Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent

A possible reason for these publications' absence among O'Brien's otherwise extensive disciplinary and interdisciplinary references could be that [Paul Cooke] and Homewood's movie selection is limited to films produced in the 2000s, thus starting significantly later than her own selection, and that [Nick Hodgin]'s analysis focuses on the notion of nostalgia. In contrast, in her first chapter O'[Brien] argues for the concept of anamnesis over nostalgia, arguing that in approaching the immediate aftermath of 1989 and the collapse of socialism movies employ tropes of amnesia and imprisonment to address sudden historic change. The four chapters of the monograph are organized around conceptual clusters that guide and establish coherence between O'Brien's expert readings of individual movies. In addition to amnesia and anamnesis, the chapters circle around political oppression and resistance, terrorism in East and West Germany, as well as utopianism and violence. While the well-written individual chapters are convincing on their own, these thematic and theoretical clusters connect the cinematic analysis throughout the book and create a narrative and argumentative flow that underscores the thoroughness of O'Brien's scholarship. Throughout the four chapters she convincingly demonstrates how the GDR and its sudden collapse, the student movement of 1968 as well as German Terrorism, most famously embodied by the RAF, are all equally unresolved episodes of Germany's national history. By bringing these historic flashpoints and their filmic representations in dialogue with each other, O'Brien successfully points to cinematic trends and shifts and highlights the thematic interplay between individual historic events and their cultural conversions. As O'Brien shows, the void of utopianism after multiple failed experiments with social and ideological alternatives to capitalism have leftGermany with yet another challenge in the already difficult undertaking of creating a national identity.