Traditional criticism on German post-war cinema tends to define rubble films as simplistic texts of low artistic quality which serve to reaffirm the spectator's image of him or herself as »a good German« during »bad times«. Yet this study asserts that some rubble films are actually informed by a type of visual and narrative Romantic discourse which aims at provoking a »critical discussion« on German national identity and its reconstruction in the aftermath of the Third Reich. Considering the lack of previous analyses with regard to the key aspects of Romantic visual style, narration and literary motifs in rubble films, this study points to a major gap in research.

As the seat of Hitler’s government, Berlin was the most frequently targeted city in Germany for Allied bombing campaigns during World War II. Air raids shelled celebrated monuments, left homes uninhabitable, and reduced much of the city to nothing but rubble. After the war’s end, this apocalyptic landscape captured the imagination of artists, filmmakers, and writers, who used the ruins to engage with themes of alienation, disillusionment, and moral ambiguity. In Rubble Music, Abby Anderton explores the classical music culture of postwar Berlin, analyzing archival documents, period sources, and musical scores to identify the sound of civilian suffering after urban catastrophe. Anderton reveals how rubble functioned as a literal, figurative, psychological, and sonic element by examining the resonances of trauma heard in the German musical repertoire after 1945. With detailed explorations of reconstituted orchestral ensembles, opera companies, and radio stations, as well as analyses of performances and compositions that were beyond the reach of the Allied occupiers, Anderton demonstrates how German musicians worked through, cleared away, or built over the debris and devastation of the war.

Afterlives of Romantic Intermediality addresses the manifold, even global artistic developments that were initiated by European Romantics. In the first section, the contributors show how the rising perspective of intermediality was discussed in philosophical terms and adapted itself to Romantic literature and music. In the second section, the contributors show how post-Romantic writers, visual artists, and composers have engaged with Romantic heritage. By exploring primary works that range from European arts to Latin American literature, these essays focus on the interdisciplinary developments that have emerged in literature, music, painting, film, architecture, and video art. Overall, the contributions in this volume demonstrate that intermedial connections—or sometimes the conscious lack of such connections—embody intriguing aspects of modernity and postmodernity.

How photography and a modernizing Berlin informed an urban image—and one another—in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city that once visually epitomized a divided Europe has thrived in the international spotlight as an image of reunified statehood and urbanity. Yet research on Berlin’s past has focused on the interwar years of the Weimar Republic or the Cold War era, with much less attention to the crucial Imperial years between 1871 and 1918. Constructing Imperial Berlin is the first book to critically assess, contextualize, and frame urban and architectural photographs of that era. Berlin, as it was pronounced Germany’s capital in 1871, was fraught with questions that had previously beset Paris and London. How was urban expansion and transformation to be absorbed? What was the city’s understanding of its comparably short history? Given this short history, how did it embody the idea of a capital? A key theme of this book is the close interrelation of the city’s rapid physical metamorphosis with repercussions on promotional and critical narratives, the emergence of groundbreaking photographic technologies, and novel forms of mass distribution. Providing a rare analysis of this significant formative era, Miriam Paeslack shows a city far more complex than the common clichés as a historical and aspiring place suggest. Imperial Berlin emerges as a modern metropolis, only half-heartedly inhibited by urban preservationist concerns and rather more akin to North American cities in their bold industrialization and competing urban expansions than to European counterparts.

Drawing on a range of cities and conflicts from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the collection explores the post-conflict condition as it is lived and expressed in modern cities such as Berlin, Belfast, Bilbao, Beirut, Derry, Skopje, Sarajevo, Tunis, Johannesburg and Harare. Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory investigates how the memory of conflict can be inscribed in historical monuments, human bodies and hermeneutic acts of mapping, traversing, representing, and performing the city. Several essays explore the relations between memory, history and urban space; where memory is located and how it is narrated, as well as various aspects of embodied memory; testimonial memory; traumatic memory; counter-memory; false memory; post-memory. Other essays examine the representations of post-war cities and how cultural imaginations relate to the politics of reconstruction in places devastated by protracted urban warfare. Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory offers a comparative survey of the complex and often controversial encounters between public art, political memory and commemoration in divided societies, as well as offering insights into the political and ethical difficulties of balancing the dynamics of forgetting and remembering.

This book explores the relationship between Dickens and canonical Romantic authors: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and Keats. Addressing a significant gap in Dickens studies, four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. Through close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, Peter Cook investigates how Dickens utilizes Romantic tropes to express his responses to the exponential growth of post-revolutionary industrial, technological culture and its effects on personal life and relationships. In this close study of Dickensian Romanticism, Cook demonstrates the enduring relevance of Dickens and the Romantics to contemporary culture.

This volume starts out with two contrasting studies of monuments. How does the seemingly stability of stone and bronze hide a constantly changing cultural use? Anne Eriksen looks at the history of ruins in Norway. The murmur of ruins turns out to be a speech of modernity, a way of emotionalising place and history. Viktoriya Hryaban discusses the fate of socialist monuments in Ukraine and shows how the attempts to create alternative post-socialist memorials reproduce a traditional Soviet cultural grammar. Lace is a dominating decorative element in many Turkish Dutch homes. It has become a sign of "Turkishness" but as Hilje van der Horst points out, people's relations to this mundane domestic element mirror some important conflicts and ideas about modernity and ethnicity. From the cultural media of monuments and lace, the discussion moves on to two more classic mass media and their role in identity politics. Stijn Reijnders explores a popular Dutch game show that has managed to survive for decades, becoming something of a national institution for some, an example of an outmoded genre for others. How does the involvement mirror ideas of an imagined national community? Finally, Silke Meyer looks at an 18th century national stereotype of "The German quack" in English popular debate and mass media. How did this caricature of Germanness become an alter ego of the English?