A GERMAN EDITION of this book was first published in 1992 by Peter Lang Publishers in Bern, Switzerland. A second revised and enlarged edition appeared in 2000 by Weidler in Berlin. For the English edition some changes were made in various chapters while the chapter on film and the bibliography were substantially expanded. The present work is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive overview of literature and film within Nazi Germany, ranging from Nazi literature to literature of the Inner Emigration and literature of resistance.

To date there have only been a few attempts at an overview of the literature in the Third Reich, for example, books by Uwe-K. Ketelsen, Völkischnationale und nationalsozialistische Literatur in Deutschland, 1890–1945 (Völkisch National and National Socialist Literature in Germany, 1890–1945 [1976]) and Literatur und Drittes Reich (Literature and the Third Reich [1992; second edition, 1994]); Horst Denkler and Karl Prümm, eds., Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich: Themen — Traditionen — Wirkungen (Literature in the Third Reich: Themes — Traditions — Effects [1976]); Ernst Loewy, Literatur unterm Hakenkreuz (Literature Under the Swastika [1969 and 1987]); and Franz Schonauer Deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich (German Literature in the Third Reich [1961]). Ketelsen's first book is a handbook that appeared in the collection of realia by Metzler Publishers; the individual chapters on various aspects of literature within the Third Reich in his second book have all been published previously in a number of different publications and are not intended as a systematic overview. The Denkler-Prümm book contains twenty-three essays by twenty-three authors on a number of literary topics. Loewy provides excerpts of texts from various literary genres on numerous topics popular with the Nazis, and Schonauer's book, the first attempt at a comprehensive survey, with the intent of being at once polemical and didactic, is somewhat out-of-date today. All of these publications, however, proved very helpful for my study, as were Dietrich Strothmann's and Jan Pieter Barbian's descriptions of cultural policies in the Third Reich and Eric Rentschler's and Linda Schulte-Sasse's books on film in the Third Reich.