Student Research Guide SPQ25/ Propoganda Films in Nazi Germany

Some key takeaways:

• Die Grosse Leibe (“The Great Love”) (1942) was the number one highest grossing film in the Third Reich. It was viewed over 27 million times during its run through the cinema and it ranked in over 8 million Reichsmarks in the box office (equivalent to around 34 million Euros in today’s money). The film was a drama about the romantic relationship between a cabaret singer and an air force pilot. It is funny to find this out because it is funny to think that the most successful film in Nazy Germany happened to be a chick flick, of all things.
• In his article Was the Third Reich Movie Made, the historian Scott Spector gives a really interesting analysis on research that has been done on Nazi film (found on page #468). He forms a synthesis between Eric Rentschler’s Ministry of Illusion and Linda Schulte-Sasse’s Entertaining the Third Reich where the anti-Semitic propaganda in the film Jud Suss (1940) can be understood as a strange form of German self-criticism, projected onto the Jewish people. Part of what is so interesting about this idea is that it seems to suggest that the act of disseminating political ideology into vehicles of mass communication, such as film, can be rooted in a kind of strange psychological coping mechanism. By putting scape goats into pop culture, the deep insecurities of a people can feel socially validated by the widespread reception of those scape goats in a mass medium.   

Some words of advice when approaching this topic, based on research experience:

• This is a topic that requires the purchase or borrowing of books, making this a difficult topic for those who can’t spend money on books. There are indeed good research articles to find on this topic (as presented in this guide), but most of the really important breakthrough ideas are going to be found within the many books that were written on the subject. Often, searching for information on the topic within databases will redirect the user to reviews of books on the topic, rather than scholar articles. I found that JSTOR had the best and most content in the scholar journal space. I believe this is because JSTOR has a specialization in research that pertains to the social sciences. So, there is usually a lot to find there in the field of history. Searching through ProQuest is kind of a waste of time for this subject.
• Be prepared to face the fact that some of the most recent research on this topic can be at least 15 years old.
• It is incredibly hard to find info on firsthand accounts of things like the different individual cinema locations throughout Germany at the time, the viewing habits of the viewers (e.g. What day of the week they go to the movies), and the reception of the contents of the cinema among regular people. This is part of the reason why research on this topic requires books, as, many historians who know how to dig into archives and find that kind of primary source information will sometimes cite and use it in their books. Don’t be afraid to ask your instructor for help if you are struggling to find anything.
• As you read through research articles and books on this subject, try to think about the information more objective manner, than even in the way the authors of the text are presenting it. Because the Nazis are understood as the ultimate evil, sometimes even scholars will present their findings under the automatic assumption of foul play. An important tactic for researching this topic is to mentally put yourself in the position of power and ask yourself: “What would I want my political subjects to see, if I were a leader in an authoritarian regime”? Doing so, allows you to think about the information as objectively as possible. Thinking about the information in this way allows you to write about the topic in a manner that is clearer and more honest than just describing how bad the bad guys are.  

 My own experience, pitfalls and all: 

     This research project was done for the LIB 201 and ENG 102 learning community. It was the second time that I took this class, after having previously failed it. Needless to say, the whole time I felt like I couldn’t quite finish the project, due to my previous failure. But the existence of this guide confirms that I managed to make it across the finish line! 

     I did not do as well of a job on my paper as I would have liked. My paper is written on the topic of propaganda in the cinema of Nazi Germany. But the introduction was terrible because it described the Nuremburg rallies instead of something that is more relevant to the topic. I didn’t have enough time to go back and rework the intro towards something that actually draws the reader into the topic better. If I did have the time, I would have liked to introduce the reader to the topic by citing Birdsall’s work on the describing the grand creative vision that the Nazis had for film. This would have fulfilled the job of enticing the reader into the story of Nazi film by demonstrating to them what made the Nazis interested in the medium, to begin with.

     I also regret not incorporating alternative views to my thesis as well as I should have. I was only able to incorporate the alternative view into the last body paragraph, and into my conclusion. This was a huge blunder because, the nature of the topic technically allows for the inclusion of alternate views as far north as the introduction. For those interested in writing their own paper on this topic, remember that it is easy to forget about alternate views when writing on a historical topic, such as this. History is about presenting a bunch of facts, and it can be all too easy to focus so intently on presenting a series of facts that you forget about thinking of how you will juxtapose your thesis to an alternative thesis. 
The research process went fairly well. Previously, when I took this class the first time around, I wrote like a wordsmith but was terrible with the research. Going at it a second time, I knew from experience that researching is not my strong suit. This allowed me to really think through the research process much more thoroughly this time around. 

     The hardest part of the research was actually a couple of things. My thesis was that Nazi propaganda was coming from the beliefs of the people that where already popular in society, and not form the party leaders at the top. At a point towards the end, I ran into a huge block. The research that I gathered for most of the class could only really be presented in two body paragraphs, and I needed more like at least four. Of the two paragraphs that I had, one was making the case for Nazi propaganda following public opinion, and the other was making the case that most of the films in the Reich were pure entertainment, and had little do with politics. Because those paragraphs were bringing together all this research about the intentions behind filmmaking in Nazi Germany, most of my research was presented there. It was very hard and discouraging to fight tooth and nail for coming up with a third topic. I eventually found out about Ich Klage An (1941) through stumbling across a general audience article and I thought it would be a good idea to use that film as an example of an exception to my thesis. And now I have a third paragraph! In order to avoid this conundrum, I recommend that you write detailed notes on your research, so that it is easier to go back and remind yourself of the details everything you have looked at. That way, if you have a block, you can go back to your sources and be able to more easily pull ideas together.

     The other difficult thing was trying to dissect and interpret the thematic meaning behind the story of Jud Suss (1940). It was a painstaking prosses of trying to put so many different parts of my research together at once. My recommendation for anyone doing research on this subject is to be very cognizant of how labor intensive and time consuming it can be to analyze a fictional narrative, which is something that will most likely be required for a research project on this topic. It can be very stressful to have to put together such an analysis towards the end of the project, when you don’t have a lot of time left.