Original subtitles

-Doctor? -Yes.

Anything missing?

No, I have everything.

Good, then have a think.

I'm thoroughly happy. It couldn't be better.

Then all's well.

Yes, indeed, gentlemen We're happy indeed

Because from now on The world belongs to us

Yes, indeed, gentlemen

Worries are far away

We do what we enjoy

Whoever disturbs us Before he twigs it

We'll have soft-soaped

Yes, indeed, gentlemen

You can bet on it

Indeed, indeed, indeed!

Germany in the middle of the 19305.

At first sight, a peaceful country.

This is when my mother was born.

They were my father's childhood years.

Hitler's domination had stabilized.

The effects of the economic crisis were invisible.

The unemployed had gone from the streets.

The regime's enemies had been silenced or exiled

or arrested, or already murdered.

Jews were the scapegoats.

Outlawed and to be exterminated.

Most Germans who remained had adjusted themselves with the regime,

if they weren't already Hitler's supporters.

Cinema offered an additional distraction.

Nazi cinema was fantasy and a dream factory.

It wanted to be a second Hollywood. Hitler's Hollywood.

Attention!

Nazi cinema was theatrical,

illusionary.

It was bigger than life. It wanted at all costs to be monumental.

Emotion and spectacle; something for the heart and the eyes.

It was nearly always ambivalent.

She, too, first worked in Germany.

We barely know these films.

But there is no reason to look away.

They are better than their reputation.

Many are worth a second look.

A look that focuses on the details and disregards the surface message

without losing sight of it.

Many know more and disclose much more than they would admit.

The best of them are self-reflective

and reveal to us something beyond themselves.

What are these films about? What do they reveal? And conceal?

Nazi cinema was show business. Exaggerated. A spectacle.

It sometimes feels as if everything was just one big film.

All this is part of our collective memory.

All this lives on in our subconscious.

What does cinema know that we don't?

Let's take a look.

Just three days after seizing power

the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, attended a film premiere

at the UFA Palast in Berlin.

A submarine film shot during the Weimar Republic

which stylized the German fight in WI as heroic self-sacrifice

and foreshadowed some of the central themes of Nazi propaganda:

camaraderie and duty as the cardinal rule,

the soldiers' collective as a meaningful unit.

Go down to 30 meters.

Silently. No movement in the submarine.

And being prepared to sacrifice yourself for the fight to go on.

A film steeped in a mythical yearning for death.

Our lives no longer belong to us.

They're no longer ours, Boehm! Are they?

We have to go on for as long as there is still breath in us.

On the submarine, again and again,

until the clear Lord sets us free.

Sleep well, fellows.

The regime did not celebrate life,

but for the cult of death Hitler and his people always found

new and spectacular images.

The propaganda events of the annual memorial for the dead

at the Feldherrenhalle and the Königsplatz in Munich.

At the party celebrations, witch's Sabbaths of dehumanized masses.

Above all, in the magically illuminated dark of night,

where they felt most at home.

And also in their films.

Film was the Hitler regime's primary media of communicating with the masses.

I know...

Farewell.

What did these Germans dream about?

Nazi cinema seemed to be fascinated by death.

A number of films are drowning in scenes of yearning for death.

I can't see you.

Aels!

Constant death sequences.

A Fascist philosopher wrote of "being towards death".

It was in this glamorous mise-en-scène of death,

that cinema came closest to the regime.

Every death was a happy death in Nazi cinema

and often absurdly kitsch.

"I do not want to die in vain.

I would love to perish on a hill of sacrifice

for the Fatherland.

To bleed the blood of my heart

for the Fatherland.

And heralds of victory descend.

We have won the battle.

Live on high, O Fatherland.

And do not count the dead!

For you, sweet one! Not one too many has fallen."

What kind of a nation was that

to need poets to be able to kill and to die?

Still the world does not collapse

It still carries on Still the world does not collapse

It will be gay again

It will be sky blue again

What did these Germans dream about? They clearly dreamt of idylls:

Of a safe family life. Of unspoilt nature.

Of a sound home.

Nazi cinema created an artificially perfect world.

Traditionalism and entertainment.

What is striking about Nazi cinema is a total lack of irony.

Instead there's a rather forced cheerfulness.

That German laughter that the world was soon to fear.

An era that, in retrospect, was not very amusing,

appears in films

as a time of constant, if rather strained joviality.

The key figure of Nazi film politics was Joseph Goebbels.

The Propaganda Minister, "patron of German film".

The highest ranking PR man of the totalitarian state.

He controlled radio, press, and every area of art.

Cinema was most important to him. He made it his personal affair.

The Third Reich was unthinkable without propaganda,

and propaganda without film.

There were no more auteur-filmmakers.

There was one real auteur in the Nazi state:

it was Joseph Goebbels himself.

He controlled scripts, cast lists, finished films, auditions.

Goebbels vigorously stamped his own style on the regime.

To some extent, the whole Third Reich is Goebbels' film, Goebbels' oeuvre.

Goebbels said,

“Propaganda is an art form.

Propaganda has just one objective,

and that objective is to conquer the masses.

Alluring people into an idea so in the end they are captivated by it,

and can no longer free themselves from it."

Political synchronization. This meant that over 2,000 film professionals

were banned from working and driven out of the film industry.

Many left Germany.

Marlene Dietrich, who was already working in Hollywood, left for good.

Fritz Lang also left Germany despite the new regime's flattery.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst also left. But he was unlucky.

In 1939, his crossing to America was already booked,

he visited his mother with his French passport.

War broke out and Pabst couldn't return.

So he had to film in Germany and arrange himself with those in power.

The result of this balancing act was Paracelsus.

We're in a madhouse! Come on.

What is propaganda? Propaganda is enchantment, not force.

Its objective is to bring society in line and to mobilize it

through mass mania.

Pabst shows a Medieval world removed from the German present

yet not, in fact, so dissimilar.

Pabst shows total mobilization,

a mass all moving in trance-like rhythm.

For a moment, they seem to be completely unified with their leader.

A representative of reason stands in juxtaposition,

feeling he has landed in a madhouse.

