Films shape people and reflect history. That has always been true and applies to democracies as well as dictatorships. In the "Third Reich", the cinema was a place for conveying, processing and reflecting worldviews and emotions. From 1933 to 1945, no other mass medium was as popular and as intensively received as the feature film. The Nazi regime used the silver screen to instil its political and ideological principles in the hearts and minds of the Volksgenossen ("people's comrades"). At the same time, the film industry had to take account of the expectations and dreams of the public, with the result that National Socialist feature films amount to far more than the expression of overt state propaganda. As a complex contemporary historical source, feature films offer insight into the dynamics of the dictatorship, because ideological manipulation encountered the ambivalences of individual reception. In films, the processes of social negotiation and cultural appropriation were closely intertwined.

Childhoods in the cinema. The visualisation of National Socialist concepts of childhood and family and their reception. This doctoral project examines the question of how children and young people, their lived experiences and their families are portrayed in (selected) Nazi feature films. To what extent were fascist or National Socialist models of childhood conveyed, and where did their mediation reach its limits and mix with other (traditional or progressive) images of childhood and family? Special attention is given to the frictions and entanglements between privacy and Nazi ideology. As with all sub-projects, the production, distribution and reception of the feature films will also be analysed.

The melodrama. Emotions, privacy and happiness in the National Socialist "Volksgemeinschaft". This doctoral project focuses on the melodrama, an extremely popular film genre, to analyse the negotiation of gender roles and socio-cultural values. Using examples of particularly successful melodramas between 1933 and 1945, the project analyses the tension between the emotional staging typical of the genre and the emotional norms of the Nazi dictatorship. The aim is to reveal the construction of individual "happiness" in the National Socialist "people's community".

Old and new faith. Religion in Nazi feature films. This doctoral project turns to the question of the values and norms that were conveyed and reflected in Nazi cinema on the topic of faith in National Socialism. Numerous feature films of the Nazi era made use of religious themes and sacred motifs with very different, partly political-ideological, partly Christian-moral interpretations. In their contradictions and intersections, they can be deciphered as exemplary for the relationship between faith and National Socialism.

NS feature films on the index. The Murnau Foundation's retained films and the films banned during the Nazi dictatorship. (Author: Johannes Hürter) In contrast to the other sub-projects, this project will focus on propaganda films. The research sample consists of the 44 feature films which, according to the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, may only be shown under academic supervision and offer a representative cross-section of the politically charged feature films of the Nazi dictatorship. In addition to the most notorious Nazi feature film "Jud Süß" (1941) and a handful of other well-known films, the list includes films that have been largely ignored until now. What are they about, who was involved in their production and how were they received, both before and after 1945? How should the films on the retained list be dealt with in future? In contrast to this "poison cabinet" of Nazi film, the films that were banned by the Nazi censors between 1933 and 1945 will also be examined. There, the question is what Nazi film policy found disturbing about these films and what this conveys about National Socialism.

Sub-project at the GWZO:

Germanisation with the help of cinema? Feature films in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and in the annexed territories of Poland 1939-1945. From the methodological standpoints of history and film studies, this doctoral project will provide an overview of the themes and protagonists of films shown in the aforementioned areas. Furthermore, questions about the reception and organisational structure of film distribution and cinema will be investigated. Ideally, the project should be designed as a comparative study of the occupation territories, taking into account archive holdings from the Bundesarchiv Berlin, the Archiwum Akt Nowych (Warsaw), the National Archive of the Czech Republic in Prague and other archives.