The Postman Always Rings Twice, by Katrin Schröter
When: Tue, Apr 10 2018 6:00pm
Where: O'Neill's
The 21 Club wishes to thank our speaker, Katrin Schröter (Professor of Foreign Languages & Literatures), for an excellent presentation.
The Postman Always Rings Twice: From the Great Depression in the United States to East Germany After Unification
James M. Cain’s acclaimed 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice has not only become a staple of American crime literature but has also become a very productive text for film adaptations. Since its publication, the novel has been adapted for the big screen seven times.
The presentation will focus on the 1946 American adaptation by the same title directed by Tay Garnett featuring Lana Turner and John Garfield and compare it to the most recent adaptation, the 2008 German film Jerichow by Christian Petzold. Set in a small East German town after unification, the film maps economic and cultural issues and problems of the Great Depression onto the socioeconomic challenges facing Eastern Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Apart from offering some insights into questions of film adaptation, the presentation hopes to illuminate the difficulties of German unification that still occupy German society and politics nearly 30 years later.
BIO for Katrin Schröter:
Katrin Schröter is Associate Professor of German and Media Arts in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of New Mexico and Co-Director of the German Summer School of New Mexico at Taos. A native of the German Democratic Republic, she studied German literature and American Studies at the University of Rostock before coming to the US in 1986. She completed a PhD in German Studies and Modern Culture & Media at Brown University in 1996.
Her research focuses on German cinema, and specifically representations of national identity in German films after World War II. Her 2004 book Border Crossings: National Identity and Nation Formation in German Films 1980-2000 focuses on films that fictionalize border crossings between East and West Germany and that problematize issues resulting from the division of Germany. She is currently working on a project that looks at the intersection of film and literature in contemporary German culture.
At the University of New Mexico she has taught of 30 different classes ranging from upper level language classes to M.A. seminars on the Weimar Republic, the GDR and the Berlin Republic, as well as a wide variety film classes for Film Studies majors and graduate students, ranging from “What’s at Stake in Vampirism?” to “Representations of the Red Army Faction in Film” and Film Theory.
