David Bathrick

Comments on the Method of Marx's Capital and Its Importance for Contemporary Marxist Scholarship

theorems of this work with the concrete reality of today. Precisely that, it seems to us, is the central task of contemporary Marxist economics. If our contribution has helped in any way to bring to consciousness this theoretical task, then its purpose has been fulfilled. Translated by David Bathrick and Anson Rabinbach

Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall

Before I address the U.S. media response to the film Downfall, I would like to mention a methodological problem that I encountered time and again when researching this essay: whether it is possible to speak of reception in purely national terms in this age of globalization, be it a foreign film or any other cultural artifact. Generally speaking, Bernd Eichingers large-scale production Downfall can be considered a success in America both financially and critically. On its first weekend alone in New York City it broke box-office records for the small repertory movie theater Film Forum, grossing

Memories and Fantasies About and By the Stasi

24,220, despite its consider able length, some two and a half hours, and the fact that it was shown in the original with subtitles. Nationally, audience attendance remained unusually high for the following twelve weeks, compared with average figures for other German films made for export markets.1 Downfall, which grossed

Anti-Neonazism as Cinematic Practice: Bonengel's Beruf Neonazi

5,501,940 to the end of October 2005, was an unequivocal box-office hit. One major reason for its success was certainly the content. Adolf Hit ler, in his capacity as star of the silver screen, has always been a sufficient

The Politics of Culture: Rudolf Bahro and Opposition in the GDR

The events of November 1989 brought two very different forms of liberation to East Germany. Viewed positively, we note a peaceful political transition that was able to remain so thanks to the courage of its oppositional citizenry as well as to a massive implosion within the GDR and Eastern Bloc power structures. Not too long thereafter came the liberation of 178 kilometres of Stasi (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, the secret service of the GDR) files — documents that made available to a volatile post-Wall public sphere a sub-history of terror and control. Jurgen Habermas pays homage to this double liberation in his following tribute to those who brought it about: ‘The removal of an unjust regime, the liberation from the supervision of a secret police that penetrates everything and outdoes anything that Foucault’s image of a panoptic society had ever sought to grasp — that is what is normatively decisive about this revolution’ (Habermas, 1990, pp. 45–6).

Billy Wilder's Cold War Berlin

The explosive response to Winfried Bonengels documentary film Beruf Neonazi in the fall of 1993 said volumes about public uncertainty: about profound social frustration concerning rising neo-Nazism throughout newly united Germany during that period as well as about a fundamental ambivalence concerning ways to represent this phenomenon. My goal in exploring the public debates that arose around this film is less to decide once and for all whether the film should or should not

The powers of speech : the politics of culture in the GDR

The arrest last year of 41 year old party official Rudolf Bahro for the publication in the West of The Alternativel marks a turning point in the process of dissent in the German Democratic Republic. For the first time a major voice of opposition comes not from the artistic or scientific-academic communities, but directly out of the ranks of the party apparatus. Whereas the poet Wolf Biermann or the professor Robert Havemann speak for sectors of an intelligentsia which have traditionally found occasion to oppose the strictures of government policy, Rudolf Bahro is a product of that policys own socialization. A comparison with the maverick Wolf Biermann is instructive. Born within the same year, both men began their formal political education as totally committed communists studying philosophy at the Humboldt University in the construction years between 1953 and 1960. Here, however, the similarities end almost as they begin. Biermanns rapidly growing reputation in the early 1960s as a poet enfant terrible openly critical of government political and cultural policy soon brought him public censure for his concerts, rejection from party candidacy and finally Berufsverbot from 1965 until his forced exile in the fall of 1976. More than any other figure, Wolf Biermann represents that segment of the younger generation which refused to allow their political commitments to conform to the version of socialism represented by the SED hierarchy. Rudolf Bahro is the reverse side of that coin of commitment. At 16 a

The Technological imagination : theories and fictions

Billy Wilder’s decision to return to Germany as a U.S. colonel at the close of World War II emanated from personal needs along with the desire of the U.S. government to have a leading Hollywood director with European experience provide advice on reorganizing and denazifying the German film industry in the postwar period.1 Wilder’s personal concerns were twofold. First, he was in search of his mother and grandmother who had disappeared in the Holocaust. What he learned eventually from the Red Cross was that they had both been murdered in Auschwitz. His other worry was more immediately existential: “We wondered where we should go now that the war was over. None of us—I mean the emigres—really knew where we stood. Should we go home? Where was home?”2 What follows is an examination of three films about Germany that Wilder was involved in during the early Cold War period (1945–61). The first, Death Mills (Die Todesmuhlen, 1945), was a twenty-two-minute documentary he edited about the concentration camps; the other two, which he directed and coscripted, were the feature films A Foreign Affair (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961). My focus is on what these films suggest about Wilder’s changing relationship to postwar Germany and how these changes dovetail with, in part