This is the first comprehensive account of Germany’s most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that ‘there is no place like home’ since cinema’s early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation ‘home’ after the catastrophes of World War II are anxiously present in these films, and von Moltke uses them as a lens through which to view contemporary discourses on German national identity.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Locating Heimat
PART I. ROOTS
1. Evergreens: The Place of Heimat in German Film History
2. Therapeutic Topographies: From Ludwig Ganghofer to the Nazi Heimatfilm
PART II. ROUTES
3. Launching the Heimatfilmwelle: From the Trümmerfilm to Grün ist die Heide
4. Heimat/Horror/History: Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab
5. Nostalgic Modernization: Locating Home in the Economic Miracle
6. Expellees, Emigrants, Exiles: Spectacles of Displacement
7. Collectivizing the Local: DEFA and the Question of Heimat in the 1950s
PART III. RETROSPECTS
8. Inside/Out: Spaces of History in Edgar Reitz’s Heimat
Epilogue: Heimat, Heritage, and the Invention of Tradition
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Johannes von Moltke is Associate Professor of German and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan.
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