Ambiguous Belief in the World: Post-Holocaust Cinema and Sterne

Join UTD Ackerman Center as Dr. Hanno Berger presents the second lecture of our annual Spring Professor Lecture Series.

Can movies about the Holocaust instill faith in the world? If yes, how? And how much does a film’s country of origin matter when it comes to answering these questions? Starting from Gilles Deleuze’s proclamation that World War Two and the experience of the Holocaust broke the link between humanity and its world, this lecture will analyze Konrad Wolf’s Sterne (GDR / Bulgaria, 1959), a film set in 1943 about a Wehrmacht soldier stationed in Bulgaria who falls in love with a Jewish woman from Greece. Following Deleuze, Dr. Berger will argue that post-war cinema can restore the faith in this link – albeit Sterne does so in an ambiguous manner.

This event is being offered free of charge to the public, but please register online here.

Dr. Hanno Berger is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at UT Dallas and Fellow of the Miriam Lewis Barnett Chair for Studies Related to the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights. His first book Thinking Revolution Through Film. On Audiovisual Stagings of Political Change was published in 2022. He is a co-editor of the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism / Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (forthcoming, 2025).