The war film genre has always existed in the tension between the calculated social-politically effective remembrance work and the staging strategies of an effect- and affect-loaded entertainment cinema. This form of media-based imagination of war forms the center of a specific idea of history in its relation to the political. For, as in most stagings of war, this genre aims at producing the history and present of a political community, a communally shared perceiving and judging of past and present political events and actions, be this community a nation, an ethnically or politically defined group, or a widely shared understanding of culture. The genre of the Hollywood war film can be utilized to paradigmatically work out what is characteristic for this idea of history. To determine this more closely is the goal of this volume. On the one hand, it discusses the medium’s historicity itself, that of genre cinema, and its function as a medium of an image of history; on the other, the theory of genre itself, the question of the genre system’s cultural function and the war film’s position within this system. The contributions of this volume seek to refrain from the judgmental discussion of the realism of representations of war, and instead understand the war film genre as an aesthetic experience form which aims at the relation of historical consciousness and socio-cultural identity. They situate war films along an intersection, at which the entanglements of aesthetic perception and historical consciousness, of affective experience and a collective memory become visible.