Nazi Film Melodrama By Laura Heins - 1421 Words

Often underestimated, the arts have time and time again proven that they are powerful. The arts in all and any of its forms has the power to move masses, it has the power to either end or start movements. Adolf Hitler knew the power the arts had, he knew that controlling art would allow him to control culture and in turn allow him to control people. The control of the arts was key to the success Nazi Germany had. It was Adolf Hitler’s belief that Germany’s destiny was to lead in terms of culture; Germany had to set the example of prime European culture. Some examples of art that Nazi Germany controlled were paintings, sculptures, literature, music, architecture, and film. Film was just one of the forums the Nazi regime used as a means to†¦show more content†¦Whatever achievements the Jewish peoples made were not worthy enough for the Fuhrer. Laura Heins focuses on what makes melodramas so popular as forms of entertainment and organizes her chapters thematically explaining the pros and cons of melodramas pertaining to the themes. Heins explains that the German government used melodramas to push their unfavorable view towards the Jews and their favored views of the Aryan way of life. Laura Heins wrote about a film, Jud Sà ¼ss, â€Å"The most notorious example of a Nazi propaganda film, Jud Sà ¼ss (Jew Sà ¼ss, 1940), cast a Jewish figure as the aristocratic villain, superimposing virulent racism onto the unresolved complexes of class and gender difference derived from both eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy and nineteenth-century sensational melodrama.† According to Heins, the film was the most evident statement of propaganda from Germany. In the film the Jewish antagonist is someone who is extremely well off and the protagonist Dorothea, a middle class German girl, is forced into the rich Jewish man’s (Sà ¼ss) bed. Films like Jud Sà ¼ss got people extremely upset, this helped feed the negative view that people began t o have of Jewish people. More and more they saw them as opportunistic and sexual individuals; they were seen as greedy in every way. In this example, the message that the Nazi government was trying to portray was clear, but the message can be blurred. Melodramas were written with the intent to stand