14.11.2012 Views

1POPULAR CINEMA

1POPULAR CINEMA

1POPULAR CINEMA

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Transform your PDFs into Flipbooks and boost your revenue!

Leverage SEO-optimized Flipbooks, powerful backlinks, and multimedia content to professionally showcase your products and significantly increase your reach.

POPULAR <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

OF THE THIRD REICH


THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK


SABINE HAKE<br />

Popular Cinema<br />

of the Third Reich<br />

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN


Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press<br />

All rights reserved<br />

Printed in the United States of America<br />

First edition, 2001<br />

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should<br />

be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819,<br />

Austin, TX 78713-7819.<br />

�� The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of<br />

ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).<br />

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA<br />

Hake, Sabine, 1956–<br />

Popular cinema of the Third Reich / Sabine Hake.— 1st ed.<br />

p. cm.<br />

Includes bibliographical references and index.<br />

isbn 0-292-73457-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—<br />

isbn 0-292-73458-1 (pbk : alk. paper)<br />

1. National socialism and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures—<br />

Germany—History. I. Title.<br />

pn1995.9.n36 h34 2001<br />

791.43�0943�09043—dc21 2001027790


CONTENTS<br />

Preface vii<br />

1. Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema:<br />

A Definition of Terms 1<br />

2. Made in 1933: German-Jewish Filmmakers and the<br />

Forced Coordination of the Industry 23<br />

3. Cinema, Set Design, and the Domestication of Modernism 46<br />

4. At the Movies: Film Audiences and the Problem of Spectatorship 68<br />

5. Stars: Heinz Rühmann and the Performance of the Ordinary 87<br />

6. Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936):<br />

A Case Study of Film Authorship 107<br />

7. The Foreign and the Familiar:<br />

On German-American Film Relations, 1933–1940 128<br />

8. The Annexation of an Imaginary City:<br />

The Topos “Vienna” and the Wien-Film AG 149<br />

9. The Power of Thought:<br />

Redefining Popular Cinema between Realism and Illusionism 172<br />

10. A Question of Representation:<br />

Working Women and Wartime Cinema 189<br />

11. The Legacies of the Past in the Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 210<br />

Notes 231<br />

Select Bibliography 263<br />

Index of German Titles and Names 267


THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK


PREFACE<br />

Why another study on the cinema of the Third Reich, and why now? The<br />

slow unification of both Germanys after the opening of the Berlin Wall and<br />

the changing political landscape in Europe since the 1990s have brought a<br />

renewed interest in the Third Reich, especially around issues of popular<br />

culture and everyday life. Many factors have contributed to this development:<br />

the revisionist histories of the Third Reich and their relevance to the<br />

conception of postwar Germany; the confrontation with the legacies of the<br />

German Democratic Republic and the old Federal Republic; the heated debates<br />

around appropriate forms of public commemoration in relation to the<br />

Holocaust and World War II; and the growing attention to questions of nation<br />

and national identity in the new Berlin Republic.<br />

In the cultural sphere, the return to conventional genre films since the<br />

1990s has demonstrated the importance of indigenous popular traditions.<br />

Contributing to this trend, German film scholars have turned to the cinema<br />

of the Third Reich and begun to explore previously neglected areas and uncharted<br />

territories in what is still regarded by many as a highly problematic<br />

period of film history. Most initiatives have been informed by the desire<br />

to move beyond deterministic theories of propaganda and ideology and<br />

incorporate more film-specific methods and inquiries. The main focus has<br />

been on the so-called Unterhaltungsfilme (literally, entertainment films)<br />

that, more than anything, confirm the pervasive influence of popular culture.<br />

Among other things, this revisionist project has drawn attention to the<br />

conflicts, contradictions, and compromises in a cinema all too often dismissed<br />

as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation. Yet what<br />

still deserves to be examined in greater detail are the heterogeneous elements,<br />

including the social fantasies, cultural traditions, economic interests,


and institutional pressures, that thrive even under the conditions of state<br />

ownership or control.<br />

It is in response to these larger debates that my study on popular cinema<br />

in the Third Reich calls for the normalization of German film history. Until<br />

unification, Third Reich cinema has been treated as the ultimate Other<br />

of German cinema and its competing discourses of art cinema, popular cinema,<br />

and national cinema. Especially the totalizing views of cinema and<br />

propaganda, ideology, and the fascist imaginary have provided a substitute<br />

for detailed historical research and political analysis. Likewise, the circular<br />

reasoning behind much writing (e.g., cinema as ideology as cinema) has<br />

produced the kind of extraterritorial space, or bifurcated narrative, that<br />

makes possible the reconstruction of an untainted filmic tradition associated<br />

with Weimar cinema, exile cinema, DEFA cinema, and New German<br />

cinema. The more Third Reich cinema is conceptualized in the homogenizing<br />

terms of domination and conformity, the more the pre-1933 and<br />

post-1945 years can be associated with a liberating heterogeneity. The identification<br />

of fascist mass culture with classical Hollywood cinema often has<br />

a similar effect, with the blanket dismissal of these two extreme examples of<br />

the culture industry opening up a space for the (often posthumous) validation<br />

of modernist practices and postmodern sensibilities. Normalization in<br />

this overdetermined context therefore means the recognition of the continuities<br />

on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic levels that haunt the<br />

history of German film beyond all ideological divisions and political ruptures;<br />

it also means an acute awareness of the paradoxical, asymmetrical,<br />

and nonsynchronous relationship between cinema and politics both then<br />

and now. As a result, Third Reich cinema can no longer be treated as an<br />

aberration of the past but must be acknowledged as an integral part of the<br />

aesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including its<br />

traumas and burdens.<br />

The present book contributes to the reassessment of popular cinema in<br />

the Third Reich by redefining both the subject and the method of investigation.<br />

Three basic assumptions inform my thinking about the material<br />

to be presented on the following pages. First, cinema in the Third Reich was<br />

above all a popular cinema sustained by well-established generic conventions,<br />

cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly<br />

developed star system. Second, these popular forms and styles developed<br />

through the selective incorporation of elements from the pre-1933 period<br />

into post-1933 cultural practices and the ongoing transformation of these<br />

viii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


elements in the productive encounter with other national cinemas, especially<br />

the dominant Hollywood model. Third, the discourses of the popular<br />

and the political remained at odds with each other and, based on their different<br />

investment in the national and the international, and the modern and<br />

the traditional, entered into highly unstable and invariably provisional alliances.<br />

Beyond the institutional and ideological pressures typical of any<br />

state-controlled cinema, the often evoked specter of a media dictatorship<br />

remained precisely that: a phantasmagoria. However, this phantasmagoria<br />

also opened up a space for the convergence of popular traditions, cultural<br />

ambitions, and international styles in the building of a public sphere presumably<br />

free of politics.<br />

Paying equal attention to the constituent elements of popular cinema is<br />

relevant not only for the rewriting of film history but also for a better understanding<br />

of the politics of entertainment during (and after) the Third<br />

Reich. In light of these wider implications, the prevailing filmic forms and<br />

practices can no longer be reduced to the opposition of entertainment vs.<br />

propaganda, nor can they be examined solely through the intentions of the<br />

Propaganda Ministry or the thematic overlaps with key ideas in Nazi ideology.<br />

Instead the process of incorporation, transformation, and instrumentalization<br />

must be evaluated in the larger context of German cinema, including<br />

its history and historiography. For this reason, I propose to shift the<br />

terms of the debate from the study of individual films to the examination of<br />

popular cinema as a social, cultural, economic, and political practice. That<br />

means: to move beyond the text-based models shared by the earliest studies<br />

on film propaganda and the most recent theories of the fascist imaginary<br />

and to develop further the contextual models that show popular cinema as<br />

a historically specific articulation of social fantasies and mentalities and examine<br />

its relevance as an ongoing negotiation of conflicting positions and<br />

influences. Key to this conceptual realignment is the insistence on cinema<br />

as a material practice and historical force. Yet new insights into the simultaneously<br />

stabilizing and destabilizing function of popular cinema can only<br />

be gained through approaches that recognize its multiple functions as a local<br />

and national industry, a cultural institution, a public sphere, a social experience,<br />

and, of course, a fantasy machine.<br />

Defining popular cinema as a dynamic process that involves aesthetic<br />

styles and social practices, cultural traditions and economic products, public<br />

institutions and private imaginations, and, last but not least, various notions<br />

of “the popular” expands the area of investigation not only in relation<br />

Preface ix


to the constituent elements and processes. Greater awareness of the complex<br />

nature of popular cinema and its privileged moments of crisis, controversy,<br />

and compromise also forces us to rethink many of the tacit assumptions<br />

about the sociopsychological function of mass entertainment in the<br />

Third Reich and, more generally, in modern Germany. In particular, the<br />

event-based nature of cinema brings out the most effective forms of negotiation<br />

and the most important areas of contention in the social and cultural<br />

practices that are implicated in, but never reducible to, dominant ideology.<br />

The theoretical implications of approaching popular cinema as a site<br />

of ongoing struggle are far-reaching. In terms of German film history, the<br />

focus on typical genres, tastes, and styles draws attention to the discontinuous<br />

continuities—that is, the prevailing modes of representation and their<br />

changing critical and aesthetic investments—that defined classical genre<br />

cinema from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Moreover, the attention to industry<br />

practices and audience expectations highlights the extensive exchanges,<br />

again with the necessary modifications, between a self-consciously national<br />

(and nationalistic) cinema and the kind of international tendencies and developments<br />

associated with Hollywood. In terms of modern German history,<br />

the emphasis on popular traditions shifts the terms of the debate from<br />

a deterministic relationship between cinema and ideology to the often inconsistent<br />

articulation of that relationship in economic strategies, political<br />

measures, artistic traditions, social movements, and, perhaps most importantly,<br />

popular tastes and mentalities. And in terms of film studies, the<br />

combination of textual and historical analysis moves the study of popular<br />

cinema beyond the binaries of propagandistic vs. escapist, subversive vs.<br />

affirmative, or innovative vs. conformist that continue to influence the debates<br />

on the fascist imaginary in often unproductive ways.<br />

As I want to argue, popular cinema in the Third Reich must be approached<br />

through its inherent contradictions. On the one hand, its most<br />

successful genres and most popular stars confirm the formative influence<br />

of the early Weimar sound period and point to even stronger connections<br />

with the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. On the other hand, the<br />

Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the industry in 1933 completed the<br />

institutional alignment with the ideology of National Socialism, primarily<br />

through the new anti-Semitic measures and the creation of a highly politicized<br />

genre, the so-called Staatsauftragsfilm (state-commissioned film). On<br />

the one hand, the identification of popular cinema with escapist entertainment<br />

helped to maintain the institutional divisions between high and low<br />

x Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


culture and between the public and private sphere of which cinema had always<br />

been an integral part. On the other hand, the affinities of popular cinema<br />

with consumerism, urbanism, and everyday life dissolved these bourgeois<br />

categories of distinction into more elusive configurations between<br />

aesthetics and politics, power and desire. On the one hand, the emphasis on<br />

fantasy and illusion made popular cinema a privileged site for the imaginary<br />

resolution of social and psychological conflicts and therefore instrumental<br />

to the preservation of the status quo. On the other hand, the cinematic experience<br />

in the widest sense gave rise to other meanings and effects that,<br />

while not subversive as such, often threatened the overall system of prohibitions,<br />

restrictions, and controlled transgressions.<br />

Articulating some of these contradictions, the book is organized around<br />

different aspects of popular cinema and, by extension, elements of film<br />

analysis (e.g., genres, stars, directors, audiences). By exposing Third Reich<br />

cinema to these categories, the following eleven chapters try to shed light<br />

on the cinema’s precarious position between political, social, and economic<br />

interests; regional, national, and international influences; high and low culture,<br />

as well as modern and antimodern definitions of art and design; petit<br />

bourgeois, popular, populist, and völkisch traditions; and the various ideologies<br />

that sustained classical narrative cinema during the 1930s and early<br />

1940s, including the ideology of National Socialism. In such an expanded<br />

definition of popular cinema, the popular and its affiliated terms (e.g., populist,<br />

folkloric, petit bourgeois) open up a new perspective not only on German<br />

cinema before 1933 and after 1945 but also on the function of film<br />

history and, by extension, of cultural history in the conceptualization of<br />

popular culture in relation to national culture, regional culture, and folk<br />

culture.<br />

Several assumptions entered into the selection and presentation of the<br />

historical material. First, only a context-based definition of popular cinema<br />

is able to reconstruct the processes of appropriation, incorporation, and<br />

transformation that connected filmic practices after 1933 to the Weimar period<br />

and to classical Hollywood cinema and that facilitated the many overlaps<br />

with musical, literary, and theatrical culture. Second, the mass appeal<br />

of popular cinema must be examined through the functioning of cinema<br />

as social experience and public event and, furthermore, through its affinities<br />

with modern design, urban lifestyles, and other mass media practices.<br />

Third, the ideological functions of popular cinema, whether in relation to<br />

classical narrative cinema or the fascist public sphere, have to be assessed<br />

Preface xi


primarily through its successes and failures—that is, through those moments<br />

where the plans about political indoctrination and mass manipulation are<br />

implemented, modified, or abandoned altogether.<br />

While taking the form of self-contained essays, the individual chapters<br />

are organized in a roughly chronological fashion that acknowledges the<br />

considerable differences between the prewar and war years and pays close<br />

attention to the filmic legacies associated with the years before 1933 and after<br />

1945. In the selection of the material, I have tried to strike a balance between<br />

relatively unknown topics (e.g., film theory in the Third Reich) and<br />

topics with heightened relevance to film theoretical debates (e.g., Detlef<br />

Sierck and authorship). Moreover, I have made an effort to include a wide<br />

variety of primary and secondary sources that, in ranging from star biographies<br />

to studio histories and reception studies, are bound to bring out the<br />

complexities and contradictions of the historical period under investigation.<br />

Finally, I have emphasized the perspective of the typical, the average,<br />

and the ordinary in order to move away from the few privileged texts that<br />

have been enlisted in the creation of a new symptomatology of fascism.<br />

Accordingly, Chapter 1 looks at the peripheral role of popular cinema<br />

in the existing scholarship on propaganda and ideology and proposes a critical<br />

reassessment of ambiguous terms such as “escapist” and “entertainment”<br />

and their discursive function in the context of national cinema and<br />

popular culture. Chapter 2 reflects on the historical designation “made in<br />

1933” by measuring the impact of anti-Semitism through the thematization<br />

of exclusion in two romantic comedies by German-Jewish directors. Chapter<br />

3 considers the legacies of high modernism in the work of several famous<br />

set designers from the Weimar years and traces the domestication of the<br />

modern style from the technological thrillers of the early 1930s to the<br />

women’s films of the early 1940s. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the extensive<br />

debates on audiences in the trade press and in academic scholarship<br />

and shows to what degree mass-psychological theories served to address<br />

persistent concerns about the elusive conditions of film reception. Chapter<br />

5 enlists the screen persona of Heinz Rühmann and his approach to comic<br />

acting in a sustained reflection on the crisis of modern masculinity and petit<br />

bourgeois consciousness.<br />

To continue with this brief overview, Chapter 6 uses a close reading<br />

of Detlef Sierck’s Schlußakkord to look at film authorship in relation to the<br />

stylistic possibilities of melodrama and the genre’s precarious alliance with<br />

artistic and cultural ambitions after 1933. Chapter 7 expands the concept of<br />

xii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


national cinema into international practices by comparing the undiminished<br />

appeal of Hollywood films during the 1930s and the very different situation<br />

of German films in U.S. markets. Chapter 8 follows the changing<br />

meaning of “Vienna” as an important cultural and political topos in German<br />

and Austrian films made before and after the annexation, with special<br />

attention paid to Willi Forst’s Vienna Trilogy. Chapter 9 approaches the<br />

extensive writings on film during the Third Reich as part of an ongoing,<br />

and ultimately failed, effort to incorporate older discourses of filmic realism<br />

into a more flexible aesthetic of reception indebted to fascist notions of populism<br />

and folk culture. Chapter 10 analyzes the overdetermined function of<br />

women, and the problem of modern femininity, by looking at the representation<br />

of working women in wartime cinema. And Chapter 11 considers the<br />

diverse attempts at coming to terms with the cinema’s own past in a number<br />

of postwar films about, and with, famous stars from the Third Reich.<br />

The individual chapters are designed in the form of case studies that,<br />

while contributing to a coherent argument about the highly adaptable nature<br />

of popular cinema, cannot be reduced to one particular thematic focus<br />

or conceptual category. In response to the particular difficulties of<br />

writing about cinema in the Third Reich, I have chosen an approach that<br />

articulates my resistance to totalizing models on both the conceptual and<br />

analytical levels. Aiming at a kaleidoscopic effect, as it were, every chapter<br />

is structured around one particular problem or problematic. To give an example,<br />

Chapter 4 on film audiences focuses on the prevailing debates on<br />

audience preferences during the Third Reich but also considers the wider<br />

implications of introducing a category like reception into the study of a cinema<br />

often described as totalitarian. Ideally every critical category sheds<br />

light on all the other categories and, in so doing, contributes to the process<br />

of historical revision that draws attention to the economic, ideological,<br />

cultural, and social influences and the pervasiveness of institutional and<br />

aesthetic compromises. Moreover, every aspect of popular cinema interacts<br />

with all the other aspects in order to bring out the multitude of filmic practices<br />

that can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the ideological and<br />

institutional pressures associated with National Socialism, the Propaganda<br />

Ministry, and the film industry during the Third Reich.<br />

Within this kaleidoscopic structure, the individual chapters are nonetheless<br />

connected to each other through a number of recurring themes: the<br />

generic and stylistic traditions that link filmic practices in the Third Reich<br />

to the Weimar period and the postwar years (2 and 11); the centrality of clas-<br />

Preface xiii


sical narrative cinema and the star system (7 and 11); the persistent problems<br />

in defining the project of national cinema against the dominance of<br />

Hollywood and through alliances with other German-speaking cinemas<br />

(7 and 9); the almost compulsive concern with identity, especially in relation<br />

to gender and class (1 and 10); the preoccupation with audiences and<br />

questions of spectatorship (4 and 9); the strong ties between popular cinema<br />

and musical culture and the heavy reliance on literary and theatrical<br />

traditions (6 and 9); and, last but not least, the continuous compromises on<br />

all levels between film as art, entertainment, commodity, and propaganda<br />

(5 and 6).<br />

As regards the wider implications of this study, my reasons for creating<br />

these kaleidoscopic effects can be summarized as follows: First, by focusing<br />

on popular cinema, I hope to move beyond the conceptual models that subordinate<br />

filmic practices to theories of fascism or the culture industry, and,<br />

in so doing, stabilize their more problematic qualities through the aesthetic<br />

and ideological effects attributed to popular cinema. Second, by organizing<br />

my argument around the main elements of cinema, rather than those of politics<br />

and ideology, I want to emphasize what I have earlier described as discontinuous<br />

continuities in German cinema before 1933 and after 1945 and<br />

in international developments during the 1930s and early 1940s. From such<br />

a perspective, what is at stake is no longer just the cinema of the Third<br />

Reich, but German cinema as a whole.<br />

Of course, my intention is neither to depict popular cinema in the Third<br />

Reich as merely an artistically inferior or ideologically more insidious version<br />

of Hollywood; nor to disregard the conditions of production and reception<br />

in a state-controlled cinema and incorporate its films into an undifferentiated<br />

body of work—that is, of mass entertainment—available to<br />

changing forms of cultural consumption. On the contrary, it is my belief<br />

that only this process of historical revision will bring into relief the particular<br />

characteristics—the Otherness— of German cinema after 1933, and do<br />

so precisely through the practices shared with other national cinemas of<br />

the period. Only by moving beyond the double dangers of demonization<br />

and banalization can we engage productively with the continuous challenge<br />

of the Third Reich to present-day debates on popular culture and political<br />

ideology.<br />

In the writing of the book, many friends and colleagues have generously<br />

offered their support during various stages of the project, and I would like<br />

to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to them: Lucy Fischer,<br />

xiv Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Mary-Beth O’Brien, Stephen Brockmann, Fred Evans, Gerd Gemünden,<br />

Alice Kuzniar, Marcia Klotz, Marcia Landy, Barbara McCloskey, Stephen<br />

Lowry, Johannes von Moltke, Annette Kuhn, Thomas Saunders, and Katie<br />

Trumpener. For their willingness to listen to preliminary thoughts on the<br />

subject, I want to thank sympathetic audiences at the German Studies Association<br />

Annual Convention and at the Hollins Colloquium on German<br />

Film. Parts of chapters have profited from the critical comments of colleagues<br />

at conferences and at lecture series at the Universität Dresden, the<br />

University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southampton, the<br />

University of Warwick, and Dartmouth College. Discussions with graduate<br />

students at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me to clarify my argument;<br />

I am particularly indebted to Daniel Wild. Bozena Goscilo provided<br />

valuable editorial advice. Jan McInroy and Jim Burr at the University of<br />

Texas Press were very supportive; Paul Spragens provided meticulous copyediting.<br />

Last, but not least, I am grateful to the staffs of the Margaret Herrick<br />

Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly<br />

Hills; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Stiftung Deutsche<br />

Kinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin; and the Interlibrary<br />

Loan Office at Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. Parts of this<br />

research have been supported by a DAAD Study Visit Grant, as well as a<br />

Hewlett International Grant and a Small Research Grant from the University<br />

of Pittsburgh. It is with great joy and deep gratitude that I dedicate this<br />

book to Fred Nutt.<br />

An earlier German version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Heinz Rühmann<br />

und die Inszenierung des ‘kleinen Mannes,’” in montage a/v 7, no. 1 (1998):<br />

33–56. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Melodramatic<br />

Imagination of Detlef Sierck: Final Chord (1936) and Its Resonances,” in<br />

Screen 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 129–148.


1<br />

POPULAR <strong>CINEMA</strong>,<br />

NATIONAL <strong>CINEMA</strong>,<br />

NAZI <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

A DEFINITION OF TERMS<br />

I.<br />

Until recently, the cinema of the Third Reich has been treated as the ultimate<br />

Other of world cinema. Excluded from standard film historical and<br />

theoretical analyses, the more than one thousand feature films produced<br />

during the period have remained closely identified with the critical paradigms<br />

of propaganda studies and ideology critique. Both have generated the<br />

kind of summary treatments, captured in terms like “Nazi cinema” or “Nazi<br />

film,” that often include sweeping conclusions about mass manipulation,<br />

popular entertainment, and fascist aesthetics but divulge little about the<br />

constituent elements of popular cinema: the leading stars and directors, the


popular genres and styles, the favorite studios and theaters, and so forth.<br />

Klaus Kanzog has recently concluded that “we have long ago reached consensus<br />

over the ideological premises of the films and even feel satisfaction<br />

about having more or less closed the chapter on ‘National Socialism and<br />

Film.’” 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. The cinema of the Third<br />

Reich has never been exposed to the full range of critical perspectives available<br />

within film studies. Much of the basic research still needs to be done,<br />

and many of the questions have not even been asked.<br />

In this chapter, I want to develop new critical perspectives based on the<br />

aesthetic, social, cultural, and economic practices associated with popular<br />

cinema. As a way of introducing the larger project, I begin with the definitions<br />

of “popular cinema” in the existing scholarship and examine some of<br />

the hidden assumptions behind the two main elements, “popular” and “cinema,”<br />

that have sustained this seemingly self-evident but also curiously undertheorized<br />

term. The second and third parts then consider some of the<br />

other terms, including “national cinema,” that contributed to the specific<br />

qualities of popular cinema in the German tradition and that, in combination<br />

with recent debates on the meaning of the popular in film studies and<br />

cultural studies, might be enlisted in a different history and historiography<br />

of popular cinema in the Third Reich. 2<br />

To summarize a prevailing trend in the scholarship from the 1970s<br />

to the 1980s: The more that was written about the propaganda films, the<br />

less became known—and appeared worth knowing—about those countless<br />

genre films categorized as “mere entertainment”; that is to say, films that<br />

were considered neither part of art nor propaganda and that often seemed<br />

closer to other rituals of mass consumption than to legitimate cultural forms<br />

and practices. The more some scholars concentrated on the filmic representation<br />

of key concepts in Nazi ideology, the less they paid attention to the<br />

vast body of work that presumably only served escapist functions and had<br />

no aesthetic value or social significance on its own. And the more other<br />

scholars speculated about the fascist aesthetics, the less they were willing to<br />

consider the continuities of classical narrative cinema in an international<br />

context or to take into account the historical conditions of film production<br />

and reception. Even the turn to cultural studies in the last decade has not<br />

resulted in radically new approaches that, by moving from textual to contextual<br />

models, might be better suited to trace the complicated processes<br />

within popular cinema as an economic, social, and cultural practice.<br />

Historically, the conceptualization of entertainment and propaganda as<br />

2 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


a kind of figure-ground effect must be traced back to Propaganda Minister<br />

Joseph Goebbels, who, in his public talks, always made the distinction between<br />

the 20 percent big-budget films with clear propagandistic intentions<br />

and “the 80 percent good, decent entertainment films on a high artistic<br />

level.” 3 Exile film critics were the first to challenge this division and draw<br />

attention to its political function. In a pamphlet written for the “purposes<br />

of psychological warfare,” Siegfried Kracauer asserted that “all Nazi films<br />

were more or less propaganda films—even the mere entertainment pictures<br />

which seem to be remote from politics.” 4 The same argumentation informed<br />

Hans Wollenberg’s more tentative conclusion, also from the 1940s,<br />

that “even apparently harmless subjects, comedies or even musicals, have<br />

somehow a tendency to advance Nazi ideologies.” 5 Relying on an epistemology<br />

of suspicion through qualifiers like “more or less” and “somehow,”<br />

Kracauer and Wollenberg laid the foundation for the conception of popular<br />

cinema as simultaneously separated from, and implicated in, the Nazi propaganda<br />

machine. In most subsequent descriptions of this undistinguished,<br />

formless mass called “entertainment films,” aesthetic and moral judgment<br />

usually takes the place of close analysis, a move that is legitimated with reference<br />

to the escapist nature of the films in question. And in all cases, the<br />

unquestioned assumptions about the total control of the Propaganda Ministry<br />

over the filmic imagination serve to protect against uncomfortable<br />

questions about the continuities of popular cinema and the social practices,<br />

attitudes, and mentalities that sustain it and, in turn, are sustained by it.<br />

The indifference toward, and ignorance of, the so-called entertainment<br />

films fulfill three distinct but related functions, all of which bear witness to<br />

the films’ problematic status in German film history and social histories of<br />

the Third Reich. On the most obvious level, the argument about apolitical<br />

entertainment provides justification for the pervasive presence of these<br />

films in today’s culture, whether in the form of television programming,<br />

video releases, or film retrospectives. The insistence on a sharp distinction<br />

between politics and entertainment allows audiences both young and old to<br />

indulge freely in nostalgic celebrations of what has become known as “the<br />

golden days of UFA [Universum Film AG].” 6 The countless memoirs by<br />

writers, actors, and directors have further contributed to such patterns of<br />

reception. To mention only two examples, screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht<br />

insists that “to a large degree, films in the Nazi state were not at all Nazi<br />

films.” 7 And director Herbert Maisch cites the regular television reruns of<br />

one of his films from the early 1940s as proof that the work remained “un-<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 3


lemished by the times in which it was produced.” 8 Thus it should not surprise<br />

that even an unrepentant fan like Karlheinz Wendtland asserts that<br />

“the penetration of every single feature film with Nazi ideology has never<br />

been proven.” 9 Yet no matter whether the films are enlisted in acts of ritualistic<br />

deconstruction or ironic appropriation (e.g., Zarah Leander as a gay<br />

icon) or exposed to redemptive readings that focus only on formal qualities<br />

and directorial styles (e.g., Veit Harlan as an unacknowledged auteur), they<br />

still remain cultural products of, and historical documents from, the Third<br />