He fights against the mania as well as ideologues

and against death.

"Propaganda is totalitarian, regressive and nihilistic.

You remove any remaining substance from meaningful terms,

and use their shell to advertise with an enticing appearance.

From beneath the tumult of propaganda a skull appears."

Since 1933,

the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer had been living in exile,

as were his friends, Adorno and Benjamin.

"Critical theory".

In exile, Kracauer wrote his great historical work,

"From Caligari to Hitler", on cinema in the Weimar Republic.

He also wrote an important but little-known study

about totalitarian propaganda.

According to Kracauer, cinema is a seismograph of its time,

an indicator of the cultural subconscious of an era.

Cinema knows something that we don't know.

It has an underlying meaning that can be exposed.

If that is true, and we believe it is,

what does Nazi cinema reveal about the Third Reich and its people?

What is the effect of their myths and narratives,

their blatant lies and hidden truths on today's German cinema?

What does German cinema tell, that we have forgotten?

The first effective, if very obvious, propaganda film

was Hitlerjunge Quex.

Hans Steinhoff's film tells of Quex, a working class boy.

It is set at the end of the Weimar Republic.

The chaos of the images and the musical references

represent the chaos of a democracy on the brink of civil war.

Music plays a central role.

Sing!

People, listen to the call...

Can't you sing?

I'll teach you.

-People, hear... -People, hear the...

The call for the last battle.

People, listen to the call...

The film works as a psychographics of fascism:

the lower class's poverty, the weakness of the father-figures,

the father-son conflict

in which the film completely takes the son's side.

You see, there are things going on

that you don't understand.

But us proletarians, we have to watch ourselves.

That's it.

And now, you youngsters have to help us.

You have to stand by us old ones.

Or we won't manage it.

Quex questions the wild and nonchalant life of the Young Communists

and is attracted by the security of the other side.

-You don't even have a girlfriend. -What's the point?

Come on. Don't be like that!

The forest becomes the place of initiation and music its means.

The idea of youth is sensuously, erotically enhanced:

adventure and secrecy.

-Where should I go? -What a question!

To your father, of course, where you belong.

That is the very question. Where does the boy belong?

I had very good parents.

But at 15, I ran away.

Thousands have run away.

-Then they were rascals. -Youngsters are wonderful!

Youngsters have always been a big mystery.

They ran away to trappers, to gypsies.

The great pull of adventure has always called.

Where does a boy belong?

Pure temptation.

Open it then!

Quex finds recognition through the Hitler Youth uniform.

You've all gone mad!

There, Heini!

Here's a mirror.

But it proved fatal.

Superb.

A good sacrificial death.

Our flag is fluttering at us.

Kracauer wrote about the film,

"A clear criticism of earlier, crass and exaggerated attempts

to please the new rulers.

The communists are portrayed not as opponents but as comrades led astray.

At the end, the ghostly columns of SA soldiers marching

seem to emerge from the dead Heini

as if he were resurrected in their ranks."

The politicization of the aesthetic

was followed by the aestheticization of politics.

Leni Riefenstahl.

Her documentary of the Nuremberg Rally, commissioned by Hitler himself,

became the prime example of film propaganda.

Skillful choreography of attention, initially as a pop concert.

Hitler is the star of a politics that's become a mise-en-scène.

Shown only from behind, his effect is seen in the faces of his fans.

And the director clearly gives this effect an erotic touch.

Faces in ecstasy.

Models of Fascism as if sculpted by Arno Breker.

Then, as a second step the film makes clear, half-unconsciously,

that the Nazi political show is also a sort of religious service

in which the Führer preaches

in imploring tones to his congregation.

...which represents all Germany.

And we'd now like you German boys and German girls...

to take in what we hope Germany to be one day.

We want to be one nation

and you, my young people, will now become this nation.

Finally, the third step.

Dissolving the individual into geometric conformity.

Musical images. Counterpoints, rhythms.

Only one remains.

No regime has ever celebrated itself with such pomp.

People still feared chaos and anarchy.

This was his reply.

Theatrical spectacle. Ceremony. Ritual.

Grandeur. The mechanics of the masses.

And what Kracauer had described years before: the ornament of the masses.

A chorus line.

Like the revue films that followed, Riefenstahl showed order,

visually conveying synchronization.

The nation was brought into line.

Spades down!

Germany.

"History became theater.

Everything was designed for the convenience of the camera.

In Triumph of the Will, the image is no longer simply the record of reality.

Reality has been constructed to serve the image."

A revolt against the modern which used the most modern media.

A movement-regime.

The order of a mobilized human block, a constant synchronized movement.

Future cannon fodder.

"Riefenstahl's films are still effective because,

among other reasons, their longings are still felt.

And their content is a romantic ideal to which many continue to be attached.

A belief in gurus and in the occult.

The exaltation of community

does not preclude the search for absolute leadership.“

Riefenstahl's Olympiad-film promoted an ideal of the body

which had an impact on daily life.

An entire state in search of the ideal body.

-I almost forgot. -What?

-Shall we go? -A new film?

Over 1,000 films were produced in the Third Reich.

Over 500 were comedies and musicals.

Around 300 melodramas, the rest were adventure and detective films.

Some surprises too.

There were well-made films, great aesthetics and beautiful moments,

but there was no innocence.

Hundreds of millions went to the cinema, a place for escapism,

but as well for indoctrination.

Control reigned here too.

A film show was to be seen in full.

Preceding the feature film was the culture film

and the weekly newsreel which Film Minister Goebbels himself released.

In Rome, the 14th International Sports Week.

In the polo tournament, Prince Louis Alexander and his team had a strong win.

The Prince received the Gold Cup from his fiancée, Princess Irina.

UFA was the major German film studio.

Its owners had helped Hitler to power.

Founded in 1917, the company quickly adapted

and strove to hit the right tone for the new state of things.

In 1937 UFA was taken over by the state.

One by one, other film companies were shut down

and in 1942 everything became one state-run monopoly: UFA-film.

A typical stylistic device: outrageously daring dissolves.

