From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film

[...]images of images circulate in an eternal cycle, an endless loop. According to Kaes, the importance and the value of the films he investigates lie in their attempt to step outside this "endless loop," to offer alternative images with which to represent-and hence rethink-a German past and to establish a German identity. In a particularly insightful chapter on Syberberg, Kaes points out that the problem with reestablishing a German identity is that Hitler's self-conscious, but deluded, mythologizingof his own persona, of the entire Third Reich-appropriated and thus contaminated the very myths (love to nature, art and music, the various "antiEnlightenment strands of German Romanticism," p. 64) that had been used to create a sense of German identity in the first place. For this reason, his book lends itself extremely well to use in both the undergraduate and graduate classroom. [...]anyone interested in post-war German culture, in German cinema, in the power of images, and particularly in the problems involved in representing history will want to read this work.