The Cosmopolitan Screen (Between the Local and the Global: Revisiting Sites of Postwar German Cinema)

The Cosmopolitan Screen investigates the extent to which German filmmakers throughout the last sixty years have engaged with the ever more fluid trade of images, meanings, and identities in a globalizing world. The volume traces German cinema’s negotiation of the global as a multilayered story in which the hopes and the fears about the prospect of a more cosmopolitan culture often go hand in hand. Featuring original work from some of the foremost scholars in German film studies from either side of the Atlantic, The Cosmopolitan Screen makes a persuasive case for rethinking the place of the “national” within an increasingly cosmopolitan and global economy of images and sounds.

"Offering fresh paradigms, perspectives and cross-connections, this volume pushes German film scholarship far beyond its old national framework."
—Katie Trumpener, Professor of Comparative Literature, English and Film Studies, Yale University

"Each of the essays, like the volume as a whole, offers new insights into the circulation of German images, sounds, stories, and texts, precisely by considering them beyond the narrow confines of a ‘uniquely German’ national identity. Schindler and Koepnick have envisioned a new future for both German Studies and Film Studies by locating postwar German cinema within global networks of production, reception, and technological innovation and change."
—Patrice Petro, Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

"Schindler and Koepnick's formulation of the ‘cosmopolitan gaze’ as a vehicle for the constitution of a postnational German film studies is both cogent and charged with fruitful possibilities for future work in the field. The admirable mix of lucidity and critical sophistication which this array of scholars bring to their subject will make The Cosmopolitan Screen essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers."
—Erica Carter, Professor and Chair of German Studies, University of Warwick

Lutz Koepnick is Professor of German, Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Stephan K. Schindler is Professor of German, Comparative Literature and Film Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.