Phd Thesis by Richard McKenzie PhD
Scholarly reviews of the Trümmerfilm have hitherto concentrated on the its redemptive qualities. ... more Scholarly reviews of the Trümmerfilm have hitherto concentrated on the its redemptive qualities. In these readings of the films, the defeated German soldiers, Landser, or émigrés return to Germany and into the arms of their beautiful and faithful wives. The wives provide the safe space that the returned men need in order to be restored, reconciled and re-integrated into the new Germany. In this role, Germany’s women are responsible for ‘setting their men on course’ to rebuild the new nation and bring it out of its defeat. Robert Shandley has suggested2 that it is possible to view the original Trümmerfilm, Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns, through a genre lens, namely that of the Western movie. He notes that the genre expectations of this film were “thwarted” (Sieglohr, 2000, 99) by the intervention of the film’s female lead, but he does not carry this idea on by examining the gender implications of this thwarting, nor does he conduct a Cross-German study of the Trümmerfilm in its western and eastern forms to explore whether this is a trend. This thesis will build on Shandley’s comments and will first attempt to show whether the Trümmerfilm can indeed be seen as constituting a “genre” and then explore the implications of Shandley’s comments across eight Trümmerfilme, four from the western zones and four eastern zone. These films will be examined through the lenses of the Western and Kriminalfilm genres. These are used at Shandley’s suggestion and are genres that have clear sets of codes, spaces, gender relations and trope outcomes. This use of a genre lens reveals that male dominance of space is slowly ceded to the films’ leading women and the standard trope outcomes are “thwarted”, thereby contradicting trope expectations. The transgression of the expected genre expectations and ceding of the control of male spaces expose the implicit criticism of German women inherent in these films. The interpretation of the films thus changes from redemptive to critical and this study thereby exposes the misogyny of the Trümmerfilm.
Papers by Richard McKenzie PhD
United Academics -Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation, Dec 2012
The post war Trümmerfilm forms a key part of German foundational iconography in relation to the i... more The post war Trümmerfilm forms a key part of German foundational iconography in relation to the immediate effects of Germany’s defeat and capitulation in 1945.
Whether created in the Western or Soviet occupation zones this genre has been have been read as texts which begin the rehabilitation of the defeated Landser, begin the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and make the first tentative steps at attributing guilt for the catastrophe that befell Germany between 1933 and 1945. Key commentators, such as Pinkert and Silbermann, concentrate on the male experience, where female characters exist principally to rehabilitate and redeem their men folk.
Concentrating on Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns this presentation will provide a new reading of the Trümmerfilm genre. This reading sees the role of the female characters less in a redemptive and more in a controlling negative role in which their independence and sexuality are employed to reduce and defeat the male characters essential masculinity. In this final battle of the German catastrophe the female characters are criticised for attempting to “civilise” the returning Landser in their own image and constraining his essential self.
Konrad Wolf, the East German film director, described himself as a “Vaterlandsverrätter” because ... more Konrad Wolf, the East German film director, described himself as a “Vaterlandsverrätter” because of his experience of resisting the Nazis by fighting as a Red Army soldier against his native land. His film Ich war 19 and other German war films of the 1950’s and 1960’s grapple with the dilemma of presenting those that resisted fascism in a positive light despite a majority of adults believing, even in the 1950’s that resistance to Hitler was treason . The German war film genre bloomed in the 1950’s and 1960’s on both sides of the Wall as it was co-opted in to efforts to support re armament, nation building and the portray resistors as suitable heroes in the hunt for “usable” heroes in Germany’s catastrophic recent past.
Building on work undertaken for my Phd this paper will present the efforts of East and West German film makers to present resistance and resistors as positive heroes. It will contrast the positions taken by the film makers on both sides of the ideological divide and examine the extent to which these “foundational” films have laid down some of the national myths of German military resistance to fascism and the Wehrmacht’s culpability in the Second World War that persist in to German war film making in to the 21st Century.