Reich. It is precisely for this reason that the historical and contemporary<br />

relevance of these films cannot be explained through the false oppositions<br />

of art, entertainment, and politics that have accompanied their critical reception<br />

from the beginning.<br />

Secondly, the unwillingness of scholars to deal with popular cinema<br />

masks an elitist contempt for mass cultural productions and their presumably<br />

passive consumers; hence the derogatory tone in many discussions of<br />

escapism and illusionism. In the same way that moral indignation about the<br />

Propaganda Ministry’s insidious manipulations is predicated on the model<br />

of a liberal public sphere, the aesthetic dismissal of “mass entertainment”<br />

betrays two equally bourgeois notions, the aesthetic superiority of autonomous<br />

art and the affirmative character of the culture industry. Thirdly, the<br />

tendency to see popular cinema only in the context of hegemonic practices<br />

distracts from the differences and contradictions within popular culture and<br />

often ends up supporting reactionary views on modern mass culture as an<br />

insidious form of controlling private fantasies and desires— of course, not<br />

those of educated individuals but only of “the masses.” Similar patterns of<br />

argumentation can even be found in early Marxist studies on popular cinema<br />

that treat its mass-produced fantasies as a manifestation of false consciousness<br />

and the kind of petit bourgeois culture that allegedly poses a serious<br />

threat to the authentic culture of the working class.<br />

Within these argumentative patterns, the forms and functions of popular<br />

cinema tend to be examined either through the notion of political<br />

propaganda or in the context of ideology critique. To begin with the early<br />

studies on film and propaganda, most analyses assume an institutionalized<br />

relationship between propaganda and entertainment (i.e., Goebbels’s<br />

20 percent–80 percent model) that can be studied through conceptual oppositions<br />

such as overt vs. covert, latent vs. manifest, textual vs. contextual,<br />

and so forth. 10 In the earliest and still most extensive quantitative study<br />

4 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


published to this day, Gerhard Albrecht relies on such a conceptual model<br />

in distinguishing between the few infamous films with a manifest politicalpropagandistic<br />

function and the overwhelming majority of entertainment<br />

films with a latent political-propagandistic function. According to Albrecht,<br />

the latent meanings in what he categorized as serious, humorous, and<br />

action-oriented films can be uncovered through a combination of textual<br />

and contextual factors, including narrative content, production history, and<br />

critical reception. 11<br />

Most studies on film and propaganda determine the propagandistic<br />

function of the so-called entertainment film by looking either at the work<br />

itself, the conditions of production, or the conditions of reception. Sometimes<br />

the distinction between political propaganda and apolitical entertainment<br />

is based on essential textual differences that manifest themselves in<br />

the thematic concerns of individual films. This approach is exemplified by<br />

David Stuart Hull, who cites the Allied Control Commission’s findings that<br />

as few as 141 of a total of 700 suspect feature films were “politically objectionable”<br />

to conclude that “only a small number of films made during the<br />

Third Reich contained propaganda.” 12 Dissolving the meaning of propaganda<br />

entirely into the conditions of production, Richard Taylor offers a<br />

radically different definition, namely that if the “conscious purpose is to lull<br />

the audience in order to manipulate its opinions for political ends, then we<br />

are concerned with film propaganda: if not, then we are concerned with entertainment<br />

pure and simple.” 13 At first, David Welch’s observations on “the<br />

majority of ‘escapist’ films that were produced . . . principally for entertainment<br />

purposes” 14 sounds surprisingly like Taylor’s, given the same reference<br />

to “purposes” (i.e., intentionality). Yet Welch ultimately places greater<br />

weight on the actualization of these intended meanings by different audiences.<br />

Accordingly, he dismisses the official distinction between entertainment<br />

and propaganda as yet another attempt by the Propaganda Ministry<br />

to achieve full control over the cinema, its fantasies, and, perhaps even more<br />

important, its discourses as well. Where Hull relies on manifest content and<br />

thematic classifications in order to defend the majority of films against accusations<br />

of ideological contamination, Welch turns to the rituals of moviegoing<br />

to assess the contribution of the division between the “political” and<br />

the “apolitical” to the preservation of the status quo. In his view, the mass<br />

appeal of the so-called entertainment films hinged on a carefully constructed<br />

illusion about everyday life, for “by visiting the cinema, people<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 5


could pretend that fascist ideology or principles, as disseminated in films,<br />

did not meaningfully impinge on everyday life or force them to restructure<br />

their system of values radically.” 15<br />

The most radical challenge to the propaganda model and its conceptual<br />

binaries has been developed in the context of ideology critique. Here the<br />

contribution by Stephen Neale is worth quoting at some length. For it identifies<br />

the basic contradiction at the core of all those contributions that<br />

constantly hover between conceiving entertainment films as nonideological<br />

and escapist and therefore performing an ideological<br />

function in not confronting “reality,” or else as embodying Nazi ideology<br />

in a hidden way through particular modes of characterisation<br />

or the portrayal of validated narrative actions. The latter are differentiated<br />

from propaganda because they are somehow not “overt” or<br />

were not produced at Goebbels’s behest. However, if they are not<br />

“overt” it is still assumed that they can be read in the covertly inscribed<br />

manner . . . that this will always be so, and this because of an<br />

intentionality that remains, in essence, in the film, rather than because<br />

the nature of the specific conjuncture in which the films were<br />

first made and viewed forces that reading. 16<br />

According to Neale, an expanded notion of ideology avoids such impasses<br />

in the theorizing of popular cinema, especially if its products and<br />

practices are conceived not in the sense of deceptions and illusions but as<br />

part of a fully developed theory of filmic representation and social reality.<br />

Defined in that sense, ideology establishes symbolic systems that take the<br />

form of cultural institutions, aesthetic practices, and critical discourses.<br />

Popular cinema represents one of the most important sites of negotiation for<br />

the conflicting forces that define the relationship between individual and<br />

society. In its infinite capacity for creating, circulating, and controlling private<br />

and public fantasies, classic narrative relies on specific patterns of<br />

identification in order to establish subject positions that actualize and integrate<br />

these conflicting forces. The resultant subject effects, as it were, give<br />

rise to the fantasy of a coherent, unified self and, in so doing, contribute to<br />

the production of social consensus and political hegemony. Yet it should always<br />

be remembered that, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the production of<br />

aesthetic or narrative forms is to be seen as an ideological act in its own<br />

6 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ight, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable<br />

social contradictions.” 17<br />

Stephen Lowry has been one of the first to utilize such an extended notion<br />

of ideology in a thorough analysis of what he, somewhat surprisingly,<br />

still describes as “shallow, seemingly apolitical entertainment films.” 18 Following<br />

Jameson, Lowry approaches ideology in Nazi cinema not through<br />

particular contents, but through the mobilization of emotions and desires<br />

and their imaginary reconciliation in accordance with the changing demands<br />

of culture and society; hence his conclusion that “we need to shift<br />

our perspective from a narrowly political definition of ideology which asks<br />

what ‘message’ films might have had, and instead scrutinize how films actually<br />

negotiated cultural and ideological conflicts.” 19 According to Lowry,<br />

the question about the specifically fascist nature of these films can only be<br />

answered through historical contextualization, including greater attention<br />

to the close connections between new mass cultural forms and established<br />

cultural practices within the fascist public sphere.<br />

Such affinities undoubtedly confirm popular cinema as an integral part<br />

of the process of modernization and the experience of modernity, but only<br />

if cinema is fundamentally redefined as a practice and event. The proposals<br />

by Lowry and others for what is alternately referred to as historical contextualization,<br />

interdisciplinary approaches, or cultural-studies readings remain<br />

incomplete as long as they fail to achieve the conceptual shift from<br />

Ideology to ideologies. Above all, this requires greater attention to the complicated<br />

relationship of popular cinema to high and low culture, as well<br />

as to regional, national, and international culture in the context of institutional<br />

practices, aesthetic forms, and cultural traditions. Otherwise the<br />

study of cinema and ideology will end up with new conceptual impasses<br />

caused by, on the one hand, the radical expansion of the fascist imaginary<br />

into popular culture and everyday life and, on the other hand, the equally<br />

problematic identification of cinema under fascism with the ideology of<br />

classical narrative cinema.<br />

Resisting such temptations, Karsten Witte has perhaps gone furthest in<br />

opening up the field of inquiry to a variety of popular genres, especially the<br />

revue films and the romantic comedies; he also has been most willing to defy<br />

the conventions that have made research in this area such a difficult and often<br />

inhibiting endeavor. His intellectual commitments are captured in the<br />

surprisingly simple and, for that reason, all the more provocative proposi-<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 7


tion that, “Instead of determining which features constitute a fascist film,<br />

we need to examine how films functioned under fascism or rather, in the<br />

context of fascism.” 20 Continuing along similar lines, though in very different<br />

theoretical contexts, Linda Schulte-Sasse has recently suggested that<br />

“rather than taking ideology as the starting point and looking at how movies<br />

show ideology, we can perhaps take movies as the starting point and examine<br />

how they harbor, transform, exceed, and undermine political ideology.”<br />

21 Her focus on fantasy as a framework in which desire becomes possible,<br />

even if it remains an impossible desire, has shed new light on the<br />

affective structures that dissolve the political into the experiential and, for<br />

that reason, can only be understood through a similar conceptual shift from<br />

the “management of ideas” to the “management of desire.” 22<br />

The growing attention to the formal aspects of classical narrative cinema<br />

has contributed significantly to the long overdue mapping of popular<br />

cinema and its hidden attractions. However, the continuous privileging of<br />

the filmic text in the conceptual trajectory from “manipulation” (i.e., in the<br />

propaganda model) to “interpellation” (i.e., in ideology critique) and “fantasy<br />

production” (i.e., through psychoanalytic readings) also raises new<br />

questions. For instance, it might be argued that these contributions have<br />

only updated the terms of analysis by enlisting the symptomatic nature of<br />

“Nazi cinema” in the new constellations of mass culture, modernity, and<br />

postmodernity. A thus expanded notion of fascist fantasy production, which<br />

finds its ideal manifestation in the Hollywood dream factory, is bound to<br />

distract from, if not act against, the historical specificity in the filmic articulation<br />

of power and pleasure. Accordingly, Schulte-Sasse’s emphasis on the<br />

close affinities between the subject effects of fascism and classical narrative<br />

cinema culminates in a typical postmodern reading of “National Socialism<br />

as virtually synonymous with illusion, theater, or spectacle.” 23 But behind<br />

the theories of subjectivity, her study on fantasies and subject effects also<br />

perpetuates the vilification of classic narrative found in more familiar arguments<br />

against film propaganda as well as Hollywood cinema. Following a<br />

similar pattern of argumentation, Eric Rentschler uses a series of individual<br />

readings to conjure up the image of a cinema of illusions that, in his<br />

view, must be described less as the culmination of the dialectics of modernity<br />

than as “a preview of postmodern attractions.” 24 Yet this new theoretical<br />

alliance does not prevent him from denouncing Nazi cinema as “a culture<br />

industry in the service of mass deception” where the films “offered<br />

only an illusion of escape from the Nazi status quo.” 25<br />

8 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Based on the groundbreaking work of Witte, Rentschler, and Schulte-<br />

Sasse, a younger generation of American scholars interested in cultural<br />

studies has begun to study aspects of popular cinema in the context of other<br />

cultural practices, discourses, and traditions, including the persistent appeal<br />

of American mass culture, the phantasmagoria of German colonialism, and<br />

the predominance of the star system. 26 All contributions are informed by<br />

the desire to move beyond the conceptual divides that have limited much<br />

early scholarship to totalizing models of explanation, whether they are<br />

called propaganda, ideology, or the fascist imaginary. My study hopes to<br />

contribute to this trend by presenting a number of critical concepts and<br />

models for thinking about popular cinema along social, cultural, political,<br />

and economic lines. While open to interdisciplinary approaches, I rely primarily<br />

on film studies as a discipline perfectly suited to provide the basic<br />

terms of analysis in what must be regarded as a crucial moment of historical<br />

and theoretical reassessment. And while I am not denying the attractiveness<br />

of a delineation of the postmodern that begins with Hitler’s appropriation<br />

of Hollywood, as it were, I also take seriously the historical legacies<br />

of modernization and modernity after 1933 and pay close attention to their<br />

changing interpretations in the aesthetic, economic, political, and social<br />

practices that constituted popular cinema in the Third Reich.<br />

II.<br />

After this overview of the existing scholarship, my goal is to outline an<br />

alternative model that locates the specificity of cinema in the Third Reich<br />

not in some stable ideological system or institutional structure but in actual<br />

filmic practices. In order to define these practices in a larger social and cultural<br />

context, I want to use the second part of this chapter to consider some<br />

of the historical conditions that made popular cinema such an important<br />

medium, both of conflict and compromise, in the articulation of modern<br />

lifestyles and contemporary sensibilities after 1933. Three factors, I believe,<br />

are central to its undisputed ascendancy: the complicated relationship to<br />

the project of mass culture and modernity, including the progressive legacies<br />

from the Weimar years; the heavy reliance on the conventions of classical<br />

narrative cinema both in its Germanized and Americanized versions;<br />

and the inherent tension between a market-driven economy and a dictatorial<br />

political regime.<br />

Throughout the period in question, the cinema’s direct appeal to petit<br />

bourgeois consciousness, including its social insecurities and rigid moral<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 9


codes, and the heavy loans from bourgeois culture, especially its intellectual<br />

pretensions, helped to gloss over the strains and ruptures in what essentially<br />

remained a class-based organization of culture. Popular cinema developed<br />

further its affinities with modern consumer culture and a homogeneous<br />

white-collar society; references to questions of race and ethnicity remained<br />

largely absent. Participating in increasingly elaborate marketing campaigns,<br />

films cultivated their close ties with the recording industry, book publishing,<br />

and the illustrated press, and they contributed actively to the consumerist<br />

celebration of modern life by influencing fashion and design trends,<br />

definitions of female beauty and sex appeal, young and urban lifestyles, and<br />

recreational activities like sports and traveling; even the war years did not<br />

significantly change these tendencies.<br />

To phrase it differently, popular cinema continued to participate in developments<br />

typical of any advanced industrial nation, urbanized whitecollar<br />

society, and modern mass culture. However, the cinema’s privileged<br />

position at the forefront of modernization must not be confused with a continuous<br />

commitment to the project of modernity and the aesthetics of modernism.<br />

The means of standardization and homogenization were in fact often<br />

used to mask more problematic divisions within culture and society as<br />

a whole. Reflecting on this contradiction, Leonardo Quaresima describes<br />

the “depoliticization of the entertainment film” after 1933 as the necessary<br />

outcome of a process “in which leisure time and the organization of leisure<br />

time constituted a fundamental part of the regime’s social modernization<br />

program.” 27 Participating in the public culture of accommodation and pretense,<br />

the cinema provided both a refuge from the pressures of modernization<br />

in the workplace and the organization of social life, and a refuge for the<br />

progressive tendencies associated with Weimar modernism and its dreams<br />

of a democratic society. This paradoxical quality has been described by<br />

Witte as “the removal of modernity from public life and its simultaneous<br />

reintroduction by means of film and other mass media.” 28<br />

What are some of the implications of the debates on modernization,<br />

modernism, and modernity for my earlier definition of popular cinema as a<br />

social fantasy, a cultural event, and an aesthetic experience? Did genre films<br />

cultivate modern sensibilities as a protection against the “aestheticization<br />

of politics” and the rituals of the “mass ornament”? 29 And did such a retreat<br />

to the private sphere, with the public sphere reserved for the cult of the national<br />

community, contribute to the kind of “split consciousness” 30 that has<br />

been considered essential to the functioning of the Third Reich as an elab-<br />

10 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


orate system based on consensus as well as coercion? Must we think of popular<br />

cinema as one of the many heterogeneous forces and practices that sustained<br />

everyday life precisely through toleration of inconsistencies and<br />

openness toward compromises, including those between the reality of an<br />

Americanized urban culture and the fantasy of a Germanized folk culture?<br />

31 Or would it be more productive to speak of popular cinema in terms<br />

of a partial public sphere that, based on the functional division between<br />

politics and entertainment, absorbed some of the traditions associated with<br />

the public/private divide into older cultural practices and other social contexts,<br />

for instance through the consumerist celebration of individualism in<br />

the highly circumscribed terms of escapism?<br />

Popular cinema after 1933, it might be argued, contributed to the undoing<br />

of the progressive/reactionary and modern /conservative divide that<br />

had constituted Weimar culture and society in the terms of cultural experimentation<br />

and innovation as well as political crisis and controversy. Continuing<br />

in this tradition, the new films did much less, and much more, than<br />

create antimodern fantasies through modern means or use international<br />

styles in nationalist mythmaking. Likewise, the cinema’s various new incarnations<br />

involved much more, and much less, than the replacement of a<br />

market-driven industry committed to mass entertainment with a powerful<br />

and highly effective propaganda machine under state ownership. Examining<br />

these continuities, Thomas Elsaesser has spoken of a “third form of<br />

modernity” 32 that enlisted popular tastes and practices in a profoundly<br />

modern derealization of space and time that remained limited to the celebration<br />

of personal lifestyles and excluded questions of labor and technology.<br />

Participating in this momentous reconfiguration of cinema and modernity,<br />

even the divisions that informed the cinema’s contribution to the rise<br />

of modern mass culture—namely as a critique of high culture—could finally<br />

be utilized in the creation of a very different public sphere under the conditions<br />

of fascism.<br />

Within these constraints, the art film, given its heavy debts to the Weimar<br />

cinema of quality, remained obliged to middle-class artistic traditions<br />

and cultural ambitions, but also made them more available to the ideological<br />

constellations of race and nation. By contrast, the popular film relied increasingly<br />

on the conventions of classical narrative cinema and the kind of<br />

stable identifications and reality effects that could respond best to various<br />

ideologies, including the bourgeois project of aesthetic education. The codification<br />

of generic formulas and stylistic conventions after 1933 cannot be<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 11


separated from the almost programmatic abandonment of formal innovation<br />

for technical perfection and the emergence of a standardized model<br />

of mass entertainment without any artistic ambitions or critical agendas.<br />

Yet even under these conditions, films managed to project a wide range of<br />

moods and mentalities, from the serious reflections on fate and destiny in<br />

the melodramas to the celebration of contemporary, cosmopolitan, and hedonistic<br />

lifestyles in the sophisticated comedies. Filmmakers paid equal attention<br />

to the latest trends in popular music and dance and the great classics<br />

of the literary and musical canon. Their highly pragmatic approaches<br />

provided a false sense of continuity that confirmed popular cinema as both<br />

a regional, national, and international phenomenon and an important mediator<br />

between high and low, popular and political, culture. Making the unavoidable<br />

comparison with the classical Hollywood cinema, Patrice Petro<br />

has therefore asked: “Was Nazi cinema merely a version of the classical<br />

Hollywood cinema?” and, if that is the case, “to what extent did the popularity<br />

of Nazi film promote distinctly national preferences and designs?” 33<br />

Defying speculation about the nature of fascist aesthetics, the many<br />

genre films produced during the Third Reich have given rise neither to a<br />

discernible filmic style nor to a particular ideological agenda. In accordance<br />

with Petro, they might be described as an impoverished, derivative version<br />

of the Hollywood original, which means: without the carefully written<br />

scripts, skilled direction, elaborate set designs, brilliant cinematography,<br />

glamorous stars, and, most importantly, generous budgets. From such a perspective,<br />

the products of forced aesthetic coordination bring into relief<br />

the pervasive lack of imagination in a popular cinema concerned above all<br />

with the systematic elimination of formal innovation and social critique. Of<br />

course, the industry’s full embrace of the Hollywood model should not distract<br />

from the many continuities with Weimar cinema, especially of the early<br />

sound period, and the repeated efforts to “Germanize” successful American<br />

formulas through the introduction of different characters, settings, and atmospheres.<br />

After all, the cinematic articulation in what Witte, in a compelling<br />

phrase, calls “Germanized Americanism” 34 took place on the level<br />

of texts and contexts, and was part of many other, more subtle forms of appropriation<br />

and incorporation within the tradition of the European art film<br />

and in relation to Central European theatrical and musical culture. Referring<br />

to the predatory nature of this process, Klaus Kreimeier has claimed<br />

that “under Hitler’s fascism, the German film came into its own: not by becoming<br />

fascist but by becoming thoroughly German.” 35<br />

12 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Yet what he describes as German melodrama and German comedy was<br />

in fact characterized less by a particular form or style than by the systematic<br />

avoidance of local and regional cultures, social and ethnic characters,<br />

and political and economic processes, except of course in the form of the<br />

most hackneyed clichés. As a result, derivative styles and eclectic tendencies<br />

prevailed in all areas of cinema, from the heavy reliance on musical culture—including<br />

a strong commitment to the operetta—to the many loans<br />

from the theatrical tradition in the acting styles and dramatic conventions.<br />

Indirectly confirming this point, the celebration of German literature (e.g.,<br />

in literary adaptations) and of German history (e.g., in the historical dramas)<br />

remained limited to the state-commissioned films and to prestige<br />

productions with artistic ambitions. The designation “German,” in other<br />

words, functioned above all as a system of reductions and absences that, at<br />

best, realized its populist ambitions in the established forms of petit bourgeois<br />

and bourgeois culture. At worst, it betrayed its underlying contempt<br />

for popular traditions in the shocking banality, triviality, and conventionality<br />

of its products. The high level of craftsmanship and professionalism only<br />

confirmed the pervasive pragmatism and utilitarianism in a national cinema<br />

interested primarily in its own efficiency and effectiveness.<br />

What was the main purpose of such formal conventionality? Almost all<br />

genres were structured around a persistent anxiety over questions of identity<br />

in the form of petit bourgeois consciousness, bourgeois notions of true<br />

character, and conflicting definitions of gender and class; hence the many<br />

compensatory fantasies about rural, small-town, and upper-class life and<br />

the insistence on national and ethnic stereotyping and on normative sexual<br />

identities. However, the intense preoccupation with identity rarely remained<br />

limited to narrative and visual strategies. It permeated all aspects of<br />

cinema culture, from the conditions of film exhibition to the celebrity cult<br />

surrounding certain stars. Even the conditions of production and distribution<br />

reflected these changing definitions of the “German” as a marker of national<br />

identity and a function of product differentiation, whether in the<br />

form of casting choices and censorship decisions or through the marketing<br />

of German films at home and abroad. On the one hand, this obsession with<br />

identity must be examined in relationship to the absent signifier of anti-<br />

Semitism and the myth of racial community. On the other hand, the preoccupation<br />

with the problem of gender must be assessed through the continuities<br />

and ruptures within classical narrative film and the organization of<br />

cinema as a social event and public sphere. Only as part of such an extended<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 13


definition of popular cinema can the hidden affinities between social and<br />

psychic formations be retraced to what was represented and what excluded;<br />

the ways in which conflicts were resolved, and values and behaviors affirmed;<br />

and, most importantly, the means through which normative assumptions<br />

about gender, class, nation, and the absent marker of race had to<br />

be negotiated across the full range of cinema culture.<br />

III.<br />

Instead of arguing that popular cinema is worthy of closer attention because<br />

of previously unacknowledged qualities, I want to take advantage of its<br />

negligible status in the existing scholarship in order to address more fundamental<br />

questions in the study of Third Reich cinema about the relationships<br />

among popular cinema, national cinema, and, as the most marginalized<br />

term, “art cinema.” This means: Rather than adding to the growing<br />

number of symptomatic readings, the following case studies are designed to<br />

challenge preconceived notions about the power of the Propaganda Ministry<br />

and the pervasiveness of Nazi ideology. And rather than investing the<br />

popular with new or different meanings, including those linked to the possibility<br />

of aesthetic resistance, I propose to consider the overdetermined<br />

function of popular cinema in relation to other, equally difficult categories,<br />

including that of national cinema.<br />

Just as the notion of the popular positions individual films in the larger<br />

context of social and cultural practices, the category of the national opens<br />

up the debates to the special conditions of film production and reception in<br />

a state-controlled industry. In the same way that popular cinema must be<br />

conceptualized through the interferences between the political and the<br />

popular, including their illusory convergence in the ideology of populism,<br />

national cinema has to be defined through the national and international<br />

influences that gave rise to a uniquely, and problematically, “German” tradition<br />

of popular cinema. Through their highly charged relationship both<br />

terms, popular cinema and national cinema, can be enlisted in the creation<br />

of a more dynamic model that, at least for the purposes of this study, is<br />

fixated less on the manifestations of power than on the difficulties in achieving<br />

institutional and ideological dominance.<br />

From a film historical perspective, the double crisis throughout the<br />

1930s in the mutual articulation of popular cinema and national cinema<br />

points, first of all, to a serious problem experienced by all European cinemas<br />

after the introduction of the sound film: their shared struggle against<br />

14 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Hollywood’s economic and cultural dominance and their search for artistic<br />

alternatives that would reconcile the growing demand for popular entertainment<br />

with national traditions and sensibilities. In trying to solve these<br />

problems, the Nazi leadership took a radical organizational approach that<br />

began with the forced coordination of the industry and ended with its absorption<br />

into the gigantic media empire overseen by the Propaganda Ministry.<br />

At least on a rhetorical level, the false reconciliation promised by the<br />

populist reawakening of cinema was to be achieved in the heightened terms<br />

of Nazi ideology, which meant: a virulent anti-Semitism and an equally aggressive<br />

nationalism. Despite all the initial measures and regulations, the<br />

populist discourses had to be adjusted constantly to the changing demands<br />

on popular cinema in relation both to national and international trends and<br />

to political and military developments, especially during the war years.<br />

As a way of delineating this failed project, one might want to think of<br />

the popular in German cinema as the expression of a highly unstable compromise<br />

between the decline of traditional folk culture and bourgeois high<br />

culture and the simultaneous rise of a streamlined consumer culture and<br />

a highly politicized media culture. Likewise, national cinema should be<br />

thought of as an ongoing struggle among cultural traditions, economic<br />

objectives, and political interests. The shifting alliances formed by these<br />

heterogeneous influences shed light on the actual or perceived threat of<br />

Americanization to German culture and the various available strategies of<br />

transformation, from the Germanization of American influences to the<br />

Americanization of German practices. Moreover, the fundamental tension<br />

between popular cinema and national cinema that finds expression in the<br />

reception of foreign films draws attention to the more intangible pleasures<br />

and preferences that are usually ignored by totalizing concepts such as the<br />

politics of mass deception, the fascist culture industry, the aestheticization<br />

of politics, the society of the spectacle, and so forth.<br />

All reflections on the popular must begin with an acknowledgment of its<br />

different meanings in modern media culture. In the two meanings identified<br />

by Stuart Hall, the first has to be understood in the sense of belonging to the<br />

people, and therefore being popular; here the popular always presupposes<br />

an oppositional term such as the cultural elite or high culture. The second<br />

meaning simply refers to a product consumed by many people; in that sense,<br />

“popular” implies being determined by the conditions of mass production<br />

and consumption and being fully dependent on new media technologies.<br />

According to Hall, the popular in the first sense is often compared to, or con-<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 15


fused with, folk culture, which is produced and consumed by the people. By<br />

contrast, the popular in the second sense usually refers to cultural products<br />

produced by specific industries for the purpose of mass consumption. In the<br />

context of German film history and criticism, both meanings of the popular<br />

have been used to justify an elitist disregard for genre film as inauthentic<br />

and derivative. They have surfaced in mass-psychological theories of escapist<br />

entertainment as well as in progressive critiques of the culture industry.<br />

Even the most recent debates in cultural studies on popular culture<br />

as a potential site of resistance (e.g., in the act of consumption) are bound<br />

to remain under the influence of such binary thinking as long as they ignore<br />

economic and political factors for the liberating gesture of “reading against<br />

the grain.” That is why Hall insists that “there is no whole, authentic autonomous<br />

