The White Ribbon

It remains to be seen whether "Das weisse Band" becomes the kind of movie that everyone shows in German class the way "Good bye, Lenin" "Männer" and "Das Leben der anderen" were taught in almost every upper-level language course until every student had seen it thrice.

Nevertheless, Michael Haneke has a made a film that every German professor will compulsively watch again and again (not a big market admittedly). Buy the DVD and stare at the last shot to figure out who is standing next to whom.

The film is stunning, clever, confounding, in many ways like his earlier mystery "Cache." As with "Cache" the last shot seems to suggest an answer to the story's mystery, but we will have to look at it slowly to find any possible clues. It took me eight viewings to catch the final revelation in "Cache," but already on the first viewing the final shot in "Das weisse Band" suggests strange positions. Why is the Pfarrer seated with the congregation of the church in the last shot? At whom are the villagers looking? What person is in the position of the camera?

Das Weisse Band makes so many allusions that we will be writing about it for years. At first glance, it evokes Fassbinder's "Effi Briest" and Edgar Reitz's "Heimat," perhaps Schlöndorff's Törless, too. But there is more than a little Stephen King in the flick as well. The innocent children stand there all blond and blank-faced denying any knowledge of the nasty tricks plaguing the village. The story is a Max und Moritz tale without the humor to distract from the brutality, instead we get a great deal of sanctimonious covering up of crimes that foreshadow the Nazi genocide. But those historical references are made lightly and late in the film. On the face, the film could just be a belated indictment of Wilhelminian Prussia.

Haneke sets shots up like paintings. He creates the look of Adolf Menzel or Ferdinand Georg Waldmuller, but without the sentimentalism. There is a long shot of a man emerging from a tree-lined road that harkens Caspar David Friedrich. He directly quotes Menzel's famous painting of Friedrich der Grosse playing a flute concert in Sanssouci. Like Fassbinder, he chooses to shoot the historical drama in black and white.

Unlike other psychological treatments of proto-Fascism, Haneke does not exclude women from participating in violence. Patriarchy comes across with snarling insults and boots in the gut, but women, the Pfarrer's Tochter, in particular, is among the scariest organizers of secret punishments. In the end, the film shows a society run by fear and beatings.

Yiddish poet

di groyskayt fun kleynkayt

The last great Yiddish poet of the twentieth century has died at age 96. Abraham Sutzkever died January 19, 2010. Born 1913 in Czarist Russia and raised up in Vilna, Sutzkever experienced the golden period of Yiddish culture in Vilna followed by its destruction and all of Yiddish culture by the Nazis. A prolific writer, he began publishing lyric poetry in the 1930s. He is remembered for his reports from the Vilna ghetto. He was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, after which he emigrated to Israel, where he continued to write in Yiddish, a struggle in a country that eschewed the language of Eastern European Jewry.

David Hirsch wrote in 1986 "Abraham Sutzkever's a major twentieth-century poet who may never be accorded the recognition he deserves, because he writes in a language whose natural readership has been decimated by the Nazi genocide in Europe. By those who read him in Yiddish, Sutzkever is widely considered the greatest Yiddish poet of the twentieth century."

There are several collections of his poems in English on line and you can find his Yiddish works through the Open Library

A few marvelous essays published on his 90 birthday can be read here:

http://www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/vilna/vilna_pages/vilna_stories_sutzkever.html

and an obituary in Haaretz:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1144431.html

one in the NZZ:

http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/kultur/literatur/der_lyriker_als_zeitzeuge_1.4570021.html

David H. Hirsch, Abraham Sutzkever's Vilna Poems "Modern Language Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1986), pp. 37-50 Available through JSTOR

New Snow Theory Agenda

So after a year of wandering about the blogger universe, trying out various topics, I realize that a decent blog needs to have a focus. So from now on Snow Theory will be dedicated to "German Studies in America." I will endeavor to post regularly on topics relevant to the profession of Germanistik in the US. Send me any suggestions.

Herta Mueller

Here is the longest and most eloquent interview with Nobel laureate, Herta Mueller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuKdNmVPyuQ

You can really get the sense that she is speaking fluently, has lots to say, and then, alas, they run out of time.

What's wrong with television is that more people don't stop watching it. It is somehow inconceivable that one does not turn it on. And thus, the programming works with the clear understanding that television will be watched, even with the internet as a rival. Early television had to draw people to buy the devices, turn them on. These questions no longer matter, and yet the shows are so much like early television, ironically because they are cheap and easy. People will watch so much drama always, as if they were staring at the logs on the fire. Where is the sense of competition?

Where is the rural left?

The left in the US has historically ignored the rural population. If small town workers were industrialized then they were swept up in essentially urban political movements that would apply to factory workers in Ohio as well, but for the most part the left has sought to ignore the middle of the country, a bias that I share with most academics as well. The historical legacy of the coastal scorn for the middle of the country has meant that a mutual resentment has grown since the time of Andrew Jackson between the port cities and the country laborers. The Jeffersonian fear of the urban masses has become a stable of the poorest country voter.

This problem faces the left in Europe as well, it has been a factor in nineteenth-century politics, the 1848 revolution turned against the Viennese bourgeoisie and in favor of the Habsburg monarchy when the peasants received their concessions from the Emperor and went back to their farms, leaving the revolution in the hands of the poor. This brilliant move was repeated by Bismarck who sought to bind the rural classes to the Prussian monarchy in alliance against the socialist urban working class. Today as in the nineteenth century, the invocation of Christianity operates to binds the rural population to the ruling elite. This is a problem that Marx saw as just manipulation by Louis Napoleon. The mistake is to rely too strongly on the belief that left-wing politics needs to connected with the social conditions created by industrial and technological change, or progress as it used to be called. So many political decisions are made independent of economic transformations. Globalization, for all its importance, is simultaneously the ideology of corporations justifying their shifts from one industrial region to another, and it is the justification used by governments to explain why they cannot replenish lost industrial jobs. Yet, no matter how well contemporary crises can be defined as global, the constitutions of the United States and most other nations reflect an agricultural, nineteenth-century society. Technological advances were not written into the US constitution as a factor that could alter the election system. Thus we are faced with an outmoded distribution of voting power that does not reflect the last hundred years of economic growth inside and outside US borders. The trouble for the left is that it concentrates on the economic distribution of power without incorporating the very population that has been made irrelevant by these transformations, but which nevertheless holds considerable voting strength. The weaker this group has become economically, the more it has allowed itself to become organized into a conservative religious class. The left analysis has been to focus on the economic relations that disenfranchised industrial workers rather than thinking about the constitutional structures that continue to split the rural population from the economic elite on the coasts.

German word for work

"Praxis" a very theoretical German word used to describe "hands-on" work. Whereas the corporate English speech resorts to any number of idioms to describe the physical immediacy of work (lots of references to hands and the rolling up of sleeves), the German spoken by corporate managers to describe the non-abstract, immediate, sensual, bodily knowledge of how to perform labor is distinctly abstract, non-specific, and universal, so that working always appears as a general term within a larger economy.

A further little irony: the word "Praxis" is used both by old Marxists as well as new global fancy corporate managers. Both prefer the term as a single category that encompasses all the multitude of actions, thoughts, patterns and hierarchies inherent in work.