Hitler - Films from Germany

The first book-length study to critically examine the recent wave of Hitler biopics in German cinema and television. A group of international experts discuss films like Downfall in the context of earlier portrayals of Hitler and draw out their implications for the changing place of the Third Reich in the national historical imagination.

MARTIN A. RUEHL is lecturer in German Thought at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge University, UK, specializing in the cultural and intellectual history of modern Germany. His research concentrates on the myths and memories that have shaped German society and culture in the twentieth century. He has published books and articles on Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and Stefan George. For the Cambridge MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures, he lectures on fascist cinema and the representations of fascism in post-war European film.


KAROLIN MACHTANS is assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at California Polytechnic State University, USA. From 2006 to 2010, she was DAAD Lecturer at Sidney Sussex College and St John's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research interests lie in twentieth and twenty-first-century German literature and film, Turkish-German and German-Jewish literature, representations of the Holocaust, and the interrelations between literature and history. Her first book, which examines the autobiographical writings of Saul Friedlander and Ruth Kluger in the context of their scholarly work, was published in 2009 by Max Niemeyer Verlag. She is currently working on a book-length study of the representation of Istanbul in German literature and film.