David Bathrick
Biographic Data
| ID | 957034 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Bathrick |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Bathrick |
| SIGNATURE | BATHRICK D |
| AFFILIATIONS | German/Theatre, Cornell University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Billy Wilder's Cold War Berlin
The Hollywood director Billy Wilder was involved in three postwar films about Germany: a twenty-two-minute documentary about the concentration camps titled Death Mills (1945) that he edited; the other two, which he directed and coscripted, were the feature films A Foreign Affair (1948) and One, Two, Three (1961). My focus is on what the production and reception of these three films suggest about Wilder's evolving relationship to postwar Germany's…
Whose Hi/story Is It? The U.S. Reception of Downfall
Before I address the U.S. media response to the film Downfall, I would like to mention a methodological problem that I encountered time and again when researching this essay: whether it is possible to speak of reception in purely national terms in this age of globalization, be it a foreign film or any other cultural artifact. Generally speaking, Bernd Eichinger's large-scale production Downfall can be considered a success in America both financia…
Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological
Research Article| August 01 2006 Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological David Bathrick David Bathrick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google New German Critique (2006) 33 (2 (98)): 65–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2006-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Bathrick; Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological. New German Critiqu…
"Rescreening "The Holocaust: The Children's Stories
The final ecstatic burst of the five year old Giosue in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful gives voice to both a truth and an obscenity. As an obscenity it reminds us egregiously through paradoxical inversion of those who did not win and whose story will never be known. Yet its truth also lies in what it reveals about the dilemma of memory and representation for those who come after the Holocaust, after the survivors of the Holocaust, and after …
Post-Fascist Fantasies
The Provocation of His Images
once asked Heiner Miiller what he thought about when he wrote his plays. He answered, as always, very softly, almost shyly: I don't think about anything. At the moment when start to write, thinking is over. am simply looking for a black space. In an interview published later he continued in a similar vein. I don't like detailed concepts. don't want to know the plot before find it. never look for a plot. find it, before look for it. That's what li…
The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR
Anti-Neonazism as Cinematic Practice: Bonengel's Beruf Neonazi
The explosive response to Winfried Bonengel's documentary film Beruf Neonazi in the fall of 1993 said volumes about public uncertainty: about profound social frustration concerning rising neo-Nazism throughout newly united Germany during that period as well as about a fundamental ambivalence concerning ways to represent this phenomenon. My goal in exploring the public debates that arose around this film is less to decide once and for all whether …
The powers of speech: The politics of culture in the GDR
In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted "to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework" of Marxism and state socialism. Bathrick compares oppositional culture in East Germany to radical culture…
Inscribing History, Prohibiting and Producing Desire: Fassbinder's Lili Marleen
While such questions have been central discussions of cinema since Fridericus Rex, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, or the American television film Holocaust, the spate of European films which appeared in the 1970s and 1980s dealing with Nazism (The Damned; Hitler, A Film from Germany; The Night Porter; Lacombe Lucien; Lili Marleen) has forced the debates onto a new plane of critical intensity. Caught between the cultural injunction to come terms wi…
The End of the Wall before the End of the Wall
Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture
In his 1977 memoirs, the former world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling tells of his initial reception into what he called Berlin society of the twenties, which did not consist of the important or influential people; not the rich or the powerful. Rather it was the people about whom everyone was talking: artists and showgirls, actors, journalists and authors, bicycle riders and intellectuals. ... They were people for whom there were no outsiders,…
Closing the Gaps: Erwin Piscator's Theater of the Spectacle
Patricide or Re-Generation: Brecht's "Baal" and "Roundheads" in the GDR
The secret is out. The evidence is in. What began a decade ago in West German theatre circles as the somewhat heretical assertion that plays were nothing more than a constant, liturgical repetition of what one already knows,' now stands as common dramaturgical parlance in the GDR as well. is dead, was the Nietzschean pronouncement of Hellmut Karasek in the Spiegel,3 to which the celebrated Brecht-Killer4 and heir apparent Heiner Miiller could onl…
Marxism and Modernism
Der deutsche Roman und seine hitorischen und politischen Bedingungen
Rudolf Bahro's "Neo-Leninism" in Context: Reply to Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda
Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda's critique of Rudolf Bahro' and all those who would uncritically support him is categorical in its effort to create a framework of debate and difference. Bahro, we are told, criticizes the social systems of Eastern Europe only (emphasis mine) in terms that remain deeply embedded in the presuppositions of those systems. The excitement caused in the West by Bahro's book is not because there is any demonstrable connect…
Growing up in Germany: "After the War after Hitler "Afterwards