Along with multiple dreamy cross-fades,

they created an unrealistic atmosphere in which everything became relative.

Kaleidoscopic images of ambivalence.

Picture puzzles.

The borders are blurred with ambiguity,

they become invisible, not only the borders between dream and reality...

If the gentleman would like to come closer.

Not a word of truth in it. It's all nonsense.

Nazi cinema itself exhibited its illusionism.

Here the cinema really became a dream factory.

The most typical genre was the revue film. Like this one.

"Talkie-operettas" was the name of these hybrid musical adaptations.

Enjoyable capers of fanciful people.

Opium for a distracted public.

Everything is uniformity and in lockstep.

The revue films exhibit order and visualize synchronization.

People don't like to be alone at night

Because love in the moonlight...

The Hungarian Marika Rökk, a foreigner like so many of the stars.

On the one hand and the other And more

Because people need A little bit of love

She and her films were a world of their own.

Robot-like and unbreakable. A woman of rubber.

In the Third Reich everyone was pirouetting,

but none on the scale of the spinning top Marika Rökk.

How many pirouettes did Rökk do in the Third Reich?

It made the audience dizzy.

You have to be able to play the piano

Whoever plays the piano Has luck with women

The other revue star, Johannes Heesters, a Dutchman and heartthrob.

Period dramas were popular.

Great Germans in uniform.

Then the melodramas: love conflicts about minor gender trouble

and huge sacrifice.

The main protagonists were usually women.

DO NOT WALK ON THE SAND HERE

Other genres shimmered with exotic fantasies

like this lavish film of 3 Karl May novel, Across the Desert.

A giaour!

A giaour!

A German brings order to the Orient.

A German Lawrence of Arabia, 30 years before David Lean.

There were few other genres.

No horror films, no fantasy.

They were not lost on audiences but too close to reality.

The Third Reich itself was pure horror, pure fantasy.

And in Germany, cinema and reality were never a good match.

In a totalitarian state, propaganda is total as well.

The only sci-fi film in the Third Reich: Gold.

A pale imitation of Metropolis,

which exuded a remarkably morbid atmosphere.

Metropolis star Brigitte Helm played the lead.

Here, she even speaks.

Don't do anything to hurt my father.

I'm not saying it for him.

And starring Hans Albers. He could do no wrong.

Fair hair, blue eyes. Born in 1891, Hans Albers was a hero of the cinema,

but a breezy, non-tragic hero.

One of the few German stars with a twinkle in his eye

and even some irony.

It was great between us two

But sadly, sadly...

A rogue, an anti-Nazi type even though Germanic.

He was like the sun god of German cinema.

He was also an action hero in Nazi cinema.

Physical and convincing

and with a fresh cheekiness that he used to attack the authorities,

he brought an almost American swing plus a street-feel to the screen.

An adventurer.

And a legend, already in his lifetime.

Hitler's Hollywood was not an auteur's cinema, but a cinema of stars.

This is where the German dream factory did work.

Noticeably, many of them came from abroad.

Foreignness brought with it desirable glamour.

An international and an exotic touch.

In that, it also resembled Hollywood.

Actors in the Third Reich had some of the best-paying jobs.

Their fees ran to high five-figure sums for each film.

In addition, from 1938, on Hitler's personal command,

40 percent of income could be off-set as advertising expenses.

What was expected in return was clear.

Cinema was part of the total-art-work of the state.

But it was hard to deal with the loss of the exiles.

Goebbels looked for a new Garbo.

Swedes were in.

Kristina Söderbaum.

Zarah Leander.

And Ingrid Bergman!

At 23, this was her only role in the Third Reich.

The Four Companions is one of the most interesting films of this era.

Images of Berlin, in the New-Sobriety-style.

Capriccios of the city.

Business interests come first.

We four.

It's about four modern women,

graphic designers who want to set up a business after their studies.

At first, they fail in a man's world, then gain success,

then fail again, as they realize they prefer marriage after all.

Conservatism wins,

but nevertheless changing role models and other options appear

for a long shining film moment.

If only you knew how good you look in an apron.

Would you give me a couple of bread rolls for me to remember you by?

Would you like some sausages too?

If I may.

My pleasure!

Bergman later wanted to sweep this under the carpet.

She said she declined a tea invitation from Goebbels.

That was all she would say.

Six years later Bergman played an anti-fascist in Casablanca.

It was also a sort of atonement.

As I stand here Is how I am, yes sir!

Zarah Leander, the first great star of the Nazi films.

She was meant to be the new Garbo.

Deep voice, dark hair,

forced cheerfulness in melancholic, melodramatic scenarios.

Her songs were of a lost homeland, unfulfilled longing

and miracles that might still occur.

A femme fatale, albeit a more conventional one.

There was you, only you.

Imitations of life that work like drugs.

They slowly seep into the audience's subconscious

and dispense their sweet magic.

Their power, the power of melancholy.

This star was created by Detlef Sierck, later to be the émigré Douglas Sirk,

having had a smooth ride for years in Nazi cinema.

He went on to shoot his melodramas in Hollywood.

Puerto Rico, a seductive and dangerously ambivalent place

between joie de vivre and feverishness.

I'm alone in the night

My soul wakes and listens

A dream made of wishes and mania, desire and loss.

An agonizing story full of neurotic characters.

Leander plays an unhappy housewife

trapped in the golden cage that is her own house.

The wind has told me a song

Plague and capitalism.

...of fortune indescribably beautiful.

It's lovely. I'll never leave.

-Never? -Not ever.

-The steamer leaves tomorrow. -I shan't be on it.

Are you mad?

You and the rest of our cold high society,

what do you know about nature?

You're behaving like a wild one!

Like a wild one indeed!

Come!

The desire for wild passion.

Come!

Ah...

The wind has told me a song

Of a heart

That I am missing

The wind...

A rather crazy film about a woman who always wants what she doesn't have.

You see,

ten years ago, I turned back, just as the steamer was leaving.

Back then, I thought the island was paradise.

Then, later, I thought it was hell.

-And now? -Now...

I don't regret it.

