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Postwall German Cinema: History, Film History, and Cinephilia. By Mattias Frey. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Pp. x + 206. Cloth $90.00. ISBN 978-0857459473.
Something-one can no longer deny it-is happening in German film studies. A discipline that for the longest time studied German national cinema primarily as an historical phenomenon, looking to it as a way to make sense of the country's past, appears in the process of recalibrating its critical lens. Without wanting to suggest that Germany's history is no longer relevant to German film studies-landmark books such as Anton Kaes's Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Prince- ton, 2011), the ongoing work by scholars such as Sabine Hake and Eric Rentschler, as well as the steady outpouring of scholarship focusing on East German cinema history would clearly belie such a claim-I am nevertheless struck by how, in recent years, an increasing number of scholars have investigated contemporary German cinema and its relation not merely to the country's past but also to its present. One might speculate that German film studies' turn toward the present symptomatically expresses larger sociocultural transformations affecting postwall Germany, not least the phenomenon of Normalisierung-the apparently growing desire among Germans to have their country be considered, at long last, a "normal" nation state. Without endorsing this Normalisierungswunsch, German films studies seems to acknowledge and respond to the possibility that the country's terrible twentieth century history no longer has the same purchase on its present as it arguably still did just a decade ago.
Whatever the reasons, this adjustment in focus among scholars of German cinema is powerfully evidenced by various books published since 2010, including Jaimey Fisher and Brad Prager's The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2010), Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood's New Directions in German Cinema (2011), Thomas Schick and Tobias Ebbrecht's Kino in Bewegung. Perspektiven des deutschen Gegenwartsfilms...