Yudit Yago-Jung, David Bathrick, Jack Zipes, Growing up in Germany: After the War after Hitler "Afterwards", New German Critique, No. 20, Special Issue 2: Germans and Jews (Spring - Summer, 1980), pp. 71-80
The Politics of Culture: Rudolf Bahro and Opposition in the GDR
The arrest last year of 41 year old party official Rudolf Bahro for the publication in the West of The Alternativel marks a turning point in the process of dissent in the German Democratic Republic. For the first time a major voice of opposition comes not from the artistic or scientific-academic communities, but directly out of the ranks of the party apparatus. Whereas the poet Wolf Biermann or the professor Robert Havemann speak for sectors of a…
Producing Revolution: Heiner Muller's Mauser as Learning Play
The Use Value of Contemporary and Future Literary Criticism
After the Death of Literary Criticism Everything is back to normal: literature is being produced to judge by the statistics, more abundantly than ever--and books on the market are finding reviewers. The situation is no different from ten, twenty or fifty years ago. The predicted demise of literature and literary criticism never did happen. Or so it would seem. Only occasionally do we recall 1968 and the horror with which one viewed the prophets p…
Concerning Legends
A Jubilee for Renegades
A constituent and vital part of the present struggle for socialism has been the process of critically assessing its own tradition. In regard the Moscow trials have served a peculiarly central and at times bizarre function. In some instances, the attitude toward the trials has been one of exoneration, even of glorification--an attitude which tells us more about the theoretical and moral dislocations and the identity crises within the ranks of the …
Comments on the Method of Marx's Capital and Its Importance for Contemporary Marxist Scholarship
theorems of this work with the concrete reality of today. Precisely that, it seems to us, is the central task of contemporary Marxist economics. If our contribution has helped in any way to bring to consciousness this theoretical task, then its purpose has been fulfilled. Translated by David Bathrick and Anson Rabinbach
Marxism Historicized: "Korsch's "The Crisis of Marxism
Crisis of Marxism was written by Karl Korsch in 1931 for purposes of self-clarification. It remained unpublished until 1971, ten years after the author's death, when it appeared in a collection of essays entitled Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History) published in West Germany. The fact that this essay remains a penetrating critique of the atrophy of Marxist theory today, both under state socialism as we…
Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture
In his 1977 memoirs, the former world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling tells of his initial reception into what he called Berlin society of the twenties, which did not consist of the important or influential people; not the rich or the powerful. Rather it was the people about whom everyone was talking: artists and showgirls, actors, journalists and authors, bicycle riders and intellectuals. ... They were people for whom there were no outsiders,…
Inscribing History, Prohibiting and Producing Desire: Fassbinder's Lili Marleen
While such questions have been central discussions of cinema since Fridericus Rex, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, or the American television film Holocaust, the spate of European films which appeared in the 1970s and 1980s dealing with Nazism (The Damned; Hitler, A Film from Germany; The Night Porter; Lacombe Lucien; Lili Marleen) has forced the debates onto a new plane of critical intensity. Caught between the cultural injunction to come terms wi…
The Dialectics of Legitimation: Brecht in the GDR
Intellectuals and Class Struggle
Intellectuals and Class Struggle appears untitled among a number of fragments, notes, and shorter essays published by Werner Hecht in the collected works (Gesammelte Werke, XX, 51-3) as Brecht's Marxist Studies. In some cases they represent the prolegomena to later works. In other instances they are dialectical finger exercises in which Brecht is playing critically and self-critically with ideas and possibilities. following piece was probably wri…
Comments on the Method of Marx's Capital and Its Importance for Contemporary Marxist Scholarship
theorems of this work with the concrete reality of today. Precisely that, it seems to us, is the central task of contemporary Marxist economics. If our contribution has helped in any way to bring to consciousness this theoretical task, then its purpose has been fulfilled. Translated by David Bathrick and Anson Rabinbach
Marxism Historicized: "Korsch's "The Crisis of Marxism
Crisis of Marxism was written by Karl Korsch in 1931 for purposes of self-clarification. It remained unpublished until 1971, ten years after the author's death, when it appeared in a collection of essays entitled Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung (The Materialist Conception of History) published in West Germany. The fact that this essay remains a penetrating critique of the atrophy of Marxist theory today, both under state socialism as we…
The Dialectics of Legitimation: Brecht in the GDR
A Jubilee for Renegades
A constituent and vital part of the present struggle for socialism has been the process of critically assessing its own tradition. In regard the Moscow trials have served a peculiarly central and at times bizarre function. In some instances, the attitude toward the trials has been one of exoneration, even of glorification--an attitude which tells us more about the theoretical and moral dislocations and the identity crises within the ranks of the …
Producing Revolution: Heiner Muller's Mauser as Learning Play
The Use Value of Contemporary and Future Literary Criticism
After the Death of Literary Criticism Everything is back to normal: literature is being produced to judge by the statistics, more abundantly than ever--and books on the market are finding reviewers. The situation is no different from ten, twenty or fifty years ago. The predicted demise of literature and literary criticism never did happen. Or so it would seem. Only occasionally do we recall 1968 and the horror with which one viewed the prophets p…
