Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter was met with both critical and commercial success upon its release in 1978. However, it was also highly controversial and came to be seen as a powerful statement on the human cost of America's longest war and as a colonialist glorification of anti-Asian violence. Brad Prager's study of the film considers its significance as a war movie and contextualizes its critical reception. Drawing on an archive of contemporaneous materials, as well as an in-depth analysis of the film’s lighting, mise-en-scène, multiple cameras and shifting depths of field, Prager examines how the film simultaneously presents itself as a work of cinematic realism, while problematically blurring the lines between fact and fiction. While Cimino felt he had no responsibility to historical truth, depicting a highly stylized version of his own fantasies about the Vietnam War, Prager argues that The Deer Hunter’s formal elements were used to bolster his troubling depictions of war and race. Finally, comparing the film with later depictions of US-led intervention such as Albert and Allen Hughes’s Dead Presidents (1995) and Spike Lee’s Da Five Bloods (2020), Prager illuminates The Deer Hunter’s major presumptions, blind spots and omissions, while also presenting a case for its classic status.

Features a new section on the institutional settings of German Jewish Studies, a Film Forum on Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla, and interviews with Paul Mendes-Flohr and Barbara Honigmann, among other contributions. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing German Jewish Studies forum in North America. Because the locus of scholarship is never incidental, Nexus 6 introduces a new section, "Contexts," to examine, in this case, what it means to pursue German Jewish Studies at a Catholic university, Notre Dame. And because research is never static, it inaugurates a series in which scholars revisit their own prior scholarly publications. Robert Smith launches this initiative by revising his view of Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a source for post-Holocaust Christian-Jewish dialogue. The volume also offers conversations with the legendary Paul Mendes-Flohr on his understanding of the German Jewish "legacy" and with Barbara Honigmann on her distinctive prose style and what it means to her to practice Judaism. The popular Film Forum section returns, this time focusing on Shahar Rozen's 1998 documentary Liebe Perla. Nexus 6 also presents new scholarship on Babi Yar Holocaust memorials, Freud's famous Moses essay, Primo Levi's translation of Kafka, and an introduction to and first English translation of the 18th-century philosopher Salomon Maimon's understudied essay History of His Philosophical Authorship in Dialogues.

Offers not only a close reading but also a film-historical contextualization of Phoenix, constituting the most significant and thorough study of Petzold's film to date. Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014), a masterpiece from one of Germany's leading contemporary filmmakers, portrays a death-camp survivor's return to occupied Berlin just after the war has come to an end. Nelly, played by German film star Nina Hoss, returns badly wounded, her face covered in bandages, hoping that her German husband will still love her. Johnny fails to recognize her and instead offers her a role in an intricate criminal scheme. Petzold's film, which he scripted together with his frequent collaborator Harun Farocki, was an international success that has been widely compared with works by Alfred Hitchcock and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This study explores the film's unique array of influences including the vast range of films, novels, and memoirs on which its screenwriters drew. Its central argument concerns the film's integration of a long history of German-Jewish works and ideas-its attempt to confront its audience with a neglected tradition that included figures as diverse as Peter Lorre, Fred Zinnemann, and Hannah Arendt. Offering a close reading of the film's themes, compositions, and music alongside a film-historical contextualization, this book constitutes the most significant and thorough study of Phoenix to date. Brad Prager is Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Missouri.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy,literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Features a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori and a Forum section on the 2016 film A German Life. Nexus is the official publication of the biennial German Jewish Studies Workshop, which was inaugurated at Duke University in 2009 and is now held at the University of Notre Dame. Together, Nexus and the Workshop constitute the first ongoing forum in North America for German Jewish studies. Nexus publishes innovative research in German Jewish Studies, introducing new directions, analyzing the development and definition of the field, and considering its place vis-a-vis both German Studies and Jewish Studies. Additionally, it examines issues of pedagogy and programming at the undergraduate, graduate, and community levels. Nexus 4 features a special section on the Hungarian German Jewish writer and theater director George Tabori; edited by Martin Kagel, this section includes both new documentary material and a number of trenchant scholarly articles. Additionally, the volume includes a Forum section (edited by Brad Prager) on the 2016 documentary film A German Life, an exploration of Kafka and childhood (Ritchie Robertson), and a provocative reassessment of Schindler's List (Eva Revesz). Contributors: Tobias Boes, Antje Diedrich, Norbert Otto Eke, Martin Kagel, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Brad Prager, Eva Revesz, Ritchie Robertson, Robert Skloot, Kerstin Steitz, Donna Stonecipher, Lena Tabori, StanleyWalden, Valerie Weinstein. William Collins Donahue is the John J. Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, where he chairs the Department of German and Russian. Martha B. Helfer is Professor of German and an affiliate member of the Department of Jewish Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Special section editor Martin Kagel is A. G. Steer Professor of German at the University of Georgia.

