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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Ofer Ashkenazi, "Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
Description: Anti-Heimat Cinema: The Jewish Invention of the German Landscape (U Michigan Press, 2020) studies an overlooked yet fundamental element of German popular culture in the twentieth century. In tracing Jewish filmmakers' contemplations of "Heimat"-- a provincial German landscape associated with belonging and authenticity -- it analyzes their distinctive contribution to the German identity discourse between 1918 and 1968. The book shows how these filmmakers devised the landscapes of the German "Homeland" as Jews, namely as acculturated "outsiders within." Through appropriation of generic Heimat imagery, the films discussed in the book integrate criticism of national chauvinism into German mainstream culture from the end...