Description
Book SynopsisA fascinating look at Nazi Germany as revealed in its films. This collection of essays offers a view of Nazi Germany through an analysis of twenty films, representing a sampling of the period's directors and reflecting the film medium's major genres. In spite of the control that Goebbels's film industry exercised over all aspects of filmmaking in the Third Reich, the films reveal an individuality that belies subsuming them under any one rubric or containing them within any one theory. Films such as Hitlerjunge Quex, Die große Liebe, and Auf Wiedersehen Franziska represent the Nazi film industry's efforts to propagandize through entertainment. Others such as Immensee, Kleider machen Leute, and Der Schimmelreiter reveal an attempt to expropriate Germany's rich literary past for the regime. These literary adaptations and films like Glückskinder, La Habanera, and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien today seem void of Nazi ideology if viewed outside the context of Nazism. But another film, Der ewige Jude, shocks us with its virulent anti-Semitism and hateful propaganda almost sixty years after its release. All of the films treated, regardless of their fame or notoriety or the level of commitment of their directors to the Nazi cause, played an important role in a cinema that not only represents the dreams and lives of the citizens of the Third Reich, but influencedthem as well. Robert C. Reimer is professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
Trade Review...gathers forward the argument that propaganda need not be defined as the willful product of government...seeks...a historical context in which, through movies, the reader might approach the complex intersections of German cultural values and Nazism. A thoughtful book with a thorough bibliography, illuminating stills, and a useful index. * CHOICE *
Table of ContentsIntroduction - modernity writ German - state of the art as art of the Nazi state; reflections of the Weimar cinema in the Nazi propaganda films "SA-Mann Brand", "Hitlerjunge Quex" and "Hans Westmar"; Luis Trenker - a rebel in the Third Reich?; the director and the diva - th efilm musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander; fear of flying - education to manhood in Nazi film comedies; far away, so close - Carl Froelich's "Heimat"; a cinematic constructioon of Nazi anti-Semitism - the documentary "Der ewige Jude"; escaping home - Leni Riefenstahl's visual poetry in "Tiefland"; literary Nazis? - adapting 19th-century German novellas for the screen; the spectacle of war in "Die grosse Liebe"; turning inward - an analysis of Helmut Kautner's "Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska", "Romanze in Moll", "Unter den Brucken"; working for the man, whoever that might be - the vocation of Wolfgang Liebeneiner.
