Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction: The Politics of Sports—"Festival of Nations"
Film: Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia (1938)
Gilles Deleuze, from The Movement-Image, selections (handout)

Week 2: "Remasking Hitler": The Comedy of Tragedy
Film: Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator (1940)
Henri Bergson, "Laughter," 61-83 (handout)
Sigmund Freud, "The Motives of Jokes—Jokes as Social Process" (handout)
Slavoj Zizek, "Hitler as Ironist?" (handout)

Week 3: "From Caligari to Hitler"
Film: Karl Grüne, The Street (1923)
Siegfried Kracauer, "From Rebellion to Submission," 119-23 (Reader)
Walter Benjamin, "Prostitution, Gambling", convolute O, Arcades Project, 489-515 (Reader)

Week 4: "Fatal Attraction"
Film: Leni Riefenstahl, The Blue Light (1932)
Siegfried Kracauer, "The Pre-Hilter Period," 258-9 (Reader)
Bela Balazs, Theory of Film, selections (Reader)

Week 5: "Aryan" Beauty
Film: Hans Steinhoff, Hitler Youth Quex (1933)
Herbert Marcuse, "The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State" (Reader)

Week 6: The Aesthetics of Fascism
Film: Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will (1934)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment and Mass Deception" (Reader)

Week 7: The Politics of Sport II: "Festival of Beauty"
Film: Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia II (1938)
Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" (Reader)

Week 8: Mapping the Other
Film: Veit Harlan, Jew Süss (1940)
Hannah Arendt, "Totalitarian Propaganda" (Reader)
Joseph Goebbels, "Why Are We Enemies of the Jews?" (Reader)

Week 9: Limits of Representation
Film: Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (1955)
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
Paul Celan, "Death Fugue" (handout)

Week 10: The Nuremberg Trials
Film: Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg
Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg, script (Reader)

Week 11: The Frankfurt Trial
Peter Weiss, The Investigation

Week 12: The Eichmann Trial: Nuremberg in Jerusalem
Film: CBC production of The Trial of Adolf Eichmann
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, selections (Reader)

Week 13: Film as Witness
Film: Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, selections
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, selections (Reader)

Week 14: Of Victors and Vanquished
Film: Konrad Wolf, I Was Nineteen (1968)
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (Reader)

Week 15: "Hitler—A German Career"
Film: Oliver Hirschbiegel, Downfall (2004)
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, selections (Reader)

Books and Films

Please order the following books either through Amazon or any other online bookstore. You may want to order “express” to make sure to have done the readings on time.

Peter Weiss, The Investigation (Marion Boyars Publishers)
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone)

All films should be viewed before our class meetings. All films are available digitally through the Language Resource Center and its website http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~lrc

To access any of the digitized films, you will need your Rice Net ID user name and password. Once you have reached the list of films for “FSEM 122”, you will have another set of user name/password, which are: film000/filmrice. You can access the films from any computer on campus, but not necessarily from your personal computer in your college room.

Work Constituting the Grade

•  Preparation for class discussions, active participation in discussions, and response papers (20%)
•  Three essays (60%)
•  Oral presentation (20%)