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BOOK REVIEWS 
Horst Janssen: Ein Leben 
by Henning Albrecht, 
Dr. Ursula Baer 
University of British Columbia 
 

In his seven hundred page biography Horst Janssen, Henning Albrecht set out to introduce 
the Hamburg artist in a new way to the world. Most notably, the biographer wanted to avoid 
following previous authors’ path, namely, to focus primarily on the shocking, the enfant terrible 
and on Janssen’s alcoholism and violent outbursts. To do that Albrecht follows the classic 
“Bildung” and life structure, ‘development’ (early years, school, studies/apprenticeship), 
‘mastery’ and ‘decline.’ He frames the artist’s life journey with two chapters that are more 
analytical. The introductory chapter offers some explanations and insights into why Janssen was 
the person he was and traces many of the artist’s struggles back to his early years: that Janssen 
was illegitimate, never met his father, was mainly raised by his grandparents, spent three years 
in the “Nationalsozialistische Erziehungsanstalt” (National Socialist Residential Institution for 
Education) in Haseldünne and was initially left to fend for himself when the school closed its 
doors in 1945. The last chapter focuses on Janssen’s work and why his large oeuvre vanished 
from the public and critics’ attention after his death in 1995. The biographer includes many and 
at times long citations, which give voice to the artist himself as well as to people in his life. The 
book’s one hundred pages of endnotes and the long list of interviewees and of people who 
generously allowed him access to collections of the artist’s art, writing and correspondence, 
listed under “Dank” (Acknowledgements) attest to the extensive research Albrecht undertook 
for his Janssen biography. Albrecht’s consistency in focusing more on Janssen’s work and less on 
the disasters of his private and professional lives is the books strength as well as its weakness.  

 

Albrecht, the historian, succeeds in making the emerging Hamburg art scene after World 
War II come alive and creates with these beautifully written sections a source for anyone 
interested in the history of post-war Hamburg and its artists. The main chapters of the biography 
follow Janssen’s journey as an artist and introduce readers to his vast oeuvre of drawings, 
etchings, pen and ink drawings, letters, other writings and books. Albrecht groups Janssen’s 
creations into early works, landscapes, self-portraits, flowers, erotic art and letters and 
organizes them around the artist’s relationships with women. The biography contains many 
black and white and color reproductions of Janssen’s work, which help bring his art closer to 
today’s generations of readers. True to his intention of introducing a new picture of Janssen, and 
in defense of his skill as a serious artist, Albrecht includes detailed and at time lengthy 
descriptions of Janssen’s techniques. He particularly elaborates on what the artist called 
“Kopieren” (copying) and argues that Janssen’s copying was in fact an inventive and new 
approach to old techniques and motives. Albrecht’s discussion of Janssen’s conscious decision to 
follow a more traditional approach in a time when conceptual art and avant-garde dominated 
the art world, of Janssen’s apparent disdain for artists such as Warhol and Beuys as well as of 
the modern art world’s dismissive classification of Janssen’s art as decorative, offers a glimpse 

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into what defined and shaped twentieth-century art. Despite the modern art world’s critical 
assessment of Janssen’s work, his art was very popular during his lifetime. Janssen’s work hung 
in the city’s public buildings, and in law and doctor offices, and was shown in more than a 
thousand exhibitions in Germany and internationally. Some considered him to be one of the 
biggest “Zeichner” (draughtsman) of the twentieth-century, second only to Picasso. Out of fear 
of not having enough time to focus on his work, Janssen rejected offers that would have brought 
him closer to the established art world. He withdrew, for example, from the opportunity to 
illustrate Günter Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum) and declined in 1965 a position as art 
professor at the ‘Hochschule für bildende Künste’ (University of Fine Arts), Hamburg. Janssen, 
readers learn, was a dedicated and prolific artist and businessmen and generously gifted friends, 
lovers and supporters with his art. He, however, also destroyed many of his works. Albrecht 
closes his prologue by calling Janssen an artiste maudit, dammed and blessed with exceptional 
skills, an enfant terrible, a social cretin and one of the greatest artists of the twentieth-century. 
He concludes his biography by briefly summarizing how Janssen burned bridges with galleries, 
collectors and museums. He points out the artist’s self-chosen isolation and focus on tradition, 
his animosity toward other artists, his aggression and alcoholism as well as “schlechte Kritik” 
(Albrecht 2015, 588) (bad critique) by critics are the reasons why the artist and his work were 
almost completely forgotten after Janssen’s death. Albrecht went to great lengths in this 
biography to ensure that Janssen’s art is not overshadowed by the scandals for which the artist 
was well known throughout his life. The remaining question to be asked is, to what end?  

 

Historian and biographer Henning Albrecht, I argue, missed in this book an opportunity 
to reintroduce Horst Janssen and his work within today’s knowledge and critical discourses 
about patriarchal, heterosexist and ethnic-racial structured Western societies. To be clear, 
Albrecht does mention that all of Janssen’s love relationships seemed to follow the same pattern 
and included violence. The biography’s sections that are dedicated to intensive work phases 
Janssen experienced when he was in a relationship, or grieving the loss of one, do each include a 
comment about the violence Janssen committed against the respective partner. Albrecht also 
points out that the artist opined, “seine Partnerin habe seine Gewalt gefälligst zu ertragen 
(Albrecht 2015, 110) (his female partner has to endure his violence) and mentions that Janssen 
enjoyed inflicting fear and was a great manipulator. He also recounts how the artist scared his 
former partner Birgit Sander into giving up the gallery she and others had built, and does not 
shy away from reporting that the artist repeatedly stole from his aunt who continued to support 
him unconditionally. However, all this and other information are too often delivered in brief and 
at times one-sentence statements without any further comments. Another example of this 
approach is the Klaus Pinkus affair. It is a great relief that Albrecht reprints the full response of 
arts dealer Pinkus to Janssen’s public accusations and defamation as readers have at that point 
in the biography read over two hundred pages of how the people in Janssen’s life and of Hamburg 
let the artist get away with pretty much everything. However, the biographer’s two brief 
comments, namely, that Janssen found in Pinkus his match and that the artist was not really a 
Nazi, are inadequate when considering that Janssen shouted in public that Pinkus, ‘the Jew,’ ‘the 
swine,’ has made money off his work. The only explanations Albrecht offers throughout the book 
for Janssen’s violent actions and speech are that the artist was an alcoholic, immature (“a big 
kid”), a prescription drug addict and was un-familied as a child and youth. Albrecht’s desire to 
show another side of Janssen led the biographer to omit discourses that have been developed 

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and widely taught to confront the Holocaust and patriarchal structures, or any information on 
the emerging discourse dealing with the history of the hundreds of thousand of people who were 
in the last century in Western societies un-familied due to heterosexist, patriarchal and ethnic-
racial structured and politically guided compulsory government-welfare measures. In doing so, 
Henning Albrecht missed in his Horst Janssen biography an opportunity to introduce this 
challenging yet undoubtedly gifted artist to a new generation and to start the vital discussion on 
what it meant to be not only an artist but a great artist, under what conditions and at what price 
that title was bestowed and about society’s fascination with this type of usually male artist in the 
Western world. The discussion of these questions and the inclusion of pertinent discourses 
would have made the biography great and a ‘Reader’ for anyone interested in twentieth-century 
art, culture, history and society.  
 
Albrecht, Henning. Horst Janssen: Ein Leben. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 2016.  
 
 
Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926-1950  
by Christian Bailey, 
Dr. Cindy Walter-Gensler 
Baylor University 
 

The early post WWII period has largely been considered the beginning of modern 
European integration, with the process initiated by individual statesmen and events including 
various European treaties. By focusing on the preexisting roots of debates and discourses about 
Europe dating to back to the interwar years, however, Christian Bailey not only problematizes 
the foundational myth of European integration as a linear process taking place only after 1945, 
but also challenges the impression that merely a few political leaders were primary initiators of 
this process. To make his case, the historian focuses on civil society associations such as cultural 
journals and political organizations, as well as grassroots movements across the ideological 
spectrum and how these groups helped to integrate Europe as a means of dealing with the 
problematic redrawing of the European map, the weakness of interwar democracy, and shifting 
the balance of power away from the nation-state toward local and regional leaders. 

 

After laying the theoretical and methodological groundwork in his introduction, Bailey 
first analyses the cultural journal Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken in 
chapters one and two. In particular, the author highlights the magazine’s two editors’ 
background, working for the Neue Rundschau and the Europäische Revue in the 1920s and 1930s, 
to demonstrate how the legacy of European unity debates between 1918-1933 reached far into 
the Cold War era’s public discourses. Moreover, Bailey’s compelling examples taken from the 
literary field show that the ongoing support of European integration spanning from the interwar 
years into the post-1945 period relates to Germany’s political left and right both fearing that 
Europe could be dominated either by the US or Soviet Union. Hence, the historian offers a new 
perspective on the roots of Third Force sentiment in Europe, clearly preceding the onset of the 

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Cold War and not tied to single statesmen, but rather linked to transnational networks and the 
(largely conservative) social elite.  

 

In chapters three and four Bailey then considers how the Internationaler Sozialistischer 
Kampfbund (IKS), an interwar splinter group of the SDP, adapted its internationalist perspective 
of the interwar years to the early post-WWII period. Most importantly, the author illustrates how 
members of the IKS became influential figures in the SDP after 1945 and went on to shape the 
party’s policy toward European integration as a means to reunite West and East Germany. This 
contrasts with much previous scholarship, viewing the SDP’s Ostpolitik—particularly as voiced 
by Kurt Schumacher—in opposition to rather than in accordance with an integrated Europe. 
Along these lines, Bailey’s case study exemplifies why and how socialists supported a Third 
Force Europe after WWII while opposing the European integration policy of the CDU during this 
time. At the same time, the author outlines how the commitment of numerous SDP politicians to 
a united Mitteleuropa was rooted in debates to overturn the national political order since the 
end of WWI.  

 

Chapters five and six then turn to the rival political groups Das Demokratische 
Deutschland and Freies Deutschland. Despite reflecting opposite sides of the political spectrum 
(Christian-centered and communist, respectively), both organizations operating out of Swiss 
exile advocated the federalization of Europe as a means of promoting regionalism in 
reconstructed Germany to constrain parliamentary democracy and the political power of 
individual political leaders. The reasons therefore, as Bailey posits, can be attributed equally to 
the Weimar experience as well as being exposed to Swiss political culture. Building on recent 
research by historians Michael Gehler and Wolfram Kaiser, however, Bailey illustrates 
particularly the importance of these groups’ transnational experience in reconsidering the non-
linear history of European integration. In this context, the scholar also explains why European 
integration nevertheless came to be seen as primarily as a series of negotiations between 
individual statesmen, when in fact the political developments leading to an integrated Europe 
were based rather on an unusual degree of cooperation across party lines. 

 

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow and its innovative perspective thus clearly enriches our 
understanding of the history of modern European integration and belongs on the bookshelf of 
every scholar interested in this topic. However, the book has its limitations. Most importantly, it 
does not entirely live up to its goal of showing how the integrationist agendas outlined in this 
work have permeated the German Zivilgesellschaft in shaping the public opinion regarding 
European integration. As Bailey highlights in his introduction, he set out to investigate not major 
political players, but rather civil society bodies as agents influencing the public’s attitude toward 
Europe. Yet the historian frequently focuses in his research on well-known politicians, for 
instance Wilhelm Hoegner, who was the Minister President of Bavaria for most of the late 1940s 
and 1950s. Likewise, the elitist literary and cultural magazines discussed in chapters one and 
two cannot truly be classified as civil society bodies influencing public opinion on a large scale.  

 

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Nevertheless, Bailey compellingly demonstrates European integration as a non-linear 
process starting well before 1945 and supported by more than a few political leaders. In 
addition, and perhaps surprisingly, Bailey’s research also contributes to re-thinking the concept 
of Heimat. His discussion in chapter six of how to overcome the ideologies of nation-states by 
focusing on the idea of a regional Heimat in post-WWII Europe as argued for by various social 
groups might thus inspire academic interested in cultural and literary studies, as well. Hence, 
the study offers new wide-ranging findings not only relevant for historians, but also for the 
larger German Studies community, and so is highly recommended. 
 
