EDGE - A Graduate Journal for German and Scandinavian Studies: Volume 2, Issue 1
No Thumbnail Available
Volume
Number
Issue Date
2011-20-10
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Journal Volume
Articles
Scaling the Barricade: DIY and Technology in the West German Punk Movement
(2011-10-20) Sikarskie, Matthew J
In this paper, I argue that the West German punk movement of the late 1970s represented a participatory engagement with cultural production that, for most of the 20th century, had been impossible due to the control of the culture industry and high cost of production equipment. With the advent of the photocopier and spread of copy shops across Germany along with the availability of recording equipment and recording media (both the cassette and the LP), punks were able to create a voice for themselves using the same technologies that previously had prevented the entrance of the amateur into the realm of mass cultural production. A result of great anger at and boredom with West German society, punk utilized these technologies in an attempt to break down walls of cultural and social conformity while simultaneously creating an independent cultural space free from, and opposed to, the established media. By redefining the use of these technologies to serve new communicative and participatory functions, punk heralded a new engagement with culture and technology that has not ceased to this day.
On the difficulties of letting the other speak: The German-Polish relationship in Christoph Hochhäusler’s "Milchwald".
(2011-10-20) Polak- Springer, Katrin
This article seeks to interpret Christoph Hochhäusler’s 2003 film Milchwald (This Very Moment), associated with the contemporary German film movement Berliner Schule. At the beginning of the 21st century, the German-Polish relationship, despite all efforts at European integration, remains a deeply emotional matter, overshadowed by the mental consequences of the population politics and destruction carried out by Germans during National Socialism. In my reading, Milchwald reveals that diplomacy can only be successful, if it engages the agents of intercultural exchange, people in their daily interactions with one another, on an emotional level. The imagery of the EU as "family", and the altruistic rhetoric surrounding European integration, cover up the fundamentally materialist motivations at the basis of the German-Polish relationship around the time of the film's release. Milchwald ultimately points to the dangerous consequences of such purely economic interests between two countries with a traumatic common past.