The patterns of competition, cooperation, and contestation that characterize the Hollywood presence in the German film business from 1945 to 2000 can be outlined, I think, across three different phases and three types of narrative. The first one is broadly economic-political, the second is governmental-institutional, and the third is cultural-authorial. Depending on which narrative one prefers, the periodization will also shift slightly. The cultural and legal models often prefer the phases 1945 to 1962, 1962 to 1982, and 1982 to 2000, while the economic periodization is somewhat simpler: it knows two cycles that run from 1945 to 1974, and from 1974 to today. The first period marks the apparent apogee, but in fact reflects the gradual decline of Hollywood hegemony (what might be called “Dominance in Disarray”); the second period marks Hollywood redux (“Dominance through Dispersal”). Since I shall be mostly looking at the issues from a German rather than Hollywood perspective, I shall keep the triple period division. However, for reasons that I hope will become clear at the end, a fair amount of overlap and blurring of these boundaries is inevitable, since I also want to contrast an orthodox account with a “revisionist” account, where the latter takes a European perspective, in contrast to the primarily national – in our case, Germano-centric – emphasis of the canonical story.

Traditionally, the economic model has been applied mainly to the first phase, from 1945 to 1960: it is the story of how Hollywood attained hegemony in the German film market, through a policy of divide and rule. It focuses on the dismantling of the heavily centralized prewar film industry, the forced regionalization of German production units, and the dumping practices of American distributors in order to saturate the market with Hollywood films.

The second phase is generally given over to the cultural model, typified by strong governmental intervention and a legislative framework. It relies on the notion of the Autorenfilm and the New Waves: for Germany, this means the Young German Film, followed by the New German Cinema. It stands under the sign of oedipal revolt: Papa's Kino ist tot, long live the Autor, which is why the cultural model could also be called the oedipal-generational approach to succession, filiation, and transmission.