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

“The history of our images of fascism is, among other things, the history of our growing doubts about the present,” as Sabine Hake quotes German film historian Georg Seeßlen (25). In her highly original book, Hake seeks to explain what the continued preoccupation with National Socialism and the Third Reich may tell us about the underlying political tensions and conflicts in the respective democratic cultures that produce filmic fantasies about the past. Nazism, with its “significatory excess” of clearly identifiable emblems, rituals, and practices, seems to allow a given democratic society to legitimize itself by “acquiring an emotional vocabulary or affective habitus through confrontation with its enemy – which also means its suppressed self ” (6). In Hake’s assessment, filmic representations of Nazism thus “(re)produce democratic subjectivity in confrontation with its historical and universal enemy” (14).

Clocking in at just over three hundred densely printed pages, the book is tightly packed with a wealth of information. The writing, while operating on a high level of abstraction, is engaging, elegant, and never wilfully difficult. The author’s command of a vast range of materials is impressive, and she excels at tying close readings of specific filmic moments to the larger, theoretically sophisticated project. Minor glitches aside, such as the confusion between German actors Ulrich Mühe and Ulrich Matthes (ix, 232) and a misquoted statement by Peter Zadek that seems to suggest that he wrote that only “three million Germans voted for Hitler in 1933” (249; the “more than” is missing), the book is, as far as I can tell, as good as free of errors. One criticism, perhaps, remains: one opens the book to a list of over seventy illustrations, only to discover that these pictures are the size of postage stamps, often of poor quality, and thus of limited use – witness the impossibility of actually discerning “Yelena Rufanova and Yelena Spiridonova in Moloch” (on page 165).

Each of the seven chapters makes for rewarding reading, even if the criteria for film selection may not always be clear. Hake first establishes the parameters of filmic representations of Nazism in the spate of anti-Nazi films produced in Hollywood between 1939 and 1948, showing how these films bolster a sense of American democracy endangered by a sinister, surreptitious “other.” Through the use of stereotypes, often in narratives of infiltration, and with an increasingly anti-communist subtext, these films squelch any political engagement that might be critical of American society by “equating Nazism with ideology as such” (40). The next chapter shows how such patterns of representation are emulated in West German films of the 1950s on the resistance to Nazism – Canaris (Alfred Weidenmann, 1954), Des Teufels General (Helmut Käutner, 1955), and the two films commemorating the Stauffenberg plot on Hitler, Es geschah am 20. Juli (G. W. Pabst, 1955) and Der 20. Juli (Falk Harnack, 1955). Persistent motifs, such as the use of close-ups on the protagonist’s face that signal a conversion experience, couch the issues in quasi-religious ethical terms. In drawing on a Christian iconography of patriotic, self-sacrificial martyrdom (strangely, Hake does not mention that Canaris is subtitled “Ein Leben für Deutschland”), these films seek to enlist their audiences in a “commitment to a Christian Democratic understanding of politics and the polity” (90), aligning these emotional investments – now associated with the democratic West – with the new antagonisms of the Cold War.

If a subtext of “resistance to resistance” (a tacit consensus that nothing could be done against Nazism) undergirded post-war representations of Nazism in the Federal Republic that absolves ordinary Germans from any responsibility, the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) drew its legitimacy from narratives of heroic anti-fascist resistance. From the more than one hundred antifascist films produced by the state-owned East German DEFA studios in the 1960s and 1970s, Hake singles out two films each by Frank Beyer – Fünf Patronenhülsen (1960) and Nackt...