What did it mean to experience the Third Reich? The desire to find answers to this question has driven volumes of historical inquiry both scholarly and popular. Yet it is also a question that is regarded as misleading, impeding us from understanding deeper causes and acknowledging the many points of view that exist on any historical moment. Capable of transporting us through time and space, and allowing us to see the world as if through someone else’s eyes, film is a central point of contention in this debate. Its powers to simulate past events have been applauded and condemned in equal measure. And, in view of the injustice and suffering caused by Adolf Hitler’s reign, the debate about its use and misuse remains particularly fierce. As reunified Germany sought to define its image of the Nazi past, this debate soared time and again, often with vehemence.

Hitler in a commanding pose, monumentalized by low angles, his features sculpted by light and shadow. The German people as an anonymous mass, arranged into rigid patterns and united in frenetic cheers. Such are the images of the Third Reich—impressive, yet distant and lifeless—conveyed by Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). Although deeply mistrusted, the images of this archetypal work are the endlessly recycled stock elements of compilation films about the period. In the 1950s, for instance, the émigré director Erwin Leiser used them as a source for his Mein Kampf (My Struggle, 1960), to this day a classic in educational documentaries about the Nazi past. By means of Riefenstahl’s images, the German people in the film appear, to quote the voice-over commentary, as “eine einzige große Marschkolonne” (a single giant marching column) conducted by Hitler’s hands. Almost two decades later, Joachim Fest and Christian Herrendoerfer likewise drew heavily on Triumph des Willens in Hitler—Eine Karriere (Hitler, a Career), their much-debated yet highly popular portrait of the dictator released in West Germany in 1977. Similarly to Leiser, the directors exploit Riefenstahl’s images to visualize Hitler’s ambition to become a “Denkmal” (monument) and to show how, choreographed into “Menschenblöcke” (blocks of humans) and “Fahnenwälder” (seas of flags), the German people succumbed to a “Rausch der Geometrie” (geometrical trance).