Ervin Malakaj – författare

Released in 1919, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today.Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Anders als die Andern is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates Anders als die Andern’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.

This book presents an approach to transform German Studies by augmenting its core values with a social justice mission rooted in Cultural Studies.

This book presents an approach to transform German Studies by augmenting its core values with a social justice mission rooted in Cultural Studies.

Despite its unabated popularity with audiences, slapstick has received rather little scholarly attention, mostly by scholars concentrating on the US theater and cinema traditions. Nonetheless, as a form of physical humor slapstick has a long history across various areas of cultural production. This volume approaches slapstick both as a genre of situational physical comedy and as a mode of communicating an affective situation captured in various cultural products. Contributors to the volume examine cinematic, literary, dramatic, musical, and photographic texts and performances. From medieval chivalric romance and nineteenth-century theater to contemporary photography, the contributors study treatments of slapstick across media, periods and geographic locations. The aim of a study of such wide scope is to demonstrate how slapstick emerged from a variety of complex interactions among different traditions and by extension, to illustrate that slapstick can be highly productive for interdisciplinary research.

Building upon recent German Studies research addressing the industrialization of printing, the expansion of publication venues, new publication formats, and readership, Market Strategies maps a networked literary field in which the production, promotion, and reception of literature from the Enlightenment to World War II emerges as a collaborative enterprise driven by the interests of actors and institutions. These essays demonstrate how a network of authors, editors, and publishers devised mutually beneficial and, at times, conflicting strategies for achieving success on the rapidly evolving nineteenth-century German literary market. In particular, the contributors consider how these actors shaped a nineteenth-century literary market, which included the Jewish press, highbrow and lowbrow genres, and modernist publications. They explore the tensions felt as markets expanded and restrictions were imposed, which yielded resilient new publication strategies, fostered criticism, and led to formal innovations. The volume thus serves as major contribution to interdisciplinary research in nineteenth-century German literary, media, and cultural studies.