Over 1000 films were produced during Germany's 12-year Third Reich. While some were blatant anti-Semitic propaganda, like the notorious epic Jud Suss, a variety of films were made in line with the "orchestra" principle of Goebbels, which stated, "We do not expect everyone to play the same instrument, we only expect that people play according to a plan." Rentschler (film, Univ. of Califronia, Irvine) examines the Nazi media culture "plan," which created a world of illusion, alternating between "heavy hands and light touches" with the aim of negating "alternative experience and independent thought." His book covers much the same ground as Klaus Kreimeier's The Ufa Story (LJ 6/1/96), but this book is more readable, gives greater detail on important films, and contains extensive chronologies, filmographies, and source lists for obtaining these films. This scholarly book will be useful in large film collections.?Stephen Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This massively documented study of Nazi cinema...notably succeeds in analysing how Nazi films created a dreamworld that seemed neither realistic nor fantastic, but agreeable and persuasive--indeed closer to Hollywood than to Stalinist cinema. Above all, [Rentschler] stresses how films belong to a German cultural continuum, reaching into the present. Fifty years after Siegfried Kracauer's landmark book
From Caligari to Hitler, this is the study that's long been needed of the movies' most disturbing triumph. (
Sight and Sound )
Fifty years after Kracauer's monumental
From Caligari to Hitler comes the next installment of the story. Rentschler shows how German films were central to an administered popular culture. Goebbels' chilling, still-seductive cinema exemplifies the complex social role played by the mass media at the end of our century. Rentschler-one of America's finest scholars of German cinema-has given us a lucid, passionate book.
--David Bordwell, University of Wisconsin, author of The Cinema of Eisenstein
[A] quite exceptional new book...[Nazi cinema] is an issue which is, in fact, far more urgent, and more topical, than it may at first appear. The cinema of Hitler, far from perishing with the passing of the Third Reich, continues to thrive...One is grateful to Rentschler both for producing such a well-researched, thorough and thoughtful book, and for doing to with such constructive energy, fine style and subtle wit. Any serious student either of film or of the Third Reich will learn a great deal from this splendid new account.
--Graham McCann (
Times Higher Education Supplement )
[This is] an invaluable book of film history...Rentschler has actually watched the several hundred films made in Germany under the Third Reich, and he's the first to be able to talk authoritatively about their content and ideology.
--Gerald Peary (
Boston Phoenix )
The scope of Rentschler's argument and the thoroughness of his research--not to mention the elegance of his prose--will significantly change how we look at the cinema of the Third Reich...[This is] a passionate, nuanced, and highly readable book that contributes significantly to existing studies on Nazi cinema while remaining accessible to a general public interested in German history, cinema, and the study of mass media in general.
--Gerd Gemünden (
German Quarterly )
The regime of Adolf Hitler was the world's 'first full-blown media dictatorship,' writes Eric Rentschler...[An] accomplished and engaging writer...Mr. Rentschler pays great...attention to the historical context of each film 'text.'
--J. Hoberman (
Forward )
The book is well researched and documented. If one wants...to learn more about the sociopolitical realities in Nazi cinema...then this is the work with which to settle down. (
Washington Times )
Rentschler's readable, superbly researched, and meticulously documented study does not attempt to engage all of the nearly 1,100 films made during the Third Reich. Rather, the author provides measured, elegantly written assessments of several key films--such as the 'movement film'
Hitler Youth Quex, the breezy, American-style
Lucky Kids, Sirk's
La Habanera,the notorious
Jew Süss, and the fantastic, still much beloved
Münchhausen--to explore recent claims of their alleged resistance to the Nazi regime and to examine reasons for their enduring popularity, at least in Germany. Rentschler avoids both pitfalls often associated with discussions of these films--reductive ideological critique and evasive 'aesthetic' appreciation. He enhances readers' awareness of the ways Nazi filmmakers used the 'Jewish' Hollywood conventions Goebbels simultaneously feared and admired and their complex relationship with Weimar film culture. An immensely useful chronology of key events, the most extensive general bibliography of the subject ever compiled in English, and helpful filmographies of and bibliographies about the leading Nazi cineastes make this an essential acquisition. (
Choice )
The Ministry of Illusion provides a long-awaited and meticulously researched examination of films in the Third Reich that will be of tremendous value to both scholars and educators. Eric Rentschler, whose encyclopedic knowledge of German film has earned him a reputation as one of the foremost film historians in the United States, provides both a historical account of Nazi ideology and a number of readings of exemplary Nazi propaganda films, such as
Hitler Youth Quex and the notorious
Jew Süss...[It is] essential reading for anyone interested in the popular appeal of the Third Reich or the ideological working of film in general.
--Marcia Klotz (
Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television )
Eric Rentschler, America's leading scholar of National Socialist cinema, has produced a compact compendium of everything you wanted to know about Nazi filmdom but were afraid to ask...well written and extensively researched; nearly half the manuscript is footnotes that yield fascinating anecdotal information...For those with an itchy curiosity about Third Reich culture,
The Ministry of Illusion warrants reading. It provides delightful browsing in bits and pieces--the perfect gift for a cinephile-compulsive literate who has a magazine rack in the loo.
--Stewart Brinton (
Pacific Cinematheque )
Given the fact that even in Europe there still doesn't exist a comprehensive book on this sordid matter,
The Ministry of Illusion will serve as a primary source for the historiographers of the Third Reich and its cultural institutions.
--Gertrud Koch, coeditor, Frauen und Film, and Professor, Ruhr University, Bochum
