Breaking the Rules: Hollywood and the Limits of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939

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.