Nazi Cinema, by Erwin Leiser, translated by Gertrud Mander and David Wilson (Macmillan, 179 pp., $7.95). “Of all the arts,” Lenin said, “film is for us the most important,” to which Dr. Goebbels, the National Socialist Propaganda Minister, added the Nazi update: “A work of art can very well accommodate a political alignment, and even the most obnoxious attitude can be communicated if it is expressed through the medium of an outstanding work of art.” By now, what we do not know (at least in outline) of the National Socialist horror, we probably have no desire to know. What is needed, especially in so fertile an area as the Hitlerian use of movies as instruments of state indoctrination, is insightful analysis, a leap beyond the trite and expectable to something channeling the disparate pieces into a coherent whole, a framework enabling the student of propaganda or film or Nazism to capture something other than fleeting glimpses of understanding. Erwin Leiser’s prosaic, predictable, preachy book isn’t what the doctor ordered. He races us along with the strapping blond youths; he bathes us in the tears of the suffering Semites; he buries us under pages of bureaucratic memoranda encouraging this or that filmmaker to do his best for Vaterland und Fiihrer; he ticks off all the requisite names—Leni Riefenstahl, for instance, gets the old go-around yet again—but he rarely carries the narrative into the realm of useful or even interesting hypothesis, much less into a developed explanation of precisely how and why all this came to be.
DAVID BRUDNOY
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