The Third Reich was not only a totalitarian state but also a total multimedia regime. Seven decades after its fiery collapse, the embers remain — including some 1,200 feature films produced under Joseph Goebbels’s ministry of propaganda. Are they historical evidence, incitements to murder, fascist pornography, evergreen entertainments, toxic waste or passé kitsch? All of the above?
Those questions are raised by “Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film,” a documentary essay by the German filmmaker Felix Moeller, opening May 13 at Film Forum for a weeklong, free-admission run.
Mr. Moeller, born 20 years after Germany’s defeat, is concerned about what he sees as youthful disinterest in the Nazi period and the concurrent rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe. He arrived at “Forbidden Films,” he said by telephone from Berlin, after making “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss,” a documentary about the family legacy of Nazi Germany’s most celebrated director, Veit Harlan. Harlan’s most notorious film, “Jew Süss” (1940) — a period melodrama in which a Jewish moneylender connives to take control of the duchy of Württemberg — is as incontrovertibly anti-Semitic as it was enormously popular.
According to the film historian Eric Rentschler, author of “The Ministry of Illusion,” an analysis of Nazi cinema, Goebbels’s productions used entertainment to reinforce the status quo. The hard-core propaganda films that followed Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the outbreak of World War II “constituted a very small portion of the era’s features,” Mr. Rentschler has written. Nazi propaganda was often deliberately entertaining and, in any case, entertainment films were scarcely immune to ideology. “You can’t separate the political films from the unpolitical ones,” Mr. Rentschler said in a phone interview from Cambridge, Mass. “They were all part of a functioning system.”
Around 300 German movies were banned by American occupation forces. In the 1950s, the role of clearing old movies for public screenings was ceded to local authorities, in particular the government-sponsored F. W. Murnau Foundation, which holds the rights to most German movies made before 1945.
Forty-four of the Murnau Foundation’s films, as well as others held by the German Federal Archives, remain prohibited there and can be shown only under special circumstances, which include the presence of an expert to furnish context. In addition to well-known propagandist works like the Nazi martyrdom film “Hitler Youth Quex” (1933), Leni Riefenstahl’s staged documentary “Triumph of the Will” (1935) and “Jew Süss,” forbidden films include the virulently anti-British “Uncle Kruger,” the pro-euthanasiamelodrama “I Accuse,” and the gung-ho bomber-pilot celebration “Stukas,” all released in 1941.
More reportage than polemic, “Forbidden Films” presents scholars, filmmakers, government officials and former neo-Nazis. Mr. Moeller also documents museum or university screenings of the banned films in Germany, France and Israel, and records a range of responses. Shaken members of the audience are interviewed after emerging from a sold-out showing of “Jew Süss,” a film that, Mr. Moeller said, is presented at least every other week somewhere in Germany. “It makes me ill, because it is so good and it transmits such a horrible message,” one says. Other viewers are stunned by “Homecoming” (1941), a movie designed to justify the German invasion of Poland, in which brutish Poles persecute the nation’s German minority.
Like “Jew Süss,” in which a devious racist fanatic takes over a “pure” German realm, “Homecoming” embodies the classic propaganda ploy of projecting one’s own crimes on the enemy. Similarly, “Uncle Kruger” credits the British with the invention of concentration camps and “The Rothschilds” (1940), a pseudo-historical movie rife with misinformation, shows Jewish capitalists using disinformation to foment international panic.
Not everyone experiences the same movie. While members of an Israeli audience appear unfazed by “The Rothschilds” — regarding it as more dated than dangerous — neo-Nazis consider it a relevant illustration of contemporary globalism. One man exits “Homecoming” pleased, he says, by its exposure of the “merciless way that Poles terrorized minorities.”
Widely distributed in Nazi-occupied Europe, with special screenings for SS units, “Jew Süss” was shown at the 1940 Venice Film Festival, where it was praised for its formal qualities by Michelangelo Antonioni, then a young journalist. The filmmaker Jonas Mekas saw the same movie as a student in Nazi-occupied Lithuania. Recalling the Jewish arch-villain as a sympathetic, even heroic character, he later wrote in The Village Voice that he “could not understand how Germans could allow this film to be shown in occupied territories” and was baffled when Harlan was tried after the war for crimes against humanity.
The debate over Nazi films is not new. The 1966 rerelease of Harlan’s war spectacle “Kolberg” (1945) in West Germany became an international story. A 1991 New York Times article on the morality of showing the venomous pseudo-documentary “The Eternal Jew” (1940) ended with an American filmmaker warning that as absurdly excessive as it was, the movie “could become a cult film.” It has — described in terms suggesting a “Rocky Horror” for skinheads by a former neo-Nazi who points out in “Forbidden Films” that “banning things makes them fascinating and taboo.” Perhaps, but showing these movies runs the risk of reducing them to camp.
To complicate matters, the original movies are crumbling (and there are those who believe they should). Mr. Moeller told me that some, like the Gestapo-glorifying thriller “Counterfeiter” (1940), are so deteriorated they could not be used in his documentary. He has joined with other filmmakers in requesting that the Murnau Foundation apply for preservation funds. But not all interest is historical. The director Oskar Roehler, whose luridly fictionalized account of the making of “Jew Süss,” “Jew Süss: Rise and Fall,” was widely criticized on its 2010 release, wondered why he can’t add these movies to his DVD library. The ban makes no sense, when YouTube is an easy source of Nazi propaganda and, Mr. Roehler said, “fringe groups will get their hands on this stuff anyway.”
Mr. Moeller gives the last word to the film scholar Rainer Rother, who regards misuse of the films as preferable to sweeping them under the rug. Mr. Rentschler agreed, invoking the Kantian notion of mature political judgment: “If these films are shown publicly, it’s going to generate public discourse.” More cautious, Mr. Moeller would lift the ban on some, like “I Accuse,” but hold off on “Jew Süss” and “Homecoming.” “There’s still quite a bit of poison,” he said.
This dilemma is not uniquely German. The founding masterpiece of the American film industry, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), is a distorted and white supremacist account of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Like “Jew Süss” and “Homecoming,” Griffith’s film serves as an object lesson in historical falsification and emotional manipulation; released during a period of frequent lynchings, it not only glorified the Ku Klux Klan but also served as a Klan recruiting tool.
Efforts to ban “The Birth of a Nation” began even before its release. And yet the movie is better shown and discussed rather than repressed and forgotten. Along with “Triumph of the Will,” it’s a demonstration of cinema’s authoritarian tendencies, capacity for seduction and potential for evil.
[J. Hoberman’s writes film criticism for the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation and other publications. His books include Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War.]
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