New essays by prominent scholars in German and Holocaust Studies exploring the boundaries and confluences between the fields and examining new transnational approaches to the Holocaust. In studies of Holocaust representation and memory, scholars of literature and culture traditionally have focused on particular national contexts. At the same time, recent work has brought the Holocaust into the arena of the transnational, leading to a crossroads between localized and global understandings of Holocaust memory. Further complicating the issue are generational shifts that occur with the passage of time, and which render memory and representations of the Holocaust ever more mediated, commodified, and departicularized. Nowhere is the inquiry into Holocaust memory more fraught or potentially more productive than in German Studies, where scholars have struggled to addressGerman guilt and responsibility while doing justice to the global impact of the Holocaust, and are increasingly facing the challenge of engaging with the broader, interdisciplinary, transnational field. Persistent Legacy connects the present, critical scholarly moment with this long disciplinary tradition, probing the relationship between German Studies and Holocaust Studies today. Fifteen prominent scholars explore how German Studies engages with Holocaust memory and representation, pursuing critical questions concerning the borders between the two fields and how they are impacted by emerging scholarly methods, new areas of inquiry, and the changing place of Holocaust memory in contemporary Germany. Contributors: David Bathrick, Stephan Braese, William Collins Donahue, Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Katja Garloff, Andreas Huyssen, Irene Kacandes, Jennifer M. Kapczynski, Sven Kramer,Erin McGlothlin, Leslie Morris, Brad Prager, Karen Remmler, Michael D. Richardson, Liliane Weissberg. Erin McGlothlin and Jennifer M. Kapczynski are both Associate Professors in the Department of Germanic Languages andLiteratures at Washington University in St. Louis.

Collection of essays exploring the controversies surrounding images of the Holocaust. Visual representations are an essential but highly contested means of understanding and remembering the Holocaust. Photographs taken in the camps in early 1945 provided proof of and visceral access to the atrocities. Later visualrepresentations such as films, paintings, and art installations attempted to represent this extreme trauma. While photographs from the camps and later aesthetic reconstructions differ in origin, they share goals and have raised similar concerns: the former are questioned not as to veracity but due to their potential inadequacy in portraying the magnitude of events; the latter are criticized on the grounds that the mediation they entail is unacceptable. Some have even questioned any attempt to represent the Holocaust as inappropriate and dangerous to historical understanding. This book explores the taboos that structure the production and reception of Holocaust images and the possibilities that result from the transgression of those taboos. Essays consider the uses of various visual media, aesthetic styles, and genres in representations of the Holocaust; the uses of perpetrator photography; the role of trauma in memory; aesthetic problems of mimesis and memory in the work of Lanzmann, Celan, and others; and questions about mass-cultural representations of the Holocaust. David Bathrick is Emeritus Professor of German at Cornell University, Brad Prager is Associate Professor of German at the University of Missouri, and Michael D. Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

Werner Herzog is renowned for pushing the boundaries of conventional cinema, especially those between the fictional and the factual, the fantastic and the real. "The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth" is the first study in twenty years devoted entirely to an analysis of Herzog's work. It explores the director's continuing search for what he has described as 'ecstatic truth, ' drawing on over thirty-five films, from the epics "Aguirre: Wrath of God" (1972) and "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) to innovative documentaries like "Fata Morgana" (1971), "Lessons of Darkness" (1992), and "Grizzly Man" (2005). Special attention is paid to Herzog's signature style of cinematic composition, his "romantic" influences, and his fascination with madmen, colonialism, and war.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Re-examines German cinema's representation of the Germans as victims during the Second World War and its aftermath. The recent "discovery" of German wartime suffering has had a particularly profound impact in German visual culture. Films from Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse (2003) to Oliver Hirschbiegel's Oscar-nominated Downfall (2004) and the two-part television mini-series Dresden (2006) have shown how ordinary Germans suffered during and after the war. Such films have been presented by critics as treating a topic that had been taboo for German filmmakers. However, the representation of wartime suffering has a long tradition on the German screen. For decades, filmmakers have recontextualized images of Germans as victims to engage shifting social and ideological discourses. By focusing on this process, the present volume explores how the changing representation of Germans as victims has shaped the ways in which both of the postwar German states and the now-unified nation have attempted to facethe trauma of the past and to construct a contemporary place for themselves in the world. Contributors: Sean Allan, Tim Bergfelder, Daniela Berghahn, Erica Carter, David Clarke, John E. Davidson, Sabine Hake, JenniferKapczynski, Manuel Koeppen, Rachel Palfreyman, Brad Prager, Johannes von Moltke. Paul Cooke is Professor of German Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds and Marc Silberman is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin.

After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the public's response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes thirteen contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere.

After the Fact studies the terrain of Holocaust documentaries subsequent to the turn of the twenty-first century. Until now most studies have centered primarily on canonical films such as Shoah and Night and Fog, but over the course of the last ten years filmmaking practices have altered dramatically. Changing techniques, diminishing communities of survivors, and the public's response to familiar, even iconic imagery, have all challenged filmmakers to radically revise and newly envision how they depict the Holocaust. Innovative styles have emerged, including groundbreaking techniques of incorporating archival footage, survivor testimony, and reenactment. Carrying wider implications for the fields of Film Studies, Jewish Studies, and Visual Studies, this book closely analyzes thirteen contemporary and internationally produced films, most of which have hardly been touched upon in the critical literature or elsewhere.

