Introduction: New Prospects—After the Berlin School?

Abstract

Within New German Critique’s long-standing commitment to analyzing German-language thought, literature, politics, and culture, film has played an integral role. At crucial points in its history, the journal has taken stock of contemporary German cinema, first doing so in a special issue devoted to New German Cinema (Fall–Winter 1981–82). That issue probed the impact of this internationally acclaimed new wave at the zenith of its success. At a time of widespread enthusiasm for this countercinema, the editors expressed concerns about the ways in which many American critical treatments of recent West German cinema had “misread, ignored or distorted its place within the long range history and present context of the German Federal Republic.” By and large, these analyses, however well intentioned, focused on textual idiosyncrasies and gave short shrift to contextual determinants; for that reason they failed “to connect the aesthetics of contemporary filmmaking to the political and