Was the Third Reich movie-made? Interdisciplinarity and the reframing of "ideology"

American Historical Review

Volumn 106, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 460-484

  Spector, Scott ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0242511469     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2651614     Document Type: Article

References (132)

1. See, for instance, the trajectory formed by the following works in American history: Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York, 1976);
2. John E. O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson, eds., American History/American Film: Interpreting the Hollywood Image (New York, 1979);
3. Ian C. Jarvie, Movies as Social Criticism: Aspects of Their Social Psychology (Metuchen, N.J., 1978);
4. Robert A. Rosenstone, "Genres, History, and Hollywood: A Review Article," Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985): 368-70;
5. Daniel J. Walkowitz, "Visual History: The Craft of the Historian-Filmmaker," Public Historian 7 (Winter 1985);
6. Robert Brent Toplin, "The Filmmaker as Historian," AHR 93 (December 1988): 121-27; and the volumes written and edited by Rosenstone in the 1980s cited below, n. 9.
7. The multiple and sometimes apparently contradictory meanings of the term play an important part in the discussions of the concept of ideology to arise since the late 1970s. See, for instance, Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; rpt. edn., New York, 1983), 152-57;
8. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), 1-31;
9. Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Stanford, Calif., 1991), 3-34. I reserve a more extended discussion of the concept for the last section of this essay.
10. See Anton Kaes, From "Hitler" to "Heimat": The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1989);
11. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film and book, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1978),
12. Joachim Neugroschel, trans., Hitler, A Film from Germany (New York, 1982).
13. Goebbels's speech to the Propaganda Ministry staff on April 17, 1945, cited in Rudolf Semmler, Goebbels: The Man Next to Hitler (London, 1947).
14. This fantasy of life-as-film/present-as-history was situated in the context of the troubled production of Kolberg, the epic of German resistance to the Napoleonic onslaught, produced at great expense, including the deployment of thousands of troops as extras, during the last stretch of the war. This remarkable comment has been cited very often by film historians and others, and serves as the epigram of Saul Friedländer's Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Thomas Weyr, trans. (New York, 1984);
15. on the film studies front, Kaes uses this quote as a point of departure for his argument about the conflation of the historical chronicle and the simulacrum of filmic representation; see From "Hitler" to "Heimat."
16. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 1.
17. Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, N.C., 1996).
18. Critical reassessments of the entertainment/propaganda dichotomy in relation to film in this period can be found in German-language publications such as Stephen Lowry, Pathos und Politik: Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen, 1991);
19. Leonardo Quaresima, "Der Film im Dritten Reich: Moderne, Amerikanismus, Unterhaltungsfilm," montage/av 3, no. 2 (1994): 5-22;
20. especially the work of Karsten Witte; but the reception of this work by historians of National Socialism in Germany is even more marginal than on this side of the Atlantic. Lowry's position, discussed at greater length below, is offered in English in the article "Fascist Film or Unpolitical Entertainment?" New German Critique, no. 74 (Spring-Summer 1998): 125-49, where he argues that the search for political content in these films "often stifles a complete and more differentiated assessment of the peculiar normality at work in Nazi films and of the complex society in which they circulated . . . foreclos[ing] scrutiny of less direct effects, of continuities with earlier and later German cinema"; p. 127.
21. Compare Alan E. Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1993), which focuses on three of the Reich culture offices but not on the film office;
22. Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, 1996), which focuses on institutional politics of visual art and, most fascinating, collection practices.
23. Yet another film studies book appearing in English in 1996 does fill this sort of role; see Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany's Greatest Film Company, 1918-1945, Robert and Rita Kimber, trans. (New York, 1996). Each of these works, in different ways, offers a more complex reading of the relationship of Reich cultural policy to cultural practice in the Third Reich, disturbing the commonsense assumption that ideological doctrine drove cultural policy, which in turn determined the form of aesthetic products.
24. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), see esp. 6.
