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195261 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.195261 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2024 87 pages Masters Thesis Academic theses Text eng Shinault, Hunter Benkert, Volker Holian, Anna Gilfillan, Daniel Arizona State University Partial requirement for: M.A., Arizona State University, 2024 Field of study: History As early as 1946 with Wolfgang Staudte’s 1946 film Die Mörder sind unter uns, the trope of the “Good German” has served as an exculpatory coping mechanism for everyday Germans helping to come to terms with Germany’s Nazi past. While richly studied throughout the decades of postwar film, several recent German productions have begun to recontextualize the Good German in older problematic eras of German history, and to great acclaim. These media, All Quiet on the Western Front (2022), Babylon Berlin (2017-), and Der vermessene Mensch (2023), apply this trope to the eras of the First World War, Weimar Republic, and Germany’s colonial genocide in Namibia, respectively. This thesis first works to concretize the sociocultural value today, and thus new-found development, of this trope, within its Holocaust/Nazi German contexts. Then, each of these new productions are analyzed to illustrate how they not only repeat but build upon the already dubious trope of the Good German. Rooted in German film analysis and historiography, this work demonstrates how the construct of the Good German serves modern audiences’ redemptive desires through creative license, which blurs the line of the historical and fictive. Questions asked and addressed are: What is the Good German, and how has it developed historically? What needs among audiences/producers does this trope serve? How does the Good German endure within these recent media productions? As the Good German trope develops and expands, how can it be placed into constructive conversations about memory and guilt? History Film Studies Holocaust Studies Film Genocide German Good Holocaust The 'Good German': History and Genocide in Contemporary German Film