Abstract
In July 1937, Variety, the American entertainment daily, expressed opinions on the influence of Hollywood movies in foreign countries that in some ways seem to anticipate 1960s leftist critiques of US ‘cultural imperialism’ by several decades. American feature films, the paper stated,
are still the subtlest and most efficient form of propaganda any nation has ever had at its command. They are still the best machinery for flooding the world with the idea that the American way of living is best, that this Republic with all its shortcomings is a garden spot in a world too full of woe.1
Among the nations that were influenced by this method of propaganda Nazi Germany held a prominent position. Europe was Hollywood’s most import-ant foreign market throughout the 1930s, and business in Germany, a nation with some 68 million people and more than 5,000 movie theatres, ranked highly in the marketing plans of major motion-picture corporations such as MGM, Paramount and Twentieth-Century Fox.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Variety, 28 July 1937, cited after K. Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of the World’s Movie Screens from the 1890s to the Present (Jefferson, 1997), p. 86.
Compare the list in M. Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz: Der amerikanische Spiel film im Dritten Reich (Trier, 1999), pp. 352–3.
Compare (besides Spieker) also: H. D. Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewusstsein: Über deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945 (Munich, 1981), pp. 129–32;
P. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997), pp. 164–82.
M. E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: Warner Bros.’s Campaign against Nazism (New York, 1999), p. 16.
See T. Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley, 1993), p. 149; Segrave, American Films, p. 115.
Compare T. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley, 1994).
See the vivid description of the atmosphere during screenings of Westerns in E. Zimmermann, Nachruf für den stummen Film’, FK 17 (1935), no. 196. See also K.-H. Hermann, Jägerstraße 42: Kindheit am Stadtrand. Erinnerungen (Hamburg, 1998), p. 82. For the difference between down-town cinema theatres and neigh-bourhood houses see ‘Kinopause’, Hamburger Fremdenblatt no. 111, 21 Apr. 1936; ‘Bach — und Tango’, HamburgerAnzeiger no. 266, 12/13 Nov. 1938.
See the figures for three small towns in B. Kleinhans, Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kino: Lichtspiel in der braunen Provinz (Cologne, 2003), p. 103.
See the extensive selection of pre-war writings in Jörg Schweinitz (ed.), Prolog vor dem Film: Nachdenken über ein neues Medium 1909–1914 (Leipzig, 1992).
See for example K. Sabel, ‘Da schickt Hollywood einen Film’, RWFZ 7 (1935), no. 140; W. Lohmeyer, ‘Filmschau’, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte 6 (1935), pp. 189–91, here p. 189; ‘Noch einmal: Die Amerikaner’, FK 18 (1936), no. 152; ‘Peter Ibbetson’, RWFZ 8 (1936), no. 22; W. Kark, ‘Peter Ibbetson’, Hamburger Tageblatt no. 187, 11 July 1936. The dubbed version of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer even received official recognition: it was screened in special performances organized for its juvenile members by the Nazi youth movement, the Hitlerjugend. See Spieker, Hollywood, p. 162.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2006 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Führer, K.C. (2006). Two-Fold Admiration: American Movies as Popular Entertainment and Artistic Model in Nazi Germany, 1933–39. In: Führer, K.C., Ross, C. (eds) Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany. New Perspectives in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800939_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800939_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28401-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-80093-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)