Bailey, Christian. Between Yesterday and Today: German Visions of Europe 1926-1950. New 
York: Berghahn Books, 2016. 
 
 
 
Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies 
By Monica Black and Eric Kurlander 
Simone Boissonneault 
University of Cincinnati 
 

This curated collection of articles, structured chronologically beginning in the decades 
immediately prior to the second world war and extending through the war into contemporary 
times, is an attempt at its core to examine the roots of the academic and pop-cultural connection 
between Nazism and the occult. While framing the collection in the introduction with the 
admonition that there is no direct connection to be drawn between occult trends and traditions 
of the Weimar era and Nazism, the volume posits that the influences and echoes of these trends 
on the Third Reich should not be ignored. In a concise introduction, Monica Black and Eric 
Kurlander briefly place the articles in this volume in the context of prior work in the field while 
addressing the need for more examination of the roles of the occult in the development of the 
Third Reich and in the development of our contemporary understanding of the events during 
and preceding the second World War. Walking a line between stark denial and flagrant 
embellishment of the role of occultism in Germany and in the development of the Third Reich, 
the essays in this collection attempt to establish a new historiographical perspective on 
interactions between Germany and the occult through examinations of a wide array of media.  

 

The volume’s initial three articles encompass inquiries addressing the tensions between 
philosophies of the occult and the Enlightenment in Germany around the turn of the 20th 
Century by examining particular occurrences in the decades leading up to the rise of the Third 
Reich. First is Peter Staudenmeier’s examination of the role played by esoteric thinkers in the 
development of philosophies of rationality in the decades before and after 1900. Scientific 
developments emerging during this period were often led by thinkers open to the “grand vistas 
of unprecedented possibility” offered by a confluence of social and economic conditions. 
Reacting against heightened materialism, numerous thinkers worked to develop esoteric 
worldviews and new spiritualities in the context of the rapid pace of modernity. Immediately 

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thereafter, Perry Meyers addresses the widespread embrace of  monismin the wake of immense 
social, cultural, and technological changes that came during the Wilhelmine era. By looking in 
particular at the works of two thinkers and intellectual publications, he establishes an image of 
German intelligentsia as a force using a variety of esoteric philosophies in an attempt to discover 
a solution to the perceived incongruence of spiritual and physical understandings of human life. 
This blending of spirituality and scientific discovery, the article posits, led to the establishment 
of a “priestly class of scientists” and to assertions of German cultural superiority which would 
later be manipulated by Nazi partisans in their quest to control the thought of the population. 
The third entry in the book’s first chapter is John Ondrovik’s article addressing the actions of 
terrorist Max Hoelz, an almost mythical figure appearing in 1920s Saxony to lead uprisings in 
1919-20. Although only briefly active in Germany, Hoelz became a figure of some legend in the 
area, appearing representative of what Ondrovik identifies as a period of tribulations both seen 
and unseen--difficulties obtaining resources after the first World War and a sudden rise in 
violent crime. In this context, Hoelz’s anti-military exploits and his ability to apparently 
“disappear” created a figure more capable of manipulating the uncertainty created by war and 
economic turmoil than the everyday citizens subject to the constant change and worry of a 
turbulent time. The final segment of this first chapter comprises Jared Poley’s examination of 
Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal works and the events during the Weimar period that created 
Kracauer’s beliefs about the links between politics, culture, and spirituality. Through Kracauer’s 
work, Poley offers, we can foresee Weimar culture’s self destruction in the very turbulence that 
is so often romanticized today.  

 

Following these explorations, the second set of articles picks up during wartime with 
Fabian Link and J. Laurence Haré’s picture of the Third Reich’s archaeological excavations of a 
Viking settlement at Haithabu. As part of Himmler’s research into German heritage, these 
excavations serve as exemplary of the fine line between scientific exploration and the so-called 
“pseudoscience” of occult study as the researchers involved were serious scientists tasked with 
finding evidence of some inherent German ancestral superiority. The authors thereby point to 
the political implications of the term “pseudoscience” and its repercussions. The next article, 
written as a collaboration by Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael T. Schetche, looks at 
the apparent contradictions between occultism and Nazi ideology as exemplified by a number of 
particular naval experiments in order to determine the compatibility of the two and the 
possibility for researchers of the occult to flourish under the rule of the Nazi government. The 
final article of the examination of the second chapter addresses the sway held by the stigmatic 
Therese Neumann, a figure granted significant reverence during her life--this extended through 
the Weimar and into the post-war era. Michael O’Sullivan contextualizes Neumann’s emergence 
as a widely-known religious figure and examines evidence of the relationship between the Nazi 
regime and her very public brand of spirituality as a concrete example of the broader and often 
uneasy relationship between the National Socialist government and religious or esoteric 
thinking.  

 

Finally, light is shed on postwar actions encompassing intersections of National Socialist 
ideologies with occult or esoteric philosophies, beginning with the 1949 emergence of mystic 
Bruno Gröning whose mixture of Catholic and occult messages and large following fostered 

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concerns about the rise of another cult of personality in Germany immediately post-war. Monica 
Black connects Gröning’s rise to the tradition of interest in spirituality and occultism in Germany 
in addition to attributing it to the turbulence and fear of the immediate post-war period. 
Secondly, Anna Lux examines the impact of the parapsychologist Hans Bender, a spirit hunter 
and erstwhile professor of parapsychology who was a popular figure after the war. Due to his 
use of mass media, Bender’s face and message was widely accessible and which, as Lux argues, 
served to legitimize and popularize parapsychology. Jeff Hayton addresses a medium on the rise 
when he analyzes Nazis in contemporary popular culture through the use of video games. In this 
medium, “the Nazi” has existed from the earliest days as an adversary representative of ultimate, 
unquestionable evil and depravity, a connection often cemented through a concurrence with 
supernatural subject matter: the “Nazi zombie”, for example, has at this point become a genre 
trope. As Hayton asserts, however, the reduction of Nazi atrocities to fantasy violence (often to 
the complete exclusion of real-life atrocities such as the Holocaust) is problematic to say the 
least. Finally, Oded Heilbronner scrutinizes connections between völkisch ideologies as laid out 
by early esoterics and contemporary European neofacist rock groups whose music idealizes 
images similar to those held aloft by the “occult- and pagan-Germanic musings” of Himmler 
(271). Through these romanticized musical visions of a constructed past, neofacist rock music 
has helped to perpetuate a number of “alternative histories” that in turn sustain Third Reich 
imagery as a form of rebellion.   

 

The articles contained in this collection span a significant period of time and a diverse 
array of topics, but do so with a clear and coherent red thread--the German traditions of science 
and spirituality which, far from being mutually exclusive, often intersect throughout German 
history. To this day, the public perception of these intersections remains central to many popular 
depictions of World War 2 and National Socialism, and this text offers valuable insights into the 
roots of these traditions as well as contributing a fresh perspective to long-standing scholarship 
in the field.  

 

Black, Monica and Eric Kurlander. Revisiting the “Nazi Occult”: Histories, Realities, Legacies. New 
York: Camden House, 2015.  
 
 
The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and 
Elisabeth Lenk 
By Susan H. Gillespie,  
Stephanie Dreier 
University of British Columbia 
 

The core of the book is a correspondence between a teacher and a student. Of course 
these particular people are quite exceptional: the teacher was the philosopher Theodor Adorno, 
one of the founders and leading members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, and the 
student was “one of Germany’s most original and interesting woman scholars” (vii) Elisabeth 

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Lenk, who actively promoted both the Frankfurt School and Surrealism as intersecting 
movements.  

 

The book was originally published in German in 2001 to recognize this relationship. Now 
for the first time in English, the correspondence was translated by Susan H. Gillespie and 
published by University of Minnesota Press in 2015. The correspondence runs from page 55 to 
page 185 in the book, and extends from November, 1962 until August, 1969, at which point the 
exchange ended due to Adorno’s death.  

 

The correspondence offers a remarkable record of a close academic friendship and there 
are at least two reasons to look at this relationship more closely. First, the letters introduce the 
reader to a very personal, almost intimate side of Adorno, a side that is usually obscured by the 
gravity of his academic writing. More importantly, the correspondence gives an insight into a 
usually concealed part of the academic context: the dialogue between a leading academic and 
his/her doctoral student. The correspondence reveals that such a relationship can provide an 
informal setting in which the creative inclinations of aspiring scholars may be shaped by their 
mentors. For anyone who has ever been a Ph.D. student in any field this book will ring a bell, as 
it is relevant to the issues and questions all advanced teachers and students face.  

 

Apart from that, The Challenge of Surrealism will be interesting to anyone who wants to 
explore Surrealism and especially the links between Surrealism and the Frankfurt School. As 
noticed by Rita Bischof, a scholar of Surrealism and former student of Lenk’s, the work features 
the perspectives of different generations on Surrealism and Critical Theory. Adorno’s view is 
that of someone who was himself growing as a young scholar at the time of the emergence of 
Surrealism and Critical Theory both, whereas Lenk’s view is that of a young scholar a generation 
later who is struggling for a job, and trying to find her ground in the unstable world of academics. 
Both meet at the intersection of Surrealism and Critical Theory, and for both it was a profitable 
meeting in many senses.  

 

The book explores Lenk’s and Adorno’s controversial perceptions of Surrealism within 
the correspondence and with supporting essays and creative texts. The scholars come to look at 
the issue not only from very different stages in their careers, but also from different places. Lenk 
was in Paris at the very forefront when the movement experienced rediscovery by André Breton 
and his groupe surréaliste in the 1960s. She offers her view of Surrealism as a “political matter,” 
(3) a force that attempted “to break up the darkness of the present.” (37) Her perspective is 
much closer to Walter Benjamin, “who saw surrealism as a response to the ‘crisis of 
intelligentsia, more precisely, of the humanist concept of freedom.” (viii) By contrast, Adorno at 
first seemed somewhat remote from Surrealism. In his essay, Adorno focuses more on 
surrealism’s “affinity with psychoanalysis,” (33) and developed its connections to dreams.  

 

Along with Surrealism and politics Adorno and Lenk’s correspondence features topics 

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that range from networking to scheduling appointments, personal experiences, and formal 
university events. The collection takes advantage of the fact that both scholars observed and 
were involved in the groundbreaking social and political events of their time and were in contact 
with a great number of prominent people among them Jürgen Habermas, Ingeborg Bachmann, 
and Herbert Marcuse.  

 

Apart from the letters, there is a good bit of supporting material included in the book 
which helps to clarify and to contextualize the importance of the correspondence. To frame the 
discussion are the enlightening “Introduction” by Rita Bischof, two new translations of Walter 
Benjamin’s poetic article “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” and 
Adorno’s critical essay “Surrealism Reconsidered,” and in the conclusion of the first section, 
Elisabeth Lenk’s “Critical Theory and Surreal Practice.” Altogether these essays raise the 
question of, as Lenk puts it, “whether surrealism – whatever its practitioners may have thought 
– was and is not precisely the practice that is appropriate to critical theory; and whether, on the 
other hand, critical theory was and is not precisely the theory towards which surreal practice 
was oriented.” (41) The supporting material is very helpful for understanding the issues raised 
by the correspondence. 

 

Following the correspondence itself there are several more texts by Lenk: her 
“Afterword” to a work by Louis Aragon and her “Introduction” to a work by Charles Fourier. In 
contrast to the previous essays, these works do not seem to contribute to the argument as much 
as they demonstrate Lenk’s witty and charismatic writing skills.  

