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Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany's first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich. This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relat...
This book examines the careers of three of Nazi cinema's preeminent movie actresses, painting a unique portrait of mass entertainment and stardom under Nazi rule. Bruns uses undiscovered sources and a new approach, which integrates visual analysis within a thorough political and social context, to trace how the Nazis tried to use films and stars to build National Socialism. This analysis focuses on female stars - an important but largely unexplored area - because they were mostly responsible for Nazi cinema's spectacular commercial success and political failure. Challenging earlier studies, which view Nazi cinema as an effective propaganda instrument that helped turn Germans into devoted "Aryan" mothers and tough warriors, the book shows that the Nazi regime's liaison with the cinema was ambivalent. Films failed to disseminate a coherent political message and to Nazify German society. However, they helped the regime maintain power by diverting people's attention from the brutality of Hitler's rule and, eventually, from impending defeat.
Overview of Nazi cinema
“A much-needed study of the aesthetics and cultural mores of the Third Reich . . . rich in detail and documentation.” (Kirkus Reviews) Culture was integral to the smooth running of the Third Reich. In the years preceding WWII, a wide variety of artistic forms were used to instill a Nazi ideology in the German people and to manipulate the public perception of Hitler’s enemies. During the war, the arts were closely tied to the propaganda machine that promoted the cause of Germany’s military campaigns. Michael H. Kater’s engaging and deeply researched account of artistic culture within Nazi Germany considers how the German arts-and-letters scene was transformed when the Nazis came to ...
New essays examining the differences and commonalities between late Weimar-era and early Nazi-era German cinema against a backdrop of the crises of that time.
A fresh, nuanced view of Veza Canetti's literary career and its relationship to that of her famous husband. The Viennese playwright, novelist, and short-story writer Veza Canetti was born in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and died in 1963 in London. Part of the avant garde in 1920s Vienna (where she met her future husband and Nobel Prize winner, Elias Canetti), from 1932 she wrote radical short stories drawn from everyday life for the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung. After censorship under the so-called Corporate State reduced her opportunities for publication, she disguised her critique in irony and humor, but from then on published little. Until 1990, when her first novel, Yel...
Goebbels' film programme, his propaganda strategies, the planning of perfidious anti-Semitic feature films and suggestive war newsreels are reflected in these pages, and so is Hitler's influence and the way in which famous film stars coo-operated with the Nazi leadership.
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