Author William Mahan

William Mahan

William Mahan is a Ph.D. candidate in the German Department at the University of California, Davis. His current research is focused on humanity’s relationship to ghosts of the past in German and Austrian literature and film from the turn of the 20th Century to the present day, considering societal changes in government and ideology as well as technological progress. He has recently presented essays on “enviromorphism” in Alfred Döblin’s Wang-lun and world visions in Brecht's The Good Person of Sezuan, and has forthcoming articles on Christoph Ransmayr’s Atlas eines ängstlichen Mannes in the Journal of Austrian Studies, and on Holocaust trauma representation in Humanities Journal.

Ghosts and their Prices: Surveillance and Image Economies in Christian Petzold’s Cinema

William Mahan

September 2017

Christian Petzold: A Dossier

This essay examines Christian Petzold’s lesser-known, early films of the 90s in their depiction of the German economy’s impact on individuals’ image-perception and then takes up his better-known film Die innere...