The 27th September marked the culmination of the 2009 German Parliamentary election campaign that... more The 27th September marked the culmination of the 2009 German Parliamentary election campaign that was to see the end of SPD/CDU/CSU grand coalition in government. It saw the confirmation of Angela Merkel as CDU Bundeskanzlerin with a CDU/CSU and FDP coalition government for the next four years. The SPD left government after 12 years as its support fell from 34.2% to 23% and the number of its MdB fall from 222 to 146
(Spiegelonline.de (2009) Superwahljahr/Prozente und Sitze)
The SPD’s campaign was based around its Manifesto, which it called its Regierungsprogram. The SPD’s pledges to the electorate were summed up on the SPD website as:
1. Deutschland kann mehr
2. Deutschland sozial und demokratisch mit Frank Walter Steinmeier
3. Gute Löhne für gute Arbeit - und zwar für alle!
4. Erstklassige Bildung ohne Gebühren!
5. Klimaschutz mit sicherer Energie statt gefährlicher Atomkraft!
6. Unterstützung für unsere Familien!
7. Echte Gleichstellung für Frauen!
8. Ein tolerantes Land für alle - Vielfalt statt Einfalt!
9. Eine menschliche Gesellschaft statt ungezügelten Kapitalismus!
10. Fortschritt durch Arbeit, Bildung, Nachhaltigkeit
(SPD.de (2009) Bundestagswahl 2009)
This essay will examine the intertextual connections between the Textsorten Wahlprogramm and the Wahlwerbespots and Posters deployed used by the SPD in the election campaign. Intertextuality is understood here as being the clear visible connection of a base text on a subsidiary text used in a campaign. In this case the Regierungsprogramm, Der Deutschland-Plan are the base texts and the Posters and Wahlwerbespots being the subsidiary texts.
A Wahlprogramm is a key document in any election campaign, since it describes where a political party wants to take the nation over the period for which it hopes to govern. Since Germany has, in general, fixed term Parliaments the timetable for an election will be well mapped out before hand and the Wahlprogramm will be developed well in advance by the Party Leader and a group of trusted politicians and Party officials. The ideas will then be discretely tested by polling organisations and the final version developed. This will eventually become the key document in the election, from which all ideas and slogans will spring.
This dissertation examines two DEFA films produced in the 1960’s by Joachim Kunert and Konrad Wol... more This dissertation examines two DEFA films produced in the 1960’s by Joachim Kunert and Konrad Wolf,who became part of East Germany’s 2nd generation of filmmakers and who explored the causes of National Socialism and the remedies for the dreadful catastrophe that overcame Germany between 1933 and 1945. The collapse of the Reich in 1945 saw the end of the 12 year National Socialist reign of terror over Germany. The Nazi’s had ensured that they had control of cultural life in Germany and had invested heavily in a film industry that created a national myth in order to support Nazi Party aims and which manipulated the public. The defeat of Germany saw the discrediting and failure of fascist, national identity, myth making, artistic stereotypes and the foundational films produced in Germany during the period 1933-45. By the 1960’s DEFA, the GDR’s state film production company had been exploring the origins of National Socialism for twenty years, starting with Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946, DEFA. The GDR’s state film company, DEFA, was given the task of” […]restor[ing] democracy in Germany and remove all traces of fascist and militaristic ideology from the minds of every German[…] (Allen, 1999,3). These films were produced to enable the Germans to have an “honest confrontation with the military and moral catastrophe that […]the Germans had brought on themselves[…]” (Barnouw,2008,48) and sought to “develop a cinematic language[…]to confront the recent German past (Pinkert,2008,20). The “grammar” of DEFA anti- fascist films was established by such films as Staudte, Die Mörder Sind Unter Uns orIrgendwo in Berlin, 1946, Gerhard Lamprecht, DEFA and Die Buntkarierten,1949, Kurt Maetzig, DEFA or Rotation,1949, Wolfgang Staudte,DEFA. These films were made by a generation that had grown up in the Weimar period and who had experienced the slide from Weimar chaos to National Socialist Dictatorship at first hand. The film makers were born in the late 19th or early 20th Centuries, Staudte in 1906, Lamprecht in 1897 and Maetzig in 1911. Their early films are an almost emotional expression of the moment of defeat containing heartfelt investigations of the causes of the catastrophe from within the Soviet Occupation Zone and later in the GDR. The 1950’s saw DEFA turn its attention to films which explored the everyday concerns of GDR citizens struggling to build a new state centring on the Berlin films of the middle of that decade.