‘popular culture’ which lies outside the field of force of the relations<br />

of cultural power and domination.” 36<br />

In the German language, the double meaning alluded to by Hall finds<br />

expression in two terms, volkstümlich and populär, that attest to the separation<br />

of authentic folk culture and industrial mass culture in modern Germany<br />

since the late nineteenth century. Given the highly politicized nature<br />

of folk and folklore within the celebration of national community, these<br />

terms introduce an additional tension after 1933 between an indigenous<br />

folk culture nostalgically evoked in various scenarios of national renewal<br />

and the kind of mass-produced foreign products, Hollywood style, regularly<br />

denounced as a threat to the nation’s cultural identity. To be sure, the popular<br />

had already been mobilized in earlier fantasies about a preindustrial,<br />

traditional folk culture, and an idealized vision of the nation as community<br />

had informed many progressive and reactionary struggles against technological<br />

progress and modern mass culture. Yet during the Third Reich, the<br />

various meanings of the popular were actively enlisted in achieving the<br />

phantasmagoric convergence of folk and mass culture, and of high and low<br />

culture, that depended on the most advanced filmic techniques and technologies<br />

available at the time.<br />

However, which qualities connected the general relevance of popular<br />

cinema to the production of social consensus and the preservation of cultural<br />

hegemony to the complicated dynamics, so specific to National Socialism,<br />

between retrograde fantasies of Volk (folk) and Gemeinschaft (community),<br />

on the one hand, and the unfinished projects of modernism and<br />

modernity, on the other hand? With the popular conceived of as a particular<br />

relationship between representation and reality, and between experi-<br />

16 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ence and desire, the individual films offered powerful fictions of the real<br />

that were sustained by the conditions of collective production and reception,<br />

the conventions of visual spectacle and classical narrative, and the<br />

competing tendencies toward realism and illusionism in the medium itself.<br />

For that reason, popular cinema produced social fantasies in which illusions<br />

and illusionism assumed their most important sociopsychological function<br />

not as an escape from, but as a corrective and an alternative to, existing reality;<br />

there lay their simultaneously oppressive and liberating quality.<br />

Unlike Kracauer’s notion of “film as the daydreams of a society,” which<br />

assumes some degree of unconsciousness, the more recent concept of social<br />

fantasy assumes a more open, dynamic structure for engaging with reality,<br />

whether in the registers of playfulness, speculation, exploration, visual<br />

pleasure, or critical analysis. 37 Even more important, the concept assumes<br />

an active relationship between the producers and consumers of social fantasies<br />

that finds expression in their respective social, cultural, and political<br />

choices. And perhaps most crucial for this study, the conceptualization of<br />

fantasy as a function of cinema in the widest sense underscores the pervasiveness<br />

of compromise in a political system usually characterized as a<br />

hierarchical power structure or totalizing ideological system. From such<br />

a perspective of ongoing struggle, the fantasies produced by, for, in, and<br />

through popular cinema must be regarded as an integral part of social reality,<br />

and as such, they are crucial to any analysis of popular culture and<br />

everyday life in the Third Reich.<br />

Under these conditions, even the categories of escapism and illusionism<br />

can contribute to the reassessment of popular cinema as a mediator between<br />

the fascist public sphere and modern consumer culture. For the concept of<br />

popular cinema as a shared production redefines “escapist entertainment”<br />

as an active process involving producers and consumers, as well as products<br />

and practices. It brings into relief the public and private fantasies that require<br />

at least some form of consensus even under the most oppressive conditions.<br />

Looking at fantasy as such a productive force, Richard Dyer describes<br />

escapism in the cinema as a form of utopian thinking based on the<br />

belief “that something other than what is can be imagined and may be realized.”<br />

38 Accordingly, he calls the display of abundance on the screen a reaction<br />

to scarcity in everyday life, and he links the celebration of energy to<br />

the experience of exhaustion, the desire for intensity to the sense of dreariness,<br />

and so forth. For Dyer such an emotional dynamic cannot be fully understood<br />

through notions of compensation that ignore the active contribu-<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 17


tion of the spectator in the realization of these effects. What is needed, in<br />

other words, is a theory of popular cinema that neither dismisses the filmic<br />

imagination as a mere reflection of social reality nor denounces its wish formations<br />

as deceptive and false.<br />

The new approaches to so-called escapist entertainment also draw attention<br />

to the popular as compromise formation within the fictions of national<br />

culture and identity. During the Third Reich, their influence extended<br />

from popular cinema as a cultural institution with competing class<br />

alliances and its contested social status as an essential, though often vilified,<br />

aspect of national culture to the overdetermined function of popular cinema<br />

as a psychological model for the desired convergence of individual and<br />

collective fantasies. Here Volkstümlichkeit (popularity, but also folksiness)<br />

provided the perfect rhetorical device through which the realities of modern<br />

consumer culture—not to speak of a media-savvy political regime—<br />

could be translated into the fiction of modern folklore and its dreams of<br />

essence and truth. However, unlike the forced coordination of the industry,<br />

the coordination of filmic fantasies was never fully achieved, and the nostalgic<br />

vision of a truly populist cinema was soon abandoned in favor of a<br />

more pragmatic division of labor between the popular and the political and<br />

their changing investments in the continuities and discontinuities of national<br />

cinema. Revealing their initial foundation in racial categories, the<br />

discourses of folk and folklore remained limited to the sphere of official culture<br />

and political ideology, whereas the modern versions of the popular became<br />

confined to the highly circumscribed conditions of what already then<br />

was dismissed as mere escapist entertainment. Within these divisions, neither<br />

the folkloric nor the popular could really develop its progressive<br />

potential. On the contrary, both remained under the influence of the selflegitimizing<br />

constructions of difference that permeated all aspects of popular<br />

culture from day-to-day decisions in the Propaganda Ministry to the<br />

most mundane rituals of cultural consumption.<br />

Through its political function as a discourse of integration, the populist<br />

notion of Volkstümlichkeit draws attention to the strategic divisions within<br />

the institutions of culture and the complete dependence of popular culture<br />

on a population or populace, as it were. Here the concept of collective mentality,<br />

which informed Kracauer’s reflections on an unconscious predisposition<br />

toward fascism in Weimar cinema, cannot be applied to the cinema after<br />

1933 without some further qualifications. For in the place of “a cinema<br />

18 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


firmly rooted in middle-class mentality,” 39 the new alliances between state<br />

and industry established a centralized power structure that, under the<br />

motto of Volkstümlichkeit, cultivated two very different models of cinema: a<br />

small, but highly subsidized, national cinema committed to the idea of race<br />

and nation, and a large, market-driven popular cinema designed to satisfy<br />

bourgeois and petit bourgeois tastes. Just as Kracauer’s model of embourgeoisement<br />

gradually loses significance in the transition, during the 1920s,<br />

from the cinema of “Caligari” to that of “Hitler,” the assertion by Julian<br />

Petley that “in a significant number of films an ideological position is inscribed<br />

which can most usefully be tagged ‘petty bourgeois’” 40 finds little<br />

support in the prevailing genres and styles after 1933. On the contrary, these<br />

class distinctions were quickly absorbed by the new division between classical<br />

genre cinema, whose formal conventions and social rituals had finally<br />

been validated as the expression of a streamlined consumer culture, and the<br />

kind of self-consciously German art film that realized its cultural ambitions<br />

through a heavy reliance on the classical canon of German music and literature<br />

in the form of literary adaptations and musical biographies.<br />

The resultant schism within the popular as a manifestation of, and an<br />

escape from, political ideology produced the genre of the Staatsauftragsfilm<br />

(state-commissioned film), which was distinguished above all by its different<br />

mode of production and reception; but it also allowed for the continuous<br />

integration of international styles into the regional and national traditions<br />

represented by more conventional genres. Significantly, it was the<br />

consolidation of these two sides of cinema, the new national(istic) film art<br />

and traditional genre cinema, that opened up an imaginary space for overcoming<br />

the collective traumas (e.g., fear of freedom, ambivalence toward<br />

authority, crisis of masculinity) that, according to Kracauer, had already<br />

preoccupied filmmakers during the 1920s and that could now be resolved<br />

through the institutionalization, in the very terms of cinema as an illusory<br />

public sphere, of the widening abyss between individual and social fantasies.<br />

In the same way that the notion of the popular offers privileged access<br />

to the divisions within cinema culture as a social practice, the concept of national<br />

cinema sheds light on the considerable tensions between economic<br />

and political forces. For that reason, the reconceptualization of popular<br />

must include its difficult relationship to the nation and to nationalism. National<br />

perspectives in film history usually become relevant whenever films<br />

are discussed in economic terms, most frequently in the interests of a do-<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 19


mestic industry and its need for protective measures (e.g., quotas, tariffs)<br />

against foreign imports. In a state-controlled film industry, political considerations<br />

often interfere with, and take precedence over, economic necessities,<br />

especially under conditions of war. Last but not least, national traditions<br />

take on additional symbolic meanings whenever the cinema’s<br />

contribution to the preservation or promotion of national culture is at<br />

stake; hence the heated debates in most European cinemas since the 1910s<br />

about film as a new art form with a cultural mission and social purpose.<br />

Contemplating the heterogeneous forces harnessed by such a homogenizing<br />

concept as nation, Andrew Higson rightly insists that the boundaries of<br />

national cinema always be examined in relation to specific production, distribution,<br />

and exhibition practices and through the concrete terms of cinema<br />

culture, from the films in circulation, including old classics and foreign<br />

films, to the various audiences and cultural settings and the competing<br />

filmic discourses and institutions. 41<br />

In light of the close connection between film and politics since the consolidation<br />

of the German film industry during World War I, it should not be<br />

surprising that the struggle over the meaning of the national has always<br />

been a struggle over audiences and, by extension, definitions of gender and<br />

class. Following in the nineteenth-century tradition of the theater as the<br />

founding site of German national identity, the cinema came to be identified<br />

with competing initiatives to create a new public sphere, first in the form of<br />

white-collar society and, after 1933, as an extension of the racial community.<br />

At the same time that silent cinema was discovered by various artistic,<br />

social, and political movements, all of which promised to overcome the deep<br />

divisions within culture and society, the new medium and its precarious position<br />

within the established hierarchies of high and low culture acquired<br />

heightened relevance in the project of national culture, namely as an instrument<br />

of social and political stabilization.<br />

It is in the tradition of such initiatives and debates that the category<br />

of the national was repeatedly evoked after 1933 to channel the perceived<br />

double threat to traditional folk culture and established elite culture into<br />

presumably more stable constellations capable of controlling the cinema’s<br />

disruptive energies while harnessing its contemporary sensibilities. For that<br />

reason, the advocates of national cinema continued to fortify its boundaries<br />

through heavy loans from the other arts, especially theater and music; the<br />

selective incorporation of regional culture and ethnic tradition; and the<br />

20 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


careful negotiation of two very different forms of the national in the old and<br />

new discourses of Germanness (e.g., Germany as “the country of poets and<br />

thinkers”) and the highly politicized context of National Socialism (e.g., in<br />

the ideology of anti-Semitism).<br />

Of course, most national cinemas during the 1930s and 1940s defined<br />

their boundaries in relation to others, and that typically in the form of economic<br />

competition; this explains why Hollywood is rarely thought of as a<br />

national cinema. No matter whether these unequal relationships were described<br />

in terms of friendly or hostile exchanges, national traditions were<br />

always evoked as an alternative to international developments and, in that,<br />

bore witness to larger political power struggles. No matter to what degree<br />

collaboration with others was encouraged or discouraged, the resultant alliances<br />

were always formed in full awareness of the cultural fantasies subsumed<br />

under the notion of “national cinema.” However, it would be misleading<br />

to think of the national and the international only through the<br />

dichotomy of self and other, or only in unambiguous and uncontested terms.<br />

In this particular case, the underlying economic and political constellations<br />

also involved the expanding binaries of regional vs. national, Germany vs.<br />

other German-speaking countries, Germany vs. Europe, and Europe vs.<br />

Hollywood that, more often than not, connected the selective incorporation<br />

of other filmic styles and traditions to more aggressive nationalist agendas. 42<br />

During the Third Reich, the program of national cinema and the ideology<br />

of National Socialism created an illusion of ideological and institutional<br />

unity through various mechanisms of exclusion that began with the forced<br />

coordination of the industry and culminated in the strategic division between<br />

a self-consciously national cinema with political ambitions and a<br />

popular cinema committed to private pleasures and fantasies. The heterogeneous<br />

qualities and homogenizing tendencies of popular cinema were enlisted<br />

in the hypocritical celebration of social, cultural, and regional differences<br />

under the heading of an all-encompassing Volkstümlichkeit.<br />

According to Neale, the dissolution of the boundaries between “entertainment”<br />

and “politics”—in other words, the very process denied by the official<br />

pronouncements by the Propaganda Ministry—was to be achieved through<br />

the ideology of nationalism. In his words,<br />

there was a constant stress upon, and fostering of, the film industry<br />

as a national industry and its production as a national product.<br />

Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 21


Hence its audience was constantly addressed as a German audience<br />

watching a German film. If the industry’s dominant product was entertainment,<br />

it was above all German entertainment. 43<br />

Despite such rhetorical efforts, the integrative power of nationalism<br />

could be fully realized only outside the cinema, namely through a retrograde<br />

mythology of Volk, which promised social and cultural harmony in<br />

the ideal of the national community, and through the aggressive force of<br />

anti-Semitism, which came to be identified with a defensive battle against<br />

the destructive effects of modernization and urbanization. The vision of a<br />

strong national cinema provided the ideological framework in which the<br />

popular was to be redefined in relation both to the projects of mass culture<br />

and modernity and to folk culture as the original model of nation in the new<br />

sense of race. 44<br />

Nonetheless, in everyday life, the popular remained the primary site of<br />

struggle for the rearticulation of the national in its changing social, cultural,<br />

and political manifestations. Identified with the continuities of mass culture,<br />

including its strong consumerist orientation, popular cinema continued<br />

to play its most important institutional and ideological functions by sustaining<br />

the illusion of a public sphere free of politics and a form of popular<br />

entertainment concerned only with individual desires and fantasies. Sustained<br />

by these powerful investments, popular cinema contributed to the<br />

conditions under which the official culture of mass spectacles, party celebrations,<br />

art events, and, of course, propaganda campaigns sought, unsuccessfully,<br />

to realize the project of ideological dominance but then quickly<br />

settled for more pragmatic solutions. Yet popular cinema also provided a social<br />

and cultural context in which audiences could partake in the ongoing<br />

transformation of mass culture and modernity, including in an international<br />

context, and engage with the social fantasies that addressed persistent<br />

social anxieties over questions of identity in the registers of classical narrative<br />

cinema. That is why the study of popular cinema is so important both<br />

to a better understanding of the Third Reich and the ruptures and continuities<br />

that define German cinema to this very day.<br />

22 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


2MADE IN 1933<br />

GERMAN-JEWISH<br />

FILMMAKERS<br />

AND THE FORCED<br />

COORDINATION<br />

OF THE INDUSTRY<br />

The year 1933 brought the release of two white-collar comedies that must<br />

be considered transitional in terms of film history and genre cinema. 1 I.<br />

Their<br />

directors, who were Jewish, came from screenwriting and had a talent for<br />

witty dialogues and spirited repartee. Suddenly marked as Other by the new<br />

racial laws and subjected to personal attacks, the two men saw their lives and<br />

careers forever changed by the Nazi takeover and the rise of anti-Semitism.<br />

Though at different points and under different circumstances, both eventually<br />

left for the United States. With them, and many other directors, actors,<br />

composers, and screenwriters, a unique sensibility disappeared from


the German cinema, a sensibility that found foremost expression in the registers<br />

of humor, irony, parody, and farce. After 1933, obligatory cheerfulness<br />

and crude sexual humor took the place of subtle innuendoes and double entendres.<br />

Visual, acoustic, and linguistic wit was abandoned in favor of conventional<br />

dramatic effects, and the provocative play with identities gave way<br />

to highly normative definitions of gender and race.<br />

What are the films in question, and who are the directors? Number One:<br />

Das häßliche Mädchen (The Ugly Girl), the first directorial effort by Hermann<br />

Kosterlitz, who had previously worked as a screenwriter, for Kurt<br />

Bernhardt among others. Shooting took place in January and February in<br />

the Grunewald studio of the Avanti-Tonfilm AG just as Hitler was appointed<br />

chancellor and the Reichstag went up in flames. When the film opened after<br />

much delay on 8 September, in the fashionable Atrium-Theater in<br />

Berlin, the director’s name had been omitted from the credits, and the (allegedly<br />

Jewish) actor Max Hansen became the target of vicious anti-Semitic<br />

attacks, with members of the audience shouting: “We want German movies!<br />

We want German actors!” Nonetheless, many reviewers in the trade press<br />

still praised Kosterlitz for his humorous approach to the problems of everyday<br />

life, and newspaper announcements advertised the film as “pleasant”<br />

and “amusing,” and “full of delightful ideas.” 2 At the time of the premiere,<br />

the director was already living and working in Paris. Having left Germany<br />

in early April, he never even saw the final cut. 3 After assignments as a<br />

screenwriter in Budapest and Vienna, Kosterlitz went to Hollywood in 1936<br />

at the invitation of Carl Laemmle. Working for Universal under the name<br />

Henry Koster, he directed such successes as The Bishop’s Wife (1947) and<br />

Harvey (1950).<br />

Number Two: Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria), directed by the<br />

prolific actor-director Reinhold Schünzel. Production took place from September<br />

to December at the UFA studios in Neu-Babelsberg. The film opened<br />

to generally positive reviews in the Christmas season on 23 December at the<br />

elegant Gloria-Palast in Berlin. However, there was an undeniable sense of<br />

ambivalence about what some reviewers still praised as quality entertainment<br />

in the tradition established by Erich Pommer and what others already<br />

denounced as fundamentally un-German in its aesthetic sensibilities. Such<br />

accusations were never directed at Schünzel personally, a fact that may be<br />

attributed to widespread uncertainty about the new anti-Semitic measures<br />

and their relevance to individual cases. The review in the Film-Kurier conceded<br />

that “some offerings are not entirely agreeable but they at least show<br />

24 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the goodwill of the giver. And that is Reinhold Schünzel.” 4 Similarly, the<br />

Lichtbildbühne concluded that the genre of “musical comedy has acquired<br />

new and more distinct contours in this quality piece by director Reinhold<br />

Schünzel.” 5 Some announcements even compared the director to Ernst Lubitsch,<br />

a surprising choice given the defamatory identification of the latter<br />

with the allegedly Jewish-dominated film culture of the Weimar years. 6<br />

Categorized by the Propaganda Ministry as a “half-Jew,” Schünzel continued<br />

to work with special permission until 1937, when a new production,<br />

Land der Liebe (Land of Love), encountered serious opposition during a<br />

second wave of purges within the industry. Now Goebbels wrote in his diary:<br />

“A typical Jewish concoction [Judenmache]. Totally unbearable. It can’t<br />

be released like that,” and, two days later: “This half-Jew did that on purpose.”<br />

7 Soon afterward Schünzel, too, left for the United States. Rejected by<br />

the exile community as an opportunist and considered politically suspect by<br />

many colleagues, he would only achieve minor successes as a Hollywood actor<br />

and director.<br />

What does the designation “made in 1933” mean for the critical assessment<br />

of individual films and their place in German film history? Does the<br />

year refer to a radical break, defined in terms of political, institutional, and<br />

artistic practices, or is it merely a historiographical construct that, in hindsight,<br />

positions the films within the social and political conditions under<br />

which they were produced and consumed? Here a closer look at another<br />

kind of Überläuferfilme (transitional films) draws attention to the relevance<br />

of dates, periods, and chronologies in the writing of a national cinema indelibly<br />

marked by the politics of identity and its most extreme articulation<br />

in the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. 8 Most German film histories are<br />

organized around the year 1933 as a pivotal moment that is evoked both to<br />

confirm that cinema’s essentially tragic teleology (e.g., in Kracauer’s conception<br />

of Weimar cinema as a movement “from Caligari to Hitler”) and to<br />

account for its historical burdens through various notions of exceptionalism<br />

(e.g., in the argument of a German Sonderweg). The predominance of such<br />

highly politicized readings accounts for the sharp divisions that, until the<br />

1990s, have excluded the 1933–1945 period from the grand narratives of<br />

art cinema and limited serious scholarship to the theoretical paradigms of<br />

propaganda and ideology.<br />

Here a closer attention to the continuities, whether in relation to a particular<br />

sound aesthetic or a distinct thirties sensibility, is bound to sharpen<br />

our awareness of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that in fact sus-<br />

Made in 1933 25


tained cinema after 1933 and provided it with a problematic new self-image<br />

based on the rhetoric of populism. 9 More specifically, popular genres such<br />

as white-collar comedy can help us to rethink the relationship among politics,<br />

technology, and entertainment and develop new perspectives on cinema’s<br />

power as a mediator between public and private fantasies, social and<br />

political realities, and high and low cultural traditions. Among other things,<br />

such a shift in focus is bound to confirm the remarkable adaptability of classical<br />

narrative, Hollywood style, to established artistic and cultural traditions<br />

as well as new institutional and ideological pressures. As I will argue<br />

in this chapter, this appearance of continuity on the level of generic conventions<br />

and the actual strategies of exclusion in the form of institutional<br />

measures are of great relevance for understanding the discursive constructions<br />

that made Jewishness the central category—but also a category of absence<br />

and disappearance—in the restructuring of cinema after 1933. Important<br />

early commentaries on the new identity politics can be found in the<br />

remarkable films made by several German-Jewish directors during the crucial<br />

first year of the regime.<br />

The need for a more differentiated view on the initial process of forced<br />

coordination is confirmed already by a cursory look at official film policies<br />

during the year in question. Without much previous experience in media<br />

politics except in the form of overly ambitious proposals for film as an educational<br />

tool, the Nazis found themselves ill-prepared to assume control<br />

over a large industry with established organizational structures and strong<br />

international connections. Not surprisingly, the representatives of the major<br />

studios remained skeptical not only about the staying power of the new<br />

political leadership, but also about the relevance of its film political programs<br />

and aesthetic visions. As Karsten Witte has shown, institutional and<br />

artistic practices during the first year exhibited a significant degree of inconsistency.<br />

10 Polemical calls for a highly politicized cinema alternated with<br />

sober warnings against any form of entertainment with political tendency.<br />

Fritz Lang’s Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse)<br />

was banned because it allegedly posed a threat to the public order, but even<br />

the anxiously awaited Horst Wessel film, Hans Westmar, about the first “martyr”<br />

of the movement, required significant changes because of its presumably<br />

unflattering portrayal of National Socialism. “Movement films” like<br />

Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex) were first promoted and then discredited,<br />

whereas film operettas, romantic comedies, and society dramas continued<br />

to thrive despite endless complaints about their frivolous subject mat-<br />

26 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ter. And the same trade journals that bemoaned a growing unwillingness<br />

among filmmakers to experiment with new visual styles and techniques regularly<br />

published vicious diatribes against the empty formalism of Weimar<br />

art cinema.<br />

To be sure, these discrepancies should not distract from the far-reaching<br />

changes introduced by Joseph Goebbels as the head of the newly formed<br />

Reich Ministry of People’s Education and Propaganda. For similar reasons,<br />

the considerable tensions between the regime and the industry during the<br />

transitional period need not invalidate the traditional Marxist analysis of a<br />

mutually beneficial alliance forged in response to the crisis of late capitalism.<br />

11 What does require closer attention in this context is the pivotal role<br />

of anti-Semitism as a unifying force that, in defining the new rules of exclusion,<br />

infused new meaning into a national cinema suffering from artistic<br />

stagnation and organizational strife. In many ways, the self-transformation<br />

of German cinema into a popular/populist cinema was made possible<br />

through the elimination of all Jewish members from the film industry<br />

and, by extension, of all aesthetic and critical sensibilities associated with<br />

Jewishness.<br />

The systematic process of silencing began on 28 March, fifteen days after<br />

the creation of the new ministry, when Goebbels appeared before studio<br />

representatives and called for a fundamental reform of the cinema in accordance<br />

with völkisch ideas. His observations on what he described as a<br />

deep spiritual crisis hinged on the diagnosis of a growing schism between<br />

films and audiences that could only be overcome through the building of a<br />

strong national cinema. The trade press quickly adopted the Goebbels position<br />

that “one cannot make films that reflect the mentality of the German<br />

people without also being of the people.” 12 Of course, the unacknowledged<br />

reference point in all subsequent remarks about harmful liberal, intellectual,<br />

and cosmopolitan tendencies was the alleged Jewish influence over all<br />

areas of filmmaking.<br />

Such views were widely disseminated to justify the dramatic changes in<br />

the industry. On 1 June, a consortium of industry groups, government representatives,<br />

and leading German banks founded the Film Credit Bank to<br />

exercise closer control over film projects, including the racial composition<br />

of their cast and crew. After 28 June, with the introduction of the Aryan<br />

Clause, everyone involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of<br />

German films had to have German citizenship and be of German extraction;<br />

some exceptions were made, for instance, for war veterans. 13 A non-Aryan<br />

Made in 1933 27


director or producer could continue to work under the contingency laws<br />

that regulated film imports and foreign-owned companies, but such special<br />

arrangements were arbitrary and unpredictable. All films made with more<br />

than 25 percent Jewish participation fell under this category. 14 Further increasing<br />

the pressures, the Film Chamber began operations on 14 July as<br />

the first of seven chambers in the Reich Culture Chamber, a guild-type<br />

organization that oversaw every aspect of cultural life. Membership in the<br />

Film Chamber became a requirement for continued employment in the<br />

film-related professions. Finally, on 5 October, all labor unions, professional<br />

organizations, and special interest groups were incorporated into the Reich<br />

Workers Guild “Film.” One of these groups was the Regisseure (directors) or,<br />

to use the preferred German term used at the time, the Spielleiter (literally,<br />

play leaders).<br />

The impact of these institutional changes on the filmic imagination can<br />

be traced with particular clarity in the numerous films by German-Jewish<br />

directors. Often working in comic traditions ideally suited to the expression<br />

of hidden anxieties about the question of identity, they continued to make<br />

films that, directly or indirectly, addressed the experience of discrimination<br />

and oppression. In their imaginary solutions to social and psychological<br />

conflicts, they not only showed the mechanisms of exclusion but also<br />

offered strategies for survival, including those involving role-playing and<br />

cross-dressing.<br />

My speculations about the critical possibilities of film comedy—and specifically,<br />

stories of false identity—are not meant to contradict the observation<br />

by Witte that the genre’s continued success after 1933 depended fundamentally<br />

on the discrepancy between the existing tradition of narrative<br />

ironization and the overall immobilization of critical energies. 15 Instead, my<br />

reclamation of these particular directors, but also of many other actors and<br />

screenwriters, for an identifiable Jewish tradition is intended to draw attention<br />

to the filmic articulation of exclusion by the victims of that process, and<br />

in so doing, to prevent their (second) exclusion from German film history.<br />

With the rise of National Socialism, these directors could no longer characterize<br />

their styles as “Jewish” without fear of contamination by the language<br />

of anti-Semitism. They no longer had the freedom to embrace or reject Jewishness<br />

as a productive category in describing their work in the way Ludwig<br />

Berger, in 1932, acknowledged his artistic debt to Ernst Lubitsch. After 1933,<br />

the momentous shift from aesthetic to racial categories in the identification<br />

of filmic sensibilities deprived Kosterlitz and Schünzel of that option. Both<br />

