Stanley Kubrick was arguably one of the most influential American directors of the post-World War II era, whose Central European Jewish heritage, though often overlooked, greatly influenced his oeuvre. Kubrick's Mitteleuropa explores this influence in ways that range from his work with Hungarian and Polish composers Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki to the visual inspiration of artists such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, and other Central European Modernists. Beyond exploring the Mitteleuropean sensibility in Kubrick's films, the contributions in this volume also provide important commentary on the reception of his films in countries across Eastern Europe.

Nathan Abrams is a professor of film, as well as thelead director for the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studiesat Bangor University in Wales.He is a founding co-editor of Jewish Film and New Media: An International Journal, and his most recent books include Kubrick: An Odyssey (Pegasus Books, 2024), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual (Rutgers University Press, 2018), as well as the edited collections Eyes Wide Shut: Behind Stanley Kubrick’s Masterpiece (Liverpool University Press, 2023), and The Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Jeremi Szaniawski is Associate Professor of comparative literature and film studies, and the Amesbury Professor of Polish Language and Culture in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the editor of After Kubrick: A Filmmaker’s Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2020), and of the online dossier “The Shining at 40” (Senses of Cinema, 2020), as well as the co-editor, among others, of Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2022), and Gender, Power, and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick (Routledge, 2023).

“Scholarship on film director Stanley Kubrick has grown substantially since his death in 1999. Abrams…leads the field by exploring the connections between Kubrick's upbringing and subtle Jewish manifestations in his films. [This volume] seeks to break fresh ground by building on those connections through the lens of Kubrick's Central European ancestry… The editors succeed in crafting a fresh contribution to the study of Stanley Kubrick… Highly recommended.” • Choice

“With some fascinating insights into an unusual topic new to Kubrick studies, this wide-ranging collection of essays firmly and persuasively situates Stanley Kubrick's work in the art and culture of Central Europe.” • Robert Kolker, the University of Maryland, author of A Cinema of Loneliness, co-author of Kubrick: An Odyssey

“An admirably multisided, cultured and suggestive inspection of some of the key ways in which works and intellectual traditions associated with Mitteleuropa cast shifting shadows across the oeuvre of Stanley Kubrick. Mitteleuropa here is not only Germanic but also embraces the rich non-Germanic, post-Habsburg cultures of early twentieth century art, music and literature, whose branchings are traced as often intertwining with the mysteriously unnamed presence in Kubrick’s work of his Jewishness.” • Paul Coates, Western University, Ontario, Canada, author of Comparative Cinema: Late and Last Things in Literature and Film and editor of Lucid Dreams: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieślowski

“This collection of essays provides informative, impressively researched commentary on an important but neglected aspect of Stanley Kubrick’s films. Again and again, the authors show us how deeply his pictures were influenced by the middle-European origins of his family. We learn this was true even in such ostensibly unrelated examples as 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining. His entire work is discussed here, along with the most fascinating of his late-career projects, The Aryan Papers. There are intriguing essays on the Polish reception of Kubrick’s films and his special use of Kafka and Penderecki. The result is a major contribution to the growing literature on Kubrick’s art.” • James Naremore, Indiana University Bloomington, author of The Magic World of Orson Welles, More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts, and On Kubrick.