Anti-Americanism and the Cold War : on the DEFA Berlin films

Sustained by well-established anti-American stereotypes and clichés, the romance between German and American culture has been a key ingredient of German cinema since its inception. The encounter with American mass culture produced compelling stories of infatuation and seduction, but also of conquest and surrender

Colorful worlds : the West German revue film of the 1950s

On the following pages you will meet a strange cast of characters: field slaves from Mississippi, steel bands from Trinidad, sheriffs from Puerto Rieo. Mexican campesinos and senioritas, and, of course, the European musical stars who performed these American stereotypes in one of the most disparaged genres of German cinema, the 1950s West German revue film

Historisierung der NS-Vergangenheit : Der Untergang (2004) zwischen Historienfilm und Eventkino

Stellen Sie sich folgende Szene vor: Sie halten sich in einem Bunker irgendwo unter der Erde versteckt, die Wände werden von Detonationen und Explosionen über Ihnen erschüttert. Sie sind von einer Kaophonie von Geräuschen umgeben. Als Sie schließlich an die Oberfläche zurückkehren, bietet sich Ihnen ein schauriges Schauspiel von brennenden Gebäuden, Schutt auf den Straßen und unbeschreiblichen Szenen der Zerstörung

A Stranger in Berlin: On Joseph Roth\u27s Berlin Discourse

As the quintessential urbanite, Joseph Roth continues to be extremely relevant to ongoing public debates on Berlin\u27s identity as the new center of a multicultural society and architecture of postmodern urbanity

The Proletarian Dream: Working-class Culture in Modern Germany

Histor

The Münchhausen Complex: From Adaptation to Intermediality

Nazi cinema took full advantage of the possibilities of media convergence by relying heavily on literary adaptations and the close relationships between film and the other arts. These textual strategies and their ideological effects are on full view in Münchhausen (1943), one of the most expensive and successful films of the Third Reich. The film about the famous Lügenbaron allows us to consider the pivotal role of media convergence in the making of the first modern media dictatorship and develop more complex models beyond close textual reading and historical contextualization that account for the dynamic interplay of film art, politics, and technology.Das Kino im Nationalsozialismus nutzte die Möglichkeiten der Medienkonvergenz durch die vielen Literaturverfilmungen und die engen Beziehungen zwischen Film und anderen Künsten voll aus. Diese textuellen Strategien und deren ideologische Effekte sind besonders deutlich in Münchhausen (1943), einem der teuersten und erfolgreichsten Filme des „Dritten Reiches“. Der Film über den berühmten Lügenbaron ermöglicht es uns, die zentrale Rolle der Medienkonvergenz in der Entstehung der ersten modernen Mediendiktatur aufzuzeigen und neue Ansätze jenseits von Textanalyse und historischer Kontextualisierung zu entwickeln, die der komplexen Dynamik von Filmkunst, -politik, und -technologie Rechnung tragen

Late 1920s film theory and criticism as a test-case for Benjamin’s generalizations on the experiential effects of editing

This article investigates Walter Benjamin’s influential generalization that the effects of cinema are akin to the hyper-stimulating experience of modernity. More specifically, I focus on his oft-cited 1935/36 claim that all editing elicits shock-like disruption. First, I propose a more detailed articulation of the experience of modernity understood as hyper-stimulation and call for distinguishing between at least two of its subsets: the experience of speed and dynamism, on the one hand, and the experience of shock/disruption, on the other. Then I turn to classical film theory of the late 1920s to demonstrate the existence of contemporary views on editing alternative to Benjamin’s. For instance, whereas classical Soviet and Weimar theorists relate the experience of speed and dynamism to both Soviet and classical Hollywood style editing, they reserve the experience of shock/disruption for Soviet montage. In order to resolve the conceptual disagreement between these theorists, on the one hand, and Benjamin, on the other, I turn to late 1920s Weimar film criticism. I demonstrate that, contrary to Benjamin’s generalizations about the disruptive and shock-like nature of all editing, and in line with other theorists’ accounts, different editing practices were regularly distinguished by comparison to at least two distinct hyper-stimulation subsets: speed and dynamism, and shock-like disruption. In other words, contemporaries regularly distinguished between Soviet montage and classical Hollywood editing patterns on the basis of experiential effects alone. On the basis of contemporary reviews of city symphonies, I conclude with a proposal for distinguishing a third subset – confusion. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Early Popular Visual Culture on 02 Aug 2016 available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1199322

Transcriptome-wide association study of breast cancer risk by estrogen-receptor status

Previous transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified breast cancer risk genes by integrating data from expression quantitative loci and genome-wide association studies (GWAS), but analyses of breast cancer subtype-specific associations have been limited. In this study, we conducted a TWAS using gene expression data from GTEx and summary statistics from the hitherto largest GWAS meta-analysis conducted for breast cancer overall, and by estrogen receptor subtypes (ER+ and ER-). We further compared associations with ER+ and ER- subtypes, using a case-only TWAS approach. We also conducted multigene conditional analyses in regions with multiple TWAS associations. Two genes, STXBP4 and HIST2H2BA, were specifically associated with ER+ but not with ER- breast cancer. We further identified 30 TWAS-significant genes associated with overall breast cancer risk, including four that were not identified in previous studies. Conditional analyses identified single independent breast-cancer gene in three of six regions harboring multiple TWAS-significant genes. Our study provides new information on breast cancer genetics and biology, particularly about genomic differences between ER+ and ER- breast cancer.Peer reviewe

Genome-wide association study identifies 32 novel breast cancer susceptibility loci from overall and subtype-specific analyses.

Breast cancer susceptibility variants frequently show heterogeneity in associations by tumor subtype1-3. To identify novel loci, we performed a genome-wide association study including 133,384 breast cancer cases and 113,789 controls, plus 18,908 BRCA1 mutation carriers (9,414 with breast cancer) of European ancestry, using both standard and novel methodologies that account for underlying tumor heterogeneity by estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status and tumor grade. We identified 32 novel susceptibility loci (P < 5.0 × 10-8), 15 of which showed evidence for associations with at least one tumor feature (false discovery rate < 0.05). Five loci showed associations (P < 0.05) in opposite directions between luminal and non-luminal subtypes. In silico analyses showed that these five loci contained cell-specific enhancers that differed between normal luminal and basal mammary cells. The genetic correlations between five intrinsic-like subtypes ranged from 0.35 to 0.80. The proportion of genome-wide chip heritability explained by all known susceptibility loci was 54.2% for luminal A-like disease and 37.6% for triple-negative disease. The odds ratios of polygenic risk scores, which included 330 variants, for the highest 1% of quantiles compared with middle quantiles were 5.63 and 3.02 for luminal A-like and triple-negative disease, respectively. These findings provide an improved understanding of genetic predisposition to breast cancer subtypes and will inform the development of subtype-specific polygenic risk scores

A Stranger in Berlin: On Joseph Roth's Berlin Discourse

As the quintessential urbanite, Joseph Roth continues to be extremely relevant to ongoing public debates on Berlin's identity as the new center of a multicultural society and architecture of postmodern urbanity