New essays examining the differences and commonalities between late
Weimar-era and early Nazi-era German cinema against a backdrop of the
crises of that time.
Hitler's Machtergreifung, or seizure of power, on January 30, 1933,
marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Third
Reich, and German film scholarship has generally accepted this date as
the break between Weimar and Nazi-era film as well. This collection of
essays interrogates the continuities and discontinuities in German
cinema before and after January 1933 and their relationship to the
various crises of the years 1928 to 1936in seven areas: politics, the
economy, concepts of race and ethnicity, the making of cinema stars,
genre cinema, film technologies and aesthetics, and German-international
film relations. Focusing both on canonical and lesser-known works, the
essays analyze a representative sample of films and genres from the
period. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of Weimar
and Third Reich cinema and of the sociopolitical, economic, racial,
artistic, and technological spheres in both late Weimar and the early
Third Reich, as well as to film scholars in general.
Contributors: Paul Flaig, Margrit Frölich, Barbara Hales, Anjeana Hans,
Bastian Heinsohn, Brook Henkel, Kevin B. Johnson, Owen Lyons, Richard W.
McCormick, Kalani Michell, Mihaela Petrescu, Christian Rogowski, Valerie
Weinstein, Wilfried Wilms.
Barbara Hales is Associate Professor of History at the University of
Houston-Clear Lake. Mihaela Petrescu is Visiting Lecturer at the
University of Pittsburgh. Valerie Weinstein is Assistant Professor of
Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and German Studies at the
University of Cincinnati.
