From Hitler to Heimat

The Return of History as Film

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by Anton Kaes

Harvard University Press

Due/Published January 1992, 288 pages, paper

ISBN 0674324560

West German filmmakers have tried repeatedly over the past half-century to come to terms with Germany's stigmatized history. How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s - a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for a national identity.