Johannes von Moltke 
No Place Like Home [PDF ebook] 
Locations of Heimat in German Cinema

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.

Innehållsförteckning

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

Om författaren

Johannes von Moltke is Associate Professor of German and Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan.