Berlin films and the cultural politics of spatial memory

About this book

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decision of the unified German government to relocate to Berlin, the city became the locus of national redefinition. Its visual representations saturated the public sphere with versions of the city past, present, and future while its center remained a construction site throughout the 1990s. This dissertation explores the unique role of film revival and production in postwall urban marketing and argues that moving images of Berlin serve as polysemic sites of all-German cultural contact before and after 1989. In particular, the dissertation looks at how cinema and new media archive the lost spatial relations of the built city and establish a collective urban nostalgia in the service of postwall unity. The dissertation employs three principal modes of investigation. First, it returns to the specific properties of the medium and asks how the relations between filmic space, lost profilmic space, and the built city have developed over time and with the advent of new media. Second, it considers the reception history of iconic revival films and recent productions and looks at how these films are treated within divided and unified German culture. Finally, the dissertation examines the films' narrative geographies in relation to the complex geographies of German spectatorship. In its four chapters the dissertation provides evidence of how filmic representations of the city construct continuities between the Berlin Republic and selective periods of 20 th -century German history. Chapter one considers the notion of 'remake' in the city symphonies of Walter Ruttmann and Thomas Schadt. Chapter two looks at the 1950s' Berlin films of Georg Tressler and Gerhard Klein as grounds for a postwall all-German 'generational' identity. Chapter three explores the 'virtuality' of spatial memory in the pre-1989 (old media) and post-1989 (new media) representations of Potsdamer Platz in Wings of Desire and The Invisible Shape of Things Past. Finally chapter four examines the 'didactic geographies' of Run, Lola, Run and Good Bye, Lenin! in relation to regional funding policy, government relocation, and film tourism.