Regrets are always foolish.

La Habanera is about yearning for the tyrant, and hating him.

She wants to get rid of him

but as soon as he has gone, she wants him back.

Sierck's film language never shies away from the obvious.

It was filmed on Tenerife in the midst of the Spanish Civil War.

The most elegant wild character of German cinema was Ferdinand Marian.

In all his roles, there is a longing for death.

Charismatic, suffering,

torn, demonic,

seductive, sensitive.

The lead in the anti-Semitic film, Jew Sties

would later be the downfall of this most modern, naturalistic German actor.

He never got over it.

-What sort of a person are you? -I have a good heart.

It just needs to be uncovered.

Panic hovers over us, gentlemen.

Do you know what that means?

Panic amongst two million people?

Panic and reason of state, press censorship and secret police.

A lady vanishes, in the middle of Paris.

The paper has been banned. The police have closed the printers.

The daughter has a rude awakening that becomes a nightmare.

Her search for her mother is in vain. She hits a wall of silence.

-Madeleine Lawrence? -No.

No.

No, Madame, she's not here.

A film of uncertainty

in the otherwise overly certain German productions.

A great film noir, made in Nazi Germany.

It is your mother's fatherland that renders you this service.

In the end she gives in, she has no choice.

That is the message of this film of devotion.

It was Veit Harlan's breakthrough piece.

Harlan was an auteur,

a filmmaker whose films had their specific handwriting.

But he was also a National Socialist, whether from opportunism or conviction

is irrelevant.

His commitment to the Nazis is integral to his work.

It cannot be narrowed down to just a part of it.

No other filmmaker has made such perfidious films at such a high level.

The daughter whose world is turned upside down in Verwehte Spuren

was played by the Swede, Kristina Söderbaum.

Already in this film Veit Harlan gave his radiant new star a big scene,

a timeless film moment where cinema celebrates itself

and its tempting power as a factory of dreams.

Séraphine.

Fernand.

A year later, Harlan divorced and married Söderbaum.

In all further films he made during The Third Reich

she played the lead.

Söderbaum had the perfect mix of innocence, purity and tearful devotion

to fit the German ideal of the time.

She was the perfect embodiment of the Nazi perversion:

a Nordic blond who in her husband's films

was always pre-destined to self-sacrifice.

Söderbaum became known as the "Reich's floating corpse"

because she exposed the necrophilia core of the Nazis.

Male fantasies.

At the end of the 1930s, Hitler's dominance had stabilized.

It seemed safe. To both friend and foe. He was the world's amazement.

Heinz Rühmann, the "common man" of NS cinema.

Seemingly invincible, accommodating to the point of opportunism,

but always visible.

Rühmann conveyed Nazi values with humor.

A cheering-up-machinery

which created the illusion that things weren't so bad.

His characters were unique.

Infantile characters, adults like children and youngsters.

This infantilism, the longing for being a child again,

successful regression, was a feature of many Nazi films.

-Did you fly here? -It was no distance.

-Where is your airplane? -I parked it on the market square.

"The effectiveness of propaganda

demonstrates one of the chief characteristics of modern masses.

They don't believe in anything visible,

not in the reality of their own experiences.

They do not trust their eyes and ears, but only their imaginations.

What convinces masses are not facts, not even invented facts,

but only the consistency of the illusion."

In private, Hitler watched Mickey Mouse, Frank Capra, musicals.

This led to a series of attempts to Americanize German cinema

and to copy Hollywood.

The closest that German comedy ever came to Hollywood was with Glückskinder.

Goebbels' remake of It Happened One Night is pure escapism.

A screwball comedy with slapstick, punch line ping pong

and sparkling dialogue.

And if I found a fortune I'd just gobble it up

I wouldn't need to go to work

The final major success with Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch,

the dream team of the early talkies in the Weimar Republic.

I wish I wasn't so

But it's no good wishing I am as I am

Harvey soon went into exile

and fled from the Gestapo to Hollywood.

Swing was forbidden, Marlene Dietrich in exile.

Nevertheless, there were films like this with jolly American music

and with references to Marlene Dietrich.

A revue as in the distant 19205.

Wir machen Musik delightfully combines comedy and revue.

This is an attempt at screwball comedies, at something different.

Käutner melancholy with a hint of Lubitsch.

To stick with our popular comparisons, the penny is slow to drop.

Today I see the world in a rosy light

Everyone wears a smile on their face

Everything looks like under a charm...

A civilian film. No militaristic, upright, uptight men.

I have you, and you have me What more do we want?

There are henpecked men and self-assured women

who are equal in the gender trouble.

I am young and you are young And the world is our oyster

Everything is easier to achieve If we stick together

From today my life has been restored

Along with the apartment You have refreshed my heart

I have you and you have me What more do we need?

You can admit it. No need to be embarrassed.

A charming little woman who is afraid and is ashamed to be afraid

who admits that she's ashamed she's afraid

is the most perfect woman a man could wish for.

I'm sorry to disappoint you.

I'm generally very daring, brave and strong.

Why do you want to be like that?

You see, that suits you far better.

No, leave it here.

Perhaps this heroic woman will scream again and then...

-Then I'll show you how brave I am. -Awful.

-Show me. -What?

What you look like when you're brave.

Oh, God, that's awful. It's all wrong. No.

-Don't I look brave? -Yes, but it doesn't suit you.

Far too many wrinkles. All your charm has gone.

No, a woman's face must be soft. Tender and feminine.

-I like you much better weak. -But I don't like myself like that.

Because you can't see how attractive you are then.

-Can we change the subject? -Of course. To the weather or so?

Gustaf Grüdgens, a genius, a wonderful actor of stage and screen.

Film director and scintillating theater boss in Berlin.

In the Third Reich, he was Göring's favorite,

not Goebbels, who hated him

but used his charisma.

A Janus-headed artist between collaboration and resistance.

Klaus Mann's roman à clef

seized on Gustaf Gründgens starring role, Mephisto.

-You're in danger. -Always.

Don't you love danger too?

Gründgens definitely did.

