals from publishers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. This…[Read more]

Jordan and Iraq are not countries that are often associated with a local film culture. Recently, however, a nascent film industry has started to grow in both Iraq and Jordan, producing films that have been shown in international film festivals. Even though the Jordanian film industry remains in its infancy, the films that have emerged of late…[Read more]

This article argues that the humanities and medicine fields have paid insufficient attention to race, which is reflected in and enabled by the apolitical nature of their cornerstone principles, their practices of literary interpretation, and their paucity of scholarship on writers of color. I examine the fields’ interpretation of Audre Lorde’s ill…[Read more]

This essay examines the circumstances of the production and appearance of East Germany’s first film about homosexuality (the short documentary “Die andere Liebe” or “The Other Love”), while considering the role it plays in our understanding of the development of German lesbian and gay history. More specifically, this essay provides a reading of…[Read more]

The Stars our Destination is a story of overcoming anxieties and biases from war, as well as other growing up issues in a steel mill town. Over time, the three main characters gradually converge. Two women have nightmares involving the past and the old Prof. Daniel Blei lives off and on in a flood of troubling recollections. The conclusion will…[Read more]