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VIII. German through Film (All Levels)
Borra, Adriana, and Ruth Mader-Koltay. German through Film. New Haven: Yale UP 2007. Paper, 153 pp., $29.00. «yalepress.yale.edu»
Schueiler, Jeanne. Cinema for German Conversation. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing/R. Puffins, 2009. Paper, 354 pp., $59.95. «www.pullins.com»
I discovered German through Film and Cinema for German Conversation while preparing my first semester-long course on German film. Both textbooks were not only immensely useful, but their authors' obvious excitement for their subject - teaching contemporary German films - proved to be contagious.This review outlines the books' approach to teaching films in general and gives an example of the application of both books in the college classroom in particular.
In this semester-long, fourth-year film course taught in German, the themes on which we focused were the depiction of childhood and children as well as the topic of Heimat in German films. The settings were pre-World War I Germany (Michael Haneke's Das weiße Band), the Third Reich (Volker Schlöndorff 's Die Blechtrommel), Kenya during the years 1938-1947 (Caroline Schlink's Nirgendwo in Afrika), post-war Germany (Sönke Wortmann's Das Wunder von Bern, Michael Verhoeven's Das schreckliche Mädchen), postwar Auschwitz (Robert Thalheim 's Am Ende kommen Touristen), and Berlin (Margarethe von Trotta's Das Versprechen, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye, Lenin, and Hans Weingartner's Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei). The last two films, the children's film Bernd Sahling's Die Blindgänger and Caroline Link's Jenseits der Stille, thematize the meaning of music in the lives of blind children in contemporary Germany.
I mention my course because seven of the eleven films above are discussed in the texts under review. German through Film thematizes Jenseits der Stille, Comedian Harmonists (Joseph ViIsmaier), Lola rennt (Tom Tykwer), Aimée und Jaguar (Max Färberböck), Im Juli...