Abstract

City Seminar: Andrew Webber This paper considers the 2005 film Gespenster (Ghosts) by one of Germany’s leading contemporary directors, Christian Petzold. It is a film about identity, relationship and loss, set between the cultivated wilderness of the Tiergarten Park and the sterilised modernity under surveillance of the reconstructed Potsdamer Platz. Reading the film with Derrida’s Specters of Marx, the paper considers what is the character – ontological and political – of the haunting that gives the film its title.

Andrew Webber is Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture in Cambridge. He undertakes research in German and Austrian culture in the modern period, with special interests in narrative writing, film, and cultural theory and analysis.