Public Memory Underground Photographs of Protest in Uwe Johnson’s “The Third Book About Achim” (1967)

This paper offers a preliminary investigation of the interrelation between literature, photography, and public memory under the conditions of authoritarian and neoliberal state control. Focusing on a fictionalized photograph of the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Germany in Uwe Johnson’s novel The Third Book about Achim (1967), I explore the performative capacity of photo-literary spaces to open up, and disrupt, institutionalized productions of public memory. Whereas official memorial technologies tend to close down alternative interpretations of history, this essay shows how small-scale, clandestine, or itinerant photographs embedded in literary archives animate historical impasses and possibilities, which persist to be responded to by future readers. More specifically, drawing on affect theory and political philosophy, I aim to rehabilitate photography’s indexicality as a performative register that enables human proximities across the boundaries of time and space

Spectral cinema from a phantom state: film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Divided Heaven and Solo Sunny

In this essay I draw on close textual analysis to consider the interface between film aesthetics and the politics of identity in Konrad Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel / Divided Heaven (1964) and Solo Sunny (1979). Both films focus on women who have to confront painful processes of self realisa-tion in specifically East German contexts. They also show Wolf and his collaborators working in two very different modes, from a nouvelle vague-inspired mix of location shooting and self-conscious formal artifice to a more laconic style and mobile camera that borrow from documentary aesthetics. Viewed from the perspective of today, the films resist the reductive stereotyping of what Christa Wolf in 1991 called the 'phantom' East Germany, and offer a more productive haunting. As living ghosts in the post-reunification era, they are a reminder of the necessity of remembering, and so confound both a negative 'master narrative' of the GDR and a collective amnesia with no interest in this history

Dennis Tate: Franz Fühmann. Innovation and Authenticity: A Study of His Prose-Writing

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995