The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, and: Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (review)

138 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 situation. All documents are dated after World War II; a brief introduction places the documents in context. Interesting and thorough, this work provides a powerful introduction to Judaism for the Christian reader. The fIrst edition appeared in 1984; this second edition is signifIcantly longer (504 versus 372 pages). No English translation has appeared. Mary Jane Haemig Department ofReligion PacifIc Lutheran University The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, by Eric Rentschler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 456 pp. $60.00. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema, by Linda Schulte-Sasse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 347 pp. $54.95 (c); $18.95 (p). While German fIlm history has always been heavily influenced by political and social developments-to a greater degree than other national cinemas-the politics of German cinema have never been more hotly contested by fIlm historians than when discussing the fIlms of the Third Reich. In this ongoing debate regarding the cinema as a site for political discourse, two seemingly unreconcilable positions have been mapped out. On one side have stood fIlm historians who have sought to explicate the fIlms of Nazi Germany as insidious, totalitarian propaganda, bent on ideologically mastering and controlling a German population, preparing them for a murderous world war of aggression and the genocide of European jewry. This position, articulated as early as 1943 by Siegfried Kracauer in his analysis ofGerman War Propaganda, commissioned by the United States government, presupposed a German audience, unwillingly trapped in a fascistic system of meaning production, and unable to defend itself against such thought control. On the other side one found fIlm historians who have perceived German fIlm production between 1933 and 1945 to be only partially controlled by propagandistic interests, historians seeking, in contrast, to defme German cinema as an ideologically neutral space, more often subject to the laws of entertainment and the market place than to the whims of Joseph Paul Goebbels. Stating that only a small portion ofGerman fIlms were outright propaganda, these historians have pointed to this cinema's aesthetic values and popularity with German audiences, analyzing these fIlms in terms of their stars, directors, and genres, while going so far as to fmd pockets of resistance in the fIlms to Nazi tyranny. Book Reviews 139 Part ofthe problem is that for most Germans (and Europeans) born before World War II, ideology is so deeply ingrained that it is mistaken for reality. For example, while persons of that generation would today see that Jew Suss is a deeply antisemitic film, most still believe that the "historical facts" in the film are essentially correct, which they are not. Another example: individuals who would be horrified if one labeled them antisemites accept such terminology as "Aryan," in contradistinction to Jew, as scientifically correct, racial categories, rather than as products of a racist nineteenthcentury ideology. Like Faber, the proto-Nazi ofJew Siiss, whose X-ray eyes pierce any disguise, this generation believes they "know what Jews look like." For the past twenty years, English-speaking readers have had available to them these two contrasting views ofNazi cinema, articulated in monographs by Erwin Leiser (Nazi Cinema, 1975) and David Stewart Hull (Film in the Third Reich, 1973). Both books had their strengths and their limitations, but with the rise of academic film studies, in particular the application to film of more empirically based historical methodologies and structuralist linguistics, these positions have seemed increasingly untenable. Now, two book-length studies have appeared in English, virtually simultaneously, which have sought to overcome these old dichotomies. Eric Rentschler and Linda Schulte-Sasse are both American Germanists who have attempted to come to terms with the fact that German cinema in the period of the Third Reich was not just an exercise in audience torture, but rather an oftentimes pleasurable experience for viewers-in the past and in the present--even when ideology was being transported. Not without reason does the world illusion crop up in the titles ofboth books, since both are concerned with the mechanisms of cinema, allowing it to please and to deceive. Likewise, both authors have structured their books by focusing...