The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Rentschler); Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Schulte-Sasse) (original) (raw)
Echoes from the Archive: Retrieving and Re-viewing Cinematic Remnants of the Nazi Past
Film footage made in the Third Reich and since found in the archive has recently provoked new forms of cinematic engagement with the incriminating images that often emphasize the perpetrator’s perspective on historic events. This essay will discuss three films that retrieve and examine archival footage from the Nazi period in an attempt to develop strategies that undo or counteract the perpetrator gaze inscribed in these images. A Film Unfinished (Israel/Germany 2010) by Israeli filmmaker Yael Hersonski investigates the traces of infamous film footage shot by German cameramen in the Warsaw Ghetto. In an attempt to understand the disturbing archival material, Hersonski juxtaposes it with other written sources and testimonies. In Aufschub (Respite, Germany/South Korea 2007), German filmmaker Harun Farocki recovers moving images from the Jewish transit camp in Westerbork. Evoking echoes of the past, Farocki frames the images with intertitles and thus initiates a process of re-reading. But already in 1988, East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann had discovered two films stored for several decades in a local archive in Stuttgart depicting anti-Jewish measures in southern Germany shortly before the majority of the Jewish population was deported to the death camps in the East. In Die Lüge und der Tod (The Deceivers and the Dead, GDR 1988), the filmmakers contextualize and examine this found footage. I will analyze these examples, showing how they frame, interrogate, and contextualize “original” footage to reflect critically on archive films and their relation to the Nazi past they claim to document.
Eric Rentschler. The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2019
Books, like films, always mean more than their authors might have intended," opines Eric Rentschler (87), when commenting on one of Klaus Kreimeier's earlier historiographical tomes, Die Ufa-Story: Geschichte eines Konzerns from 1992. The remark could equally apply to Rentschler's own eclectic historiography, comprising reprints from journal articles, book chapters, and catalogue contributions first published between 1985 and 2013 and now cohabiting within the same book covers, effectively charting his own coherent take on German fi lm history. The effect is certainly intriguing, revealing the incremental assembly, "Stück für Stück," of a comprehensive vision of this national cinema across the course of one scholar's illustrious career. In this regard, the volume constitutes as much an autobiography of Rentschler's scholarly evolution as it does a historiography of German film, evincing self-reflexivity most especially in the bookended introduction and closing comments. That closing chapter describes two visits to the Berlinale-a festival Rentschler first visited in 1979 and has attended annually between 1985 and today, making a point to note that he has missed it only once during that time span. This fact alone bespeaks an extraordinary commitment to and unabating passion for German cinema, one that has rendered him not only fluent in the canonized highlights of this national cinema but also savvy about the lesser known and underestimated directors and their films-a consideration which solicits a rethinking of inherited tropes and assumptions. Transposing one's scholarly career into a coherent table of contents poses its own challenges, but the current organization works quite effectively, moving in chronological order across key epochal divisions in German film history while also enabling novel ways of identifying both continuities and discontinuities across eras with regard to modes of production, aesthetics, politics, and criticism. In what may very well be a reflexive gesture towards Rentschler's own contribution to the enterprise of film reception, the first section focuses on key German figures in film criticism, beginning with an essay on notable early writers Siegfried Kracauer and Rudolf Arnheim. Rentschler argues that the social and formal divisions all too often drawn between these two theorists dissolves if one reviews their writings as a whole, including overlooked and untranslated texts that reveal that Kracauer also acknowledged the imbrication of aesthetics within the social, and that Arnheim, by turns, possessed a sensitivity to the
German Life and Letters, 2006
The following article examines the contribution of German feature films about the Third Reich and the Holocaust to memory discourse in the wake of German unification. A comparison between East and West German films made since the 1990s reveals some startling asymmetries and polarities. While East German film-makers, if they continued to work in Germany's reunified film industry at all, made very few films about the Third Reich, West German directors took advantage of the recent memory boom. Whereas films made by East German directors, such as Erster Verlust and Der Fall Ö, suggest, in liberating contradiction to the anti-fascist interpretation of history, that East Germany shared the burden of guilt, West German productions subscribe to the normalisation discourse that has gained ideological hegemony in the East-West-German memory contest since unification. Films such as Aimée & Jaguar and Rosenstraße construct a memory of the past that is no longer encumbered by guilt, principally because the relationship between Germans and Jews is re-imagined as one of solidarity. As post-memory films, they take liberties with the traumatic memory of the past and, by following the generic conventions of melodrama, family saga and European heritage cinema, even lend it popular appeal.
The Author and his Corpse: German Classical Culture in the Cinema of Occupied Germany
German Life and Letters, 2018
The status of German High Culture and that of German National identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way setting the German National project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke described in 1907 as a Kulturnation.[2] With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946,[3] he sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, now defined by barbarism and folly by the Allied powers occupying it. In examining two films, Georg Klaren’s 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck,[4] and Karl-Heinz Stroux’s 1949 filming of Goethe’s Werther[5], released in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic my paper will cast new light on this dilemma through the popular medium of Cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. I shall examine the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and look at what role they fulfil in a recuperative project of German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.
Whence Did German Propaganda Films Derive Their Power
Reason Papers, 2016
The history of cinema is an important tool for understanding the use of film for propaganda and indoctrination. Scholars of propaganda should be grateful to Ian Garden, because his The Third Reich's Celluloid War 1 is a comprehensive and insightful history of Nazi propaganda films. He holds that the Nazis understood propaganda to be a powerful weapon and that they wielded it more effectively than did the Allies. He also notes, though, that the Nazi propaganda machine made a great number of mistakes. He seeks to explain the key features of the major German propaganda films, the degree to which they were propagandistic, and how effective they were. Upon reviewing his work, I conclude that although Garden offers thoughtful reflections in many ways, he understates the unique power of Nazi propaganda film. Garden discusses briefly the nature of propaganda, defining it as messaging aimed at persuasion (p. 11). Understood that way, propaganda is a benign concept; however, after persistent misuse over a century by political agents, it now pejoratively means the dispersing of mendacious information. On his view, propaganda doesn't necessarily involve lying or distorting the truth-though it often does. Propaganda may involve stating facts that are true, but they are so selectively presented that they mislead the audience into the point of view the propagandist is pushing. Garden adds that this sort of biased reporting-called "special pleading"-is difficult to get away with in a society that has a free and balanced press, because competing media can present the other side (p. 12).
Inside Nazi Germany and PR war films in America
Public Relations Review, 2013
This article analyses Jack Glenn and Louis de Rochemont's Inside Nazi Germany (1938), a screen magazine from The March of Time. The aim of this paper is to analyze Inside Nazi Germany as a public relations war effort of the 20th century. Arising from the informative and propagandistic strategy of late 1930s newsreels, this documentary was made using very appropriate narrative techniques to award it the dimension of objectivity and truthfulness characteristic of public relations messages, without losing sight of its educational and persuasive function. From this standpoint, Inside Nazi Germany constituted one of the clearest precedents of public relations war films in America.
The Author and His Corpse: German Classical Culture in the National Cinema of Occupied Germany
German Life and Letters, 2018
The status of German high culture and that of German national identity have historically been bound up with each other in a unique way, setting the German national project apart in Europe as what Friedrich Meinecke, among others, described as a 'Kulturnation'. With the appearance of his work Die deutsche Katastrophe in 1946, Meinecke sought to revisit his discussion of Germany as a nation defined by his earlier conception of cultural value as a means to recover moral standing for a defeated and shamed nation, thereby challenging the Allied occupiers' disparagement of Germany as barbarous and foolish. By examining two films, Georg Klaren's 1947 Soviet Zone adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck and Karl-Heinz Stroux's 1949 filming of Goethe's Werther, produced in the Tri-Zone just before the founding of the Federal Republic, this article casts new light on this dilemma of cultural self-definition through the popular medium of cinema. Both films feature the authors themselves as diegetic mediators for the adaptations of their work. The article examines the choices of Büchner and Goethe as authors for the screen and looks at the role they fulfil in a project to recuperate German cultural and national identity under Allied occupation.