Ebook: German postwar films life and love in the ruins

This volume of essays by scholars of German film and culture examines the relatively neglected German films of the immediate post-World War II period, the so-called "rubble films." Often seen merely as symptoms of a particular German malady--the supposed inability to confront the sins of its immediate past--these films have rarely been examined for their aesthetic qualities and for what they actually depict about postwar German life, attitudes, and fears. Placed within the context of German film history of the postwar period and Allied censorship, the essays examine both well-known and nearly forgotten films for their narrative structure, aesthetic strategies, political ideologies, psychological portraits of damaged adults and orphaned youth, and the nuances of the history they reveal.;Introduction : Looking again at the rubble / William Rasch -- "When everything falls to pieces" : rubble in German films before the rubble films / Erhard Schütz -- Rubble without a cause : the air war in postwar film / Wilfried Wilms -- A time for ruins / Dagmar Barnouw -- Rubble film as archive of trauma and grief : Wolfgang Lamprecht's Somewhere in Berlin / Anke Pinkert -- The stones begin to speak : the laboring subject in early DEFA documentaries / Brad Prager -- What's new? Allegorical representations of renewal in DEFA's youth films, 1946-1949 / Marc Silberman -- In the ruins of Berlin : A foreign affair / Gerd Gemünden -- Rubble noir / Jennifer Fay -- When Liebe was just a five-letter word : Wolfgang Liebeneiner's Love 47 / Robert G. Moeller -- "Kampf dem Kampf" : aesthetic experimentation and social satire in The ballad of Berlin / Claudia Breger -- Planes, trains, and the occasional car : the rubble film as demobilization film / Jaimey Fisher -- The sound of ruins / Lutz Koepnick.