1POPULAR CINEMA

and institutional pressures, that thrive even under the conditions of state
ownership or control.
It is in response to these larger debates that my study on popular cinema
in the Third Reich calls for the normalization of German film history. Until
unification, Third Reich cinema has been treated as the ultimate Other
of German cinema and its competing discourses of art cinema, popular cinema,
and national cinema. Especially the totalizing views of cinema and
propaganda, ideology, and the fascist imaginary have provided a substitute
for detailed historical research and political analysis. Likewise, the circular
reasoning behind much writing (e.g., cinema as ideology as cinema) has
produced the kind of extraterritorial space, or bifurcated narrative, that
makes possible the reconstruction of an untainted filmic tradition associated
with Weimar cinema, exile cinema, DEFA cinema, and New German
cinema. The more Third Reich cinema is conceptualized in the homogenizing
terms of domination and conformity, the more the pre-1933 and
post-1945 years can be associated with a liberating heterogeneity. The identification
of fascist mass culture with classical Hollywood cinema often has
a similar effect, with the blanket dismissal of these two extreme examples of
the culture industry opening up a space for the (often posthumous) validation
of modernist practices and postmodern sensibilities. Normalization in
this overdetermined context therefore means the recognition of the continuities
on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic levels that haunt the
history of German film beyond all ideological divisions and political ruptures;
it also means an acute awareness of the paradoxical, asymmetrical,
and nonsynchronous relationship between cinema and politics both then
and now. As a result, Third Reich cinema can no longer be treated as an
aberration of the past but must be acknowledged as an integral part of the
aesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including its
traumas and burdens.
The present book contributes to the reassessment of popular cinema in
the Third Reich by redefining both the subject and the method of investigation.
Three basic assumptions inform my thinking about the material
to be presented on the following pages. First, cinema in the Third Reich was
above all a popular cinema sustained by well-established generic conventions,
cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly
developed star system. Second, these popular forms and styles developed
through the selective incorporation of elements from the pre-1933 period
into post-1933 cultural practices and the ongoing transformation of these
viii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich