DIÓGENES COSTA CURRÁS (Spanish and Portuguese, UMass Amherst)
Katechontic Francoism: Cold War Reimagining of the Middle Ages
Throughout the Spanish Civil War, and during his ensuing dictatorship, Francisco Franco presented himself as the protector of civilization against the destructive forces of Marxism and Judaism, a presentation that was reinforced through the signing of treaties with both the Vatican and the US throughout the 1950s. This resulted in further religious collaboration, and political and economic support, in which film production and distribution played a major role. In this essay I read Anthony Mann’s film El Cid (1961), adaptation of the founding text for Spanish nationalism, as a continuation of narratives established by Francoist propaganda. Considering cinema as an indoctrinating apparatus, and drawing on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the katechon, which he theorizes as the historical power that can prevent the end of times, my analysis will contribute to current discussions about bloc relationships during the Cold War, as well as the uses of the figure of El Cid in relation to the historic reality of Spain during Francoism.
Diógenes Costa Currás is a Five College Faculty Associate and Lecturer in the Program of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He received his PhD in Spanish Literature from the University of Michigan in August 2014. His research interests include 19-21st century Spanish literature and culture, film studies, literary theory, Galician studies, critical theory, and exile studies. He is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript, which examines conceptions of realism in Spanish fiction from the 19th to the 21st centuries, arguing that fictional realist narratives are privileged sites of historical memory in modern Spain.
ELA GEZEN (German and Scandinavian Studies, UMass Amherst)
Realist Didacticism: Aras Ören and the Working-Class in Cold War Berlin
Aras Ören is one of the earliest and most significant contributors to the emergence of Turkish-German literature. In addition to viewing himself as a “chronicler” of Berlin, and as a Turkish-German voice in Berlin’s divided public sphere, he was an active member of West Berlin’s literary Left. In my contribution to the roundtable, I explore how Ören’s literary aesthetic emerges out and responds to both German and Turkish debates with regard to the role and function of art and the social responsibility of the artist, specifically focusing on Bertolt Brecht’s and Nazım Hikmet’s conceptualizations of realist aesthetics and didacticism. In Ören’s dialectical concept of literary aesthetics, I argue, writing functions as social analysis and criticism, and reflects on social circumstances with the intention to change them. In addition to playing a pioneering role within the development of Turkish-German literature, Ören made significant contributions to debates regarding the politicization of literature in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the West German context (and against the backdrop of Cold War antagonisms)—debates which ramified beyond debates about guestworkers’ presence in Germany, and in its literary public sphere.
Ela Gezen is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research interests include 20th and 21st Century German and Turkish literature and music, cultural studies, transnationalism, and sound studies. Currently she
is working on a book manuscript, which traces the significance of Bertolt Brecht for Turkish-German cultural production. She is the co-editor of a Colloquia Germanica special issue that explores new directions in the field of Turkish-German Studies and has presented widely on topics as diverse as Bertolt Brecht, Turkish music, Afro-German poetry, and Turkish-German literature.
SETH HOWES (German and Russian Studies, University of Missouri)
On the Cinematic Margins of the Late GDR: Hermeticism and Anti-Politics, Eight Millimeters at a Time
This essay focuses on the super-8 cinema scene in East Germany, a topic of increasing interest for popular commentators, academic scholars, and professional archivists. Specifically, it considers the concept of the (a)political which has anchored post-Wall readings of East Germany’s unofficial art scenes and of the amateur cinema it produced. If these experimental, often inscrutable films possessed a political character merely by dint of their existence—and several interlocutors have proposed they did—it remains to be studied in detail whether, and if so how, this political character was determined. While many accounts consider these films' politicality a coefficient of their production, distribution, and reception outside the mainstream (i.e. professionalized) institutions of GDR cinema’s studio system, this essay supplements such contextual arguments with a textual one, considering these films as aesthetic objects and situating their formal innovations not only with respect to contemporary developments in East German cinema and art history, but with respect to ongoing innovations in other territories, media, and genres as well.
Seth Howes is Assistant Professor in the department of German and Russian Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He has published essays on punk and the Prenzlauer Berg and Peter Weiss and Jean-Paul Sartre, and is co-editing a volume on the cultures of German punk. His first monograph, entitled Disengagement: Avant-Gardes on the Margins of East Germany, will examine the experimental painting, performance art, punk rock, and printmaking scenes of the late GDR, focusing in particular on the relationship between politics and aesthetics as received, and reconstituted, in the cultural artifacts produced by, and circulating within and between these scenes.
MATTHEW D. MILLER (German Studies, Colgate University)
Epic Narration after Epic?: Alexander Kluge’s Cold War Cartographies
My contribution to the symposium will correlate the emergence Alexander Kluge’s counter-network of multimedial production to the geopolitical complexity of the Cold War. To do so, my paper draws on two different parts of my book manuscript Mauer, Migration, Maps: The German Epic in the Cold War. The first half selectively extrapolates an account of artistic production that responds to the spatiotemporal complexity of the divided continent in reference to the site of Berlin. The second half focuses on Kluge’s multimedial network. Kluge’s mimetic-constructivist cartography across different media is predicated on a conception of antagonistic realism that aspires to provide orientation amidst Cold War conditions of Sinn- and Zeitentzug and Raumverengung. In delivering an account of Kluge’s work, I focus on the proliferation and spatiotemporal logics of his short literary narratives that populate the hollows of epic form in the wake of that genre’s implosion and perceived inability to encapsulate the era in narrative. While my argument pertains to the Cold War origins of Kluge’s method, I also make reference to the continuation of its tenability beyond that period’s scope and close with notes on Kluge’s structuration of his work post-1989 that might inform our retrospective understanding of the 20th century.
