Nazis and the Cinema

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Description

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, 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 Sss, and the compilation documentary Der Ewige Jude. She explores in detail how the film makers were controlled and used by the regime and examines other less well-known films featuring Jewish characters and how their image differed from film to film. She also 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.

Reviews

Tegel's work offers a comprehensive, accessible introduction to the cinema of the Third Reich through the lens of antisemitism. * American Historical Review *
Susan Tegel, the historian who advised the legal team that was preparing to sue Leni Riefenstahl for Holocaust denial, is the latest scholar to analyze fully the role played by movies in the Third Reich. It's a testament to the field's richness that her Nazis and the Cinema covers territory left largely unexplored in the two major books on the subject, Linda Schulte-Sasse's Entertaining the Third Reich, and Eric Rentschler's Ministry of Illusion (both published in 1996) ... [Tegel] emphasize[s], in a way that they do not, the manner in which Jews were represented on the German screen. -- J. Hoberman * Film Comment *
Susan Tegel's book is a brilliant pulling-together of a lot of research and thinking about film in the Nazi era. -- Taylor Downing * History Today *
It is an important volume for historians, sociologists, and film scholars alike. -- Cynthia J. Miller * History: Reviews of New Books *
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. -- Alan Rosenfeld * German Studies Review *
Tegel's judicious overview is the only English-language account to build on recent German micro-histories. * The London Review of Books *
Susan Tegel's Nazis and the Cinema is built on an immensely rich bibliography, uniting research from across Europe, as well as Israel and North America. Tegel wears her impressive learning lightly, but there is no mistaking her extensive familiarity with her sources. * War in History *
Informed by a substantial amount of primary source research [this book] offers new perspectives on the subject. It is also lucidly written and persuasively argued Tegels approach is very much that of the historian with the emphasis throughout on understanding films in context Overall, this is a highly illuminating and well-researched book that will almost certainly become the standard text for a generation. -- James Chapman * Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature *

Author Bio

Susan Tegel was formerly head of History at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is the author of Jew Suss (2011).