Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate Professor of German Studies and Film, Media & Television
[email protected]Office Information:
https://umich.zoom.us/my/moltke
6330 North Quad
Office Hours: W 2-3
phone: 734.764.8018
Graduate Faculty; Faculty; Germanic Languages and Literatures; German
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Literature, Duke University, 1998B.A., Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College, 1989
Current Courses
FTVM 333-001
Fascist Cinemas
GERMAN 333-001
Fascist Cinemas
Publications
Siegfried Kracauers Grenzgänge: Zur Rettung des Realen
Sabine Biebl, Helmut Lethen, Johannes von Moltke (Editors)
This volume of essays on Siegfried Kracauer brings together historical, literary, and media theoretical perspectives. The volume includes contributions from Thomas Elsaesser, Inka Mülder-Bach, Jörg Später, and many more. Johannes von Moltke contributed an article on Kracauer’s Theory of Film in the context of the Cold War, which draws on his previous work in The Curious Humanist. The volume grew out of a ...
See MoreThe Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America
Johannes von Moltke (Author)
During the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer established himself as a trenchant theorist of film, culture, and modernity, and he is now considered one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century. When he arrived in Manhattan aboard a crowded refugee ship in 1941, however, he was virtually unknown in the United States and had yet to write his best-known books, From Caligari to Hitler and Theory of Film. Johannes von Moltke details the intricate ways in which the American intellectual and political context shaped Kracauer’s seminal contributions to film studies ...
See MoreSiegfried Kracauer's American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture
Siegfried Kracauer (Author), Johannes von Moltke (Editor), Kristy Rawson (Editor), Martin Jay (Afterword by)
Siegfried Kracauer's American Writings allows readers to delve into Kracauer's film and cultural criticism from a fascinating era of American intellectual life. Writing on the margins of the so-called "New York Intellectuals" and of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (also in exile in New York), Kracauer commented insightfully on everything from Disney's Dumbo to "Hollywood's Terror Films," from Italian Neorealism to early postwar cinema in Germany, from Jewish culture in the United States to the "State of the Humanities" in the early 1960s – ...
See MoreCulture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer
Edited by Gerd Gemünden and Johannes von Moltke
Culture in the Anteroom, which was co-edited with Gerd Gemünden and published by our own UM Press, assembles essays on the many different disciplinary pursuits of Siegfried Kracauer. Leading scholars from the U.S. and Germany - including UM faculty Kerstin Barndt, Claire Zimmerman, and von Moltke - offer insights into Kracauer's work as an architect, novelist, film theorist, and as cultural critic who commented incisively on art and photography, exhibition culture, urban landscapes, and on the sights and sounds of modernity.
Kracauer had to flee from the Nazis in 1933. He spent...
See MoreNo Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema
Johannes von Moltke (Author)
This is the first comprehensive account of Germany's most enduring film genre, the Heimatfilm, which has offered idyllic variations on the idea that "there is no place like home" since cinema's early days. Charting the development of this popular genre over the course of a century in a work informed by film studies, cultural history, and social theory, Johannes von Moltke focuses in particular on its heyday in the 1950s, a period that has been little studied. Questions of what it could possibly mean to call the German nation "home" after the catastrophes of World War II are...
See MoreArticles
Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion
Johannes von Moltke
Name of Periodical: New German Critique
Volume Number: 34
Issue Number: 3
Year of Publication: 2007
Page Numbers: 17-43
doi Number: 10.1215/009403X-2007-009
Projektionen der Gewalt: Heimkehr (1941)
Johannes von Moltke
Name of Periodical: WerkstattGeschichte
Volume Number: 46
Year of Publication: 2007
Page Numbers: 74-86
Nazi Cinema Revisited
Johannes von Moltke
Name of Periodical: Film Quarterly
Volume Number: 61
Issue Number: 1
Year of Publication: 2007
Page Numbers: 68-72
German History after the Visual Turn
Johannes von Moltke
Name of Periodical: Forum Response
Year of Publication: 2006
Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic
Johannes von Moltke, Julia Hell
Name of Periodical: Germanic Review
Volume Number: 80
Issue Number: 1
Year of Publication: 2005
Page Numbers: 74-95