Witnessing insanity Book

This is an interesting book. One at the crossroads of Art, Psychology and History. The object at stake (The New German Cinema) is that one of the post-war Germany. It's about the task of mourning and reconstruction. It's about new (art) ways to confront the past and imagine a new, autonomous future.
"For years I have been attempting through literary and filmic means to change opera stories: to disarm the fifth act ...we must work to develop an imaginary opera, to bring forth an alternative opera world" Alexandre Kluge
The author writes: "...the New German Cinema has been indelibly marked by filmmakers and commentators alike with themes of loss, guilt, paralysis, and grief. Freud's 1915 Mourning and Melancholia provided the theoretical backbone to that mourning work constituting mourning and melancholia as normal and neurotic responses...to loss (...)"fatherless" Germany was unable to mourn and work through its guilty past".


"As I noted in Chapter One, Freud model of somatic conversion in hysteria influenced film scholars analysing melodramatic excesses in the 1980's"
The book is about a discussion of German films,... "made in Germany". And some still echo the "separation" issue; the nationalistic stance; the demarcation from the American influence. See this Wim Wenders quote: "The Yanks have colonized our unconscious", in his 1976 movie "Im lauf der Zeit".