The following essay originally appeared in German in Bahamas 94 (Spring 2024). Translated by Xuxu Song.
 For decades now, everything has been known about Rudolf Höss and his ostensible double life as both an enforcer of the Holocaust and a loving family man. Robert Merle’s 1953 roman à clef Death Is My Trade was based in part on publicly accessible notes that Höss had composed while in prison for war crimes. Pictures of the affable Mr. Höss with his wife and colleagues appeared in Alain Resnais’s 1956 film Night and Fog. The testimony of prison psychologist Gustav M. Gilbert, who had spoken with Höss at length in Nuremberg, came up in 1961 during the Eichmann trial. Höss’s autobiographical notes were published by DTV in 1963 under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. Things got especially German in 1977 when the film Death Is My Trade—the German title translates as Excerpts from a German Life—by Theodor Kotulla, based on Robert Merle’s novel and starring the prominent actor Götz George, the son of two celebrated German thespians, was released in German cinemas. A review from the Catholic magazine Filmdienst in December 1977, and quoted on Wikipedia, revealingly states:
The interchangeability of collective thinking and The Enemy becomes frighteningly clear in Kotulla’s emotionless psychohistorical analysis….In Kotulla’s film, political and moral superficiality and the volatile idea of “peace, order and above all cleanliness,” irrationally propagated as the highest value in itself—under this pretext, up to 9,000 people were sent into the “shower room” every day in Auschwitz—rightly appears as the main cause of the totalitarian abuse of power, which is why it can continue to function openly or covertly worldwide in various forms and ideological guises. In this respect, this fact-oriented fiction is a lesson that every teacher, especially every history teacher, should discuss with young people.
Even back then, the pedagogical lesson lay in the notion that Auschwitz merely provided the backdrop for vague musings about man’s responsibility for his actions in times of unfreedom.
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By Telos Press · Friday, February 11, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Vivian P.Y. Lee about her article “The City in Flux: Toward an Urban Topology of Hong Kong Cinema,” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Hong Kong’s urban space and its cinematic reinventions; the relationship between cinematic space and disappearance; the cinematic lineage of Patrick Lung and John Woo, and their different depictions of modern urban institutions and individual heroes; the use of nostalgia in film to reveal darker realities of the dystopian present; how post-Umbrella Movement films have created new forms of production and distribution; the present and future of Hong Kong cinema; and the ways in which filmmakers have turned the city of Hong Kong into a protagonist. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Friday, January 21, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Xuesong Shao about her article “Restoring and Reimagining Socialist-Built Cities: Wang Xiaoshuai’s ‘Third Front Trilogy,’” from Telos 197 (Winter 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the history of the Third Front Movement in China; how migration is depicted in Wang Xiaoshuai’s Third Front trilogy; the article’s approach to the issue of nostalgia; the relationship of nostalgia and ruination in Red Amnesia; the ways in which Wang Xiaoshuai uses the male gaze to reinforce gender stereotypes; the personal versus the historical in Eleven Flowers and how elusive personal recollections align with the master narratives of the nation-state; and the different ways that Wang Xiaoshaui and Jia Zhangke depict places of memory and places of history. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 197 are available for purchase in our online store.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu · Wednesday, December 15, 2021 Telos 197 (Winter 2021): The Modern City in World Cinema, edited by Jaimey Fisher and Sheldon Lu, is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural divide; cities and gendered, racial, and class divides; urban planning and urban space; film as a particular medium, with specific parameters, in the broader age of media; film as mass entertainment and as revolutionary propaganda. Even with this wide range of topics and their themes, there are many more to be explored, herein and elsewhere, so complex and rich are the relations of the urban to the cinematic.
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By Peter Yoonsuk Paik · Tuesday, November 6, 2018 Peter Yoonsuk Paik’s “The Korean Wave and the Impasse of Theory” appears in Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
South Korean popular culture has achieved startling success across much of the globe during the past decade. The first transnational form of popular culture that is not the legacy of an imperial project, the efforts to understand the significance of the “Korean wave” have been hampered by dominant scholarly approaches in the humanities that are not capable of grasping both its emergence and its appeal. This article argues that a key reason for the appeal of South Korean television and film is the fact that they explore the clash between tradition and modernity. South Korean media resonates with peoples across the world who are living out the conflicts between tradition and modernity and are thus eager for models for negotiating the competing demands of the two.
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By Haerin Shin · Monday, September 24, 2018 Telos 184 (Fall 2018), a special issue on Korea, edited by Haerin Shin, is now available for purchase in our store.
 While Korea’s history as a modern nation-state has always been a tumultuous reel of socio-political unrest, never has it drawn the globe’s attention to the degree and extent to which the press coverage of the past two years attests. South Korea’s candlelight demonstrations in the fall of 2016 were widely regarded as a newly arisen form of celebratory civil protest culture, and news of the progressive party’s subsequent rise to power stood out amid the global turn toward conservative politics. Meanwhile, with North Korea’s nuclear threat becoming a palpable reality, media outlets began clamoring with predictions of a major military outbreak across the Pacific. (I remember being inundated by concerned emails from acquaintances abroad during my breaks in South Korea last year.) Then came the dramatic shift toward prospects of denuclearization and North–South collaboration this past summer. Millions watched in awe as Kim Jong Un took President Moon’s hand and walked over the Military Demarcation Line. The meeting in Singapore was viewed with skepticism in the United States, but more pertinently such attempts to reestablish channels of communication were greeted warmly in South Korea.
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