Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Allied forces and their understanding of propaganda

I found many of the events mentioned in Rentschler's appendix to be worthy of discussion or further research, but one that stood out to me as particularly relevant to this class was the criteria at the very end for the censorship of German films by Allied forces (September 28, 1945). Aside from the issue of the merits censorship itself, which could easily be brought in, what comes to mind is: exactly which films were these 700 that were banned by the Allies? And what implications does this have? If I had to guess, I would surmise that blatantly offensive films such as Jud Suss would be on the list, but what about the films in which the propaganda is more subtle? Because, by definition of what Goebbels and his entire branch set out to do with films under the Third Reich, wouldn't all films produced in that era qualify as violating the new rules for postwar censorship, since they were supposed to be infused in some way or other with Nazi sentiment? Or if not, did that mean that Goebbels & co. failed to produce the kinds of films they were aiming to produce? What probably happened was neither of the above, but instead the Allied rules simply had a different understanding of what was offensive/harmful/propaganda. They probably only screened out those films which were overtly offensive-- but in the end, we seem to have learned, the overtly offensive films usually are the most ineffective and easily rejected. Which means that they left all the truly dangerous ones loose to do the kinds of damage Goebbels intended.

Basically, it would be interesting to know which films the Allied forces censored, and where they fit on the "successful/unsuccessful" and "overtly/covertly propaganda" spectrums -- to see how much overlap there is between the various categories.

1 comment:

  1. That would be a really interesting undertaking. I wonder whether anyone has done work on that yet?

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