Framing Totalitarianism: Language and Film in Nazi Germany

This research examines language and film in Nazi Germany from a multidisciplinary perspective. This thesis fills the gap in the scholarly research focused on language and film in Nazi Germany as independent phenomena by elucidating the more complex mechanisms by which a totalitarian regime used language and film for ideological coercion. By studying the language of public discourse and policy to focus on selected films by Luis Trenker, Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Ucicky, and Veit Harlan, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which film language incorporated natural language and the discourse of the Nazi regime to produce magnified ideological effects through the cinema. This thesis identifies two broad types of effects – representing negation and aestheticizing negation – and shows how they constitute the aesthetics of negation: the visual manifestation of the inherently negative totalitarian ideology of the regime.