Ali: Fear Eats The Soul: An Anatomy of Racism

In 1966, aged 21, Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote a play entitled Nur eine Scheibe Brot (Just a Slice of Bread). The play consists of ten scenes and tells the story of a young man, Fricke, who wants to make a film about Auschwitz that does not comply with the official post-war Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) narrative on the events. The main character is afraid of spectacularising and trivialising such a sensitive issue without offering any insights into the causes that made the Holocaust happen. He is more inclined to make a film which acknowledges the limits of representation. Eventually, he succumbs to the temptation to produce an object which is based upon all the conventional, emotional clichés that one can identify in contemporary films on the subject; not surprisingly he receives public praise and a number of Federal prizes. Fassbinder's play proleptically addresses some of the key points raised later by Holocaust survivors such as Elie Wiesel, who reacted against the "trivialisation of memory" in mainstream cinema's portrayals of the concentration camps. 2 David Barnett has brilliantly captured the complexity of the play:

The German-Jewish Experience: Contested Interpretations and Conflicting Perceptions, 2016

A Transnational Art-Cinema: The Berlin School and Its Global Contexts. Ed. Jaimey Fisher and Marco Abel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2018.

South Central Review, 2004

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Quarterly Review of Film and Video , 2013

Transit, 2014

What is the Berlin School?" is the central question for Marco Abel's most recent book, the first to address the recent trend in German cinema in its entirety. The term "Berliner Schule" was originally coined by critics to describe a group of young filmmakers who all studied at the Deutsche Film-und Fernsehakademie Berlin, and has since grown to encompass a larger spectrum of directors whose styles reflect those of the original Berlin School members. Although all the films of the Berlin School are set in Germany and deal with contemporary issues in Germany, the films on the whole have not enjoyed commercial success on the national or international level. Nevertheless, the "Berliner Schule" remains a useful term for talking about the work of these filmmakers, which has only recently begun to receive academic attention, most of it coming from outside Germany. Abel's book, The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, and Jaimey Fisher's, Christian Petzold, being the first ones of their kind, are both major contributions to this area. Both authors delve into the films of the Berlin School and examine what these films have in common and what distinguishes them from 'mainstream' national German cinema. Through their respective examinations, what emerges is not the importance of production or reception, but a focus on the symbolic idea of Germany and the conception of the Berlin School as a possible "counter-cinema." While a few filmic techniques can be said to be common across the Berlin School (e.g., long takes, non-traditional camera angles and editing, minimal use of nondiegetic sound), the styles of the individual filmmakers show a significant amount of variation, which makes it impossible to characterize the Berlin School on cinematography alone. Abel instead recognizes a general trend in cinematographic style and additionally identifies several common themes. It is this combination of characteristics that Abel uses to define the Berlin School. He closely examines how each filmmaker individually participates in this trend creating what he argues is a "counter-cinema." These themes include the question of Germany and temporalityspecifically, the notion of the "future perfect," and the concept of "utopia," or "nowhere," rooted in the here and now. Abel employs Deleuze and Guattari's idea of "minor" to explain how the Berlin School films present reality-they do so in a way that neither invites viewers to identify with nor to be alienated from the films, but rather intensifies their experience of reality in order to deepen the presentation of the relevant topic. To do this he dedicates one chapter to each filmmaker, in which he examines his or her films individually, identifying prominent themes, and situating

GDR Bulletin, 1998

New German Critique, 1994

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2019

Books, like films, always mean more than their authors might have intended," opines Eric Rentschler (87), when commenting on one of Klaus Kreimeier's earlier historiographical tomes, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Konzerns from 1992. The remark could equally apply to Rentschler's own eclectic historiography, comprising reprints from journal articles, book chapters, and catalogue contributions first published between 1985 and 2013 and now cohabiting within the same book covers, effectively charting his own coherent take on German fi lm history. The effect is certainly intriguing, revealing the incremental assembly, "Stück für Stück," of a comprehensive vision of this national cinema across the course of one scholar's illustrious career. In this regard, the volume constitutes as much an autobiography of Rentschler's scholarly evolution as it does a historiography of German film, evincing self-reflexivity most especially in the bookended introduction and closing comments. That closing chapter describes two visits to the Berlinale-a festival Rentschler first visited in 1979 and has attended annually between 1985 and today, making a point to note that he has missed it only once during that time span. This fact alone bespeaks an extraordinary commitment to and unabating passion for German cinema, one that has rendered him not only fluent in the canonized highlights of this national cinema but also savvy about the lesser known and underestimated directors and their films-a consideration which solicits a rethinking of inherited tropes and assumptions. Transposing one's scholarly career into a coherent table of contents poses its own challenges, but the current organization works quite effectively, moving in chronological order across key epochal divisions in German film history while also enabling novel ways of identifying both continuities and discontinuities across eras with regard to modes of production, aesthetics, politics, and criticism. In what may very well be a reflexive gesture towards Rentschler's own contribution to the enterprise of film reception, the first section focuses on key German figures in film criticism, beginning with an essay on notable early writers Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim. Rentschler argues that the social and formal divisions all too often drawn between these two theorists dissolves if one reviews their writings as a whole, including overlooked and untranslated texts that reveal that Kracauer also acknowledged the imbrication of aesthetics within the social, and that Arnheim, by turns, possessed a sensitivity to the