THE FOLLOWING COLLECTION OF ESSAYS investigates the continuities and discontinuities in German cinema before and after 1933, namely, during the transitional period of 1928 to 1936. Much of the scholarship on German cinema approaches the subject by assuming discrete historical periods defined by political regimes. Weimar and Third Reich film are thus often examined apart from one another, in spite of the continuities in both style and substance found in films made before and after 1933. Not only does this standard approach impede investigation of significant continuities, but it also obscures longer discursive genealogies and their social, political, and cinematic significance. The current volume serves as a corrective to this tendency by foregrounding comparisons of German cinematic works across the Weimar and Nazi periods.

Several scholars have challenged using the ascendancy of the National Socialists to power in 1933 as the basis for periodization of German cinema. Focusing on genre cinema, Klaus Kreimeier argues that the continuities and discontinuities in German film and film genres before and after 1933 pose serious problems for discrete periodization. For example, genre cinema does not exhibit a clear stylistic break between the Weimar and Nazi regimes, but rather more subtle differences. Focusing on modernist films, Thomas Elsaesser similarly challenges the 1933 break between Weimar and Nazi cinema, alternatively conceptualizing the period from 1930 to 1936 as a single filmic epoch in Germany, unified by the introduction of sound as well as common economic, technological, and geopolitical concerns. Building on Elsaesser's approach to the scholarship, the editors of this volume propose an earlier date of 1928, a year in which these various changes began to manifest.

Although differences in institutional circumstances before and after 1933 are obvious, the relationships among films made between 1928 and 1936 are complex and manifold. Within such rich complexity, we find particularly meaningful linkages in cinema's relationships to the political, economic, and social crises of these years. Although the construct of “crisis” posits a decisive break, as elaborated in the discussion that follows, such fantasies of rupture, disruption, and renewal persist throughout the period in question, accompanying and sometimes masking an array of stylistic, ideological, and institutional associations.

BRIGITTE HELM, THE “EUROPEAN ÜBERVAMP” of the late 1920s and early 1930s, is all but forgotten today. Although her life and films are depicted by Daniel Semler and she is included in Friedemann Beyer's recent anthology of Ufa actors, she is excluded from several contemporary accounts that investigate the German star system. Helm made her cinematic debut in a leading role as vamp and virgin in Fritz Lang's famous Metropolis (1927), a double role for which she was mostly praised in the press of the time. However, as Tim Bergfelder points out, Helm has been “virtually obliterated by the retrospective reception of Metropolis and its director,” and she is barely mentioned in contemporary works on the film. In contrast to the critical interest garnered by Metropolis, scholars have paid little attention to Helm's other films, which is an astounding oversight, given her continuous popularity during her time with Ufa (1925–35). In addition to Bergfelder's work, the scholarship of Andrea Böhm, Robert Müller, and Valerie Weinstein constitutes significant exceptions to the dearth of critical examinations of Helm's career. While these scholars emphasize the continuity of the actress's vamp image, they also argue that her career was revived with the comedy Die Gräfin von Monte Christo (The Countess of Monte Christo, 1932), and that her femme fatale image was incompatible with Nazi views. As I show elsewhere, Die Gräfin was only somewhat successful at reinventing Helm beyond her vamp image; though this reinvention worked narratively, the gestural and behavioral codification of Helm's performance remained that of a femme fatale. In contrast to Böhm, Müller, Bergfelder, and Weinstein, who consider only a select few of Helm's films and offer no interpretation of the bulk of her work produced between 1933 and 1935, in this essay I focus on the films produced during this time span and argue that Helm's image was changed to reflect Nazi ideology. My analysis of Die schönen Tage in Aranjuez (The Beautiful Days in Aranjuez, 1933), Inge und die Millionen (Inge and the Millions, 1933), Gold (1934), Die Insel (The Island, 1934), and Ein idealer Gatte (An Ideal Husband, 1935) reveals Ufa's continuous though not always similarly intense efforts to remodel Helm's image.

IN RECENT YEARS several scholars have investigated the role of popfeminism, a term coined in 2007 by Sonja Eismann, which denotes Germany's own version of contemporary feminism. While these scholars have scrutinized the relationship between popfeminism, pop literature, and neoliberalism, and they have pointed out the absence of concepts of race and ethnicity in numerous popfeminist texts, they have paid little attention to those popfeminist works that do analyze the intersections between sexuality, race, and ethnicity. In this essay I address this gap by investigating the humor-inflected popfeminist autobiographical works Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (An Order of Hans with Hot Sauce, 2005) and its sequel, Ali zum Dessert (Ali for Dessert, 2008) by the Turkish-German journalist Hatice Akyün. As is typical for popfeminist writing, Akyün uses pop tropes such as sampling, remixing, and resignification to present an independent, career-oriented woman who enjoys consumer empowerment and sexual agency while, significantly, she is also critical of the sexism and racism that operate in German society. The celebration of consumerism is a fundamental aspect of popfeminism that resignifies consumption as pleasure, which contrasts with its rejection in second-wave feminism. While Akyün shares with other popfeminist writers the use of an individualist approach manifested in the form of the autobiography, her books stand out because they emphasize sexual agency in the context of a modern, highly cross-cultural Turkish-German female identity.

Akyün is not the only female author to explore the identity of modern Turkish-German women, a topic also depicted in Iris Alanyali's Die blaue Reise (The Blue Journey, 2009), Dilek Güngör's Unter uns (Among Us, 2004) and Ganz schön deutsch (Very German Indeed, 2007), and Hilal Sezgin's Typisch Türkin? (Typical Turkish Woman?, 2006). While all these books examine the complexity of contemporary, modern Turkish-German female identity and defy stereotypes about Muslim families generally viewed as oppressive toward women, there are significant differences between them and Akyün's work. Neither Alanyali's nor Güngör's jovial books display the sexual openness and incisive scrutiny of racism and sexism present in Akyün's texts. Furthermore, whereas Sezgin's work criticizes the intersectionality of sexism and racism, her project differs from Akyün's generically and stylistically, as it is a collection of interviews of first-and second-generation Turkish-German women in which humor plays no role.