Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy by Sabine Hake (review)

This is another important contribution to film history by Sabine Hake, and its scope and value is not limited to German film and media studies. In this book Hake analyzes the political functions of the numerous, invariably negative representations of Nazism in European and American fiction films since the 1940s, when anti-Nazi films were first produced in Hollywood, continuing through the anti-Nazi films made in West and East Germany during the Cold War, the eroticized “retro” films about Nazism made in Italy during the 1970s, all the way to European and American portrayals of Nazis in the current, “postideological” era since the fall of communism in the early 1990s.

Hake’s approach is original in many ways: beyond the impressive theoretical sophistication one expects in a study by this scholar, this book is characterized by a genuinely transnational approach, by no means limited to German attempts to “master” or “come to terms with” the Nazi past. In fact Hake’s study is not much concerned with the Nazi past at all, but rather with what political meaning any particular European or American film about the evils of Nazism might have for the time and the place in which it was made. It is this question that guides the thorough and persuasive historical contextualization Hake provides for the films she discusses. Furthermore, Hake is interested not only in the “prestige” (and generally realist) historical films about the Nazis, but also in more experimental art films and “lowbrow” productions as well. This is because she is interested in how films about the Nazis impact audiences emotionally, that is, about the “affective dimensions” of these films, a crucial aspect in determining how they function politically. For Nazism functions in general as the “other” of postwar democracy, a projection screen that reveals a great deal about the various crises of political regimes that purport to define themselves in opposition to that which Nazism represented.

After an introduction that describes important theoretical and historical issues at stake in the book, Chapter 1 focuses on the Hollywood anti-Nazi films, which got a somewhat late start with Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939. (As Ben Urwand and Thomas Doherty have demonstrated, Hollywood remained for the most part unwilling to anger Nazi Germany—and lose the German market—until 1939; even then Hollywood was not willing to make many films of this type of film until after the US entered the war in December 1941). The Hollywood anti-Nazi films used the “friend/enemy” distinction to create antipathy for Nazism and support for democracy, which represented an “unprecedented politicization” of Hollywood film culture (28). They also set the pattern that would dominate future films about the Nazis.

In Chapter 2 Hake examines West German anti-Nazi films of the 1950s, most of which featured anti-Nazi resistance in the officer corps and had the difficult task of making men who were considered traitors in the Third Reich into heroes. They also served the ideological function both of demonstrating the Federal Republic’s democratic—and anticommunist—credentials in the Cold War. Chapter 3 looks at the anti-Nazi films made in the other German state, where the films also had a contemporary agenda related to the Cold War. Whereas in the West resistance to the Nazi state was depicted as anticipating anti-communism, in the East it served the official antifascist ideology of the German Democratic Republic, according to which West Germany was the successor state to the Third Reich.

Of special interest is Hake’s original discussion of the eroticized Italian films of the 1970s that depicted Nazis, the topic of Chapter 4. She reads these films as emblematic of the cultural sensibilities in Western Europe after 1968, with the “sexy Nazis” of these films as evidence either of depoliticization or of the ascendancy of the sentiment that “the personal is political” (or both). Especially provocative is her comparison of art...