The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler BenUrwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

Abstract

The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact with Hitler Ben Urwand. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.This book has aroused a huge controversy among academic scholars, some of whom arc demanding that Harvard University Press review its publication of the book. Much of the debate stems from academic claims that Urwand's book is deeply anti-Semitic in many of the assorted claims that the author, a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, presents throughout the book.The reader can decide whether or not The Collaboration warrants all this negative attention. It is a fascinating story and well-written, a book that one will find difficult to put down. The title of the book describes correctly what the author's thesis is: the between the Nazis and the Hollywood film community, especially the producers, over the making of films that would be acceptable to the Germans. The author does not say anything that most film scholars have not said (or known) before, namely the methods that Hollywood employed to keep the lucrative German film market open by the Nazis during the 1930s, after Hitler took power, through World War II. In order to continue doing business in Germany after Hitler's ascent to power, Hollywood studios agreed not to make films that attacked the Nazis or condemned Germany's persecution of Jews. Urwand reveals this bargain as a collaboration (Zusammenarbeit) that drew in a cast of characters ranging from notorious German political leaders such as Goebbels to Hollywood studio heads such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner.Central to the story is Hitler himself, who was obsessed with movies (he saw one almost nightly) and who recognized the power of film to shape public opinion. The Prologue discusses the making of King Kong (1933) and its eventual reception in Germany where it became one of Hitler's favorite films. He was captivated by the story, discussed it often, and had it screened several times. Other chapters are just as illuminating, such as the first chapter (Hitler's Obsession with Film) which details how Hollywood desperately sought approval by the German film censors to show the antiwar film, All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), in Germany and to show it without censorship. The film's plot is not sympathetic to Germany's loss in World War I so understandably there was concern on the film's reception in that country. In December 1930, his Party rioted against the Berlin screening of All Quiet on the Western Front, which led to a chain of unfortunate events and decisions that lasted over a decade.Fearful of losing access to the German market, all of the Hollywood studios started making concessions to the German government, and, when Hitler came to power in January 1933, the studios, many of them headed by Jews, began dealing with his representatives directly (37). …