By Jaimey Fisher · Monday, July 2, 2012 Jaimey Fisher’s “Citizen Soldiers and Militarized Nostalgia: Genres of War and Place in the 1950s Public Sphere” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 One of the most celebrated postwar German films, Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (Die Brücke, 1959), has garnered remarkably little scholarly attention, but the film both reflects and engages fundamental changes in the German public sphere in the 1950s and 1960s. It has traditionally been assumed (right through the present) that the 1950s was an era driven by an emphatic forgetting of Germany’s criminal wartime past, but recent work reflects a turn in our understanding of the 1950s thinking about this past. It is now increasingly acknowledged that 1950s society and culture did engage the past, but in often highly refracted ways. One of these ways comes into focus with the cinema, particularly in the dominant genre cinemas of the 1950s. While the so-called Heimatfilm has dominated scholarly thinking about film in this era, the war film (as the second most popular genre of the decade) was also a crucial means to represent, but also distort, memories of the Nazi period. The essay considers the role of the war film in the public sphere as well as the representation of the public sphere, and its politics, within the war film genre. The small-town counter public sphere detailed in The Bridge, in fact, shows the film’s engagement not only with the recent war and 1950s memory culture, but also with that other most popular genre of the time, the Heimatfilm.
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By Eleanor Courtemanche · Thursday, June 28, 2012 Eleanor Courtemanche’s “Marx, Heine, and German Cosmopolitanism: The 1844 Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This article argues that Marx’s economic cosmopolitanism was formulated, in part, as a response to the exiled radical poet Heinrich Heine’s satirical attacks on German nationalism. In Paris in 1844, the young journalist Marx collaborated with the revered Heine on the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which was meant to join German metaphysics and poetry with French socialist politics. Like Heine, Marx was a secular Jew from the border region of the Rhineland who saw French revolutionary politics as Germany’s inevitable destiny. While Heine wrestles with nostalgia for a backwards Prussia in Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (published in Vorwärts! in 1844), Marx’s “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” argues that Germany must accomplish a difficult backwards somersault (“salto mortale“) over the dialectical boundary of the Rhine to transcend the impasses of French politics and British industrialism. Both Heine and Marx transformed their critique of Prussian autocracy into a more generalized cosmopolitan radicalism, though Heine’s aestheticism is sometimes confounding to Marxist critics. Meanwhile Marx’s engagement with the German tradition of Nationalökonomie is complex: while he critiques the Prussian nationalist use of free trade theories, the internationalism of his economic vision brings him closer to the British classical tradition of Smith and Ricardo than to German romantic protectionists like Friedrich List.
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By Michael Bray · Monday, June 25, 2012 Michael Bray’s “Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class and Alexander Kluge’s Counterproducts” appears in Telos 159 (Summer 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
This essay analyzes the seductions and impasses of the “openness” of public sphere theory in class society. It does so by sidestepping the more obvious limits of formal-discursive models of publicity and critically engaging with the theory and practice of Alexander Kluge, whose foundational work with Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience, continues to ground experiential and affective models. For Kluge, this experiential turn was necessitated by the classist exclusions rationalist forms of publicity enact and it also made clear the need for “counterproducts” (rather than theoretical accounts) to combat audiovisual pseudo-publicity and construct a “proletariat public sphere.” Drawing together Kluge and Negt’s compelling account of exclusion and the specific character of Kluge’s own film and television counterproducts, shows how the latter fail to answer to the concerns the former, and helps explain the peculiar substitution, in Kluge’s films, of “feminine labor” and protagonists for the proletariat. This substitution, I suggest, is paradigmatic for the continuing shift of the “new left” away from issues of class. In closing, I propose the potential of a “populist public sphere” to more adequately address both the exclusions diagnosed by Kluge and Negt and the issues of gender “ciphered” in Kluge’s films.
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