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Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany’s first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich. This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film’s thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola’s various “incarnations.”

In one of the first books to address the New German Cinema from a feminist perspective, Barbara Kosta looks closely at two autobiographical films, Helma Sanders-Brahms's Germany, Pale Mother and Jutta Br'ckner's Years of Hunger; and at two books, Ruth Rehmann's Man in the Pulpit: Questions for a Father, and Christa Wolf's Patterns of Childhood. In different ways, Kosta shows, these works of the 1970s and 1980s have recast traditional autobiography, offering fresh characters in new roles, exploring innovative forms of expression, and confronting long-repressed themes such as the devaluation of the female voice and the horror of Germany's fascist past.

Proceedings of the 26th annual conference of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education, held in Auckland in December 2009. 180 presentations were made by 440 authors. The conference theme reflects the changing nature of the student learning and teaching environment and the fact that the internet and digital tools are influencing the way educators and students interact, learn and teach, and the locations in which this occurs.

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Even after her marriage to well bred Stephen Dallas ends, irrepressible Stella is determined to give their daughter the life she never had.