by Linda Maria Koldau
513 pages, ISBN 978-3-515-09510-5
Submarines are a highly-charged topic in German history of war, and they have created a myth persistent until today.... more
Submarines are a highly-charged topic in German history of war, and they have created a myth persistent until today. Already during World War I, the submarines became the symbol of an invincible weapon in German thinking. Books and films were issued that glorified this clandestine and mortal weapon. With the Cold War, the myth began to spread far beyond Europe. nuclear submarines carried the responsibility for the world’s safety – but also for the highest risks in the mutual military threats. Mystified and mainly unknown in their days, u-boat missions have become part of the cultural memory through film: the submarine film has become an important genre in American, English, German, and Russian film (it is shown in relation to the dominant genre theories that u-boat films constitute a genre of their own).
The book sketches the relevance of the submarine for 20th-century war history (First and Second World Wars, Cold War, asymmetric warfare from the 1990s onwards) and its rendering in film. First of all, The Boat and its music are analyzed in detail, then a selection out of the more than 100 submarine films is presented, covering German and American films from 1933 to 2006 and giving insights into the characteristic blurring of genres in the submarine film. In the final part of the book, the commercialization of the submarine myth is discussed, with an analyses of computer games, documentaries, film trailers and DVD menus. It is concluded that the submarine myth, originally created as a tool of propaganda via the media, literature, and radio, has been intensified and universalized through film, thus becoming valid up to the present time.
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