A still from “The Rothschilds.”
Amos Vogel, who founded and programmed Cinema 16, a film society that was New York’s major outlet for independent films in the nineteen-fifties, sold no tickets at the door. His screenings were for the group’s members only (it had as many as seven thousand), a policy that Vogel established in order to avoid the state’s stringent pre-censorship of movies. His group of liberal-minded viewers were hostile to the puritanical standards that the government imposed on the world of movies, which is why Vogel, who was Jewish and left Austria because of the rise of Nazism, would sometimes program Nazi propaganda films. His idea was to challenge the conventional progressive opposition to censorship. As the filmmaker Ed Emshwiller, a spectator at one such screening, recalled, “I thought it was a terrific program because you didn’t leave feeling, Oh, sure, I’m against censorship: you really were conflicted about where one draws the line.”

Today in Germany, the line is drawn much more strictly: approximately forty films made during the Nazi era are banned there to this day. They’re the subject of Felix Moeller’s documentary “Forbidden Films,” playing today and Sunday in the New York Jewish Film Festival, at Film Society of Lincoln Center (an organization that Vogel himself helped to launch, more than fifty years ago), and one of the merits of the documentary is its collection of clips from the films in question.
The first surprise is the wide range of propaganda subjects on which bans are still enforced. Moeller shows clips from an anti-French film (a historical drama about the Napoleonic Wars!); an anti-British film (set in South Africa); an anti-Russian film (featuring soldiers gunning down a German family); a pro-war film (a ludicrous musical in which pilots in flight sing a hearty toast to their Stukas); a pro-euthanasia film (about a doctor whose wife is suffering from multiple sclerosis and who, at her behest, puts her out of her misery); a drama denouncing the Weimar Republic; a “pro-community” film, in which listeners gather around a radio to hear a pro-Nazi speech; and a family drama, “Hitler Youth Quex,” in which an adolescent defies his leftist father to join the Nazis. And there’s one fiction film, realized with an exceptional artistic fervor, called “Homecoming,” from 1941, showing Poland’s German minority being persecuted, brutalized, and imprisoned by the Polish government and even being prevented from leaving the country for Germany. (One ethnic German woman is shown yearning to return to the homeland, where she won’t have to hear people “speak Yiddish or Polish in the shops.”)
There’s also, of course, a large dose of anti-Semitic propaganda on the list, and Moeller shows clips from these films, too. The most infamous of them are “Jew Süss,” a drama based on a historical subject, though grotesquely distorted in Veit Harlan’s 1940 filming of it (I wrote about the film here a few years ago and about Moeller’s own documentary on Harlan) and “The Eternal Jew,” an ostensible nonfiction film or visual essay that reduces Jews to physically repugnant caricatures and likens them to swarming rats. Moeller also refers to a drama, “The Rothschilds,” in which that family is shown attempting to conquer the world “for Israel.” (The movie shows a scene in which the head of the family draws a Star of David as a map of conquest.)
The political purposes of these films in Germany were and are self-evident: the anti-Semitic films are meant to justify persecution, deportation, extermination; the anti-British, anti-Russian, and anti-Polish films justify war; the anti-French films justify occupation; the pro-euthanasia film readies the extermination of the disabled.
These movies serve as officially approved emotional manipulations of German viewers’ opinions—but the policies that they reinforce were faits accomplis. The war was already on when the films hostile to Germany’s enemies were made; Jews were already being persecuted and deported, and forced euthanasia was already taking place in Germany. These policies weren’t the result of democratic decision-making following robust public debate, they were the decrees of a dictator and his inner circle, issued in an environment of stringent censorship. They weren’t subject to public discussion of any sort. When “The Eternal Jew” was shown, no one could subject it to appropriate derision; when “Homecoming” was shown, no one could call out the lies. In short, these movies were symptoms, not causes, of the horrors of the Nazi regime.
