“Goethe Boom” Films: Bildung Reloaded

Summary

THE PROJECT OF GERMAN REUNIFICATION in the 1990s coincided with a marked decline in film adaptations based on German canonical texts. The move signified a turn away from classical literary adaptations and broke with a longstanding trend in the German film industry. Whereas previous eras of cultural crisis and change, such as during the 1930s and 1970s, had often prompted renewed interest in classical adaptations, changes in funding structures in the early 1990s shifted the German adaptation industry's attention away from eighteenth-century Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers) to the works of contemporary bestselling authors. With these sorts of book-tofilm endeavors proving economically successful on the global market, in part due to financially advantageous changes in the book publishing industry, such adaptations promised Germany's film industry a strengthened foothold in commercially successful entertainment cinema. From Joseph Vilsmaier’s Schlafes Bruder (Brother of Sleep, 1995) to Tom Tykwer's Parfüm. Die Geschichte eines Mörders (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1995), the adaptations created during this era indeed garnered national and international acclaim, with Caroline Link's Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa, 2001) even winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. At this point, it seemed that the relevance of Weimar classicism had waned.

Starting in the early 2000s, however, German film studios began to return to canonical texts and have released numerous adaptations based on the works of Goethe, Lessing, Schiller, and Kleist, among others. Loosely grouped under the umbrella term “contemporary classical adaptations,” these films range from more conservative theater-based productions like Leander Haußmann's Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love, 2005), to modernizations such as Christoph Stark's Julietta (2001), Sebastian Schipper's Mitte Ende August (Sometime in August, 2005) and Uwe Janson's Werther (2008), to biopic-oriented heritage films like Philipp Stölzl's Goethe! (Young Goethe in Love, 2010) and Dominik Graf's Die geliebten Schwestern (Beloved Sisters, 2014). As suggested by Paul Cooke, Randall Halle, and Brad Prager and Jaimey Fisher, the cultural shift toward eighteenth-century German literature in the early twenty-first century complicates scholarly treatments of the current transnational German film market. Whereas these scholars outline contemporary German film output as increasingly outward-looking, with Germany’s traumatic twentieth-century past and contemporary multiculturalism often stylized for consumption by global markets, the contemporary classical adaptations discussed here point toward a pervasive national preoccupation with two intertwined endeavors that can be traced back to production and reception processes of the eighteenth century.