Nazis and the Cinema

Before the rise of television, the cinema was a key medium of entertainment and information. The Nazi regime, which inherited the largest film industry outside Hollywood, realised this clearly, with some of the most memorable images of Hitler and his party coming from Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will". Susan Tegel has written a comprehensive account of the films made in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, including the notorious feature film, "Jud Suss", and the compilation documentary Der Ewige Jude. She explores in detail how the film makers were controlled and used by the regime. She also examines other less well-known films featuring Jewish characters. In such films, she relates the historical context to government policies concerning the Jews. Newsreels and documentaries and their place within a cinema programme are discussed as are the two documentaries made in Theresienstadt under the SS rather than the Propaganda Ministry. She looks at the industry itself, its reorganization, funding, the interventions of the Propaganda Ministry headed by Goebbels, the compromises which people had to make, the careerism and the dangers which some faced either of unemployment or worse.

ISBN 1847250009   Pages 320 ISBN13 9781847250001 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.   Weight (grammes) 667 Imprint Hambledon Continuum   Published in London Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 01 Jun 2007   Width (mm) 156 Library of Congress PN   Spine width (mm) 31 DEWEY 791.43094309043   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

1		Hitler : image-building		1
2		Nazi propaganda		9
3		The German film industry to 1918		21
4		Weimar cinema		25
5		The German film industry 1933-1945		37
6		The Kampfzeit films, 1933		49
7		Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the will		75
8		A Judenfrei cinema : 1934-1938		99
9		Two German comedies (1939)		113
10		The Rothschilds and Jud Suss		129
11		Der ewige Jude (1940)		149
12		The Second World War		169
13		Film and the 'final solution'		191
14		Theresienstadt		209
15		Liberation		225

"Susan Tegel deserves applause for achieving exactly what she sets out to accomplish: exploring the intersection of art and politics as well as the efficacy of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda machine ... Tegel's jargon-free prose makes this book a palatable choice for an upper-division course ... Posing questions rather than asserting overambitious claims, Nazis and the Cinema provides its readers with substantial cerebral nourishment" German Studies Review--Alan Rosenfeld

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