Example Of Thesis Proposal On German Film Paper Thesis

Thesis: The treatment of women in Good Bye, Lenin! And No Place to Go shows its female protagonists finding different and unique ways to retreat into their fantasy of an East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Both Christiana and Hanna Flanders, respectively, struggle with the newfound rise of capitalism and its effects on the GDR they once knew. In this respect, themes of simulation and nostalgia underlie the sociopolitical dimension of these films, as the characters construct more comfortable realities around themselves to address their own anxieties about the future of the GDR and their place within it. Berlin Is In Germany will be also referenced in relation to films that explore people effectively waking up in a post-Wall Berlin.
For this paper, secondary sources used to support these arguments will come from Kapcynzski’s “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin!”, Berghahn’s East German Cinema After Unification, and Godeanu-Kenworthy’s “Deconstructing Ostalgia: The National Past Between Commodity and Simulacrum in Wolfgang Becker’s Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)”.
Thesis: The Edukators and Berlin Is In Germany both cinematically depict the physical and cultural changes that occur in East Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Both Martin Schulz and the titular “Edukators” find themselves resenting and actively resisting the new capitalist universe of East Berlin after the fall of the Berlin Wall – while Schulz flounders in his search for economic solvency, the Edukators vandalize and rebel against capitalist interests in East Berlin. In both films, the confusing and labyrinthine nature of a nation transitioning into a new way of life is depicted through the struggles of its people. Secondary sources include Kapcynzski’s “Negotiating Nostalgia: The GDR Past in Berlin is in Germany and Good Bye, Lenin!”, Berghahn’s East German Cinema After Unification and Wagner’s “The Collapse of the Conventional: German Film and Its Politics at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.”