German Studies

Part I of "Olympia" documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany.

Part II of "Olympia" documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics.

his film, commissioned by Adolf Hitler to record the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, is the "most powerful piece of propaganda ever produced". Included are many scenes of gatherings, marches, and parades. The viewer will also hear speeches given by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and Hess as well as samples of monumental architecture designed by Albert Speer

A film commissioned by Adolf Hitler as the official record of the Nuremberg Party Rally of 1933

"Bismarck - ein Stück deutscher Geschichte, ein ungekrönter Herrscher und grosser Staatsmann. Der Film zeigt wichtige Stationen seines Lebens: Heersereform, Deutches-Dänischer Krieg, Treffen mit Napoleon, Krieg mit Österreich, Einigung der deutschen Fürsten, Kaiserproklamation."--Container

The Third Reich's tribute to the Prussian hero Frederick II portrays his struggle for victory during the Seven Years War. Considered by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, to be of paramount ideological significance

"Mobilized Germany's most talented artists ... to re-create the true story of a Prussian town's rebellion against Napoleon's army of occupation. Laced with anti-Christian symbolism and National Socialist ideology, the film is a mirror of Hitler Germany's own war for survival. In its characterization of Kolberg's besieged citizenry, the epic allegorically reflects the spirit of fanatical resolve to fight on, that Nazi propaganda was attempting to instill in the German population during the final years of World War II"--Container

"A visit to the Lodz ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, recorded by German cameramen with the naïve cooperation of the Jewish community, is combined with rare archival footage, clips from international newsreels and excerpts from related cultural films to portray the world's Jews as swindlers and parasites. This pseudo-logical, uncomfortably realistic and genuinely frightening documentary interprets Jewish life and history from the viewpoint of traditional European anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology." -- Container

This notorious Nazi propaganda historical costume melodrama is based on the Nazi version of the novel of the same title by Lion Feuchtwanger, which is based on the real historical character of Josef Süss Oppenheimer who was a Jewish tax advisor to Karl Alexander during the early 1700s and was publicly executed in Stuttgart for manipulation of state funds

In this musical farce, the first major Nazi Germany anti-semitic film, two 19th century vagabonds rob a Jewish banker and his friend to help a girl being forced to marry another Jew. Jews are portrayed here as clumsy, dull, greedy, and lecherous

The Rothschilds was the first of three stridently antisemitic movies made in 1940 under the Nazi regime. A purportedly "historical" account of the Rothschild family's rise to fortune, set mostly in Great Britain during the Napoleonic wars, the movie reflected a wildly ambitious racial-political agenda. Beyond its indictment of "Jewish" intrigue and avarice, The Rothschilds aimed to show the "Judafication" of British society at Rothschild hands, and thus demonstrate why, in Joseph Goebbels' words, Britons had become "the Jews among Aryans." Yet the film's dramatic conventions did not always mesh with its racial politics, and when the film was released in July 1940, German audiences were left unclear as to just who they were mainly supposed to hate. Goebbels had it pulled from distribution; a year later, a much-revised version, purged of any conceivable sympathies for its British characters, was released. The revamped movie was renamed The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo; this is the version presented on this DVD. But by the time of its re-release, the movie's moment had passed. Germany's air war with Britain was winding down to an inglorious end, while at home, a new, wildly popular film, Jud Süss, had become the regime's preferred vehicle for whipping up antisemitic feeling. If, in the end, The Rothschilds proved a less effective incitement to hate, it wasn't for lack of trying. With its striking juxtaposition of Nazi social criticism and racial theory, its twin assaults upon Jewish and British character, and its deft recycling of many key myths surrounding the House of Rothschild, this film deserves far more notoriety than has been its due

Nazi propaganda film portrays Jews in negative light; Anti-Semitic/racist stereotypes of greed/shrewdness in Warsaw Ghetto

Hanna Heyt, a young woman married to Thomas, a doctor and medical researcher, is stricken with multiple sclerosis. She pleads with her husband and his friend Werther, also a doctor, to assist in her death. Werther refuses, but Thomas complies. After seeing what happened to a young child with meningitis whom he saved, Werther has second thoughts about refusing Hanna and testifies at Thomas' trial. The trial provides a forum for a debate on euthanasia

This is the first publication to bring together comparative research on the international expansion of Third Reich cinema. This volume investigates various attempts to infiltrate - economically, politically and culturally - the film industries of 20 countries and regions either occupied by, friendly with or neutral towards Nazi Germany.