25. See also the essays collected in Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, N.J., 1995).
26. See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J., 1947);
27. Erwin Leiser, "Deutschland, erwache!" Propaganda im Film des Dritten Reiches (Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1968),
28. trans. by Gertrud Mander and David Wilson as Nazi Cinema (London, 1974). Leiser's book was published in the wake of his documentary film Deutschland, erwache! which consisted of clips from German films from the Nazi period organized by propaganda theme, introduced by brief explications of the way they reflected Nazi political and ideological goals.
29. Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 12.
30. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983).
31. See also Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik (Munich, 1969);
32. Albrecht, ed., Film im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Karlsruhe, 1978).
33. That Welch's and Leiser's approach to reading propaganda themes in Nazi film still holds considerable power is evident in a recently translated study of Nazi documentary film; see Hilmar Hoffmann, Und die Fahne führt uns in die Ewigkeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1988),
34. J. Broadwin and V. R. Berghahn, trans., The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism, 1933-1945 (Providence, R.I., 1996).
35. David Welch, Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations (Totowa, N.J., 1983), 1.
36. George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964);
37. Fritz R. Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 1961);
38. see also Jost Hermand, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich: Völkische Utopien und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main, 1988).
39. An excellent review of the controversy is in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York, 1993), see esp. 6-13, 86-113.
40. See also Tim Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker, eds., Der "Führerstaat": Mythos und Realität; Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart, 1981), 23-41.
41. In place of attempting to survey the entire literature, I offer the following works as examples of these successes: Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York, 1996);
42. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge, 1991);
43. Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: "Euthanasia" in Germany c. 1900-1945 (Cambridge, 1994);
44. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984);
45. Detlev Peukert, "The Genesis of the 'Final Solution' from the Spirit of Science," in Childers and Caplan, Reevaluating the Third Reich, 234-52, and other essays in that volume.
46. In the 1980s, this research moved from an earlier focus on organized political resistance to the realm of daily life. See among many others Detlev Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life, Richard Deveson, trans. (New Haven, Conn., 1987);
47. Alf Lüdtke, ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt, 1989);
48. Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria 1933-1945 (Oxford, 1983);
49. Michael Balfour, Withstanding Hitler in Germany: 1933-1945 (London, 1988).
50. The sophisticated turn such research has taken in the 1990s is demonstrated in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance against the Third Reich, 1933-1990 (Chicago, 1994).
51. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996);
52. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941, Martin Chalmers, trans. (New York, 1998);
53. To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942-1945, Chalmers, trans. (London, 1999).
54. See the review of the Goldhagen reception by István Deák, "Holocaust Views: The Goldhagen Controversy in Retrospect," Central European History 30, no. 2 (1997): 295-307.
55. Compare Jeremiah M. Riemer and Andrei S. Markovits, "The Goldhagen Controversy," Tikkun 13 (May/June 1998): 48-49;
56. Manfred B. Steger, "Genocide, Resistance and Willing Executioners: Reflections on the Goldhagen Controversy," Southern Humanities Review 32 (Fall 1998).
57. Notably, Andrei S. Markovits, "Störfall im Endlager der Geschichte," in Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern? Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen Kontroverse und die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (Hamburg, 1996), 228-40;
58. Elie Wiesel, "Little Hitlers," The Observer, March 31, 1996;
59. but also the sharply critical Omer Bartov, who attacked the author for his lack of moderation and inexplicable claims to originality, while asserting that he was not wrong to "stress once more the importance of anti-Semitism . . . as an arguably crucial and (in recent mainstream scholarship) somewhat underemphasized condition of the Holocaust." In summarizing the dispute between Christopher Browning and Goldhagen over Police Battalion 101, Bartov mentions the possibility of a third position, "which stresses a crucial factor neglected both by Browning's circumstantial interpretation and by Goldhagen's essentialist view, namely the powerful impact of ideology . . . on the perpetrators." Bartov, "Ordinary Monsters," New Republic 214 (April 29, 1996): 32-38, see 34 and 35.
