Introduction: Whither Autobiography? The Difficulties of Saying “I” in the German Context

Summary

Recent transformations in audiovisual technologies and rapidly proliferating sites of reception have brought about an increasing blurring of the divisions between the private and the public that is highly relevant to any systematic study of the mediatization of the autobiographical mode. The impact of this blurring on the ways in which historical experience and the discourses of historiography are negotiated has only recently begun to make itself felt in the German context and will doubtless become ever more apparent in years to come. Two aspects of this shift should be highlighted here: first of all, private viewing, whether facilitated through DVD players in the home environment, clips from films viewed individually or collectively on the Internet, or through other methods of “exhibition” and dissemination that depart from the classical communal setting in the movie theater, can facilitate greater intergenerational communication—a key component of autobiographical discourse. At the same time, modes of reception made possible by new medial forms of presentation and distribution have brought visibility to many films, both recent and older, that might otherwise have remained inaccessible and thus perhaps unknown outside of Germany. And yet, despite ever increasing global circulation enabled through various platforms of digital exchange, it is important to bear in mind that access to both films and the discourses they explore is not only determined by virtue of their material proximity, on, for instance, a DVD. Films may be physically readily available but remain nonetheless linguistically or culturally impenetrable, depending on the viewer’s background knowledge. Thus it is one of the goals of this volume to foster greater access, physically, culturally, and linguistically, to a body of significant films that not only adumbrate forms of autobiography unique to the German context but also highlight with rare insight the challenge implicit in the project of constructing the self via audiovisual media.

Indeed, within literary theory, the assumption that autobiography is an easily recognized genre that can be defined and delimited through a particular list of formal characteristics has long been challenged. Recent scholarship on the topic has gone so far as to suggest that autobiography is a culturally specific phenomenon that may not be grasped as such without detailed knowledge of the culture in question.