5AAGB503 Society, Politics & Popular Culture in Germany
Credit value: 15 credits
Module tutor: Dr Alex Clarkson
Assessment: 2012-13 One three hour examination (100%); 2013-14 One 4000 word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern: Two hours per week
Module description
Throughout the last century, Germany has experienced an extraordinary transformation of the role of popular culture, technology and the media in politics as well as people’s day to day lives. This Level 5 course will therefore examine the role of media and popular culture in German society after 1870 with a particular focus on the emergence of industries based on mass media and mass entertainment. By contextualising the study of popular culture within a historical framework, this course will also investigate how German identity is ‘read’, what it means to be or to be seen to be ‘German’, and how popular culture plays a role in shaping national identity. While the first two classes will help the students to develop their awareness of the theoretical framework of popular culture, the rest of the course will explore such topics as the rise of German language cinema and music industries, the professionalisation of sport, the influence of other nations on developments in Germany as well as the ways in which popular culture has been instrumentalised by different ideological movements.
Thus the classes dealing with the Wilhelmine, Weimar and National Socialist periods will explore how interaction between popular culture and politics reflected and affected attitudes toward technology, gender relations, domestic relations and sexuality. The later classes will go on to examine how Cold Ward division and growing ethnic diversity after 1945 transformed the structures and genres of popular culture. The assessment will be based on a single three hour exam in January. This course will look also look at that transition through key cultural artefacts from post-war Germany. The films, television programmes, and playlists used in this course will help students to better understand the historical background of contemporary German popular culture. They will also suggest new ways of thinking about Germany in the past – and the present.
Recommended reading
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Thomas Hecken, Theorien der Populärkultur, Bielefeld, Transcript, 2001
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Dick Hebdidge, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London, Routledge, 1979.
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Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, Cambridge Mass., O’Reilly, 2001.
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Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation and Social Democracy : the SPD press and Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
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Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989.
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Kate Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere 1923-1945, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1996.
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Hanna Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001.
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Corey Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR, London, Arnold, 2002.
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Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.
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Robert P. Stephens, Germans on Drugs: the Complications of Modernization in Hamburg, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2007.
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Hermann Meyn, Massenmedien in Deutschland, 2nd edn., Frankfurt, UVK, 2004.
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Alan Tomlinson/Christopher Young (ed.), German Football: History, Culture, Society, Abingdon, Routledge, 2006.
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http://www.jugendkulturen.de/