Carola Daffner (Southern Illinois) p.1-16
2011 Issue 2
Abstract
Traditionally studies of Nazi cinema have focused on its repeated depiction of a national community – a Volksgemeinschaft – which had to be purified of all foreign elements. Among these hate-mongering productions, Veit Harlan‘s masterpiece Jud Süß (1940) is considered one of the biggest coups of the Third Reich. In Harlan‘s extremely popular and highly anti-Semitic film, the historic figure Joseph Süβ Oppenheimer serves as a vehicle to engage collective fears of invasion on the screen. My article expands previous studies about the film‘s mass manipulation via the construction of an ‗other‘. Through an analysis of specific scenes, I show how Harlan‘s visual geographies negotiate an identity propagated by the social and racial utopias of the regime. Paradoxically, the spatial migration of the allegedly unwanted Oppenheimer becomes hereby a crucial and necessary catalyst in the strengthening of the imaginary National Socialist fantasy of space.