This event is part of the Goethe-Institut New York's "Queer as German Folk" series, with which we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots as a milestone in the fight for gender diversity and equality.
"Queer as German Folk" is a project of the Goethe-Instituts North America in cooperation with the Schwules Museum Berlin, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung).
Realized in cooperation with The DC Center for the LGBT Community, The Rainbow History Project, and Whitman-Walker Health.
#queerasgermanfolk #qagf #stonewall50 #smu #bpb
As a part of the Goethe-Institut North America’s
Queer as German Folk series – in which we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn Uprising as a milestone in the fight for gender diversity and equality – the Goethe-Institut Washington and its many local project partners have selected a number of culturally- and historically-significant films from Germany and North America, highlighting various aspects of queer rights movements. We present
Kino-Q, a film series that guides viewers through parts of this history, paired with expert-led discussions.
Coming Out
German Democratic Republic, 1989, 112 min., Director: Heiner Carow.
An introduction to the film will be provided by Dr. Richard Langston, Associate Professor of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. A discussion will follow.
East Berlin, around the end of the 1980s: Philipp, a young teacher, begins a relationship with his colleague Tanja. He has kept his real sexual orientation a secret for years, until his re-encounter with Jacob – a former friend, who is gay – makes him aware of his repressed longing.
In a gay pub, Philipp meets Matthias and falls in love with him. From then on, he leads a double life: Tanja must learn nothing of Matthias, and Matthias must learn nothing of Tanja. But this cannot go on for long.
Coming Out was the first and only feature film of the German Democratic Republic that dealt openly with the subject of homosexuality. It premiered on November 9, 1989, the evening of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
RSVP
Heiner Carow was born in 1929 in Rostock. In 1950, he began his film education in the directing class of the DEFA (East German state film studio) junior studio. From 1954 to 1956, Carow was a director in the DEFA studio for popular science films. From 1956, he was a director in the DEFA studio for feature films. He passed away in January 1997.
Richard Langston is Associate Professor of the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies. His research crisscrosses the media divides between 20th- and 21st-century German literature, film, television and art. A common theme in much of his research is the question of aesthetic politics within and between media like literature and moving images. What do texts seek to achieve within and without their own textual boundaries? In his first monograph,
Visions of Violence (Northwestern, 2008), he tracks the evolution of German avant-garde praxis from the 1930s to 2000 and in his nearly completed second book project,
Dark Matter, he interrogates the centrality of "gravitational thinking" in both the social philosophy of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge as well as Kluge's prose, film and television programming. A third project tentatively entitled
Literary Values imagines modern and contemporary German drama and fiction like portfolios where otherwise worthless matter is suffused with exceptional surplus value and knowledge of literary worlds emerges from exchange value.
Back