28 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


had been strongly connected to a tradition of ironic detachment and critical<br />

reflexivity that was unmistakably coded as Jewish in the critical reception<br />

of their urban comedies. What previously had been evoked with innocence<br />

and pride now functioned as an aggressive gesture of exclusion that,<br />

in some instances, resulted in the summary dismissal of Weimar cinema as<br />

too “Jewish.”<br />

The actors, screenwriters, producers, and directors thus categorized<br />

were affected doubly by the new racialized thinking: first in their professional<br />

status, and second in the reception of their work. The emergence of<br />

“Jewish” as a category in film criticism—and, of course, more generally, in<br />

political rhetoric—was bound to interfere with a director’s productivity,<br />

from his daily dealings with studio executives and representatives of the<br />

ministry to his occasional discussions with colleagues and friends on the future<br />

of filmmaking and, of course, the new regime. Some directors felt the<br />

need to “prove” that their continued employment was essential to the German<br />

film industry, while others quickly realized the seriousness of the political<br />

situation. Again others believed, mistakenly, that their films would<br />

continue to be appreciated by supportive audiences. The case-by-case decisions<br />

on questions of membership by the Propaganda Ministry only added<br />

to the widespread confusion among film professionals. While most personnel<br />

decisions in 1933 cited Jewishness as a sufficient category of exclusion<br />

from the Reich Film Chamber and its allied organizations, there seems to<br />

have been no binding rule on the application of the Aryan Clause in individual<br />

cases. Precisely this exceptionalism made the impact of anti-Semitism<br />

on filmmaking and filmmakers all the more pernicious.<br />

In addition to Kosterlitz and Schünzel, the following directors continued<br />

to work under these adverse conditions: Fritz Kortner, Richard Oswald,<br />

Max Ophüls, Ludwig Berger, Robert Siodmak, and Kurt Bernhardt. Prior<br />

to his departure for Vienna as the first stop in a long journey of exile, Kortner<br />

still saw the January release of the romantic comedy So ein Mädel<br />

vergißt man nicht (You Don’t Forget Such a Girl). In March and April, Oswald<br />

directed the famous Jewish tenor Joseph Schmidt in Ein Lied geht um<br />

die Welt (A Song Travels around the World) before leaving Berlin for London.<br />

Yet until the day of their departure, these directors regularly received<br />

positive reviews that combined standard phrases such as “witty,” “highspirited,”<br />

“sophisticated,” and “charming” with admiring remarks on their<br />

artistic originality and creative integrity. Ophüls was singled out for his innovative<br />

use of visual and acoustic effects in Liebelei and Berger praised for<br />

Made in 1933 29


the musicality of his direction in Walzerkrieg (Waltz Wars). Even in Siodmak’s<br />

adaptation of the Stefan Zweig story Brennendes Geheimnis (Burning<br />

Secret), critics managed to find a deep honesty despite the many signs of<br />

what they regarded as excessive refinement. And the apparent lack of fully<br />

developed characters, another typical complaint against Jewish directors,<br />

did not stop critics from admiring Bernhardt’s Der Tunnel (The Tunnel) for<br />

its spectacular special effects. 16<br />

While some Jewish actors and directors still received accolades, many<br />

others already saw their names slandered in the press. “Overly refined,”<br />

“shallow,” and “mediocre” became familiar code words for “Jewish.” The<br />

vacillation between aggressive and defensive tendencies in the codification<br />

of a language of resentment is nowhere more evident than on the foreignlanguage<br />

pages of the trade journal Film-Kurier. International reactions<br />

to developments in Germany had became a source of considerable concern,<br />

and much effort was spent on dispelling rumors about the rising anti-<br />

Semitism while at the same time explaining the need for stricter racial policies.<br />

Thus British claims about “the ruin of the German film industry<br />

through the elimination of the Jews” 17 were refuted in lengthy treatises<br />

about the need for a strong and healthy national cinema that usually ended<br />

with more contemptuous remarks about “the same old cant about the ‘productive<br />

Jewish genius.’” 18 Responding to similar reactions in the United<br />

States, the trade press declared defiantly that, “as far as the ‘refugees’ are<br />

concerned, they went voluntarily. They did not have to flee. Nobody placed<br />

any obstacles in their way. The only trouble is that the German public no<br />

longer has any desire to accept their conception of ‘cinematographic art.’<br />

They have become absolutely superfluous.” 19<br />

The threatening conclusion that audiences no longer have any “understanding<br />

or sympathy for the ‘art’ propagated by that certain class of ‘German<br />

fugitives,’ be they directors, actors or musicians,” 20 bears witness to the<br />

discursive strategies that, during the initial phase of forced coordination,<br />

“resolved” all remaining disagreements within the industry through the<br />

vilification of the Jew as the ultimate Other of German cinema. An indication<br />

of the “success” of these exclusionary measures, scenes from numerous<br />

pre-1933 films would later be included in the infamous anti-Semitic compilation<br />

film, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940). At that point, Reichsfilmintendant<br />

Fritz Hippler would use actors like Kortner, Lorre, Gerron,<br />

Bois, and Hansen from The Ugly Girl to illustrate the moral corruption of a<br />

Jewish-dominated film culture. 21 In 1933, such anti-Semitic rhetoric still co-<br />

30 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


existed with unmitigated praise for the leading representatives of that culture.<br />

During that year, Jewish directors were still making films.<br />

II.<br />

The Ugly Girl can be described as a modern morality tale about the importance<br />

of appearances. Still conveying some of the optimism of the stabilization<br />

period, the film tells a typical white-collar success story: a competent<br />

young secretary is first hired, then fired, and ultimately promoted. On the<br />

level of generic conventions, the narrative rehearses the basic structure of<br />

the classical romantic comedy: girl meets boy, boy is uninterested, girl has<br />

a makeover, boy is interested, girl gets boy. The conflicts in the workplace<br />

reflect the contemporary mentality described so poignantly by Siegfried<br />

Kracauer in his case study on white-collar workers. 22 What distinguishes<br />

this film from its Weimar precursors is an acute awareness of the price to be<br />

paid for social acceptance and professional success, including in the form of<br />

sexual harassment. Achieving an effective balance between affirmative and<br />

subversive tendencies, Kosterlitz infuses social realist elements in the tradition<br />

of Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) into the kind of illusionist<br />

strategies perfected by Die Privatsekretärin (The Private Secretary,<br />

1931) and similar early sound comedies.<br />

These realistic elements illuminate the rituals of inclusion and exclusion<br />

that articulate racial, sexual, and national differences especially during<br />

periods of economic and political upheaval. In the same way that the hostile<br />

office environment in the film functions as a microcosm of German<br />

society, the plight of the female title figure sheds light on the growing preoccupation<br />

with bodies as markers of difference. Rather conventionally,<br />

masquerade is introduced as a typical female defense strategy. Yet through<br />

the hidden affinities between sexual and racial discrimination, the resourcefulness<br />

of the young heroine in dealing with a difficult situation offers<br />

a model for similarly painful, and painfully contemporary, experiences.<br />

Taking advantage of the slippage between the filmic representation of race<br />

and gender, the highly codified problem of femininity—in this case, the disguise<br />

of “the ugly girl”—establishes a fictional context for reflecting on the<br />

rise of anti-Semitism and its social implications.<br />

The initial trauma for the main protagonist is that she is perceived as<br />

ugly, which in this context also means: she looks too Jewish. All actions and<br />

reactions are motivated by her desire to undo that initial impression of difference.<br />

The melancholy mood that permeates the film even in its happiest<br />

Made in 1933 31


1. Das häßliche Mädchen (1933, The Ugly Girl), Advertisement from Die Filmwoche,<br />

17 May 1933<br />

moments suggests that her efforts are bound to be only partially successful.<br />

The opening sequence articulates this dilemma by staging a scene of public<br />

humiliation. The setting is quintessential white-collar society: a sleek modern<br />

office building. The situation is equally typical for working women during<br />

the early 1930s: an insurance company has an opening for a secretary.<br />

However, framing and editing deviate from standard treatments in the close<br />

32 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


attention to questions of perception. Its pitfalls are thematized in relation<br />

to the power of the gaze and the experience of objectification. From a young<br />

woman’s beautiful face in close-up, the camera moves along eight similarlooking<br />

women dressed in fashionable suit jackets and coats, adorned with<br />

small caps or cloches, and all armed with the obligatory confident smile.<br />

Then the extensive traveling shot comes to a halt on the face of a very different-looking<br />

woman. Her eyes are averted, her cropped hair covered by<br />

a beret, and her hunched shoulders the very expression of painful selfawareness.<br />

Suddenly, an off-screen voice shouts: “You!” The woman looks<br />

up, frightened, turns her head to the left and the right, and then—visibly<br />

confused—stares straight ahead. “Yes, you!” the male voice insists. With<br />

the camera now placed behind her, she rises and moves toward an officiallooking<br />

man positioned in front of the group. In the following reverse shot,<br />

the camera is located slightly above the man’s head to demonstrate how she<br />

eagerly complies with his request: “Why don’t you come here?”<br />

The personnel manager’s subsequent questions about her typing skills<br />

confirm that the company indeed has an opening for a secretary. Much to<br />

the surprise of the other contenders, the “ugly girl” is hired—as we find out<br />

shortly afterward, precisely because she is ugly. With a slight smirk, the<br />

manager takes her to the accounting department. He opens the door to an<br />

open-floor office with numerous similar-looking young men seated at almost<br />

identical desks. Now it is her inquisitive gaze that becomes identified<br />

with a mobile camera registering various expressions of shock and dismay.<br />

Repeating the shot /reverse-shot pattern from the opening sequence,<br />

the camera’s point of view moves back and forth between the young woman<br />

and the accountants, with the manager serving as an occasional mediator.<br />

“Gentlemen, this is the new secretary,” he declares. “I hope that you will<br />

finally be able to work in peace.” Of course, the organizing principle behind<br />

this game of perceptions is the consensus, reached through suggestive<br />

glances among the men, that the new secretary is indeed unattractive and<br />

destined to become the target of cruel jokes and mean pranks.<br />

While identification with the camera’s point of view is predicated on<br />

certain unspoken assumptions about femininity, the editing establishes a<br />

more dialogic structure and, in so doing, bears witness to the violence inherent<br />

in the exchange of looks and perceptions. On the most basic level,<br />

the man is confirmed as the bearer and the woman as the object of the gaze.<br />

Such objectification links the exercise of male power to an ability to humiliate<br />

others. The woman’s return gaze seems to bear out her lack of agency.<br />

Made in 1933 33


However, at no point does she enter into the oppressive discourse on femininity.<br />

In accepting the role of victim, she turns herself into a mirror in<br />

which the callousness of the men becomes all the more apparent. And by<br />

embodying the cliché of the “ugly girl,” she reveals the hidden assumptions<br />

about normative gender roles and social hierarchies that sustain these unequal<br />

exchanges. Thus the spectators in the cinema are forced to examine<br />

their own identification with the victimizers from the perspective of the victim<br />

and acknowledge a different kind of resolve in her stubborn retreat to<br />

a position of innocence: a solution that assuredly, even in romantic comedy,<br />

can be maintained only for a very short time.<br />

After this initial encounter, the imbalance of power between the female<br />

outsider and the all-male group increases with every exchange of glances,<br />

words, and, eventually, deeds. When the woman complains about the missing<br />

mirror in her locker, one man remarks: “Be glad about that.” Another<br />

accountant declares: “I protest against the ruination of the accounting department,”<br />

and yet another threatens: “Tomorrow she will no longer be<br />

here.” On the next opportune occasion, all the men leave the office except<br />

the one who has volunteered to deliver the final blow in the form of aggressive<br />

sexual advances. Terrified by his behavior, she attempts to leave but<br />

is forcefully stopped at the door. Exasperated, she exclaims, “You are making<br />

fun of me!” and slaps him in the face. But when his colleagues return<br />

and join him in showering her with false compliments, she begins to believe<br />

her good fortune and even volunteers to wiggle her ears for their amusement.<br />

Suddenly, the personnel manager returns and, confronted with the<br />

couple in a compromising embrace, fires the young woman on the spot.<br />

Stunned, she pleads for a chance to demonstrate her superior typing skills.<br />

Even at that point, the manager’s bogus explanation, “You’re simply too<br />

pretty,” leaves her without a clue about the ongoing game of deception.<br />

“But that’s not my fault,” she only replies, meekly.<br />

From then on, the narrative concentrates on the romantic consequences<br />

of that first fateful meeting between the naïve secretary and the brashest<br />

among the accountants. Lotte März (Dolly Haas) must realize that she has<br />

been doubly humiliated: as an employee and as a woman. By falling in love<br />

with Fritz Mahldorf (Max Hansen), the man who so shamed her, she is<br />

forced to recognize her “shortcomings” and accept the seemingly universal<br />

expectations about female appearance and demeanor. Accordingly, Lotte’s<br />

miraculous transformation from a gawky tomboy into an attractive flapper<br />

brings together two very different thematic concerns. On one level, the<br />

34 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


makeover at the beauty parlor, complete with haircut, perm, and facial, becomes<br />

her entry ticket to the world of heterosexual love. Yet on another<br />

level, this beautification project can be seen as a conscious act of masquerading<br />

that, beyond familiar notions about femininity as a performance, introduces<br />

one of the most effective strategies of accommodation in the face<br />

of aggression. Central to this process of strategic accommodation is the<br />

woman’s growing awareness of femininity as a construction. Losing her<br />

naïveté, which is not to be confused with innocence, gives her the ability to<br />

become the image projected onto her by the others. At the same time, her<br />

healthy pragmatism enables her to preserve a sense of self within the constraints<br />

placed upon her by society. Thus enlisted in a subtle commentary<br />

on sexual and racial difference, the “ugly girl” ends up occupying a paradoxical<br />

place that makes her an ideal stand-in for a German-Jewish director<br />

concerned about rising anti-Semitism.<br />

Within the conventions of romantic comedy, the title figure inspires<br />

little more than a humorous reflection on male arrogance, female lack of<br />

self-esteem, and the powerful effect of a beauty treatment. However, as a<br />

figure of difference that rehearses paradigmatic situations of exclusion, the<br />

woman functions as a textual conduit between the similar mechanisms of<br />

sexual and racial discrimination. By articulating the binaries of gender, she<br />

draws attention to other, equally oppressive forms of difference, including<br />

those of race. In a key scene at the beginning of the film, the “ugly girl” cries<br />

out: “But I haven’t done anything to you!” Could this traumatic scene be<br />

read as a veiled reference to Kosterlitz’s own situation in the German film<br />

industry? Could the character’s choice of a makeover be interpreted as a<br />

sign of his willingness to adjust to the new situation? Or must the thematization<br />

of discrimination within the generic constraints of white-collar comedy<br />

be seen as a heartfelt expression of moral outrage in an increasingly<br />

conformist film culture?<br />

These questions structure all of Lotte’s relationships in the narrative<br />

and turn them into hidden reflections on the nature of compromise and<br />

compliance. The most important other figure to be considered in this light<br />

is Fritz, her initial antagonist, who so confidently assumes the right to define<br />

the terms of difference. Fully conversant in the tactics of self-advancement,<br />

he knows how to be both a leader and an equal among his colleagues. A<br />

snappy dresser, he is acutely aware of his attractiveness to women but remains<br />

interested only in himself. This narcissistic quality explains his shockingly<br />

opportunistic behavior. A rare feeling of remorse compels Fritz to get<br />

Made in 1933 35


Lotte rehired, this time as the director’s assistant. But when he arranges for<br />

a secret tryst with Lydia (Genia Nikolajewa), the director’s girlfriend, two<br />

uninvited characters show up at his apartment: first the smitten Lotte and,<br />

soon thereafter, the jealous director Mönckeberg (Otto Wallburg). During<br />

the ensuing series of misunderstandings, which begin with the discovery of<br />

the girlfriend’s fur coat and end with a costume ball at the director’s villa,<br />

Fritz eventually falls in love with Lotte. Yet even in their intimate scenes, he<br />

continues to rely on flattery and deception, a choice that, among other<br />

things, casts some doubt on the ennobling power of love.<br />

Seen in another light, Fritz may be described as Lotte’s double in a revealing<br />

reflection on race that is sustained by less obvious analogies and informed<br />

by more complicated affinities. Accordingly, the trials and tribulations<br />

of love can be said to establish a framework for problematizing the<br />

experience of exclusion and for considering various possibilities of selfdefense.<br />

The vacillation between narrative and discursive levels that brings<br />

out these hidden meanings is achieved through the highly symptomatic differences<br />

between actor and role, and between character and performance.<br />

For with his dark hair, large nose, and expressive features, Fritz looks typically<br />

“Jewish,” whereas Lotte fits the stereotype of the blond German girl<br />

child. Yet it is she, as a woman manqué, as it were, who is from the beginning<br />

marked as Other, and therefore forced to adjust, to assimilate. The<br />

problem of his essence (i.e., Hansen’s presumed Jewishness) is translated<br />

into the problem of her appearance (i.e., Lotte as the ugly girl). With the<br />

roles between victim and victimizer thus reversed, the discrimination<br />

against the male actor finds narrative representation in the discrimination<br />

against the female protagonist. Through such reversals, Fritz, the man with<br />

the typical “Jewish” physiognomy and the quintessential German name,<br />

sheds light on the director’s own need for concealment and, of course, the<br />

fact that he, Kosterlitz, is still there, making films: a gesture both of accommodation<br />

and defiance.<br />

In general, the dynamics between actors and characters played a pivotal<br />

role in the alignment of popular cinema with the ideology of anti-Semitism.<br />

As noted earlier, personal attacks on actors increased considerably during<br />

the early 1930s, and the ethnicity of famous stars was often cited in the reviews<br />

as “proof” of a film’s inferior artistic quality. However, the attribution<br />

of “Jewish” characteristics under the conditions of the star system followed<br />

a somewhat haphazard pattern. In the case of The Ugly Girl, the title<br />

character may have inspired a subtle reflection on sexual and racial dis-<br />

36 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


crimination, but rumors about Dolly Haas’s own background also prompted<br />

emphatic assurances that “she comes from a pure Aryan family.” 23 The<br />

character of Fritz failed to elicit any remarks on racial status, whereas<br />

the actor Max Hansen was denounced as too “Jewish” at the premiere. In<br />

the same way, the comical figure of the director was described in the Nazi<br />

press as a typical member of Berlin’s nouveau riche obsessed with sex and<br />

money. Yet the Jewish comic Otto Wallburg, who (as a veteran of World<br />

War I) made films until 1936 and later perished in Auschwitz, had not yet<br />

become the target of any personal attacks. 24<br />

The reflection on performance and performativity allowed German-<br />

Jewish filmmakers to respond to the oppressive discourse on identity, and<br />

to do so in the deceptively conciliatory terms of romantic comedy. In The<br />

Ugly Girl, the emphasis on performativity unites various visual and narrative<br />

elements in the service of more serious concerns and more pressing<br />

agendas. These multilayered reflections on the importance of appearances<br />

and the necessity of role-playing culminate in the screen persona of Dolly<br />

Haas, whose precarious position between male and female, between woman<br />

and girl, made her ideally suited as a reflection on the performance of identity<br />

as a masquerade. 25 In contrast to other androgynous types like Elisabeth<br />

Bergner, Haas had appeared exclusively in comedies, and, given her close<br />

identification with white-collar culture, she became associated with the typical<br />

anxieties experienced by the members of that new social class.<br />

With such references, the cross-dressing theme from the earlier Der<br />

Page vom Dalmasse-Hotel (The Page from the Dalmasse-Hotel, 1933) returns<br />

in Haas’s choice of male attire for the costume ball and further implicates<br />

sexual masquerade in the individual’s battle against social and<br />

economic marginalization. Her pirate costume, a miniature version of the<br />

director’s costume, alludes to the romantic imagery of piracy, including the<br />

romance of revolt, but also uses the theatrical tradition of the Hosenrolle<br />

(i.e., an actress playing a man’s part), with its allusions to narcissistic doubling,<br />

to underscore Lotte’s secret affinities with the director. The result is<br />

a highly suggestive performance of their marginalization as filmic types.<br />

Significantly, the specter of gender ambiguity in Haas’s screen roles repeatedly<br />

caused concern among reviewers, including one who compared her<br />

earlier performance as Scampolo, ein Kind der Straße (Scampolo, a Child of<br />

the Street, 1932) to “a phantom without real life and, most importantly,<br />

without a clearly identifiable racial and national identity.” 26<br />

Haas performs the transition from the initial trauma of rejection to her<br />

Made in 1933 37


subsequent efforts at adaptation and accommodation by moving from a<br />

very physical, almost slapstick-like comic style to a more internalized, conventionally<br />

feminine style. Her reactions in the beginning are unmistakably<br />

coded in the terms of performative excess: she is always too eager, too<br />

happy, too afraid, or too disappointed. Every emotion is translated into facial<br />

expressions (e.g., of joy, excitement) and bodily movements (e.g., the<br />

curtsies and the cartwheels). This kind of physical excess evokes the lost<br />

immediacy of childhood, but it is also predicated on the denial of sexuality.<br />

Significantly, her gestures become very subdued once she enters into the<br />

rituals of sexual difference. In the same way that the question of identity is<br />

introduced through the recognition of that difference, its reenactment ends<br />

up producing a condition of lack. Since the “ugly girl” is presented as Other<br />

from the outset, it is only through her painful awareness of this otherness<br />

that the slow process of assimilation can take place. Under the pressures of<br />

normative femininity, she begins to reenact the constraints placed on the female<br />

body. While she continues to be vivacious, these aspects of her earlier<br />

self are now realized only in relation to, and for, the male gaze. The precarious<br />

nature of her compromise between authenticity and masquerade<br />

comes to the fore in the final scene, which, for a brief moment, introduces<br />

the possibility of failure (i.e., her suicide attempt) but then rejects such an<br />

unacceptable solution in favor of a happy ending that, even in the closing<br />

image of the romantic couple, fails to compensate for the woman’s initial experience<br />

of humiliation. Perhaps the appeal of romantic comedies that engage<br />

the discourses of gender and race in such subtle ways always hinges on<br />

their ability to provide imaginary solutions that speak both to the desire to<br />

believe and the necessity to doubt; perhaps therein lies the simultaneously<br />

stabilizing and destabilizing effect of popular culture as a whole.<br />

III.<br />

There is hardly a film from the 1933 lineup that would be more suited to a<br />

further investigation of the elusive alliance between gender and race than<br />

the UFA comedy Victor and Victoria. This famous film about cross-dressing<br />

and gender bending, remade as a Hollywood film by Blake Edwards in 1982<br />

and a more recent Broadway musical with Julie Andrews, has played a key<br />

role in positioning sexual difference, including its aesthetic transgressions,<br />

at the center of ongoing analyses informed by feminist film theory and<br />

queer studies. 27 What has been neglected in the exclusive focus on Viktoria’s<br />

presumably liberating double cross-dressing—that is, a woman pre-<br />

38 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


tending to be a man pretending to play a woman—is the degree to which the<br />

question of racial difference permeates the rather predictable play with sexual<br />

preferences and identities. Whereas Viktoria performs the lack of masculinity<br />

only in order to assert her essential femininity, Viktor introduces<br />

the much more troubling possibility of masculinity perceived as lacking.<br />

Significantly, it is through a woman’s masquerade—first as a man, then as<br />

a female impersonator—that the crisis of masculinity becomes available to<br />

representation, including in the racialized terms outlined in the chapter’s<br />

first and second parts. The enforcement of normative femininity provides<br />

the framework through which the equally oppressive but increasingly suppressed<br />

question of race can be articulated, but this time through the figure<br />

of the hysterical male.<br />

As in The Ugly Girl, the opening sequence of Victor and Victoria introduces<br />

the female lead through a selection process based on detached observation<br />

and cool calculation. Actors and singers have gathered in the hallways<br />

of a theatrical agency to show off their talents and, they hope, to obtain<br />

a contract. The scene opens with the camera panning along a row of candidates<br />

preparing for their interviews. The off-screen command “Next,<br />

please!” indicates the tough competition among performing artists in the<br />

depression-ridden late Weimar years. Entering different offices, the camera<br />

uses the opportunity to show the importance of role-playing in times of crisis.<br />

In accordance with the generic rules of comedy, Schünzel makes this<br />

critical point by focusing on those who refuse to comply with the conventions<br />

of the entertainment business. The young Susanne Lohr (Renate<br />

Müller) finds herself dismissed because her timid rendition of a lyrical song<br />

makes her ill-suited for the theater’s world of eroticized fantasies. In an adjacent<br />

office, the failed thespian Viktor Hempel (Hermann Thimig) offers<br />

an unintentionally comical interpretation of classical stage roles, much to<br />

the dismay of everyone present; he too is quickly ushered out. After these<br />

two paradigmatic scenes of rejection, the camera moves back to the corridor,<br />

where a matronly woman and a cantankerous old man assess the general<br />

situation. “This should be forbidden,” he complains, obviously referring<br />

to the lack of talent around him. “A law must be passed.” The open<br />

animosity directed at the two protagonists and, by extension, all the others<br />

thus marked as inadequate, or different, not only sets the story into motion<br />

but also structures many subsequent exchanges.<br />

From this perspective, the dramatic complications are quickly summarized:<br />

Susanne Lohr and Viktor Hempel meet outside the theater agent’s<br />

Made in 1933 39


2. Viktor und Viktoria (1933, Victor and Victoria), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-<br />

Filmarchiv<br />

office and recognize each other as fellow artists in need of a warm meal and<br />

a breakthrough performance. Incapacitated by a severe cold, Viktor persuades<br />

Susanne to take his place as the female impersonator in a variety<br />

show; she has phenomenal success and is offered a lucrative contract. Her<br />

growing international reputation brings Viktor/Viktoria to the London<br />

stage, where she encounters the charming Robert (Adolf Wohlbrück) and<br />

the elegant Elinor (Hilde Hildebrand), both members of British high society.<br />

Sustained by the conventions of drawing-room comedy, the theme of<br />

sexual permissiveness and, by implication, of cultural decadence becomes<br />

closely linked to the latter class and country. And it is in that same tradition<br />

of national stereotyping that the naïve German woman in drag becomes<br />

easy prey to the sophisticated British aristocrats. Robert’s gay come-ons in<br />

the bar and, later, in full awareness of her deception, at the pub and the<br />

barbershop, as well as Elinor’s flirtatious behavior, suggestive of a lesbian<br />

attraction, during a teatime rendezvous, only end up validating Renate’s<br />

true identity as a heterosexual woman. The spectacle of transvestism neither<br />

allows for a celebration of same-sex desire nor advocates less rigid gen-<br />

40 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


der roles. Robert, who quickly uncovers Susanne’s secret, decides to test the<br />

limits of her “masculinity” in order to bring out the “real woman” in her.<br />

Likewise, Susanne is increasingly miserable about having to witness the<br />

harmless flirtation between Robert and Elinor from the position of a man.<br />

The happy ending puts everybody in his or her rightful place: Renate and<br />

Robert as the romantic leads, Elinor and her fumbling suitor Douglas (Fritz<br />

