Dietrich's Ghosts

Dietrich's Ghosts is the first major English-language study to look at the star system under the Third Reich. Erica Carter argues that after the Weimar period, the German star system was reorganized to foster an antimodernist mode of spectatorship geared to an appreciation of the beautiful and the sublime. Carter discusses the reconfiguring of film production and exhibition around idealist aesthetic principles and offers case studies of three stars. Emil Jannings figures as an exemplar of what Carter terms the volkisch sublime, while Marlene Dietrich emerges as a figure at the crossroads of modernist and idealist conceptions of beauty. A provocative chapter on Zarah Leander in the feature films of the early war years portrays this star as a post-Dietrich emblem of the supposed sublimity of a fascist war. This unprecedented new study reassesses existing paradigms in German film history debates and throws suggestive new light on the icons and popular culture of the Third Reich.