 

Ultimately The Challenge of Surrealism features a few shorter pieces by “Castor 
Zwieback,” the pseudonym of Adorno and his friend Carl Dreyfus who co-authored these texts. 
There is something quite charming about these texts. They are clearly the work of young, 
enthusiastic readers wanting to participate in Surrealism in some form. What would have 
supported the overall argument and made the texts even more relevant would have been 
Elisabeth Lenk’s response to these pieces. At this point, the nature of her feedback remains 
unknown and requires further investigation. 

 

The book makes a significant contribution to research on both the Frankfurt School and 
Surrealism. Furthermore, it provides valuable insight into the turbulent waters of the academic 
world, especially the highly charged relationships between doctoral students and their 
supervisors. This collection should be consulted by at least these two groups and will be relevant 
for research and teaching alike. 
 
Gillespie, Susan H. The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno 
and Elisabeth Lenk. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.  

 
 
 

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Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States 
Edited by Rachel J. Halverson and Carol Anne Costabile-Heming 
Ellen C. Chew 
University of Cincinnati 

 

Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States is a fresh and updated take on the 
status of German programs in the twenty-first century. The book begins with an introduction by 
editors Carol Anne Costabile-Heming and Rachel J. Halverson, a note by Frank Trommler, and is 
divided into four major sections: I. Curriculum, II. Initiatives, III. Research, and IV. The New 
Millennium. The essays collected in this book seek to provide solutions to the current challenges 
that the instruction of German as a foreign language faces in the United States today and is meant 
to serve as a useful resource to any educator looking for advice to keep their German program 
thriving in spite of these challenges in the new millennium.  

 

The Introduction by editors Costabile-Heming and Halverson, is a comprehensive and 
detailed examination of the present state of, a brief history of, and future course for German 
Studies in the United States. The first part, from which the Introduction takes its name, 
“Introduction: Challenges and Opportunities for the Study of German,” acclimates the reader to 
the present state of German Studies in the United States. Costabile-Heming and Halverson list 
statistics from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Center for Applied Linguistics 
(CAL), and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) that report the 
state of German programs in the United States “from Kindergarten through postgraduate study” 
(2) in the new millennium. However, despite “an overall increase in the number of language 
learners studying German at all levels” (2), many German programs in the United States are 
seeing a decline in enrollments and in some cases, even closing. Costabile-Heming and Halverson 
then track the roots of these challenges facing German Studies in the second part, “Previous 
Assessment of German Studies in the United States” from the 1970s to present-day. Issues of 
concerns in the 1970s and 1980s included the need to find “what is specifically American” (4) 
about German Studies to differentiate it and establish its identity as a discipline separate from 
the German Germanistik, the 1990s were what the editors call a “wake-up call” for German 
Studies, when Germanists John Van Cleve and A. Leslie Wilson attributed “the enrollment crisis 
in American Germanics” to be “a teaching problem” (4), and the remainder of the nineties and 
into the 2000s saw Germanists taking initiatives to address these issues and redefine German 
Studies in the United States. In the search for a new identity, the fields of Technology, 
Interdisciplinary Studies, and Globalization (or the “dominance” of the English language (7)), 
began to frequent conference papers. Finally, in the third part, “German Studies in the New 
Millennium,” the editors provide their statement of purpose: to collect essays that provide a 
“positive perspective” on the future of German Studies and “propose concrete and successful 
ideas to strengthen the study of German at the local, regional, and even national levels” (8).  The 
book is dedicated to Helene Zimmer-Loew, who served as Executive Director of the AATG in 
2012 from 1985-2012. 

 

Following the Introduction, the editors include a note by Frank Trommler titled “German 

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Studies: The Short Version,” which builds on the third part of the editors’ introduction. Much like 
the editors, Trommler praises Helene Zimmer-Loew’s service to the AATG and her 
accomplishments during her nearly thirty year career. Trommler also embraces Technology and 
Cultural Studies, arguing that the Internet has given students “unprecedented access to German, 
Austrian, and Swiss websites for classroom and home work,” (23) and arguing that Cultural 
Studies, “help [to] situate and explore the individual languages” taught at the high school and 
college levels in the new millennium (25).  Trommler’s review of German Studies in the United 
States since the 1980s is very positive, and his outlook for the future is optimistic. 

 

The first section of the book “Part I: Curriculum,” features two essays by Lynne Tatlock 
and Albrecht Classen which focus on the essential role of curriculum in peaking and maintaining 
students’ interest in German. Both Tatlock and Classen have excited their students about the 
German language by appealing to them first through German culture. Tatlock’s essay is an 
account of her experiences during “The Making of Modern Europe,” a unique curriculum which 
succeeded at Washington University in St. Louis for ten years from 2001 to 2011. This program 
which “focused on the tense Franco-German relations in the age of European nationalism (1789-
1914)” was led by German, French and History professors and open to students who had 
previously taken German or French as high school students. These students then “enrolled 
simultaneously in either a German or French [language] course appropriate to their abilities” 
(35). Classen’s essay focuses on the crucial role of Medieval Studies in German Studies and how 
its relevance is equal to that of “modern and postmodern approaches, such as film studies, 
Migrationsliteratur (literature by immigrants) and[…]Weimar literature”(52). In this essay 
Classen shares his success stories in engaging students through Medieval Studies and the 
German language using the Nibelungenlied and Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich. Tatlock 
and Classen’s unique curriculums indicate that there is still a healthy interest among students in 
German language and culture.  

 

The second section, “Part II: Initiatives” features four essays by Kathleen Condray, 
Gregory H. Wolf, Rachel J. Halverson, and Regina Braker, who prove that it takes true initiative 
to advocate for German programs across institutions of higher education in the United States, if 
German departments are to survive in the twenty-first century. To this end, Condray shares the 
steps that the University of Arkansas has taken to save its German department from elimination, 
which includes offering coursework suited to the needs of engineering and business majors, 
implementing the Goethe-Institut B1, B2 and C1 exams into their advanced curriculums, and 
assisting students with internships (73). Wolf’s essay asks the question: “What and how should 
we teach?” in order to have a thriving German department (89). The answer he poses is rooted 
in “translingual and transcultural competency” (90) where “[l]anguage and culture are 
inextricably intertwined” (95), which is how Wolf has been able to operate as a “one-person 
program” at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois (94). Halverson’s essay shifts the focus 
to professional development. Her essay focuses on the “EIKK- Die Entwicklung von 
interkultureller Kompetenz im Kontext” (104), a seminar for professionals to gain “a common 
understanding of intercultural understanding of foreign language instruction […] pedagogical 
goals, and methods for assessing achievement of cultural understanding” (105). Regina Braker’s 
essay shares her experience seeking cultural understanding and equivalency between the CEFR 

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(Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) system A1-C2, and the system of 
the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) at the KEFKO Seminar in 
Leipzig. Much like Condray, Braker comes to the conclusion that the A1-C2 examinations should 
“inform” American teachers “of the kinds of tasks [they] need to engage in to prepare [their] 
students as they develop language skills and cultural insights” (127). Although these 
contributors are writing from different perspectives, the common theme to be found in these 
four essays is advocacy. It is only by advocating for German Studies, that the discipline will 
continue to flourish and not be subjected to elimination at the university level.   

 

The third section, “Part III: Research,” features four essays by Aleidine J. Moeller and Sheri 
Hurlbut, Kurt Buhanan and Glenn S. Levine, Teresa R. Bell, and Traci S. O’Brien. These essays 
focus on the research necessary to develop a strong educational curriculum for students of 
German at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, in order to train well-rounded future 
educators in German Studies. Moeller and Hurlbut’s essay focuses on the “impact visionary 
leadership can have on a field of research” (137). In response to benefits of the Internet, 
professors developed the “on-line master of arts degree in German Language Pedagogy” offered 
through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, also known as GOLDEN (German Online Distance 
Education Network), with coursework focusing on training teachers in “education” (138). 
Buhanan and Levine’s essay “Woher und Wohin?” focuses on how far German Studies has come 
since Helene Zimmer-Loew started as executive director in 1985 during the “mature Cold War 
mode” (155), and the direction that German Studies is moving towards in the twenty-first 
century.  Their essay compiles research from 1986-2011 on German pedagogy and provides 
articles for reference on “teaching and learning of German grammar” (174-179), “teaching with 
and through German-language literary works” (180-189), and “teaching German and German 
Studies” (190-193). Similar to Condray in Part II: Initiatives, Bell’s essay focuses on the amount 
of research necessary in order to retain a German program. Her essay is a unique study which 
“compare[s] and contrast[s] teachers’ perceptions of effective teaching practices with those of 
their students” (201). Bell believes that this kind of research involving both student and teacher 
participation can only encourage students to “consider continuing their study of German at more 
advanced levels” (211). O’Brien’s essay focuses on the pedagogical training of graduate students. 
His research is based on his belief which demands that equal attention must be paid to the full 
professional development of the graduate student in “three major roles: FL [Foreign language] 
teacher, future FL colleague and continuing FL learner” (226). The rest of his essay focuses 
primarily on this last point and the need for a “clear definition of advancedness” (238), of which 
the ACTFL’s OPT (Oral Proficiency Interview) may not be the most effective evaluation. The 
theme linking these essays in Part III: Research, is conducting the necessary research to make 
improvements in order to survive.  

 

The fourth section of the book, Part IV: The New Millennium features two essays by Lynn 
Marie Hutch and Martin Hagel and William Collins Donahue. Hutch links the closing of programs 
and falling enrollments in part to “the financial crisis that began in 2007 and deepened in 2008” 
(251). She introduces the idea of a “collegiate consortium” that has been effective for German 
Studies throughout Pennsylvania for “exchanging research within the discipline, course sharing, 
or pooling pedagogical resources (254).  Kagel and Donahue support Hutch’s claim attributing 

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closings and falling enrollments to the financial crisis in 2007-2008. Their thesis, however, is 
that in order to survive in the twenty-first century, “German Studies will [have to] change and 
that, in fact it should do so” (272). Kagel and Donahue’s idea of change would be developing an 
“undergraduate major/minor” called “Transnational European Studies” and they lay out their 
“proposal” in this essay (272). 

 

Taking Stock of German Studies in the United States is an important resource for both 
current and prospective professionals in the field of German Studies. The Introduction and 
thirteen essays included offer an exchange of knowledge and ideas that may be valuable to a 
professor working to reinvigorate their German Department or to a new PhD, whether fresh on 
the job market or newly employed. In conclusion, the editors Rachel J. Halverson and Carol Anne 
Costabile-Heming have succeeded in collecting essays that are an honest and unapologetic 
reflection of the status of German programs while providing a hopeful and optimistic outlook for 
the future of German Studies in the United States. 
 
Halverson, Rachel J. and Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, eds. Taking Stock of German Studies in 
the United States. New York: Camden House, 2015.    
 
 
 
Red Vienna, White Socialism, and the Blues 
by Rob McFarland 
Eduardo Altheman Camargo Santos 
University of São Paulo 
 

The relations between Europe and the United States of America have been a central 
theme for the humanities for an extensive period of time, especially when it comes to 
understanding the role played by intellectuals who have, for numerous reasons, fled their homes 
in the Old World in order to establish themselves in America. Such a relationship has been 
described in various forms, some more harmonic and complementary, while others stress the 
incompatibilities or even violent clashes existing between the society and the ways of living in 
Europe and in the U.S. Rob McFarland’s book provides us, in a flowing prose, with his approach 
to the subject by following the footsteps of Ann Tizia Leitich from her hometown of Vienna until 
her arrival in Boston and eventual set up in the core of America’s biggest city, New York City. 

 

 But who exactly is Ann Tizia Leitich, most of us might still be wondering, and why 
is it worth to get acquainted with her life and work? McFarland is well aware of Leitich’s situation 
of relative anonymity, when one compares her status to other German speaking intellectuals – 
such as Walter Benjamin or Siegfried Kracauer, only to name two of the most famous – who came 
to the U.S. and wrote their own impressions about this country, or others who, never being able 
to come to the U.S., still wrote their remarks from across the Atlantic Ocean. Nonetheless, while 
Leitich’s popularity today might be regarded as somewhat circumscribed, McFarland relates 

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how she at one point shook hands with the 30th president of the U.S. Calvin Coolidge and his wife 
at a reception in the White House. Her texts, published in the liberal Neue Freie Presse, were also 
widely read in Vienna and Austria, having Stefan Zweig and the chancellor of the Austrian 
Republic Ignaz Seipel among her devoted readers, for instance. 

