Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema

Barbara Hales, Valerie Weinstein, Barbara Hales, Valerie Weinstein

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781800739482, 9781789208726
• eBook ISBN: 9781789208733
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: German History

The burgeoning film industry in the Weimar Republic was, among other things, a major site of German-Jewish experience, one that provided a sphere for Jewish "outsiders" to shape mainstream culture. The chapters collected in this volume deploy new historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to understanding the significant involvement of German Jews in Weimar cinema. Reflecting upon different conceptions of Jewishness – as religion, ethnicity, social role, cultural code, or text – these studies offer a wide-ranging exploration of an often overlooked aspect of German film history.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction — The Jewishness of Weimar Cinema
• Part I — Jewish Visibility On and Off Screen
• Chapter 1 — Humanizing Shylock: The “Jewish Type” in Weimar Film
• Chapter 2 — Energizing the Dramaturgy: How Jewishness Shaped Alexander Granach’s Performances in Weimar Cinema
• Chapter 3 — The Jewish Vamp of Berlin: Actress Maria Orska, Typecasting, and Jewish Women
• Chapter 4 — Jewish Comedians beyond Lubitsch: Siegfried Arno in Film and Cabaret
• Chapter 5 — Alfred Rosenthal’s Rhetoric of Collaboration, the Politics of Jewish Visbility, and Jewish Weimar Film Print Culture
• Part II — Coding and Decoding Jewish Difference
• Chapter 6 — Two Worlds, Three Friends, and the Mysterious Seven-Branched Candelabrum: Jewish Filmmaking in Weimar Germany
• Chapter 7 — Homosexual Emancipation, Queer Masculinity, and Jewish Difference in Anders al die Andern (1919)
• Chapter 8 — Der Film ohne
• Chapter 9 — “The World Is Funny, Like a Dream”: Franziska Gaal’s Verwechslungskomödien and Exile’s Crisis of Identity
• Part III — Jewishness as Antisemitic Construct
• Chapter 10 — Cinematically Transmitted Disease: Weimar’s Perpetuation of the Jewish Syphilis Conspiracy
• Chapter 11 — The Einstein Film: Animation, Relativity, and the Charge of “Jewish Science”
• Chapter 12 — “A Clarion Call to Strike Back”: Antisemitism and Ludwig Berger’s Der Meister von Nürnberg (1927)
• Chapter 13 — Banning Jewishness: Stefan Zweig, Robert Siodmak, and the Nazis
• Chapter 14 — Detoxification: Nazi Remakes of E.A. Dupont’s Blockbusters
• Coda
• Chapter 15 — “Filmrettung: Save the Past for the Future!”: Film Restoration and Jewishness in German and Austrian Silent Cinema
• Afterword
• Index