Propaganda Minister Research Articles

The Nazi radio [Past Forward

Summary form only given, as follows. As propaganda minister for the Nazis, Joseph Goebbels understood the power of radio. But radios in the early 1930s were expensive. Goebbels turned to electrical engineer Otto Griessing to design a cheap, technically simple, and easy-to-mass-produce device. Industrial designer Walter Maria Kersting fabricated the housing out of Bakelite, a plastic that could be molded and had a modern flair. The resulting Volksempfänger ("people's radio") debuted on 18 August 1933 at the 10th International Radio Show, in Berlin. At 76 Reichsmarks (about US$250), it was about half the price of the cheapest radios then on the market. More than 100,000 units sold during the two-day show; by 1941, nearly two-thirds of German households owned one. The radio carried state-sanctioned music and entertainment. And Hitler gained a direct conduit into people's homes.

The German Mission in Africa and Poland: Women, expansion, and colonial training during the Third Reich

The German Mission in Africa and Poland:Women, expansion, and colonial training during the Third Reich Rachel O'Sullivan In 1926, the Koloniale Frauenschule (Colonial Women's School) opened in Rendsburg in northern Germany and began training women for work in overseas colonies, although Germany had not possessed colonies since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.1 The school remained open for a further 19 years, operating during the entirety of the Third Reich (1933–45). Despite extensive promotion and planning by colonial enthusiasts and official Nazi institutions like the Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy, KPA), founded in 1934 and lead by war veteran and Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of Bavaria Franz Ritter von Epp, Nazi Germany did not reclaim these overseas colonies. Instead, German expansion in Eastern Europe during the Second World War eclipsed the colonialists' efforts to promote the reacquisition of German territory in Africa. Apart from the colonial school's student cohort, German women also participated in similar types of training and tasks during the war, albeit for a geographical location within Europe. Various organisations, such as the Reichsarbeitsdienst der weiblichen Jugend (Women's Youth Labour Service, RADwJ) the NS-Frauenschaft (National Socialist Women's League), Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM, League of German Girls) and the Arbeitsgemeinschaft nationalsozialistischer Studentinnen (National Socialist Women Student Organisation) trained women in numerous domestic and agricultural tasks and assigned them work in annexed Poland. During such assignments, known as an Osteinsatz (Eastern Work Placement), German women helped with the resettlement and Germanisation of newly-arrived Volksdeutschen (ethnic Germans) throughout the war. The students' activities at the Koloniale Frauenschule and activities undertaken by German women in Poland both featured in two separate films released during the Third Reich. The documentary Die deutsche Frauenkolonialschule „Rendsburg" directed by Paul Lieberenz and released in 1937, featured the school and its students.2 Multiple locations in Germany screened the documentary, as did schools and clubhouses in Latin America and Africa.3 Mädel verlassen die Stadt (Girls Leave the City) was a Kulturfilm released in 1943 by Universum Film AG (UFA), a film production company under the control of the Propaganda Ministry.4 Although the two films are set in different locations, their release dates differ by six years and the women featured in each film were training for or working in different geographical areas, parts of the films are strikingly similar. The potential continuities or similarities between Nazi Germany's territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe and in overseas colonies in Africa have remained a subject of historical debate for more than a decade.5 Such research on the comparisons and contrasts of the Nazi regime to colonial models has thus far been largely dominated by the topic of violence and the Holocaust. Although historians have demonstrated that certain commonalities exist between the Nazi regime's methods of rule, domination, and violence, the extreme case of the attempted annihilation of the European Jews appears to break from patterns of colonial violence against Indigenous, colonised peoples.6 Mark Mazower and Shelly Baranowski have highlighted the interlinked nature of empire building and violence in regard to the similarities between Nazi Germany's expansion into Eastern Europe and European colonialism. However, traditionally colonial regimes often attempted to legitimise conquest and violence by using the notion of a developmental or "civilising" mission.7 Colonial intervention could be justified in the minds of the colonisers by the supposed benefits of colonisation for the colonised, like culture, education and healthcare. Mazower and Baranowski argue that Nazi Germany built and ran its version of empire without the pretence of any such civilizing mission.8 Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski have similarly argued that the Nazi regime did not initiate a developmental mission as evidenced by the treatment of European Jews and Poles.9 Conversely, my research has previously shown that certain facets of the Nazi regime's approach to the perception and treatment of ethnic German resettlers demonstrate Nazi Germany did perceive and promote some of its activity in Poland within a similar framework to colonial developmental missions.10 Additionally, the attempted assimilation of racially valuable Poles and Poles deemed loyal to Germany through the Deutsche Volksliste (German People's...

Інформаційно-пропагандистське забезпечення в Армії Української Народної Республіки періоду Директорії (1918–1921 рр.)

The article deals with the experience of implementing information and propaganda support in the Ukrainian People's Army from the end of 1918 to the end of 1921. It was considered process of creation and activity of the press and information department (press and propaganda ministry) of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The emphasis is on the advantages and disadvantages of conducting propaganda campaigns in the ranks of the Army of the Ukrainian People's Republic during the period of the Directory.

Verfolgungsinstrument Schwarze Liste

Abstract The article investigates the importance of ‚blacklists‘ as a tool of Fascist and National Socialist racial policy in the field of music. It critically examines the radicalizing effects that National Socialist antisemitism exerted on Fascist racial policy, which has often been described as yielding to German pressure. In fact, Fascist leaders demonstrated their will to cooperate on the ‚Jewish question‘ very early, though Fascist antisemitism never reached the exterminatory dimensions of the Nazi Holocaust. Already in 1936, cultural policymakers were working towards the goals of their German allies, taking initial steps to discriminate against Jewish musicians long before the Racial Laws were introduced in 1938. Various documents recently discovered in the historical archives of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome also highlight the pivotal role of musical institutions and their rich documentation in the investigation of cultural policy under Fascist rule, especially since the vast majority of the official records belonging to central institutions like the Italian Propaganda Ministry must be considered lost.

Latin American Media & The State: Beyond the Old Symbiosis

Observers of Latin America have long regarded the pervasive relationship between the region’s governments and its privately owned media, especially its TV-based conglomerates and its often oficialista newspapers, as one of accommodation or interdependence. For much of the twentieth century, hegemonic governments, whether military dictatorships or the lengthy dictablanda perpetrated by Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), prolonged their rule in part by relying on compliant media to collectively act as a ministry of propaganda; in turn, TV hegemons such as Brazil’s Grupo Globo, Mexico’s Televisa, and El Salvador’s Eserski family were permitted to maintain their quasi-monopolistic status, while newspapers retained generous state subsidies, which in most cases they needed for their survival.

Frank OrmsbyThe Rain Barrel

propaganda minister; and Rudolph Hess, who landed a plane in Scotland in a futile attempt to negotiate a peace in 1941. One appreciates Larson’s attention to the morale of the English people undergoing repeated attacks in the cities. Clementine Churchill became quite concerned with conditions in the shelters, where many chose to sleep when there was a “bombers’ moon.” Finally, there is the Great Man himself, never quite stepping off his mythic pedestal, uplifting the populace with regular tours of bombed areas, speaking by radio to the nation. The reader also sees a man in his moods, as war news comes in, a man with appetites for eating, drinking, smoking, and talking till the wee hours of the morning. Reading of Churchill’s and England’s trials during 1940 and 1941, month by month, one becomes quite unsympathetic with America’s sitting out for so long. It should have been clear to F. D. Roosevelt and the American public that England suffered immensely and would not be able to withstand a full-scale invasion. Why did it take Pearl Harbor to bring the US into the war? One wants to know more about public sentiment for staying out, the resistance even toward the Lend-Lease program, Roosevelt ’s excessive caution. Had the failure of the League of Nations, the Depression, the Dust Bowl so turned our concerns inward? Did we feel secure because an ocean separated us from Europe? Can we expect another book? W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Kemal Varol Wȗf Trans. Dayla Rogers. Austin, Texas. Center for Middle Eastern Studies. 2020. 193 pages. KEMAL VAROL IS little known outside Turkey, where he is a minor star of contemporary literature. He is best known for the 2014 novel Haw, translated into English under the title Wȗf as part of the University of Texas’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies’ (CMES) book series Emerging Voices from the Middle East. In Turkey, the novel was awarded multiple prizes, including a journalism association’s peace prize, and was translated thanks to a prestigious PEN/Heim grant. The sixth book in the CMES series, Wȗf is the rare literary work from Turkey made available into English and proves its author to be as strong an emerging talent as Elif Shafak or Orhan Pamuk were upon their anglophone debuts. Books in Review Frank Ormsby The Rain Barrel Winston Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2020. 112 pages. KEEN OBSERVATIONS ARE expected of a poet, and Irish poet Frank Ormsby satisfies many times over in The Rain Barrel. The book is filled with bright idylls such as “The Beekeeper” and “Small Things.” In “Small Things,” a pair of “old boys” try to cheer the speaker because he’s just missed seeing a heron: “They cast about for fitting consolation. / ‘Have you seen the egrets?’” they ask. But the speaker’s not disappointed: he finds “three pleasures” in their joy from “the small things made precious by their delight.” Each of these poems is a pretty figure in its own right, like pieces of beach glass, but The Rain Barrel is much more than a string of pretty baubles. There are poems of playful personification, such as “Scarecrow,” in which Ormsby imagines the family’s scarecrow pining for a “ragdoll / who won a prize for lady of the house” and who “lives in a cornfield further west.” As these character/objects multiply and reoccur throughout The Rain Barrel, they begin to weave a complex tapestry of a place and a family. Ormsby demonstrates a subtle virtuosity in this book. There are many variations and departures from the quiet, reflective poems. The poem “Small World (4)” is a series of ten brief and independent stanzas. Each of them is a highly compressed combination of observation and sentiment. If one isn’t fussy about counting syllables, they are excellent examples of the haiku form. Or, for a different form, consider “The Love Poem,” which begins by announcing “the love poem has been discredited / . . . a day has been set aside for the shredding of the English love sonnet.” However, by the end of the piece, the love poem has been restored—“my prohibition...

Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein

Reviewed by: Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany by Valerie Weinstein Daniel H. Magilow Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany. By Valerie Weinstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. Pp. 296 + 20 b/w illustrations. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0253040701. While lay audiences associate the cinema of Nazi Germany with its most overtly nationalistic and antisemitic films—think of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) and Fritz Hippler's The Eternal Jew (1940)—scholars of this dark chapter of German mass culture have long recognized that a more complete understanding means looking past the most tendentious productions of Goebbels's propaganda ministry. Pioneering scholarship by Eric Rentschler, Linda Schulte-Sasse, Sabine Hake, and others has demonstrated that relatively few films made in Nazi Germany wore their Jew hatred on their proverbial sleeves. Most that did tended to flop at the box office anyway. (Veit Harlan's Jew Süss [1940] was a notable exception). Because overt antisemitism characterizes only a few of the film comedies that comprised 48 percent of the 1,094 films produced in Germany between 1933 and 1945, many have maintained reputations as politically innocuous. Some have even become cult hits. Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944) inspires audience participation rituals akin to those at screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or The Room. Münchhausen (1943) inspired Terry Gilliam's 1988 remake and is periodically screened on Turner Classic Movies. But as Valerie Weinstein convincingly argues in Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany, comedies may not have expressed antisemitism as conspicuously as other kinds of films, but they were still instrumental in normalizing and legitimizing it. Weinstein's work productively erodes the barriers between reified categories like "propaganda" and "entertainment" and the naive and dangerous commonplace that Nazi Germany's lighter fare is apolitical. Her theoretical framework for reading these comedies attends to what she terms their "inferential antisemitism." Unlike the [End Page 420] conspicuous anti-Jewish vitriol in The Eternal Jew, Jew Süss, and The Rothschilds, inferential antisemitism "operates below the level of articulation" as an "insidious mode of representing Jewish difference" (14). In Weinstein's paraphrase of historian Lisa Silverman, Jewish difference is a conceptual model for understanding how the coding of certain discourses as Jewish creates a context whereby "both Jews and non-Jews shape ideals of the 'Jewish' and 'non-Jewish'" (13). In Nazi film comedies, inferential antisemitism manifested itself in "innuendos, gaps, and displacements," such as the rejection of irony, fast-paced repartee, and other "Jewish" strategies termed "wit," as opposed to genuine German "humor." Inferential antisemitism made film comedies into weapons of mass ideological destruction. They were predicated on ideas about Jewishness and Germanness that were offered as axiomatic and beyond critique, thereby reinforcing them as common sense. In the pre-televisual media environment of Nazi Germany, film's role in such subliminal ideological conditioning was wide-reaching. Comedies contributed substantially to the project of using film to form a unified people's racial community (Volksgemeinschaft) out of the filmgoers who accounted for over a billion visits to the cinema in 1943. After an introduction that effectively lays out the book's main argument, Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany first turns to Nazi theoretical works on Jews, humor, and the film industry, particularly writings that claimed Jews had contaminated and commercialized German film. This discussion then analyzes how the film trade press translated these ideas in their "reviews" of films—to the extent genuine film reviewing even existed. Implicitly and explicitly, the film trade press "regularly maligned common comic strategies coded as Jewish, including wit, irony, intellectualism, exaggerated physicality, rapid rhythm, and superficial, rote comicalness" (45). The next six chronologically arranged chapters offer close readings of the strategies of film comedies, beginning with the overt antisemitism of early films such as Die Blume von Hawaii (1933) and Nur nicht weich werden, Susanne! (1935). Additional chapters unpack underexamined works like Wenn wir alle Engel wären (1936), while the films April! April! (1935) and Donogoo Tonka (1936) offer a "case study in how stock characters and disciplinary humor can result in inferential antisemitism" (155). A chapter on the Verwechslungskomödie (mistaken-identity comedy) Robert...

News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 by Heidi J.S. Tworek

Reviewed by: News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945 by Heidi J.S. Tworek Stephanie Seul News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945. By Heidi J.S. Tworek. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 344. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0674988408. For Hitler and the NSDAP, propaganda was central to the establishment of a totalitarian dictatorship. In March 1933, the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda was set up under Joseph Goebbels to control the press, radio, film, theater, and art. The editorial independence of newspapers was eroded, communist, socialist, and other oppositional papers were forbidden, and the state-controlled news agency Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro (German news office) shaped newspaper content. Moreover, the Nazis seized the broadcasting system, which was used as a powerful tool for spreading propaganda at home and abroad. Nazi propaganda was also spread abroad through Transocean, a wireless news service directed at foreign newspapers and news agencies. It played a crucial role in the "war of words" during the 1930s and World War II and was particularly influential in Latin America and China, much to the annoyance of the British and American governments. One reason the Nazis could swiftly seize control of communications in 1933 was the structure of media control built up in Germany during previous decades. As Heidi Tworek reveals in News from Germany, there was a long tradition of government influence on news gathering and distribution dating back to imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. Since around 1900, German elites—i.e., bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists, military leaders, and journalists—considered news as a key to international power and news agencies a means to achieve broader political, economic, and cultural objectives through the control and spread of information at home and abroad. Hence, Berlin sought to establish an international news network that could compete with its British and French rivals. Building on the new technology of wireless telegraphy, the Germans aimed to bypass the undersea cable networks controlled by Britain and France. The strategic importance of cables was revealed in 1914 when, in the first days of World War I, the British cut all cable connections with Germany and taught a lesson in the importance of wireless communications to German elites. News from Germany is not a story about newspaper content, but about the news networks that operated in a transnational space and fundamentally shaped what newspapers printed. Those networks were largely invisible to newspaper readers, [End Page 179] since the papers often did not name news agencies as their sources of information. German governments considered this invisibility an advantage because it enabled them to secretly influence public opinion inside and outside Germany, as well as foreign governments, through control of the flow of information. As Tworek argues, German news agencies became the bottlenecks of news provision. Since news gathering was costly, few papers could afford their own correspondents in Berlin and abroad. The majority of the roughly 4,000 newspapers in Germany were dependent on news agency material. This gave news agencies considerable power. At the same time, through state-funding and exclusive access to official information, news agencies were firmly tied to the German government, which enabled the latter to shape newspaper content without having to deal with hundreds and thousands of individual publications. Tworek skillfully narrates the transnational history of German news agencies. Since the 1860s, Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau was Germany's principal news agency and exclusive provider of official news. In return for financial support, Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau agreed to give preferential treatment to government notices and to submit politically sensitive news for approval by the government prior to its publication. During the Weimar Republic, the German government even paid the salaries of several of the bureau's correspondents, whom they considered useful agents of Germany's cultural diplomacy. Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau formed part of an international news cartel dominated by the British Reuters and the French Havas agencies. Between them, they divided the supply of news, each reporting on an assigned sphere of influence and exchanging their news with the others. In order to circumvent this restriction as well as British-dominated cable networks, the German government turned to...

'It's all over now.' The dentist Helmut Kunz and the killing of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' children at the end of the Third Reich.

Joseph Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister of National Socialist Germany and one of the most powerful Nazi politicians, committed suicide at the end of the Second World War together with his wife, Magda, thus escaping his political responsibilities. Prior to committing suicide, the Goebbels' conspired to murder their six children, and to this end, enlisted the help of the dentist Helmut Kunz. Not until 1959, however, did Kunz stand trial on six counts of aiding and abetting in a homicide. Using extensive court records, this article examines the life of the dentist Helmut Kunz, his function in the Third Reich, and his role in the murder of the Goebbels children.

National memory as a weapon in the information war

National memory as a weapon in the information war

“I intend to have this book retranslated”: Translation in Joseph Goebbels’s diaries

ABSTRACTJoseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister in the Third Reich, kept a diary during the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship. In spite of the pitfalls associated with diaries as a historical source, Goebbels’s entries on translated literature prove meaningful for the history of translation during the Nazi regime. The entries shed light on Goebbels’s reading of translated literature and the different functions he attributes to it. They reveal a significant politicisation in his thinking about translation, improve our understanding of his agency in translation matters and provide insights into the motivations that inform the Propaganda Minister’s decision-making around translated texts. By investigating this historical source which has not been considered from the point of translation so far, the present article aims to contribute a fresh perspective on the workings of translation policy in Nazi Germany.

The Uniform in the Closet:Mädchen in Uniformin Nazi Germany

This article highlights the significance of Mädchen in Uniform’s (1931) reception in Nazi Germany for feminist, queer, and German film studies. Contrary to popular belief, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry did not ban the film or expunge it from cultural memory. Instead, primary sources show that it was screened and praised, and that it served as an important model for other Third Reich films. Historically and theoretically grounded analyses explain how its pre-1933 reception, as well as its visibility strategies, circulation, and adaptation after 1933, enabled the film to be “closeted.” As a result, the Nazi film establishment could integrate it into their vision through acts of strategic blindness. By illuminating the film’s closeted status in the Third Reich, this article complicates scholarly narratives about both Nazi German cinema and Mädchen in Uniform as a lesbian-feminist film.

Research on the Main Problems and Causes of College Students' Social Practice

In recent years, the social practice of college students has received extensive attention. It is the Party's fine tradition and style to integrate theory with practice. The combination of theoretical education and practical education is the fundamental principle of College Students' ideological and political education. A great deal of work has been done by the relevant central departments such as the Ministry of Propaganda, the Ministry of Education, the Central Committee of the League, local departments and universities, and the research on practical education and social practice of college students is also in-depth conducted. Based on this, this paper mainly analyzes the shortcomings and causes of College Students' social practice, and further puts forward targeted strategies and suggestions, in order to optimize the social practice of college students in China to better carry out. College students participating in social practice activities can understand the society, understand the national conditions, increase their talents, contribute to society, exercise their perseverance and cultivate their character, deepen their understanding of theories and knowledge what they learn in the classroom , deepen their understanding of the Communist Party's line, principles and policies, and firmly follow the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. The students’ social practice activities is of great significance for training qualified builders and reliable successors, realizing the common ideal and belief of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, strengthening the sense of historical mission and social responsibility. At the same time, it is also of great significance to strengthen college students’ self-independence. College students' social practice is not only the continuation of school education and classroom teaching, but also the transformation of college students from "campus students" to "social workers" and the process of accepting social education. From the perspective of the formation process of people's ideological and moral character and the actual needs of College Students' all-round and healthy development, the importance and significance of social practice education is indubitable. Developing social practice of college students in a planned way is also an inherent requirement for colleges and universities to accomplish the fundamental task of "building morality and cultivating people".

Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938 by Robert Dassanowsky

Reviewed by: Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938 by Robert Dassanowsky Joseph W. Moser Robert Dassanowsky, Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933–1938. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018. 423 pp. With Screening Transcendence: Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, eminent Austrian film scholar Robert Dassanowsky has shed light on a yet unexplored but very complex and important topic in German-language film of the 1930s. Well known for his important monograph Austrian Cinema: A History (McFarland, 2005), which provided the first comprehensive English-language overview of Austrian film, Dassanowsky focuses in Screening Transcendence on Austrian film in the five years before the Nazi takeover of Austria, during which time Germany was already under Nazi control and Austria was an authoritarian fascist state, though very different in regard to film production given the Austrofascist regime’s acceptance of Jewish actors and filmmakers as well as the lack of an effective centralized government authority shaping Austrian film. Austria provided German-language film with a brief period of freedom, which however was limited by economic considerations, as films that could not be released in the German market were unlikely to make a lot of money. The Austrian film industry in this period was [End Page 168] thus split into films that were intended for release in Nazi Germany, primarily out of economic considerations, and which thus fulfilled the racist exclusion and political conformity as required by Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, essentially preempting the so-called Anschluss in Austrian film. More interesting is the other group of Austrian films that did not meet Nazi criteria for release in Germany and had to rely on box office returns in Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and other free European countries. It is this latter category of films that provided German exiles and German-speaking Jews an opportunity to continue making films—for some this was a temporary stop on the way into exile in Hollywood. This well-researched book, which includes an extensive bibliography and index as well as a helpful, detailed chronological filmography, is accessible to both experts and novices. Dassanowsky provides his readers with an expert introduction on the political context of Austrofascism that may be very useful for scholars uninitiated to the topic, while immediately drawing his readers into Austrian film production and examples of the films, some of which is likely to be new material for seasoned Austrianists as well. The book is laid out in three main parts with subchapters. “Part 1: Structures” provides the contextual political background as well as the context of Austrian film production of the time. “Part 2: Genres, Narratives, Contexts,” which makes up three-quarters of the book, provides detailed examples of various film genres and actual films over the course of eight chapters. The topics included in this part deal with Viennese Film as conceived and developed by Willi Forst and Walter Reisch; the Emigrantenfilm and “the Construction of a Catholic-Political Identity”; “Female Types and Sexuality in Feature Films”; “Tales of Patriarchy”; cine-operettas and music film; “New Order Out of Chaos: The Austrian Screwball and Hybrid Comedy”; experimentalism and the question of a national film style; and “the Alps versus Vienna in Film.” The wide variety of topics covered in this part of the book are indicative of the large scope of films made in Austria in this time. The book closes with “Part 3: Locations,” the subtitle of which, “From Rome to Hollywood,” indicates some of the directions that Austrian filmmakers (along with Berlin) were looking at in these five years. In this short period, Austrian film laid a pathway for many actors to work in American film, such as “Walter Reisch, Franziska Gaal, Hans Jaray, S. Z. Szakall, Felix Bressart, Oskar Karlweis, Felix Jackson, Henry Koster, Joe Pasternak, Hans J. Salter, Richard Oswald, Hans May, Nicholas Brodszky, [End Page 169] Albert Bassermann, Steve Szekely, Robert Wilmot” (ix), and thus this book is also an important contribution to better understanding Austrian-American history in film. At the same time, in this period the careers of Austrian actors and filmmakers who would stay under Nazi occupation continued to develop as well. Willi Forst developed a Viennese aesthetic...

Dzerela do istorii ukrainskoi zhurnalistyky u fondakh viddilu rukopysiv Natsionalnoho Zakladu imeni Ossolinskykh

The article identifies and describes the main groups of non-catalogued documents from Manuscripts Department of Ossolinski National Institute in Wroclaw, enabling the study of unknown pages of Ukrainian journalism history. The revealed documents made it possible to clarify new aspects of editors’, publishers’, journalists’ activity, to find out the unknown periodicals, as well as to enrich their «biographies» with new information. They are, in particular, the copies of Ukrainian newspapers, magazines and bulletins published in Austria, Poland, Germany in 1919–1921, editions issued in displaced persons’ camps, and early unknown handwritten student’s magazine «Vіstnyk» (1890) and its Polish language supplement «Dodatek do Vіstnyka». The author characterizes archival materials of Ukrainian newspapers’ editorial boards, such as of «Ukrainska Trybyna», «Ridnyi Krai», «Zyz», «Litopys Chervonoii Kalyny», «Ukraiinski Visti» and others. Mostly, they include authorized texts with editor’s marks, letters to correspondents and their answers, evidences about contributors, ways of forming the periodicals’ content, cooperation with polish journalists, as well as with editorial boards of other periodicals, both Ukrainian and foreign. The article stated the significance of different documents of the Ministry of Press and Propaganda of Ukrainian Peoples Republic’s Government as a historic source, especially those issued during so called Tarniv period. That is regulative and normative documents, reports, official correspondence by minister O. Kovalevskyi, heads and referents of Department of Press and Department of Propaganda V. Ostrovskyi, K. Vrotnovskyi-Syvoshapka, F. Krushynskyi, N. Hnatiuk and others. The author examines personal documents, which highlight the biographies of both prominent and little-known journalists, publishers, other persons closely cooperated with press. Private correspondence by F. Dudko, M. Yeremiiiv, O. Kovalevskyi, P. Kovzhun, M. Tverdokhlib, V. Pisniachevskyi, F. Khyzhniak, M. Yatskiv was especially emphasized, since besides private troubles, contains important discussions on media publishing, valuable information about periodicals they were working for and their reflections on the importance of journalism in general. Key words: history of Ukrainian Journalism, periodicals’ editorial boards, private correspondence, journalists, publishers.

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany

A Woman’s Petrified Gaze at the Dead: Uncovering the Troubled Ethics Behind an Iconic Image of Bombing War Against Nazi Germany Christoph Weber (bio) In 2003, the German historian Jörg Friedrich published the picture book Brandstätten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs (Scenes of Fire: The View of the Bombing War), a visual counterpart to his bestselling 2002 monograph Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940–1945 (The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War 1940–1945). The gruesome photographs of charred and disfigured corpses in the chapter “Bergung” (rescue) sparked a controversy in Germany, as they had been presented without proper historical context. Reviewers jumped to the conclusion that Friedrich’s selection of shocking images constituted an attempt to balance “German crimes with German suffering,” thereby perpetuating “the myth of the Germans as Opfer.”1 For instance, Heinz-Peter Preußer argues that in Germany, “these photographs cannot be regarded without denoting the emblem of industrial mass killing, the destruction of European Jewry.”2 Viewed in isolation, without the critical reexamination of the historical circumstances that led to the destruction of Germany’s urban centers, the images of dead German civilians are vulnerable to misappropriation by revisionists and their accusatory claim that the Allies had perpetrated a “Bombing Holocaust.”3 This demonstrates the fundamentally problematic nature of showing violence in what John Berger calls “public photographs.”4 Because public photographs are “like images in the memory of a total stranger,” they “carry no certain meaning in themselves” and thus “lend themselves to any use.”5 With the easy access to and rapid proliferation of images on the internet, the question as to how photographed atrocities are being used in the service of an ideological standpoint becomes all the more pressing. David F. Crew concludes his analysis of online treatments of the bombing war in Germany since the 1990s with the remark that “numerous websites depend on inflammatory rhetoric, shock images, emotional appeals, and narrow perspectives to focus users’ attention exclusively on German suffering.”6 The “new emphasis on anger and outrage” informs the way these internet sites employ “[p]ictures of desolate ruins and gruesome [End Page 10] corpses” and ultimately “does not encourage viewers to think about the differences between the moral valence and the emotional impact of an image or series of images.”7 A possible strategy for blunting the emotional resentment and controversy that the photographs of the Allied bombardments are able to generate to the current day is to integrate them into what Berger has called the context of social and political experience: “The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images.”8 In fact, what has been barely explored in the debate about the ethical implications of publishing photographs of the German bombing dead is the context in which they were taken. Michael Kimmelman points out in his review of Brandstätten that “Mr. Friedrich is mysterious about their origin. They seem to have been amassed by the country’s efficient record keepers and collected in town archives.”9 Friedrich briefly mentions the involvement of unnamed professional photographers and officials with photo permits—fire officers, city architects, air raid wardens—in the documentation of the bombing war and who later in life donated their private photo collections to city archives.10 Yet it remains unclear what kind of socio-political forces pushed for the photographic documentation of the devastating air raids in the first place. Friedrich himself justifies the publication of atrocity images by stating that Joseph Goebbels “forbade these photos of our victims from the German papers” and “[i]n a way we’ve obeyed his orders until this day.”11 As the Allied bombings intensified, press directives issued by the Reich Ministry of Propaganda had indeed proscribed the newspaper publication of photographs of dead German civilians.12 However, the sheer volume of surviving images attests to a particular interest among Nazi officials in meticulously documenting the horrors unleashed by the so-called Anglo-American “terror attacks.” Contrary to Friedrich’s polemical claim, photographs...

Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion by Bill Niven

MLR, .,   have started a little more from that pole. is feature enables great writing always to be in two places at the same time. R I A H R Hitler and Film: e Führer’s Hidden Passion. By B N. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. . xi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Written by Bill Niven, a British historian known for his research on Germany’s dif- ficult past, Hitler and Film is part of a growing trend at university presses to publish books aimed at a general readership. Like Ben Urwand’s e Collaboration: Hollywood ’s Pact with Hitler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Harvard University Press, ), this most recent contribution feeds the unending fascination with Nazi cinema as both the ultimate other of classical Hollywood and the most extreme example of the politicization of film. Aer years of ideology critical studies, film theoretical analyses, and Cultural Studies readings, both books also contribute to a renewed interest in the role of individuals, whether studio bosses or Fascist dictators, in controlling all aspects of film production and reception. Hitler and Film will be a satisfying read for history buffs and film fans interested in the ird Reich. e book is written in a fluid, highly readable style and provides a vivid account of the personal and political ambitions that propelled Hitler to take an intense interest in film as a technology of mass entertainment and a form of political indoctrination. ere are many details involving Hitler’s film-viewing habits, his heated arguments with Goebbels over films in production, and his alternately obsequious and menacing behaviour towards film actresses. Aside from drawing extensively on archival sources from the Bundesarchiv, Niven makes effective use of the numerous memoirs written by Ufa stars trying to justify their professional choices and to profit from the widespread fascination with what is oen described as the first media dictatorship. Hitler’s comments about individual films (e.g. ‘good’, ‘bad’) reveal him as an ardent film fan—but one with surprisingly ordinary tastes and limited powers of discernment. His interventions in ongoing film productions and his interactions with celebrities requesting special treatment confirm the conclusion reached by countless biographies of Hitler, namely, that the Führer enjoyed exercising control over all things major and minor. However, in what ways his decisions shaped a national film culture defined as much by its hierarchical power structure and ideological objectives as by the opportunism, pragmatism, and mediocrity of those working under these conditions remains an open question. Niven introduces the main story of his book by reconstructing Hitler’s intense love of film through the daily screenings at the Berghof and his repeated clashes with Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. e chapters on Leni Riefenstahl, from her first party rally films to Triumph of the Will () and Olympia (), cover familiar ground explored in numerous monographs on (or by) Riefenstahl on her  Reviews life and work. Subsequent chapters document the public relations efforts surrounding Hitler’s appearances at film premieres, his representation in wartime newsreels, and his extensive socializing with celebrities at official functions and society events. Niven rightly highlights the difference between the pre-war and war years. Not only did Hitler become closely involved in the approval process for wartime newsreels and anti-Semitic films such as Jew Süss () and e Eternal Jew (); together with Goebbels, he also created the List of the Divinely Gied that protected film professionals from being sent to the front. Significantly, Hitler’s growing need for shaping the image of Nazi Germany for posterity coincided with concerted efforts to minimize his own film appearances—and conceal his Parkinson’s disease. For scholars of German cinema and media and historians working on the ird Reich, this book does not offer much new information or interpretation. Niven does not engage with the existing scholarship, whether on film propaganda (i.e. newsreels , state-commissioned films) or the kind of mainstream cinema that has inspired numerous studies on studio histories, film genres, and the star phenomenon. As a result, opportunities for deeper engagement are missed: how the kind of top-down approach chosen by Niven complicates...

Izložba nove nemačke arhitekture u Beogradu 1940. godine

Among architectural exhibitions that marked the interwar period of Serbian architecture, the exhibition of new German architecture held in Belgrade in October 1940 attracted great attention. It was the first exhibition of German national socialist architecture abroad. Top members of Yugoslav government took part in the organizational activities, with Prince Pavle as a patron. The exhibition was prepared by architect Albert Speer who was a public works inspector for the Reich capital, and according to the directives of the Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and propaganda minister Goebbels. The exhibition attracted a great deal of attention from both High-profile and wide public, and was reported widely by the daily press. It has interpreted the social, cultural and political aspects of German architecture and its reception in Serbian and Yugoslav architecture.

Murrow's Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration

Edward R. Murrow is an icon of American journalism. Three full-length biographies and scores of other studies have recounted his reporting of World War II, his exposé of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and his criticism of television's trivialization. However, Murrow's brief postjournalism career as director of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) during the Kennedy administration has received comparatively little attention. Gregory M. Tomlin fills that gap with a concise, lucid, and sympathetic analysis of Murrow's tenure at the USIA, which Tomlin describes as “the propaganda ministry of the United States throughout the Cold War” (p. xvi). Propaganda did not carry the same negative meaning then as it does today, and much of what Murrow and the USIA did would now be called “public diplomacy” (hence the book's subtitle). Nonetheless, Murrow was continually challenged with negotiating “the balance between his agency's presentation of news and its championing of America, since the USIA could not opt out of either” (p. 29).

« Ma chère Florence ». Maurice Maeterlinck - Florence Perkins. Vingt années de correspondance inédite

This article is the result of an internship at the KBR. It summarizes twenty years of correspondence between Maeterlinck and a mysterious American notable, Florence Perkins, from the 1920s to the 1940s, during his emigration to the United States. These letters show the genesis of works that became a real success, now a little forgotten, the author’s close relationship with the natural and occult sciences, intellectual and literary exchanges, but also numerous biographical details concerning the management of his real estate, the organization of his days including at the time of the Second World War and the conflicts with Georgette Leblanc, his first companion. Maeterlinck’s political vision appears unperturbed, both his fear of the « Bolshevik Revolution » and that of the German invasion, which he feels imminent, or his clear sympathy for Salazar and his Minister of Propaganda. The opportunity for the reader to discover the aging writer, far from the romanticized vision we have today.