Olivia DrakeLeo Lensing, professor of film studies, is the author of a review essay titled “Fritz Lang, man of the eye. On the Edgar Allan Poe of German Cinema,” published in the June 15 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (London). The TLS cover article takes stock of Fritz Lang. Die Biographie (Propyläen Verlag, 2014), the first full-length biography in German of the great Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang (1890-1976), and compares it unfavorably with Fritz Lang. The Nature of the Beast, the standard American life by Patrick McGilligan. Lang’s reputation, Lensing writes, continues to be linked primarily to two films he…
A commentary by Leo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, was featured in the Times Literary Supplement in January. The commentary focuses on Austria’s exploitation of Karl Kraus’s great anti-war drama, The Last Days of Mankind, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. Kraus first published the play in four special issues of his satirical journal Die Fackel (The Torch) in 1918–19. "The red wrappers and the documentary photograph of Wilhelm II used as the frontispiece of the epilogue initially lent it the explosive impact of a revolutionary pamphlet," Lensing writes in the commentary. "Kraus…
Lauren RubensteinLeo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, is the co-editor of the book, Träume. Das Traumtagebuch 1875-1931, published by Wallstein Verlag in 2012. Träume is the dream journal of Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931). Schnitzler is the author of La Ronde, Fräulein Else and other classics of early 20-century Austrian literature. Prepared together with Peter Michael Braunwarth to celebrate Schnitzler's 150th birthday, the revised and expanded version of the dream texts originally included in Schnitzler's diaries can be read as an implicit challenge to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. Schnitzler's Träume (Dreams) is both an "unconscious" autobiography of its author, whom Freud called his doppelgänger, and a dark, surreal reflection of…
Leo Lensing, chair and professor of German studies, professor of film studies, is the editor of the book, Peter Altenberg: The Self-Invention of a Poet. Letters and Documents 1892-1896, published by the Wallstein Verlag (Goettingen) in Germany. The 210-page book, published in September, documents the beginning of the literary career of the Viennese writer Peter Altenberg (1859-1919). The book received positive reviews in a Sept. 28 issue of The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, whose arts pages are the most prestigious in the German-speaking world.