Nazi Film Melodrama

by adminNazis

Nazi Film Melodrama

Laura Heins

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 0252079353

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Cultural productions in the Third Reich often served explicit propaganda functions of legitimating racism and glorifying war and militarism. Likewise, the proliferation of domestic and romance films in Nazi Germany also represented an ideological stance. Rather than reinforcing traditional gender role divisions and the status quo of the nuclear family, these films were much more permissive about desire and sexuality than previously assumed. Focusing on German romance films, domestic melodramas, and home front films from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Film Melodrama shows how melodramatic elements in Nazi cinema functioned as part of a project to move affect, body, and desire beyond the confines of bourgeois culture and participate in a curious modernization of sexuality engineered to advance the imperialist goals of the Third Reich.
 
Offering a comparative analysis of Nazi productions with classical Hollywood films of the same era, Laura Heins argues that German fascist melodramas differed from their American counterparts in their negative views of domesticity and in their use of a more explicit antibourgeois rhetoric. Nazi melodramas, film writing, and popular media appealed to viewers by promoting liberation from conventional sexual morality and familial structures, presenting the Nazi state and the individual as dynamic and revolutionary. Some spectators objected to the eroticization and modernization of the public sphere under Nazism, however, pitting Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda against more conservative film audiences in a war over the very status of domesticity and the shape of the family. Drawing on extensive archival research, this perceptive study highlights the seemingly contradictory aspects of gender representation and sexual morality in Nazi-era cinema.

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Inactivity that stands in crass opposition to the heroic contemporary experience of the German people.83 Thus, audiences felt that melodramatic suffering did not conform to the historical moment, to the thrills of the Blitzkrieg. The public apparently wanted less self-sacrifice and more celebratory optimism. The other hit of 1940, Wunschkonzert, apparently better fulfilled the public’s momentary generic needs by mixing battle with musical comedy.84 Most spectators could not foresee how Der.

Medical romances was often his employee. Such workplace romances emphasized total commitment to professional duties and, just like the teacher-student romances, reinforced authority structures at home and on the job. The 1938 romance Die Frau am Scheidewege (The Woman at the Crossroads) even suggested that a woman’s duties in the hospital were more important than those in the home. The film opens in an operating room, where the director of a university clinic, Dr. Henrici, is performing his.

That the conventional cinematic images of women as either innocent virgins, dependent housewives, or prostitutes were all non-Aryan and anti-German in origin. Patriarchy and prostitution were Oriental inventions, he suggested, and he condemned both: the figure of the hetaera [is] from the ancient Orient and the deeply Easterninfluenced antique Mediterranean world, reappearing up until now in constantly altered form. On the other hand, along with the Eastern idea of the privileged position of the.

Stadt crystallizes its racist argument in a father-daughter kiss on the lips in close-up, followed by a dissolve that suggests a continuation of incestuous relations off screen. The girl’s attempts to escape this Nazi fantasy once again end in drowning. But death in Nazi cinema was not only enforced as a punishment for racial “impurity” or illicit desire; in fact, there is a symptomatically high mortality rate for all mothers and wives in Nazi cinema. Female characters are eliminated from the.

War itself so that war becomes simply another form of male adventure, one that facilitates erotic adventure. By narrating the prehistory of World War II as the embattled but stimulating “great love” of a German couple, Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska covers war with romantic appeal, reducing it to an event that is ultimately beneficial for the private lives of the characters. It is war that provides narrative closure and puts a halt to the divorce, at least temporarily. But Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska.

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