With internationalist aspirations and wide-ranging historical perspectives, East German films about artists and their work became hotly contested spaces in which filmmakers could look beyond the GDR and debate the impact of contemporary cultural policy on the reception of their pre-war cultural heritage. Spanning newsreels, documentaries, and feature films, Screening Art is the first full-length investigation into a genre that has been largely overlooked in studies of DEFA, the state-owned Eastern German film studio. As it shows, “artist-films” played an essential role in the development of new paradigms of socialist art in postwar Europe.
Table of Content
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Texts and Contexts
Chapter 1. German Classical Humanism and the Sovietisation of Culture
Chapter 2. Cosmopolitanism, Formalism, and Fantasies of National Culture
Chapter 3. Experiments in Modernism I: From Bitterfeld to Barlach
Chapter 4. Experiments in Modernism II: Responses to the Eleventh Plenum
Chapter 5. New Ways of Seeing: Jürgen Böttcher and the Transformation of Tradition
Chapter 6. The Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Romantic Turn
Epilogue: Art, Exile and the Socialist Imaginary
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Seán Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. His publications include the co-edited volumes Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (with Sebastian Heiduschke, 2016) and DEFA: East German Cinema, 1946–1992 (with John Sandford, 1999). He has published widely on the films of Konrad Wolf, Kurt Maetzig and Jürgen Böttcher, and on East German identity in post-unification cinema.
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