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Author Thomas dardy recently released a new book entitled Hollywood and Hitler 1933 to 1939. It explores how studio heads, writers, and other artists dealt with business and artistic decisions as the Nazis rose to power. Dardy came to the Museum of Jewish Heritage to discuss what he found during his presentation.
Dardy explained how Nazism entered the American mindset through the motion picture industry. Initially, there was very little imagery of Nazis. The Nazis are so vivid in our imagination today from movies, from like *Casablanca* in 1942 to Tarantino's *Inglourious Basterds*, that it might be hard for us to imagine there was a time in American history where the Nazis were kind of a blurry, dim image on the American screen.
"Nazis knew better," said Dardy. "Most Americans had other things on their minds. It was the Great Depression. It wasn't like people didn't have problems of their own here at home. And it really isn't until 1938 where the news from Germany becomes so menacing and so obviously dangerous to democracy everywhere."
Gradually, films started presenting anti-Nazi messages but presented them more allegorically than explicitly. So, you get a lot of ecumenical films about tolerance and the American pageantry that aren't explicitly anti-Nazi. You don't hear the word Nazi Germany. The word Hitler isn't mentioned, but anybody in the 1930s, I think, would have taken those for what they were meant to be, which is a celebration of American tolerance and American diversity.
The moderator for the discussion was *New Yorker* magazine film critic David Denby. He criticized the studio bosses, saying they did their best to ignore what was happening in Germany along with the rest of the country. He described them as not particularly brave. "They didn't advance Nazism, they simply failed to oppose it, which, uh, I'm sorry about. Um, I wish they had been more courageous. There were enormous pressures on them from outside forces, um, and also in the Jewish community, um, to keep their heads down, not to draw attention to themselves as, as Jewish, uh, powers in the media world."
But Denby said there's no evidence it would have made any difference, but that morally, that's not the point. The point is it would have been more honorable if they had faced, uh, this disaster in Germany and the threat it posed to Jews and to the whole world more directly and more forcefully.
For his part, Dardy cautioned the audience to remember that people back then didn't know what was coming. He said there are parallels to what's happening in the world today. "Is there something on the horizon now? You know, I mean, there is a nation-state with a totalitarian set of values that one wants to eliminate Jews, right? And that's Iran."
As Europe moved closer and closer to war, drama played out on and off screen. Anti-Nazi films like *Hitler's Reign of Terror* raised some awareness about Nazism. But ultimately, Dardy found that Americans' view of Nazis today is very different from what it was back in the 1930s.
This is Zack Bador for JN1 in New York.