Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

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viii Steffen Hantke Critical consensus among historians of German film concedes that there may be postwar German horror films, but insists that there is no postwar German horror film. In other words, critics are to acknowledge the existence of individual horror films, even of horror film cycles, but they refuse to acknowledge that these films add up to what can be called a genre. Their refusal to take the argumentative leap from the specific to the general, and the arguments delivered in support of this hesitation, makes for a story so compelling that it is well worth recounting. There used to be German horror film before the advent of the Third Reich, or so the story goes. These were the golden days of German expressionist filmmaking. But this flourishing of the genre came to an end with the Nazis, who, like other totalitarian regimes of the 20th century that exercised absolute control over their respective national film industries, had no interest in the horror genre or were actively opposed to it. Joseph Goebbels’ Reichspropagandaministerium (Ministry of Propaganda) was opposed to the “degenerate” excesses of German expressionism, its brooding introspection, its conflicted view of the human condition. At the movies, the Nazis preferred the light entertainment of costume and period drama, which would distract the population from politics and the increasingly terrifying realities of the war. Streamlining popular culture, the Nazis put an end to horror film during the twelve years of the Third Reich. Their efforts to root out the genre were so successful that, once the Zero Hour had passed and the film industries began to reconstitute themselves in East and West Germany, historical continuity had been severed. For a variety of reasons, both economic and ideological, there was no going back to prewar German cinema, no recovery of cinematic traditions. As the German film industry started to pick itself up from the rubble, the desire for distraction from the harsh realities of the historical moment, which used to be officially prescribed during the Third Reich, found itself confirmed and justified yet again. “The ‘rubble films’ of 1947–49 fit in with that down-to-earth positivistic model for ‘coping with the past’ that the Allies offered to the Germans; they relieved them of the task of radical selfanalysis and thoroughgoing revisionism” (Kreimeier 377). Horror films, which appear to be relatively useless for such conciliatory politics, were no part of the production schedules. As it turned out, this condition was to be permanent. In effect, up to the present day, the horror film genre in Germany never recovered from having been so rudely interrupted at the height of its achievements. Every now and then, someone will make a film that qualifies as a horror film; occasionally, a horror film will hit upon a formula successful enough to initiate a cinematic cycle. But neither the quantity nor quality of these films justifies regarding them as elements functioning within the conceptual framework of genre. They remain statistical anomalies. They don’t add up. Or so the story goes. My goal in this introduction is not to steer head on against the flow of this historical narrative, trying to disprove or dismiss it altogether. For that, the narrative is too convincing, just as its authors have invested far more time and scholarly attention in its construction than I can possibly muster for the purpose
Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film ix of my own argument. As much as anyone can make sense of the historical data—the films, their contents, and the circumstances of their production, distribution, and consumption—the official historical narrative is, simply put, a pretty good account of what happened. But this narrative is also the product of an act of interpretation, or rather, a complex chain of deductions. And to the degree that the story is an interpretation of events, it is open to challenge. Recognizing the mechanisms of its construction, we might not only understand why the story goes as it does but might think of alternative ways of telling it. This is the goal of my argument: to take a look at how this argument is constructed; to find a foothold in its interstices for proposing a slightly divergent reading, and, ultimately, to propose a way of looking at postwar German film that allows for the existence of German horror cinema. In a manner of speaking, I would like to open up the discourse on postwar German horror film to a more postmodern concept of genre, a more flexible and self-conscious understanding of how a cinematic tradition positions itself toward a concept that both facilitates and enables creative expression. Within this framework, genre would allow for more internal heterogeneity and external exchange than is commonly attributed to it. Genre would no longer mean an authoritative gesture of classificatory closure but rather a process of engaging with internal and external heterogeneity that helps to negotiate individual and collective identities. This reframing of the concept of genre strikes me as particularly relevant for the case of postwar Germany, a culture haunted by the historical trauma of the Third Reich, by unsuccessful attempts at suppressing this traumatic past rather than confronting it. Postwar Germany’s search for a viable national identity is, in many ways, fertile soil for the horror film. With its multiple investments in the concept of trauma, and its interest in articulating the return of the repressed, horror film might be particularly useful in helping audiences, in Eric Santner’s words, to “inhabit the heterogeneous language games that constitute the modest forms of community which mark the postmodern landscape” (7). In this broader sense, the anthology invites readers to contemplate “the shattered fantasy of the (always already) lost organic society that has haunted the Western imagination and to learn to tolerate the complexities and instabilities of new social arrangements as well as more hybrid, more “creole,” forms of personal, sexual, cultural, and political identity” (Santner 7–8). To open a way into this discussion, let me examine the validity of the official historical narrative by taking a closer look at its constitutive elements. The story revolves around three elements: the presence of horror films in the German film industry before the Third Reich, a period most closely associated with expressionist style and a small number of films that serve as its prime representatives; the rupture in historical continuity constituted by the Third Reich and the war years; and, finally, the absence of horror films from German film production after World War II. Let me address these elements one at a time. First, critics assert that German filmmaking during the Weimar years played a crucial role in the development of horror film. Histories of the horror
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Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

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