Besprechungen / Reviews H ESTER B AER : Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009. 304 pp. $ 90.00 Hb. $ 34.95 Pb. Hester Baer’s new book Dismantling the Dream Factory: Gender, German Cinema and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language represents an important contribution to the study of postwar German cinema. Perhaps its most significant accomplishment is to broaden the academic understanding of German film during the 1940s and 50s, a period that in the American and German academies has functioned largely as the straw man for the «real» rebirth of German cinema after National Socialism in the form of the post-Oberhausen New German Film and New German Cinema of the 60s and 70s. Baer’s book shines new light on the commercial cinema that arose from the wreckage of National Socialism and makes astoundingly clear how these films from the 40s and 50s began to invent a new film language for a postwar audience made up of seventy percent female viewers. While «Papas Kino» may have been struggling by the 1960s, Baer’s work shows that it was anything but «dead» as the adherents of the New German Cinema (and their academic and intellectual proponents in West Germany and abroad) would have us believe. Quality, engaging films were being made in the 1940s and 50s, and they were popular with their audience. The relative unimportance assigned to the period by film scholars may, as Baer argues persuasively in the introduction, have more to do with biases against popular, consumer culture - particularly those forms that address a predominantly female audience - among academic and cultural elites than the relative quality or critical nature of the films that were being made. Baer’s book supports Frank Stern’s thesis that «the New German Cinema began in 1946 and not in the late 1960s» (Stern, Frank. «Film in the 1950s: Passing Images of Guilt and Responsibility.» The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949-1968. Ed. Hanna Schissler. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. 267). In addition, Baer provides compelling interpretations of the ten featurelength films that form the basis of her study. Her interpretations focus on the role of gender and the female figures in the films as they relate to the social reconstruction of German society and the reconstruction of a viable German film language after National Socialism. One of the strengths of Baer’s study is that she situates her work within the scholarship on gender and postwar reconstruction as it has taken shape over the past thirty years in both the United States and Germany. Drawing on works as diverse as Angela Delille and Andrea Grohn’s Blick zurück aufs Glück: Frauenleben und Familienpolitik in den 50er Jahren and Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Baer makes a compelling argument for the central importance gender played in the social and political reconstruction of West Germany. Dismantling the Dream Factory is made up of three parts: «Relegitimizing Cinema: Female Spectators and the Problem of Representation,» «Art on Film: Repre- CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 277 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 277 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18 278 Besprechungen / Reviews senting Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema,» and «Towards the New Wave: Gender and the Critique of Popular Cinema,» framed by an Introduction and Epilogue. Together the three sections build a convincing argument as to the central role played by gender in the reconstruction of German society and the reconstruction of a German film language after World War II. The first section «Relegitiminzing the Cinema» focuses on the problems of reestablishing a viable national cinema in the aftermath of the war. Baer gives critical readings of The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), Film Without a Title (1948), Love ’47 (1949), and Epilogue (1950). The second section «Art on Film» revisits postwar aesthetic debates as they play themselves out on the big screen in relation to gender construction in Willi Forst’s The Sinner (1951), Alfons Stummer’s The Forester of the Silver Wood (1955), and Veit Harlan’s Different from You and Me (1957). And the third section «Towards the New Wave» looks at the self-critical nature of Engagement in Zurich (1957), The Girl Rosemarie (1958), and The Bread of Those Early Years (1962). The book is clearly written and accessible to scholars and students in a variety of fields from film studies to German history and/ or gender studies. The focus on individual films in each chapter makes the book a must-have for those working on postwar film as the chapters can stand alone even as they contribute to broader arguments put forth in the book as a whole. As an increasing number of German Studies scholars pay closer attention to popular culture and its effects in postwar Germany, they will be building directly and indirectly on Baer’s book. University of Kentucky Jeff Rogers D EBORAH H OLMES AND L ISA S ILVERMAN (E DS .): Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity. Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. 310 pp. $ 75. While Germany’s Weimar Republic and its capital Berlin have been the focus of intensive historical, sociocultural, economic, and political study, Austria’s First Republic (1919-34) and the significance of Vienna continue to remain in Weimar’s shadow with respect to grasping the cultural-historical importance of the Austrian interwar period for understanding European modernity. The appearance of Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity in 2009 brings much-deserved attention to this fifteen-year period of Austrian cultural history and its significant contributions for examining the political, economic, and sociocultural tumult that both characterized the period and underpinned European modernity. Edited by Deborah Holmes, lecturer in German at the University of Kent, and Lisa Silverman, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the volume reflects the same interdisciplinary atmosphere that marked the interwar period in Vienna in terms of the interconnectedness «of public events and personal lives - including the related political and social influences that shaped the cultural products of these years» (10). With an eye toward illuminating the position of culture - defined broadly as the arts, humanities, and intellectual life - within the dominant sociopolitical tensions between the Social Democrats of «Red Vienna» and the Christian Socialists, who CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 278 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 278 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18