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Nazi-Retro Films: How German Cinema Remembers the Past
At the end of the 1991 film Europa Europa the protagonist, now an elderly man, steps outside the action of the film to reflect on the extraordinary story it has told of how as a youth he managed to conceal his Jewish identity during World War II in Nazi Germany. The pull of the painful, complex years of the Third Reich, 1933-45, remains so powerful that five decades later Salomon Perel is still trying to understand and explain his experience of them.
In Nazi-retro How German Narrative Cinema Remembers the Past, Robert and Carol Reimer cite the more than 100 German films made since 1946 that, like Salomon Perel, look back on those years in an effort to comprehend them. "Since the end of World War II and the collapse of the Third Reich, Germans have been trying to come to terms with the legacy bequeathed them by Hitler and the Nazis," the Reimers write, "The essence of the legacy is so powerful that single words convey the hold the past has on the Auschwitz, genocide, the Holocaust."
Beginning with Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are among Us, German filmmakers have consistently made remarkably diverse works on the subject. Their films focus on Hitler's megalomania, on the callously rational ways the Nazis formulated his policies, on the acquiescence of the average citizen to those policies, on the bravery of those who resisted them, on the relentless persecution and murder of Jews that resulted from them, and on the shame, guilt, and denial of responsibility that followed. Unlike other treatments of German films on the war, which are often organized chronologically or biographically by director, the Reimers' study revolves around these and other themes, thereby elucidating in all its guises the portrayal of nazism on film.
In Nazi-retro How German Narrative Cinema Remembers the Past, Robert and Carol Reimer cite the more than 100 German films made since 1946 that, like Salomon Perel, look back on those years in an effort to comprehend them. "Since the end of World War II and the collapse of the Third Reich, Germans have been trying to come to terms with the legacy bequeathed them by Hitler and the Nazis," the Reimers write, "The essence of the legacy is so powerful that single words convey the hold the past has on the Auschwitz, genocide, the Holocaust."
Beginning with Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are among Us, German filmmakers have consistently made remarkably diverse works on the subject. Their films focus on Hitler's megalomania, on the callously rational ways the Nazis formulated his policies, on the acquiescence of the average citizen to those policies, on the bravery of those who resisted them, on the relentless persecution and murder of Jews that resulted from them, and on the shame, guilt, and denial of responsibility that followed. Unlike other treatments of German films on the war, which are often organized chronologically or biographically by director, the Reimers' study revolves around these and other themes, thereby elucidating in all its guises the portrayal of nazism on film.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1992
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