Odemar) as their comic reflections, and Viktor doubling as his very own<br />

Viktoria.<br />

Like The Ugly Girl, Victor and Victoria engages with the question of<br />

identity on two levels, through the spectacle of gender performance, including<br />

its implicit assumptions about masculinity and femininity, and<br />

through the dramatic conflicts among the characters, including their perception<br />

of one another as either male or female, masculine or feminine, heterosexual<br />

or homosexual. On the level of performance, it is Renate Müller<br />

as Mister Viktoria who disrupts the established modes of spectatorship, especially<br />

in relation to the visual presentation of the female star. Yet where<br />

the other characters see a pretty young boy in tails who attracts the attention<br />

of all the ladies in a nightclub, the film’s spectators see the actress in<br />

an evening suit, with her hips and breasts clearly visible. As Susanne, Müller<br />

personifies the softer, more feminine version of the New Woman that dominated<br />

the fashion scene of the 1930s. But even as the presumably worldly<br />

Mister Viktoria, she looks and acts like a good German boy: blond hair, blue<br />

eyes, regular features, slender build, good posture, impeccable manners, and<br />

a natural aversion to alcohol and debauchery; hence her timid and bashful<br />

behavior in the men’s dressing room.<br />

Behind the titillating effects associated with cross-dressing, Schünzel’s<br />

film advocates very normative definitions of gender and sexuality; whether<br />

or not this diverts attention from the more disturbing spectacle of hysterical<br />

masculinity cannot be answered decisively. By testing the limits of the<br />

possible and permissible, the various characters define the boundaries of<br />

“normal” masculinity and femininity, with Viktor Hempel obviously positioned<br />

on the far side of acceptability. Strangely, it is only the ambiguous<br />

Robert who regularly exercises his privilege of judgment, and that despite<br />

his association with aristocratic refinement and extravagance. And despite<br />

the gay mannerisms of Wohlbrück himself, the character’s ability to recognize<br />

what is considered to be the essence of a woman makes him the leading<br />

advocate of healthy heterosexuality.<br />

Precisely this tension within the representation of male authority allows<br />

Made in 1933 41


the spectator to partake in the illicit thrills to be gained from the humiliation<br />

of those found deficient, deviant, or simply different. This sadistic quality<br />

is most apparent in the cruel jokes Robert plays on Viktor and, with more<br />

selfish motives, on Susanne. As the only character with a clearly defined<br />

social and sexual identity, Robert does not fall for the boyish charms of<br />

the female impersonator, Mister Viktoria, and he has only contempt for the<br />

squeamish Viktor, whom he drives to the verge of a nervous breakdown<br />

(e.g., through threats of a duel with Douglas). On several occasions, Robert<br />

aggressively confronts both of these gender impostors with their actual or<br />

presumed lack, that is, their being anything but “victors” and “victorious.”<br />

In the case of Susanne, this means exposing her to the manly world of smoking,<br />

drinking, flirting, and fistfighting. Luckily for Susanne, she shares Robert’s<br />

belief in an authentic femininity, as evidenced by her indignant response<br />

to Viktor’s initial proposal about taking over his stage act—“I am a<br />

girl and I shall remain a girl”—and her quiet assurance to Robert that “her<br />

femininity is hereditary.”<br />

Yet what role does the story of cross-dressing assign to the real Mister<br />

Viktoria? The fact that Viktor is the only one who remains uncoupled points<br />

to his pivotal role as a shifting signifier in the play with gender performances.<br />

He stands on the margins both of the romantic constellations and of<br />

the experiments in cross-dressing. Identified with the difficulties of masculinity,<br />

Viktor rejects traditional gender roles for a more free-floating, liberating<br />

eroticism. His Spanish-style drag number, which is motivated in the<br />

narrative through financial problems, offers in fact a perfect cover for his<br />

feminine tendencies; Susanne at one point even calls him a sissy. In developing<br />

the character, Hermann Thimig relies heavily on the comic stereotype<br />

of the hysterical male, but also incorporates allusions to homosexuality<br />

and, less directly, to Jewishness. 28 Interestingly, Thimig was not Schünzel’s<br />

first choice for the part of Viktor; the director wanted Max Hansen, the male<br />

lead from The Ugly Girl. The Austrian actor who replaced Hansen had already<br />

worked with Renate Müller in several earlier films where his comical<br />

take on male incompetence provided the perfect backdrop for her goodnatured<br />

pragmatism.<br />

In Viktor and Viktoria, Thimig’s exaggerated style brings out the discrepancy<br />

between his grandiose self-image and his actual accomplishments.<br />

The grotesque exaggeration of movements and gestures must be seen as<br />

a defense against the recognition of an inadequacy that already informs<br />

Viktor Hempel’s first appearance as a dramatic actor with a “distinguished”<br />

42 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


career as Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo, to name only a few signature roles.<br />

After several close-ups of lobby cards that show Thimig in dramatic poses,<br />

the camera does its utmost to ridicule his megalomania, for instance by<br />

showing his not so silent struggle with various mundane objects and by focusing<br />

on his considerable effort necessary in conjuring up these images of<br />

heroic masculinity. The skewed, low camera angles and the cross-cutting<br />

between the agitated Viktor and the uninterested theatrical agents may offer<br />

some comic relief, but, again, the underlying patterns of perception—<br />

namely the perception of otherness—are ultimately based in feelings of<br />

resentment.<br />

What does Thimig’s performance of the hysterical male in this popular<br />

comedy from the year 1933 have to do with the problem of race and, more<br />

specifically, the specter of anti-Semitism? It might be argued that the disempowerment<br />

of the outsider becomes the means through which the group<br />

asserts its mastery: in The Ugly Girl through her lack of femininity, and in<br />

Victor and Victoria through his lack of masculinity. As Sander Gilman has<br />

shown, gender functions as a privileged trope in fantasies about the Jewish<br />

body, beginning with the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish man; hence<br />

the frequent equation of the male Jewish body with (mental) illness, homosexuality,<br />

and neurasthenia and, in a kind of circular reasoning, with the diagnosis<br />

of racial degeneracy. 29 In light of the imbalance between the centrality<br />

of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology and the conspicuous absence of<br />

anti-Semitic images from most feature films, stereotypes must be treated as<br />

part of a more complex system of projections and displacements that is<br />

equally effective in relation to what is present and what is absent. 30 Isolating<br />

the function of the stereotype from its reliance on filmic means (e.g.,<br />

camerawork, mise-en-scène, performance) only ends up validating the division<br />

between the narratives of racial and sexual identity. After all, in the<br />

transitional films from the early 1930s, Jewishness functions as the absent<br />

signifier in films presumably concerned only with the performance of femininity.<br />

These discursive effects confirm Ella Shohat’s observation that “ethnicity<br />

is culturally ubiquitous and textually submerged” and must be seen<br />

“as a spectrum of identities and differences, all ultimately involving questions<br />

of inequalities of power.” 31<br />

In using the problem of masculinity for a humorous reflection on identity<br />

and difference, Schünzel took advantage of a long and predominantly<br />

Jewish tradition in Weimar cinema. The stories of mistaken and false identities<br />

that enjoyed renewed popularity in the early 1930s refer back to the<br />

Made in 1933 43


early slapstick comedies of Lubitsch, where the desire, or the necessity, to<br />

be someone else played a key role in everyday situations unmistakably<br />

coded in ethnic terms. Of course, the very physical humor in these films can<br />

be interpreted as an indicator of oppression or a form of accommodation.<br />

Precisely because it hovers on the margins of the visible, Jewishness in the<br />

cinema requires the markers of sexual difference in order to tell its stories<br />

of humiliation. In light of the frequent association of film comedy with experiences<br />

of lack, whether defined in social or sexual terms, it should not<br />

be surprising that the displacement of the problem of race onto the problem<br />

of gender constitutes one of the key elements of ethnic humor, whether<br />

in terms of screen performances or directorial styles.<br />

Accordingly, Schünzel’s fixation on “the hysterical male” must, like Kosterlitz’s<br />

identification with “the ugly girl,” be understood as a sly commentary<br />

on the racialized Other as the organizing principle behind a new and<br />

aggressively German cinema. This preference for indirect expressions is already<br />

evident in Schünzel’s early screen roles as a dandy and con artist, continued<br />

in comedies that thematized the virtues of deception, and perhaps<br />

also contributed to his professional opportunism after 1933. 32 For that reason,<br />

transvestism, in the form played out by Victor and Victoria, does not<br />

necessarily represent a move toward more flexible definitions of gender, an<br />

exploration of the boundaries of identity. On the contrary, the transgressive<br />

effect always hinges on the belief in an essential gender identity unaffected<br />

by the play with appearances and perceptions. With his unique talent for<br />

conjuring up such deceptive scenarios of transgression, Schünzel contributed<br />

to the continuities of popular cinema in the transitional period until<br />

1935. But while his affinity for states of ambiguity and ambivalence made<br />

him appealing to audiences, the same qualities also made him increasingly<br />

suspicious to the Propaganda Ministry.<br />

With these wider implications, the last films by German-Jewish directors<br />

draw attention to the aesthetic and ideological mechanisms of exclusion.<br />

These are often acknowledged in studies on film exile but ignored in film<br />

historical accounts of the Third Reich that are concerned more with anti-<br />

Semitic images than with Jewish voices. Here a closer look at the films<br />

“made in 1933” confirms the important contribution of Jewish film artists<br />

to the classical German cinema while mapping the radical transformation<br />

of the term “Jewish” during the first year of the cinema of the Third Reich.<br />

As I have argued, the last films by Kosterlitz and Schünzel introduce the<br />

possibility of critical reflection and, perhaps, resistance, a category that con-<br />

44 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


tinues to play a key role in the critical assessment of popular culture as a site<br />

of contradictions within ideology and a vehicle for alternatively affirmative<br />

and subversive effects. The examined films reveal the perspective of the victims<br />

in the process of forced coordination through aesthetic strategies usually<br />

identified with the so-called inner emigration. Against recent calls for<br />

new historiographical models in German film history based on technological<br />

innovations or stylistic movements, the defiant voices of Jewish film<br />

artists from 1933 underscore the overwhelming force of politics. In so doing,<br />

these films simultaneously contradict and confirm Klaus Kreimeier’s assertion<br />

that “the nature of film itself . . . ultimately resisted the ‘micromanagement’<br />

of Goebbels’s controlling machinery.” 33<br />

As my analysis of the performance of identity in The Ugly Girl and Victor<br />

and Victoria has shown, the manifestations of racial politics in the cinema<br />

of the Third Reich need to be read in ways that include sexual and<br />

racial stereotypes, as well as the complicated relationships between them.<br />

For that reason, the claim by Richard Grunberger, “Had a Rip van Winkel<br />

[sic] dozed off in the Depression and woken in the Third Reich he would<br />

have found the screen filled with the self-same images,” 34 cannot be corroborasted<br />

by two comedies that utilize the conventions of the white-collar<br />

comedy of the Weimar years but do so with an acute awareness of its threatened<br />

artistic and critical potential. As products of the transitional year 1933,<br />

these films bear witness to the oppressive effects of the new aesthetic and<br />

political order on the filmic imagination. Through the distinctive signatures<br />

of Kosterlitz and Schünzel, they also draw attention to the irreversible losses<br />

to German cinema—and, of course, to culture and society as a whole—<br />

brought about by anti-Semitism.<br />

Made in 1933 45


3<br />

<strong>CINEMA</strong>, SET DESIGN,<br />

AND THE<br />

DOMESTICATION<br />

OF MODERNISM<br />

As a visual medium, film has always relied on architectural styles and ideas<br />

in the construction of narrative space, whether through the material elements<br />

of set design or the filmic techniques of mise-en-scène. 1 I.<br />

Silent film in<br />

particular has functioned as a laboratory for new art and design movements<br />

and provided a training ground for modern tastes and sensibilities. Given<br />

the strong influence of painting, architecture, and set design on early filmmakers,<br />

it is not surprising that mise-en-scène played a major role in the<br />

emergence of Weimar art cinema and continues to be regarded as a distinguishing<br />

mark of the German film tradition. The productive contribution


of the visual arts can be seen in the expressionist vocabulary of chiaroscuro<br />

lighting, organicist forms, and object symbolism; the simple, angular designs<br />

in the social realist films of the stabilization period; and, more generally, the<br />

prevalence of spatially overdetermined genres such as the Kammerspielfilm<br />

(chamberplay film) and the Straßenfilm (street film). Lotte Eisner has described<br />

this close attention to space and spatiality as an expression of the<br />

Romantic demonic, which hinges on an animation (Beseelung) of the object<br />

world, whereas Siegfried Kracauer has used the same stylistic preferences<br />

to examine the unresolved conflicts and resentments behind the fatal trajectory<br />

“from Caligari to Hitler.” 2<br />

Yet what happened to this much-celebrated “metaphysics of decor” 3 after<br />

the introduction of film sound and, even more relevant for this study, the<br />

Nazi takeover of the industry? Does Eric Rentschler’s claim that “film narrative<br />

of the Nazi era generally privileged space over time, composition over<br />

editing, design over movement, sets over human shapes” hold true for all of<br />

popular cinema? 4 Or were these preferences limited to the historical dramas,<br />

Prussian films, and genius films and their allegorical spaces of German<br />

manifest destiny? Did the romantic comedies, sophisticated comedies, and<br />

musical comedies contribute to what has been described as the aestheticization<br />

of politics in the “mass ornament”? 5 Or must we consider a very<br />

different scenario for the contemporary mise-en-scène, namely a growing<br />

separation between political spectacles and public rituals that allowed audiences<br />

to retreat to what Klaus Kreimeier calls “imaginary shelters of<br />

middle-class privacy and normalcy”? 6 Following this line of argumentation,<br />

the changing attitudes toward modern design in the cinema, and in everyday<br />

life, might be more productively discussed through the division of labor<br />

between progressive technologies and regressive fantasies that, during the<br />

Third Reich, informed the increasingly conventional approaches to production<br />

design.<br />

As an artistic program, social movement, and stylistic revolution, modernism<br />

had a profound influence on architecture, design, and other visual<br />

arts during the 1920s. Tracing its fate in popular cinema after 1933, the<br />

pages that follow will examine what might be called permutations of modernism<br />

in a number of films that rely on a decidedly contemporary urban<br />

setting for their character development and dramatic structure. While modernist<br />

styles in architecture found a refuge in industrial architecture and<br />

product design, where the masculine ethos of labor and industry still ruled<br />

supreme, their filmic equivalents were banished to the feminine world of<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 47


sensual and emotional excess. The resultant separation between public and<br />

private spaces, and between real and imaginary spaces, made possible the<br />

selective inclusion of what is sometimes referred to as moderate modernism<br />

(gemäßigte Moderne) in the nation’s new designs for living. These highly<br />

gendered divisions complied with the official antimodernism, especially its<br />

chauvinistic overtones, while acknowledging the pervasiveness of modern<br />

design in everyday life.<br />

Understanding these divided legacies and their contribution to the<br />

filmic mise-en-scène of social and sexual identities requires us to distinguish<br />

more clearly among the modernism associated with the aesthetic<br />

avant-gardes, the process of modernization identified with Fordism and<br />

Taylorism, and what Thomas Elsaesser has called modernity as a particular<br />

attitude toward life—in other words, lifestyle modernism. 7 Approached in<br />

such a contextualized manner, popular cinema’s troubled alliance with<br />

modern architecture and design not only sheds light on its growing dependency<br />

on illusionist effects. These qualities also bring into relief the gendered<br />

terms that made possible the marginalization of high modernism<br />

in the actual cityscapes and its transformation in the imaginary spaces of<br />

cinema.<br />

In mapping this process, I propose to pay special attention to the futuristic<br />

drama of the transitional period and the woman’s film from the war<br />

years, which, directly or indirectly, thematize these developments, whether<br />

through their utopian and dystopian visions of modern technology or<br />

through their symbolic use of domestic interiors as reflections of modern<br />

femininity. Throughout I am less interested in uncovering residues of the<br />

modernist style in Bauhaus-inspired houses, functionalist designs, or artdeco<br />

furnishings than in considering the conditions of domestication and,<br />

by extension, feminization that gave rise to the styles and sensibilities of<br />

moderate modernism. As I hope to show, the abandonment of the constructed<br />

spaces of high modernism for more organic, and presumably more<br />

authentic, places was not merely an aesthetic choice but involved a fundamental<br />

critique of the modernist tenet that identities are determined by external,<br />

material forces. The subsequent retreat to a more essentialist position<br />

and the identification of the modernist aesthetic with the problem of<br />

femininity and, as a consequence, with the rituals of consumerism must be<br />

considered central to the visual and narrative articulation of the antimodernist<br />

impulse in the popular cinema of the Third Reich.<br />

48 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


What role did the many well-trained and highly respected set designers<br />

play in this process? German film architects (Filmarchitekten), to use the<br />

professional designation coined in the silent period, have always sought inspiration<br />

in new architectural movements. From the film interests of Hans<br />

Poelzig to the architectural obsessions of Fritz Lang, from mundane construction<br />

problems on the film set to ostentatious motion-picture theater<br />

designs, we find ample evidence of extensive and intensive exchanges between<br />

cinema and architecture. Architects turned to the new medium to develop<br />

innovative approaches to design questions and to explore aesthetic<br />

solutions to social problems. They also responded to what they perceived as<br />

a most troubling disintegration of urban space and a proliferation of surface<br />

effects under the impact of new filmic modes of perception.<br />

Thriving on such controversies, the cinema during the 1920s became an<br />

important showcase for modern design and, given its trend-setting function,<br />

for contemporary lifestyles and mentalities as well. Just as new approaches<br />

to urban planning inspired the stylized cityscapes of Metropolis (1926) and<br />

Asphalt (1929), concurrent developments in product design found expression<br />

in the cold functionalist interiors of Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh,<br />

1924) and Spione (Spies, 1928). And in the same way that architecture and<br />

design in the early 1930s returned to more traditional styles, the early sound<br />

film often reduced the modernist challenge to mere decorative effects. In<br />

the process, the enthusiastic tributes to modernism as an instrument of democratization<br />

gave way to virulent attacks on commodity culture and its<br />

presumably destructive impact on ethnic, regional, and national culture.<br />

The extensive research on film architecture in silent cinema continues<br />

to cast a long shadow over the early sound period and is partly to blame for<br />

the blanket dismissal of most films from the 1930s as visually uninspired.<br />

However, some of the conclusions about the subsequent instrumentalization<br />

of visuality and spatiality are characterized by a peculiar contradiction.<br />

Sweeping claims about the subordination of politics to the rule of the spectacle<br />

appear side by side with equally broad observations about the impoverishment<br />

of the visual arts during these years. Focusing on aesthetic productions<br />

that privilege collective modes of reception (e.g., films, buildings,<br />

public events), some critics have diagnosed a convergence, if not confusion,<br />

of spectatorship and experience unique to fascism that, in their view, had a<br />

devastating effect on all aspects of public life. Usually these critics depart<br />

from the influential theses about the aestheticization of politics under fas-<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 49


cism first presented by Walter Benjamin in the early 1930s and developed<br />

further by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their analysis of the<br />

culture industry. 8<br />

Whether theorized in the tradition of Critical Theory or under the<br />

influence of more recent poststructuralist debates, the conjunction of aesthetics<br />

and politics (e.g., in the notion of the simulacrum) continues to be<br />

seen as a distinguishing mark of fascist mass culture. Yet without the necessary<br />

historical specificity, the more ambitious conclusions about the politics<br />

of spectacle and the aesthetics of simulation often end up overestimating<br />

National Socialism’s control over the visual imagination. Especially where<br />

they promote, or simply assume, a totalizing view of Nazi aesthetics, these<br />

reflections on “fascinating fascism” are often more revealing about present<br />

theoretical concerns than the actual relationships between mass culture<br />

and modernity at the time. 9<br />

Arguing within the same conceptual divisions, film scholars have denounced<br />

the propaganda films as all-powerful in their manipulation of<br />

imaginary desires. At the same time, they have dismissed the popular films<br />

as dialogue-heavy and plot-driven and therefore ineffectual as works of art<br />

or propaganda. In both cases, too little attention has been paid to filmic<br />

techniques such as camerawork, editing, and mise-en-scène; questions of<br />

set and costume design tend to be ignored altogether. Even the most theoretically<br />

ambitious studies on the power of the image and the gaze rely primarily<br />

on narrative analysis and ignore one of the principal means of image<br />

production in the cinema: set design, or, to use a more contemporary<br />

term, production design.<br />

To reverse this trend, it might be useful to look at the writings of architectural<br />

historian Dieter Bartetzko, who has examined architecture in the<br />

Third Reich specifically through its cinematic effects. Moving beyond formalist<br />

approaches that denounce Nazi architecture as bad classicism, Bartetzko<br />

emphasizes its experiential qualities and uses this shift toward the<br />

cinematic to better understand the convergence of space, desire, power, and<br />

imagination in what he calls “mood architecture.” 10 His approach offers a<br />

conceptual model for thinking about cinema as a function of architecture.<br />

In his readings of buildings and places, architecture is elevated to an event.<br />

It becomes a medium that simultaneously produces and reproduces attitudes<br />

and behaviors but does so through an eclectic mixture of architectural<br />

styles, including historicism, neoclassicism, and various regionalist revivals.<br />

For that reason, the analysis of styles is no longer limited to formal elements<br />

50 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


and characteristics but includes emotions, mentalities, and dispositions as<br />

well. Bartetzko uses such an expanded definition to show how the prevailing<br />

tendencies in film and theater design during the 1920s continued in the<br />

architecture of the 1930s but did so in the context of a very different choreography<br />

of the masses. The experience of collectivity in a thus reconfigured<br />

architectural space, Bartetzko argues, established an experiential<br />

paradigm for a public sphere no longer limited by the traditional distinction<br />

between political events and public diversions.<br />

In what ways can Bartetzko’s conclusions be utilized for a critical assessment<br />

of set design in popular films that, at first sight, only confirm the<br />

continuities of genre cinema, including its emphasis on private spaces and<br />

individual experiences? Obviously, only with an acute awareness of the<br />

growing division of labor between the various architectural practices, including<br />

in film and theater, that made possible this process of transformation<br />

and reconfiguration. A more differentiated account of the shared fate<br />

of modernist architecture and popular cinema after 1933 would therefore<br />

have to acknowledge the considerable range in formal approaches; it would<br />

also have to stress the linkages with other spatially determined modes of visual<br />

pleasure such as tourism and consumerism. Contributing to such a<br />

critical reassessment, recent studies on the legacies of the Bauhaus School<br />

have pointed to the continuous influence after 1933 of modernist styles<br />

on “marginal” practices such as product design. Other contributions have<br />

drawn attention to the moderate modernism advanced by influential architects<br />

like Bruno Paul and Paul Schmitthenner and promoted through the<br />

furniture designs produced since the 1910s in the Deutsche Werkstätten in<br />

Dresden-Hellerau. 11 Banished from public spaces and official settings, the<br />

modernist imagination survived in the pragmatic world of functional architecture<br />

and industrial design or formed strategic alliances with the new regionalist<br />

and rural revival movements. In similar ways, the modern visions<br />

conjured up by the Weimar cinema continued to assert their influence in<br />

the design-conscious genres that thematized this process of marginalization<br />

in their visual and narrative strategies.<br />

II.<br />

Sometime during the early 1930s, film credits exchanged the term “film architect”<br />

(Filmarchitekt) for that of “set design” (Ausstattung). Far from being<br />

a minor terminological change, the implicit return to theatrical traditions<br />

announced a major shift from the highly symbolic functions of public<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 51


spaces to the largely decorative functions of private space as an extension of<br />

the individual. The conventions of theatrical illusionism provided a framework<br />

or setting, quite literally, for the disengagement of aesthetic from<br />

political categories and the degradation of stylistic choices to matters of<br />

personal taste. Symbolizing the productive convergence of cinema, architecture,<br />

and modernism, Metropolis remained an important reference point<br />

for set designers during the early sound period and continued to be hailed<br />

as a showcase of modern design trends and innovative special effects. Perhaps<br />

it was out of admiration for the film’s dynamic mass choreography and<br />

its dream of social reconciliation that Goebbels (allegedly) offered Lang the<br />

leadership of the German film industry. Perhaps it was also the conflation<br />

of modernism and mythology in its monumental architecture that, together<br />

with the allegorical representation of the machine as femme fatale, opened<br />

up new possibilities for the spatialization of identity in the very different social<br />

and racial utopias formulated after 1933.<br />

While Lang left for a distinguished career in Hollywood, his three collaborators<br />

from Metropolis— Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht—stayed<br />

in Germany and worked on numerous productions throughout<br />

the 1930s and 1940s. Together with many other Weimar set and costume<br />

designers, they helped to preserve the good reputation of the UFA style. According<br />

to Alfons Arns, Hunte and Kettelhut’s approach to film architecture<br />

may be described as “static monumentalism” and must be distinguished<br />

from the more dynamic style preferred by that other famous designer team<br />

from the period, Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig. 12 Collaborating on Murnau<br />

classics like The Last Laugh, the latter aimed at a radical expansion of<br />

narrative space both through the traditional elements of mise-en-scène<br />

(settings, props, lighting) and through uniquely filmic techniques such as<br />

editing and camerawork (e.g., Karl Freund’s famous “unleashed camera”).<br />

By contrast, Hunte and Kettelhut remained true to their background in the<br />

theater and constructed stunning landscapes and cityscapes without ever<br />

challenging the static order of the proscenium arch. It was this older tradition<br />

of illusionism that, according to Arns, prevailed after 1933 and, from<br />

then on, redefined the filmic mise-en-scène in relation to the principle of<br />

visuality.<br />

The transformation of the modern spirit from a new mode of perception<br />

with powerful social and cultural implications into a mere sensory or<br />

decorative effect coincided with the further codification of classical narrative<br />

during the early sound period. It fit even better into the apolitical de-<br />

52 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


signs for living—a different kind of Lebensraum indeed—that dominated<br />

popular cinema after 1933. The positive images of technology as a liberating<br />

force disappeared from the screen, a victim of its association with earlier<br />

modernist movements committed to diminishing social differences. Aspects<br />

of the machine aesthetic survived only in non-narrative forms like the<br />

industrial film and, later, the war newsreel (e.g., Walter Ruttmann’s work for<br />

companies like Mannesmann, Bayer, and Henkel). Yet in the context of<br />

entertainment, the much-celebrated beauty of labor could not compete<br />

against the more seductive beauty of leisure. 13<br />

Under such conditions, Hunte and Kettelhut continued to quote modernist<br />

styles but, by the mid-1930s, found themselves working primarily on<br />

small-scale romantic comedies and society dramas. During these projects,<br />

they were often aided by longtime collaborator Vollbrecht. The only context<br />

in which the three men could still develop more elaborate designs was the<br />

historical films, where the high production costs often corresponded with<br />

clear propagandistic intentions. To what degree these prestigious assignments<br />

contributed to the new phantasmagoria of race and nation can be<br />

seen in Hunte’s knowledgeable reconstruction of eighteenth-century Stuttgart<br />

in Veit Harlan’s anti-Semitic Jud Süss (Jew Suess, 1940) and of nineteenth-century<br />

Berlin in Wolfgang Liebeneiner’s Bismarck film, Die Entlassung<br />

(The Dismissal, 1942). How these designers approached the new<br />

constellations of myth and modernity becomes glaringly obvious in their<br />

modified approach to the high modernist style. After Metropolis, Otto Hunte<br />

continued to pursue his interest in futuristic designs, first in Lang’s sciencefiction<br />

adventure Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929), and then in<br />

