Triumph Of The Will Research Articles

"I Compose the Party Rally...": The Role of Music in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

"I Compose the Party Rally...": The Role of Music in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will

Classic and Modern Propaganda in Documentary Film: Teaching the Psychology of Persuasion

Primary source material found in documentary film has the potential to richly inform college teaching. This article describes using 2 historically significant documentary-style films to teach concepts in the psychology of persuasion. Exemplary clips taken from Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, 2004) illustrated theoretical and applied topics typically taught in undergraduate social psychology. Evidence of student learning along with positive student evaluations support the use of this approach as an effective way to teach about concepts and techniques in persuasion and propaganda.

Shadows of War: Fascist and Anti-Fascist Representations of Childhood in Triumph of the Will, A Letter to Santa Claus, and The Little Princess

This article examines the anti-fascist appeals of the Federal Theatre Project’s production A Letter to Santa Claus and 20th Century Fox’s The Little Princess to consider issues of home front patriotism raised by both productions in late 1930s America. The project brings into comparison changing discourses of childhood that construct differing connections between home and nation. An introductory comparison to fascist representations of the child in Triumph of the Will highlights the manner in which children’s symbolic plenitude is utilized to enact national values and model citizen behavior in both fascist and anti-fascist productions.

Questionable Intent: Documentary Cinema and the Authorial Fallacy

This article examines the relationship between intention and meaning in documentary cinema. It argues that audience assumptions about the film-maker's intentions have limited the interpretation of documentary more than any other category of film. Evidence is drawn from Luis Buñuel's Land with Bread (1932), Leni Riefenstahl's The Triumph of the Will (1934), Michael Moore's Roger and Me (1989) and Arlene Bowman's Navajo Talking Picture (1986).

LENI RIEFENSTAHL'S ENCOUNTER WITH THE NUBA

Leni Riefenstahl, a legend recently deceased at more than 100 years of age, is perhaps best known for her association with Hitler in the form of her films Olympia and Triumph of the Will, and she has provoked controversy ever since. This paper will focus on the lesser-known African travel books which Riefenstahl published in Germany between 1972 and 1976. Therein she presents images of Nubian people taken in the Sudanese mountains which seem to echo her previous work in their portrayal of physical perfection. While her pictures of the Nubian people have so far been looked at as a homogeneous body of work, the following analysis will concentrate on the qualitative difference between Riefenstahl's first and subsequent Nuba photo-publications and her changing motivations. Riefenstahl's romantic quest to capture the innocence of Africa and her desire for renewal and salvation on the edges of civilization, which were at the centre of her first visit to the region, are to be seen in stark contrast to the driving force behind following visits, when she sought to push into an even more unknown and wilder Africa, whereby her camera attempted to produce images reminiscent of a sublime. I will argue that, in doing so, Riefenstahl regressed into producing Eurocentric and sensationalist depictions of ‘her Africans’. Likewise, her role as an agent for change is viewed critically against her self-perception as an anthropological conservationist; her pictures are analysed together with her own commentary. Her narrative accompanying the photos seems to diminish the power of her images and may affect her reputation as a great visual artist as it appears to suggest doubtful motives.

Leni Riefenstahl's Gypsy Question Revisited: The Gypsy Extras In Tiefland

Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) made very few films: four documentaries during the Third Reich—three on the annual Nazi party rallies, commissioned by Hitler, and the fourth on the 1936 Olympic games,...

Music in Nazi film: How different is Triumph of the Will?

The article analyses the use of music in Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens (Riefenstahl, 1934/35). A discussion of the theory and practice of film music in the Third Reich shows how Riefenstahl's film conformed to and indeed embodied the model of monumental film art promulgated by the Nazi state. At the same time, the music in the film also draws on idioms and devices used in commercial film making in Germany and beyond in the 1930s. This suggests that the film and its particular effects cannot be understood only in terms of Nazi propaganda but that the film's relation to a wider cinematic context must be taken into account.

