Rethinking Jewishness in Weimar Cinema

Barbara Hales is a Professor of History and Humanities at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. Her publications focus on film history of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. She is the author of Black Magic Woman: Gender and the Occult in Weimar Germany (Peter Lang, 2021). Along with Mihaela Petrescu and Valerie Weinstein, she also co-edited a volume entitled Continuity and Crisis in German Cinema, 1928-1936 (Camden House, 2016). Dr. Hales is President of the Center for Medicine After the Holocaust.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors



Introduction: The Jewishness of Weimar Cinema

Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein



Part I: Jewish Visibility On and Off Screen



Chapter 1. Humanizing Shylock: The “Jewish Type” in Weimar Film

Maya Barzilai



Chapter 2. Energizing the Dramaturgy: How Jewishness Shaped Alexander Granach’s Performances in Weimar Cinema

Margrit Frölich



Chapter 3. The Jewish Vamp of Berlin: Actress Maria Orska, Typecasting, and Jewish Women

Kerry Wallach



Chapter 4. Jewish Comedians beyond Lubitsch: Siegfried Arno in Film and Cabaret

Mila Ganeva



Chapter 5. Alfred Rosenthal’s Rhetoric of Collaboration, the Politics of Jewish Visibility, and Jewish Weimar Film Print Culture

Ervin Malakaj



Part II: Coding and Decoding Jewish Difference



Chapter 6. Two Worlds, Three Friends, and the Mysterious Seven-Branched Candelabrum: Jewish Filmmaking in Weimar Germany

Philipp Stiasny



Chapter 7. Homosexual Emancipation, Queer Masculinity, and Jewish Difference in Anders als die Andern (1919)

Valerie Weinstein



Chapter 8. Der Film ohne Juden: G.W. Pabst’s Die freudlose Gasse (1925)

Lisa Silverman



Chapter 9. “The World is Funny, Like a Dream:” Franziska Gaal’s Verwechslungskomödien and Exile’s Crisis of Identity

Anjeana K. Hans



Part III: Jewishness as Antisemitic Construct



Chapter 10. Cinematically Transmitted Disease: Weimar’s Perpetuation of the Jewish Syphilis Conspiracy

Barbara Hales



Chapter 11. The Einstein Film: Animation, Relativity, and the Charge of “Jewish Science”

Brook Henkel



Chapter 12. “A Clarion Call to Strike Back”: Antisemitism and Ludwig Berger's Der Meister von Nürnberg (1927)

Christian Rogowski



Chapter 13. Banning Jewishness: Stefan Zweig, Robert Siodmak, and the Nazis

Andréas-Benjamin Seyfert



Chapter 14. Detoxification: Nazi Remakes of E. A. Dupont’s Blockbusters

Ofer Ashkenazi



Coda



Chapter 15. “Filmrettung: Save the Past for the Future!”: Film Restoration and Jewishness in German and Austrian Silent Cinema

Cynthia Walk



Afterword

Barbara Hales and Valerie Weinstein