German Politics and Society

As a result of Nazi race politics, World War II, and the restructuring

of Europe in the postwar era, the painful experience of forced migration

became a reality in the lives of many Europeans. About 12 million1

ethnic Germans shared the fate of being forced to leave their

ancestral areas of settlement in Eastern and Eastern/Central Europe

between 1939 and 1948. These people were either forced to move

“back to the Reich” by the Nazi government, fled from advancing

enemy forces in 1944/45, or were forced out of their homes by Eastern

and Central European postwar governments.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, unification, and the subsequent reinvention

of the nation, German filmmakers have revisited their

country’s cinematic traditions with a view to placing themselves creatively

in the tradition of its intellectual and artistic heritage. One of

the legacies that has served as a point of a new departure has been

the Heimatfilm, or homeland film. As a genre it is renowned for its

restorative stance, as it often features dialect and the renunciation of

current topicality, advocates traditional gender roles, has antimodern

overtones of rural, pastoral, often alpine, images, and expresses

a longing for premodern times, for “the good old days” that supposedly

still exist away from the urban centres. The Nazis used Heimat

films in an effort “to idealize ‘Bauerntum’ as the site of desirable traditions

and stereotyped the foreign (most often the urban) as the

breeding ground for moral decay.”

Betigül Ercan Argun, Turkey in Germany: The Transnational Space of Deutschkei (New York: Routledge, 2003)

Eva Østergaard-Nielsen, Transnational Politics: Turks and Kurds in Germany (New York: Routledge, 2003)

Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004)

Review by Geoff Eley

Eli Nathans, The Politics of Citizenship in Germany: Ethnicity, Utility and Nationalism (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2004)

Review by Tobias Brinkmann

Kolinsky, Eva, and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds., Reinventing Gender: Women in Eastern Germany since Unification (London, Portland: Frank Cass, 2003)

Review by Katrin Sieg

William Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (Chapel Hill/London, 2003)

Review by Clay Clemens

Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge and New York, 2003)

Review by Henry Krisch

Patrick Stevenson, Language and German Disunity: A Sociolinguistic History of East and West in Germany, 1945 – 2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Review by Heidi Byrnes

Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds., Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester: Camden House, 2002)

Review by Kris Thomas Vander Lugt