Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens - Essays on Cinema of Nazi Germany

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 groe 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 influenced them as well

Robert C. Reimer is professor of German at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte