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Collective Emotions and Victimization in the World War Two Film Der Untergang (2004)
Author(s) -
Süselbeck Jan
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.12103
Subject(s) - emotive , german , history , world war ii , literature , art history , aesthetics , art , political science , sociology , law , anthropology , archaeology
After Bernd Eichinger's blockbuster war movie Der Untergang was released in 2004, it received many positive reviews by North‐American critics. But the biggest success of this film is still on‐going: more than a decade later, Der Untergang has become canonized in a way similar to the Oscar winning GDR surveillance movie Das Leben der Anderen (2006). Today, Der Untergang is one of the classic films to teach the “Third Reich” in many German courses. While many scholarly studies have been written about Der Untergang , they do not use the most promising methodological approach that can help us to understand how this film manages to be so suggestive. This paper's thesis is that it is crucial to take a closer look at the emotive strategies used in Der Untergang . Emotion research is the key to understanding the film's transnational success.