Karl Hartl’s more ambiguous technological thriller Gold (1934). Films about<br />

oil boom towns like Stadt Anatol (City of Anatol, 1936) and Anschlag auf<br />

Baku (Attack on Baku, 1942) confirmed the designer’s fascination with<br />

modern technology. Yet they also demonstrated to what degree the cult of<br />

production could serve progressive as well as reactionary purposes.<br />

Erich Kettelhut, too, returned to the cool functionality of Metropolis<br />

and Asphalt with the technological adventure F.P.1 antwortet nicht (F.P.1<br />

Doesn’t Answer, 1932) but then limited his forays into the modern world to<br />

elaborate stage sets and decorative backdrops. For the Hartl film, Kettelhut<br />

even constructed an artificial island—“magnificent constructions,” to cite<br />

one reviewer— on the Oie Island near Greifswald. Yet this island of steel and<br />

glass would be his last contribution to an aesthetic of production that still<br />

acknowledged the perspectives of industry and labor. After 1933, Kettelhut<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 53


worked on numerous Paul Martin comedies, including the popular Glückskinder<br />

(Lucky Kids, 1936), and he designed several revue films for Georg<br />

Jacoby and Marika Rökk, most notably Die Frau meiner Träume (The<br />

Woman of My Dreams, 1944). He also was responsible for the symbolically<br />

charged interiors in Detlef Sierck’s Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936), a film<br />

to be discussed in Chapter 6.<br />

The demontage of the cult of the machine can be traced in three technological<br />

or futuristic dramas designed by Kettelhut, Vollbrecht, and Hunte<br />

in the transitional period of the early 1930s. Evoking the Weimar spirit<br />

of innovation and cooperation, these German-French coproductions announce<br />

their modernist and, by extension, international allegiances already<br />

in the choice of subject matter. Yet behind the suspenseful stories about<br />

great inventions and achievements, these films already betray a new weariness<br />

of technological progress, especially in the context of globalization and<br />

its threats to the nation. Not surprisingly, the utopian promises of immeasurable<br />

wealth and unlimited mobility invariably fail in the face of intrigue,<br />

espionage, and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion. Thus in F.P.1 Doesn’t<br />

Answer, German engineers erect a fueling station in the Atlantic Ocean for<br />

transatlantic air travel but are sabotaged by foreign agents in the service of<br />

global capitalism, a threat visualized through water as an element of infiltration<br />

and entrapment. In Der Tunnel (The Tunnel, 1933), American and European<br />

workers dig a tunnel connecting the two continents, but lose their<br />

lives in a gigantic explosion that is indirectly caused by the machinations of<br />

international financiers. And in Gold, a power-hungry British millionaire is<br />

stopped from building a gold-making machine by his German engineer and<br />

his exploited workers after news of the invention causes turmoil on international<br />

financial markets. Following in the Weimar tradition of Amerikanismus<br />

(Americanism), the figure of the engineer is called upon to defend the<br />

project of progress and enlightenment against greedy individuals and corporations.<br />

Yet his isolation and singularity make clear a permanent solution<br />

to the conflict between power and knowledge can only be found in the new<br />

ethos of duty and service to the (national) community. Only a return to the<br />

values of nationalism, the films seem to suggest, will bring out the positive<br />

qualities of modernization.<br />

The first contribution to what might be called a radical rewriting of the<br />

technological imagination, the 1932 UFA production F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer,<br />

contains a highly symbolic scene that illustrates well the new relationship<br />

between aesthetics and technology. In one brief moment, the famous avia-<br />

54 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


tor Ellissen (Hans Albers) uses a Marcel Breuer tubular steel chair to break<br />

through a porthole on the refueling station while it is filling up with poisonous<br />

gas. Should we read this liberating act as a telling commentary by<br />

Kettelhut on the power of high modernism to break through the walls<br />

erected by nationalism and to infuse, quite literally, a breath of fresh air into<br />

a world still ruled by boundaries and rivalries? Or does the symbolic gesture<br />

implicate this classic of modern furniture design in the rise of a global<br />

culture—symbolized by the artificial island—in which any sense of place, or<br />

rootedness, has disappeared? Because of his association with aviation as a<br />

privileged trope of internationalism, Ellissen remains triumphant in<br />

demonstrating the heroism of technology. Yet in the love triangle, the adventurer<br />

is defeated by the more serious, reliable engineer who personifies<br />

the reconciliation of technological progress with the desire for traditional<br />

community. Thus in the end, the romance of technology gives way to the<br />

apotheosis of German character, a process that combines sentimental and<br />

aggressive elements and magically resolves the tensions that, according to<br />

Kreimeier, defined “the fascist modernization of Germany.” 14<br />

In the second example, the 1933 Bavaria-Film production The Tunnel,<br />

Vollbrecht relies on the highly charged opposition between the spectacle of<br />

labor on the one side, and the international centers of finance capital on the<br />

other side. He uses these divisions to rearticulate the dialectics of modernity<br />

through the symbolism of high/low and light /dark so familiar from<br />

Metropolis and, to evoke a tunnel project concerned more with workers’ solidarity,<br />

from G. W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1931). Produced<br />

during a time of rising anti-Semitism, the second filmic adaptation of the<br />

Kellermann novel did not remain unaffected by the identification of Jewishness<br />

with modernist styles, that is to say: its denunciation as an aesthetic<br />

sensibility presumably without origin or identity. Director Kurt Bernhardt<br />

(Curtis Bernhardt) worked with special permission during a temporary return<br />

from French exile; screenwriter Hermann Kosterlitz was already listed<br />

in the credits under the pseudonym Reinhart Steinbicker. 15<br />

Director and designer both became targets of anti-Semitic attacks, with<br />

the attacks on the (non-Jewish) Vollbrecht really directed against modern<br />

architecture and design. Most negative reactions in the press focused on the<br />

New York City sequence, with its rapid montage of skyscrapers and street<br />

scenes. Despite the formal similarities with the opening of Metropolis, a film<br />

greatly admired by Goebbels and Hitler, Nazi polemicists denounced these<br />

innovative techniques as part of the despised functionalist style and its cult<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 55


of surface phenomena. In their view, the simple white facades, dynamic<br />

lines, elegant lobby, and tastefully furnished rooms of the ultramodern Astor<br />

Hotel in The Tunnel symbolized the worst of an international consumer<br />

culture addicted to pleasure and luxury. The appearance of this art-deco<br />

gem among otherwise undistinguished, conventional interiors is all the<br />

more revealing of the fundamental changes after 1933 if one compares this<br />

production to two other adaptations of the novel: a much more innovative<br />

first adaptation by Kurt Matull in the eponymous PAGU film from 1915 and<br />

a very sleek and stylish British-Gaumont version from 1935, for which Curt<br />

Siodmak wrote the screenplay.<br />

The most significant changes in the attitude toward modernist design<br />

can be found in the 1934 UFA production Gold. This “technical phantasmagoria”<br />

was hailed in reviews as a “contemporary romance of steel” that,<br />

according to one reviewer, appealed to audiences precisely through its “uncanny<br />

demonic nature.” 16 Hunte’s gold-making machine, a platform with<br />

five metal tubes pointing outward like phalluses, combines standard themes<br />

from the technological imagination (e.g., the spectacle of electricity, the<br />

suspense of high pressure) with embellishments taken from art nouveau<br />

and art deco (e.g., elongated forms, organic shapes, shiny surfaces, ornamental<br />

arrangements). Largely decorative and without any narrative function,<br />

this machine lacks the mythological power of the Moloch from Metropolis.<br />

And despite the heavy allusions to alchemy, the process of gold-making<br />

fails to conjure up the dangers of male conception depicted so compellingly<br />

in the birth scene of the False Maria. In his designs for the film, Hunte follows<br />

the example of Metropolis and The Tunnel and locates the sites of conflict<br />

underground, with public and private spheres organized along a vertical<br />

axis. This spatial hierarchy extends to the gendered triangulation of<br />

desire, with the powerful father figure and his sexually alluring daughter occupying<br />

the upper world of privilege and the working men, including the<br />

engineers, challenging these divisions only after they, quite literally, rise<br />

above the tyranny of the machine. Without the social context established by<br />

Metropolis’s legendary city of the future, the demonization of the machine<br />

in Gold prepares the ground for the denunciation of foreign (i.e., Jewish)<br />

capital as evil and parasitic. Missing are the allegorical impulses that in Metropolis<br />

allow at least for a critical reflection on the double nature of the machine<br />

through the Moloch as the symbol of industrial labor and the False<br />

Maria as the embodiment of a dangerous female sexuality. Instead the doubling<br />

of demonic forces through the femme fatale above and the dangerous<br />

56 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


machine below translates the morally charged opposition into the terms of<br />

national and racial stereotyping, with the Englishman suddenly revealed as<br />

the Jew.<br />

These three films were the last to articulate the possibilities of modern<br />

technology in the form of utopian narratives and futuristic designs. The<br />

spectacle of engines, turbines, and hydraulic pumps gave way to the destructive<br />

power of dynamite, electricity, and gas. After Gold, the grand narratives<br />

of scientific discovery and technical invention were limited to the<br />

simultaneously idyllic and heroic past populated by “great Germans” like<br />

Peter Henlein, Gustav Diesel, Robert Koch, and others. Contemporary settings<br />

remained free of the drama of innovation and provided an occasion<br />

for technological feats only in the form of recreational activities and domestic<br />

eccentricities (e.g., Heinz Rühmann’s racing cars and kitchen machines).<br />

Beyond such humorous solutions, the machine aesthetic found a valid outlet<br />

only in the obsession with luxury cars and other high-priced consumer<br />

goods, a phenomenon often associated with Weimar culture. Thus in Hitlerjunge<br />

Quex (Hitler Youth Quex, 1933), the image of Heinrich George sitting<br />

in a hospital waiting room designed in the functionalist style, reading the<br />

lifestyle magazine Elegante Welt, only serves to demonstrate the deep alienation<br />

of this quintessential German from the modernist imagination and its<br />

false promises of social change through good design. Similarly, the appearance<br />

in Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son, 1934) of Luis Trenker in the<br />

sleek art-deco interiors of a New York City town house only underscores his<br />

spiritual homelessness in the modern world and confirms a collective need<br />

for the kind of antimodernism associated with Heimat.<br />

Under these conditions, the modern spirit found a highly compromised<br />

expression only in the three central categories of otherness: Weimar, America,<br />

and modern femininity. Often in combination with exclusive fashion<br />

styles and leisure pursuits such as traveling on cruise ships and private<br />

yachts, modern design became a marker of refinement, extravagance, and<br />

conspicuous consumption. Appearing in genres ranging from romantic<br />

comedies to crime thrillers, the ocean liner emerged as the most important<br />

showcase for international design trends, except of course for the shunned<br />

streamline moderne style prevalent in many Hollywood comedies and musicals<br />

from the 1930s. On the German ocean liners, a modest version of turnof-the-century<br />

modernism prevailed, from the geometrical designs of Josef<br />

Hoffmann to the organic arts-and-crafts style of Henry van de Velde. Examples<br />

include the elegant white-lacquer Jugendstil interiors on the ocean<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 57


liner in Allotria (Tomfoolery, 1936), the more solid Deutsche Werkbund<br />

styles on the Montrose in Dr. Crippen an Bord (Dr. Crippen on Board, 1942),<br />

and the geometrical Wiener Werkstätte designs on the cruise ship in Frauen<br />

sind keine Engel (Women Are No Angels, 1943).<br />

Precisely this association of the modern style with upper-class tastes,<br />

leisure pursuits, and typical female interests also accounts for its survival in<br />

the popular revue films. Combining elements from the Hollywood musical,<br />

the film operetta, and the variety show, the revue films in a way took the<br />

place of the technological adventures that had preserved modernist sensibilities<br />

in their thematic concerns. Usually limited to the design of elaborate<br />

stage sets, the modern imagination may have been reduced to consumerist<br />

pleasures—including visual pleasure—but was now also free to reclaim its<br />

utopian and fantastic qualities. Here the revue film received many impulses<br />

from the Hollywood musical, a further indication of its unique position as<br />

a mediator between national and international trends and a conduit in the<br />

ongoing permutations of modernism from the 1920s to the 1930s. 17 German<br />

designers tried to develop a more dynamic stage choreography by studying<br />

the luxurious white-on-white sets of the sophisticated comedies produced<br />

by Paramount and by imitating the ornamental choreography created by<br />

Busby Berkeley for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 18 Even banned films like the<br />

Berkeley classic Gold Diggers of 1933 were available for private screenings<br />

to members of the industry. Not surprisingly, the suspended staircases and<br />

cantilevered platforms from Dancing Lady (1933), Born to Dance (1936),<br />

and Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937) reappeared in numerous UFA revue<br />

films from the late 1930s. Perhaps the best way to describe their mode of<br />

adaptation is through terms like moderation, containment, and compromise.<br />

In the process, angular forms were replaced with round forms, and<br />

geometrical shapes with organic shapes. Within these confines, any experiments<br />

with the dynamic relationship among identity, form, and space could<br />

only be realized in the context of individualism. As a consequence, the new<br />

choreography of the masses no longer absorbed the individual but instead<br />

heightened his or her accomplishments. The emotional effects can be studied<br />

exemplarily in the elaborate stage numbers of Hallo Janine (Hello Janine,<br />

1939) and Wir machen Musik (We Make Music, 1942).<br />

III.<br />

As design historians have shown, the feminization in the 1930s of a style that<br />

during the 1920s had regularly been described as hard, cold, and angular—<br />

58 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


that is, as masculine— occurs in most other national cinemas, including the<br />

sumptuous interiors associated with Hollywood screen deco and the allwhite<br />

settings of the Italian “white-telephone” films. 19 The popularity of<br />

neoclassical styles in graphic design, interior design, product design, and<br />

women’s fashions can be traced from the celebrated film sets of Cedric Gibbons<br />

(for MGM) to the grandiose architectural fantasies of Albert Speer<br />

(for Hitler). Likewise, the reconciliation of modernist elements with eclectic<br />

historicist styles can be seen in the fashionable interiors populated both<br />

by the society ladies from the sophisticated comedies produced by Paramount<br />

and UFA and by the famous German and American stars posing<br />

for photomagazines in their Hollywood and Babelsberg villas. As a consequence,<br />

the design trends in Germany after 1933 must be evaluated in the<br />

context of international developments. All point to profound changes in<br />

the ideology of modernism: from the aesthetics of production to the aesthetics<br />

of consumption; from the celebration of progress to the cultivation<br />

of style; from an interrogation of structure to a fetishization of surface effects;<br />

from a program of social and political change to various forms of individual<br />

self-expression.<br />

However, in the German cinema, the enlistment of modern styles in the<br />

staging of femininity brought with it a malicious tone missing from Hollywood’s<br />

celebration of a blissfully consumerist and unabashedly upper-class<br />

modernism. To put it somewhat schematically, a feminized high modernism<br />

emerged as the Other of a masculinized culture of mass spectacles and<br />

events, to extend Andreas Huyssen’s reflections on the gendered divide between<br />

mass culture and modernism in Weimar culture to the very different<br />

ideological divides that informed the repeated attacks on modernism after<br />

1933. 20 Not surprisingly, many areas of popular culture were deeply affected<br />

by the antimodernist campaigns that culminated in the 1937 Degenerate Art<br />

Exhibition and that inspired, among other things, a number of filmic treatments<br />

that deserve closer attention.<br />

Released only one year after the exhibition, Die Umwege des schönen<br />

Karl (The Roundabouts of Handsome Karl, 1938) uses the experiences of a<br />

young waiter (Heinz Rühmann) during the world economic crisis to denounce<br />

modern art and design as the most obvious symptom of a society<br />

ravaged by parliamentarianism, communism, lesbianism, cosmopolitanism,<br />

and so forth. The equation of Weimar modernism with the culture of decadence,<br />

including its racial implications, found an even more strident expression<br />

in Venus vor Gericht (Venus on Trial, 1941), a trial drama about a<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 59


young sculptor in Weimar Berlin who resists the international trend toward<br />

abstraction by creating female nudes in the style of Georg Kolbe and Arno<br />

Breker. Very pleased with the results, one reviewer spoke of a final reckoning<br />

with “the Jewish art trade that cunningly took advantage of this mishmash<br />

of ’isms.’” 21<br />

Old-fashioned expressions such as Frauenzimmer (literally, a woman’s<br />

room) for a young single woman confirm to what degree spatial metaphors<br />

have always been used to express male anxieties over the hidden nature of<br />

female sexuality. 22 The equation of the feminine with interior spaces and,<br />

more generally, with interiority can be found in ancient myths such as Pandora’s<br />

Box, and the association of female imagery with questions of dwelling<br />

and belonging is evident already in the etymology of a word like “metropolis”<br />

(Greek for mother city). A highly gendered approach to space even informs<br />

Freud’s reading of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to spatial<br />

phobias such as claustrophobia and agoraphobia. Under the influence<br />

of the modern uncanny, the filmic presentation of interior design after 1933<br />

returned to these gendered divisions between male and female spaces that,<br />

during the 1920s, had celebrated the modern as an extension of masculinity.<br />

Now associations with the problem of femininity predominated; the<br />

modern style became identified with the inauthentic gestures of female<br />

emancipation. Replacing the New Man as the icon of modernism at its most<br />

liberating, the New Woman emerged as the privileged metaphor of an oppressive<br />

modernity. 23 In the same way that the modernist style was initially<br />

hailed as a release from the confinements of tradition, it was now held responsible<br />

for the leveling of categories like place, space, and identity.<br />

Abandoning the big city as a laboratory of modern styles and sensibilities,<br />

films by the mid-1930s began to identify such preferences with difficult<br />

domestic settings and inappropriate personal choices. No longer connected<br />

to ambitious social programs and reform movements, a modernist aesthetic<br />

found its most troublesome incarnation in the single career woman and her<br />

(ill-advised) quests for individual self-fulfillment; in other words, for “a<br />

room of one’s own.” Identified with a particular sensibility rather than a<br />

particular style, the modern interiors in the films to be considered on the<br />

following pages might tend toward the neoclassical or resemble a bohemian<br />

version of arts-and-crafts. Often inspired by regional and ethnic styles, the<br />

cozier versions of these female interiors usually feature wood furniture,<br />

wrought iron, earthenware, as well as natural materials like wicker, bast,<br />

and cork and hand-loomed fabrics in simple geometrical patterns. By con-<br />

60 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


trast, the cool look of the international deco style typically requires plenty<br />

of space and light, precious materials and fabrics, as well as pale shades and<br />

shiny surfaces. Yet in both cases, the main character’s flight from traditional<br />

marriage and family life to these highly symbolic spaces of female liberation<br />

offers an occasion for a sustained reflection on modern femininity.<br />

Analyzing these fictional interiors within the conventions of genre cinema<br />

calls for a closer look not only at set and costume design, but also at<br />

camerawork, mise-en-scène, and editing. After all, in order for any ideological<br />

investments to take place, interior space must be transformed into narrative<br />

space. Of particular relevance to this process is the identification of<br />

the (gendered) gaze with power and desire. Spatial control is established<br />

through the point of view of the characters; through their movements inside<br />

the space; and through editing, lighting, and camerawork, including<br />

shot sizes, movement, and framing. To what degree these domestic spaces<br />

are highly gendered in nature can be seen in the rituals of entering and exiting.<br />

It is always the man who enters the woman’s space; it is always he who<br />

comments on the decor in relation to her physical appearance and his sexual<br />

preferences.<br />

Within such a highly codified narrative space, doors and windows establish<br />

points of transition between interior and exterior spaces and, by extension,<br />

public and private definitions of female identity. Pieces of furniture<br />

become obstacles and auxiliaries in the project of self-realization. Curtains<br />

and screens function as framing devices, and props establish hierarchies between<br />

foreground and background. Dramatic lighting, together with natural<br />

light sources and primary color schemes, sets the general mood, whereas<br />

editing and framing offer important clues for the spatial experiences of various<br />

characters. To give only one example, open floor plans are repeatedly<br />

used to express a woman’s resistance to traditional notions of domesticity<br />

and to suggest a more fluid relationship among her professional, social, and<br />

domestic lives. Invariably, such unconventional layouts enlist the close<br />

relationship between interior/exterior space and the social/sexual body to<br />

show the limits of emancipation.<br />

The hybrid genre of the woman’s film emerged as the ideal setting during<br />

the late 1930s and early 1940s for achieving the domestication of high<br />

modernism as well as modern femininity. During the war years, the heightened<br />

sense of urgency surrounding cinema—whether in terms of political<br />

propaganda or escapist entertainment—made the modern styles all the<br />

more relevant as a privileged expression of alienation, ambivalence, and al-<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 61


terity. The two love stories that I have chosen to make this point, Auf Wiedersehn,<br />

Franziska (Good-bye, Franziska, 1941) and Liebespremiere (Love<br />

Premiere, 1943), are fairly typical of a wartime cinema striving to reassess<br />

modern femininity within the new designs for living. In both cases, the<br />

man’s initial opposition to domesticity is portrayed as a sign of healthy masculinity<br />

that expresses itself in his professional commitments: as a war journalist<br />

in Good-bye, Franziska and a serious composer in Love Premiere. By<br />

contrast, the women use interior design to express their principled opposition<br />

to traditional female role definitions.<br />

With considerable didactic ambition, the dramatic events reveal these<br />

interiors as a mere protective shield, a mask of modern emancipation, behind<br />

which the woman hides her personal and professional insecurities.<br />

Both the arts-and-crafts studio apartment of the (asexual) good companion<br />

in Good-bye, Franziska and the elegant town house of the cold (frigid) career<br />

woman in Love Premiere are designed to demonstrate the inevitable<br />

failure of such emancipatory gestures. In the end, it is the woman who, as<br />

part of her successful initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, has to<br />

leave her own space in order to move, quite literally, into the man’s world.<br />

This process no longer involves the kind of talking cures performed in the<br />

sophisticated comedies of the early 1930s, with their madcap heroines and<br />

spirited sexual banter. Instead the woman’s surrender to social and aesthetic<br />

convention requires a spatial cure, as it were, that results in her expulsion<br />

from the utopian spaces of modernity.<br />

In accordance with these underlying tendencies, Good-bye, Franziska,<br />

the only openly propagandistic work by Helmut Käutner, matches a quintessential<br />

German actress, Marianne Hoppe, with a similarly wholesome<br />

version of moderate modernism. Designed by Willi A. Hermann, Hoppe’s<br />

small Berlin studio apartment evokes associations with life reform, healthy<br />

living, and, of course, Kunsthandwerk (arts-and-crafts). Hoppe uses the<br />

combined living/working space to make wooden toys, “little fetishes for big<br />

people,” as she calls them. Her many knickknacks, from figurative candleholders<br />

to animal sculptures, serve to diminish her ambitions as a wood<br />

artist and a working woman. Like the actress herself, whose plain but classic<br />

beauty conveys wholesomeness, the apartment realizes the modest desires<br />

of its occupant with a healthy pragmatism; hence her description of<br />

the rooms as “simple, functional, a little cool—like me.”<br />

In terms of aesthetic choices, Hoppe’s studio apartment might well be<br />

on display in one of the halls devoted to good German design in the annual<br />

62 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


3. and 4. Auf Wiedersehn, Franziska (1941, Good-bye, Franziska), Courtesy<br />

Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv


Berlin Building Exhibitions. The pieces of furniture are tasteful but never<br />

pretentious; the materials are simple but far from cheap or crude. Wood furniture<br />

predominates in the combined living and working area, as well as in<br />

the small sleeping area. The extensive use of raffia for the floor covering in<br />

the seating area and behind the bed frame and the preference for thickly<br />

woven fabrics with abstract patterns in a modified Bauhaus style contribute<br />

to an overall impression of solidity and earnestness. Details like the parchment<br />

wall lamps and the open brick fireplace give the living area an old-<br />

German, rustic character, an indication that the young woman will have no<br />

difficulties leaving behind this modern idyll of personal independence for<br />

married life (with the Hans Söhnker character) in an old family residence<br />

filled with antique furniture and medieval art.<br />

Love Premiere, skillfully directed by Arthur Maria Rabenalt and designed<br />

by the venerable Robert Herlth, stages the same problematic in the<br />

more glamorous cosmopolitan settings known from the popular society dramas<br />

and their preoccupation with upper-class lifestyles. Herlth’s influence<br />

on the production is evident not only in the elaborate stage sets, complete<br />

with grand spiral staircase, but also in the marked preference for the faux<br />

neogreco styles first shown in Amphitryon (1935). In Love Premiere, Herlth<br />

continues with such stylistic experiments, including their gendered references,<br />

and reinvents modernism as a form of modern classicism, but this<br />

time through a contemporary “taming of the shrew” story. A modern luxury<br />

apartment provides the stage on which a successful revue star, who<br />

marries only to have a child, is slowly transformed into a real wife by the<br />

strict love of her husband-for-hire. Like Hoppe, the actress Kirsten Heiberg<br />

is presented as an extension of the interiors, with her oval face, slender body,<br />

and elegant robes displaying the same perfection that characterizes her elegant<br />

showcase home. Design elements from the furniture continue in her<br />

dresses, including a long white robe with black piping and a tunic-style evening<br />

gown with a beaded neckline. 24<br />

The revue star inhabits what appears to be a two-level town house, with<br />

a large living room, music room, and dining room on the first floor and two<br />

bedrooms on the second floor. High floor-to-ceiling windows, covered by<br />

transparent gauze curtains and a striped awning on the patio side, create an<br />

atmosphere of openness. The emphasis on horizontal movement, a key feature<br />

of modernist design, is achieved through white walls, low ceilings, and<br />

a generous layout of several rooms connected through sliding doors and<br />

transparent dividers. The impression of spaciousness is underscored by<br />

64 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


5. and 6. Liebespremiere (1943, Love Premiere), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-<br />

Filmarchiv


several light-colored carpets with decorative borders. Their distinctive undulating<br />

zigzag pattern returns, in variations, in the frieze along the upper<br />

walls and in the casing of the staircase. The Greek influence continues in<br />

a white satin chaise with black borders, tassels, and piping and a similarlooking<br />

sofa with low backrests and armrests. Modern elements predominate<br />

in the music room’s casual seating arrangement, complete with black<br />

sofa and white seats. The dining room, with the simple wood chairs and high<br />

paneling, is designed in the arts-and-crafts style, as is the brick patio with<br />

its quaint bamboo furniture. Last but not least, art-deco influences can be<br />

found in the oval-shaped light fixtures and numerous sculptures, including<br />

a bas-relief behind the seating area, a black seal with a silver ball on the<br />

mantelpiece, and a bronze female nude with tennis racket on the upper<br />

landing of the staircase. Together the materials—the glass windows, the<br />

white drapes, the shiny fabrics—convey an atmosphere of independence<br />

and confidence, qualities typically associated with creative men. However,<br />

the feminine touches in the generous use of decorative fabrics and the many<br />

flower arrangements, including gladiolas, lilac, and the obligatory philodendron<br />

and rubber plant, indicate that the owner of the town house may not<br />

be entirely lost to the allure of traditional romance.<br />

As noted earlier, it is always through specific filmic techniques that the<br />

interiors become part of narrative space. Following established conventions,<br />

the woman’s living room is first shown from the perspective of Hans<br />

Söhnker, an impoverished composer who later agrees to become her husband-for-hire.<br />

