Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud Süss (1940), for which he had to defend himself in two trials. A detailed portrait of him raises the question whether it is permitted to appreciate the artistic talents of a man who actively supported the Nazi regime’s genocidal politics. There is no precedent for this challenge because none of the leading Nazi criminals produced enduring works of art, whereas Harlan did. Moral questions inevitably ar ... More

Veit Harlan has often been called “the male Leni Riefenstahl,” but he poses a much bigger challenge for the biographer because he directed a frighteningly effective anti-Semitic hate picture, Jud Süss (1940), for which he had to defend himself in two trials. A detailed portrait of him raises the question whether it is permitted to appreciate the artistic talents of a man who actively supported the Nazi regime’s genocidal politics. There is no precedent for this challenge because none of the leading Nazi criminals produced enduring works of art, whereas Harlan did. Moral questions inevitably arise throughout the book, but another task is the portrait of a man whose function in Nazi Germany didn’t fit into the familiar villain/hero/victim scenario. Harlan was the product of Weimar Germany’s leftist youth movement and after 1933 managed to combine opportunism with a passionate individualism. The body of work he left is intriguing not despite but because of his moral flaws: his mysticism, sentimentality, and sexism as well as, above all, the perception of himself as a philosopher-artist. His preferred genre was melodrama, a canon that deserves to be expanded beyond the films of Douglas Sirk and Frank Borzage. As someone who chiefly addressed female audiences and who allowed his actress-wife Kristina Söderbaum to dominate his oeuvre with her child-bride persona, Harlan is of interest to women’s studies and, with its recurring transgender motives, gay studies as well. Many stimulating articles have been written about individual Harlan films, but so far no one has analyzed them in the context of his biography. The research for this book includes discussions with dozens of people who worked with Harlan or watched all his films, half of which have never been before been analyzed in any language.