Postwall Germany's historical film wave

This dissertation examines postwall Germany's historical film wave as a "cinema of retro-flection," i.e., a highly ambivalent engagement with German history and film history which looks back to the recent past through and, in some instances, against prior interpretations of national history, especially the retrofilms of the New German Cinema. The term "retro-flection" emphasizes how retrospection and reflection are of a piece in the German history film wave. At issue are how postwall historical films respond to certain directors, stars, genres, traditions, or individual productions from Germany and abroad, indeed, how they incorporate and rework film history. More specifically, these films animate and investigate three layers of memory: (1) the works' historical interpretation of the period, event, and figures in question; (2) previous interpretations of this event, era, or figure; and (3) the contemporary moment in which the films themselves were made and screened. Five case studies from the post-1990 domestic film landscape offer a wide historical spectrum of East and West German experience: Das Wunder von Bern ( The Miracle of Bern, 2003), which returns to the 1950s; Baader (2002), which imagines the late 1960s and especially the 1970s; 23 (1999), a film about the 1980s; and two films that revisit the unification era, Die Unberührbare ( No Place to Go, 2000) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). Going beyond studies of so-called "German Heritage Films" which have almost exclusively focused on retrospective readings of the Nazi era, this contribution views Germany's postwall cinema of retro-flection above all as a much more expansive site of contestation in which national identity has been refashioned and reformulated.