60. See Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, N.J., 1990), where two distinct Sonderweg arguments - the one about a German revolutionary spirit transcending left and right orientations, the other about an anti-Semitism essentially different from other European anti-Semitisms - are interwoven into a single teleological fantasy spinning for centuries toward the Holocaust. In fact, the remarkable attention given to Goldhagen's 1996 book notwithstanding, it has been more the rule than the exception that intellectual historical studies of German anti-Semitism resort to sweeping exceptionalist diagnoses about a unified anti-Jewish mindset running from Reformation to Holocaust.
61. See, for example, John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago, 1996).
62. Compare the enlightening critical review by Geoff Eley, "What Are the Contexts for German Antisemitism? Some Thoughts on the Origins of Nazism," Studies in Contemporary Jewry 14 (1997).
63. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York, 1997), 73-112.
64. See Eric Rentschler, "The Elective Other: Jew Süss (1940)," in Ministry of Illusion, 149-69, 355-63.
65. See Linda Schulte-Sasse, "Courtier, Vampire, or Vermin? Jew Süss's Contradictory Effort to Render the 'Jew' Other," in Entertaining the Third Reich, 47-91, see 90.
66. Marcia Klotz, "Epistemological Ambiguity and the Fascist Text: Jew Süss, Carl Peters, and Ohm Krüger," in New German Critique, no. 74 (Spring-Summer 1998): 91-124, see 96-102.
67. Klotz's larger project in this essay is the question of "epistemological ambiguity," or the "gray area that lies between the realms of 'knowing' and 'not knowing,' a realm generated within the field of Nazi ideology that was absolutely crucial to the smooth functioning of the German fascist regime" (p. 91). Such a project speculative nature of an inquiry into how complex ideological messages were (and not just "could be") processed by actual moviegoers. See Klotz, "Epistemological Ambiguity," 124.
68. Indeed, the interpretation of La Habanera as Nordic/fascist allegory was not dominant, according to Rentschler, due in part to the pieties surrounding Sierck's presumed subversive filmmaking (characterized by an exaggerated and therefore ironized mise en scène) and Leander's oppositional associations. Rentschler thus displaces these "myths" with a more complex reading of ideological signifiers and their potential receptions. See Ministry of Illusion, 126-29.
69. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 134.
70. This complex reciprocal relationship has been discussed by Omer Bartov in the provocative article "Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust," AHR 103 (June 1998): 771-816,
71. now in his book Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford, 2000). Bartov's discussion dwells on the intersubjective level of collective identity and memory constructions but in a very complex way, since it links these constructions across time and space (the definitions of fantasy "elusive enemies" and victimized selves from Jews in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany to Germans and Israelis after the Holocaust). Bartov's goal is to use the exemplary case of German anti-Semitism to expose the structure of an ideological complex that he suggests is anything but unique to National Socialism.
72. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 144.
73. Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge, 1992), 3.
74. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses, xiv-xv.
75. See also Denise Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918-1935 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1985).
76. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge 1992) see esp. 33-36, 94, 115, and 139.
77. New German Critique, no. 74 (Spring-Summer 1998), Special Issue on Nazi Cinema. In her contribution to the special issue, "Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular," Patrice Petro also notes the explosion of interest in Nazi films (heralded by, among other things, two symposia in 1997) and its relationship to trends in histories of National Socialist Germany, which "chart continuities as well as discrepancies between National Socialist policy and everyday culture in the Third Reich." Petro also notes that it is "curious (or perhaps not curious at all) that historians of 'everyday fascism' have rarely looked to cinema for evidence they seek of the mundane, everyday aspects of life within which Nazism and its crimes unfolded. Indeed, what better place than the cinema to find traces of the choices, emotions, and coping mechanisms of ordinary Germans?"; pp. 41-43.
78. See, for instance, Marc Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context (Detroit, Mich., 1995), 49-96;
79. Sabine Hake, "The Melodramatic Imagination of Detlef Sierck: Final Chord and Its Resonances," Screen 38 (Summer 1997): 129-48;
80. Thomas Elsaesser, "Hollywood and Berlin," Sight and Sound 7 (November 1997): 14-17;
81. the contributions by Anke Gleber and Janet Lungstrum in Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1997);
82. the collection Der Star: Geschichte - Rezeption - Bedeutung (Munich, 1997).