In 2011 a UK film magazine produced a list of the 500 greatest films which all film lovers ‘must... more In 2011 a UK film magazine produced a list of the 500 greatest films which all film lovers ‘must see’.
The list includes classics like Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind and Georg Lucas’ Star Wars but it only includes 10 warfilms about World War II. Since the number of warfilms recommended in the list is so small in comparison to the whole it is remarkable that three of the ‘must see’ films are German.
The three films that made the list are : Reitz’ Heimat , Peterson’s Das Boot and Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang. This list fits in with my own research in to German film.
I am currently writing a Phd which will examine how East and West German films which deal with World War II produced in the 1950’s and 1960’s have informed German cultural memory of the war. In the course of my investigation I discovered that German warfilms draw from a narrow set of stereotypes that continue in to the 21st Century.
At the end of World War II Germany and Austria’s cities were in ruins, its people shattered by 6 ... more At the end of World War II Germany and Austria’s cities were in ruins, its people shattered by 6 years of “Total War” and vilified as guilty monsters around the world. Curt Reiss, returned German émigré and American War Correspondent, described the streets of 1945 Berlin as “endless ruins, [...]bombed out tanks, the ubiquitous machine guns and helmets shot to pieces”. This fantastic landscape and guilty citizens fascinated filmmakers. They produced films which tried to depict the implications of defeat for the Reich and for the victors. The backdrop to these films was the endless ruins of Berlin and Vienna and in the foreground to questions of guilt and redemption.
This presentation will discuss three films which present the Reich’s defeat, and how filmmakers dealt with questions of guilt, responsibility and possible redemption. It will also examine how the films assess the effect of victory on Allied soldiers. The films examined are: Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946, Wolfgang Staudte, Germany, DEFA, A Foreign Affair, 1948, Billy Wilder, US, Paramount , and The Third Man, 1949, Carol Reed, UK, London Films.
Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns the first Post-War German movie and began the tradition of the Trümmerfilm described by Ezra as “a hard edged look at the difficulties of reconstructing Post War Germany”. Trümmerfilme used the catastrophic ruins as an oppressive backdrop and lean on interwar film techniques such as expressionism and melodrama. Wilder produced a black comedy with a message, described by Gemünden as, “waver[ing] between educational program, an overwrought history lesson and a comedy of very dark humor”. Reed’s 1949 Film Noir, The Third Man, is a film which Gemünden describes the action as taking place “not in a domestic city but the chaotic continental theatre of war, often viewed through Robert Krasker’s tilted lens, chiaroscuro effects[...]”.
In using elements of expressionism the directors present a representative vision of the defeated Germany and Austria, rejecting both the direct assault of neorealism and the upbeat spectacle of Hollywood film making. The presentation will explore how each director has examined German guilt, physical and psychological destruction, retribution, denazification and management of a Germanic or Austrian post war dystopia.
Teaching Documents by Richard McKenzie PhD
Uploads
Phd Thesis by Richard McKenzie PhD
Papers by Richard McKenzie PhD
Whether created in the Western or Soviet occupation zones this genre has been have been read as texts which begin the rehabilitation of the defeated Landser, begin the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and make the first tentative steps at attributing guilt for the catastrophe that befell Germany between 1933 and 1945. Key commentators, such as Pinkert and Silbermann, concentrate on the male experience, where female characters exist principally to rehabilitate and redeem their men folk.
Concentrating on Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns this presentation will provide a new reading of the Trümmerfilm genre. This reading sees the role of the female characters less in a redemptive and more in a controlling negative role in which their independence and sexuality are employed to reduce and defeat the male characters essential masculinity. In this final battle of the German catastrophe the female characters are criticised for attempting to “civilise” the returning Landser in their own image and constraining his essential self.
Building on work undertaken for my Phd this paper will present the efforts of East and West German film makers to present resistance and resistors as positive heroes. It will contrast the positions taken by the film makers on both sides of the ideological divide and examine the extent to which these “foundational” films have laid down some of the national myths of German military resistance to fascism and the Wehrmacht’s culpability in the Second World War that persist in to German war film making in to the 21st Century.
