Film and Television (American) After World War II, Germany in

Since 1945 American films, and later tele­vision, have mainly portrayed German people as Nazis, mad scientists, Commu­nists, or some combinations of them. Given that Hollywood films and television programs have traditionally been much more influential in shaping American per­ceptions of historical events than any other media, Hollywood’s propagation of Ger­man culture in negative terms has culti­vated a German legacy that remains largely negative to this day in the United States.

But Hollywood’s main goal has always been to entertain and not to educate, and since World War II the most entertaining portrayal of Germany has been that of Nazism. American portrayals of Nazism in film began before the United States even entered the war, when the Three Stooges lampooned Adolf Hitler in seven short films from 1937 to 1944. Charlie Chaplin produced the only full length anti-Nazi movie (The Great Dictator, 1940) before the United States declared war on Germany. Until the present, a steady stream of anti­Nazi movies have been produced, perpetu­ating the notion that all Germans are Nazis at heart regardless of the passage of time.

The most numerous form of anti-Nazi films have been the many World War II battle films, which began in the mid- 1940s. Since then there have been over sixty full-length feature films focusing on the American and Allied struggle against Nazism. The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s pro­duced a roughly constant flow of anti-Nazi battle films, including The Desert Fox (1951), The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and A Bridge Too Far (1977).

Beginning in the 1960s, Hollywood began producing several films that com­bined the popular image of the Nazi with that of a new threat—German commu­nism. The Berlin airlift (1948), the parti­tioning of Germany (1949), and the build­ing of the Berlin Wall (1961) all helped foster the notion of a “good” capitalist West Germany and a “bad” Communist East Germany in American popular culture and, of course, in movies by the mid- 1960s. Although Nazism was still the dom­inant perception of Germans in that decade, it began to take on a secondary and often comical role as newer threats of Ger­man Communist spies and atomic annihi­lation predominated. In Dr. Strangelove (1964), for example, the title character is a former Nazi scientist advising the United States on nuclear arms matters while con­stantly having to curb his habit of saluting in Nazi fashion. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) combines the threat of Nazism and German communism. This theme resurfaced as late as 1991 in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, when a militaristic Klingon general argues, “We need breathing room!” to which the heroic Captain Kirk retorts “Hitler—1939.” In the same conversation the Klingon later re­marks, “We are all cold warriors in space.”

By the 1970s, serious films focusing on the threat of Nazism began to decrease, but many movies continued to be produced containing Nazi overtones. The most suc­cessful American movie series of all time, Star Wars, began in 1977 and contained strong Nazi themes. By the end of2005 the Star Wars series will have included six major blockbuster films that follow the rise and defeat of an evil intergalactic empire led by an opportunistic chancellor who is only elected after he invents a military threat to an otherwise peaceful republic.

Nazi overtones are apparent in many popular 1980s and 1990s movies as well. In two of the three Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), the title character battles evil Nazis for possession of magical religious artifacts during World War II. The Oscar-winning Sophie's Choice (1982) relates the story of a Jewish man’s and a female Polish Auschwitz survivor’s re­lationship in the postwar United States. Several 1990s movies were produced with direct anti-Nazi storylines, including Schindler's List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and The Thin Red Line (1998). More recent movies such as Enemy at the Gates (2001) have kept anti-Nazism alive in twenty-first century United States culture.

The second most popular American stereotype about Germany after Nazism is the idea that Germany is the home of the world’s worst mad scientists. This is the old­est stereotype about Germany in films, be­ginning with the first Frankenstein movie in 1909. Since then, scores of Frankenstein movies have emerged from Hollywood, in­cluding the classic Frankenstein (1931), The House of Frankenstein (1944), the comedic Young Frankenstein (1974), and the more recent Frankenstein (1994) starring Robert De Niro. Several other films set in the post­war period have combined the German mad scientist concept with the familiar Nazism threat. In They Saved Hitler's Brain

(1963) and The Boys from Brazil (1978), for example, postwar Nazi scientists in hiding attempt to revive the Third Reich by reviv­ing Hitler’s maniacal life essence. Similarly, in Splash (1984), a former Nazi scientist now living in the United States attempts to capture a beautiful mermaid for evil biolog­ical experiments.

American television portrayals of Ger­many are similar to that in films in most re­gards, except that television programs about Germany have been more numerous and somewhat more lighthearted. As with films, the most popular German stereotype on television has been that of Nazism, but beginning in the late 1950s, several pro­grams cast the Nazi threat in a comical light. From 1959 to 1973 the popular chil­dren’s cartoon The Adventures ofRocky and Bullwinkle had as its main villain a charac­ter named “Fearless Leader” who sported latent Nazi insignia. The 1953 movie Sta- lag 17, a comedy about Allied prisoners of war (POWs) in World War II Germany, spawned a popular television series from 1965 to 1971 called Hogans Heroes, which lampooned Nazism by having the Ameri­can POWs constantly outsmart the igno­rant but loveable Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz.

The most common type of programs dealing with Germany after 1945, however, has been the numerous television docu­mentaries about World War II and Nazism. Portrayals of Nazism reached somewhat of a peak in the 1970s with the airing of Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) and Holocaust (1978). Fictional programs about Nazism have been less popular and include The Winds of War (1983) and Hitler’s Daughter (1990), both based on popular books. Al­though serious fictional and documentary programs about Nazism were more numer­ous than the few comedy series of the 1960s, the comedies were, in the long run, more influential in American culture, espe­cially since they were immortalized in syn­dication and continue to air today.

JeffStone

See also Hollywood

References and Further Reading

Abramson, Abraham, project coordinator.

New York Times Film Reviews. New York: New York Times, 1970-1975, vols. 3-7. Barclay, David E., and Elisabeth Glaser-

Schmidt. Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1997.

Gorman, Lyn, and David McLean. Media and Society in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2003.

Hanson, Patricia King, and Stephen L. Hanson. Film Review Index. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1986, vols. 1-2.