Our second workshop took place at UCL in June 2019 and centred on visual representations of "Violence Elsewhere", including those in filmic and photographic form.

The workshop’s focus on visual culture in the context of “Violence Elsewhere” brought forth discussions about different modalities of witnessing, the ethics of representing violence and questions about authority and power in the context perceiving, documenting and distributing images of violence.

The group discussion was followed by paper presentations and a public screening of Café Togo (2018), a German film by activist Abdel Amine Mohammed and filmmakers Gregor Kasper and Musquiqui Chihying, which examines German colonial violence in a contemporary context.

See below for this workshop’s reading and paper abstracts.

Wendy S. Hesford, ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering’, Biography, 27.1 (2004), 104-144.

Charlotte Klonk, ‘Flugzeugentführungen seit den 1960er Jahren’ / ‘Strategiewechsel in den 1980er Jahren. Von den Tupamaros in Uruguay zur RAF in Deutschland’, in Klonk, Terror: Wenn Bilder zu Waffen werden (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer, 2017), pp. 94-130.

Wendy Kozol, ‘Introduction: Looking elsewhere’, in Kozol, Distant Wars Visible: The Ambivalence of Witnessing (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 1-22.

Martin Mhanda and Keyan G. Tomaselli, ‘Film and Trauma: Africa Speaks to itself through Truth and Reconciliation’, Black Camera, 1.1 (2009), 30-50.

Vilho Amukwaya Shigwedha, ‘The return of Herero and Nama bones from Germany: The victim’s struggle for recognition and recurring genocide memories in Namibia’, in Human Remains in Society: Curation and Exhibition in the Aftermath of Genocide and Mass-violence, ed. by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Élisabeth Anstett (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 197-219.

Oraib Toukan, ‘Cruel Images’, e-flux, 96 (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/96/245037/cruel-images/.

Professor Jonathan Long 'Volker Braun’s Cold War Camera'

In 1955, Volker Braun’s GDR compatriot Bertolt Brecht published his Kriegsfibel (War Primer). This consisted of reproductions of news photographs that Brecht cut from (mainly American) press sources during his years of exile, accompanied by four-line poems that commented on the photographs in a variety of ways in order to offer an account of the Second World War from a fairly conventional Marxist perspective. Twelve years later, Braun followed in Brecht’s footsteps with his Kriegserklärung (Declaration of War), which likewise combines poetic quatrains with news photographs depicting the conflict in Vietnam. So why did Braun turn to photography in order to comment on the pre-eminent war among proxy conflicts that were fought throughout the Cold War without ever encroaching on Europe or North America? What account of the Vietnam War does Braun offer? And perhaps more interestingly, how does the commentary on war photography in 1967 engage with entirely different media-ecological issues from those confronted by Brecht in his War Primer? I offer some answers to these questions as a way of exploring the relationship between visuality, politics, and the problem of imag(in)ing violence elsewhere.

Jonathan Long is Professor of German and Visual Culture at Durham University. He has published extensively on twentieth-century photography, including its role in the work of writers such as Bertolt Brecht, W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, and Monika Maron. His current research focusses on the photographic book of the Weimar Republic.

Professor Seán Allan 'Images as Weapons. DEFA, Studio H&S, and the Global Cold War'

For many years, the work of Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, two of the most prolific documentary filmmakers in the GDR and the founders of ‘Studio H&S’, was dismissed as a crude form of state-sponsored propaganda. Such a view ignores not only the unusual status of Studio H&S within the GDR’s system of film production (which between 1969 and 1982 was a privately-owned production company), but also the filmmakers’ own conflicts with the SED regime. Often screened on East German television during primetime viewing, the films themselves display a degree of aesthetic complexity that has often been overlooked; and it is impossible to overstate their contribution to the development of a transnational culture of political agitation. As I shall argue, although Studio H&S made very few films about the GDR itself and focused instead on Chile and the violent legacy of colonialism in Africa, Vietnam and Cambodia, it is precisely through this process of imagining violence elsewhere that the filmmakers ought to sought to legitimise the position of the GDR as an antifascist state committed to challenging what it saw as the imperialist ambitions of the West during the Cold War. In my paper I will be focusing on their representation of the conflict in Vietnam and, in particular, on their mini-series for TV Piloten im Pyjama (1968).

Seán Allan is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on the cinema of the GDR and his books include the volume DEFA. East German Cinema, 1946-1992 (Berghahn, 1996) co-edited with John Sandford, and Re-Imagining DEFA. East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (Berghahn, 2016), co-edited with Sebastian Heiduschke. His most recent publication in this field was supported by a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and is a monograph on the East German ‘Künstlerfilm’ entitled Screening Art. Modernist Aesthetics and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (Berghahn, 2019). He has also worked extensively on the culture of the European Enlightenment and, in particular, on the writer Heinrich von Kleist. Together with Ricarda Schmidt he co-directed a major AHRC project on 'Heinrich von Kleist. Education and Violence. The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics’ which led to two publications: a co-edited volume (with Ricarda Schmidt and Steven Howe) Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (Königshausen & Neumann, 2012) and a jointly authored monograph (with Ricarda Schmidt and Steven Howe) Unverhoffte Wirkungen. Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists. (Königshausen & Neumann, 2014).

You can listen to Seán's paper here:

Professor Erica Carter 'Spectres of violence in German-African film'

This presentation draws on Marti Mhando and Keyan Tomaselli’s notion of an African ‘cinema of difficult dialogues’ to explore films that consider acts of colonial violence on the African continent. The paper explores recent reckonings with colonial violence in German-African film, focusing on films that address the Herero and Nama genocide in Namibia including Weisse Geister (Martin Baer, 2004), and Skulls, of my People (Vincent Moloi, 2016).

Erica Carter is Professor of German and Film Studies at King’s College, London, founding Chair of the UK German Screen Studies Network, and Principal Investigator on the DAAD-funded project Circulating Cinema. The Moving Image Archive as Anglo-German Contact Zone. She has written extensively on German-language cinema; her publications include the BFI German Cinema Book (2nd edition 2019); Béla Balázs. Early Film Theory (2010), and Dietrich’s Ghosts. The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004); and she is currently working on a monograph on cinema, race and subject-formation in the postwar British colonial territories.