Fahrenheit 9/11: Documentary, Truth-telling, and Politics

Fahrenheit 9/11:Documentary, Truth-telling, and Politics Ken Nolley On Monday, June 28, picking up my moderating duties on H-Film after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 on the first weekend of its U.S. release, I asked list members for responses to the film. An impassioned and difficult discussion followed that provoked approximately [End Page 12] 90 postings, almost 2/3 of which came during the two-week period immediately following. Another 30 or so posts were scattered over the next month, this latter group focused mainly on the controversy that had developed over the title's relationship to the title of Ray Bradbury's novel. A less publicly visible aspect of the controversy was the number of posts rejected and returned for editing. H-Film is a moderated listserv with relatively strict rules regarding civil and reasoned discussion. As a matter of course, we do not allow posts that flame list members or engage in other forms of ad hominem argument. Though we seldom need to return posts for editing, during the first week of the discussion I suddenly found myself returning a large number of posts from both sides of the debate. The off-line negotiations over wording made me deeply aware of the difficulties we were having discussing the film, but the publicly visible online evidence of our conversation alone made our difficulty in establishing and maintaining a meaningful discussion richly apparent. H-Film list is, like much of academia, more inclined to the liberal side of the political spectrum. Posts ran approximately three to one, liberal to conservative, although if one were to count authors rather than individual posts, the balance tilted much more precipitously to the liberal side. Without doubt, we got off to a difficult start. The first post compared Fahrenheit 9/11 unfavorably to Triumph of the Will.1 That comparison provoked precisely the angry response one might have expected from a group like ours, and we were off to a rocky beginning. In retrospect, what seems most significant and revealing about the discussion that followed was how tightly it conformed to a pattern. Moore's critics (mostly conservatives) tended to criticize the filmmaker more directly than the film, attacking both Moore's veracity and his ethics, so much so that I finally intervened to suggest that our prohibition of ad hominem argument should too include the filmmaker, not merely other list members. The most dominant assertion was that Moore was a liar, though the authors of some posts indicted him for insensitive or unethical treatment of his interview subjects as well. The argument about truthfulness often morphed into an argument about genre—specifically the contention by some that the film was not documentary, but rather propaganda. Moore's defenders (mostly liberals) tended on the other hand to cast their responses in terms of a broader political discourse. They valued the film for its contribution to contemporary political debate, celebrating the fact that finally someone was raising publicly questions that neither the administration nor the mainstream press seemed prepared to discuss or even to recognize. A number of writers defended Moore's treatment of his subjects, and others engaged the genre argument, observing that opinionated discourse has always been in the mainstream of the documentary tradition. While some liberal critics who defended the film also conceded that its argumentative style might have been manipulative, few of them engaged directly the claims of untruthfulness made by critics, other than to observe that the claims of lying and inaccuracy were (in our discussion at least) almost completely unsubstantiated by evidence or even by specific counterfactual claims. This was a position that I initially took myself in an off-line discussion with a list member. During that first week of the discussion, I intervened publicly twice more, hoping to produce a conversation in which people really did address issues raised by the other side, but I felt that I was largely ineffectual in doing so. And I should say here that certainly some of my difficulties stemmed from a number of predictable factors that had nothing to do with this particular film: 1. a large number of list members had not yet seen the film...

