No Place Like Home: Locations Of Heimat In German Cinema

"Alternating between panoramic prospects and close-up views, this epic study takes us on an invigorating journey through a century of film history. This exemplar of critical film history is a major breakthrough."--Eric Rentschler, Harvard University
"Taking his cue from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Johannes von Moltke argues that only once one's home is jeopardized or lost does one realize that "There's no place like home." In brilliant readings of German films from the 1950s and early 1960s, he sees "Heimat" as a deeply ambivalent, unstable concept, forever in need of re-grounding. In these films, "Heimat" must be incorporated or adapted into various menaces, whether the threat comes from outsiders, such as politically displaced persons or city dwellers relocating to the countryside, or via the encroachment of modernity, as with increased technological communication and transportation. This book is the sum of superior research, engaging presentation, and sophisticated argumentation. It offers an original contribution to German cultural history."--Alice A. Kuzniar, author of "The Queer German Cinema"

This is the first comprehensive account of Germany's most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that "there is no place like home" since cinema's early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation "home" after the catastrophes of World War II are anxiously present in these films, and von Moltke uses them as a lens through which to view contemporary discourses on German national identity.