Sabine Hake studied German studies and sociology in Hanover. In 1984 she wrote her dissertation »Ernst Lubitsch, a German Rising History« and emigrated to the USA, where she taught at the University of Pittsburgh for 16 years. In 2004, she moved to Austin to the University of Texas as Professor and Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture. As a cultural and film historian, she focuses on German film history and the culture of the Weimar Republic. In addition to classical film theory, her area of expertise lies in the relationship between cultural practices and aesthetic sensations such as modernism and fascist aesthetics, as well as in mass, popular, urban and working-class culture.
In 1992 she published her first book »Passions and Deceptions: The Early Films of Ernst Lubitsch«, in which she examined Lubitsch’s early German films. »What impressed me then, and still impresses me now, is the way she pushed aside competing schools of thought to take a more comprehensive approach that went far beyond what was fashionable at the time. From the beginning of her academic career, she respected the films and their makers, rather than encountering them through changing waves of ideology and theory.« (Weissberg). Her second book »The Cinema’s Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany, 1907-1933« (1993) does not deal with so-called »expressionist cinema«, but describes the journalistic and theoretical environment in which film culture emerged at the time. »The volume presented important texts to English-speaking readers that were previously difficult to access, and demonstrated their comprehensive approach to film history, which was based on the integration of film, reception and analysis.« (Jury). In 2001, her book was published with her introduction to the topic of »Film Journalism of the Weimar Years« (1997), and was expanded in 2007 in the series of »German National Cinema«. In the following decade, she investigated the forms of entertainment genres within the »Third Reich«, and wrote two books on »Popular Cinema of the Third Reich«. »She went beyond simplistic ideas of propaganda and its power to discuss the imagery and the effect of pleasure in a more informed way.« (Jury). In the years that followed, she conducted intensive research on the topic of workers’ culture, as she did in 2008 in »Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin«. Her latest work to date »The Nazi Worker« (2023) is the second part of a three-volume project on the figure of the worker and, in a broader sense, on class issues in 20th-century German culture.
In 2005-16 she co-edited with Hans-Michael Bock (CineGraph, Hamburg) and Tim Bergfelder (University of Southampton) the series »Film Europa. German Cinema in an International Context« published by Berghahn Books in New York and Oxford. From 2011 to 2021, she also served as editor of »German Studies Review«, the magazine of the influential German Studies Association.