The theme that dare not speak its name: Geopolitik, geopolitics and German foreign policy since unification

The purpose of this chapter is to trace the emergence of a new security imaginary in the foreign policy discourse in Germany during the 1990s and to determine whether it constitutes a return of Geopolitik in German foreign policy making. Does the re- appearance of geopolitical terms and expressions in the official and the academic discourses in post-unification Germany indicate such a shift? The essay will argue that the claims about a return of Geopolitik cannot be sustained. To the extent that the rhetoric of German government officials changes during the 1990s, this does not produce a coherent geopolitical security imaginary that stands diametrically opposed to the definition of political and institutional spaces of the Bonner Republik.

Between the lines: Konrad Wolf's 'Mama, ich lebe' and the dilemmas of betrayal

The article offers a close reading of Konrad Wolf’s anti-fascist Second World War film 'Mama, ich lebe' (DEFA, 1977). 'Mama, ich lebe', like all East German films about the Nazi past, deals with the re-founding of post-war Germany. Unlike the usual approach which focused on political redemption of the past crimes, Wolf’s approach explores rupture and failure of political agency as the pre-condition for a new beginning. The rupture is effected by the defection of four Wehrmacht soldiers who decide to cooperate with the Soviet enemy. Their betrayal of the national collective is ethically motivated and arises from their responsibility for the Soviet ‘other’. Its radicalness opens up a moment of utopian freedom and conciliation for the traitors. Yet the back side of betrayal is insecurity and confliction with regard to their role and roots. While the four meet their role as traitors with self-deception about their ambivalent position, they are eventually forced to acknowledge their position as one of self-defeat. Their ‘ethical betrayal’ (Parikh 2009) does therefore not lead to utopian fulfilment but to the traitors’ expiatory sacrifice as the only form of accountability and self-justification. In Wolf’s film antifascism as a tale of political redemption is thus revised and becomes a tale of necessary individual atonement.

(In)Complete acquisition of Turkish among Turkish German bilinguals in Germany and Turkey: an analysis of complex embeddings in narratives

Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals canmvary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish�German bilinguals. The approach of the present paper is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish� German bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish�German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe.

‘Warsaw Pact Military Doctrines in the 70s and 80s: Findings in the East German Archives’

This article draws on Warsaw Treaty Organisation and East German military archives to demonstrate that the WTO's military exercises until the mid-1990s always envisaged an offensive strategy with the aim of reaching the Channel in a few days. Only gradually did this change under Gorbachev and to include also defensive strategies, very much against the opposition of East Germany.

The new Brazilian cinema

In the second half of the 1990s, Brazil experienced a cinematic boom. Many of the new films were received enthusiastically by audiences and critics and released worldwide. This passionately argued and illuminating book provides the first comprehensive critical account of what is known as the 'Renaissance of Brazilian cinema' and demonstrates just how thought-provoking and inspiring Brazilian cinema has become. Contributors: José Carlos Avellar - Ivana Bentes - Stephanie Dennison - Verônica Ferreira Dias - Carlos Diegues - Amir Labaki - Maria Esther Maciel - José Álvaro Moisés - Laura Mulvey - Lúcia Nagib - Luiz Zanin Oricchio - Fernão Pessoa Ramos - Lisa Shaw - Robert Stam - João Luiz Vieira - Ismail Xavier.

A utopia no Cinema Brasileiro: matrizes, nostalgia, distopias

This book studies the ressurgence of the utopian gesture in Brazilian Cinema from the mid-1990s onwards, as well as its variations and negations. The analysis identifies trajectories of rise and fall, which reflect oscillations in the political scenario, and includes a retrospective look at utopian traditions of the Brazilian cinematic past, in turn derived from the nation's foundational myths. At the same time, it considers the ways in which recent Brazilian film production transcends Cinema Novo's national project to interacts with modern, postmodern and commercial cinemas of the world, thus benefiting from and contributing to a new transnational cinematic aesthetics.