In this persuasive reversal of previous scholarship, Linda Schulte-Sasse takes an unorthodox look at Nazi cinema, examining Nazi films as movies that contain propaganda rather than as propaganda vehicles that happen to be movies. Like other Nazi artistic productions, Nazi film has long been regarded as kitsch rather than art, and therefore unworthy of critical textual analysis. By reading these films as consumer entertainment, Schulte-Sasse reveals the similarities between Nazi commercial film and classical Hollywood cinema and, with this shift in emphasis, demonstrates how Hollywood-style movie formulas frequently compromised Nazi messages. Drawing on theoretical work, particularly that of Lacan and Zizek, Schulte-Sasse shows how films such as Jew Süsss and The Great King construct fantasies of social harmony, often through distorted versions of familiar stories from eighteenth-century German literature, history, and philosophy. Schulte-Sasse observes, for example, that Nazi films, with their valorization of bourgeois culture and use of familiar narrative models, display a curious affinity with the world of Enlightenment culture that the politics of National Socialism would seem to contradict. Schulte-Sasse argues that film served National Socialism less because of its ideological homogeneity than because of the appeal and familiarity of its underlying literary paradigms and because the medium itself guarantees a pleasurable illusion of wholeness. Entertaining the Third Reich will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those engaged in the study of cinema, popular culture, Nazism and Nazi art, the workings of fascist culture, and the history of modern ideology.

A landmark, now classic, study of the rich cinematic history of the Weimar Republic, From Caligari to Hitler was first published by Princeton University Press in 1947. Siegfried Kracauer--a prominent German film critic and member of Walter Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's intellectual circle--broke new ground in exploring the connections between film aesthetics, the prevailing psychological state of Germans in the Weimar era, and the evolving social and political reality of the time. Kracauer's pioneering book, which examines German history from 1921 to 1933 in light of such movies as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis, and The Blue Angel, has never gone out of print. Now, over half a century after its first appearance, this beautifully designed and entirely new edition reintroduces Kracauer for the twenty-first century. Film scholar Leonardo Quaresima places Kracauer in context in a critical introduction, and updates the book further with a new bibliography, index, and list of inaccuracies that crept into the first edition. This volume is a must-have for the film historian, film theorist, or cinema enthusiast. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer made a startling (and still controversial) claim: films as a popular art provide insight into the unconscious motivations and fantasies of a nation. In films of the 1920s, he traced recurring visual and narrative tropes that expressed, he argued, a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule. The book has become an undisputed classic of film historiography, laying the foundations for the serious study of film. Kracauer was an important film critic in Weimar Germany. A Jew, he escaped the rise of Nazism, fleeing to Paris in 1933. Later, in anguish after Benjamin's suicide, he made his way to New York, where he remained until his death in 1966. He wrote From Caligari to Hitler while working as a "special assistant" to the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's film division. He was also on the editorial board of Bollingen Series. Despite many critiques of its attempt to link movies to historical outcomes, From Caligari to Hitler remains Kracauer's best-known and most influential book, and a seminal work in the study of film. Princeton published a revised edition of his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality in 1997.

German film-goers flocked to see musicals and melodramas during the Nazi era. Although the Nazis seemed to require that every aspect of ordinary life advance the fascist project, even the most popular films depicted characters and desires that deviated from the politically correct ideal. Probing into the contradictory images of womanhood that surfaced in these films, Antje Ascheid shows how Nazi heroines negotiated the gender conflicts that confronted contemporary women.The careers of Kristina Soderbaum, Lilian Harvey, and Zarah Leander speak to the Nazis' need to address and contain the woman question, to redirect female subjectivity and desires to self sacrifice for the common good (i.e., national socialism). Hollywood's new women and glamorous dames were out; the German wife and mother were in. The roles and star personas assigned to these actresses, though intended to entertain the public in a politically conformist way, point to the difficulty of yoking popular culture to ideology.