Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931) is a groundbreaking German film that defied established societal norms, showcasing the power of women, both behind and in front of the camera. Adapted from Christa Winsloe's lesbian play, the story follows Manuela, an orphan in a boarding school for impoverished Prussian nobility. When her love for a female teacher is discovered, the oppressive principal punishes her, leading to a desperate suicide attempt. Barbara Mennel's compelling study firmly establishes Mädchen in the Weimar cinema canon. Breaking away from the teleological and over-determined “Caligari to Hitler� approach that has dominated the field since its inception, Mennel examines the film on its own terms within its immediate historical moment. Although it was prohibited viewing for several years, having been banned by the Nazis for its lesbian subtext and anti-authoritarian message, she asserts its central role in articulating feminist film theory in the late 1970s. Analysing its themes of democracy versus tyranny, the collective versus the individual, and expressive desire versus repressive discipline, she underscores the film’s timeless impact, and why it continues to resonate with contemporary audiences.

Auteurism expanded With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

The second edition of Cities and Cinema provides an updated survey of films about cities, from their significance for modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary relationship between virtual reality and urban space. The book demonstrates the importance of the filmic depiction of capitals for national cinemas in the twentieth century and analyzes the transnational transfer of cinematic images surrounding global cities in the twenty-first century. Cities and Cinema covers the different facets of the cinematic depiction of cities. It rehearses distinct methodologies and offers a survey of the history of the cinematic city. The book also deepens our understanding of tropes and narrative conventions that shape films about urban settings and that reflect the transformation of cities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the Weimar "street film," it analyzes how the city film defined modernity. The book outlines the sociological context and the aesthetic features of so-called film noir, made in 1940s Hollywood and depicting Los Angeles. Paris became the site for the development of auteur cinema, which repeatedly depicts characters moving through the city. Tokyo took up noir to signal modern crime. The volume delineates how filmic genres, such as science fiction, comment on the present by imagining future forms of urban living. After analyzing how cinema captures the relationship between sexual identity and urban anonymity, migration and urban space, and marginalized ethnic and sexual identity in ghetto films, the book emphasizes transnational dynamics and global cities in the twenty-first century. Its conclusion points to the increasing virtual mediation of cities with new media. Cities and Cinema offers a historical overview of the development of films about cities and a theoretical approach to the intersection of urban studies and film studies. This title is designed as a textbook primarily for second-year undergraduate students in Film/Media studies, Urban studies, as well as Geography and Planning.

In 1962 Norbert Elias was invited as a temporary professor at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. He taught, employed fieldwork, travelled, and met many people in postcolonial Africa. When Elias left Ghana in 1964, he had laid the basic groundwork for a fundamental sociological argument on human societies. The volume on hand is a selection of his unpublished writings based on these experiences. Together they touch upon not only the well-known criticism of Eurocentrism and a developmental perspective but also what could be considered the core of Elias's work: the concept of civilisation. In a foreword, Dieter Reicher and Adrian Jitschin have endeavoured to explain and break down the relations of Elias's African experience to the rest of his work and biography. They also clarified some misleading interpretations of Elias's time in Africa. Finally, Arjan Post has uncovered the previously unknown fascinating story of Elias' encounter with Malcolm X in an epilogue.

Presents fifteen new German-language novelists and a close reading of an exemplary work of each for academics and the general reader alike. After the international success in the 1990s of authors such as Bernhard Schlink, Marcel Beyer, and Thomas Brussig, an impressive number of new German-language novelists are making a significant impact. Some, like Karen Duve, Daniel Kehlmann, and Sasa Stanisic, have achieved international recognition; some, like Julia Franck, have won major prizes; others, like Clemens Meyer, Alina Bronsky, and Ilja Trojanow, are truly "emerging authors" who have begun toattract attention. Between them they represent a range of literatures in German, from women's writing to minority writing (from Turkish immigrants and Eastern Europe), to "pop literature" and perspectives on the former GDR and onGermany's Nazi past. This volume devotes individual essays to fifteen such writers, examining in detail a major work of each. Translated excerpts from works by Vladimir Vertlib and Clemens Meyer round out the book, which willbe of interest not only to academics and students of English and Comparative Literature in the UK, the US, and beyond, but also to the general reader, for whom titles of texts and quotations are translated. Contributors: Lyn Marven, Stuart Taberner, Anke S. Biendarra, Stephen Brockmann, Rebecca Braun, Frauke Matthes, Brigid Haines, Julian Preece, Emily Jeremiah, Valerie Heffernan, Barbara Mennel, Heike Bartel, Kate Roy, Andrew Plowman, Sonja E.Klocke, Jamie Lee Searle, Katy Derbyshire. Lyn Marven is a Lecturer in German at the University of Liverpool. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

A dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film. This dynamic, event-centered anthology offers a new understanding of the hundred-year history of German-language film, from the earliest days of the Kintopp to contemporary productions like The Lives of Others. Eachof the more than eighty essays takes a key date as its starting point and explores its significance for German film history, pursuing its relationship with its social, political, and aesthetic moment. While the essays offer ampletemporal and topical spread, this book emphasizes the juxtaposition of famous and unknown stories, granting attention to a wide range of cinematic events. Brief section introductions provide a larger historical and film-historicalframework that illuminates the essays within it, offering both scholars and the general reader a setting for the individual texts and figures under investigation. Cross-references to other essays in the book are included at the close of each entry, encouraging readers not only to pursue familiar trajectories in the development of German film, but also to trace particular figures and motifs across genres and historical periods. Together, the contributionsoffer a new view of the multiple, intersecting narratives that make up German-language cinema. The constellation that is thus established challenges unidirectional narratives of German film history and charts new ways of thinkingabout film historiography more broadly. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis, and Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

