The Triumph of the Ordinary
Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989
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Book Presentation:
Were movies in the East Bloc propaganda or carefully veiled dissent? In the first major study in English of East German film, Joshua Feinstein argues that the answer to this question is decidedly complex.
Drawing on newly opened archives as well as interviews with East German directors, actors, and state officials, Feinstein traces how the cinematic depiction of East Germany changed in response to national political developments and transnational cultural trends such as the spread of television and rock 'n' roll. Celluloid images fed a larger sense of East German identity, an identity that persists today, more than a decade after German reunification. But even as they attempted to satisfy calls for "authentic" images of the German Democratic Republic that would legitimize socialist rule, filmmakers challenged the regime's self-understanding. Beginning in the late 1960s, East German films dwelled increasingly on everyday life itself, no longer seeing it merely as a stage in the development toward communism. By presenting an image of a static rather than an evolving society, filmmakers helped transform East German identity from one based on a commitment to socialist progress to one that accepted the GDR as it was.
About the Author:
Joshua Feinstein has taught European history at Stanford University and Emory University. He lives in Buffalo, New York.
Press Reviews:
"An extremely well-researched book. . . . [This] multilayered analysis . . . is a remarkable feat of historical contextualization."
-- "Monatshefte"
An original and engaging exploration of East German cinema and the role of cultural production and consumption in the evolution of postwar socialist society. (Heide Fehrenbach, author of "Cinema in Democratizing Germany")
See the publisher website: University of of North Carolina Press
> On a related topic:
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Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960
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Neubau Atmospheres (2025)
East German Cultural Remediations of Modernist Architecture
Screening Art (2022)
Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema
by Seán Allan
Re-Imagining DEFA (2016)
East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts
Dir. Seán Allan and Sebastian Heiduschke
Hollywood Behind the Wall (2005)
The Cinema of East Germany
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