Audiences for contemporary German film and television are becoming increasingly transnational, and depictions of German cultural history are moving beyond the typical post-war focus on Germany’s problematic past. Entertaining German Culture explores this radical shift, building on recent research into transnational culture to argue that a new process of internal and external cultural reabsorption is taking place through areas of mutually assimilating cultural exchange such as streaming services, an increasingly international film market, and the import and export of Anglo-American media formats.

Stephan Ehrig is a Lecturer in German at the University of Glasgow. He previously taught at the universities of Bristol, Durham, and University College Dublin. He is the author of The Dialectical Kleist (Transcript, 2018) and is coeditor of The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (Peter Lang, 2018) and Exploring the Transnational Neighbourhood: Integration, Community, and Cohabitation (Leuven UP, 2022).

Benjamin Schaper is a Stipendiary Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford. He was formerly a Teaching Fellow at the universities of Munich and Durham, as well as a Sylvia Naish Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research in London. He is the author of Poetik und Politik der Lesbarkeit in der deutschen Literatur (Winter, 2017).

Elizabeth Ward is a film historian specializing in German cinema. She is a Lecturer at the Europa-Universität Viadrina. Her monograph, East German Film and the Holocaust was published in 2021 with Berghahn Books.

“This is a state-of-the-art introduction and overview of current issues in German film and, even more particularly, television culture.” • Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon University