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142 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 for the fact that the film drew over 20 million willing viewers into the cinemas of Germany. In the following chapters, Schulte-Sasse goes on to present psychoanalytic readings of Nazi film biographies of eighteenth-century geniuses (Friedrich Schiller, Friedemann Bach) and of films about money (Go/d), and machines (Diesel). She concludes with an analysis ofMiinchhausen, which posits its hero as a person living in a fictional space, ordinarily reserved for "the Jew": transient, liberated, omnipotent. Indeed, Schulte-Sasse's central argument in all her analyses concerns the image ofthe Jew in Nazi cinema as the guilty pleasure of the Aryan, because, unconstrained by ethics or sexual morality, Jews have more fun. Nazi cinema, therefore, is seen as an endless cycle of addressing and kindling audience desire, only to attempt to suppress it through narrative. The audience in question, though, is a theoretical construct rather than a historically defmed entity. While Rentschler explicates texts by continuously returning to their historical context, grounding his theoretical conclusions in a material reality, Schulte-Sasse proceeds from a theoretical superstructure in search of a text. While Rentschler's text is easily accessible, even to individuals who are not film specialists, Schulte-Sasse's book requires stamina and a thorough knowledge of the theoretical presuppositions underlying the book. An added advantage to Rentschler's book is its extremely informative endnotes, and its appendices, listing films and political events in chronological order (including banned films), its directorial filmographies, and its thorough bibliography. Rentschler's knowledge of the political, social, and economic contexts, his painstakingly accurate research, and his ability to contextualize the issues addressed in a clear and understandable language without sacrificing a theoretical base will make his book a standard work for decades to come. Jan-Christopher Horak Munich Filmmuseum The Ufa-Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company 1918-1945, by Klaus Kreimeier, translated by Robert and Rita Kinmber. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. 451 pp. $35.00. It is an indication ofthe relatively underdeveloped state of film studies in Germany that the best writing on German film history has been done by foreign scholars. Whether Anthony Kaes, Timothy Corrigan, or Eric Rentschler in America, Thomas Elsaesser and Frank Kessler in Holland, Bernard Eisenschtitz in France, they are all based outside Germany. The exceptions proving the rule, perhaps, are the publications by film historians around the Berlin Kinemathek's and Hamburg Cinegraph's yearly Book Reviews 143 retrospectives. Yet even their publications are usually blissfully ignorant of the theoretical debates informing film history. Most German film historians work outside the academy, writing histories that are equal parts impressionistic journalism and rehashes of previous publications. Klaus Kreimeier's The Ufa-Story is a well written piece ofjournalism with some original research, but no theoretical background and no acknowledgment of research on Vfa done elsewhere. The story ofthe Vniversum-Film A.G., popularly known as Vfa, is indelibly bound to the history ofGermany's cinema. Like perhaps no other film company in relation to its national film culture, the Vfa's changing fortunes are a barometer of the economic, political, aesthetic, and ideological struggles that make up Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Although the Vfa never monopolized the German market, the way Paramount-MGM-Fox controlled the American industry, its power was both real, in terms of its combined production, distribution, and exhibition potential, and imagined, as the symbolic core of the German film industry's aesthetic aspirations. Founded by the German High Command in 1917, the object ofan American take-over in a Germany tom by post-war inflation, revolutions and counterrevolutions, coopted in 1933 and inflated to a state-owned and -operated monopoly by the Nazis for their own propagandistic purposes, ultimately deconstructed after the war by the Allies to protect American film interests, the Vfa mirrored the German experience. Yet, ironically, the company also tried to create for both its own employees and its audience a fragile, hermeneutic world, a Lebenswelt, outside the strictures and commands of history, existing only in the darkened caverns ofthe studio and in the minds ofa people burdened with too much history. Siegfried Kracauer...

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