Remapping the World in Film: Fiction and Truth in Nazi Cinema

The enquiry sheds new light on three blockbusters produced under National Socialism: Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda piece Triumph of the Will (1934), Veit Harlan's anti-Semitic hate film Jew Süss (1940) and Josef von Baky's fantasy comedy Münchhausen (1943). In their frequent use of collective imaginative geographies, all three movies approach 'truth' and 'authenticity' via depictions of geographical patterns. My reading of these films popular in the Third Reich highlights the how and why of place manipulation. The article further explores Nazi cinema's complex amalgam of visual aesthetics and geopolitics, yielding possible insights into the regime’s specific contradictions

Remapping the World in Film: Fiction and Truth in Nazi Cinema

The enquiry sheds new light on three blockbusters produced under National Socialism: Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda piece Triumph of the Will (1934), Veit Harlan's anti-Semitic hate film Jew Süss (1940) and Josef von Baky's fantasy comedy Münchhausen (1943). In their frequent use of collective imaginative geographies, all three movies approach 'truth' and 'authenticity' via depictions of geographical patterns. My reading of these films popular in the Third Reich highlights the how and why of place manipulation. The article further explores Nazi cinema's complex amalgam of visual aesthetics and geopolitics, yielding possible insights into the regime’s specific contradictions

Chalmers, Beverly. Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust. Tolworth Surrey: Grosvenor House, 2020.

Review of Chalmers, Beverly. Betrayed: Child Sex Abuse in the Holocaust. TolworthSurrey: Grosvenor House, 2020.&nbsp

Gertrud Kolmar: Dichten im Raum.

The focus of my dissertation is the German-Jewish poetess, Gertrud Kolmar (born in Berlin in 1894), who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943. My particular interest is in Kolmar's re-workings of various contemporary spatial images that sought to define, confront, and manipulate the Jewish self. Theoretical writings on the theory of space, as being sociological, political, and collective, inform my reading of Kolmar's poems, her novel as well as her essays.My first chapter analyzes Kolmar's "Gotterdammerung", and her increasing disillusionment in the 1920s and 30s with the German cultural landscape she grew up in. Kolmar, as I show in my dissertation, understands modern Jewry as cultural and not as religious community insufficient in its imitation of German models.The second chapter considers the problem of the idolization of the German Classics in Jewish cultural circles. I read Kolmar's novel Die judische Mutter as a literary reworking of the conflict between "hyper-assimilation" with the belief in a German-Jewish symbiosis and the internalization of anti-Semitic cliches. Martha, the main protagonist of the novel, becomes the mirror of an artist who is not capable to create freely, as she is caught between definitions of "Jewish" and "German" identities.My analyses in the third and fourth chapters focus on selected poems. I look at imagined geographies in the form of imperial and colonial fantasies as well as Jewish reactions to an orientalized image of Asia. Kolmar's poetic answer poses a challenge to Zionist discourse of the Jewish community. The result is a retreat of the poetic-female language from the world into the inner space of the poem.My last chapter is dedicated to Kolmar's fascination with Jewish culture and Hebrew poetry as well as her redefinition of the "Jewish" work of art. This approach promises new insight into Gertrud Kolmar's poetics. It also reveals the world-view and self-understanding of modern Jewry before and during National Socialism, in which the demand for a "room of one's own" became ever more urgent. It is the argument of this dissertation that Kolmar's rich topographical imaginations allow critical insight into the corpus of her literary work.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Vanderbilt University, 2007.School code: 0242