No Place Like Home, But What Does Home Look Like? AN ANALYSIS OF THE INFLUENCE OF THE GERMAN DISCOURSE OF PLACE, BELONGING, AND IDENTITY IN WEST AND EAST GERMAN HEIMAT FILMS.

Abstract

This thesis will look into the role of the Heimat concept – the key concept in discourses of place, belonging, and identity – in West and East German cinema of the 1950s. Heimat, a concept with close ties to nation, space, and modernity, was one of the main concerns of both the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, as both were concerned with nation formation and legitimization. The division of Germany into West and East makes that many scholars investigating the cinema of the 1950s in Germany look at these cinemas in binary oppositions. Rather than acknowledging the concern with Heimat in the East, where there is no such thing as a Heimatgenre, they claim that only West German cinema knew Heimatfilme. In taking a more dialectical view towards Heimat in film, this thesis will try to avoid the endless repetition of the binary definitions of Heimat and rather look at its function in film. So, instead of looking at the generics of the typical West German Heimatfilm, this thesis will try to answer the question “What was the influence of the discourse of place, belonging, and identity on German cinema in East and West Germany in the 1950s?”