Art or Propaganda? Dewey and Adorno on the Relationship between Politics and Art

Art or Propaganda? Dewey and Adorno on the Relationship between Politics and Art William S. Lewis Almost all people—even if they seldom articulate or act on this belief—believe that art is good in an "enriching" type of way, making us better people and promoting a healthy and free society. Conversely, most people believe that propaganda is bad because it "impoverishes" our experience, reducing our selves and our society to one-dimensionality and reducing our freedom. In addition, almost everybody believes that they can distinguish between art and propaganda. If it is indeed the case that art enriches our experience and propaganda impoverishes it, then establishing criteria that will allow us to make a distinction between the two would seem a worthwhile exercise, one whose ramifications could affect the quality of our educational, cultural, political, and spiritual lives. However, there is a problem with making these necessary and potentially beneficial distinctions and this problem belies the common notion that the difference between propaganda and art is easily visible. When we actually attempt to consider a specific work or body of works in its integrity, according to its form and content, distinguishing between that which is art and that which is propaganda is often troublingly difficult. As an example of this problem, consider the classic "propaganda" film, Triumph of the Will (1934), directed by Leni Riefenstahl. After numerous screenings in the "Philosophy and Film" course I regularly teach, I have noticed that my students evince two nearlyincommensurable reactions to this documentary of the National Socialist Party Congress at Nürnberg. One of these reactions is that of aesthetic arousal and enjoyment. The geometric patterns formed by columns of soldiers, the close-ups in which these soldiers appear as statuary, the minutiae conveyed by faces in the crowd: all of these masterful shots involve the film's viewer in an aesthetic experience that is neither banal nor gratuitous but satisfying and inspirational. Triumph of the Will—perceived in this first way as involving the viewer in an experience that is cathartic, fulfilling, and memorable—is enjoyed and experienced as a work of art. [End Page 42] The other response of my students to a screening of Triumph of the Will is that of visceral revulsion. It is the feeling inspired by a morally repugnant piece of propaganda. The events depicted in the film—Hitler's descent from the sky, the volks parade, the rhythmic and fevered cries of "Sig Heil"—all these engagingly filmed actions appear absolutely repellent to those whose knowledge of history demands that they be seen as seeds of World War II and of the Holocaust. Because Triumph of the Will is so artfully executed, the viewers' feelings of revulsion towards the film are made even more intense than they would have been were the picture poorly made. Even noting these intense feelings of revulsion, there remains my students' other yet simultaneous reaction to the film: specifically, that it is a great film and that it can be seen as a work of art. This feeling, and from this feeling the reasonably unavoidable contention that Triumph of the Will is indeed a work of art (it is beautiful in its execution, arouses sentiment, provokes contemplation, and offers meaning), stands in uneasy tension with its effectiveness as a piece of propaganda. Always there remains the question: "How can I be appreciating something that, as a propaganda piece for Nazi ideology, should be and is loathsome and repellent to me?" Almost since its debut, critics have been wrestling with the tension caused by the ambivalent response the film provokes. Most have resolved this tension by arguing decisively for viewing the film either exclusively as propaganda or exclusively as art. Critics like Susan Sontag and Siegfried Kracauer contend that the film is an abhorrent propaganda piece with nice cinematography, whereas analysts like David Hinton and Andrew Sarris emphasize Riefenstahl's relative autonomy from the Nazi propaganda machine and concentrate on the film as a piece of documentary art.1 This tendency to unequivocally categorize Triumph of the Will—or for that matter any creative work—as either propaganda or art is not, however, a productive, revealing, or honest analysis. With such...

The Triumph in Triumph of the Will

The question at issue is whether moral defects of artworks can be aesthetic defects. Noel Carroll claims they can be, Berys Gaut claims they are, and James Anderson and Jeffrey Dean claim they are not. I side with Anderson and Dean and produce additional arguments against Carroll and Gaut. Triumph of the Will serves as an example that all five of us agree is a morally flawed artwork. I argue and conclude that its horrible moral defects are not aesthetic ones. Its triumph is the sum total of its aesthetic merits.

What Rousseau Teaches Us about Live Theatrical Performance

In his survey article, Art and Ethical Criticism: in some way affected by this consideration, An Overview of Recent Directions of while moderate autonomists will resist such a Research, Noel Carroll points out that although view. philosophers from Plato to Kant have engaged When discussing the recent attempts at ethin ethical criticism of art, Anglo-American ical criticism, as well as recent attempts at philosophers in the twentieth century have, until understanding the relationship between the recently, neglected this practice (even though moral and the aesthetic, Carroll mentions work art critics during the same period have not).' on literature, cinema, and television. Some Recent attempts at ethical criticism have stage plays are mentioned as well, but these are occurred within the context of a debate about given much less focus than other narrative art the viability, and proper orientation, of that forms. Yet of all the arts, the one with the richpractice. The two sides of the debate are dubbed est history of conflict with the defenders of moralism and autonomism.2 The conflict morality, both theological and philosophical, is between the two rests on the question of the theater. Despite the uneasiness moralists whether moral considerations bear in any way have historically felt with regard to art, some on the aesthetic evaluation of a work. Radical arts, and even some general aesthetic concepts moralists argue that moral considerations are all such as beauty and harmony, often enjoy the that is relevant to aesthetic evaluation, and privilege of becoming moral metaphors. But moderate moralists argue that moral considerwhen it comes to theater, the conflict with ations bear in some ways on the aesthetic evalumorality comes into sharp, unmitigated relief. ations of certain (usually narrative) works. In his monumental work, The Antitheatrical Autonomists deny the relevance of moral conPrejudice, Jonas Barish reminds us that this siderations to aesthetic evaluation, but whereas conflict is embedded in our very language. He radical autonomists completely deny the tenabilasks us to consider that, whereas most epithets ity of ethical criticism, moderate autonomists derived from the arts are laudatory (musical, acknowledge that some art can and should be poetic, graphic, picturesque, sculpturevaluated on ethical terms-they merely deny esque, etc.), those derived from the theater are that ethical evaluation bears on the aesthetic almost always condemnatory (melodramatic, evaluation of a given work. So, to take a comstagey, making a scene, acting the part, mon example from the literature, while both and, of course, theatrical). Barish points out moderate moralists and moderate autonomists that theater, far more than any other art, has can agree that Triumph of the Will (1934) puts been subject to censure, disapproval, opproforward a reprehensible, fascist point of view brium, and general defamation, and that this that must be challenged, moderate moralists state of affairs is not confined to the Englishmay argue that the movie's value as a movie is speaking world, or even to Europe, or even to