Matthew D. Miller is Assistant Professor of German at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. He works on 20th-21st century German literature and film, 18th-21st century German theater, and critical and aesthetic theory from Kant through Adorno. Interests include Danubian studies; modernity, modernism, and the avant-gardes; the political and cultural history of East Germany; transnational cinema in the New Europe; and futurity studies. Representative articles include "Facts of Migration, Demands on Identity: Christian Petzold’s Yella and Jerichow in Comparison," German Quarterly: Special Issue: German Film Studies 85:1, Winter 2012, 55-76 and “Critical Storytelling and Diabolical Dialectics: Alexander Kluge and the Devil’s Blind Spots,” Germanic Review 85.4, Winter 2010, 318-339. His current research includes the book project Mauer, Migration, Maps: The German Epic in the Cold War, which focuses on works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, as well as a co-edited anthology Watersheds: The Poetics and Politics of the Danube, which features an interdisciplinary approach to the river as a unifying artery of economic, cultural and international exchanges in the diverse region of central and southeastern Europe.
JON B. OLSEN (History, UMass Amherst)
Can Germany Celebrate its Past? Germany’s Monuments for Freedom and Unity
In 2007 the German Federal Parliament passed legislation authorizing the construction of a new national memorial to commemorate the historic events of 1989 and 1990 – the democratic revolution in East Germany and the unification of the two German states. At first, only one memorial was planned for Berlin, however popular protest brought about the addition of a second national monument planned for Leipzig.
The process of constructing these so-called Memorials for Freedom and Unity has taken an interesting path. Originally meant to be unveiled to mark the twentieth anniversary of 1989, both projects were subsequently pushed back to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary only to flounder and remain incomplete. This paper explores the twisted paths that each monument project took and analyze why building a consensus around how best to honor these two different, yet related, memories reveals general trends of memorial culture in united Germany and how the political elite, journalists, and scholars have attempted to shape a post-1990 memory culture.
Inclusion of the broader public in the decision-making process has been an important component in each of the monument projects. At the same time, opening the discussion to a wider public slowed down the process and ultimately led to delays. In each case I try to look at how national and local politicians attempted to involve a wide range of people in the selection process and how the views of everyday people tended to differ from those in decision-making positions. By analyzing this process, we find that there is a great deal of divergence between vernacular, or popular, memory of the events and meaning of 1989/1990 and the memory culture espoused by Germany’s prominent artists and politicians.
Jon Berndt Olsen is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he teaches courses in the fields of Public History, Digital History, German and European history. Jon holds a Ph.D. in German history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. He completed his undergraduate degree at St. Olaf College. In addition to his academic training, Jon worked in Germany for the Haus der Geschichte museums in Bonn and Leipzig as well as for a member of the German Parliament assisting him with his work on a special parliamentary commission looking into the crimes of the East German dictatorship.
Jon has contributed and managed many digital history projects, including the website “Making the History of 1989” and a smartphone walking tour of Amherst, Massachusetts during the Civil War era. Jon’s research focuses primarily on issues of collective memory and function of monuments, museums, and commemorations in shaping national memory cultures in post-war Germany. His first book, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945-1989 will appear in February 2015 with Berghahn Books. His current research continues to focus on memory politics in Germany and has begun a new book-length research project on the history of tourism in East Germany.
KATHERINE PENCE (History, Baruch College)
Cold War Political Exhibitions as Cultural Diplomacy in the Decolonizing World
This paper will focus on the case study of two mobile exhibitions through Africa in 1961 and 1963, sponsored by the West German government, to discuss the role of political exhibitions as a form of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. As states in Africa become independent of former colonial rulers, Germans joined other powers, such as the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, in sponsoring exhibitions designed to offer aid, trade, and to win non-aligned countries as Cold War Allies. This paper looks at these exhibitions as a particular culture of the Cold War, by analyzing the displays themselves for both content and design and the complex interaction between the exhibitioners and their African audiences. It explores the temporary and traveling exhibition as a unique medium for reaching audiences in Africa.
Katherine Pence is Associate Professor, Chair of the History Department, and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She has published widely on women and consumer culture in East and West Germany and co-edited a volume of essays with Paul Betts entitled Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2008). Her current research, entitled The East and West German Scramble for Africa: Exhibiting Cold War Competition in the Age of Decolonization, examines German trade and political exhibitions in early 1960s Africa.
KIRA THURMAN (History, University of Akron)
Singing the Right Message: Black Musicians in the GDR
This paper investigates the experiences of black American musicians such as Paul Robeson, George Byrd, and Aubrey Pankey who traveled to the communist German Democratic Republic between 1945 and 1961. Although popular culture suggests that the GDR was an isolated state cut off from all international ties, the travels of these performers suggests otherwise. Their journeys symbolized an exchange between a kind of America that the U.S. state department was uncomfortable representing and a new nation-state (the GDR) struggling to gain cultural and political legitimacy during the Cold War. East German reception of black performers reveals the extent to which local music critics, communist dignitaries, and enthusiastic listeners were willing to incorporate black performances into their Marxist narratives, provided that the musicians would sing along.
Kira Thurman is an assistant professor of modern Central European history at the University of Akron in Ohio. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Rochester in 2013, where she also pursued a minor field in musicology through the Eastman School of Music. Her research areas include German cultural history, American-German relations, music and identity, and the history of blacks in Europe. Her current project focuses on the history of black musicians in Germany and Austria in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her work has been supported by the DAAD, the Dietrich W. Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the Fulbright Program, the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the National Humanities Center, the University of Notre Dame, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her article, “Black Venus, White Bayreuth: Race, Sexuality, and the De-Politicization of Wagner in Postwar West Germany” appeared in the journal German Studies Review in October 2012 and won the German Studies Association’s DAAD prize for best article on German history in 2014.