Contemporaries described him as having the guts

to overstep boundaries in both directions.

When people go to bed In a pointed nightcap

And entreat their king to protect them

We slip festively dressed Behind the taverns

Dawdling along under the street lamps

The night isn't only for sleeping

The night is when it all happens

A one-man show, totally reliant on Gründgens' charismatic performance.

The lyrics are of note.

When morning finally dawns

Behind dark panes

And the men without a bride Stay side by side

They hatch bombs out of conversations Held in whispers

Rebellion, rebellion in the catacombs

"Rebellion" was clear.

“Bombs out of conversations" was ambiguous.

Goebbels permitted the film

but the record and the score of the song were banned.

-Good heavens! -Look at Debureau.

Are you crazy?

Watch out!

Don't use your sword, but your verses. They're more effective.

In the film, he throws down a rain of flyers

as Hans and Sophie Scholl would do later in Munich, and be beheaded for it.

Resistance and danger.

How do you assess such a film?

It shows an artist challenging the authorities

and propagandizes the artist's self-assertiveness.

Scenes of a successful revolution in Nazi cinema.

Was that resistance?

Or did they do it to keep people in a good mood?

The artists, like court jesters, could more easily speak the truth,

but at court.

The night isn't only for sleeping The night is when it all happens

World War II begins

With the outbreak of war the cinema grew in propaganda

as well as in entertainment. There were many films of legitimization.

Films which legitimized some over-stepping of limits:

war, genocide, the killing of the disabled.

"Big men", that meant major German men,

were now in demand.

Veit Harlan set the tone in Der Herrscher

a reworking of the Gerhart Hauptmann play

in accordance with the Ministry of Propaganda

obviously aimed at the Krupp family.

The capitalist as leader.

Our purpose is to work for the nation.

That is the ruling principle of my work.

Everything else is secondary.

Costume and sets immersed the viewers in the joy

of going back in time emotionally releasing them from the present.

A strategy of forgetting that no one could fully escape.

It was all far-removed from historical reality anyway.

All these films, these "big German men", were bigger than life.

Whoever was born to be leader, needs no other teacher

than his own genius.

My sons, what is the answer?

Are great minds born or formed?

Formed, Your Highness.

Born, Your Highness,

not formed.

Let's discuss that.

Genius, is not born of its mother but of the entire nation.

Excellent.

But the state, through its schooling, first points the way

to perfection.

No. Genius, abandoning imperfect schools,

can, with its own resources, find its way to perfection.

Aestheticized genius, animal, superhuman, barbarian.

Genius can do no wrong, and it legitimizes the amoral.

Another form of legitimization was offered by the film lch klage an

directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner.

He perfidiously combines the theme of killing

as wished for by a terminally ill person with the murder of a mentally ill person

and other severely disabled people, including many children.

I'm so calm now.

So happy.

The happy death is euthanasia.

I loved my wife very much.

Ultimately, it is all a courtroom drama.

Good-bye, Franziska.

At school they said we don't have a proper father. What do you think?

It's rubbish.

Cinema in the war was increasingly aimed at a female audience.

It dealt with women's fantasies and nightmares.

Helmut Käutner's Auf Wiedersehen, Franziska!

Was the first of many 'holiday films' in which a man moves out

to learn fear and to teach fear to the world.

And a loyal and steadfast woman waits for him at home.

Franziska, I can't leave you again.

You did for years looking for adventure.

Now when it means something, you can't?

THE GERMAN NEWSREEL

NEWS FROM THE FRONT FROM THE PROPAGANDA UNIT

June 1940, German Occupation of France.

France was crushed in 39 days.

Germany knows that this victory was won

thanks to the leadership of brave soldiers and excellent organization.

A view of the Eiffel Tower.

Left of the Führer is Professor Speer.

A few days ago, Chamberlain declared to an American

that England and her allies feel they are custodians of civilization

fighting medieval barbarianism.

So these are the custodians of culture.

And these are the barbarians.

Where rats appear, they bring destruction.

Barbarianism was legitimized in film.

They are shrewd, cowardly and cruel and usually appear in large swarms.

In the animal world, they represent insidious and subterranean destruction.

No different to the Jews amongst people.

There is a direct line from racism to anti-Semitism and murder.

Before the Wannsee conference,

Goebbels produced an anti-Semitic propaganda film.

Der ewige Jude was a commissioned work,

directed by Fritz Hippler, Goebbels' adjutant.

Der ewige Jude can be seen as a sort of official announcement

of Hitler's decision for the Holocaust.

Jewish spirit and blood will no longer contaminate the German people.

Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler,

Germany has raised the banner against the eternal Jew.

Europe cannot be at peace until the Jewish question is settled.

If the international financial Jewry were to succeed

in driving nations into another world war,

it will result not in a Jewish victory,

but in the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.

But this anti-Semitic incitement to murder took other forms as well,

such as burlesque comedies.

Are you all bridled up?

-What do you mean? Is this a circus? -We'll see when the soiree begins.

Well?

From the front you look like Catherine the Great.

And from behind as fit as Napoleon.

Don't mention Napoleon. He was anti-Semitic.

That's why he also went broke in Moscow.

Here in Frankfurt we have our head office.

In Gibraltar, there's England.

And what is there?

Jerusalem.

Want to set up a branch there too?

The reverse, my dear man.

We are the branches of Jerusalem.

And historical dramas.

Such films prove that an ugly secret understanding existed

between Nazi anti-Semitism and the rest of the Germans

who both knew and wanted to suppress it.

The most disgraceful German film was by Veit Harlan.

He denied responsibility for it.

Jew Süss in 1940 prepared the way for the "final solution"

allegedly kept secret from the German people by those responsible.

The film shows two types of Jews.

The sort in the ghetto, the stereotype, dirty and ridiculous.

Eight different roles were played by the same actor, Werner Krauß.

And the assimilated Jew.

Attractive, powerful, superficially fitting in,

urbane, ambivalent, dangerous.

People appear not to know how to deal with a great man.

-But you do know? -Well, yes.

I mean, I don't know

but I should be glad if I could say I am a loyal servant to my master.

