This article evaluates three movies by Michael Verhoeven— The White Rose (1981), The Nasty Girl (1990), and My Mother's Courage (1995)—as an accidental but coherent trilogy. Focusing on their narratives, cinematic styles, and historical contexts, it argues that these movies represent German society and German ambiguities towards its memory of the past more perceptively than is commonly acknowledged. The trilogy reflects the cultural shifts in German society over the last thirty years in a unique way while simultaneously, albeit with differing success, attempting to engender these shifts. Thus, Verhoeven's movies pushed the proverbial envelope and challenged German audiences to question the comfortable consensus which attempted to "draw a line under the past."
This is the first-ever analytical study of Nazi Germany's political foreign intelligence service, Office VI of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its head, Walter Schellenberg. Katrin Paehler tells the story of Schellenberg's career in policing and intelligence, charts the development and activities of the service he eventually headed, and discusses his attempts to place it at the center of Nazi foreign intelligence and foreign policy. The book locates the service in its proper pedigree of the SS as well as in relation to its two main rivals - the Abwehr and the Auswärtige Amt. It also considers the role Nazi ideology played in the conceptualization and execution of foreign intelligence, revealing how this ideological prism fractured and distorted Office VI's view of the world. The book is based on contemporary and postwar documents - many recently declassified - from archives in the United States, Germany, and Russia.
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