 

McFarland’s answer to such a question, as well as his primary reason for writing this 
book, is that Leitich, experiencing in loco everything America had to offer “from the deserts of 
Arizona to the jazz clubs of Harlem” (6), was able to provide her fellow Austrians with a much 
more nuanced view than many of the apocalyptical critiques who saw in America the decay of 
the German Kultur in favor of an American Zivilisation. This thesis is present already in the very 
title of the book, in which the colors of the American flag intertwine with the words “Vienna” and 
“socialism” as to visually represent such an integration. 

 

According to McFarland, Leitich hoped to inject new energy in the old structures, which 
would be able to revitalize Europe’s culture in general, which was in crisis in the end of the First 
World War, and Austrian in particular, which was somehow disoriented with the increasing 
dismantle of the House of Habsburg. In doing so, Leitich would act as a privileged mediator 
between Europe and America and develop her ideas of a cultural synthesis between them, 
according to which both locales would benefit from their fusion, without falling into the traps of 
a cultural pessimism. According to McFarland, this would indelibly mark the works of many 
German speaking intellectuals since Immanuel Kant and Ferdinand Tönnies, but especially in 
Oswald Spengler’s famous Der Untergang des Abendlandes. The fact that Leitich was also a 
woman is not neglected by McFarland, who explores her insights regarding the important role 
that women play in the masculine dominated industrial society of the U.S. 

 

In the first chapter, the author explores the conflicts encountered by the daughter of the 
Austrian Bildungsbürgertum that renounces her social destiny in Europe in order to make a 
living in America. At the age of thirty-four and two weeks prior to achieving eligibility for a 
pension as a teacher in her hometown, Leitich, who was brought up in the traditional ways of 
the Viennese educated bourgeoisie, faces a personal crisis that goes along with the critical 
situation of Austria as a whole and decides to leave for the U.S. to work as a domestic servant in 
Chicago. She worked in many different jobs in the United States of America – such as nanny, 
cashier, secretary, etc. – and even took university classes at Des Moines University, but it was 
through her typical Viennese style feuilleton writings that she eventually made a name for 
herself. In her many articles, Leitich explored a wide variety of subjects that analyzed the 
American way of living and, by rejecting Spengler’s binary opposition between Kultur and 
Zivilisation, was able to find a way out for her personal as well as for European crisis as a whole. 

 

The second chapter deals with Leitich’s articles and insights about movies and mass 
culture in America, made possible by her inside position working at a New York based 
department of Metro-Goldwyn film studios. In keeping with Vienna’s Social Democrats and their 
particular version of Austromarxism, Leitich defended the idea that mass culture was able to 

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transform the lives of the people traditionally excluded from the spheres of high culture and 
therefore give birth to new humans. McFarland argues that such a position is not without its 
contradictions, since Leitich was in many ways reticent toward the masses, still sometimes 
trapped within the prejudices of her traditional upbringing. Utilizing a typical Bourdieusian 
framework, McFarland argues that Leitich maintained a position typical of her class of 
condescension towards the proletariat and its so-called low culture. However, she was still able 
in many articles to refuse such class prejudices and analyze film – as well as other manifestations 
of mass culture, such as jazz, magazines, radio and dance – as a type of art worthy of its name. 

 

In the third chapter, McFarland reconstructs the debate over Americanism that took place 
especially in German speaking countries during the 1920s and 1930s. He analyzes how America 
was portrayed by many scientists, literati, and journalists, among which Stefan Zweig, the 
famous Viennese feuilletonist Felix Salten and, evidently, the role played by Leitich herself. 
Leitich attempts to refute Zweig’s argument about the monotonization of the world brought by 
Americanism and tries to reveal the unseen potentiality embedded in technology as a tool for 
the democratization of art and culture. 

 

The following chapter is dedicated to the debate over industrialism and mechanization 
and their respective roles within capitalist and socialist societies. The ideas of Henry Ford and 
Frederick Winslow Taylor were read in distinct ways by several branches of the Left in Europe 
and, in the German speaking world, a particular kind of reading gave birth to the so-called “white 
socialism”, as opposed to a violent and oppositional “red socialism”. Leitich witnessed such 
debates closely and also made her contribution by adding an element that was usually missing: 
gender. In her articles at the time, argues McFarland, Leitich proposes a new reading of the 
binomial Zivilisation/Kultur, according to which men in America represent the ideals of 
Zivilisation, whereas women embody the Kultur. 

 

In the fifth chapter, McFaarland turns to Leitich’s articles and novels about Chicago, a city 
she sees as the ultimate symbol of America: conjugating business, rationalism and 
standardization on one side and music, art, and beauty on the other, Chicago is described in such 
way in Leitich’s writings that it appears to be the personification of the puzzle America 
represented. 

 

The sixth and final chapter discusses how Leitich analyzed two genres of American music: 
Jazz and the Blues. While she still looked at Jazz, according to McFarland, through the eyes of a 
condescending and often racist typical member of the Viennese Bildungsbürgertum, she saw in 
the Blues hope for cultural potential in America. McFarland also describes how Leitich slowly 
stopped writing feuilletons for the Neue Freie Presse as well as other German newspapers, how 
she got married to an Austrian, returned to her country and gradually lost touch with the daily 
events that took place in the U.S. She also gradually abandoned the feuilleton form and 
increasingly started writing in other forms, such as novels, and eventually turned into a 
recognized interpreter of Austrian history, becoming an established historian of the Viennese 

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and Austrian culture. 

 

In the epilogue, McFarland inserts Leitich’s personal history within the global history of 
the relationship between Austria and Nazi Germany. He shows us how Leitich was able to 
introduce her writings, as well as her personal life, as representatives of the anti-Nazi heroine 
par excellence, which fitted harmoniously within the vision of Austrians as victims of Germany’s 
Anschluss, even if Leitich herself never had substantial problems during the national socialist 
years in Austria and, as we all know, not all Austrians were only victims in this picture. 

 

Before the end of the book, McFarland still provides his readers with a chronology of Ann 
Tizia Leitich’s life, as well as a selected bibliography from and about Leitich, for those who wish 
to dig deeper into her life and writings. 

 

McFarland’s Red Vienna, White Socialism, and the Blues does an excellent job of 
reconstructing the life and writings of Ann Tizia Leitich and of examining her role as a mediator 
of two alleged extremes, Austrian Kultur and American Zivilisation. However, one thing should 
be noted. In his effort to make Leitich stand out as a better interpreter of Americanism than her 
fellow German speaking intellectuals, McFarland ends up drawing a long line of 
“misinterpretations” that stretches from Kant, Spengler, Tönnies, all the way to Kracauer and, 
ultimately, the Frankfurt School. By doing so, he evaluates in a reductionist fashion the works of 
the Frankfurt School, not realizing that they never fell into the traps of condescension that 
affected many of their earlier colleagues – a mistake usually made by Bourdieusian theoreticians. 
A reading of the texts in which Adorno criticizes Spengler, or Marcuse’s political engagement in 
the U.S., for instance, would suffice to undo such common and reductionist view of their works. 
That does not however eliminate the merits of the book, which remains an insightful analysis, 
and is well worth the read. 
 
McFarland, Rob. Red Vienna, White Socialism, and the Blues. New York: Camden House, 2015.  
 
 
Broom Service 
by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister 
Dr. Alex Hogue  
Coastal Carolina University 
 

Broom Service is a board game created by Andreas Pelikan and Alexander Pfister and 
published by Ravensburger Spieleverlag and Alea in 2015. The game is designed for two to five 
players age ten and up, can be completed in 45 to 75 minutes, and carries the prestigious 
Kennerspiel des Jahres award. In the game each player controls two witches who fly about the 
countryside delivering potions. Along with these two witches, represented by wooden pawns, 
are druids who also deliver potions and gatherers who help the player acquire more resources, 

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neither of which are physically represented on the game board as the witches are. In this review, 
I will be evaluating the game specifically with regard to the physical presentation of the game 
itself and its artwork, the gameplay and rules, and the emergent effects on the players.  

 

 The game's box is tall, somewhat narrow, and of average depth and features a purple 
background with an inset window that depicts a witch on a broom flying across the countryside 
delivering potions by parachute. While the inset image is both colorful and packed with exciting 
action, the purple frame around it unfortunately serves to dampen the dynamism of the witch in 
the foreground. The art on the box, the game board, and cards are colorful, lively, and of excellent 
quality adding to the player's sense of immersion within the game's theme. Each player receives 
ten cards featuring four witches (forest, mountain, prairie, and hill), three gatherers (root, fruit, 
and herb), two druids (peak and valley), and one weather fairy. Each character card contains an 
image of the character, his or her name (e.g. Drizzelda the Weather Fairy or Torie Nado the 
Prairie Witch), and two options that the player may choose from: cowardly and brave. Each 
witch corresponds to different types of land on the game board and allows a player to fly to that 
area with similar rules for the druids, although no pawns are moved. 

 

 The board itself is double sided with one side geared for standard play and the back 
allowing more seasoned players to scale up the difficulty and complexity. The art is similar to a 
high quality comic book and is incredibly attractive increasing the enjoyability of the theme and 
the replayability. The pawns, score trackers, and potion bottles have a quality feel to them as they 
are painted wood rather than plastic and the cardboard pieces are printed with bright, colorful 
images. While the tactile and visual aspects of the game will keep players coming back, the game's 
box is unnecessarily large for the contents within. The board itself is significantly smaller than the 
box in both height and width, resulting in a lot of wasted space, and while the rules book fits the 
dimensions of the box perfectly, making the rules book and game box smaller in all dimensions 
to fit the board size and the accompanying pieces would have significantly decreased the wasted 
space and materials both inside the box and on the shelf.  

 

The rules of Broom Service are explained over twelve large pages that consist mostly of 
text with few pictures. The basic game is covered by the first nine pages with the remainder 
being devoted to more advanced play options. On the right of each page there is bold text 
summarizing each section, which may lead the player to believe that it will function as a quick 
start guide; however, this not the case. The bold text is only intended as refresher information 
for seasoned players. This heavy reliance on text is rather surprising and disappointing given 
the international market of Eurogames and their focus on language-independence within the 
games themselves.  

 

Despite the lengthy text, the rules are rather simple: A game consists of seven rounds and 
each round is led by the player who went last in the previous round or the oldest in the case of 

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the first.1 At the beginning of a round, each player chooses four of the ten cards they have to be 
their hand for the round. A number of bewitched cards are revealed that decrease points earned 
by using various characters, and a conditions card is revealed that puts into effect a new rule for 
the round. The leading player chooses one card from their hand and reveals it stating either "I 
am the brave..." or "I am the cowardly..." forest witch, peak druid, root gatherer, etc. Each 
subsequent player must follow suit and reveal that card if he or she has it in hand. Cowardly 
actions are affected immediately, while brave actions must wait until the end of the round and 
may be stolen by subsequent players. With this risk comes reward as brave actions score points 
with the witches and druids and net more resources from the player's gatherers. Players reveal 
the cards corresponding to the area that they would like to travel to (the prairie witch goes to 
the prairie, etc.) and players may only move to areas adjacent to the one they are currently in. 
The player with the highest score at the end of seven rounds wins. Given that this explanation, 
simplified as it may be, of the basic rules covers a single paragraph, Broom Service would do well 
to have its twelve pages of rules presented more concisely with a quick start guide added for 
beginning players.  

