Jana Bruns's book, Nazi Cinema's New Women, fits into the newer body of work on film in the Third Reich that stresses the ambiguousness, rather than the overt indoctrination, that characterized much of Nazi cinema. Yet, Bruns seeks to set her work apart from the “literary scholarship” that, she states, has characterized recent film studies. Such literary analyses focus on close readings and formal aspects of Nazi films or on the roles, gendered images, and aesthetic constructions of the films' actors and actresses. Bruns asserts that while such textual examinations impart a more nuanced assessment, they do not provide a full picture of cinema in Nazi Germany. She argues that by binding textual analysis to the historical context in which Nazi Germany's film stars and films operated, she is able to offer important insights into the transformation of the Nazi film industry, the ideological essence of the films and the star images they conveyed, the Nazis' conundrum of both promoting their socio-political agenda and appealing to film audiences, and the impact of film stars and of film on popular attitudes. In other words, Bruns focuses her lens—historical and textual—on the site where mass entertainment, stardom, propaganda, gender ideology, and popular culture intersected in the Third Reich. She is interested in learning what the Nazis wanted entertainment films to achieve, how successful they were in meshing propaganda objectives with entertainment and commercial interests, how such films were received, how they shaped the experience of Nazism, and if they served to support or to destabilize the regime.

To answer these questions, to examine the often ambiguous images of and roles played by actresses in Nazi films, and to suggest a more complex interpretation of how gender ideology operated in Nazi Germany, Bruns examines the careers and films of three of the most popular female movie stars of the period—Marika Rökk, Zarah Leander, and Kristina Söderbaum. To Bruns, Rökk's movies exemplify one aspect of Nazi cinema, that of light, escapist Hollywood-style entertainment. Leander's films elegantly mixed entertainment with ideology, while Söderbaum's films largely fit with National Socialist aesthetics, values, and intents. Yet, previous scholarship to the contrary, Bruns contends that none of these actresses played roles or exuded star images that perfectly modeled the Nazis' concept of Aryan womanhood; nor were their films entirely compatible with Nazi ideology and practice. In fact, a close study of these three actresses' careers, their roles both on and off the big screen, and the films in which they starred reveals that the Nazis had great difficulty making movies with cohesive, coherent political messages that “resisted interpretation and reconfiguration” by filmgoers and served to shore up support for the regime (p. 14). According to Bruns (and, I should add, recent scholarship that precedes her book), cinema proved to be a far less effective propaganda instrument than Propaganda Minister Goebbels had hoped and that film scholars have suggested. Even so, cinema in the Third Reich did prove itself useful in one very important way. It provided the public with distraction and diverted attention from the regime's brutality, criminality, and ultimate failure.

Bruns is at her best when she describes the institutional transformation of the German film industry once the Nazis were in power, as well as its rapid acquiescence to the new regime. In no time at all, the economic, administrative, and creative aspects of the film industry were brought under state control, while aryanization, fueled by an admixture of opportunism and fear of exclusion or loss of livelihood, was complete by 1938. Bruns also details Goebbels's growing power in all cultural matters, his interference in everything from the important to the trivial, and his frenetic efforts to control and make successful—commercially and politically—the Third Reich's cinema. Goebbels's belief in film's potential power to transform Germans into enthusiastic, loyal Nazi supporters meant that cinema and its concomitants (actors and actresses, directors, and film companies) were given great prominence, special privileges, and unending financial support. All the while, Goebbels struggled with his seemingly incompatible two-fold vision of providing sophisticated entertainment while adhering to a politicized, National Socialist aesthetic. Additionally, Bruns offers an in-depth study of Marika Rökk's career and films, which have not received a great deal of scholarly attention despite Rökk's great popularity during the Third Reich. Following her chapter on Rökk, Bruns delves into the careers and films of Zarah Leander and Kristina Söderbaum. She takes to task earlier analyses of Söderbaum and Leander, claiming that scholars have often separated the actresses from their historical context. Bruns asserts that when properly contextualized, the roles Söderbaum, Leander, and Rökk played on the screen and the star images they conveyed off the screen were far more complex, multifaceted, and conflicted than previously thought.

While Bruns's work contributes significantly to our understanding of cinema in the Third Reich, some of her assertions are sweeping. For example, she claims that all previous scholarship on Nazi films has lacked historical contextualization and has dismissed the importance of examining how those films were received. She also contends that studies of Nazi culture have not looked closely at the products of mass culture, what the Nazis wanted those products to achieve, or how those products were received. Recent studies of art, fashion, music, and radio during the Third Reich address these issues and more. Additionally, her statement that “Marika Rökk's career and films have not received any critical attention” (p. 53) is contradicted by her bibliographical inclusion of Jo Fox's Filming Women in the Third Reich, which examines several of Rökk's films. Furthermore, Bruns states, “The three actresses survived the Third Reich's collapse essentially unscathed and quickly returned to stage and screen” (p. 232). Bruns notes earlier in her book, however, that Söderbaum “was considered an accessory to Nazi genocide” because of her role in the notorious film Jud Süss, a “stigma” that “plagued her until her death” (p. 172). While Söderbaum's first postwar film, directed by her husband Veit Harlan, was a box office hit in 1950, Bruns writes that the couple's “subsequent films were marred by boycotts and unfavorable reviews” (pp. 233–34). Bruns's rather dismal description of Leander's cinematic “comeback” after five years of forced unemployment also seems to belie her assertion. Additionally, a fuller explanation (or even scholarly conjecture) of why the top three female film stars in Nazi cinema were non-Germans would have helped to answer this nagging question. Was the sole reason because the talent pool had been greatly reduced with the purging of Jews and political opponents from the film industry, as Bruns suggests (pp. 11, 55, 66)? These quibbles aside, Bruns succeeds in adding nuance, complexity, and richness to our understanding of Nazi cinema and its leading actresses, Söderbaum, Rökk, and Leander. Through her comparative analysis of the three film stars, both on and off the big screen, and her two-fold—textual and historical—approach, Bruns shines an unsparing light on the unresolved ambivalence that marked both gender ideology and film policy in Nazi Germany.