Concerning Legends
The Politics of Culture: Rudolf Bahro and Opposition in the GDR
The arrest last year of 41 year old party official Rudolf Bahro for the publication in the West of The Alternativel marks a turning point in the process of dissent in the German Democratic Republic. For the first time a major voice of opposition comes not from the artistic or scientific-academic communities, but directly out of the ranks of the party apparatus. Whereas the poet Wolf Biermann or the professor Robert Havemann speak for sectors of a…
Der deutsche Roman und seine hitorischen und politischen Bedingungen
Rudolf Bahro's "Neo-Leninism" in Context: Reply to Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda
Andrew Arato and Milhaly Vajda's critique of Rudolf Bahro' and all those who would uncritically support him is categorical in its effort to create a framework of debate and difference. Bahro, we are told, criticizes the social systems of Eastern Europe only (emphasis mine) in terms that remain deeply embedded in the presuppositions of those systems. The excitement caused in the West by Bahro's book is not because there is any demonstrable connect…
Growing up in Germany: "After the War after Hitler "Afterwards
Yudit Yago-Jung, David Bathrick, Jack Zipes, Growing up in Germany: After the War after Hitler "Afterwards", New German Critique, No. 20, Special Issue 2: Germans and Jews (Spring - Summer, 1980), pp. 71-80
Marxism and Modernism
Patricide or Re-Generation: Brecht's "Baal" and "Roundheads" in the GDR
The secret is out. The evidence is in. What began a decade ago in West German theatre circles as the somewhat heretical assertion that plays were nothing more than a constant, liturgical repetition of what one already knows,' now stands as common dramaturgical parlance in the GDR as well. is dead, was the Nietzschean pronouncement of Hellmut Karasek in the Spiegel,3 to which the celebrated Brecht-Killer4 and heir apparent Heiner Miiller could onl…
Closing the Gaps: Erwin Piscator's Theater of the Spectacle
Max Schmeling on the Canvas: Boxing as an Icon of Weimar Culture
In his 1977 memoirs, the former world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling tells of his initial reception into what he called Berlin society of the twenties, which did not consist of the important or influential people; not the rich or the powerful. Rather it was the people about whom everyone was talking: artists and showgirls, actors, journalists and authors, bicycle riders and intellectuals. ... They were people for whom there were no outsiders,…
The End of the Wall before the End of the Wall
Inscribing History, Prohibiting and Producing Desire: Fassbinder's Lili Marleen
While such questions have been central discussions of cinema since Fridericus Rex, Griffith's Birth of a Nation, or the American television film Holocaust, the spate of European films which appeared in the 1970s and 1980s dealing with Nazism (The Damned; Hitler, A Film from Germany; The Night Porter; Lacombe Lucien; Lili Marleen) has forced the debates onto a new plane of critical intensity. Caught between the cultural injunction to come terms wi…
The powers of speech: The politics of culture in the GDR
In this definitive study, David Bathrick examines East German culture both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Bathrick argues that dissident East German writers were unique among East European literary intellectuals in that they attempted "to open up alternative spaces for public speech from within [the] framework" of Marxism and state socialism. Bathrick compares oppositional culture in East Germany to radical culture…
Anti-Neonazism as Cinematic Practice: Bonengel's Beruf Neonazi
The explosive response to Winfried Bonengel's documentary film Beruf Neonazi in the fall of 1993 said volumes about public uncertainty: about profound social frustration concerning rising neo-Nazism throughout newly united Germany during that period as well as about a fundamental ambivalence concerning ways to represent this phenomenon. My goal in exploring the public debates that arose around this film is less to decide once and for all whether …
The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR
The Provocation of His Images
once asked Heiner Miiller what he thought about when he wrote his plays. He answered, as always, very softly, almost shyly: I don't think about anything. At the moment when start to write, thinking is over. am simply looking for a black space. In an interview published later he continued in a similar vein. I don't like detailed concepts. don't want to know the plot before find it. never look for a plot. find it, before look for it. That's what li…
Post-Fascist Fantasies
"Rescreening "The Holocaust: The Children's Stories
The final ecstatic burst of the five year old Giosue in Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful gives voice to both a truth and an obscenity. As an obscenity it reminds us egregiously through paradoxical inversion of those who did not win and whose story will never be known. Yet its truth also lies in what it reveals about the dilemma of memory and representation for those who come after the Holocaust, after the survivors of the Holocaust, and after …
Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological
Research Article| August 01 2006 Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological David Bathrick David Bathrick Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google New German Critique (2006) 33 (2 (98)): 65–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2006-004 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation David Bathrick; Robert Wilson, Heiner Müller, and the Preideological. New German Critiqu…
Philosophy (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Art (11 works) · German History and Society (10 works) · History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · European history and politics (5 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works)