Weimar Cinema – Weimar Studies Network

Provincializing Weimar Culture

On 25-26 April 2024, Utrecht University hosts the international conference “Provincializing Weimar Culture Global and Local Perspectives on Interwar Germany”, with support from the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. This conference brings together scholars advancing new approaches to the cultural history of the Weimar era. It takes its inspiration from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialize Europe”, in the sense of historicizing and criticizing modernity’s claims to universality to uncover its colonial heritage. In this vein, the scholars approach the subject from a transnational or postcolonial perspective and in its global context. However, the conference also employs the idea of “provincializing” in a second, more literal sense, focusing on cultural life outside of Berlin and other urban centres of Weimar Germany. These two perspectives – the global and the local – are not mutually exclusive, but rather dialectically intertwined.

More information here.

Daily Life in Berlin, 1925

Two years before Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin. The Symphony of the City (1927), Ufa published The City of the Millions. A Life Picture of Berlin by Adolf Trotz. The film documents life in Berlin in the mid-1920s, taking the viewer on a tour of the city, from fashionable shopping streets such as the Friedrichstrasse and the Kurfürstendamm to the film studios in Tempelhof and Babelsberg and petit-bourgeois quarters of the city. Continue reading “Daily Life in Berlin, 1925”

Weimar Cinema at Berlinale 2018

Weimar film fans have something to celebrate in 2018: the Berlin Film Festival Berlinale has just announced a whole section devoted to Weimar cinema next year, from Georg Lamprecht’s gritty proletarian drama Die Unehelichen (1926) to Friedrich Dalsheim and Gulla Pfeffer’s ethnographic documentary Menschen im Busch (1931):”The Retrospective of the 68th Berlin International Film Festival will focus on the great variety of cinema in the Weimar era. Some one hundred years ago, at the end of World War I and the dawn of the Weimar Republic, one of the most productive and influential phases in German filmmaking began unfolding, a creative era that went on to shape international perception of the country’s film culture, even to the present day. For “Weimar Cinema Revisited”, the festival will present a total of 28 programmes of narrative, documentary, and short films made between 1918 and 1933. … Most of the silent film screenings will be accompanied by music played live by internationally renowned musicians.”

Weimar Film and Jewish Identity

In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenazi’s Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity ‘provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous “German-Jewish symbiosis” before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framework for the understanding of the German “national” film in the years leading to Hitler’s regime.’