German Wartime Memory, American Exceptionalism, and Post-Cold War Transatlantic Popular Cinema in German Hollywood and American Babelsberg

This book excavates the diverse and mostly unnoticed political meanings made available to American and German audiences by the blockbuster films helmed by transplanted West German directors Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen.

Through formal film analysis, broad consideration of American and German film criticism, and reflection on relevant political developments of the post-Cold War era, the book reveals how traces of Germany’s experience of dictatorship and wartime destruction find inadvertent cinematic expression in ways that helped American and German moviegoers find orientation in the changed political and cultural landscape of a newly globalized world. To complement and deepen the analysis of the Hollywood output of Emmerich and Petersen, the book juxtaposes the creative product of these transplanted directors to examples of a converse cinematic phenomenon considered under the label, American Babelsberg, which encompasses World War Two-themed films shot by American directors in Germany utilizing the production facilities at Babelsberg. Focus here is placed particularly on two high-profile cinematic releases of the aughts, Valkyrie (2008), and Inglourious Basterds (2009). The magnetic attraction to, or nettlesome burden of, World War Two memories on these directors of American Babelsberg and German Hollywood is explained in this book by the entwined histories of Germans and Americans, the different challenges of national self-definition and renewal they faced in the post-Cold War world, and their long-standing and ongoing transatlantic discourse of political ideas and cultural ideals.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of film studies, politics, popular culture, and contemporary history.

Robert C. Pirro is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Georgia Southern University, USA. He came to Georgia Southern in 1997 after finishing graduate work at U.C. Berkeley (Ph.D. 1996) and undergraduate work at Harvard (B.A. 1986). He covers most of the department’s survey courses in political theory/philosophy (Ancient Political Thought, Modern Political Thought, Contemporary Political Thought, American Political Thought, Feminist Political Thought). Film and Politics is the newest addition to the political theory/philosophy courses he offers. Professor Pirro has many scholarly interests including the politics of tragedy, the political thought of Auschwitz survivor, industrial chemist, and writer Primo Levi, the political theory of the German-Jewish refugee-turned-American Political theorist Hannah Arendt, and the politics of film. His book publications include Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi: The Hidden Groundwork of Agency in His Auschwitz Writings (2017); The Politics of Tragedy and Democratic Citizenship (2011); and Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Tragedy (2001).