Film Comedy after the Third Reich: On the political Aesthetics of Entertainment in Defector Films

• Duration: 2021 – 2024
• Project lead: PD Dr. Rasmus Greiner

Team: PD Dr. Rasmus Greiner, Tatiana Astafeva M.A.

Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG)

Contact: film-history@uni-bremen.de

The project aims to research German feature films from 1944/45 that were not completed or premiered until after the end of the Second World War. These approximately 60 defector films are of disproportionate importance for film theory and (film) history. Using the example of a manageable film corpus, cultural and socio-historical continuities as well as ruptures between the Nazi era and post-war Germany can be worked out concisely. The focus here is on the film comedy, which, with more than 30 productions, represents the most common genre of defector films – and thus also had a decisive influence on entertainment films after the ‘Third Reich’.

The aim of the project is to use the example of defector comedies to investigate how the interweaving of entertainment, politics and aesthetics developed during the period of political and social upheaval in the 1940s and 1950s. As a missing link, according to our thesis, the defector comedies offer a broad spectrum ranging from Nazi-affirmative to subversive potentials that manifest themselves in a political aesthetic. In this way, they establish a connection between cinematic perception in the late phase of National Socialism and in the post-war period. The innovative core of the project lies in the integrative treatment of the hitherto largely homogeneously conceptualized phenomenon of defector films on the one hand, and the analysis of the films in relation to New Film History, genre studies and political aesthetics on the other.