Klaus Vögl's investigation of Austrian cinema from the Anschluss on 12 March 1938 until the end of World War II in May 1945 is based on a real treasure trove of sources. In 1981, Vögl, a historian and lawyer by profession, discovered in an old steel locker at the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber the almost complete records, about twenty thousand pages, of the Austrian Reich Chamber of Film (Reichsfilmkammer or RFK) and the succession records up until the 1970s.

This unique find—no similar records exist for Nazi Germany—allows for very detailed insight into the structure of the Austrian film business, particularly the process of Aryanization of Austrian cinemas that started right after the Anschluss and their operational management in the following seven years. In his introduction, Vögl states that his analysis is not about films and audiences but about structure and organization (22); the book, however, is far from being a dry read. Where necessary, the author contextualizes his structural history (Strukturgeschichte) into larger political contexts, turning the work into a fascinating, important history lesson for anybody who is interested in how Nazi cultural politics operated on a larger, specific scale.

Vögl's first chapter presents an overview of Austrian film history from its beginnings to 1938. His outlining of the Austrian film industry's economic entanglement with Germany before the Anschluss, in which the Austrians were both financially dependent on the export of their films to Germany and on the import of German films to Austria, is very instructive. Already in 1933 five films could not be exported due to the presence of Jewish actors in their casts. In the following years it became impossible for Jewish actors or film technicians to work for Austrian film productions.

Vögl then meticulously analyzes the years between 1938 and 1945 in Austrian cinema history, wherein the process of Aryanization presents the “centerpiece” of his study (23). The seven years of German occupation, for which Vögl follows the official terminology, are divided into five periods. The first, from the day of the Anschluss until the introduction of the legislation of the Reich Chamber of Culture in May 1938, served as a preparatory period for the Aryanization of the Austrian film industry. During the second, from June 1938 to the beginning of World War II in September 1939, the film industry transformed according to the norms of the new laws, during which time the Aryanization of Jewish-owned and Jewish-run cinemas was implemented. In the third, up until summer 1943, Aryanization was completed, but the first effects of the war—like the shortage of film—could be noticed. Until autumn 1944, the fourth period, Austrian cinema suffered substantially from shortages of staff, material, and film. During the fifth and final period, up to the end of the war, the cinema became the Nazi regime's last cultural force. Official efforts to keep the cinemas open for the public until almost the last day of the Third Reich made it possible that by the end of April a Viennese cinema had already reopened its new business.

In his central chapter, “Cinema, National Socialist Race Legislation, and ‘Aryanization’” (Kino, nationalsozialistische Rassengesetzgebung und “Arisierung”), Vögl shows that the Nuremberg Laws applied in May 1938 and their ensuing dispossessions and currency restrictions made Jewish life in Austria almost impossible. On short notice—just ten days after the occupation—it became impossible for Jewish cinema owners to sell their businesses. Because the laws prohibited Jews from running their own businesses, management of Jewish-owned cinemas was immediately taken over by so-called provisional administrators (kommissarische Verwalter), who arranged for the cinemas’ Aryanization (93). The last official note of a Jewish cinema owner living in Vienna is dated to August 1940.

The new cinema owners rarely came from the business, but there were good reasons to apply for ownership. In Vienna 50 percent of the cinemas—among them the most prestigious—were run by Jewish citizens. These cinemas comprised 65 percent of all seats in the city. The cinema business was a financially attractive one, and taking over a local cinema guaranteed social well-being. Consequently, high-ranking party members and citizens that had been loyal to the party benefited from Aryanization, which was euphemistically called a social campaign or Sozial Aktion (156).

Vögl shows how the selection process, operated by a special Aryanization commission of the RFK, and the negotiations between the old and the new owners were little more than a political farce that often involved violence and repression to reach a business agreement. The Aryanization of Austrian cinema was the biggest break in Viennese cinema history, with consequences reaching far beyond the end of the war. Most of the former Aryanized cinemas ended up in the hands of the city of Vienna's cinema operational service (Kino Betriebsanstalt or KIBA).

The final hundred pages, consisting of more than eight hundred endnotes and an appendix (including a detailed list of all Austrian cinemas), concludes and underscores Vögl's careful study. One cannot rank the significance of Vögl's book highly enough and one can only hope that Vögl's treasure trove will provoke more important research in the near future, not only in Austria but also worldwide. For example, what happened to Jewish cinema owners—the majority of whom never came back to their home city? Did they continue with their businesses in their new homeland? Vögl cites names and destinations for some of them—an invitation for transnational research.

In his introduction, Vögl stresses that film is not cinema and that film history has often neglected cinema's institutional significance. It is exactly this aspect, however, that has been established for more than decade as a new research field within film studies, the so-called new cinema history (Richard Maltby, Daniël Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers, eds., Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies [Malden, 2011]). Consideration of this work could have given the study a supporting international contextualization, but its absence does not diminish Vögl's outstanding work—one that surely will become a benchmark in Austrian film/cinema historiography.