83. As a marker of the shifting ground of interdisciplinary innovation and resistance, see Peter C. Rollins's introduction to a special issue of American Quarterly on film and American studies, where historians are to provide the interdisciplinarity and traditional film studies the resistance. Rollins is optimistic that the contextual work begun in that issue indicated the greater promise of interdisciplinary and historical work than the "myopic" concerns of film scholars.
84. See Rollins, "Film and American Studies: Introduction," American Quarterly 31 (Winter 1979): 595.
85. In this sense, this 1943 article from the Teacher's Section of a historical journal covers very familiar territory: Philip D. Jordan, "Social Studies and the Sound Film," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 30 (December 1943): 408-11.
86. John E. O'Connor, "Teaching Film and American Culture: A Survey of Texts," American Quarterly 31, Special Issue: Film and American Studies (Winter 1979): 718-23.
87. An excellent article from 1952 suggested a shift in focus to the interplay of spectator and film; see David and Evelyn T. Riesman, "Movies and Audiences," American Quarterly 4 (Autumn 1952): 195-202.
88. I have already cited some exceptions to this focus, including within the pages of this journal. One further example is the excellent article in the last issue, Charles Ambler, "Popular Film and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia," AHR 106 (February 2001): 81-105, where the author reconstructs the ways in which colonial audiences' experience of Hollywood films was not engineered by the movies' overt messages or the censoring arm of the colonial state.
89. Historians may be better equipped than their cultural studies counterparts to engage in such reconstruction, but evidence such as that with which Ambler was able to work is not always available, as I discuss further below. The question of accuracy has been somewhat retooled within the explorations of historical representation in film as a viable competitor to narrative history in the works of Robert A. Rosenstone cited above, and in an AHR Forum on the subject: Rosenstone, "History in Images/History in Words: Reflections on the Possibility of Really Putting History onto Film," AHR 93 (December 1988): 1173-85;
90. David Herlihy, "Am I a Camera? Other Reflections on Films and History," 1186-92;
91. Hayden White, "Historiography and Historiophoty," 1193-99;
92. John E. O'Connor, "History in Images/Images in History: Reflections on the Importance of Film and Television Study for an Understanding of the Past," 1200-09.
93. Geoffrey Cocks, "The Ministry of Amusements: Film, Commerce, and Politics in Germany, 1917-1945," Central European History 30, no. 1 (1997): 77-88.
94. Cocks, "Ministry of Amusements," 82.
95. Jay W. Baird, book review, AHR 103 (April 1998): 545-46.
96. By "symptomatic," I mean that this review is a particularly clear manifestation of a particular condition of historiography, and exemplary in this sense only. That is not to say that Baird's response is exemplary or typical for all historians or all German historians, as Cocks's very different position demonstrates. There is a great deal of receptivity to the lessons of cultural analysis from other disciplines in the German history field, to be sure (as several of my own footnotes will attest). The question I am hoping to get at in this essay has to do with what the necessary limits of these lessons might be, from the disciplinary perspective of History. Hence this AHR book review helps me map out this ground.
97. See esp. Jay W. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 1939-1945 (Minneapolis, 1974).
98. Rentschler, for his part, is somewhat critical of Baird's scholarship; see Ministry of Illusion, 320 n. 11.
99. Baird, book review, 545.
100. See, for example, George L. Mosse, "Beauty without Sensuality/The Exhibition Entartete Kunst," in Stephanie Barron, ed., "Degenerate Art": The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles, 1991), 25-32.
101. The continuity of Weimar filmic modernism and Volkish, authoritarian, or otherwise proto-Nazi ideology was already established by Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler.
