The German Courtroom Film During the Nazi Period: Ideology, Aesthetics, Historical Context
| Date | 01 March 2001 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00179 |
| Author | Peter Drexler |
| Published date | 01 March 2001 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 28, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2001
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 64–78
The German Courtroom Film During the Nazi Period:
Ideology, Aesthetics, Historical Context
Peter Drexler*
This essay examines the films of the Nazi period concerned with
questions of justice and the administration of the law. It traces the ways
in which law films developed prior to the Nazi era. It notes the apparent
paradox of the Nazi obsession with questions of justice, law, and legality
which are found in their strictly controlled film output. The use of film as
a mass propaganda weapon affected legal subjects and this can be seen
as a means of creating consensus. This centred on the role of the state in
creating a system which allowed the individual to be integrated into the
mythical folk community. Those who threatened this social cohesion
were depicted as threats to the common sense of ordinary people and
this stretched from propaganda films into comedies.
INTRODUCTION
The Nazi period offers a rich field for a study of the representation of law in
film. Between 1933 and 1945 about 1,100 feature films were released, and a
substantial number of these are more or less explicitly concerned with
questions of justice and the administration of the law. But this is a
problematic which has attracted little critical interest from both law and film
historians.
I was first confronted with this issue a few years ago, while collecting
material for a paper on German Gerichtsfilm (courtroom film) 1930–1960
that had been commissioned for a conference.
1
I was surprised to find that
there existed no critical study on the subject. More irritatingly, the German
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ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*Department of English and American Studies, University of Potsdam, Karl-
Liebknecht-Strasse 24-5, D-14476 Golm, Germany
1P.Drexler, ‘Der deutsche Gerichtsfilm 1930–1960. Anna
¨herungen an eine
problematische Tradition’ (‘German courtroom film 1930–1960: an approach to a
problematic tradition’) in Verbrechen – Justiz – Medien. Konstellationen in
Deutschland von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (Crime – justice – media. Constellations
in Germany from 1900 to the present), eds J. Linder and C.M. Orth (1999).
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