Fear and Loathing in the Third Reich

What strikes me most by these two films is the way in which they create fear of Jews, not only disgust. In Jew Süss, for example, we are disgusted by Süss’s advances on the lovely, and clearly Aryan, Dorothea. Yet as licentious as Süss is, the driving emotion we feel during this movie is fear that Süss will come after our own daughters next. Similarly, while we are frustrated with the Duke for having succumbed to Süss’s villainy, we are also frightened that our own leaders will make the same grave mistake. Of course, the basis of this fear is artificial, and therefore the fear irrational, but the German citizens during the Third Reich would not necessarily have realized this.

The Eternal Jew uses fear in many of the same ways. The scene with the map showing the spread of the Jews across the world is a great example of how the film makes the audience frightened of nothing. (I mean seriously, they are showing white lines on a map. That’s it.) The films comparison of Jews to rats makes us feel disgust, yes, but worse is the implication of this comparison: that Jews bring a plague upon Europe. The Eternal Jew uses misleading and outright falsified information throughout the “documentary” to show the evil of the Jewish people and to instill panic in the German populace.

The use of fear tells us a lot about the Nazi perspective. Fear is a more visceral emotion that just disgust, and it makes us act even more irrationally than disgust or loathing. This approach to the European Jews made sense in the larger context of the Nazi perspective because it did not require a coherent argument or platform that would be explained to the Germans, it only required appealing to German emotions.