Activity
Conference paper, Panel 4: Austrian Wartime ExperiencesDescription
A Hidden Life (Malick, USA/Germany, 2019) offers a fictionalised portrayal of the life of Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter (1907-1943), who was executed in 1943 for his refusal to serve in the Wehrmacht and beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007. In his film, American auteur director Malick presents Jägerstätter as a timeless model for the importance of resistance and taking a moral stand in totalitarian regimes. The emphasis the film narrative places on the ostracisation that both Jäggerstätter (played by August Diehl) and his family were subjected to, as well as further universalization of the narrative through reference to contemporary world politics, means that the specifically Austrian context of Jägerstätter’s story is not foregrounded for the international viewer. The citation in A Hidden Life of footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film Triumph des Willens, as well as the inclusion of music by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, also serves to place the narrative in a broader context of resistance to totalitarianism in a work of ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg 2009). Aspects of Austrian history, such as the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany) and the wide-spread support for National Socialist policies before and after the annexation – as well as Jagerstätter’s own reflections on this in the posthumously published and translated letters and writings from prison – remain unilluminated in Malick’s depiction of Jägerstätter’s ‘hidden life’. Drawing on memory studies scholarship (Rothberg 2009; Erll 2011), writing on shaming and humiliation (Frevert 2017), and the field of transnational German Studies, my paper will analyse how Malick’s film, in its highlighting of the universal importance of Jägerstätter’s story, constitutes a missed opportunity to engage transnational audiences with the specificity of Austrian history before, during and after the Second World War| Period | 22 Mar 2024 |
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| Event title | Entrenched Narratives, Hidden Figures: Reappraising Representations of War Across German Screen Media |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Warwick, United KingdomShow on map |