Reappraising Riefenstahl‘s Triumph of the Will

Leni Riefenstahl was one of filmmakings most contentious directors. The power of her epic documentaries, Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), have cemented her place in film history. More criticism has been written about Riefenstahl than any other director, except perhaps Hitchcock and Welles. Publicity surrounding the publication of an illustrated book marking her centenary reawakened debates about Riefenstahl‘s career in film and her involvement with the Third Reich. In this article, I focus on one of the key films which emerged from that relationship, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), which I discussed at length in my interview with Riefenstahl. Her recollections were sharp and I was intrigued by some of her answers, not for what new insight they offered, but for how they reaffirmed how she wished others to interpret her films and motivations. In particular, I was interested in the way she considered Triumph of the Will to be a realistic portrayal of the Nazi‘s 1934 Nuremberg Rally and the events surrounding it, and her role as a filmmaker in shaping that representation.

Triumph of the Will: Imagination and Self-Cultivation in François de Sales

ON JANUARY 13, 1547, IN Trent, the Ecumenical Council approved the official statement of the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine on justification, that is, the way in which certain human beings are redeemed from sin and promised eternal happiness and others are condemned to eternal suffering. Central to the doctrine approved on that day is the freedom of the human will and the consequent responsibility of mankind to exert itself to cooperate with divine grace. In August 1608, Fran90is de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, completed the first edition of a best-seller of seventeenth-century French letters, L'Introduction a la vie devote, a guide to spiritual self-improvement that calls upon the reader to develop her or his 'inner life' through regular, structured use of imagination. Between the Church's strongly-worded, even militant, emphasis on the will and de Sales's promotion of the individual, private imagination there is a direct relation, one that the Bishop of Geneva recalls frequently, especially in his second, more theoretical book, Le Traite de l'amour de Dieu (1616). We are called upon to augment our inner life, for the grace of the Holy Spirit will enter into us 'sinon par Ie libre consentement de notre volonte [ ... J selon la me sure de son bon plaisir et de notre propre disposition et cooperation, ainsi que dit Ie sacre Concile'. 1 De Sales's insistence on disposition and cooperation furnishes the charter, so to speak, for his whole pastoral, and hence literary, project, and helps us to understand not only the simple fact that he and his Catholic contemporaries were avid practitioners of inner selfdevelopment but the particular form of that development: one that emphasised what could be called an active and imaginative form rather than a primarily hermeneutic or receptive one. Fran90is de Sales's work was widely read and influential there were at least twenty-four editions in the seventeenth century and have been at least four hundred editions in French altogether.2 Soon after the author's death in 1622, his tomb near Annecy became a place of pilgrimage, and he was canonised only forty-three years later in 1665. His call to develop the individual imagination may well have made subsequent use of this faculty or way of thinking important even for those whose intentions were far from religious. Moreover, the practice of Salesian devotion goes hand in hand with the development of the absolutist compromise that made possible so much of what we know as French baroque and classical culture? In this way, the use of imagination that is taught in L'Introduction a la vie devote has much importance for the development of politeness and civility across the spectrum of social condition in the following century.

Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas

Previous articleNext article No AccessMemory, Photography, and Modernism: The “dead bodies and ruined houses” of Virginia Woolf's Three GuineasMaggie HummMaggie HummSchool of Cultural and Innovation StudiesUniversity of East London Search for more articles by this author School of Cultural and Innovation StudiesUniversity of East LondonPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 28, Number 2Winter 2003 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/342583 Views: 203Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2002 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Suzana Zink Rooms of Memory: “A Sketch of the Past”, (Feb 2018): 185–212.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_8Jessica Berman Three Guineas and the Politics of Interruption, (Jan 2016): 203–216.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118457917.ch15 JENNIFER BARKER Indifference, Identification, and Desire in Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light and Triumph of the Will, and Leontine Sagan’s Maedchen in Uniform, Women in German Yearbook 26, no.11 (Jan 2010): 73.https://doi.org/10.5250/womgeryearbook.26.1.0073

Film and History, Foxes and Hedgehogs

Maligned for trashing a priceless heritage, condemned for fobbing off hallucinations as documentaries, and damned for trading pure truth for filthy lucre, Hollywood film has long been written off by historians. Hands wring before Patriot (2000), heads shake during Pearl Harbor (2001), and minds boggle at JFK (1991). To teachers and scholars in the history racket, the pre-credit tag line based on actual events is a warning sign that suggests everything that follows is basically made up. Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided. Whether as bearers of past tidings (the purview of biopics and fact-based melodramas) or as archeological artifacts (the trea sure trove of 35 mm material in studio and government archives), the motion picture legacy is too important to leave to the ama teurs. Besides, to study World War II without screening Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934) or Frank Capra's Prelude to War (1943) is to neglect more than audiovisual aids: both films were weapons of war as well as expressions of the ethos of the combatants. Likewise, to deny that Saving Private Ryan (1998) and even Pearl Harbor transmit and transmute that ethos is to ignore the strength of dominant culture in American life. As ever, the question is not whether to use film for historical study, but how to make the best use of it. In a famous formulation, the scholar Erasmus divided thinkers into two categories?foxes and hedgehogs. The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing, he declared, plagiarizing from the Greeks. Adapted slightly, the metaphor offers two enlightening methods to chase down meaning in film and history: the way ofthe peripatetic, microminded fox, scurry ing about the text to check out minutiae, or the way of the deliberate, macrominded hedgehog, taking the long view and biting into one big thing. For the historian-cineaste, the bifocal outlook can also serve as a guide for when to unleash moral outrage and when to not sweat the small stuff. microangle on film and history bewails the dumb mistakes that infest the conceit of cinema and decries the poetic license that streamlines the motion picture experience. focus is on pinpoint accuracy in historical recreation. official film jargon term for fidelity to the known record is verisimilitude, the faithful duplication of period detail in dialogue, set design, costuming, and so on. In a combat film, verisimilitude means the faithful depiction of weaponry, uniforms, insignia, and military bearing; in a costume drama, it means a careful restora tion of the once fashionable clothes, furniture styles, and so cial manners. Nitpickers by na ture, historians delight in fixating on micromistakes in verisimili tude, snickering over the way people from foreign countries and remote epochs all seem to speak colloquial American English and inhabit bodies sculpted by Nauti lus, dressed by Donna Karan, and coiffured by Vidal Sassoon. Of course, the historian who blanches at poetic license in the art of cinema, who demands a scrupulous duplication of the common vernacular and standards of beauty in Salem in 1692, had better just avoid celluloid and video altogether. To be sure, at some point, a cascade of shameless departures from known facts and habits will cause even the most carefree historical epic to collapse under the weight of slipshod scaffolding. Suspension of disbelief is no longer possible if the GIs at Normandy are wearing Nikes or sporting Walkmans. But given that Hollywood cinema traffics in entertainment, the medium can not be expected to surrender the pleasures of spectacle and story for static pageants Yet the grim truth that Americans absorb more history from the multiplex than from middle school demands that Hollywood's treatment of the past be considered carefully rather than simply avoided.

Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art

Pablo Picasso's Guernica, Francisco de Goya's Fifth of May, Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, and D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, are all examples of expressly political art. Historically some art has been not only an object of aesthetic appreciation, but has also embodied and imparted a political message. Understanding the way art can be used to further political aims is an important part of art education. I contend that it is as important to investigate the political and cultural uses of art as it is to engage in the more traditional inquiries of form and style. To further this end, I propose a new model of that can better accommodate the phenomenon of art propaganda. Propaganda, in current usage, has a pejorative sense; however, at one time propaganda was understood to mean mere persuasion. My aim in this essay is to rehabilitate as a term of analysis while accounting for the pejorative sense has come to have. First, I provide a conceptual analysis of propaganda. In doing so, I develop a new model of the epistemic merit model. I argue that this model will enable us to identify and assess in general. Second, I show that my definition is especially well-suited to cases where the in question is also a work of art, since art, from posters and pamphlets to films and novels, has been a particularly prevalent means for the dissemination of propaganda.

Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich" , and: Jüdische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (review)

168 SHOFAR Summer 2000 Vol. 18, No.4 A separate chapter is devoted to Chiune Sugihara, the consul in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania who, on the basis of bogus final destination visas to the Dutch island of Curayao, issued transit visas to Polish Jews caught between the German and Russian lines in 1940. While Sugihara's actions certainly are laudable, he was not the only Japanese consul following existing instructions by issuing transit visas to Jewish refugees. The account of the activities of the Dutch honorary consul Jan Zwartendijk who provided the bogus end visas was not fully discussed and is inaccurate. The number of visas issued by Zwartendijk was not 1,200 to 1,400 as stated, but 2,345. Without these, Sugihara could not have issued more than a few transit visas. The book also describes the actions ofColonel Senko Yasue and CaptainKoreshige Inuzuka, who in 1911 were involved with the translation ofthe "Protocols ofthe Elders ofZion," and how Captain Inuzuka, considered by some as an "arch anti-Semite," was put in charge of the Bureau for Jewish Affairs in Shanghai. In 1942, when relief funds no longer reached Shanghai, Inuzuka cooperated with the representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in feeding the starving Jewish refugees. Sakamoto goes into great detail discussing Tokyo's prevailing politics and the working relationships between embassies and consulates scattered around the world with their superiors in Japan, citing numerous references. Perhaps a reader thoroughly familiar with the workings of the Japanese government might be better able to follow the elaborate trail through the functions of its divergent organizations. Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees lists voluminous references attesting to the author's extensive research. Unfortunately, she sometimes seems to have relied on personal testimonies and recollections as well as other sources without having fully verified their accuracy, thus making this otherwise excellent work umeliable for research by future historians. Ernest G. Heppner Independent Scholar Propaganda und Film im "Dritten Reich," by WolfDonner. Berlin: tip Verlag, 1995. 159 pp. n.p.!. Out ofprint. Judische Figuren im Film und Karikatur: Die Rothschilds und Joseph Suss Oppenheimer, edited by Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus. Sigmaringen and Frankfurt/Main: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1996. 167 pp. DM 24.80. The late Wolf Donner was one of Germany's more important film journalists in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the director ofthe Berlin Film Festival from 1976 to 1979. As a film critic, Donner championed left-wing causes and directors who privileged social issues in the first and third worlds. Like many leftist-minded Germans of his generation (Donner was born in 1939), he spent a good deal ofhis adult life corning to Book Reviews 169 grips with the legacy of National Socialism and the nation's culpability in the Holocaust . This posthumously published monograph grew out of a set of lectures that Donner gave to students at the University ofCologne and at various Goethe Institutes. Donner died before he could write a book for publication or even complete a final chapter dealing with West German Neo-Nazis. And unfortunately, Donner was a better critic than he was a film historian, so these lectures have the rough edges ofhalf-baked ideas and reveal almost nothing new about film or propaganda in Nazi Germany. In his opening chapter, Donner discusses the Nazis' extremely efficient use ofmass media, inparticularJoseph Goebbels' ability to coin and endlessly repeat catchy phrases which reduced complex political issues to emotional appeals, e.g., "the Fuhrer commands and we obey," "Victory or Bolshevism," and "One People, One Fuhrer, One Reich." The last parole is used as a title to Donner's next chapter, which analyzes certain themes of National-Socialist propaganda: the attack against the Weimar Republic, the Fuhrer principle, militarism, "blood and soil," and antisemitism. There follows a very brief chapter about Goebbels' co-option of the German film industry, before Donner moves on to describe such signature films of the Third Reich as Hitlerjunge Quex, Triumph ofthe Will, Jew Suss, and Kolberg. While Donner's intentions were certainly pure and his plan to bring the book's concerns into the present by discussing the repression ofthe Nazi past in the 1950s and...