Again and again boundaries are crossed.

Jews, dressed in rags, like refugees, make their way through city gates.

Süss himself, blurs boundaries.

He takes no notice of any limits of territory, status, cities or gender.

He penetrates everything.

He wants something that is not his,

and if he doesn't get it he takes it with force.

Stop that!

Would the lady like to dance now?

No, not anymore.

It's outside. Start!

Then remove it.

No.

Let me have it back.

The rape as sadomasochistic fantasy.

To make his victim submit, Sties has her man tortured.

The death of the victim provokes an uprising.

Jew!

Jew!

The evil one's mask is torn away.

There he sits, the unholy Jew.

In months of trial, all he has done is lie.

Let me live. I want to live.

I want to live!

The film was shown in more than 15 European countries.

It was shown to all SS teams, on Himmler's orders

as early as the winter of 1940, so before the attack on the USSR.

It was a call for murder with the means of cinema.

Hundreds of love letters were sent to Marian by female fans.

They complained about the "poor Jew Süss".

Wunschkonzert was one of the most successful films.

An afternoon's entertainment which starts at the 1936 Olympics,

the honeymoon for the regime and the people.

Nice memories.

Excuse me, miss. I have a spare ticket. Perhaps I can be of service to you.

Here come the Germans.

Pure propaganda.

A love story and a war,

feature film and newsreel images merge seamlessly into one another.

-What's happened? -I have to leave.

You don't need to worry about hurting me, but...

Inge, you have to trust me.

You are to be my wife.

-Is that really still so? -Inge.

Classical German music and soldiers' songs,

an uncut scene.

This film was so successful

because it related to people's experience.

Plus the Nazi's biggest propaganda program,

the weekly Wartime Radio Request Program

with its singing movie stars Heinz Rühmann and Marika Rökk,

was included in the story line.

That can't shock a seaman Fear not, Rosemarie

We won't let our life sour

Fear not, Rosemarie

And when the whole world shakes

And the world becomes unbalanced

That can't shock a seaman Fear not, Rosemarie

One night in May

So much can happen

You can lose your heart

And it goes one, two, three

One night in May

You can dream so sweetly

Sitting under trees

All sorts of things can happen

The most infamous and most successful coup of filmic Nazi war propaganda.

All branches of the armed forces appear at the end of this film.

Give me your hand

Your white hand

Farewell, my darling

Farewell, farewell

For we sail

For we sail

For we sail to take on England

England

Ilse Werner, the most modern woman in Nazi cinema.

The daughter of a Dutchman.

The only Nazi actress who could really have made it to Hollywood.

In 1938 her father turned down a Hollywood contract for her with MGM.

She had charisma.

Sporty, slim, not a typical German girl,

she could have also been in French films.

Werner hid her toughness well, like some suppressed contradictions.

With her Dutch passport, she had to report to the police every week.

That's pretty. Where's it from?

It's from... the south sea.

Radiant and vibrant, she was more than a beautiful woman.

She was a foretaste of a time that had to come, and did.

It might upset him.

Das große Spiel is a quantum leap in the history of football films.

It mixes feature film scenes

with historical footage from the German Championship Final

that Rapid Vienna won against Schalke 04.

It is a conventional narrative about a successful brotherhood

and the community-building power of sport.

We see film actors with the general public and famous spectators.

It's incredible this match took place because it was on a very special day.

It was Sunday, 22 June, 1941.

That morning the army had gone to war with the Soviet Union.

"Leaders have a concern that supersedes all utilitarian considerations.

They want their predictions to be true."

After months of silence, the Führer

takes the only remaining possible course of action, saying,

"I have decided to place the fate and future of the German Reich

back in our soldiers' hands.

Germany is in a terrible crisis.

We live in a period which will determine everything

and change the face of Europe."

The army attacks.

Veit Harlan was a very capable director. He could even stage huge masses.

Which Germany do you mean?

The outdated one, resting on the splendor of the Holy Roman Empire?

This utopia should collapse.

A German Empire must come and Prussia lead it.

Only Prussia has the material and moral right to hold this position,

not Hapsburg.

Hapsburg has proved itself incapable of such leadership

because it is prepared to share its power with foreign nations

who cannot have the interest of the Germans at heart.

"The similarity between Otto Gebühr's screen Friedrich

and the popular image of Hitler cannot be ignored.

A genius.

Of course his plans and deeds are based on intuition."

You must be wondering why I have called on you unannounced.

I don't wonder about anything with you.

The film Ohm Krüger attacked the archenemy, Britain.

The film depicts a nation

brought down by conspiracy, propaganda and concentration camps.

Ferdinand Marian plays Cecil Rhodes.

And the film shows the reality...

at the Eastern Front.

What's to become of us?

Don't worry about that, ladies. You'll go to a concentration camp.

-And now? -Now we should get some sleep.

-And where? -Somewhere nice.

A heart like mine Doesn't like to be alone

Love and war and songs again.

A morale-boosting film

which transforms an air raid into a romantic event.

All clear!

Where to put one's hands?

Love strikes like a bomb attack.

War with the Soviets.

That's why the captain had to leave straightaway.

Women were supposed to stay behind while the men fought.

I know another miracle will happen

And a thousand fairy tales will come true

I know no love can pass so quickly

When it is so immense and wonderful

In the beautiful time of roses

I found a darling

That wasn't all.

In the midst of war, realism returned.

It was not necessarily neorealism.

It was a new, romantically-charged realism.

Everyday poetry.

Berlin has 4,220,000 inhabitants...

I want to show you Berlin.

In these everyday stories of busy people during wartime,

another Germany emerges,

an observant look at the margins and at day-to-day life

that was less strictly controlled.

Another theme returned.

It had been buried by the glorification of the homeland, blood and soil.

The city.

The city meant contradiction. And working women.

The Wannsee.

One year before, the Wannsee Conference was held on the opposite shore.

-You're from Berlin too! -Why?

-Charlottenburg Sports Club. -No, the trunks are from the old lady.

-Old lady? -Yes.

