In and Out of War: Space, Pleasure and Cinema in Hamburg 1938-1949.

Abstract

This dissertation reinterprets the relationship between film and the Nazi state in a locally grounded study of Nazi cinema. Trying to understand the simultaneity of genocide and normality, of racism and ‘family values,’ of wartime brutality and the everyday pursuit of pleasure in Nazi Germany, I argue that cinema was an important venue for the negotiation of popular consent. Focusing on Germany’s second largest city, Hamburg, and its complex national and international contexts, I show that the discussions of individual films, the intellectual debates over cinema as a National Socialist art form, and the actual practice of going to the movies invited functionaries, activists, and consumers in Hamburg to maintain locally specific visions of Nazism. These visions were not always in congruence with the ideological imperatives of the Reich. Although local voices never posed a challenge to the racial ideology underpinning the murderous expansionism of the regime, they do illustrate that terror and repression notwithstanding, even the tightly coordinated and top-down administered realm of the cinema invited and provoked constant negotiation on the ground. Local actors, rather than merely consenting to a pre-articulated version of Nazism, deliberately attempted to shape its character. By providing consistency to the Nazi experience and extending its promises for security and plenty into a post-Fascist future, cinema, I argue, provided one of the few bridges between what Ulrich Herbert defined as Nazism’s “good” and “bad” times. Tracing the role of film in Hamburg through the celebratory mood following economic recovery, the victories of war, the subsequent disintegration of the Volksgemeinschaft and postwar occupation, I suggest that film nurtured hopes for local prosperity and aspirations of world recognition in and out of war.