Cultural History Through a National Socialist Lens

by Reimer, Robert C.

• ISBN13: 9781571131645
• ISBN10: 1571131647
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-01
• Publisher: Camden House

Summary

This collection of essays offers a view of Nazi Germany through an analysis of twenty films. These represent a sampling of the period's directors and reflect the film medium's major genres. For 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 I>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. Yet 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.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Acknowledgments	x
Chronology of Films	xi
Introduction: Modernity Writ German: State of the Art of the Nazi State	1	(10)
David Bathrick
Reflections of Weimar Cinema in the Nazi Propaganda Films SA-Mann Brand, Hitlerjunge Quex, Hans Westmar	11	(26)
Heidi Faletti
Luis Trenker: A Rebel in the Third Reich? Der Rebell, Der verlorene Sohn, and Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, Condottieri, and Der Feuerteufel	37	(28)
Franz A. Birgel
The Director and the Diva: The Film Musicals of Detlef Sierck and Zarah Leander: Zu neuen Ufern and La Habanera	65	(19)
Thomas R. Nadar
Fear of Flying: Education to Manhood in Nazi Film Comedies: Gluckskinder and Quax, der Bruchpilot	84	(25)
Cary Nathenson
Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich's Heimat	109	(24)
Florentine Strzelczyk
A Cinematic Construction of Nazi Anti-Semitism: The Documentary Der ewige Jude	133	(22)
Joan Clinefelter
Escaping Home: Leni Riefenstahl's Visual Poetry in Tiefland	155	(21)
Roger Russi
Literary Nazis? Adapting Nineteenth-Century German Novellas for the Screen: Der Schimmelreiter, Kleider machen Leute, and Immensee	176	(21)
Richard J. Rundell
The Spectacle of War in Die große Liebe	197	(17)
Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien
Turning Inward: An Analysis of Helmut Kautner's Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska; Romanze in Moll; Unter den Brucken	214	(26)
Robert C. Reimer
Working for the Man, Whoever That May Be: The Vocation of Wolfgang Liebeneiner	240	(28)
John E. Davidson
Works Cited	268	(17)
Index	285