The Americanization of the holocaust

If the Holocaust, as image and symbol, seems to have sprung loose from its origins, it does not mean we should decry Americanization; rather, the pervasive presence of representations of the Holocaust in our culture demands responsible evaluation and interpretation.-from the Introduction The Holocaust is everywhere in American cultural consciousness today-in movies, books, theater, and television, in college courses, museums, and public monuments. In The Americanization of the Holocaust, Hilene Flanzbaum presents a collection of essays on America's cultural appropriation of this central event in twentieth-century history. The authors discuss a broad range of topics and examples, from Schindler's List to Elie Wiesel's throwing out the first pitch at the Mets season opener in 1988, from the idealizations of Anne Frank to a cookbook of recipes from survivors of the Terezin concentration camp, from a look at Art Spiegelman's acclaimed comic book Maus to a contemporary faux pas at the Nike Corporation. While several authors draw directly from the testimony of survivors, the volume as a whole examines how much of our knowledge of the Holocaust comes to us through cultural filters--from editors and publishers, producers and directors, artists and advertising executives. Covering the more than fifty years since the end of the Holocaust, this rich and comprehensive overview spans a wide variety of critical approaches, media, and genres. Contents and contributors: The Imaginary Jew and the American Poet, Hilene Flanzbaum . Aliens in the Wasteland: American Encounters with the Holocaust on 1960s Science Fiction Television, Jeffrey Shandler . Imagining Survivors: Testimony and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness, Henry Greenspan . America's Holocaust: Memory and the Politics of Identity, James E. Young . Inheriting the Holocaust: Jewish American Fiction and the Double Bind of the Second-Generation Survivor, Andrew Furman . Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang, Amy Hungerford . Three Thousand Miles Away: The Holocaust in Recent Works for the American Theater, Joyce Antler . The Cinematic Triangulation of Jewish American Identity: Israel, America, and the Holocaust, Sara R. Horowitz . Reflections on the Holocaust from Nebraska, Alan E. Steinweis . Who Never Was There: Slavery and the New Historicism-Deconstruction and the Holocaust, Walter Benn Michaels . Suffering as a Moral Beacon: Blacks and Jews, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas . Play Will Make You Free: Reprising The Triumph of the Will in Chicago's Nike Town, Andrew Levy

Film propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany

Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler and Goebbels all regarded cinema as their most important weapon for mass political propaganda. This revised and expanded edition of Film Propaganda examines the ways in which cinema was used for political purposes by two of the most highly politicised societies in twentieth-century European history. Film Propaganda is still to date the only book in English to compare these two cinemas and examine both in depth. Richard Taylor demonstrates how cinema was brought under political control in each country and goes on to explore the themes and stereotypes projected by the feature films that were produced. In so doing, he highlights the means used by the authorities to condition and control the filmgoer as individual spectator and as member of a mass audience. This process is examined in greater depth in a series of detailed analyses of films selected for their particular political significance, including October, Alexander Nevsky, Triumph of the Will, The Wandering Jew and, new to this edition, the 1949 Stalin cult film, The Fall of Berlin. Also new to this edition are appendices with details of films viewed by Hitler and Goebbels, which were captured by the Red Army from Berlin 's ruins in 1945 and were considered by Stalin for release during the film famine years after the war.

The Triumph of the Will

In this paper some of the most elusive concepts in administrative thought are revisited, most notably that of will but also cognate and related notions such as intention, consciousness, value and depth motivation. Philosophical resources drawn upon include Nietzsche. The writer also draws on his own works and, after considering aspects of contemporary malaise, is led to propose a curricular reform and research direction which would substitute axiological for current epistemological preoccupations. The new agenda would be appropriate to the condition of postmodernity yet congruent with the spirit of Socratic classicism. A directional shift is necessary within the administrative profession because the leadership function has the potential for being either the greatest of applied humanisms or the most devastating of all sociopathologies.