102. It is noteworthy that a review essay written for a more popular audience displays some of the symptoms I am identifying in Baird's treatment: J. S. Marcus stresses the centrality of film to the Third Reich, the luster of its blockbusters, and hence "German history's distraction from itself," ignoring the links Rentschler makes between distraction and ideological message, and recoiling from what he calls "Rentschler's modish academic style"; Marcus also agrees with Baird that Rentschler has valuably "assembled much sound historical detail, especially in his appendixes." See Marcus, "Screentime for Hitler," in New York Review of Books (March 4, 1999): 39-42. Schulte-Sasse's work, with its principal focus on the play of ideology within a structure of viewer fantasy-formation, seems to be out of the view of historians and general public alike.
103. Baird, book review, 129.
104. Karsten Witte's work on entertainment film in the Third Reich has been of singular importance as a source for all of the work presently under discussion. See, for example, Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag: Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich (Berlin, 1995);
105. "Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film," J. D. Steakley and Gabriel Hoover, trans., New German Critique, nos. 24-25 (Fall-Winter 1981-82): 238-63. The previously discussed special issue of New German Critique is an homage to Witte.
106. Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975),
107. rpt. in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York, 1981), 71-105.
108. See, for example, Mosse, "Beauty without Sensuality."
109. See Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 68.
110. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 69.
111. Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion, 55.
112. Baird, book review, 546.
113. See Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology," in Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London, 1994), 1-33.
114. Žižek, "Introduction," 9. Žižek even suggests that the contributions within the volume can be seen as organized along the tripartite axis of doctrine-belief-ritual, which in turn parallels the Hegelian In-itself - For-itself - In-and-For-itself. See pp. 9-10 and n. 9.
115. Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Ben Brewster, trans. (New York, 1971), 127-86.
116. This difficult question is a privileged one in literature departments at the moment, constituting the central axis of approaches to popular culture under the broad rubric of "cultural studies." It may be too early to tell, but my own experience suggests that the youngest generation of cultural historians, namely our graduate students, have already overcome the disciplinary resistance I have been describing, and that future work in history is likely to incorporate more complex models of ideology than we have had at our disposal in the past.
117. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, "Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film," Critical Inquiry 23 (Autumn 1996): 109-44, esp. 142-43;
118. see also Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001).
119. Film had already been seriously considered by as prominent a historian of Italian fascism as Victoria de Grazia, but she focused more on institutional frameworks and the film industry as a cultural field, rather than engaging in the language of film as Ben-Ghiat does. See de Grazia, "Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920-1960," Journal of Modern History 61 (March 1989): 53-87.
120. Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931-1943 (Princeton, N.J., 1986), 18-19.
121. This view of ideology is drawn from Antonio Gramsci's prison notebooks (see 260-61 of Hoare/Nowell-Smith edition), as well as Raymond Williams's Marxism and Literature (1977) and Frederic Jameson's work. Consistent with the German film work I have been exploring, and particularly close to Schulte-Sasse, Landy points out how "escapist" genre films, in spite/because of their conventions, reveal "how desire is managed." This involves a complex reading of their escapist dimensions not unlike those of Rentschler described above.
122. Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, N.J., 1992).
123. Lutz P. Koepnick, "Fascist Aesthetics Revisited," Modernism/modernity 6 (January 1999): 51-73.
124. Koepnick, "Fascist Aesthetics," 52-54.
125. See esp. Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Lacan, But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (London, 1991);
126. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1991);
127. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out (New York, 1992).
128. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).
129. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, see 5-7.
130. As I noted above, for instance, Marcia Klotz is conscious of the dearth of empirical evidence to support her own and Schulte-Sasse's assumption of female viewer identification. Stephen Lowry works on Nazi film within Frederic Jameson's influential model of ideology, stressing the tensions between ideological program - "closure," or "containment" - and the viewers' desires, which are not directly produced by that program but are immediately in a sort of "horse-trade" with it. See Lowry, "Ideology and Excess," 129-33;
131. compare Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), 24-58;
132. Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 94-109. Lowry, in turn, confesses the problem of reconstructing effects of these films on actual viewers of the 1930s and 1940s, acknowledging the lack of reliable empirical data, and laments the necessity to engage a text-oriented analysis to speculate on extratextual effects. He sees this as a problem for the historian and an opportunity for interdisciplinary dialogue.