Breaking the Rules: Hollywood and the Limits of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939
Date
2011-09-06
Authors
Gregory, William
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Abstract
The emulation of Hollywood by German films studios in the 1930s caused
significant problems from an ideological perspective. “Germanized” Hollywood
productions incorporated the exciting elements that made American films so popular in
the Third Reich in an effort to displace them. However, a glorification of consumer
capitalism and political individualism accompanied Californian style assembly-line
filmmaking, even in Nazi Germany. In particular, Hollywood style stardom, western
films and remakes introduced potentially dissonant ideas and messages into Germany’s
public sphere. These films broke the rules and depicted worlds that subtly questioned
Nazi ideology in their depiction of non-Nazi modes of identity. “Germanized”
Hollywood deviated from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s attempts to
reconstruct the cinema as a location of indoctrination. The presence of American social
values in German films resulted in a mixed articulation of “Germanness” in the regime’s
preferred medium of propagandistic persuasion.
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Keywords
Germany, National Socialism, Hollywood, Propaganda, Culture