While difficult questions of history, culture, and politics figured less prominently in the lighter cinematic fare of the 1980s and 1990s, German filmmakers have recaptured the world's attention since the turn of the millennium with vital, dynamic, and engaged works. In fact, today's filmmakers have turned back to many themes that were important in the 1960s and 1970s, when a movement of young filmmakers proclaimed the collapse of existing filmmaking conventions. In The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, editors Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager present contributions from prominent German film studies scholars to examine the current politically charged and provocative moment in German filmmaking historically, ideologically, and formally as another break with cinematic convention. Fisher and Prager introduce the volume with a look back at the history of German film to define New German Cinema and identify the themes and motives that characterize its films and filmmakers. In the first section, essays explore the cinematic treatment of German national identity in historical films, including those that confront Germany's Nazi past, such as Downfall, The Miracle of Bern, and the TV-film Dresden. The second section takes on German cinema's examination of life in East Germany and the consequences of reunification by analyzing the films Good Bye, Lenin and The Lives of Others. The Collapse of the Conventional also examines new groundbreaking work by filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Fatih Ak?n, and Christoph Hochhausler to investigate how German film critically approaches globalization and the end of the cold war. This collection shows that today's German filmmakers are delving into new modes of cinematic production in a global context. Students, scholars of film, and anyone interested in German and cultural studies will appreciate this volume.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Crosses disciplinary boundaries to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience and the interplay of text and image in Romantic epistemology. The work of the groundbreaking writers and artists of German Romanticism -- including the writers Tieck, Brentano, and Eichendorff and the artists Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge -- followed from the philosophical arguments of the German Idealists, who placed emphasis on exploring the subjective space of the imagination. The Romantic perspective was a form of engagement with Idealist discourses, especially Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Fichte's Science of Knowledge. Through an aggressive, speculative reading of Kant, the Romantics abandoned the binary distinction between the palpable outer world and the ungraspable space of the mind's eye and were therefore compelled to develop new terms for understanding the distinction between "internal" and "external." In this light, Brad Prager urges a reassessment of some of Romanticism's major oppositional tropes, contending that binaries such as "self and other," "symbol and allegory," and "light and dark," should be understood as alternatives to Lessing's distinction between interior and exterior worlds. Prager thus crosses the boundaries between philosophy,literature, and art history to explore German Romantic writing about visual experience, examining the interplay of text and image in the formulation of Romantic epistemology. Brad Prager is Associate Professor of Germanat the University of Missouri, Columbia.

The social history of the genocide, its representation in postwar culture, and new theoretical approaches stand at the forefront of current research in a range of disciplines.   Analyses at the most intimate scale—of the individual or of a particular locale— are juxtaposed with those that turn to broader studies of the war or postwar order. Complementing these different scales are theoretical investigations that address individual agency, moral judgment, and the construction of meaning and memory in the study of the victims of the Holocaust and in our understanding of society as a whole. Together they mark the contemporary scholarly landscape of Holocaust studies, which includes history as well as film and literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies (among other disciplines). Each of the volume's three sections contributes to understanding the Holocaust and postwar ramifications of the genocide by focusing on: 1) the history of specific communities of both victims and perpetrators; 2) postwar cultural representations; and 3) new theoretical understandings of each. The essays in this volume thus represent new interests in the field that contribute to building integrated histories of the Holocaust.

The social history of the genocide, its representation in postwar culture, and new theoretical approaches stand at the forefront of current research in a range of disciplines. Analyses at the most intimate scale-of the individual or of a particular locale- are juxtaposed with those that turn to broader studies of the war or postwar order. Complementing these different scales are theoretical investigations that address individual agency, moral judgment, and the construction of meaning and memory in the study of the victims of the Holocaust and in our understanding of society as a whole. Together they mark the contemporary scholarly landscape of Holocaust studies, which includes history as well as film and literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies (among other disciplines). Each of the volume's three sections contributes to understanding the Holocaust and postwar ramifications of the genocide by focusing on: 1) the history of specific communities of both victims and perpetrators; 2) postwar cultural representations; and 3) new theoretical understandings of each. The essays in this volume thus represent new interests in the field that contribute to building integrated histories of the Holocaust.

Werner Herzog is renowned for pushing the boundaries of conventional cinema, especially those between the fictional and the factual, the fantastic and the real. "The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth" is the first study in twenty years devoted entirely to an analysis of Herzog's work. It explores the director's continuing search for what he has described as 'ecstatic truth, ' drawing on over thirty-five films, from the epics "Aguirre: Wrath of God" (1972) and "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) to innovative documentaries like "Fata Morgana" (1971), "Lessons of Darkness" (1992), and "Grizzly Man" (2005). Special attention is paid to Herzog's signature style of cinematic composition, his "romantic" influences, and his fascination with madmen, colonialism, and war.