Grimm Lecture 2013: The Lives of Others: The History of Heritage and the Rhetoric of Consensus

The 2013 Jakob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm Lecture will be given by Harvard film scholar Eric Rentschler. Professor Rentschler, who will also be receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo for his leading scholarship in film studies, will be speaking on the film The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen, winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2007.

This lecture will be held in English.

Florian von Donnersmarck’s renowned feature The Lives of Others displays tableaux from the GDR as a heritage for postwall times. It offers post-ideological tableaux that in fact reproduce well-known Cold War panoramas. But this is just one way of looking at the lives of others and only one sort of heritage cinema. This presentation, in probing this exemplary heritage film, will reflect on the dynamics of recent German films that revisit the past and consider the rhetoric of consensus and heritage at work in these retrospective readings.