German Wartime Memory, American Exceptionalism, and Post-Cold War Blockbuster Cinema

This book excavates the diverse and mostly unnoticed political meanings made available to American and German audiences by the blockbuster films helmed by transplanted West German directors Roland Emmerich and Wolfgang Petersen. Through formal film analysis, broad consideration of American and German film criticism, and reflection on relevant political developments of the post-Cold War era, the book reveals how traces of Germany’s experience of dictatorship and wartime destruction find inadverte