284 Besprechungen / Reviews Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007); or the work on testimonial literature in Latin America, typified in the anglophone world by The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, edited by Arturo Arias (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001). Bürgerkrieg Global will indeed open up a field of investigation for Germanists in outlining a contemporary, specifically politicized approach to contemporary germanophone literatures. Yet (pace Hans Wagener, who believes it documents German literature’s turn outwards to global human rights), and given that the study of human rights literatures has been an active field of scholarship in the anglophone world, it is unfortunate that an opportunity has been lost in the project’s execution. Lützeler clearly wants to establish the credibility of germanophone literature as a world human rights literature, but it is regrettable that he implies the isolation of both this literature and scholarly engagement with it. These are not German inventions, and so those Germanists who (rightly) are moved by this well-written book to take up the project should be warned that they need not recreate a theoretical wheel, and that the project of studying global literatures has much greater political and local nuance than Lützeler has in framing texts with widely diverse political claims based in human rights issues as «deutschsprachige Gegenwartsroman[e].» The University of Texas at Austin Katherine Arens C HRISTIAN R OGOWSKI (E D .): The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema. Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010. 354 pp. $ 85. Camden House’s The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema, edited by Christian Rogowski, is a welcome addition to the long line of Weimar film scholarship. The volume clearly shows the progress made since Kracauer’s and Eisner’s accusations that Weimar film was Nazi infected. The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema does not seek to replace Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema, Thomas Elsaesser’s influential Weimar Cinema and After, or Noah Isenberg’s Weimar Cinema, but rather add another layer of interpretation. As Weimar scholarship is moving beyond the canonical classics such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Fritz Lang’s films, the book provides much-needed information on many of the rediscovered movies. As Christian Rogowski states in his introduction, the book aims to expose a larger audience to the many recently discovered films that have become available on DVD, including Robert Reinert’s Nerven, Robert Wiene’s Orlacs Hände, Wilhelm Dieterle’s Geschlecht in Fesseln, Joseph Delmont’s Die entfesselte Menschheit, or Henrik Galeen’s Alraune. A number of articles focus on psychological issues in film related to Weimar Germany’s continued preoccupation with its post-WWI trauma, among them Barbara Hales’s article on Nerven and Anjeana Hans’s on Orlacs Hände. It becomes clear that Weimar cinema was progressive in a society deeply traumatized by the WWI experience. As Jill Smith writes, filmmakers collaborated with psychoanalysts in so-called «social hygiene films,» as did the psychiatrist Magnus Hirschfeld who worked with the filmmaker Richard Oswald. As a result, movie making became a major factor in sexual law reform. Christian Rogowski’s discussion of Geschlecht in Fesseln provides a convincing illustration of Weimar’s flawed homosexuality laws. CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 284 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 284 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18 Besprechungen / Reviews 285 These issues of psychoanalysis and sexuality came together in Robert Reinert’s movie Nerven, one of the most discussed films of the recent Weimar film debate. Often considered the first German expressionist film, Nerven was one of the first movies to link Weimar’s political problems with the mental state of its citizens. It provides an excellent tool in recording the abundance of mental illnesses following WWI. As Barbara Hales shows in her essay, Weimar psychiatrists were attempting to blame war victims for instigating the revolution that brought the German monarchy to an end. If the returning soldiers could be blamed for the political unrest following WWI, Hales writes, society would be able to distance itself from the war and the revolution. Therefore Nerven, in which soldiers are depicted as madmen, must be seen as a symbolic representation of Weimar Germany’s unsettled cultural milieu. Another theme in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema deals with the role of female stars, which Valerie Weinstein explores in her essay on the vamp in Henrik Galeen’s Alraune, Mihaela Petrescu on Brigitte Helm and Marlene Dietrich and their roles of developing the vamp for Weimar movies, and Richard McCormick on female desire in Ernst Lubitsch’s Sumurun. Lubitsch recognizes prejudices against «Ostjuden» which links into another theme of this book, that of Weimar Germany’s controversial responses to integrating Jews into its culture. Cynthia Walk explores the German- Jewish symbiosis in her article on E.A. Dupont’s movie Das alte Gesetz, a Jewish- Gentile romance. As the war experience was at the forefront of Weimar’s social problems, a number of contributions address this issue, among them Jaimey Fisher’s article on Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s Westfront 1918. In this well-written article Fisher uses an innovative spatial theory to analyze opposing shots in order to delineate confronting viewpoints. As the book is designed as a compendium of Weimar film, various other topics are explored, among them the star system, Weimar’s role in international film, and the upcoming sound film. There are also a number of essays on commercially successful films, such as exotic fairytales and romantic comedies. While some of the articles will be more useful than others, overall the book is very informative to both newcomers to the field and those more experienced in Weimar scholarship. The book is highly recommended not only for anybody teaching courses on Weimar film, but also as a useful addition to Weimar history courses. With the ready availability of Weimar films, students of German history would definitely benefit from the exposure to films in which many of the social and political issues are reflected. Christian Rogowski’s introductory comments and his brief bibliography about the history of Weimar film provide any newcomer to this field with enough information for a thorough film analysis. The attached filmography will be very helpful in locating movies for class use. University of the South Reinhard Zachau CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 285 CG_42_3_s193-288_End.indd 285 28.06.12 16: 18 28.06.12 16: 18