(Spiegelonline.de (2009) Superwahljahr/Prozente und Sitze)
The SPD’s campaign was based around its Manifesto, which it called its Regierungsprogram. The SPD’s pledges to the electorate were summed up on the SPD website as:
1. Deutschland kann mehr
2. Deutschland sozial und demokratisch mit Frank Walter Steinmeier
3. Gute Löhne für gute Arbeit - und zwar für alle!
4. Erstklassige Bildung ohne Gebühren!
5. Klimaschutz mit sicherer Energie statt gefährlicher Atomkraft!
6. Unterstützung für unsere Familien!
7. Echte Gleichstellung für Frauen!
8. Ein tolerantes Land für alle - Vielfalt statt Einfalt!
9. Eine menschliche Gesellschaft statt ungezügelten Kapitalismus!
10. Fortschritt durch Arbeit, Bildung, Nachhaltigkeit
(SPD.de (2009) Bundestagswahl 2009)
This essay will examine the intertextual connections between the Textsorten Wahlprogramm and the Wahlwerbespots and Posters deployed used by the SPD in the election campaign. Intertextuality is understood here as being the clear visible connection of a base text on a subsidiary text used in a campaign. In this case the Regierungsprogramm, Der Deutschland-Plan are the base texts and the Posters and Wahlwerbespots being the subsidiary texts.
A Wahlprogramm is a key document in any election campaign, since it describes where a political party wants to take the nation over the period for which it hopes to govern. Since Germany has, in general, fixed term Parliaments the timetable for an election will be well mapped out before hand and the Wahlprogramm will be developed well in advance by the Party Leader and a group of trusted politicians and Party officials. The ideas will then be discretely tested by polling organisations and the final version developed. This will eventually become the key document in the election, from which all ideas and slogans will spring.
The list includes classics like Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind and Georg Lucas’ Star Wars but it only includes 10 warfilms about World War II. Since the number of warfilms recommended in the list is so small in comparison to the whole it is remarkable that three of the ‘must see’ films are German.
The three films that made the list are : Reitz’ Heimat , Peterson’s Das Boot and Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang. This list fits in with my own research in to German film.
I am currently writing a Phd which will examine how East and West German films which deal with World War II produced in the 1950’s and 1960’s have informed German cultural memory of the war. In the course of my investigation I discovered that German warfilms draw from a narrow set of stereotypes that continue in to the 21st Century.
This presentation will discuss three films which present the Reich’s defeat, and how filmmakers dealt with questions of guilt, responsibility and possible redemption. It will also examine how the films assess the effect of victory on Allied soldiers. The films examined are: Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946, Wolfgang Staudte, Germany, DEFA, A Foreign Affair, 1948, Billy Wilder, US, Paramount , and The Third Man, 1949, Carol Reed, UK, London Films.
Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns the first Post-War German movie and began the tradition of the Trümmerfilm described by Ezra as “a hard edged look at the difficulties of reconstructing Post War Germany”. Trümmerfilme used the catastrophic ruins as an oppressive backdrop and lean on interwar film techniques such as expressionism and melodrama. Wilder produced a black comedy with a message, described by Gemünden as, “waver[ing] between educational program, an overwrought history lesson and a comedy of very dark humor”. Reed’s 1949 Film Noir, The Third Man, is a film which Gemünden describes the action as taking place “not in a domestic city but the chaotic continental theatre of war, often viewed through Robert Krasker’s tilted lens, chiaroscuro effects[...]”.
In using elements of expressionism the directors present a representative vision of the defeated Germany and Austria, rejecting both the direct assault of neorealism and the upbeat spectacle of Hollywood film making. The presentation will explore how each director has examined German guilt, physical and psychological destruction, retribution, denazification and management of a Germanic or Austrian post war dystopia.
Teaching Documents by Richard McKenzie PhD
Whether created in the Western or Soviet occupation zones this genre has been have been read as texts which begin the rehabilitation of the defeated Landser, begin the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung and make the first tentative steps at attributing guilt for the catastrophe that befell Germany between 1933 and 1945. Key commentators, such as Pinkert and Silbermann, concentrate on the male experience, where female characters exist principally to rehabilitate and redeem their men folk.
Concentrating on Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns this presentation will provide a new reading of the Trümmerfilm genre. This reading sees the role of the female characters less in a redemptive and more in a controlling negative role in which their independence and sexuality are employed to reduce and defeat the male characters essential masculinity. In this final battle of the German catastrophe the female characters are criticised for attempting to “civilise” the returning Landser in their own image and constraining his essential self.
