Framed Visions
Popular Culture, Americanization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination
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Emphasizes the fluid relationship between literature, cinema, and social life
Framed Visions analyzes the pivotal role American mass media and popular culture have played in shaping the political, social, and psychological identity of postwar Germans and Austrians. Through detailed readings of films, novels, plays, and poems of a variety of contemporary artists--including Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Elfriede Jelinek, Herbert Achternbusch, Monika Treut, Peter Handke, and Rolf Dieter Brinkmann--Gerd Gemünden reveals the paradoxical stance of this generation toward American politics and Hollywood aesthetics. On the one hand, they are pulled toward a culture that has shaped childhood images, tastes and desires; on the other, they reject American politics and the colonizing effect of its mass culture.
In contrast to most scholarship about the reception of U.S. culture abroad, this study underscores the imaginary relation of contemporary German and Austrian artists to America. Topics such as "Americanization" and "cultural imperialism" are therefore treated not as a foreign principle imposed from the outside but as ways that German and Austrian artists have tried to come to terms with their own problematic culture and history. Gemünden's study elucidates how the culture of the United States has been mapped in contradictory ways onto questions of national and cultural identity in Germany and Austria over the last thirty years.
Gerd Gemünden is Assistant Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.
> From the same author:
Culture in the Anteroom (2012)
The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer
Dir. Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke
Subject: Theory
The Cinema of Wim Wenders (1997)
Image, Narrative and the Postmodern Condition
Dir. Roger F. Cook and Gerd Gemünden
Subject: Director > Wim Wenders
> On a related topic:
Film Societies in Germany and Austria 1910-1933 (2023)
Tracing the Social Life of Cinema
Sensitive Subjects (2020)
The Political Aesthetics of Contemporary German and Austrian Cinema
Hollywood in Berlin (1994)
American Cinema and Weimar Germany
Reframing the European Other (2023)
Identity and Belonging in Contemporary French and German Cinema
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