Resounding Silence, Recalcitrant Images: Harun Farocki’s Stummfilm Aufschub
Anna Parkinson, Associate Professor of German, Northwestern University
Harun Farocki’s film-essay Aufschub (Respite, 2007) is a collation of fragmentary rushes of “everyday” aspects of daily life in the Dutch transit camp Westerbork. Filmed in 1944 by German-Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer at the behest of camp commandant Albert Konrad Gemmeker, the footage includes rare scenes of the deportation of Jewish and Roma inmates to Auschwitz. Deploying a montage of original rushes and inserted intertitles, Harocki constructs a dialectic between acts of imagination and critique that resists easy consumption by the spectator, foregrounding our necessary complicity in creating–and resisting–meaning at the interface of memory and histories of violence.
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This seminar provides a forum for scholarship-in-progress in the area of German studies. The seminar is particularly interested in papers that cross disciplinary boundaries and that reconceptualize the materials and conventions of German Studies as a field, including beyond the frames of the German language and nation state. The seminar is generously sponsored by Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University, and the Department of History at Northwestern University.