Sabine Hake Libros

In the last five years of the twentieth century, films by the second and third generation of the so-called German guest workers exploded onto the German film landscape. Self-confident, articulate, and dynamic, these films situate themselves in the global exchange of cinematic images, citing and rewriting American gangster narratives, Kung Fu action films, and paralleling other emergent European minority cinemas. This, the first book-length study on the topic, will function as an introduction to this emergent and growing cinema and offer a survey of important films and directors of the last two decades. In addition, it intervenes in the theoretical debates about Turkish German culture by engaging with different methodological approaches that originate in film studies.

From the late 1930s to the early twenty-first century, filmmakers in Europe and America have shown a persistent interest in Nazi leaders, rituals, and symbols, producing numerous films ranging from Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) to Inglourious Basterds (2009) and beyond. Sabine Hake explores the emotional roots and impacts of this fascination, examining the historical ties between film and fascism and their implications for mass culture, media society, and politics. These films confront the specter of fascist power, portraying historical figures and events while eliciting emotional responses from audiences, thereby infusing concepts of democracy, liberalism, and pluralism with renewed significance. Hake supports her analysis with a thorough examination of various films, addressing production history, authorship, reception, and aspects of performance and spectatorship. Chapters delve into Hollywood anti-Nazi films from the 1940s, West German anti-Nazi films of the 1950s, East German anti-fascist films from the 1960s, Italian “Naziploitation” films of the 1970s, and the exploration of fascist aesthetics, resistance ethics, and historicization in films from the 1980s to the 2000s across the United States and Europe.

The improvements in the technology, artistry, and distribution of motion pictures coincided with the traumas of modern Germany. It is hardly to be wondered that filmmakers frequently turned their cameras on Germany's social and political problems that propagandists regularly sought to manipulate them, that entrepreneurs tried to exploit them, and that German thinkers brooded upon the relationship between German society, politics, and the films that represented them all. From these tangled motives a rich discourse on film emerged that paralleled or anticipated discourses in the other film centers of the world. The Cinema's Third Machine reproduces the diversity of perspectives and the intensity of controversies of early German film within the broad context of German social and political history, from the aesthetic rapture of the first years to the institutionalization of film by the national socialist state. Many texts have been rediscovered and are now presented to modern scholars for the first time. Hake treats all aspects of the medium: production, promotion, education, journalism, aesthetics, and political activism, following throughout the various forms criticism assumed.

Examines a range of films in relation to the social, political, economic and technological events surrounding them. This book assesses the work of directors and stars alike, exploring the competing definitions of German cinema as art cinema, entertainment, political propaganda and rival of Hollywood.

Popular cinema during the Third Reich is explored as a complex interplay of established conventions and cultural practices, rather than mere propaganda. This study highlights how films served as both a reflection of and a counter to the Propaganda Ministry's intentions, creating a public sphere that masked political realities. By examining the social, economic, and political dimensions of this cinema, the book reveals how it inadvertently supported the Nazi regime, particularly during wartime, while also showcasing a developed star system akin to Hollywood's.

Focusing on interdisciplinary inquiry, this series features monographs and edited volumes that explore significant scholarly work in German cultural studies. It covers a wide range of topics across all periods and regions of German-speaking cultures, emphasizing the collaboration between various disciplines such as history, musicology, and media studies. By integrating new theoretical and methodological approaches, these works enhance critical understanding in the field. The series publishes three to four new titles each year, all in English.

The Nazi Worker is the second in a three-volume project on the figure of the worker and, by extension, questions of class in twentieth-century German culture. It is based on extensive research in the archives and informed by recent debates on the politics of emotion, the end of class, and the future of work. In seven chapters, the book reconstructs the processes by which National Socialism appropriated aspects of working-class culture and socialist politics and translated class-based identifications into the racialized communitarianism of Volksgemeinschaft (folk community). Arbeitertum (workerdom), the operative term within these processes of appropriation, not only established a discursive framework for integrating proletarian legacies into the cult of the German worker. As a social imaginary, workerdom also modelled the work-related emotions (e. g., joy, pride) essential to the culture of work promoted by the German Labor Front. The contribution of images and stories in creating these new social imaginaries will be reconstructed through highly contextualized readings of the debates about workerdom, Nazi movement novels, worker’s poetry, workers’ sculpture, as well as industrial painting, photography, film, and design.