Trust as Violence: The Politics of Film and the Militarization of Male Sexuality in National Socialism

GHI West and the Center for German and European Studies at UC Berkeley continue their joint lecture series with Anja Laukötter’s talk about the political significance of film and emotions in National Socialism. She will explain how Nazi ideology and culture politics led film to be conceived of, produced and planned as a forum for regulating emotions. She will explore the regime’s ambivalent sexual politics, and in particular its attempts to fight the spread of venereal disease, which took on a new relevance for the military after the beginning of the Second World War.

Anja Laukötter is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Additionally, she is co-director of the international research group The Healthy Self as Body Capital: Individuals, Market-Based Societies, and Body Politics in Visual Twentieth Century Europe.