 

While many of the game's mechanics are typical to Eurogames, choosing brave or 
cowardly actions is a unique twist that keeps all players in the game and participating until the 
end, but may leave players frustrated with their brave actions being stolen by players following 
suit each round. Competition between players is largely indirect as they work against one 
another for the ability to deliver resources to various towers and earn victory points. The sheer 
number of options for where to deliver potions also means that players can potentially carve out 
their own territories and may not even compete over them at all. Further, while round towers 
may only receive one potion, square towers can receive multiple. Although the rules restrict how 
often a single player can deliver to any given square tower, there is no way to keep track of this 
and the rule itself is not well explained. While it is possible not to compete with other players 
over towers, one could play very aggressively and actively seek to prevent fellow players from 
delivering potions to certain, more profitable areas. Like many other Eurogames (Settlers of 
Catan and Carcassonne come to mind right away), competition and strategy are only as fierce or 
passive as the players make them and emerge from the group dynamic of the players themselves 
rather than being embedded within the rules.  

 

While the basic mechanics of the game are rather simple, an emergent strategy soon 
develops, whereby players take into account where other players are at any given time, what 
resources they have, and what cards are currently bewitched in order to choose the cards for 
their hands that are most likely to succeed in maximizing the number of brave options per round. 
Through this strategy, players are incentivized to keep away from other players' territories and 
land their pawns in land areas of a different type from other players at the end of each round. 
One becomes not only an accountant of one's own resources, but also of those of other players 
                                                 
1 Determining the first player in the first round by age is a standard way to choose, but is wholly unimaginative and does 
not add to the immersion. Other methods, such as the hairiest player going first in The Grizzled or the last one to have 
been sick in Pandemic (nominated for Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2009) offer much more creative ways of solving this 
issue. The authors of Broom Service could have made the determiner be the last player to have been in the mountains, 
forest, prairie, or hills or any number of other, more creative options. 

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and one begins to try and predict the movements of the other players so as to choose the cards 
that will net the most point and resource gains. One is also incentivized to make heavy use of 
overlapping witch and druid cards (the peak druid can go to both the hills and mountains, which 
overlaps with the hill witch and mountain witch cards) to try to ensure that at least one brave 
action may be taken in a round, if not multiple. The bewitched cards add further interest as they 
are intended to dissuade players from using their equivalents, but that dissuasion itself can 
incentivize other players to use them in order to get the brave action at a reduction of 3 points.  

 

Overall Broom Service is an excellent game with high replayability. Between the emergent 
strategy and the scaling complexity, this game offers something to those new to board games as 
well as to the most seasoned connoisseur. Only a few small elements do not work in the game's 
favor, namely the box size and its dynamism dampening background, the unnecessary length 
and text reliance of the rules book, a lack of a round counter, and a similar lack of a way to keep 
track of potion deliveries to square towers. These, however, are minor issues in an otherwise 
well-conceived and implemented game definitely deserving of the Kennerspiel des Jahres prize. 
While some games produce interest and fun for the players in the actions allowed by the rules 
themselves, the best games structure their rules to allow for interest and fun to emerge from the 
players' interactions with the game and with one another guided by the bounds of the rules and 
Broom Service does just that.  
 
Pelikan, Andreas and Alexander Pfister. Broom Service. Newton, New Hampshire: 
Ravensberger, 2015.  

 
 
Die Fliegen 
by Tex Rubinowitz 
Dean Guarnaschelli 
St. John’s University 
 

In den 1990ern hatten Hörbücher ihren Höhepunkt erreicht. Für motivierte 
Deutschlernende damals, die schon von Janosch gehört hatten oder sogar Fans waren, gab es die 
einmalige Gelegenheit, die gesprochene Version seines Roman für Erwachsene Schimanski: Die 
Kraft der inneren Maus auf CD (Deutsche G, Universal, 1996) unterwegs zu genießen. Gerade weil 
für viele Menschen der Name Janosch mit guten, unterhaltsamen Geschichten verbunden wird, 
konnte man sich auf eine lustige, mit vielen metaphorischen, sogar ironischen Gedanken 
versehene Geschichte freuen, die einem die Sprache bereichern könnte, insbesondere beim 
wiederholten Abspielen. Das Buch, das im stereotypischen ,Wilden Westen’ spielt, weckte 
sicherlich das Interesse seitens der Zuhörer über die Auswahl eines vergangenen, sehr 
spezifischen amerikanischen Milieus. Es stellt sich zunächst einmal die Frage, was es eigentlich 
an dem Wilden Westen ist, das so viel Ansehen für moderne, deutschsprachige Autoren einen 
beliebten Rang hat. Egal welche Antwort, das Cowboy-Dasein bietet etwas an, das funktioniert, 
wenn es um hartnäckige Einzelgänger geht.  

 

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Für Tex Rubinowitz’ Neuerscheinung Die Fliegen aber, passen statt Kakteen und Stetsons 
vielleicht Brennnessel und Carmen-Miranda-Obsthut besser ins Konzept, um weitere, ganz 
unwillkürliche Bilder im Kopf zu wecken, denn Cowboy-Requisiten sind hier total unnötig.  In 
knappen 36 E-Book-Seiten wird es dem Leser schon im ersten Kapitel klar, dass das Gegenteil 
von Cabaret einfach zu viel Cabaret ist und die wenigen Textstellen, die auf ein mögliches aber 
nicht kohärentes Abenteuer hindeuten, werden von der darauffolgenden Dosis Meta-Referenzen 
unterbrochen, die auf der Stand-Up-Bühne halbwegs funktionieren könnten.   

 

Einst hatte Kulturkritiker Theodor W. Adorno zwischen richtigem und falschem Lachen 
unterschieden; auch der Spaß der Kulturindustrie war für ihn ein heikles Thema.  Adornos 
Theorie nach war das, was dem Publikum zugeliefert wird, dank unserer Massenkultur 
vorschriftsmäßig und ohne echte Selbstreflektion; von einer Art Erkenntnis ist gar nicht die 
Rede.  Für Die Fliegen ist das leider der Fall, da die Überhäufing des literarischen Rate-Mal-Spiels 
einfach ablenkt und kontraproduktiv ist.  Was sich hinter der Explosion vom US-inspirierten 
„name dropping“ alles verbirgt, erlebt man nur wiederholt als kommunikativen Fehlschlag 
seitens der Hauptperson, der am Ende der Erzählung den Namen Tex Rubinowitz verliehen wird.  
Ob das mit Absicht ist, können Online-Interviews bestätigen.  Gelungen und auch sehr 
willkommen wären Illustrationen, die vielleicht die nötige Verbindung zwischen Autor und 
Selbstironie besser darstellen könnten.  Max Müller, Musiker und Zeichner hat sich schon für 
Rubinowitz engagiert (Irma, Rowohlt Verlag, 2015) Dass Die Fliegen nur aus 36 Seiten besteht 
ist verwirrend und eine Erleichterung zugleich.   

 

Für seinen Text Wir waren niemals hier aus Irma wurde Tex Rubinowitz 2014 mit dem 
Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis für Literatur ausgezeichnet. Irma markiert vielleicht den ersten 
Schritt in eine erfolgreiche, wenn nicht etwa chaotische Richtung.  Das Groteske und viel 
Selbstironie spielen auch hier eine Rolle; der Einfluss der Anarchie in Die Fliegen ist aber eine 
Portion größer.   

 

Der Vergleich mit Janosch am Anfang der Rezension war nicht ganz ohne Zweck: Durch 
seine (damals) originelle Landschaft erreicht Janosch eine Art parallele Welt, durch die sich 
seine Hauptfigur bewegt.  Hätte Rubinowitz sich auch für eine Welt entschieden, wo seine 
Handlung stattfinden würde, ohne dies mit verrückten Bildern zu komplizieren, dürften 
Leserinnen und Leser die Fehlkommunikationen im Leben des Ich-Erzählers befolgen und sich 
nicht als Opfer eines Albtraums fühlen.  Ironie ist eine prekäre Sache.  Bei Janosch ist der Cowboy 
in seinem Roman tatsächlich eine verwegene Maus; bei Rubinowitz stemmt sich die Hauptfigur 
gegen alle Vorwürfe, eine Maus zu sein.  
 
Rubinowitz, Tex. Die Fliegen. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 2016.   
 
 
 
 

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The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films 
By Quinna Shen 
Melissa Sheedy 
University of Wisconsin-Madison 
 

Within the last quarter century after the fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the GDR, 
countless pieces have been published focusing on the legacy of the East German film company 
DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft), with special attention paid to its place in German 
national film heritage. Qinna Shen joins this discourse with her 2015 monograph The Politics of 
Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films, and her book distinguishes itself though its focus on fairy-tale 
adaptations among the DEFA corpus of films. In The Politics of Magic, Shen provides a cultural 
history of over forty feature-length, live action films spanning from the immediate postwar 
period to German unification. Within this expansive exploration, the author gives special 
attention to the complex interactions between GDR cultural politics and the embedded ideology 
in these films. With an eye to the ways in which the fairytale as a genre played either a subversive 
or supporting role in East Germany, Shen explores the value of these fairy-tale films as both 
didactic and entertaining media for children and for adults, and she shows how they differed 
structurally and thematically from their western counterparts. 

 

While the fairytale as a genre and its function and reception in the GDR have been treated 
in depth, and while DEFA films in general are well represented, there exists a considerable gap 
in the scholarship regarding the fairy-tale films specifically. In light of their significance in both 
East and West Germany and their enduring legacy after the fall of the Wall, Shen’s volume 
identifies and answers the call for a detailed treatment of the these distinctive and popular films. 
Through the theoretical lens of narrative analysis and through supporting considerations of 
aesthetic and formal characteristics of these films, the author offers an in-depth examination 
which helps bridge this gap in fairy-tale and film scholarship. 

 

Following an introduction in which Shen deftly lays out the cultural and historical 
significance of DEFA fairy-tale films along with their critical and popular reception in the GDR, 
the author approaches these films in a more or less chronological order in five chapters. The first 
chapter, “Inheriting the Humanist Tradition,” centers on the first two fairy-tale adaptations 
produced by DEFA, Paul Verhoeven’s The Cold Heart (1950) and Wolfgang Staudte’s The Story of 
Little Mook (1953). Shen grounds her analysis in a discussion of the balance between realism 
and the fantastic and she demonstrates how magic in the films is de-emphasized in favor of 
human agency. Returning to the complicated relationship between GDR cultural politics and 
fairytales, she reinforces here the ways in which these films were made to satisfy the demands 
of socialist realism, and yet managed to stay true to the highly-valued humanist tradition of the 
19th century.  

 

Chapter 2, “Entangled in the Cold War,” also engages with the reception of fairytales in 
the GDR with its exploration of film portrayals of power, exploitation, and transformation that 

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resonated with socialist ideas of worker oppression. In her discussion of cinema of the 1950s 
and 60s, Shen examines political allegory and class conflict as depicted in the DEFA fairy-tale 
films of this era and also analyzes how the sociopolitical context of these years and of the Cold 
War specifically are reflected and at times indirectly legitimized in these films. In describing the 
censorship of even those films that staunchly supported the party line, she demonstrates the 
complicated and fluctuating whims of the SED, which were not always apparent to filmmakers.  

 

Shen continues her discussion of the Cold War in chapter 3, “Love is Real Wealth,” and 
focuses on developments as the conflict endured beyond the 1960s. She identifies the themes of 
love and work in these films, which often play out within the aristocracy or royalty rather than 
in the working class. In discussing how the inclusion of the aristocratic circle in these films could 
still be in keeping with socialist ideals, Shen shows how many of these adaptations subvert the 
traditional fairy-tale formula of achieving wealth and status by ending instead in a social 
“demotion” of the protagonist. Here, the author also compares the DEFA fairy-tale films with 
their West German and Disney counterparts, with an eye to different gender and power relation 
representations. While this type of comparison is not the primary focus of this monograph, her 
treatment here nevertheless adds depth to her discussion of East German fairy-tale films and 
helps make the book accessible to readers who are less familiar with GDR cinema. 

