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  • Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion by Bill Niven
  • Valerie Weinstein
Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion. By Bill Niven. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 295. Cloth $30.00. ISBN 978-0300200362.

In his introduction to Hitler and Film, Bill Niven writes that "the impression one gains from most books on the Third Reich film industry is that there would be little to be learned by examining Hitler's involvement more closely. This book sets out to show [End Page 172] that, in fact, much can be learned by doing so" (2). Throughout his well-researched and compellingly narrated study, Niven emphatically proves his thesis. Many readers, from armchair historians to academics, will find Hitler and Film fascinating and learn much about both Hitler and Nazi cinema.

Hitler and Film offers a very accessible narrative about Hitler's interest in film and his personal interventions in Nazi filmmaking. It exemplifies an approach to Third Reich cinema favored by historians, methodologically similar to recent books by David Welch (2001) and Susan Tegel (2008, 2011). Niven has done extensive archival work and an impressive job excavating and documenting a wealth of information about Hitler and film. By compiling information from multiple published and unpublished sources, Niven tells us which films Hitler saw when, both privately at the Berghof and publicly in theaters, and when and how Hitler intervened in film production, censorship, and distribution. Niven painstakingly traces those who helped or hindered Leni Riefenstahl's Third Reich career and Hitler's personal involvement in it. He also describes Hitler's social relationships with members of the film world and passages in several chapters rehearse and disprove longstanding salacious rumors about Riefenstahl's, Hitler's, and Goebbels's sexual affairs.

Niven artfully weaves information about Hitler's film preferences and his interventions into film production and censorship into a narrative of Nazi cinema that focuses primarily on interactions among Nazi cinema's elite and on films with overt Nazi content. Niven is less interested in the Third Reich's "ordinary men" (Christopher Browning, 1992) and their "popular cinema" (Sabine Hake, 2001) than in the top-down influence of Hitler and other Nazi leaders through explicit propaganda. My favorite chapter was chapter 5, "The Führer at the Movies: Hitler in German Cinemas," which examines Hitler's literal presence at movie screenings, his projected appearances in films and radio broadcasts, and his presence by proxy in feature films about leader figures. Using these disparate sets of data, Niven explains how cinemas created an intimate but still hierarchical relationship between the Führer and the German people. This chapter makes an excellent supplement to Erica Carter's analysis of the affective, hierarchical, and community-building functions of Third Reich movie theaters (2004). Details in chapter 9 about Hitler and wartime newsreels allow the reader to extrapolate from claims in chapter 5. The section of chapter 8 about the production and circulation of Jud Süß (1940) is full of little-known archival information and makes a welcome contribution to the scholarship on the infamous motion picture.

Despite the many strengths of Hitler and Film and its eloquent account of events that presumably speak for themselves, Niven missed an opportunity here to engage more thoroughly with the scholars he believes to have unjustly dismissed Hitler's involvement in Third Reich film. In pointing to this gap in the scholarship, he exposes [End Page 173] a rift in Third Reich film studies between historical approaches and approaches more closely aligned to cultural studies and critical theory. Since the 1990s, film studies and cultural studies practitioners have built on the groundbreaking work of Karsten Witte (1995), Eric Rentschler (1996), Sabine Hake (2001), and others, scrutinizing the banal genre cinema that made up the majority of Third Reich film productions. Focusing on how Third Reich genre cinema created an "illusion" of an apolitical public sphere (Rentschler, 1996), these scholars have targeted the nexus of entertainment and politics in Nazi Germany's "popular cinema," its ambiguities and ambivalences, and the complex conditions of production and patterns of consumption that shaped it (Hake, 2001). While this intellectual tradition remains acutely...

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