Books by Sabine Hake

The proletariat never existed-but it had a profound effect on modern German culture and society. As the most radicalized part of the industrial working class, the proletariat embodied the critique of capitalism and the promise of socialism. But as a collective imaginary, the proletariat also inspired the fantasies, desires, and attachments necessary for transforming the working class into a historical subject and an emotional community. This book reconstructs this complicated and contradictory process through the countless treatises, essays, memoirs, novels, poems, songs, plays, paintings, photographs, and films produced in the name of the proletariat. The Proletarian Dream reads these forgotten archives as part of an elusive collective imaginary that modeled what it meant-and even more important, how it felt-to claim the name "e;proletarian"e; with pride, hope, and conviction. By emphasizing the formative role of the aesthetic, the eighteen case studies offer a new perspective on working-class culture as a oppositional culture. Such a new perspective is bound to shed new light on the politics of emotion during the main years of working-class mobilizations and as part of more recent populist movements and cultures of resentment. Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures 2018

The improvements in the technology, artistry, and distribution of motion pictures coincided with the traumas of modern Germany. This title reproduces the diversity of perspectives and the intensity of controversies of early German film within the broad context of German social and political history.

A collaborator with Warner Brothers and Paramount in the early days of sound film, the German film director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) is famous for his sense of ironic detachment. This title focuses on the visual strategies Lubitsch used to convey irony and analyzes his contribution to the rise of classical narrative cinema.

Examines a range of films in relation to the social, political, economic and technological events surrounding them. This book assesses the work of directors and stars alike, exploring the competing definitions of German cinema as art cinema, entertainment, political propaganda and rival of Hollywood.

An overview of Third Reich cinema through the lens of national cinema studies.