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.

The effect of a new drag-law parameterization on ice shelf water plume dynamics

A drag law accounting for Ekman rotation adjacent to a flat, horizontal bou ndary is proposed for use in a plume model that is written in terms of the depth-mean velocity. The drag l aw contains a variable turning angle between the mean velocity and the drag imposed by the turbulent bound ary layer. The effect of the variable turning angle in the drag law is studied for a plume of ice shelf wat er (ISW) ascending and turning beneath an Antarctic ice shelf with draft decreasing away from the groundi ng line. As the ISW plume ascends the sloping ice shelf–ocean boundary, it can melt the ice shelf, wh ich alters the buoyancy forcing driving the plume motion. Under these conditions, the typical turning ang le is of order 10° over most of the plume area for a range of drag coefficients (the minus sign arises for th e Southern Hemisphere). The rotation of the drag with respect to the mean velocity is found to be signifi cant if the drag coefficient exceeds 0.003; in this case the plume body propagates farther along and across the b ase of the ice shelf than a plume with the standard quadratic drag law with no turning angle.