About
Johannes von Moltke's research and teaching centers on film and German cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries. He studied in Germany, France, and the US, and has previously taught at the University of Hildesheim in Germany. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema, winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in German Studies. Combining his interests in German, Film, and Cultural Studies, he has published widely on issues in German Cinema, Critical Theory, and 20th-century German culture. Articles on Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno, the work of Alexander Kluge, the role of melodrama and affect in recent historical "event television," on New German Cinema, the phenomenon of stardom in Germany and Hollywood, representations of Jewishness, the culture of Americanization, and popular culture in postwar Germany, and more have appeared, among others, in Criticism, New German Critique, Screen, Cinema Journal, Germanic Review as well as in numerous edited volumes in the U.S. and Germany. Together with Julia Hell and Andreas Gailus, Johannes von Moltke currently serves as executive editor for The Germanic Review, and together with Gerd Gemünden he is the series editor for Screen Cultures: German Film and the Visual at Camden House. He is the organizer of the biannual German Film Institute, was recently elected to the Board of the German Studies Association, and serves on the executive board of the University of Michigan Press.
Professor von Moltke's current research concerns Siegfried Kracauer's role as a cultural theorist at the intersection of the Frankfurt School and the New York Intellectuals. The monograph he is completing is titled "Manhattan Transfer: Siegfried Kracauer, Critical Theory, and the New York Intellectuals." This work has also led to the recent publication of essays by and about Kracauer, respectively: together with Gerd Gemünden (Dartmouth College), von Moltke assembled an interdisciplinary anthology of essays entitled Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer (University of Michigan Press, 2012); and together with Kristy Rawson, who received her PhD in Screen Arts & Cultures at Michigan, he compiled Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2012).
Professor von Moltke's past courses and future teaching interests include Film Analysis, Film Theory, German Film History, Fascist Cinema, New German Cinema, Siegfried Kracauer, Critical Theory, Melodrama and Affect.
Selected Publications
• Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)
• Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer, Gerd Gemünden & Johannes von Moltke, eds. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012)
• No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Winner of the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Germanic Languages and Literatures, 2006
• "Teddie and Friedel: Theodor W. Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and the Erotics of Friendship," in Criticism 51.4 (Fall 2010), pp. 683-694.
• "Projektionen der Gewalt: Heimkehr (1941)," in WerkstattGeschichte no. 46 (Fall 2007) pp. 74-86.
• "Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic" [with Julia Hell], in Germanic Review vol. 80, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 74-95.
• "Sympathy for the Devil: Cinema, History, and the Politics of Emotion" in New German Critique, no. 102
• "Nazi Cinema Revisited" (Review Essay) in Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007)
• "German History after the Visual Turn" (Forum Response)