Significantly, the town house is the only interior setting in<br />

the film that does not offer any exterior views; it remains isolated. The bachelor<br />

pad shared by the composer and his songwriter friend, on the other<br />

hand, opens onto a clichéd panorama of rooftops, complete with chimney<br />

sweep, neon lights, and glimpses of a painter and nude model in an adjacent<br />

studio. This juxtaposition of closed female space and open male space<br />

determines the spatial journey required of the modern career woman if<br />

she wants to find true love and happiness. Her interiors may be impressive,<br />

but they are also overly designed, just like her plans about motherhood<br />

without a husband and marriage without commitment. Not surprisingly,<br />

their troubled marriage is consummated only after the woman leaves her<br />

artificial world and moves into his small and crowded place where the natural<br />

order of things prevails, both in the casual decor and in male-female<br />

relations.<br />

What are the wider implications of such didactic scenarios for the<br />

66 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


much-praised “metaphysics of decor” in German cinema? The gradual shift<br />

from the heroic modernism of the early 1930s to the decorative modernism<br />

in the woman’s film of the early 1940s suggests both an erasure of social and<br />

political implications and a domestication of the promises of self-expression<br />

in the minor registers of interior design. These permutations were achieved<br />

through the association of modernism with femininity. Yet the demands of<br />

the modern woman kept alive the promises of freedom and change, if only<br />

in the form of home decorating. Obviously, modernism in popular cinema<br />

did not just mean simple geometrical forms, smooth white surfaces, and<br />

functional styles. These elements also reflected very specific attitudes toward<br />

designed space as an extension of individual and society, and they offered<br />

important reflections on the sexual and social body. My discussion has<br />

focused on the material elements, including fabrics, materials, patterns,<br />

pieces of furniture, art objects, and so forth. Obviously, future analyses will<br />

have to investigate further how the prevailing approaches to production<br />

design in films with a contemporary setting contributed to other filmic<br />

practices, including editing and cinematography, that extended the antimodernist<br />

impulse into the formal language of film itself. In all cases, the<br />

complicated relationship between the modernity of film as a visual mass<br />

medium and the antimodernism of popular cinema in the Third Reich can<br />

only be examined through the material objects and effects through which<br />

the permutations of the modern took place, the basic elements of production<br />

design.<br />

Cinema, Set Design, and Modernism 67


4AT THE MOVIES<br />

FILM AUDIENCES<br />

AND THE PROBLEM<br />

OF SPECTATORSHIP<br />

I.<br />

Going to the movies is both a private ritual and a public act. The cinema<br />

provides groups and individuals with a real and imaginary space for making<br />

sense of their lives. But it also allows them to withdraw from the pressures<br />

of the everyday and seek other experiences in the safe and comfortable<br />

environment of the motion-picture theater. Precisely this vacillation<br />

between a continuous engagement with social reality and a temporary surrender<br />

to the world of fantasies made the German cinema after 1933 such<br />

an immensely popular, if not strategically populist, cinema. Through the<br />

modes of identification associated with classical narrative, spectators were


positioned inside as well as outside Nazi ideology; the illusory nature of this<br />

opposition was an essential part of the appeal. Moreover, the motionpicture<br />

theater played a crucial role in maintaining the division of labor<br />

between public and private fantasies. While the cinema’s cult of diversion<br />

addressed the audience as modern consumers with individual tastes and<br />

preferences, its rituals of forced communality turned them into a model for,<br />

and an extension of, the national community.<br />

In providing a social, perceptual, and architectural space, the motionpicture<br />

theater functioned as an important mediator between two seemingly<br />

separate spheres, the one of mass entertainment and the one of political ideology.<br />

Yet the “producers” of such a profoundly filmic effect included not<br />

only the directors, actors, and studios, but also the spectators, whose imagination<br />

gave meaning to the cinema’s pleasures beyond the spatial confines<br />

of the auditorium. In a national cinema known for its obsession with consensus<br />

building, the Publikum, to use the German word for audience, was<br />

bound to play a highly contested role in negotiating the relationship between<br />

political indoctrination and what is often, and rather problematically,<br />

referred to as escapist entertainment.<br />

On the following pages, I want to sketch a composite image of this historical<br />

audience through the changing rules and regulations in film exhibition<br />

and the critical debates on the social and psychological aspects of<br />

moviegoing. In sharp contrast to the abundance of articles and books on the<br />

topic published during the 1930s and early 1940s, there has been surprisingly<br />

little research on film audiences in what many scholars would consider<br />

the quintessential totalitarian cinema. While the Wilhelmine period has inspired<br />

several case studies on local exhibition practices and the affinities of<br />

early cinema with other popular diversions such as the variety and the diorama,<br />

there have been no comparable studies for the period after 1933.<br />

While Weimar audiences have played a central part in the reevaluation of<br />

classical silent cinema from the perspective of gender and class, audiences<br />

from the Third Reich continue to be treated as a predictable and therefore<br />

negligible group. They are usually vilified as passive and uncritical recipients<br />

of film propaganda or, less frequently, vindicated in their individual efforts<br />

to escape from the official culture of mass spectacles and collective rituals.<br />

This unresolved tension between the demonization of audiences and<br />

the insistence on their ordinariness informs even more recent studies and<br />

attests to the hidden anxieties about spectatorship and visual pleasure in the<br />

theorizing of popular culture in general. However, based on the available<br />

At the Movies 69


material, must we conclude that, to cite Eric Rentschler, “Nazi cinema<br />

exploited the limitations of human imagination, seeking to obliterate firstperson<br />

consciousness and to replace it with a universal third person”? 1 Or<br />

should we agree with Linda Schulte-Sasse that it was “this identification<br />

with someone else’s authority, and this oscillation between narcissistic experience<br />

of self and communal experience that [lent] the subject effect of<br />

classical cinema its affinities with that of fascism”? 2<br />

Rather than assuming a perfect fit between ideal spectators and actual<br />

audiences, I propose to organize the following remarks around the almost<br />

obsessive preoccupation with audiences in industry questionnaires, trade<br />

publications, and scholarly treatises from the Third Reich. Questions like<br />

“What do audiences want?” and “How can we accommodate their tastes and<br />

preferences?” express the interests of any film studio trying to sell a product.<br />

Yet questions like “How can we influence their attitudes and beliefs?”<br />

articulate concerns more typically associated with a state-controlled cinema.<br />

As I hope to show, the numerous sociological studies on audience<br />

composition, attendance patterns, and exhibition practices and the thenprevalent<br />

theories on spectatorship and more elusive categories such as social<br />

mentality or national character place these questions in the necessary<br />

historical context. Despite, or perhaps because of, their obvious methodological<br />

shortcomings, these publications shed new light on the dynamics of<br />

seduction and coercion, through which moviegoers in the Third Reich were<br />

enlisted as active and passive participants in the transformation of cinema<br />

into an illusory public sphere. 3<br />

The methodological problems that haunt most audience studies, from<br />

the heavy reliance on empirical methods and statistical models to the implicit<br />

assumptions about the (gendered) nature of film spectatorship and the<br />

rituals of cultural consumption, seem almost insurmountable when it comes<br />

to the cinema of the Third Reich. 4 On the one hand, there are the analyses<br />

developed by a purged film industry, a conformist academic community,<br />

and the Propaganda Ministry itself. On the other hand, there are the film<br />

historical studies that, since the earliest articles on film and propaganda,<br />

have failed to address the elusiveness of cinema as a social experience and<br />

public event. Here a fundamental shift in focus can only be achieved<br />

through a closer look at the divergent and often conflicting forces that<br />

made, or were supposed to make, the audience an extension of the national<br />

community. Such a shift requires us not only to historicize spectatorship<br />

70 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


and to theorize the audience, but also to acknowledge the interrelatedness<br />

of both terms in the conceptualization of popular cinema.<br />

II.<br />

The coordination of the film industry profoundly affected the conditions<br />

of moviegoing in various ways, beginning with the dramatic changes in<br />

production and the new regulations pertaining to exhibition. After the introduction<br />

of racially based membership requirements in the Reich Film<br />

Chamber, audiences could no longer choose among the diverse filmic styles<br />

and critical sensibilities that had sustained a lively cinema culture during<br />

the Weimar Republic. Once the practice of a censorship of effects (Wirkungszensur)<br />

made the emotional response of the “average German” the final<br />

measure for official censorship decisions, going to the movies became<br />

part of a tightly choreographed culture of public spectacles and mass diversions<br />

that, at least according to the ambitious plans of the Propaganda<br />

Ministry, equated looking with experience and reduced politics to alternately<br />

voyeuristic and exhibitionist scenarios. In 1935, a purely descriptive<br />

film journalism (Filmbetrachtung) replaced the kind of “subjective aestheticism”<br />

and “critical negativity” associated with Weimar film criticism. 5<br />

Determined to depoliticize popular cinema while at the same time politicizing<br />

certain forms of moviegoing, the Propaganda Ministry and the<br />

various party organizations concentrated on reaching new social groups<br />

and creating new exhibition venues. In addition to the use of film as a training<br />

tool inside the party itself, specialized programs were developed for<br />

schools and universities, professional associations, housewife organizations,<br />

and so forth. The Hitler Youth organized the Jugendfilmstunden (Youth<br />

Film Hour) to address the young as an audience with special interests and<br />

needs. 6 On the nationwide Filmvolkstag (Film People’s Day), new releases<br />

could be seen for a nominal fee, an occasion for low-income groups to partake<br />

in the cinema’s fictions of community both on and in front of the<br />

screen. Mobile film units brought feature films to remote rural areas, a practice<br />

that would continue in the work of the so-called PK (propaganda) companies,<br />

which, after 1939, organized regular screenings at the front.<br />

Yet the changes in exhibition practices after 1933 cannot be explained<br />

through the objectives of mass manipulation alone. Relevant data suggest<br />

that the studios’ close attention to moviegoers as consumers must also be<br />

linked to persistent financial problems after the transition to sound in 1929.<br />

At the Movies 71


Efforts to attract more regulars included everything from promotional campaigns<br />

to commodity tie-ins. Thus the steady increase in box-office receipts<br />

after 1933 was as much the result of more competitive admission prices and<br />

greater discretionary incomes as of a renewed sense of public pride and<br />

confidence attributable to the new regime. Already in 1936, 362 million<br />

tickets were sold, up from 245 million tickets in 1933. Of course, the domestic<br />

market was still small by international standards. Until the war, only<br />

8.6 percent of the population went to the movies on a weekly basis, compared<br />

to 41.2 percent in England and 34.2 percent in the United States. As<br />

possible reasons, Boguslaw Drewniak cites the uneven distribution of theaters<br />

in urban and rural areas, the existence of a still vibrant pub culture<br />

and a wide network of local clubs and associations, and the residual prejudices<br />

against the “flickers” among members of the educated middle class. 7<br />

In order to improve the situation, UFA used the staggered admission price<br />

structure—most larger theaters had orchestra, tier, and box seats—to analyze<br />

the attendance patterns of different income groups and market new releases<br />

accordingly. The widespread preference for cheaper seats intensified<br />

such efforts, especially in light of the studio’s persistent financial problems.<br />

In the first years of the regime, the composition of the audience remained<br />

relatively consistent in terms of age, sex, class, education, religion,<br />

occupation, and marital status. Likewise, the patterns of movie attendance<br />

showed the same differences between big cities and small towns, rural and<br />

industrial areas, and progressive and conservative federal states that had<br />

characterized cinema culture during the late Weimar years. However, the<br />

category of race introduced an entirely new dimension in the organization<br />

of cinema as a social event. After 1935 the Nuremberg Laws restricted<br />

sharply the presence of Jews in the public sphere and regulated their access<br />

to all places of public assembly. These discriminatory measures redefined<br />

film audiences in racial terms and turned moviegoing into an experience<br />

with political implications. It might even be argued that the participation in<br />

such practices involved audiences much more strongly in the celebration of<br />

the racial community and the underlying assumptions about German culture<br />

and national identity than the system of structuring absences that, with<br />

the exception of a few explicitly anti-Semitic feature films, left the most offensive<br />

images to the newsreel and the compilation film. Through the practice<br />

of a racially segregated audience, moviegoing was transformed into a<br />

powerful tool of nation building and racial politics. Confirming the official<br />

awareness of these mechanisms, Goebbels, in his infamous 1933 Kaiserhof<br />

72 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


speech, had declared that “one should not underestimate popular taste”<br />

and then concluded that “popular taste is not as it appears in the imagination<br />

of a Jewish director.” 8 After 1938, such arguments helped to justify the<br />

exclusion of the Jews from all cultural events, including public screenings.<br />

With the German film now elevated to an art form of the people and for the<br />

people, its enjoyment could only be guaranteed in a “clean, Jew-free atmosphere.”<br />

9 Welcoming this racialized view of the audience, the trade journals<br />

during that year carried such proclamations as, “from now on they [the<br />

moviegoers] can concentrate on the presentations in the theater without the<br />

disruptions and disturbances caused by such undesirable proximity.” 10<br />

The German occupation of most neighboring countries in the course of<br />

World War II ushered in a period of unprecedented growth for the film industry,<br />

but it also brought new problems, such as the boycotts and frequent<br />

sabotage against UFA-owned theaters in the Netherlands or the organization<br />

of separate screenings for Germans and non-Germans in Poland. In<br />

1943, the best year ever for the industry, 12.4 percent of all people living in<br />

the Reich went to the movies on a weekly basis; in the bigger cities, the<br />

number was regularly above 20 percent. During the same year, more than<br />

one billion people visited 6,561 motion-picture theaters to watch seventyeight<br />

feature films, compared to 332 million in 1926, the first year for which<br />

official audience statistics are available, and 115 million in 1976, the absolute<br />

low point in the history of German cinema. 11 Even in 1944 and 1945,<br />

when the bombing of major cities and the collapse of the war economy<br />

turned everyday life into a constant struggle for survival, movie attendance<br />

declined only slightly. 12 For the same reason that scarce resources were requisitioned<br />

for new films in production, many venerable state theaters were<br />

equipped for film exhibition, a development that some observers welcomed<br />

as the final victory of the cinema over the theater as the founding site of national<br />

identity.<br />

Programming practices during the war played an important role in<br />

diverting attention from the growing disparities between the official rhetoric<br />

and the hardships of war. Finding the proper balance between “too<br />

little” and “too much” illusionism was a constant concern among exhibitors.<br />

Motion-picture theaters stopped showing double features because of<br />

their association with the uncontrollable excess of emotions. 13 Instead of<br />

compensating audiences for the deprivations in daily life, an overdose<br />

of fantasy might increase their sense of frustration and despair; here careful<br />

programming was to provide the necessary constraints. Through the<br />

At the Movies 73


practice of “locked doors” (i.e., no admissions after the beginning of the<br />

show), audiences during the war years had no choice but to sit through the<br />

entire program of newsreel, cultural film, and main feature. The resultant<br />

mixture of fact and fiction was considered essential to the process of derealization<br />

that had informed the restructuring of the fascist public sphere<br />

from the very beginning. However, at the movies, the active participation<br />

of the audience produced both very predictable results and less calculable<br />

effects. Anecdotal accounts from the war years are filled with stories about<br />

women and children who turned the motion-picture theater into their “asylum<br />

for the homeless,” 14 literally and figuratively speaking. In letters from<br />

the front, soldiers, too, confess using excursions to theaters in occupied<br />

cities to immunize themselves against the horrors of war. Taking advantage<br />

of such individual survival strategies, the Ministry frequently organized<br />

mandatory film screenings for those special units of the SS (Schutzstaffeln)<br />

involved in the Final Solution (e.g., in the case of The Eternal Jew), as well<br />

as for members of the armed forces fighting for the Final Victory (e.g., in<br />

the case of Kolberg).<br />

The official anxieties over the elusive nature of spectatorship are nowhere<br />

more apparent than in the personal viewing habits of the minister in<br />

charge. Until the war, Goebbels saw most films prior to their release, made<br />

recommendations about changes, and had unlimited access to foreign films<br />

even after they were banned in 1939. His diaries give some indication of how<br />

he thought about audience reactions and how he intended to control a film’s<br />

potentially subversive effects. On 27 January 1939, for instance, Goebbels<br />

noted about Hotel Sacher: “Superbly made, but not quite politically watertight.<br />

I shall have it re-edited and a few scenes reshot.” 15 And on 10 October<br />

1940, he concluded about Über alles in der Welt (Above All in the<br />

World): “Absolutely naïve and primitive, but could well be a big hit with the<br />

public. Ritter says patriotic things with a lack of inhibition that would have<br />

anyone else blushing. A few things will have to be changed.” 16<br />

Throughout, Goebbels uses the metaphoric registers of transgression<br />

and containment to identify the two sides in the textual actualization of ideological<br />

positions. Terms like “not quite watertight” and “lack of inhibition”<br />

present spectatorship as a destabilizing force. By evoking the image<br />

of a pressure chamber, Goebbels implies that any excess of representation<br />

might threaten the precarious balance between aesthetic and political intentions<br />

and give rise to dangerous forms of “reading against the grain.” His<br />

sharp distinction between two groups of audiences hides this more troubling<br />

74 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


possibility behind the typical bourgeois contempt for the broad masses,<br />

those most prone to “misunderstand.” While he praises the educated elite<br />

for appreciating quality on its own terms, he has only scorn for the average<br />

moviegoer captivated by simple messages, conventional stories, and cheap<br />

visual effects. Accordingly, too much calculation on the side of filmmakers<br />

might compromise the aesthetic appeal of films, whereas too much pleasure<br />

on the side of audiences might jeopardize the stabilizing function of popular<br />

cinema.<br />

Identifying potential problems in the actualization of a film’s intended<br />

meaning was the main purpose of the so-called Berichte aus dem Reich (Reports<br />

from the Reich). Prepared by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, or secret police),<br />

these reports documented spontaneous reactions in the theater but<br />

also included more informal remarks made by moviegoers in the lobby and<br />

on the street. The accounts tended to be very detailed for high-budget films<br />

and often focused on specific groups such as women, adolescents, Catholics,<br />

and non-Germans. In some instances, the positive reception of a propaganda<br />

film may have been staged by party members or fabricated by SD<br />

agents, but this possibility does not invalidate the relevance of the agents’<br />

observations as constructions of publicly expressed enjoyment and dislike.<br />

In accordance with the prevailing thinking about the popular appeal of<br />

cinema (to be examined more closely in Chapter 9), the reports evaluated<br />

new releases in relation to their emotional effects; hence the frequency of<br />

statements like “audiences were deeply impressed,” “film was received with<br />

great enthusiasm,” or “the screening caused strong reactions.” Uninteresting<br />

stories and unconvincing characters are usually explained through<br />

breakdowns in the system of identifications. Even more important, any failure<br />

to reach the audience is measured against standards of authenticity established<br />

not by “real art” but by “real life.” Despite occasional value judgments<br />

like “artistically convincing,” formal or technical problems are rarely<br />

mentioned and aesthetic questions are always translated into the conditions<br />

of spectatorship; hence the prevalence of taste-based categories like “shallow,”<br />

“kitschy,” and “old-fashioned.” 17<br />

A few examples may suffice to show in what ways the “objective” documentation<br />

of “spontaneous” reactions was enlisted in the attainment of a<br />

perfect fit between films and audiences. Ideal conditions, according to the<br />

SD reports, existed whenever “the film fully satisfied the desire of the broad<br />

mass for diversity and topicality,” 18 as in the case of the immensely popular<br />

Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940). Problematic cases were examined<br />

At the Movies 75


from the perspective of those groups most vocal in their opposition—the implication<br />

being that their departure from the norm revealed deeper contradictions<br />

in the ideological formation. The agents made every effort to explain<br />

most signs of dissent through biological differences (e.g., between men<br />

and women) or special interests (e.g., by professional groups). Thus women’s<br />

positive reactions to the portrayal of motherhood in Die Reise nach Tilsit<br />

(The Journey to Tilsit, 1940) and their indifference to the battle scenes in<br />

Der große König (The Great King, 1942) were seen as a legitimate expression<br />

of their femininity. In the case of Ich klage an (I Accuse, 1941), the ethical<br />

questions raised by the controversial subject matter may not have found<br />

much interest among doctors and lawyers, according to the reports. Yet the<br />

protests by Protestant and Catholic groups proved significant enough to<br />

contribute to the termination of the entire euthanasia project.<br />

My discussion until now has focused on the dramatic changes in exhibition<br />

practices and their restrictive effect on all aspects of film reception.<br />

The reports by the secret police attest to the persistent anxieties that, particularly<br />

after 1939, informed day-to-day decisions in the Ministry and made<br />

the patterns of moviegoing an important test case for the limits of mass manipulation.<br />

Incidentally, these official concerns are corroborated by the socalled<br />

Sopade reports commissioned by the Social Democratic Party in Exile.<br />

According to its informants, audiences avoided the newsreels altogether<br />

or responded to the appearance of political leaders on the screen with snickering.<br />

Allegedly, not even half-priced tickets could entice many SS and SA<br />

men to watch Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). Contradicting<br />

industry statistics, some reports even noted a marked decline in movie<br />

attendance and a growing dissatisfaction with the standard offerings. 19<br />

Even in the late 1930s, the preoccupation with audiences cannot be explained<br />

solely through the interests of an oppressive regime in achieving total<br />

control over all aspects of the cinematic experience. As noted earlier, the<br />

film industry, too, had a strong interest in studying audience preferences in<br />

a more systematic fashion. Confronted with an expensive new sound technology,<br />

studios needed to minimize their economic risks, as, for instance,<br />

by researching consumer behavior; hence the renewed interest in masspsychological<br />

theories that combined the rhetoric of public morality from<br />

the cinema reform movements of the 1910s and 1920s with the more scientific<br />

approaches to media and society developed by new academic disciplines<br />

like Publizistik and Zeitungswissenschaften (communication) studies.<br />

The question of “popularity,” which brought together political and eco-<br />

76 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


nomic perspectives, played a central role in the reconceptualization of cinema<br />

as an illusory public sphere. Two concepts dominated the debates in<br />

the trade press, Mundpropaganda (word of mouth) and Publikumsgeschmack<br />

(popular taste). Whereas the practice of word of mouth (literally, verbal<br />

propaganda) allowed critics to assess the active contribution of audiences<br />

from the side of social practices, the notion of popular taste permitted<br />

them to study genre films as an object of aesthetic appreciation as well as<br />

consumerist choice. Questionnaires became the most frequently used instrument<br />

for measuring the latter. As early as 1933, theater owners in Munich<br />

organized a questionnaire on the most popular German actors and<br />

genres. The findings put an end to initial speculations about a sudden<br />

change in popular tastes after the Nazi takeover. Hans Albers and the film<br />

operetta received most of the votes in the respective categories, but little<br />

agreement could be reached on the mass appeal of newsreels or the proper<br />

balance between politics and entertainment. 20 A similar questionnaire<br />

from Breslau confirmed these mixed results. Again Albers, and, among the<br />

women, Brigitte Helm, took the lead in the popularity contest. Romantic<br />

comedies and film operettas now shared first place in the genre category. 21<br />

Taking a more content-oriented approach, the Film-Kurier presented the<br />

results of a 1935 survey from Hamburg through a summary of “typical”<br />

replies. These included statements like “‘We want to see the good, the better<br />

film’—‘Not kitsch, but truth’—‘Without big advertisements’—‘Films on<br />

new paths’—‘Unvarnished and unspoiled films’—‘The true, plain humanity’—!”<br />

22 Heavily promoted genres like the cultural film and the historical<br />

film drew plenty of criticism for failing to entertain, a common complaint<br />

that prompted the trade journals to propose more effective initiatives in audience<br />

education. 23<br />

The war put an end to such discussions and enlisted the trade press<br />

more actively in the services of the Propaganda Ministry. Thus a 1941 questionnaire<br />

about the most popular genres duly noted a growing interest in<br />

historical films and a sharp drop in the appeal of society dramas and romantic<br />

comedies. The enormous popularity of stars like Zarah Leander,<br />

Willy Birgel, Paula Wessely, and Heinrich George suggests that the war also<br />

brought a long overdue appreciation of the dramatization of suffering and<br />

self-sacrifice in the inflated terms of the state-commissioned film. 24 However,<br />

most official claims about a fundamental change in audience tastes<br />

remained wishful thinking; exceptions like the box-office hit Request Concert<br />

only confirmed the rule.<br />

At the Movies 77


In the absence of any measurable results, the harmonious convergence<br />

of texts and contexts could only be achieved in the kind of programmatic<br />

statements that became the trademark of ambitious academic treatises. In<br />

constituting the audience as a subject of critical inquiry, these studies rely<br />

heavily on concepts taken from mass psychology, media pedagogy, and normative<br />

aesthetics; references to Gustave LeBon and José Ortega y Gasset are<br />

ubiquitous. 25 Concerned less with the means than with the effects of cinema,<br />

most scholars limited their analyses to the medium’s short-term impact<br />

on social attitudes and beliefs. From the perspective of reception, they<br />

measured film’s power as an instrument of political propaganda, considered<br />

the uses of cultural films in educational and cultural settings, and argued<br />

about the contribution of popular cinema to the new master narratives of<br />

race and nation.<br />

In full agreement with the ascendancy of classical narrative, most contributions<br />

focused on film’s mimetic qualities and cathartic effects and approached<br />

spectatorship as an integral part of the medium’s illusionistic<br />

qualities. Rejecting the formalism of Weimar film theoreticians like Rudolf<br />

Harms and Rudolf Arnheim, scholars returned to the well-tried mixture<br />

of idealist aesthetic and media didacticism developed by conservative cinema<br />

reformers during the Wilhelmine period, most notably Konrad Lange.<br />

In their early calls for a highly politicized cinema, the leading proponents<br />

of Nazi film theory initially returned to the nationalistic programs first formulated<br />

in the 1920s by Hans Buchner and others. With the national community<br />

as the ultimate reference point for all questions pertaining to film<br />

audiences, Fritz Hippler, Hans Weidemann, and Walter Panofsky set out to<br />

measure the contribution of specific genres and styles to the building of<br />

a strong populist cinema based on national, popular, and folk elements.<br />

However, the more perceptive writers never lost sight of the fact that such<br />

a mobilization of the imagination was always fraught with dangers. Cinema<br />

seemed ideally suited to assume the role of the theater as a “moral<br />

institution” and to become the stage on which the nation encountered itself—though,<br />

again, less through specific contents than through the experience<br />

itself. But films also possessed the greatest potential for destabilizing<br />

such equations through the intense emotional effects associated with<br />

spectatorship.<br />

Through the notion of popular taste, film scholars tried to combine textual<br />

and contextual categories in the pursuit of a perfect match between<br />

films and audiences. The question of taste allowed those writing for the in-<br />

78 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


dustry to contemplate the degree to which the patterns of identification<br />

corresponded with the interests of real moviegoers. Unlike earlier efforts in<br />

educating a larger audience in the great traditions of German literature, the<br />

new debates on popular taste never left the realm of social and political applications.<br />

According to the vice president of the Reich Film Chamber, Hans<br />

Weidemann, the primary purpose of cinema was no longer self-expression<br />

but participation in a larger social and cultural project. However, the realization<br />

of this goal required close control on all levels; to cite Weidemann:<br />

A popular taste left to its own devices represents not only a danger<br />

to itself but ultimately also to the entire nation since it lays the<br />

ground for an exploitation of the lowest instincts. Today German<br />

filmmakers—in fact, all national comrades— . . . have the duty to<br />

work toward the greater goals and to overcome any form of resistance<br />

through education and persuasion. 26<br />

In contributing to this national project, filmmakers were instructed<br />

to avoid the excesses of representation that, from then on, became closely<br />

identified with the cultural legacies of the Weimar Republic and a global<br />

film culture ruled by Hollywood. The much-touted education in good taste<br />

was to reach from such everyday concerns as women’s fashion and interior<br />

design to a systematic training of audiences in the heroic styles prevalent in<br />

political propaganda and much official art. This raising of standards was to<br />

begin with a rejection of the decadent moods of the past for the “noble simplicity”<br />

of the present. Ideally the process ended with the elimination of all<br />

alien influences from a contemporary folk culture reconstituted through<br />

the unifying concept of race. 27<br />

When Heinz Zimmermann proclaimed that “film, more than any other<br />

art form, belongs to the people [Volk] and is connected to the people,” 28 he<br />

had in mind precisely such a mixture of popular, folkloric, and ethnic elements.<br />

