[Commlist] CFP - Kubrick's Mitteleuropa: The Central European imaginary in the films of Stanley Kubrick

KUBRICK’S MITTELEUROPA


The Central European imaginary in the films of Stanley Kubrick


edited by Nathan Abrams and Jeremi Szaniawski

Stanley Kubrick was arguably the most important American director of the 
post WWII era. He was born to a secular Jewish family and was never bar 
mitzva’d. However, his Jewish heritage is of great importance to the 
understanding of his oeuvre, and his was specifically a Central European 
Jewish background. As Kubrick told Michel Ciment, his parents had 
Romanian, Polish, and Austro-Hungarian backgrounds. Accordingly, while 
Jewishness runs throughout Kubrick’s oeuvre—albeit on a subsurface 
level—so does a Central European sensibility occupy a strong position in 
it. Kubrick married a German woman, Christiane, adopted her daughter, 
and Christiane’s brother Jan was his executive producer for over twenty 
years.

Like most American intellectuals of his time, Kubrick was exposed to the 
writings of Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, 
Hermann Hesse. The director was a keen admirer of Max Ophüls, whose 
adaptations of Arthur Schnitzler he adored. Fittingly, Kubrick ended his 
life and career by adapting Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle.

Kubrick’s work with Hungarian and Polish composers Bela Bartok, György 
Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki, made their challenging work, informed 
by war and the Holocaust (in the case of Ligeti and Penderecki), world 
famous. They infuse his films with a sense of dread and the sublime that 
are outright unlike anything the Western musical or cinematic canon was 
able to summon.

Kubrick even brought touches of Mitteleuropa to outer space: the 
Viennese waltzes of Johann Strauss, Jr. and the vibrant harmonies of 
Richard Strauss are forever and indelibly linked with Kubrick’s 2001: A 
Space Odyssey. Franz Liszt’s ‘Grey Clouds’ hover, beautiful and ominous, 
over the morgue scene of Eyes Wide Shut. The music of Franz Schubert is 
forever associated with the most moving scenes of Barry Lyndon. 
Stretching the borders of Mitteleuropa ever so slightly, Kubrick also 
used the music of Haendel for the film’s main title (the ‘sarabande’ in 
its re-orchestrations courtesy of Leonard Rosenman), adored Prokofiev’s 
score to Alexander Nevsky, and used the music of Beethoven and 
Shostakovich in equally unforgettable ways for A Clockwork Orange and 
Eyes Wide Shut.

The look of Kubrick’s films, particularly Eyes Wide Shut, was influenced 
by the art of Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and other central European artists.

While Kubrick never set his films in Central Europe (although his 
Napoleon and Wartime Lies unrealized projects would have been located 
there), the area looms large in his oeuvre, and parts of Barry 
Lyndon and Paths of Glory were shot in Germany.

This collection seeks to elicit the ‘Mitteleuropa’ sensitivity in 
Kubrick, but also invites commentary from scholars about the reception 
and understanding of Kubrick in countries such as Germany, Austria, 
Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.


It will be our role also to determine differences between 
Mitteleuropa and Eastern European Jewishness and treatments of Jewish 
people (i.e. the way Jews were treated in Prussia, in Austro-Hungary, 
and in the Russian Empire), the presence of Mitteleuropa (delis, shops, 
music, theater, etc.) in New York during Kubrick's childhood, i.e. the 
presence of German and Polish alongside Central and Eastern European 
Jewish émigrés at the time.

Possible topics might include any of the following, but feel free to 
send us your own suggestions:

_ approaches to the reception of Kubrick's films in the Eastern bloc and 
in the post-communist era

_ the influence of Kubrick's films on contemporary Central and Eastern 
European artists

_ relevant traits of Mitteleuropa culture running through Kubrick's oeuvre

_ Kubrick and Viennese culture

_Kubrick and the Hapsburgs

_ Kubrick and Jügendstil

_ the influence of Max Ophüls

_ Kubrick and György Ligeti; and Krzysztof Penderecki; Bela Bartok, 
Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, but also Dmitri 
Shostakovich

_ Kubrick and silent/Expressionist cinema

_ Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and other German writers in Stanley 
Kubrick's 'The Shining'

_Schnitzler and/or Zweig in Kubrick

_ Schulz and/or Kafka in Kubrick

_ Critical reception of Kubrick's films in the two Germanies; in 
Communist Poland; in Communist Czechoslovakia...

_ Kubrick and the Danube: from the Viennese waltz to enmeshed traits of 
Romanian and Jewish irony

_ Polish posters of Kubrick's films

_Kubrick in Central European translation

_Kubrick and Polanski

_Kubrick and mitteleuropean Jewishness

_Kubrick and the fin-de-siècle

_Kubrick and Viennese history, Peter Gay, Carl E. Schorske.

About the editors:
Nathan Abrams is Professor in Film at Bangor University in Wales, UK. He 
is the author of, most recently, Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish 
Intellectual (Rutgers UP, 2018), Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the 
Making of His Final Film (with Robert Kolker; Oxford UP, 2019), and The 
Bloomsbury Companion to Stanley Kubrick (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Jeremi Szaniawski is Amesbury Professor of Polish Language, Film, 
Literature and Culture at UMass Amherst. He has published extensively on 
Eastern European cinema and is the editor of After Kubrick: 
a Filmmaker’s Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Please send your abstract (no more than 400 words) and short bio by 
October 31st, 2019, to both (n.abrams /at/ bangor.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(n.abrams /at/ bangor.ac.uk)> and (jszaniawski /at/ umass.edu) 
<mailto:(jszaniawski /at/ umass.edu)>.

Submissions in German, Polish, Russian, Czech or Hungarian – to be 
translated into English – will also be considered. However, we ask that 
the initial abstract be sent in English.

Direct and general queries to Jeremi Szaniawski at (jszaniawski /at/ umass.edu) 
<mailto:(jszaniawski /at/ umass.edu)>

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