Building on work undertaken for my Phd this paper will present the efforts of East and West German film makers to present resistance and resistors as positive heroes. It will contrast the positions taken by the film makers on both sides of the ideological divide and examine the extent to which these “foundational” films have laid down some of the national myths of German military resistance to fascism and the Wehrmacht’s culpability in the Second World War that persist in to German war film making in to the 21st Century.
(Spiegelonline.de (2009) Superwahljahr/Prozente und Sitze)
The SPD’s campaign was based around its Manifesto, which it called its Regierungsprogram. The SPD’s pledges to the electorate were summed up on the SPD website as:
1. Deutschland kann mehr
2. Deutschland sozial und demokratisch mit Frank Walter Steinmeier
3. Gute Löhne für gute Arbeit - und zwar für alle!
4. Erstklassige Bildung ohne Gebühren!
5. Klimaschutz mit sicherer Energie statt gefährlicher Atomkraft!
6. Unterstützung für unsere Familien!
7. Echte Gleichstellung für Frauen!
8. Ein tolerantes Land für alle - Vielfalt statt Einfalt!
9. Eine menschliche Gesellschaft statt ungezügelten Kapitalismus!
10. Fortschritt durch Arbeit, Bildung, Nachhaltigkeit
(SPD.de (2009) Bundestagswahl 2009)
This essay will examine the intertextual connections between the Textsorten Wahlprogramm and the Wahlwerbespots and Posters deployed used by the SPD in the election campaign. Intertextuality is understood here as being the clear visible connection of a base text on a subsidiary text used in a campaign. In this case the Regierungsprogramm, Der Deutschland-Plan are the base texts and the Posters and Wahlwerbespots being the subsidiary texts.
A Wahlprogramm is a key document in any election campaign, since it describes where a political party wants to take the nation over the period for which it hopes to govern. Since Germany has, in general, fixed term Parliaments the timetable for an election will be well mapped out before hand and the Wahlprogramm will be developed well in advance by the Party Leader and a group of trusted politicians and Party officials. The ideas will then be discretely tested by polling organisations and the final version developed. This will eventually become the key document in the election, from which all ideas and slogans will spring.
The list includes classics like Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind and Georg Lucas’ Star Wars but it only includes 10 warfilms about World War II. Since the number of warfilms recommended in the list is so small in comparison to the whole it is remarkable that three of the ‘must see’ films are German.
The three films that made the list are : Reitz’ Heimat , Peterson’s Das Boot and Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang. This list fits in with my own research in to German film.
I am currently writing a Phd which will examine how East and West German films which deal with World War II produced in the 1950’s and 1960’s have informed German cultural memory of the war. In the course of my investigation I discovered that German warfilms draw from a narrow set of stereotypes that continue in to the 21st Century.
This presentation will discuss three films which present the Reich’s defeat, and how filmmakers dealt with questions of guilt, responsibility and possible redemption. It will also examine how the films assess the effect of victory on Allied soldiers. The films examined are: Die Mörder sind unter uns, 1946, Wolfgang Staudte, Germany, DEFA, A Foreign Affair, 1948, Billy Wilder, US, Paramount , and The Third Man, 1949, Carol Reed, UK, London Films.
Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns the first Post-War German movie and began the tradition of the Trümmerfilm described by Ezra as “a hard edged look at the difficulties of reconstructing Post War Germany”. Trümmerfilme used the catastrophic ruins as an oppressive backdrop and lean on interwar film techniques such as expressionism and melodrama. Wilder produced a black comedy with a message, described by Gemünden as, “waver[ing] between educational program, an overwrought history lesson and a comedy of very dark humor”. Reed’s 1949 Film Noir, The Third Man, is a film which Gemünden describes the action as taking place “not in a domestic city but the chaotic continental theatre of war, often viewed through Robert Krasker’s tilted lens, chiaroscuro effects[...]”.
In using elements of expressionism the directors present a representative vision of the defeated Germany and Austria, rejecting both the direct assault of neorealism and the upbeat spectacle of Hollywood film making. The presentation will explore how each director has examined German guilt, physical and psychological destruction, retribution, denazification and management of a Germanic or Austrian post war dystopia.