As an enduringly popular topic in fi lm history, the study of Nazi cinema now has a history of its own. The “canonical story” of Nazi cinema studies that most of these books rehearse in their introductions runs something like this: in the 1960s and 70s, historians and political scientists initiated the fi eld with a “fi rst wave” of work on Nazi propaganda; this groundwork has been followed, since the mid-1990s, by a new, revisionist historiography informed by methodologies in fi lm and cultural studies, whose focus has been popular genre cinema. The two publications widely recognized as having set off this “second wave” were Linda Schulte-Sasse’s Entertaining the Third Reich (Duke University Press, 1996) and Eric Rentschler’s The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996). In a clear sign of a disciplinary paradigm shift, these two texts now serve as the established reference points for new work. A decade on, it is time to take stock. Have scholars continued to pursue the directions opened up by the shift from a “fi rst” to a “second” wave historiography? In the ever-accumulating work, what is truly new? Which questions still remain open? The work considered here is diverse and wide-ranging, so I shall confi ne myself to recurrent motifs, common assumptions, and the degree to which individual contributions diverge from the canonical story to offer new vistas. Reviewing these books, one is struck by a recurrent fi gure around which questions of fi lm and popular culture under National Socialism converge: each of these authors has something to tell us about the fi gure of the female fi lm star. The touchstone for most authors remains Zarah Leander, about whose post-war career among queer audiences much has been written (notably by Alice Kuzniar Queer German Cinema [Stanford University Press, 2000]); the contributions here insist on placing the Swedish-born diva—“arguably Nazism’s biggest and most complicated star persona” (Ascheid, 9)—back in her “original” historical contexts, with a particular emphasis on her function as a contradictory cultural icon during the war years, when she starred in the home-front fi lm Die grosse Liebe (The Great Love, 1942). The recurrence of Leander refl ects an implicit scholarly consensus that she best incarnates the ideological functions and limitations of Nazi stardom. Underpinning this consensus, we can infer, fi rst, the methodological conviction that stardom constitutes an epicenter of popular culture, and, second, the more or less explicitly argued assumption that the gender politics of popular culture are signifi ed with particular acuity by the female star. In Hitler’s Heroines, Ascheid programmatically unravels this assumption with the intention of offering “a more complex feminist history of women in the Third Reich” (8). She juxtaposes normative notions of Nazi womanhood with the rather more complex performances and images of femininity on view in the cinema. Drawing on theorizations of stardom in Cultural Studies, Ascheid argues that “the stars of fascism must be seen as containing the cultural incongruities of the period, or better, as the embodiments of particular societal confl icts and contradictions” (35). Viewed through this lens, the Hungarian-born Kristina Soderbaum appears as an unruly incarnation of melodramatic “excess.” Lilian Harvey, whose career spans the Weimar and Nazi years and includes a stint in Hollywood, looks rather more cosmopolitan and “modern” than National Socialist ideals of womanhood would allow; and Zarah Leander, whom the fi lm studios “imported” from Sweden by way of Vienna as a replacement for Marlene Dietrich, becomes an “exemplary fi gure of contradiction and incoherence” (161). While Ascheid occasionally overreaches in her valuation of such contradictions and their potential to destabilize the ideological matrix of National Socialism, these broad arguments are born out in some detail through both textual and contextual readings. A substantial and often stunningly revealing sampling of the trade and popular press adds depth, buttressing Ascheid’s claims. While each of the stars discussed in Hitler’s Heroines is certainly unique, they do represent certain cultural “types” of the kind that were prevalent during the Weimar period (to wit, Harvey’s “girlish” image) and that have been charted in typological star studies from Edgar Morin onward. By contrast, Leni Riefenstahl—if she is to be considered under the