Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

xii Steffen Hantke
German production between 1933 and 1945 is undisputed; perhaps it suffices to
point out the aversion of the official cultural bureaucracy toward the types of
radical artistic modernism that manifested itself in the showcase productions of
Weimar cinema. But this is to insist that German horror film and expressionist
style were inseparable, and that, somehow, horror film turned out to be virtually
the only cinematic genre that could not be absorbed and co-opted by the Third
Reich—both problematic assumptions for a number of reasons. 5 In this sense,
the question why the German film industry during the Third Reich did not produce
horror films has never been asked. This is all the more surprising since
ample scholarship exists on the film industry of the Third Reich, as well as on
the transitional period between Nazi Germany and postwar German film production.
But then again, if the historical narrative is correct, why would it be surprising
to find film historians silent on the issue of German horror film after
1933; after all, how do you discuss something that does not exist? 6
This argumentative conundrum aside, the takeover of the German film industry—as
part of the process of Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of all
aspects of society with the dominant ideology under the Nazis—was accompanied
by a massive exodus of talent from the German film industry. 7 Many who
had been the inventors, promoters, and practitioners of the style and the cinematic
genre most readily associated with it were no longer active participants in
the making of German cinema. Instead, their names begin to appear in the U.S.
film industry, in the credits of American film noir, but also of the Universal horror
films in the 1930s and the RKO horror films of the 1940s, which were to
become the next stage in the history of the horror film, according to official film
history. 8
Just as critical opinions on the crucial importance of prewar German cinema
for the development of the horror film appear to be unanimous, so critics,
by and large, concur when they state that postwar German cinema no longer
featured horror films. 9 The standard history of German film, the Geschichte des
Deutschen Films, published in 1993, which works its way chronologically
through German cinema from the silent film era to the present, does not give a
coherent account of German horror films, the way it does discuss other film genres
(e.g. the rubble film or the Heimatfilm). German director Jörg Buttgereit, to
whom the book you are holding in your hands is devoting two essays and an
interview, does not appear in the index of the Geschichte des deutschen Films at
all. Neither does Uli Lommel’s Tenderness of Wolves, a film about serial killer
Fritz Haarmann, make an appearance in its index of film titles. It does mention
Christoph Schlingensief, but only once, and in this single case it refers to his
film Das Deutsche Kettensägenmassaker as “grotesque Horrorshow” rather than
a horror film (321, emphases added). Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu is referred to
in the context of silent film (263), while Roland Emmerich is mentioned in passing
as one of the younger German filmmakers in the 1980s interested not specifically
in the horror film but, more broadly, “in current genres” (294).