Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945 by Klaus Christian Vögl

Abstract

Reviewed by: Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945 by Klaus Christian Vögl Joseph W. Moser Klaus Christian Vögl, Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938– 1945. Vienna: Böhlau, 2018. 447 pp. In Angeschlossen und gleichgeschaltet: Kino in Österreich 1938–1945, Klaus Christian Vögl examines movie theaters in Austria during the Nazi period from 1938 to 1945. The author uses the term Kino to define in a literal sense the structure, organization, and history of Austrian movie theaters and not cinema or film, so this book is not a history of film in Austria in this time period. However, given the significance of film in the Nazi period, questions of how movie theaters operated in this era should be of considerable interest to film scholars. Vögl worked as the "Geschäft sführer der Fachgruppe der Lichtspieltheater und Audivisionsveranstalter in der Sparte Tourismus und Freizeitwirtschaft der Wirtschaft skammer Wien" from 1981 to 2010. In this capacity, he discovered a steel safe in 1981 containing about twenty thousand pages of records from the Reichsfilmkammer in Austria that were about to be discarded, since it no longer seemed of any use to Vienna's Wirtschaft skammer. Vögl saved these documents, and most of his research for this book is based on these files, which provide new and interesting information. Vögl provides a detailed chapter with a historical overview of movie theaters in Austria during the monarchy from 1896 to 1906 and after the creation of the Reichsverband der Kinomatographenbesitzer in Österreich from 1907 to 1918; he also covers movie theaters in the First Republic and the Austrofascist period, which Vögl identifies as the Ständestaat. Then, the author examines the legal changes that affected movie theaters in Austria after the Anschluss. As a trained historian and lawyer, Vögl places an interesting emphasis on the legal context in which movie theaters operated. Like many German-language monographs, the book is divided into subchapters allowing for a comprehensive overview of the topics covered. The most fascinating parts of the book are on the "Arisierung" of Jewish-owned movie theaters in Austria, and in this thirty-page chapter the book crosses briefly into an important aspect of Holocaust Studies, the dispossession of Austrian Jews perpetrated by the Nazis, a process that left behind a legalistic paper trail that is an important part of Holocaust history in Austria. The other important parts of the book look at how the Nazi government and its various organizations exerted control over movie theaters, including the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (DAF), which oversaw movie theater personnel, and the Reichsfilmkammer, which controlled the issuance of movie theater operating licenses. The book [End Page 118] provides ample evidence of how tightly the Nazi regime sought to control movie theaters, which further illustrates the importance of film as media in this period. A weakness of this book is that it is almost exclusively based on the trove of documents that the author discovered in 1981, which furnish an incomplete picture of the movie theater business, in large part due to the lack of other secondary sources on the topic. To some extent this is understandable, but the book would have benefited from being edited in a way that it did not try to cover all of information available in these documents and instead focused more succinctly on the Arisierungen and the influence the state exerted on movie theater operations and then tied this in with the significance of film at the time, which might have made the book more appealing to film scholars. While the book is a heavy and somewhat disjointed read that is not suited to be used with students or scholars new to the topic, the book offers a wealth of new information for film scholars trying to contextualize the role of movie theaters for the films that people were seeing in Austria in the Nazi period. This book will undoubtedly also be of significant interest to historians studying everyday life during the Nazi period as well as the home front in Austria during World War II. Joseph W. Moser West Chester University Copyright © 2020 Austrian Studies Association