 

As mentioned, Shen’s writing deals substantially with the reception of fairytales and 
fairy-tale films in the GDR, and she returns to this focus in chapter 4, “Ambiguity between 
Conformism and Resistance.” The focus of discussion in this chapter is the only banned DEFA 
fairy-tale film, The Robe (1961). Here, she begins to concentrate on the more insidious role of 
films marketed towards children as a medium for potential political critique. While fairytales 
had been successfully integrated into the cultural politics of the GDR, this chapter shows that 
they also serve as a unique vehicle for internal critiques disguised as harmless tales. 

 

In the book’s final chapter, “A Sign of the Times,” Shen covers films of the last decade of 
the GDR, the 1980s. As she demonstrates, these films begin to move away from the traditional 
Grimm tales and they begin to treat Romanticism more broadly, featuring adaptations of works 
by E.T.A. Hoffmann and Bettina von Arnim, for example, and focusing on themes of women’s 
emancipation, environmentalism, and peace. In this chapter, the author demonstrates the 
connections these films established to concurrent political movements and issues as well as to 
their more experimental nature in general, thus even further distinguishing themselves from 
West German and Disney fairy-tale films.    

                                                                                                    

The Politics of Magic sets out to provide an unprecedented overview of almost 40 years                  

of DEFA fairy-tale films, while situating them within the constantly fluctuating 
sociocultural and political contexts in which they were produced. More than a mere list of works 
or of themes, this volume links these films through shared values and critiques, and traces an 
overarching aesthetic and ideological development throughout 40 years of DEFA filmmaking. In 
so doing, Shen provides valuable insight into these films’ critical reception and impact. In 

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describing the effort made in producing these “countertales” to transform the original folk- and 
fairytales into stories suitable for the big screen, Shen establishes a clear connection between 
the 19th century and the GDR. However, she makes no attempt to gloss over the uneasy 
relationship between the regime and the source material. Through a subtle and deft handling of 
this often tense dynamic, the author provides a foundational overview of fairytale and fairy-tale 
film reception in East Germany. This volume is recommended to anyone interested in fairytales, 
DEFA films, and the complex relationship between the cultural politics of the state and these 
tales. Shen’s treatment of the topic endeavors to reconceptualize these films not merely as state-
sanctioned, simplistic propaganda, but rather as creative works with true aesthetic and 
historical value. She also shows them to be separate from their Disney and West German 
counterparts, not only through their structural disenchantment of gold and royalty, but also in 
their enlightened and fresh portrayals of female characters. Through her discussion of DEFA 
fairy-tale films’ shared traditions and the careful tracing of ideological developments throughout 
the years, Shen demonstrates the true cultural value of these films and shows them to be worthy 
of our attention, both as representations of the former East German state and also as works of 
art in their own right.  
 
Shen, Quinna. The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films. Detroit: Wayne State University 
Press, 2015. 
 
 
Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World 
Edited by Quinn Slobodian 
Felix A. Jiménez Botta 
Boston College 
 

International socialist solidarity was central to the political paradigm of the communist 
regime of East Germany. Solidarity campaigns and missions of aid to friendly countries were a 
staple of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). Comrades of Color is an important 
investigation into the lived experience of international solidarity for both the giver and the 
recipients of East German solidarity, filling lacunae in the historiography of East German 
internationalism and foreign policy. The result is an accessible book suitable for both research 
and teaching. Featuring incisive investigations into grand reconstruction projects in war-
ravaged Asian countries, solidarity and aid campaigns in East Germany, and the experience of 
the 'comrades of color' in the German homeland of 'Real Existing Socialism,' the volume 
advances three main interrelated arguments. First, East German internationalism was more a 
product of self-interested objectives than altruism and socialist amity; second, there were 
continuities in racist thought from the pre-1945 period in the East German state and society, 
that were not subjected to a public debate, which created in turn awkward inconsistencies 
between propaganda and lived reality; and third, actual solidarity between East Germans and 
'comrades of color' could and did exist, mostly from interpersonal relations not mediated by the 
state. 

 

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 Quinn Slobodian dissects the GDR's paradoxical attitude towards race. The East 
German government argued that racism did not exist in the country, but held on to the belief in 
real existing difference between human beings. East German solidarity stood on two shaky 
pillars: the mistaken argument that racism had been excised from the country, and an "uncritical 
cult" around allied people of color in 'Third World' countries (32). The result was that the 
propaganda lauding equality and comradeship between peoples did little to inform actual 
contacts between East Germans and foreigners, while racial prejudice in East German society 
remained.  

 

  Young Sun Hong's chapter shows how the East German reconstruction of the war-
destroyed North Korean city of Hamhung stalled due to conflicting visions for socialist 
modernity. East Germany aimed at integrating North Korea further in the socialist bloc and 
showcasing its technological prowess, while North Korean leader Kim Il Sung envisioned 
nationalist juche autarchic development and a continued push for the reunification of the Korean 
Peninsula. Pyongyang rejected East German apartment blocs modeled after socialist realism, 
insisting on increased speed of production and housing units at the expense of western luxuries 
such as high roofs and private bathrooms. The East Germans cancelled the project early, but for 
all the problems that emerged, Hong is careful to emphasize the relations that existed between 
workers from both countries, which accounted for real expressions of solidarity.  

 

 Gregory Witkowski's chapter analyzes the work of the three most important East 
German aid agencies: the state-run Solidarity fond, the protestant Brot für die Welt, and the 
catholic-run Not in der Welt. Since socialist states such as the GDR distanced themselves from 
Western charity, and two of the organizations were run by churches operating in an officially 
atheist state, how did these programs fit in the GDR's political paradigm? As Witkowski shows, 
the agencies followed official precepts to educate donors and provide solidarity to suffering 
peoples of the 'Third World.' In his analysis of posters goading potential donors to give, the 
author finds that GDR charity recreated western liberal types of charity in its portrayal of Third 
World victimhood, the main exception being  when it came to display images of idealized 'Third 
World' inhabitants in the process of building socialism. GDR religious charity was also 
remarkably similar to its Western counterpart in that it presented East Germany as a part of the 
industrialized world, and East German citizens as part of a privileged minority, with 
responsibilities towards the deserving mass of sufferers in underdeveloped nations.  

 

 Bernd Schaefer investigates the close relations that formed between East 
Germany and Vietnam. The Vietnamese relied on East German expertise for everything from the 
training of Vietminh cadres to printing paper currency and minting coins. Moreover, unlike the 
North Koreans, the Vietnamese did appreciate the East German style of building and 
reconstructing. The GDR's largesse, however, created expectations that the increasingly 
bankrupt state could not provide. One way to help spur the Vietnamese economy while ensuring 
some sort of repayment led to the import of Vietnamese temporary workers to boost the flagging 
GDR economy, which led in turn to racism against Vietnamese workers on East German soil. East 
Germany's heavy investment in Vietnam’s nascent coffee industry (today a major source of 

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income for the Southeast Asian country) was done with an eye towards covering its commodity 
needs from a friendly country, and heightening domestic morale.  
 

 Simon Steven's chapter on black South African anti–Apartheid activist William 
'Bloke' Modisane's experiences in East Germany takes a biographical approach that serves to 
bring the view of one of the 'comrades of color' to the volume. Modisane's negative experiences 
as a person of color in mid-sixties GDR, that reminded him of white South African racism, show 
how little the official discourse of solidarity with black South Africans had percolated in the East 
German population. This issue is further explored in Sarah Pugach's contribution that 
demonstrates that "the GDR was more a site of ambivalence and inconsistency than tolerance 
when it came to questions of race" (132). Relations between African male students and German 
women made East German authorities apprehensive, throwing into relief the ambivalence of 
state officials towards race and miscegenation. East German officials believed that mixed-race 
unions were incompatible with socialist morals (in clear continuities with pre-1945 notions), 
and sought to limit these unions whenever possible, a stance that belied the alleged absence of 
racism in the GDR. Stereotypes of lecherous African men and immoral German women became 
a staple in the lingo of state officials and East German citizens alike. At the same time, East Berlin 
needed to maintain both its image of anti-racism and anti-fascism and good relations with 
African countries, which led to uneven decisions on the matter. Moreover, East Germany did not 
compromise on its strict pro-natalism, as it considered the offspring of mixed race relations to 
be legitimate and valuable members of East German society.  

 

 Katrina Hagen's uses the extensive campaign on behalf of Angela Davis in the early 
1970s to explore East and West German attitudes towards black female sexuality and new left 
radicalism. International solidarity played a central role in the GDR's repertoire for international 
legitimation. It was meant to show that while fascism and racism were extinct behind the 'anti-
fascist defensive wall," they remained alive and well in the capitalist west. GDR officials were 
wary of Angela Davis' ties to Herbert Marcuse and the Black Panther Party, whose radical take 
on Marxism differed much from the state socialist version. Hagen highlights the similarities in 
East and West German apprehension towards Angela Davis and African American anti-racism 
activists. GDR media followed in the footsteps of its counterparts in the United States and West 
Germany, in highlighting Davis' looks and exoticism to increase the campaign's appeal while 
eliding her potentially explosive political message. Although the "Free Angela" campaign was 
widespread, it did not trigger a wider debate on domestic racism in East Germany, and served 
merely as an "outward and highly politicized expression of a state-mandated anti-racism" (179).  

 

 The toxic effects of this missed debate and lingering apprehension towards people 
of color showed in the failure of the "School of Friendship" project. Jason Verber examines the 
genesis and demise of an East German institution supposed to strengthen East Berlin's ties with 
the newly decolonized nation of Mozambique by ensuring that the upcoming elites were trained 
according to Marxist–Leninist precepts. But problems plagued the project: East German teachers 
questioned their Mozambican counterpart's ideological solidity, sexual mores and attitude 
towards abortion, while East German and Mozambican youths' brawls became more violent and 

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vicious as the decade matured.  

 

 A similar ambivalence is obvious in the collaborative cultural work between the 
East German state's film studio DEFA and China in the 1950s and with Vietnam in the 1980s. 
Quinn Slobodian emphasizes the limits of international solidarity as East German filmmakers 
clashed with their Chinese counterparts over aesthetical representations of Chinese socialism 
and the unequal relation between European and Asian socialist countries. The trope of cultural 
difference and the resulting limits of camaraderie also loom large in Evan Torner and Victoria 
Rizo's analysis of the 1988 East German/Vietnamese co-production Dschungelzeit, a movie 
based on the experiences of Germans who left the French Foreign Legion in the late 1940s to join 
the Vietminh. Nothing survived of the original plans that envisioned an equitable film co-
production that would serve to overcome national differences in favor of socialist unity. Instead 
difference, mistrust, and the recreation of North–South relations of inequality and subservience 
dominated the production of Dschungelzeit.  

 

 Christina Schwenkel's contribution takes the most positive attitude towards GDR 
relations with the Global South, by focusing on the affect of solidarity and its enduring legacy in 
Vietnam. In the reconstruction of the city of Vinh, warm human relations between East Germans 
and Vietnamese working to rebuild the war-ravaged city led to 'affective solidarities.' Official 
GDR slogans were not always devoid of meaning. Even more than twenty years after the fall of 
the wall, inscriptions remembering East German labor in Vinh remain alive as well as goodwill 
from the Vietnamese who worked side-by-side and benefited from East German solidarity.  

 

 Finally, Jennifer Ruth Hosek and Victor Fowler Calzada's collaborative essay 
investigates the enduring legacy of East Germany in Cuba with fascinating insights on the 
reception of movies about surveillance in East Germany and on its collapse in 1989/90, in a 
country that still subscribes to state-socialism and single party rule. The chapter poses that the 
GDR's extensive relations with Cuba were part of the larger fabric of German–Cuban relations, 
but tells us little about how those relations developed between 1959-1990.  

