Hitler - Films from Germany

For more than fifty years, German films about the Third Reich hardly ever featured its leader. Since the late 1990s, however, there has been a steadily increasing number of 'Hitler films'. Big-budget cinema productions like Downfall (2004) as well as publicly funded television series have given Hitler an unprecedented prominence and fundamentally recast his image in German popular culture. In Hitler - Films from Germany, a group of international experts take stock of these transformations. Film and cultural historians discuss the most recent depictions of Hitler in the context of earlier ones and critically assess their impact on the collective memory of National Socialism in the Berlin Republic. Enhanced by more than 100 illustrations, this volume brings a fresh, interdisciplinary perspective to the latest Hitler wave.

The first book-length study to critically examine the recent wave of Hitler biopics in German cinema and television. A group of international experts discuss films like Downfall in the context of earlier portrayals of Hitler and draw out their implications for the changing place of the Third Reich in the national historical imagination.

' superbly researched and presented Editors Machtans and Ruehl greatly enrich our understanding of Hitler's representations in German cinema and television.' - Alan Marcus, University of Aberdeen, UK

' a thought-provoking collection, with some outstanding essays. This volume

makes an important intervention in debates about film and the Third Reich, the depiction of history on screen, and the politics of memory.' - Jo Fox, Durham University, UK

'With historical precision and theoretical nuance, Hitler Films from Germany illuminates German cinema's enduring fascination with Hitler. A rich and revealing book about a past that refuses to go away.' - Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley, USA

'Hitler Films from Germany is an excellent collection of meticulously researched scholarship that demonstrates the complex and contradictory ways in which Hitler figures as an object of fascination in past and contemporary German media productions.' - Monatshefte

Autorentext
KAROLIN MACHTANS is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Connecticut College, USA. From 2006 to 2010, she was DAAD Lecturer at Sidney Sussex College and St John's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests lie in twentieth and twenty-first-century German literature and film, Turkish-German and German-Jewish literature, representations of the Holocaust, and the interrelations between literature and history. Her first book, which examines the autobiographical writings of Saul Friedländer and Ruth Klüger in the context of their scholarly work, was published in 2009 by Max Niemeyer Verlag. She is currently working on a book-length study of the representation of Istanbul in German literature and film.
MARTIN A. RUEHL is Lecturer in German Thought at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge University, UK, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Germany. His research concentrates on the myths and memories that have shaped German society and culture in the twentieth century. He has published books and articles on Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Stefan George. For the Cambridge MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures, he lectures on fascist cinema and the representations of fascism in post-war European film.

Inhalt
Introduction; K.Machtans & M.Ruehl PART I TOTEM AND TABOO The Fuhrer's Fake: Presence of an Afterlife; E.Rentschler 'Hitler's shadow still looms over us': G.W. Pabst's The Last Ten Days as Film and Event; M.Toteberg Our Hitler : A Film by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg; T.Elsaesser PART II ANOTHER HITLER Entombing the Nazi Past: On Downfall and Historicism; S.Hake Tragedy and Farce: Dani Levy's Mein Fuhrer; M.D.Richardson Man, Demon, Icon: Hitler's Image between Cinematic Representation and Historical Reality; M.Elm Hitler Wars: Guilt and Complicity from Hirschbiegel to Harald Schmidt; M.Butter PART III APPROXIMATIONS Hitler Nonfictional: On Didacticism and Exploitation in Recent Documentary Films; K.Stutterheim Encountering Hitler: Seductive Charisma and Memory Spaces in Heinrich Breloer's Speer & Hitler; A.Bangert Conclusion: Far Away So Close: Loving to Hate Hitler; J.von Moltke