“Forbidden Films” includes talking-head interviews with commentators drawn mainly from the ranks of German film historians and programmers, and they offer a wide range of views regarding the ongoing censorship of the forbidden forty. One participant supports the ban, lest such films be sold in supermarkets or screened on television; another affirms that the ban on public screenings (except in carefully controlled museum settings) only affects the “educated bourgeoisie,” because the movies in question are easily available to anyone who wants them, on the Internet, from video dealers in the United States, or from underground right-wing vendors in Germany.
That point of view is affirmed by the most remarkable of the movie’s participants—neo-Nazis, whose faces aren’t shown and who appear silhouetted in a dark room. They and their associates have no trouble getting hold of these movies, and they know these films well, using them as part of their training and indoctrination process. The very fact that these movies are banned, they say, only increases their appeal among youths in self-styled revolt.
Indeed, the appearance of such movies on open sale in supermarkets or broadcast on television would also be a symptom—a sign that the venues in question think they can turn a profit selling them, a sign that the venues in question would fear no public criticism for doing so.
The discussions that take place in Moeller’s film remind me of the ongoing public debate in France over the illegality of anti-Semitic expression and Holocaust denial. In the wake of the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, the comedian Dieudonné, whose shows have long had an explicit anti-Semitic bent, was prosecuted for saying, “I am Charlie Coulibaly” (the last name being that of the killer of four Jews at the kosher supermarket).
It’s not the first time that Dieudonné, a former mainstream comedian who now puts on highly politicized, tendentious one-man shows in which the far right and the far left unite to laugh at his anti-Semitic humor, has come under the sanction of the law for his remarks. (Alexander Stille, writing on this site last year, discussed Dieudonné’s career and legal battles.) As it turns out, the opposition that he faces from the French authorities hasn’t hurt his career much: Le Monde reported last month that “Dieudonné keeps going unfazed with his show at the Théâtre de la Main d’or, behind the Bastille. Two shows each evening, three days a week, for six months, and the two-hundred-seat theatre is full to the rafters. The tickets sell for forty euros, along with T-shirts and other knickknacks.” His confrontation with and defiance of the authorities, his open conflict with the French government, is the best advertising that he can get. And, as horrifying as his message is, his skill as a performer is remarkable (which renders his misuse of his talent all the more dismaying). The problem with Dieudonné, however, isn’t with his own venomous expression but with the large audience that’s eager to lap it up. France can’t extirpate the political malady with legislation any more than Germany can cleanse its past by banning movies.
As repellent as these blatant manipulations of opinion are, they’re equally fascinating as works of art. The mask-like artifice of the pilots in song, the histrionic flourishes of the historical masques, the melodramatic excesses of villains and heroes alike offer an extravagant thrill of overstoked emotion to a nearly unbearable intensity. That aesthetic is authentic and significant—all the more so in that it lives on, today, whether on talk radio or in pulpits or in the crudest advertising, political or otherwise—or in the novels of Ayn Rand.
Yet for all the univocal pounding of a single official perspective, the movies—at least, the brief clips of them in Moeller’s documentary—offer surprising and enlightening moments of unintended internal contradiction. For instance, the movie (unnamed by Moeller) that shows a group of people listening to a radio speech makes the people on camera—the actors themselves, even more than the characters they play—look frozen with terror; it’s a vision of a totalitarian regime at work that should send chills through citizens and performers alike. The garbled verbal gymnastics of a father trying to console a young woman for the loss in war of her lover sound sickening and mealy-mouthed, hollow and insensitive. They’re exactly the kinds of points that could have been made, when the movie were shown, if they were in fact shown in a democratic society; but then, it’s hard to imagine any artist of significant talent, in a democratic society, making them in the first place.
That’s what makes the aberrance of a Dieudonné all the more extraordinary—and why, rather than being banned or prosecuted, that attitude needs to be aired out. The contents of his performances and the forty forbidden films are rendered volatile by pressure but lose their effect when dissipated into the environment—if the environment is sufficiently democratic and tolerant. And if it isn’t—if the political environment in France or Germany proves to be fertile soil for such spores of hatred—a ban won’t help, and may even be a sign or element of exactly that environment.