Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular

The past two years have seen a great deal of scholarly activity and interest in the cinema of the Third Reich, especially in the United States and Britain. In 1996, not one but two scholarly books on Nazi Cinema were published in the United States: Eric Rentschler's The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife and Linda Schulte-Sasse's Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema.1 Essays on individual films as well as the broader political and cultural context of Nazi filmmaking have appeared in the pages of Screen and Sight and Sound.2 November of 1997 saw two international conferences devoted, at least in part, to Nazi film: at Dartmouth, a conference on the career of Detlef Sierck/Douglas Sirk; and in London, a day-long symposium (sponsored by the Goethe-Institut London and the British Film Institute) on Weimar and Third Reich Cinema. What are we to make of this recent interest in Nazi cinema among British and American intellectuals? As Rentschler and others have