 

 Comrades of Color fulfills its purpose of eroding the myth of East German 
provincialism, by demonstrating the intensity of the GDR's relations with fellow socialists states 
in the Global South. These intense relations, led in turn, to the arrival of these 'comrades of color' 
in East Germany, which confronted a population accustomed to cultural homogeneity with 
diversity, which in turn led to racial stereotypes and conflicts. The volume also manages to 
"provincialize East Germany," which in spite of its affirmation of socialist internationalism and 
solidary altruism, remained a relatively developed European country, where continuities of 
European and German racism and feelings of superiority towards underdeveloped nations 
existed, in spite of extensive propaganda to the contrary.  

 

 One criticism that can be made is the little attention paid to Latin America, 

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excepting the last article. A discussion of the extensive campaigns on behalf of the Chilean and 
Nicaraguan left would have been an important addition. How did Latin Americans, with their 
diversity of 'races,' fit into the racial chromatism of East Germany? The contributions highlight 
the negative effects of GDR relations with its allies in the Global South, with the conspicuous 
exception of Vietnam. This reviewer was left wondering whether East Berlin's relationship with 
Vietnam could not have been 'provincialized' further. How might Vietnamese dependency led to 
structures reminiscent of North American and Western European relations with the Global 
South, which in turn, decreased Hanoi's ability to criticize East German conceptions of socialism? 
Finally, given the emphasis on continuities and discontinuities with pre-1945 racism in 
Germany, can we be sure that Russians, Poles, and Romanians were not seen also as "comrades 
of color" in the eyes of the East German population, if not by the state? But these are minor flaws, 
considering the important contribution that this volume presents. Featuring an accessible style 
of writing, and with the added benefit that the chapters can be read on their own, this collection 
is an indispensable tool as much for courses on German and Global history, as it is for any scholar 
researching on post-1945 German history.   
 
Slobodian, Quinn, ed. Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World. New York: 
Berghahn Books, 2015.   
 
 
Der goldene Handschuh 
By Heinz Strunk 
Gernot Waldner 
Harvard University 
 

Am Anfang und am Ende dieses Romans stehen Tatsachen. Zu Beginn wird in nüchterner 
Ermittlungsprosa berichtet, wie die Leichenteile mehrerer Frauen zufällig gefunden werden und 
die Polizei einen Mordfall aufnimmt ohne den Täter zunächst zu fassen. Am Ende werden die 
letzten Lebensjahre des Serienmörders Friedrich Paul Honka abgehandelt, als läse man eine 
Krankenakte, die sachlich mit einer tödlichen Lungen-Herz-Erkrankung endet. Heinz Strunks 
Roman spannt einen Bogen vom Tod der Opfer zum Tod des Täters und stellt sich damit die 
Aufgabe, dem wieder Leben einzuhauchen, was zwischen den Toten vorfiel. Seinen Ausgang 
nimmt der Roman in der titelgebenden Hamburger Trinkerkneipe „Der goldene Handschuh“, 
einem an der Schwelle zwischen Leben und Tod situiertem Soziotop, in dem von Gewalt, Drogen 
und dem Rotlichtmilieu gezeichnete Protagonisten ihre Nächte dem Verfall entgegen fristen. 
Strunk lässt bei seiner auf Recherche basierten Wiederbelebung also keinen Phönix aus der 
Asche steigen: in einer Szene wird ein Aschenbecher mit Bier gefüllt und in einem Zug geleert. 
Doch auch diese Kneipe, in der zumindest die Hoffnungslosigkeit gleich verteilt zu sein scheint, 
gehorcht einer hierarchischen Ordnung. Die Nähe zur Bar und die Spitznamen der Gäste 
bestimmen, wer in der untersten Unterschicht zu den Oberen gehört. Einer von diesen 
Untersten, die Luft nach oben wittern, ist Fritz Honka. Seine niedriger stehenden Opfer sind in 
die Jahre gekommene Prostituierte, denen er Korn und Logis anbietet, wenn sie sich ihm dafür 
bedingungslos unterwerfen. Der zweite Teil des Buches handelt von einer dieser von Sadismus 
und Spießertum geprägten Beziehungen, von der Suche nach einfachem Glück, nach warmer 

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Suppe, mediokrer Freizeit, sicherem Einkommen und orientierenden Routinen. Manche 
Schlagerplatten werden zehnmal nacheinander abgespielt, um dem Leser die unbeweglichen 
Konturen dieser Glücksvorstellung einzuprägen. Trotz kontinuierlicher Annäherungen an das 
Kleinbürgertum, schafft es Honka nicht, sein Leben zu stabilisieren. Vergangenheit, Geilheit und 
Abhängigkeit holen ihn immer wieder ein und aus diesen und glücklicherweise auch aus 
zufälligeren Gründen kommt es im abschließenden Teil des Buches zu den brutalen Morden, die 
bis heute Honkas lokalen Nachruhm begründen. Die Kneipe, in der er seine Opfer kennen lernte, 
nennt sich inzwischen „Honka-Stube“, zwei Hamburger Bands widmeten ihm makabre Lieder 
und ein Theaterstück zum Frauenmörder von Altona beschloss die Versuche, aus Fritz Honka 
eine kleine Ikone der Gegenkultur à la Charles Manson zu machen. Obwohl vor allem die Legende 
des Serienmörders für die Vermarktung herhalten musste und auf dem Cover des Buches 
entsprechend eine Zeichnung von Honka zu sehen ist, drehen sich weite Teile des Romans nicht 
um den Serienmörder, sondern um eine adelige Reederfamilie namens von Dohrens. Auch in 
diesem Erzählstrang stehen männliche Protagonisten im Zentrum: der dem Ressentiment der 
Kriegsverlierer verfallene Großvater, der ebenso wie Honka gewaltbereite und alkoholkranke 
Vater und der durch einen genetischen Defekt entstellte Sohn, ein den ersten Hormonschüben 
ausgelieferter Teenager. Durch diese Parallelhandlung wird der Roman von zwei sozialen 
Extremen bestimmt und der Leserin wird selbst überlassen, ob damit Rückschlüsse auf die 
ominöse Mitte der Gesellschaft zu ziehen seien. Konzeptuell gewinnt der Roman durch die 
zweite Handlungseben eine gebrochene Anthropologie. Die Welt der von Dohrens ist zwar in 
ähnlicher Weise von Gewalt- und Alkoholexzessen geprägt, im Gegensatz zu Honka bietet sich 
hier jedoch ein ebenso abstoßendes wie vollendetes Bild sozialer Routine und selbstgewisser 
Identität. Gegen Ende des Romans berühren sich beide Erzählstränge fast, als Vater und Sohn 
von Dohren zufällig im Goldenen Handschuh landen. Der Roman vermeidet aber den direkten 
Kontakt, lässt beide Welten nebeneinander stehen und stellt so den Leser abermals intellektuell 
auf die Probe, wenn der Sohn der Reedersfamilie den Serienmörder ansieht und sich die zentrale 
Frage des Romans stellt: Wie kann man denn zu so einer Person werden? Schließlich wirken die 
von Dohrens auch wie eine mildernde Geste inmitten dezidiert schonungslos erzählter Realität. 
Nach vielen Seiten mit zum Sex zweckentfremdeten Bockwürsten und brutalen Schlägen ins 
Gesicht weiß man sich kurz versichert, beim Lesen nicht nur den Serienmörder anzuglotzen 
sondern auch die Perversionen der Oberschicht vorgeführt zu bekommen. Natürlich liegt kein 
wirklicher Trost in diesem ästhetischen Ausgleich, zumindest wird aber die Frage evoziert, 
woher denn das Gefühl von verhältnismäßigem Trost stamme, wenn man den Gewalttaten von 
Privilegierten zusieht. 

 

In beiden Teilen des Buches scheint Strunk mehr zu montieren als zu erfinden, er folgt, 
wenn man so will, der Zweckentfremdung, wie sie an der Bockwurst vorexerziert wird. Nicht 
nur die Akten des Falles Honka sondern auch historische Details, popkulturelle Referenzen und 
milieuspezifischer Jargon vermitteln den Eindruck, sich nahe an einer ernüchternden Realität zu 
befinden, die sich selbst nur betrinken kann, um sich zu ertragen. Die Position des Erzählers 
gerät dabei relativ flexibel, deckt aber nicht alle nahe liegenden Perspektiven ab. Politische und 
historische Kontexte sowie persönliche Schicksale werden allwissend aufbereitet um einen 
ebenso kantigen wie verlässlichen Eindruck davon zu geben, wie die Charaktere zu dem wurden, 
was sie nun zu tun fähig sind. Stellenweise wechselt der Erzähler auch in die subjektive 
Perspektive, lässt sowohl Honka als auch die von Dohrens vernichtend über ihre Eindrücke 

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urteilen, deren Genese davor noch objektiv vermittelt wurde. Da die subjektiven Eindrücke aber 
großteils wieder an Zitate erinnern, wird ein Gefühl von Subjektivität stets ausgespart und die 
Frage nach der Identifikation mit der Hauptfigur, wie gesagt, geschickt einem Teenager in den 
Mund gelegt. Trotz diesen klugen Verzichts mangelt es dem Roman keineswegs an Charakteren. 
Im Gegenteil: mitunter sind sie es, welche die schönsten Momente des Buches ausmachen. Wenn 
etwa ein Trinker sich selbst mit in unterschiedlich gefärbte Liköre getauchten Tampons behängt 
(170), die Selbstgewissheit der Oberschicht ausschließlich mit negativen Attributen 
charakterisiert wird – Campingplatz und Sonderangebot beschrieben ihn nicht (64) – oder Fritz 
Honkas Bruder auftritt, eine an Kalendersprüchen und Anekdoten überschäumende Frohnatur, 
deren zentrale Einsicht darin besteht, dass jedes Ding zwei Seiten hat, um schließlich selbst im 
Delirium auf seine dunkle Seite zu fallen. Wird aber Honka selbst beschreiben, so fehlt die 
lustvoll groteske Perspektive. Wollte man daraus eine Kritik machen, so könnte man dem Roman 
einen protestantischen Duktus vorwerfen. Was aus den Akten dieses Lustmörders nämlich 
beklemmend plausibilisiert wird – sola scriptura – sind die von Misogynie und Sadismus 
gezeichneten Morde. Auf einen Versuch, der individuellen Lust an diesen Morden literarisch 
Raum zu geben, hat Strunk verzichtet. Wo der Sohn der Reedersfamilie die von ihm gequälten 
Frauen „Freundchen“ nennt und literarisch innovative Passagen, wie etwa ein Fragebogen für 
Alkoholiker, auftauchen, sucht man bei Honka solche Elemente vergeblich. Am Lustmörder 
interessiert mehr der Mord als die Lust, dieses Wort von Karl Kraus trifft auch auf diesen Roman 
zu. Honka wirkt stellenweise eher lustlos, nicht nur in der Szene, in der er sich selbst, wie im 
Rahmen eines erzählerischen Gnadenaktes, kastrieren will. Wie diese Szene mit den 
historischen Fotos, die Honka lächelnd in einer SS Uniform zeigen, zusammen gehen könnte, sei 
dahin gestellt. Strunk selbst scheint sich in Interviews auf die historisierende Lesart seines 
Romans festgelegt zu haben. Etwas mehr Mut die zuvor erwähnte Lust zu gestalten, wäre dem 
mehr als lesenswerten Roman aber zu wünschen gewesen und hätte ihm vielleicht auch die eine 
faktische oder die andere sozialrealistische Länge erspart. 
 
Strunk, Heinz. Der goldene Handschuh. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 2016.  
 
 
Amon: Mein Großvater hätte mich erschossen 
By Jennifer Teege 
Corrina Peet 
Wayne State Univesity 

While browsing her local library in Hamburg, Germany, the unsuspecting Jennifer Teege 
(1970), then 38 years of age, stumbled upon a book that would forever change her world.  In the 
opening passage of her memoir Amon: Mein Grossvater hätte mich erschossen (2013), Teege 
recounts this decisive moment; the moment at which she realized the book she had found was 
her biological mother’s biography, and that her grandfather was Amon Göth, the sadistic Nazi 
commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp near Kraków, Poland; the same Göth--the 
reader is reminded--who was famously portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s film 
Schindler’s List (1993).   

Born out of her desire to answer the many questions that arose in the wake of this fateful 

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discovery, Teege’s text escorts the reader through her personal journey to understand her 
grandfather’s role in the Holocaust, her beloved grandmother’s relationship with him, and why 
her family chose to keep such a dark secret. Interspersed throughout Teege’s text are journalist 
and co-writer Nikola Sellmair’s commentaries about Teege’s reactions and emotions as she 
uncovers her past. Moreover, Sellmair contextualizes Teege’s writings by expounding upon her 
mother’s family history, providing historical information related to Göth and the Holocaust, and 
by referencing academic research on relevant topics such as psychology. 

Immediately after discovering she is a blood relative of the murderous Göth, Teege falls 
into a deep depression. She is consumed with questions about what personality traits and 
physical characteristics she may have inherited from her grandfather, and is also compelled to 
obsessively research the details about his involvement in the Holocaust. Furthermore, she is 
burdened by the prospect that her family history could negatively impact her relationships, 
particularly those with Israeli friends, whose grandparents perished in the Holocaust.  While 
Teege’s initial distress surrounding these questions is genuine, one cannot help but wonder if 
the severity of her anguish is to a degree dictated by collective German guilt regarding the 
Holocaust. As Sellmair mentions, even those members of the third generation who are unsure 
about the role their ancestors played in World War II and the Holocaust maintain this guilt, and 
therefore tend to unrealistically envision their ancestors as victims or members of the 
resistance.  In light of this, it is feasible that Teege’s depression was, at least in part, tied to the 
guilt associated not only with her knowledge about her biological grandfather’s participation in 
the Holocaust,  but also with the fact that Göth is, thanks to Schindler’s List, well known by many 
as the brutal commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp. With this in mind, there are 
moments of Teege’s narrative, especially when she pays what seem to be almost obligatory visits 
to Auschwitz and to the Płaszów memorial, that feel a bit dramatic. That being said, however, 
Teege does not dwell on Göth and the associated guilt throughout her narrative, but rather shifts 
her focus to questions surrounding her adoption, her relationship with her biological mother, 
and in particular, on her relationship with her deceased grandmother--Amon Göth’s mistress. 

 

Although Teege, the daughter of Monika (née Göth) Hertwig and a Nigerian man, was 
adopted by a German family at the age of seven, she did have intermittent contact with her 
biological mother and grandmother as a young child.  Teege explains that the relationship with 
her mother was always distanced and tense. Until her adoption, she was raised in an orphanage 
and only ever saw her mother sporadically.  Very occasionally, Teege’s mother would pick her 
up for a visit, but would remain cold and withdrawn for the duration. Moreover, Teege feared 
her mother’s husband; an abusive alcoholic.  The only solace she seemed to have during such 
visits was the time spent with her grandmother, Ruth Irene (née Kalder) Göth.  Although Teege 
does not remember her as a doting grandmother, but rather as a strict and disciplined woman, 
she does recall that “Irene” was a well-dressed and had a big heart. Teege loved Irene and 
explains that she always felt safe and secure in her presence. For Teege, the memories of her 
grandmother are the most difficult to reconcile. How could someone she remembers so fondly 
have been so in love with the brutal Amon Göth?  How could her grandmother have stood by as 
he killed countless innocents, and how could she have kept a photo of him hanging in her 
apartment until the day she died?  Plagued by these questions, Ruth Irene Göth emerges as 
Teege’s main preoccupation, and ultimately, take’s the narrative’s center stage. Sellmair’s 

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interjection of interview excerpts in which Ruth Irene Göth professes her love for Amon, as well 
as the inclusion of the photo of her as a young woman in Płaszów, both underscore Teege’s 
bewilderment, and generate the reader’s own questions about the complicity of the partners and 
family members of Nazi criminals, or, in the case of the German reader, engender thoughts about 
the Nazi legacy—a point that is also driven home when Teege explains that her adoptive German 
parents’ were unable to emotionally engage with her regarding her biological family’s dark past. 

 

While at times the text reads somewhat disjointed due to the shift between Teege’s 
thoughts and Sellmair’s commentary, it is written in an uncomplicated language and is generally 
a swift read.  The reader becomes easily engaged with Teege’s experience and emotions, yet is 
also left with unanswered questions related to Teege’s African roots, and the general history of 
Afro-Germans.  While the title suggests that she, due to her African heritage, would have been 
murdered by her grandfather, she neither expounds on the position of Afro-Germans in Nazi 
Germany, nor goes into detail about the paternal side of her family.  A more detailed exploration 
of these topics would further contextualize Teege’s narrative, tie it into the premise of the text, 
and, ultimately, make it a richer read.   
 
Teege, Jennifer. Amon: Mein Großvaterr hätte mich erschossen. Berlin: Rowohlt Verlag, 2013.  
 
 
Berlin Replayed: Cineman and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era 
By Brigitta B. Wagner 
Bruna Della Torre de Carvalho Lima 
University of São Paulo 
 

 There is something dissonant about Berlin. Every big city in the world has its 
element of chaos, its facet of disharmony, its highlights of contradiction. But just as people do, 
cities bring a certain something that somehow it identifies them as unique. Whoever has been to 
Berlin as a tourist may have noticed it, but it seems that this dissonance is also – and perhaps 
even more intensely – present to Berlin’s inhabitants, as Brigitta B. Wagner shows us through 
her stimulating book. 

 

Even though it was written by a film historian, a filmmaker and a curator, Berlin Replayed 
is not a book limited to those strictly interested in German Cinema and quite on the contrary 
presents a piece of German history and geography narrated by images that can be of interest for 
anyone in German Studies. German politics and the tensions between East and West Germany 
are also a main subject of the book. 

 

Wagner traces an overview of Berlin’s representations starting, in the first chapter, with 
Walter Ruttmann’s urban cross-section film Berlin: Symphony of a great city, from 1927. Berlin 
has been represented many times and under many aspects, but almost every representation 

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reports, either purposely or not, to Ruttmann’s film and its craving for a Weltstadt status for 
Berlin. 

 

The ideal Berlin and the representation of Weimar Republic’s modernity and Berlin’s 
desire of being a great Metropolis is also present in Wagner’s reconstruction.In Chapter 3, of the 
iconographic and cinematographic history of Potsdamer Platz, once the main symbol of Berlin’s 
modernity and then almost destroyed because of the war and one of the most ambiguous symbol 
of Berlin’s stretched reunification – where one can find nowadays the monument in honor of 
Karl Liebknecht standing next to the Sony Center architectural statement of capitalism’s victory. 
Starting with a Potsdamer Platz representation as a construction site in 1944, the “Berlin 
International Film festival” of 2001 proposed the theme “Do you remember?” for the audience 
to reflect on. Wagner attempts to relate moving images to actual places and history finds its best 
configuration in this chapter with the interpretation of Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin 
(1987). While the character Homer portrays us a colorful, lively and welcoming Potsdamer Platz, 
the camera shows us a destroyed site, which is not recognizable to its former visitors. “So this 
can’t be it, can’t be Potsdamer Platz”, Homer exclaims. 

 

The question that arises from this discussion is: how can one represent a city that has 
changed so much?  

 

The Invisible Shape of things past project created in 1995, made it possible to virtually 
represent the analogy to the mind Freud once formulated as the history of Rome. That is, 
according to the fouding father of psychoanalysis, the unconscious could be comprehended as if 
Rome’s every single construction since its beginning could cohabit the same time and space. New 
media made it possible to represent this and in that sense we could re-discover Berlin’s history.  
The question that remains is consistent with that of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno in 
their 1930s debate: does the new technology allow us to also represent history and not just 
geography? 

 

In the second chapter, Wagner approaches the 1950s generation and the split of 
Germany, Berlin and German cinema in two sides in constant strain. It is curious to rediscover 
the existence of a pre-Wall, but still divided, cinema, once the attention is commonly drawn to 
the post-Wall cinema of the reunification. Wagner’s choice of analyzing the young pre-Wall 
movies was very happy once it could show both similarities and differences between the East 
and West construction of these new Germanys and of the new generation that was growing with 
them.  Movies such as Die Halbstarken (1956), representing the West, and Berlin – Ecke 
Shoenhauser, (1957) and Eine Berliner Romanze, (1957), representing the East, are not only 
interpreted but also scrutinized by Wagner in order to explore the picture of the youth divided 
between capitalism after the catastrophe and socialism in construction through an also divided 
Berlin, which serves as a scenario to the teenage dramas and adventures. 

 

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Last but not least, the final chapter investigates the contemporaneous representations of 
Berlin by the X-films of New Berlin, especially Run Lola Run (1998) and Goodbye Lenin (2003) 
that soon drew international attention. The way Wagner reconstructs Run Lola Run, brightly 
guiding us through Berlin’s Straßen and Plätze, is beautifully done and makes the reader realize 
how distracted one usually perceive films’ scenarios by showing Berlin as an important 
character of the movie. It is worth to review both movies after Wagner’s investigation of Berlin’s 
apparitions not only in the new frenetic, capital of electronic music in the first, but in the 
reconstruction of the East and the nostalgia of a lost dream in the second. Her descriptions are 
informative and very enjoyable at the same time. 

 

Those searching for an accurate analysis of German cinema or the urban nostalgia after 
the fall of Berlin’s wall are not going to find it in Wagner’s book, despite of its indication in text. 
The author is much more interested in rewriting the filmic history of Berlin’s aspirations to be a 
great city. This allows her to design a panorama of the construction of Berlin’s image through a 
very troubled century, to say the least. Cinema, nostalgia, tensions between East and West, 
reunification, all play the role of structuring axes in the book, but Berlin is the main theme. 

 

If one thinks, though, of Berlin’s divided history, there is something missing in Wagner’s 
book. If Run Lola Run shows the new desire for a capitalist electronic and virtual modernity and 
Goodbye Lenin tries to represent the arising phenomena of urban nostalgia for socialism after 
the reunification, on one side, there are also many tensions remaining from this process and the 
reader wonders why Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators) from director Hans 
Weingartner from 2004 and Der Baader Meinhof Komplex  by Uli Edel from 2008 were not 
included in the postwall era of German Cinema. Both of them represent, among others, Berlin’s 
image. 

 

When Wagner reconstructs the East and West dispute for Berlin’s image and the 
challenges of Berlin’s reunification, especially in the second and the fourth chapter, the quarrel 
is presented as if it were polarized between capitalism and socialism. But the movies quoted 
above show something very interesting that could be included in Wagner’s analysis. Berlin’s split 
was not just an effect of the fight between capitalism and socialism in the Cold war. The Baader 
Meinhof movie shows that the West Berlin was also split between those who were for liberal 
capitalism, on one hand, and remaining Nazis, on the other – just remember that one of RAF’s 
targets were former Nazis that were again in powerful political and economic positions after the 
loss of the war. The Edukators also shows a representation of a divided country between rich 
and poor and the impotence of the left after the end of the socialist utopia. So, the postwall era 
is not as reunified as Run Lola run and Goodbye Lenin show. If it is easier to deal with the 
communist past, as a dream gone bad, it is much harder to handle the true nightmare, and many 
times the taboo, of Nazism and the catastrophic consequences it brought to German society. 
Berlin’s dissonance has to do with all this phantasmagoria that surrounds the city. 

 

As George Orwell once wrote, “who controls the past controls the future”. That is, the 

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history of our past will immediately impact not only our imagination but also the construction 
of the future [city] itself. In the present days, we could argue that Cinema can be considered not 
only part of history, but one of its builders; telling the history of a divided city and its aspirations 
through its filmic representations, therefore, has a much more important role to play than mere 
entertainment. Wagner’s book can help us see that. 

Wagner, Brigitta B. Berlin Replayed: Cinema and Urban Nostalgia in the Postwall Era. 
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015 

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