Judenfilm

Thomas Doherty gives a chilling example of Nazi film criticism in his Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939 . As summarized by the TLS reviewer, “Nobody sensed the power of cinema more acutely than the propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. As early as December 1930, at the German premiere of Universal’s much-touted anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, when the Nazis hadn’t yet commandeered office, he unleashed a brigade of Brownshirts equipped with stink bombs, sneezing powder and throngs of white mice to spoil the high-profile screening at Mozart Hall in Berlin. Goebbels himself dismissed the picture with a one-word epithet: ‘Judenfilm!’

Without demonizing, Doherty also shows how the American film industry reacted: “Despite the expressions of outrage in the aftermath, Hollywood studios, whose core interest in profit shares trumped most other concerns, tended to handle the new political situation with kid gloves. ‘The American attitude on the matter,’ Variety noted, after Jewish employees at the Berlin branches of Hollywood studios were forced to flee Germany in the wake of Hitler’s ascent, ‘is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market.’”