The second edition of Cities and Cinema provides an updated survey of films about cities, from their significance for modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century to the contemporary relationship between virtual reality and urban space. The book demonstrates the importance of the filmic depiction of capitals for national cinemas in the twentieth century and analyzes the transnational transfer of cinematic images surrounding global cities in the twenty-first century. Cities and Cinema covers the different facets of the cinematic depiction of cities. It rehearses distinct methodologies and offers a survey of the history of the cinematic city. The book also deepens our understanding of tropes and narrative conventions that shape films about urban settings and that reflect the transformation of cities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with a discussion of the Weimar "street film," it analyzes how the city film defined modernity. The book outlines the sociological context and the aesthetic features of so-called film noir, made in 1940s Hollywood and depicting Los Angeles. Paris became the site for the development of auteur cinema, which repeatedly depicts characters moving through the city. Tokyo took up noir to signal modern crime. The volume delineates how filmic genres, such as science fiction, comment on the present by imagining future forms of urban living. After analyzing how cinema captures the relationship between sexual identity and urban anonymity, migration and urban space, and marginalized ethnic and sexual identity in ghetto films, the book emphasizes transnational dynamics and global cities in the twenty-first century. Its conclusion points to the increasing virtual mediation of cities with new media. Cities and Cinema offers a historical overview of the development of films about cities and a theoretical approach to the intersection of urban studies and film studies. This title is designed as a textbook primarily for second-year undergraduate students in Film/Media studies, Urban studies, as well as Geography and Planning.

A dynamic, event-centered exploration of the hundred-year history of German-language film. This dynamic, event-centered anthology offers a new understanding of the hundred-year history of German-language film, from the earliest days of the Kintopp to contemporary productions like The Lives of Others. Eachof the more than eighty essays takes a key date as its starting point and explores its significance for German film history, pursuing its relationship with its social, political, and aesthetic moment. While the essays offer ampletemporal and topical spread, this book emphasizes the juxtaposition of famous and unknown stories, granting attention to a wide range of cinematic events. Brief section introductions provide a larger historical and film-historicalframework that illuminates the essays within it, offering both scholars and the general reader a setting for the individual texts and figures under investigation. Cross-references to other essays in the book are included at the close of each entry, encouraging readers not only to pursue familiar trajectories in the development of German film, but also to trace particular figures and motifs across genres and historical periods. Together, the contributionsoffer a new view of the multiple, intersecting narratives that make up German-language cinema. The constellation that is thus established challenges unidirectional narratives of German film history and charts new ways of thinkingabout film historiography more broadly. Jennifer Kapczynski is Associate Professor of German at Washington University, St. Louis, and Michael Richardson is Associate Professor of German at Ithaca College.

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

"Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires, and Gay Cowboys" illustrates queer cinematic aesthetics by highlighting key films that emerged at historical turning points throughout the twentieth century. Barbara Mennel traces the representation of gays and lesbians from the sexual liberation movements of the roaring 1920s in Berlin to the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City and the emergence of queer activism and film in the early 1990s. She explains early tropes of queerness, such as the boarding school or the vampire, and describes the development of camp from 1950s Hollywood to underground art of the late 1960s in New York City.

Mennel concludes with an exploration of the contemporary mainstreaming of gay and lesbian films and global queer cinema. "Queer Cinema: Schoolgirls, Vampires and Gay Cowboys" not only offers an introduction to a gay and lesbian film history, but also contributes to an academic discussion about queer subversion of mainstream film.

Auteurism expanded With acclaimed films like Sink or Swim and The Odds of Recovery, Su Friedrich’s body of work stands at the forefront of avant-garde and Queer cinema. Barbara Mennel examines the career of an experimental auteur whose merger of technical innovation and political critique connects with both cinephiles and activists. Friedrich’s integration of cinematic experimentation with lesbian advocacy serves as a beginning rather than an end point of analysis. With that in mind, Mennel provides an essential overview of the filmmaker’s oeuvre while highlighting the defining characteristics of her artistic and political signature. She also situates Friedrich within the cultural, political, and historical contexts that both shape the films and are shaped by them. Finally, Mennel expands our notion of auteurism to include directors who engage in collaborative and creative processes rooted in communities.

Vol. 18 of the Collected Works, besides including the consolidated index to the Collected Works as a whole, contains two substantial supplements: a long and important critique on Freud written in the last weeks of Elias' life, not previously published in English; and an essay, not previously published in any language, on the anthropologist-philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl and the problem of 'the logical unity of humankind'. Both essays fill important gaps in Elias' work, and deal with common criticisms of his thought.

From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.

From hairdressers and caregivers to reproductive workers and power-suited executives, images of women's labor have powered a fascinating new movement within twenty-first-century European cinema. Social realist dramas capture precarious working conditions. Comedies exaggerate the habits of the global managerial class. Stories from countries battered by the global financial crisis emphasize the patriarchal family, debt, and unemployment. Barbara Mennel delves into the ways these films about female labor capture the tension between feminist advances and their appropriation by capitalism in a time of ongoing transformation. Looking at independent and genre films from a cross-section of European nations, Mennel sees a focus on economics and work adapted to the continent's varied kinds of capitalism and influenced by concepts in second-wave feminism. More than ever, narratives of work put female characters front and center--and female directors behind the camera. Yet her analysis shows that each film remains a complex mix of progressive and retrogressive dynamics as it addresses the changing nature of work in Europe.