Prof. Lisa Haegele as a DAAD visiting scholar

Her book will explore long-forgotten West German genre films – crime dramas, action thrillers, neo-Westerns, road movie comedies, and post-punk horror films – from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

In emphasizing the significance of these films, the book aims to 1) reveal a richer and more diverse West German cinema culture than existing scholar­ship suggests; 2) challenge the commonly held divisions between “popular” (genre) and “political” (art/auteur) filmmaking that have shaped our understanding of German cinema since the postwar period; and 3) show how the films enrich and expand dominant historical narratives of West Germany in the “long 1968.”