Oh, your old lady? You leave your mother alone on the first day of your holiday!

-First day, I wish! -Why?

It's my only day of holiday.

I like you much better than earlier.

And what about your mother?

I have no mother. I have no one at all.

-Not even relatives. -Nor do I.

Oh.

Bodies were also more visible,

but they look so inhibited, so strangely wooden and unsure.

You can feel shyness,

and see that they don't know what to do with their bodies.

-I just had to get away from it all. -Really?

-Don't you believe me? -Of course!

-That's exactly what Mum said today. -Your mum?

-No, our matron. That's what we call her. -Then she had a great idea.

What are you doing this afternoon?

-I have to ask Inge. -The loudspeaker?

You weren't listening.

If there was such a thing as a feminist film in Nazi Germany, then it was this.

It was shot in 1942,

as the 6th army was bleeding to death in Stalingrad,

and shortly before Hans and Sophie Scholl were beheaded.

A country woman in Berlin wanting to be a professional photographer.

She's still unsure, but is soon successful.

The film shows that women gaze at things differently.

Beautiful.

That was a delightful picture, Madam. So natural.

It will be a lovely series alongside the fashion show.

An event of the day, something unique, like you.

It's current.

-But it's usually done by men. -Photography?

Yes.

-Photography. -And usually the event too.

We see a woman who doesn't go after men, who doesn't want a family, children.

Who is friends with a man without being in a love relationship.

As far as was at all possible in Nazi cinema,

this film defends privacy, self-determination,

indeed the hedonism of happiness in the here and now.

The body keeps working while we sleep.

The heart beats, the lungs breathe.

But we're not aware of it. At most we dream.

The city sleeps that way too and dreams.

Within it, its blood circulates and life goes on.

This is also an homage to the city.

And a film that shows workers' life.

She asks about happiness

but that can mean much more than obeying tradition.

And are you...

Are you happy, Rolf?

Happy, Renate?

Who is happy?

In 80 minutes there's barely a uniform to be seen in Großstadtmelodie.

Then everything changes.

In terms of the principle of the people's right to self-determination,

I have to say we wild ones are the better democrats.

We see representative images, propaganda.

How is such a film to be assessed?

The terror of war and the first bombings leave no trace.

The lies of a regime and its accomplices, the population,

who don't want to give up the hope of a happy ending.

An alternative reading:

Großstadtmelodie shows civilian life, celebrates personal happiness

and holds up a mirror to reality.

It shows what everyone has lost.

The city, which appeared on the screen at the premiere, and the life within it

had long gone since then.

Der verzauberte Tag directed by Peter Pewas is more private.

But here too the conventional dreams of a shop assistant

are realistically clashed.

The film also tries to counter the image of propaganda with its own magic.

No film can be a deserter

but Helmut Käutners Unter den Brücken keeps a distance.

On the bridge, too le doo

The girls walk up and down

Even though Goebbels prized its craft,

the film was banned.

It was too intimate, too civilian and human,

this story of a love-triangle.

Untouched by war, two friends in love with the same woman.

Your friend says to come up. We're nearly there.

Yes.

Coming.

What's the smell?

-You can't just puff at me. -I'm sorry, but...

I had to puff.

Your hair.

I won't do it again.

Helmut Käutner, born in 1908,

is one of the best German directors of all time.

He almost became a German neorealist.

His career began, rather like Rosselini's and Antonioni's, in Italy,

under Fascism.

Käutner was no dissident

but an Anti-Fascist in his soul and his attitude.

He cleverly found thematic niches in The Third Reich

to make almost independent films under the radar of the regime.

Romanze in Moll, an homage to Renoir, was about a love triangle.

This time it ends in tragedy.

Stalingrad, 80,000 men were captured.

Hundreds of thousands were killed.

The German war of annihilation

had long since become a war of self-annihilation.

Do you want the total war?

Do you want it, if necessary, to be more total and more radical

than anything that we can even yet imagine?

The dreamboat of Nazi-Cinema,

the first talkie- "Titanic " sunk in German cinema.

No iceberg, but evil capitalists.

Jews and the British were to blame.

...a surprise, which will shoot up our shares beyond expectation.

Gentlemen, that's all I wish to say for now.

But please trust in me.

As we all trust in our Titanic.

The film celebrates the glamour of the Empire,

which it purports to despise, with palpable envy.

The sole German is stuffy and humorless.

A Cassandra who suspects what will happen

but can't assert his authority.

Who is in charge, President Ismir or the captain?

The captain naturally does what the president demands.

And why does he demand such nonsense?

The desire for downfall dominates. For disaster.

It doesn't celebrate technocracy or progress, which are part of Fascism.

There are no negative female characters but many negative male characters.

This film was made for women.

But it could also be seen as follows:

women instinctively sense that men with their desire for profit and power

cause a ship's, or a state's, downfall.

Titanic was an allegorical portrayal of what was happening in Germany.

After Stalingrad, this was too much for Goebbels.

Titanic was banned in Germany.

Germans could only see it in occupied countries

and talked about it.

DIE TERRA PRESENTS

PORT OF FREEDOM

The blazing red sky of Hamburg was courtesy of Agfacolor.

But during the filming, Hamburg went up in flames

and this film was completed in Prague.

Große Freiheit Nr. 7 was perhaps the best film of The Third Reich,

but it wasn't a Nazi film.

La Paloma, ohé

It will be over some day

The sea will take us one day

And not return any of us

“It will be over some day."

If anyone understood this sentence, it was Goebbels.

In splendid Agfacolor, the film counters all the Nazis held dear.

In the world of the underdog, of drinkers, of a shady life,

Käutner once again deals with a love triangle.

He shows what lies behind the Nazis' exaggerated cheerfulness:

unhappiness.

Hans Albers plays a man demoralized by a dishonest business.

A drunkard who sees a chance for a different life.

The high point is a dream sequence that turns into a nightmare.

On the Reeperbahn, at half past midnight

Whoever has never, in the snug night...

Come back to the sea.

Come back to the sea.

Stay with me.

Hannes!

His beloved, only dimly seen, soon slips away from him.

