Abel receives Berlin Prize to pursue new book on German political cinema

Professor and department chair Marco Abel is the recipient of a 2019 Berlin Prize, a semester-long fellowship  awarded to scholars, writers, and artists by the American Academy in Berlin. This fall, he will join ten other fellows at the Academy's Wannsee property outside Berlin and begin work on his new book project, tenatively titled Left Politics without Leftism: A Counter-Genealogy of Germany's Political Cinema.

Abel's new project creates a fascinating pre-history to his award-winning book The Counter-Cinema of the Berlin School, investigating a previous great era of postwar "political" cinema—the 1960s and 1970s. "How was political cinema configured in the context of (West) German film history?" Abel asks. Here he takes up the question of Was war links? (What was Left?) raised by Andreas Christoph Schmidt in his 2003 TV documentary, which explored the nostalgia permeating the discourse of "1968" in post-1989 Germany. Rather than assuming that images re-present a preexisting world against which we can measure and evaluate an image's meaning, veracity, morality, and political viability, Abel asks the filmic image, "How does it work?" and "What does it do?" To explore these questions, he plans to conduct research in the collections of the dffb, Deutsche Kinemathek, and Filmuniversität Babelsberg, as well as interview filmmakers such as Christian Petzold, Angela Schanelec, Christoph Hochhäusler, Dominik Graf, Klaus Lemke, May Spils, and Werner Enke.

The Berlin Prize provides recipients with the time and resources to step back from their daily obligations to engage in academic and artistic projects they might not otherwise pursue. Fellows work with local individuals and institutions in the American Academy's well-established network, forging rich connections and lasting transatlantic relationships. During their stay, fellows engage audiences through public lectures, performances, and readings, which take place at the Academy as well as throughout Berlin and Germany.

To learn more about the Academy, the Berlin Prize, and the 2019-20 class of fellows, visit the American Academy in Berlin's website.