Marc Silberman

Rethinking Peter Weiss

Eight essays, two in German, revised from presentations at a November 1998 workshop at the University of Wisconsin consider whether the nearly total neglect of German painter, filmmaker, essays, novelist, and dramatist Weiss (1916-ca.1982) since the end of the Cold War can be and should be reversed. He was a committed socialist who burst on the scene in 1964 with his film Marat/Sade and dealt with many social and political themes during his career.

DEFA at the Crossroads of East German and International Film Culture: A Companion

Although East Germany may have seemed like an island during the Cold War, films produced by DEFA were never just a monologue but in constant dialogue, if not competition, with both the capitalist West and socialist East. This volume reshapes DEFA cinema studies by exploring international networks, identifying lines of influence beyond national boundaries and recognizing genre qualities that surpass the temporal and spatial confines of the state.

After-words: Lessons in Memory and Politics

The number of memorial sites, historical museums, and public places of mourning are increasing worldwide, becoming what has been referred to in the American context as “memorial mania” and extending globally to “grassroots memorials,” shrines, and other forms of ritualized practices.1 While memorializing seems to fulfill an anthropological need among humankind, the contemporary process of historical remembering and the very vocabulary to articulate it date to the much more recent crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazi regime in Germany. Like no other event in recent memory, the Holocaust reveals both the possibilities and limitations of historical interpretation and artistic representation. As Adorno suggested early on, its extreme nature marks not only a political and social rupture but also a rupture of experience and morality.2 So the Holocaust has become the test case for the workings of modern collective memory as a cultural practice of remembering and self-reflection, raising conceptual, categorical, and interpretative problems. And yet, this discourse of remembering after the violence of the Second World War is fairly recent. In Germany, after two decades of institutionally controlled memory that served primarily the goal of forgetting, that is, of resisting shame and facing up to the responsibility for the past, social memory swelled in the 1970s through an interest in autobiographical writing, family genealogy, and plans for new museums and commemorative sites; and since then it has generated a veritable boom with a heterogeneous outpouring of interdisciplinary and international scholarship.3

Introduction: Where Is Germany?

When the Berlin Wall opened unexpectedly on November 9, 1989, it marked a rupture of global significance in the history of the twentieth century. For Germany’s national history, the event has become—next to the defeat of 1945—the most significant date in collective memory, advancing very quickly to the status of a foundational myth of postwar German identity. An improvised barrier when the East German Central Committee first decided to install it on August 13, 1961, for Cold War Europe, the Berlin Wall represented the architectural incarnation of the Iron Curtain: a symbol of border crisis and of systemic difference and division. Today the Berlin Wall has literally disappeared, dismantled and removed to the realm of museums and commemorative sites. Ironically, this concrete barrier has become now a symbol for the passage of time and the process of change. But it was not only a symbol 50 years ago. It was also a local marker of world significance that linked politics, the public sphere, and the everyday experience of millions of people for the nearly 30 years of its existence. Understanding this central Cold War construct can also point to the possibilities inherent in its demise, both in Germany and within the larger context of European expansion: the fall of the Wall refers to a turning point, an end of one history and a new beginning, that of the post-Wall era.