How manliness is shaken is blatant in this melodrama of men.

They are vulnerable, tearful sentimental, full of yearning, broken.

In an industrial plant in Berlin.

Große Freiheit Nr. 7 points the way for an apocalyptic mood.

German cinema increasingly escaped into the unreal and became pure fantasy.

Albers played Münchhausen, the "baron of lies".

Propaganda was becoming ineffective.

The Woman of My Dreams was even more fantastical than Münchhausen.

A film on acid. The film itself was like a drug.

The longing for an alternative world must have been tremendous in 1944.

The strained excess is not only a wonderful spectacle

and a final high point of Nazi cinema's mesmerizing character:

there is also something hysterical about it.

A film for the apocalyptic final days.

This is also a part of the history of the German mentality.

A masked ball. A place of excess, but treacherous too.

Everyone wears a mask in this film, even if they are not seen.

The film's Germany, like much here, is once again a place of illusions.

An ostensibly non-political story.

Albrecht is an adventurer, an anti-intellectual world conqueror

who returns after many years, for a final conquest.

Torn between two women,

he marries the demure and cool Octavia, from a good family.

In deep and muted colors,

Harlan paints the decadence of the bourgeois world,

the old and faded upper class.

He shows the foreshadowing of the downfall.

"The sun sinks.

Not much longer will you thirst, Burned heart!

A promise is in the air,

blowing to me from unknown mouths.

The great coolness comes...“

Beautiful.

Yes. Beautiful.

The opposite to all this seems to be embodied in the enigmatic Aels.

Sport, nature, an awakening, courage and wildness.

Like a siren, she emerges, the first time we meet her.

She represents the freshness of nature, but she also represents the foreign.

That was wonderful, Aels.

Oh, there's no skill in hitting it at this distance.

But from a galloping horse is something else.

She fascinates the man, but she's terminally ill.

Her terminal illness is covered through a show of strength

through sport and naturalness.

Bravo!

Do you see the rainbow?

The bridge to the other side.

Who knows how soon we will have to walk it.

Morbidness and intense yearning

had always run through the films of The Third Reich.

The regime had long since promised their fulfillment.

Now there was nothing to hope for. All that was left was longing.

Without an aim.

Do you think so?

What should I think about then?

About you?

If I were to die now...

that would be the sweetest death.

In this German Vertigo

which revolves around a man's fantasies,

and in which the women are undead or vampires,

Harlan tells of temptation, and of the victory of tradition

of the bourgeois,

of apparent decadence.

It is his melodrama:

In order to love a healthy woman, a sick one must first die.

Harlan provided both the presentiment and the rear up against the end.

His two final films are rehearsals for the downfall.

"Gentlemen, in 100 years a wonderful color film will be shown

about the terrible times we are going through.

Don't you want to play a role in this film?

Stand firm so that in a hundred years the viewers do not boo and hiss

when you appear on screen."

In the summertime many a one

Has lost their heart

The circle closes. From Morgenröte to Kolberg.

The most expensive film ever made in Germany.

With 6,000 horses, 10,000 costumes

and over 100,000 drafted Wehrmacht soldiers.

A war melodrama.

Germans...

No love is more sacred than the love of your fatherland.

No joy is sweeter than the joy of freedom.

But you know what is in store if we don't win this battle with hon our.

So whatever sacrifice is required

make your priority the sacred values for which we are fighting and must win

if we are to remain Prussians and Germans.

With foreboding, but undaunted

Dawn is breaking

And the sun, cold and bloody

Lights up our bloody path

In the next few hours

The world's fate will be decided

Others are shaking now

And the certain die is cast

No longer a morale-boosting film but a twilight of the gods,

making sense of the senseless.

The downfall is no longer denied, but made heroic.

The atmosphere is one of resignation and defiant heroism.

A ghost of a film. An exorcism.

A German Gone With The Wind almost out of puff.

A film as a means to promote the idea of a burnt land and the Volkssturm.

From the ashes and rubble a new nation will rise, like a phoenix.

A new Reich.

One last time, Harlan celebrates the ornament of the masses

and fantasies of absolute power.

And then cinema returned to reality.

They're shooting at our town!

Come on!

And then the screen is void of people.

But where are those people?

Which of these films have they seen?

Maybe we understand more about the Third Reich

if we imagine that in some way it was all a single film

and a big dream.

Maybe the Germans didn't want to leave the cinema until the very end,

didn't want to return to reality.

How much of this cinema lives on in today's films and films post-1945?

Does German cinema still dream the old dreams, in a different form?

There was never a zero hour for German cinema.

What does cinema know that we don't?

I take Prussia and Kolberg to my heart.

There only remain a few jewels in our crown.

Kolberg is one of them.

Hans Albers made 19 more films after 1945.

He considered Große Freiheit Nr. 7 his best film.

He died in 1960.

Ilse Werner was temporarily banned

from working due to her role in Wunschkonzert.

Never able to repeat her former success,

she made just ten films in the Federal Republic

but worked as a dubbing artist and TV presenter.

She died in poverty in 2005.

Ferdinand Marian was issued a life-long work ban

due to his role in Jew Süss.

Shortly before he was likely to be pardoned, he died in a car crash.

Suicide was suspected.

Veit Harlan was exonerated post-1945.

He went on to make 11 films in the German Republic.

In his many trials, he claimed the Nazis had taken his non-political work

and used it for their aims.

He claimed he was forced to make Jew Süss.

He never asked for forgiveness. He died in 1964.

Kristina Söderbaum was allowed to work directly after the war

and appeared in her husband's films.

One other film role followed, in Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Karl May.

She died in 2001.

Helmut Käutner was a major filmmaker post-1945.

He went on to make 27 feature films and 24 TV films. He died in 1980.

The screenwriter of Münchhausen was the popular author, Erich Kästner.

As a banned author he had to use a pseudonym, Berthold Bürger,

absent from the opening credits.

Kästner was given special permission to write the screenplay.

The screenplay included some anti-totalitarian barbs,

but Kästner couldn't go too far for fear of endangering himself.