Based on this highly syncretic definition of Volk, the act of moviegoing<br />

was to turn cultural consumers into political beings and give birth to<br />

the national community out of the modern masses. According to the head<br />

of the Film Censorship Office, the (old) taste of the masses had already been<br />

replaced by the (new) taste of the Volk, with the legitimate needs of the<br />

masses now fully integrated into a so-called “folk art of the masses” (Volksmassenkunst).<br />

As a result, filmmakers no longer needed to differentiate<br />

between educated and uneducated audiences. Even residual social and re-<br />

At the Movies 79


gional differences would eventually be eliminated through the celebration<br />

of spectatorship as the most instinctual and therefore most powerful expression<br />

of identity through community. Alluding to the power of such an<br />

essentialist notion of identity, one writer confidently declared that “the<br />

people have a healthy instinct for the authentic and the false” 29 and would<br />

soon find their proper place in the political theater of National Socialism,<br />

including its cinematic fictions.<br />

All attempts at influencing audiences through reviews and advertisements<br />

confronted one major obstacle, the elusive phenomenon called word<br />

of mouth. Already the term points to a widespread awareness of the similarities<br />

between official and unofficial propaganda. The spontaneous exchange<br />

of opinions among devoted film fans as well as occasional moviegoers<br />

was considered essential to the commercial success or failure of new<br />

releases and the public image of individual stars and directors. Even more<br />

important, these casual conversations among friends, acquaintances, and<br />

colleagues introduced the possibility of dissension, if only in the realm of<br />

aesthetic judgment. Constituting an informal public sphere, the practice<br />

of word of mouth threatened the fantasy of a harmonious unity—the audience<br />

as a manifestation of the body politic—and undermined official declarations<br />

about an almost instinctual approach to matters of taste. Hermann<br />

Meyer’s comments are very revealing here, beginning with his use of legal<br />

terminology:<br />

Word of mouth seems to be an illegitimate expression of opinion, in<br />

this case about films. But it is actually legitimate. . . . Word of mouth<br />

consists of the opinions of individuals. Its true character manifests itself<br />

only in the sum of opinions. It would be wrong to ignore an individual<br />

opinion because of its ostensible insignificance. . . . [On the<br />

contrary,] influencing this cumulative process is the special duty of<br />

all those responsible for the protection of cultural assets. 30<br />

Of course, neither the planned improvement of popular tastes nor the<br />

intended restrictions on word of mouth diminished the audience’s appetite<br />

for trivial and sensationalist fare. That is why some scholars turned to the<br />

mass-psychological concepts introduced by early cinema reformers in their<br />

campaigns against the trashy film. Endowed with a kind of mass soul (Massenseele),<br />

the audience could now be simultaneously dismissed as a formless,<br />

passive body controlled by base instincts and embraced as a pristine<br />

80 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


eing with an innate sense of its world historical mission. Although the cultural<br />

pessimism behind the metaphor of mass soul stood in marked contrast<br />

to the more ambitious proposals on audience education, it proved very useful<br />

in concealing an unabashedly instrumental approach to film reception.<br />

In the darkness of the motion-picture theater, the argument went, the individual<br />

abandoned critical judgment in favor of purely emotional reactions.<br />

Once the masses had been transformed into the national community, such<br />

emotionality needed no longer to be regarded as a weakness, but instead<br />

could turn into a mark of true German character. After all, by becoming one<br />

in the act of looking, the audience only “realized” the principles on which<br />

Nazi propaganda was based, beginning with the equation of spectatorship<br />

and experience. Not surprisingly, strong emotional reactions were actually<br />

encouraged. Some writers found spontaneous applause during a screening<br />

perfectly natural, despite the absence of live performers. 31 Even loud crying<br />

was suddenly validated. Betraying his anti-intellectual biases, one critic<br />

announced, “Those who cry have more of life!” 32 because they are not<br />

weighed down by what he called the sickness of irony and skepticism.<br />

Most film scholars agreed that visual pleasure played a key role in forging<br />

individuals into a unified mass. Whereas the cinema reformers of the<br />

1910s and 1920s perceived the scenarios of looking as a threat to public<br />

morality, the advocates of a cinema of strong identifications welcomed anything<br />

that would put an end to the critical detachment associated with<br />

Weimar art cinema. They appealed to filmmakers to abandon their intellectual<br />

ambitions and “reach the emotional life of the people, that immense<br />

world ruled by drives and desires lying deep below the level of consciousness.”<br />

33 Responding to such calls, even director Wolfgang Liebeneiner proclaimed<br />

that “audiences . . . feel, and do not think. As soon as they start<br />

thinking, something in the art work is unconvincing.” 34 Perhaps the most<br />

revealing insights came from Hans-Walther Betz, who simply equated spectatorship<br />

with people’s need “to come to terms with [their] basic drives.” 35<br />

Going to the movies, he argued, provided a cathartic experience, as it allowed<br />

individuals to purge themselves of antisocial impulses. “Temptation,<br />

surprise, lust for power, craving for admiration, fame, magic, miracles, magnitude,<br />

brilliance, suffering, attraction, adventure, the appeal of the unique,<br />

the seemingly endless . . .”: 36 this is how Betz characterized the power of<br />

cinema and, by extension, of Nazi ideology in a rather incoherent stream of<br />

consciousness.<br />

In mapping this uncharted territory of raw emotions and sensory pleas-<br />

At the Movies 81


ures, Walter Panofsky distinguished two basic impulses, visual pleasure<br />

(Schaulust) and the will to experience (Erlebniswille), and examined their<br />

contribution to the new scenarios of specularity accordingly. He set out by<br />

calling for a workable compromise between the political relevance of filmic<br />

realism and the audience’s ineradicable need for illusionism and concluded<br />

that “we must accommodate their desire to escape from everyday life . . .<br />

and treat this as a legitimate desire emanating from their natural disposition<br />

[Publikumsempfinden].” 37 Panofsky’s passionate defense of the will to<br />

experience stood in sharp contrast to the pathologizing of such needs in earlier<br />

campaigns against trash and smut. Elevating the cinema to an Erlebnis<br />

allowed the author to treat filmic texts and contexts as extensions of each<br />

other and to subsume the aesthetic entirely under the experiential. The<br />

conceptual move from the individual spectator to the entire audience is essential<br />

to this process. Whereas a notion like Empfinden implies a certain<br />

distance from the work and still differentiates between artistic means and<br />

effects, Erlebnis places the spectator firmly within the libidinal structures<br />

that constitute imaginary communities inside and outside the theater. Not<br />

surprisingly, some critics spoke about the cinema in terms of “empowering<br />

human experiences” 38 that no longer shared anything with traditional aesthetic<br />

categories. The thus-constituted imaginary community of spectators,<br />

they hoped, would be propelled to contribute more actively to the goals of<br />

National Socialism.<br />

The most systematic approach to the psychological dimensions of spectatorship<br />

can be found in Wolfgang Wilhelm’s 1940 dissertation Die Auftriebswirkung<br />

des Films (The Elevating Effect of Film), which is based on<br />

two in-depth questionnaires. 39 In the first, the author asked twenty university<br />

students to describe their reaction to specific story elements and filmic<br />

techniques (e.g., camerawork, editing). The second test group consisted of<br />

twenty-three individuals of various social backgrounds who were asked<br />

about their reasons for going to the movies. Wilhelm evaluated their answers<br />

in relation to the elevating effect that, in his view, distinguished experience<br />

in the cinema from that in the other arts.<br />

In relying on aesthetic and psychological categories, Wilhelm’s study<br />

moves beyond the formulas of mass psychology and avoids empty political<br />

slogans in favor of closer attention to the individual viewing experience.<br />

The elusive connection between the stories on the screen and the individual<br />

spectators, he insists time and again, depends fundamentally on the power<br />

of spectatorship to facilitate active and passive forms of identification and<br />

82 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


to accommodate widely divergent emotional states: the suspension of disbelief,<br />

the surrender to visual spectacle, the play with free association, and<br />

the possibility of critical engagement. According to Wilhelm, the elevating<br />

effect of film is based on a temporary deliverance from the pressures of selfhood.<br />

Spectatorship in the cinema provides moments of fullness and immediacy<br />

and allows the individual to celebrate experience as a value in itself.<br />

The author’s definition of surrender (Hingabe) suggests that this phantasmagoric<br />

state can be fully realized only from a position of uninvolved involvement<br />

and through a healthy balance between tension and release.<br />

Among the major obstacles to the elevating effect, Wilhelm lists “distance”<br />

and “resistance,” terms that evoke both the racial characteristics of Jews in<br />

anti-Semitic rhetoric and the aesthetic traditions of Weimar art cinema with<br />

its various forms of self-reflection. Rejecting formal experimentation on<br />

principle, Wilhelm speaks out in favor of illusions and fantasies. Thus he<br />

opposes all filmic devices that create either too much or too little closeness,<br />

thereby jeopardizing the complicated dynamics of form, content, and mode<br />

of address that for him constitute spectatorship at its ideal, that is, its purely<br />

emotional, manifestation.<br />

As a way of linking some of these general remarks to actual spectators,<br />

it might be helpful to conclude by considering the extensive writings on<br />

women audiences. Like children and adolescents, women were singled out<br />

in audience studies because they represented both a distinct social group<br />

and a metaphor of spectatorship. Their intense preoccupation with matters<br />

of the heart, many critics argued, originated in the monotony of women’s<br />

lives and their greater need to find compensation in the make-believe world<br />

of cinema. On the one hand, women were regarded as a deviation from the<br />

normal paradigms of film viewing. Many articles in the trade press complained<br />

regularly about women’s exaggerated interest in detail (e.g., the<br />

clothes worn in an ethnographic film). 40 Identified with an unhealthy emotionalism<br />

and lack of critical detachment, they personified the failures in<br />

the balancing act between fantasy and reality.<br />

On the other hand, women were often chosen to embody the audience<br />

in its purest, most desirable form. Ostensibly without individuality, they<br />

functioned as stand-ins for the ideal-typical community formed in the act<br />

of looking. Because of their greater suggestibility, they came to symbolize<br />

the processes through which the cinema extended its powers over everyday<br />

life. Even aesthetic categories were reevaluated from the perspective<br />

of an essentialized sexual difference and the alleged affinities between<br />

At the Movies 83


women and cinema—reason enough for some critics to wonder whether<br />

film had to be characterized as a female art, given the feminizing conditions<br />

of spectatorship.<br />

The close connection between women’s actual experiences and their<br />

status as cinematic metaphor is already evident in colloquialisms like the<br />

proverbial “servant girl from Posemuckel,” who was frequently evoked as<br />

an indicator of popular tastes. This fictional character from the countryside<br />

stood for the practical wisdom of uneducated viewers who instinctively rejected<br />

all “trash and smut” for a healthy mixture of idealism and realism.<br />

What did these servant girls want? The answer, according to the authors in<br />

the trade press, was very simple: “They all want to love and be loved, but<br />

in a higher, nobler way than is possible in everyday life, in reality.” 41 Providing<br />

more concrete insights into these matters, the Lichtbildbühne published<br />

a series of articles in which “average” women shared their thoughts<br />

on various aspects of popular cinema. A housewife took on the subject of<br />

male screen idols and, after describing types like the dandy, the romantic,<br />

and the athlete, spoke about women’s real favorites, “the lovers of the Clark<br />

Gable type who are really 100 percent masculine but also serious and reliable.<br />

With these men you at least feel protected and secure, and that is what<br />

counts most in the end.” 42 A sixteen-year-old high school student explained<br />

her passion for the movies by referring to the low ticket prices, the flexible<br />

times, and the casual environment. “I admire and respect what it offers,”<br />

she said about the classical theater. “But what the cinema is able to give us<br />

is so much more in my opinion that I love it and must give it preference in<br />

a comparison, for one is closer to what one loves than what one admires and<br />

respects.” 43 Precisely this emotional bond was thematized in the findings of<br />

a film seminar organized by the Bund deutscher Mädel (Association of German<br />

Girls). Most girls agreed that stories had to be moving, yet believable.<br />

Stylization and formal experimentation were unimportant, they insisted;<br />

what mattered above all was the proper attitude (Gesinnung). At the movies,<br />

“experience [Erlebnis] is the main thing!” 44<br />

The close attention to women allowed critics to study the more problematic<br />

aspects of moviegoing, including its detrimental effect on sexual<br />

mores and work habits, without implicating male viewers in the more dangerous<br />

scenarios of fandom. 45 Again the identification of female audiences<br />

with extreme forms of spectatorship provided a convenient framework for<br />

measuring the productive and disruptive effects of what even then was often<br />

dismissed as escapist entertainment. Obviously genre films depended<br />

84 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


crucially on such rhetorical oppositions— of being inside and outside—for<br />

creating an illusion both of individual autonomy and self-abandonment.<br />

Thus when a letter to the editor of some daily newspaper blamed women’s<br />

limited worldview for the tyranny of trivial entertainment, the critic for the<br />

Film-Kurier set out to refute these arguments step by step. Defending ordinary<br />

women, he asserted:<br />

The preoccupation of woman’s thoughts with a happy marriage<br />

and a dependable living companion . . . has nothing to do with the<br />

fake romanticism and saccharine sentimentalism still found in some<br />

films today. These shortcomings are not the result of film’s female<br />

orientation but of the filmmaker’s inferior artistic instinct and<br />

skill. 46<br />

The contributions by women critics who incorporated such gender<br />

essentialism into their own reflections on audiences are very interesting<br />

in this regard. Some linked women’s greater potential for daydreaming to<br />

their unfulfilled and, as Christine Großmann insisted, unfulfillable desires. 47<br />

Celebrating the new ideals of comradeship, others declared women’s interest<br />

in erotic thrills and romantic fantasies to be a thing of the past. Ingrid<br />

Binné, one of the few female critics working during the Third Reich, insisted<br />

that even women then took a stronger interest in the newsreel and the<br />

culture film. 48<br />

“I often go to the movies,” 49 this recurring sentence in Eva Zeller’s recollections<br />

from the war years finally introduces a necessary subjective perspective<br />

into experiences that continued to elude description and analysis,<br />

whether in the form of case studies on historical audiences or through more<br />

theoretical studies on spectatorship. Autobiographies, memoirs, letters, oral<br />

histories, and even fictional accounts of moviegoing in feature films from,<br />

and about, the period in question invariably draw attention to the heterogeneous<br />

elements and forces that constitute popular cinema. Already for<br />

that reason, such sources should ideally be included in studies on historical<br />

audiences. As they illustrate the power of cinema in articulating private<br />

dreams and desires, they also remind us that the contribution of moviegoers<br />

to the production of filmic pleasures cannot be reduced to binary structures<br />

like active vs. passive, emotional vs. intellectual, or subversive vs. affirmative.<br />

Instead audiences must be treated as participants in an extended field<br />

of multiple and often contradictory meanings. Against the normative effect<br />

At the Movies 85


produced by sociological studies, such individual accounts uphold the possibility<br />

of subversive readings and protect the various forms of diversion,<br />

enjoyment, and entertainment against simplistic attributions of cause and<br />

effect. 50<br />

However, just as the fixation on particular types and models can produce<br />

a mechanistic view of audiences that reveals very little about the pleasures<br />

of cinema, the undifferentiated celebration of individual perspectives<br />

is bound to obscure the particular constraint placed upon popular cinema<br />

in the Third Reich. In other words, the individual accounts must never distract<br />

from the oppressive measures that controlled all aspects of moviegoing,<br />

from censorship decisions to programming practices and rules of admission.<br />

Both sides of the cinematic experience, the private one of desire<br />

and fantasy and the public one of consensus building and indoctrination,<br />

played equally important roles in the building of a national audience positioned<br />

between the false promises of film as apolitical entertainment and<br />

the tightly controlled conditions under which the rituals of moviegoing de<br />

facto became political acts. It is in awareness of these complexities, I hope,<br />

that future and more detailed studies on audiences in the Third Reich will<br />

continue with such inquiries.<br />

86 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


5STARS<br />

HEINZ<br />

RÜHMANN<br />

AND THE<br />

PERFORMANCE<br />

OF THE<br />

ORDINARY<br />

I.<br />

As the countless star memoirs and biographies indicate, German film actors<br />

have played, and continue to play, an important role in the popular imagination,<br />

and this despite the Hollywood star machinery. With the exception<br />

of the East German cinema, which rejected the star system as a manifestation<br />

of bourgeois individualism, and the New German Cinema, which dismissed<br />

the cult of celebrity as an obstacle to individual self-expression,<br />

domestic productions have always been designed around a changing cast of<br />

famous stars, respected character actors, and skilled ensemble actors. Concurrent<br />

with the revival of genre cinema since the early 1990s, especially in


the form of romantic comedies, film scholars have initiated a critical reassessment<br />

of the star phenomenon in German cinema. The function of<br />

“Germanness” in the development of ideal types and iconic images has been<br />

an integral, if not central, part of this investigation. 1 In the search for key<br />

moments in German film history, many studies have focused on the cinema<br />

of the Third Reich, which relied heavily on the star phenomenon and which<br />

produced a distinguished group of stars, including the subject of this chapter,<br />

Heinz Rühmann.<br />

Whether or not this historical alliance of star power and political power<br />

was driven by the special problems of legitimization in a state-controlled<br />

cinema cannot be answered conclusively through one case study. Given the<br />

selective incorporation of international trends into national traditions, it<br />

would make more sense to emphasize the similarities with the Hollywood<br />

dream factory and its celebration of glamour and sex appeal. Yet in light of<br />

the suppressed discourse about Jewishness behind the preoccupation with<br />

questions of identity, it would be equally logical to foreground the strategic<br />

use of actors and actresses in the phantasmagoria of the racialized body. In<br />

both cases, the star system offered the perfect vehicle for the visual and narrative<br />

articulation of identity. Different stars occupied different positions<br />

within a highly developed system that, in the purview of this study, has already<br />

been considered in earlier remarks on the performance of identity in<br />

two film comedies “made in 1933” (Chapter 2) and that will be addressed<br />

again in closing thoughts on the problematic legacies of the star system during<br />

the postwar period (Chapter 11). Given my focus on popular cinema, I<br />

am particularly interested in the star as a mediator in aligning the reflection<br />

on national identity with the representation of ordinary people and everyday<br />

life. This connection is often ignored in contributions that focus only on<br />

dramatic actors who embody aspects of racial theory. Whereas the latter<br />

shed light on the normative effects of identity, especially in its ideal-typical<br />

representations, comic actors bring out the contradictions in the social fantasy,<br />

central to popular cinema, about a harmonious integration of public<br />

and private identities.<br />

Which actor would be more suited to such an investigation than Heinz<br />

Rühmann? 2 At first glance, this small, ordinary-looking man seems like<br />

an odd choice for a case study on famous stars from the Third Reich. The<br />

young Rühmann neither complied with the stereotypical images of masculinity<br />

circulated by the Hollywood star factory, nor did he contribute to<br />

the heroic narratives of German race and character. He never became the<br />

88 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


object of admiration and worship, and rarely inspired groups or individuals<br />

to imitate his appearance or behavior. After all, the similarities among the<br />

actor, his roles, and his audiences were always already a constitutive part of<br />

his screen persona.<br />

This almost perfect fit offers the first clue to a better understanding of<br />

Rühmann’s popular appeal. According to Richard Dyer, film stars articulate<br />

“contradictions in ideology—whether within the dominant ideology or between<br />

it and other subordinated/revolutionary ideologies.” 3 In the case<br />

of Rühmann, his rise to stardom must be linked to the performance of<br />

what Dyer calls “typical ways of behaving, feeling and thinking in contemporary<br />

society, ways that have been socially, culturally, and historically constructed.”<br />

4 The actor’s screen persona developed in the context of whitecollar<br />

comedy and its humorous but also sentimental stories about the<br />

problems of the so-called “little man.” His trademark comic style translated<br />

the familiar elements of petit bourgeois mentality into the essentializing<br />

terms of an ordinary Germanness beyond the divisions of gender and class.<br />

Time and again, an imaginary resolution of social and sexual conflicts was<br />

achieved through a comic performance of ambivalence that returned these<br />

conflicts to the scene of contemporary life, but in the aggressive and defensive<br />

registers of the body. As a function of identity formation, performance<br />

thus draws attention to the complex processes that make possible the ultimate<br />

affirmation of oppressive social and sexual roles. By utilizing and articulating<br />

what Susan Hayward calls “indigenous cultural codes” 5 such as<br />

movements, postures, glances, gestures, and so forth, stars—especially those<br />

associated with the European popular cinema—define the terms of national<br />

identity in relation to questions of class, race, and gender.<br />

The countless obituaries for Rühmann, who died in 1994 at the age of<br />

ninety-two, bear witness to his elevated status as the very embodiment of<br />

Germanness. The natural progression mapped in the obituaries from “the<br />

funny romantic lead, via the lovable comedian, to the great and, in rare<br />

moments, magnificent character actor [Menschendarsteller]” 6 shows the extent<br />

to which Rühmann today has come to personify those aspects of German<br />

cinema that seem untouched by politics and its compromising associations.<br />

The actor, whose last screen appearance in Wim Wenders’s In weiter<br />

Ferne, so nah (Far Away, So Close, 1993) comments on his status as a national<br />

icon, has always been identified with a very limited, but highly articulated,<br />

range of movements, behaviors, and attitudes. All evoke a class mentality<br />

that, despite euphemisms such as “the little man” and “the average<br />

Stars 89


man,” is clearly recognizable as petit bourgeois. And all stand for a type of<br />

modern masculinity that, behind phrases like “the eternal boy” or “the big<br />

child,” raises the question of sexual inadequacy. In today’s psychological idioms,<br />

the imbalance between means and ends, and between intentions and<br />

results, might be diagnosed as a symptom of low self-esteem, performance<br />

anxiety, passive-aggressive behavior, or, in the most general way, as some<br />

form of narcissistic disorder. To what degree these elements continue to<br />

be enlisted in a national imaginary that seems to derive self-confidence<br />

from the validation of the weak over the heroic, the flawed over the perfect,<br />

and the ordinary over the extraordinary can be seen in a recent lexicon<br />

entry that commemorates the deceased actor as “the eternally adolescent<br />

German.” 7<br />

The complete identity of actor, role, and type makes the Rühmann<br />

screen persona appear authentic in the most diverse settings. This appearance<br />

of authenticity has always been more important than his identification<br />

with any particular social attributes or positions. As early as 1940, Florian<br />

Kienzl noted: “Strange that we talk about him as if he were in person what<br />

he represents in his roles. In his case, both lie so closely together.” 8 And in<br />

the same year, another critic observed that Rühmann’s “art is identical with<br />

his very being, and for that reason it will always be genuine, true to life, and<br />

natural.” 9 Described in such highly charged terms, Rühmann played a pivotal<br />

role in the alignment of the old star system with the new program of<br />

film folklore, including its conciliatory fantasy of ordinary Germanness.<br />

Through his performance of authenticity, the positive aspects of popularity<br />

could be separated from the negative effects of celebrity, and the figure of<br />

the star endowed with an aura of familiarity often missing from the more<br />

synthetic products of the star system. Not surprisingly, Rühmann became<br />

the only comic actor considered worthy of inclusion in more speculative<br />

comments on the ideal body of Germanness, a “distinction” otherwise reserved<br />

for dramatic actors like Hans Albers and Heinrich George. 10 Unlike<br />

these symbols of male strength, Rühmann became identified with the “eternally<br />

human” and “all too human” and, in so doing, he validated the ordinariness<br />

of Germanness, as it were. His performances contributed to the<br />

filmic codification of a national physiognomy that dissolved the boundaries<br />

between the popular and the political and reduced the remaining conflicts<br />

between individual and society, including its class- and gender-based manifestations,<br />

to the “normal” problems of the “little” man dealing with the<br />

“average” problems of “everyday” life.<br />

90 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


These sociopsychological categories give some indication of why the<br />

“centennial actor” who has been a “friend, jester, and soul mate” to German<br />

audiences for over seventy years cannot be understood outside his<br />

formative period during the Third Reich. Rühmann’s posthumous status as<br />

a model of quiet nonconformity and passive resistance and as, to quote one<br />

writer, a “symbol of freedom” 11 makes this connection all the more relevant<br />

to historical reassessments. While the actor’s appeal as a figure of integration<br />

has always included contradictory character traits, his almost habitual<br />

celebration as the quintessential German actor demands further attention,<br />

especially in relation to the problematic legacies of the past. Rühmann and<br />

the underlying assumptions about the identity of actor and role have given<br />

rise to an almost compulsive concern with authenticity even, or especially,<br />

where his characters manifest symptoms of inauthenticity. It is in this integrative<br />

effect, which translates social and sexual conflicts into psychological<br />

states, that we must locate the main source of his continuous popularity<br />

with German audiences and, of course, his complete lack of appeal on international<br />

markets.<br />

Rühmann’s comic style developed in the silent comedy of the 1920s and<br />

the sound comedy of the early 1930s and, after its further codification during<br />

the late 1930s and early 1940s, remained basically unaffected both by<br />

the dramatic political and social changes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s<br />

and the new media-political pressures of the 1980s and 1990s. Since his first<br />

screen appearance in 1926, Rühmann has been identified with a distinctly<br />

German sense of humor. This almost symbiotic relationship was forged<br />

within a self-consciously popular cinema that saw the star system as an effective<br />

compromise between national traditions and international trends.<br />

Rühmann’s success within this system hinged on his performative articulation<br />

of two central topoi within Weimar culture, the rise of white-collar society<br />

and the decline of traditional masculinity. He translated the typical<br />

reactions of the “little man” into the highly codified language of comic<br />

acting and used his unique speaking style to express anxiety, stress, and<br />

frustration in alternatively defensive and aggressive ways. Throughout, his<br />

screen persona remained defined by a profound sense of ambivalence that<br />

proved stronger than the compulsive striving toward closure in the obligatory<br />

happy endings. 12<br />

Many critics have introduced oppositional pairs like brave vs. cowardly,<br />

ebullient vs. inhibited, modest vs. impertinent, pedantic vs. chaotic, and disrespectful<br />

vs. submissive to describe Rühmann’s popular appeal. Stephen<br />

Stars 91


Lowry has relied on such oppositions to identify several recurring themes<br />

in the Rühmann screen persona, including the hostility toward institutional<br />

power structures, the resistance to role expectations, and the insistence on<br />

a strict division between public and private life. 13 Other critics have interpreted<br />

these contradictory elements as a form of inner emigration, and yet<br />

again others have found further evidence of a pervasive pattern of compliance<br />

that the famous actor shared with his audiences during the Third<br />

Reich.<br />

Pointing to the symptomatic nature of these contributions, Georg Seesslen<br />

characterizes the various attempts to reclaim Rühmann as an apolitical<br />

figure as an “inability to acknowledge history in everyday life” and to<br />

recognize the degree to which the comic actor functioned as “the negative<br />

to, and the supplement of, the patriarchal and heroic Führer.” 14 The validation<br />

of the ordinary cannot be separated from the cult of the extraordinary<br />

in official Nazi culture, Seesslen seems to imply, just as the emphasis<br />

on basic human values must be seen as a deliberate denial of the material<br />

forces of politics and ideology. For the same reason, it might be argued that<br />

the politicization of the public sphere could not have taken place without<br />

the celebration of the private sphere in film comedies that promised, in the<br />

words of one early Rühmann hagiographer, “freedom and deliverance from<br />

the deep worries of the daily life struggle.” 15 While these strategies of retreat<br />

and escape have been discussed in relation to the filmic representation<br />

of petit bourgeois life, surprisingly little has been said about the underlying<br />

gender trouble and its encoding in performative terms. As the following<br />

overview of Rühmann comedies from the 1930s and early 1940s suggests, it<br />

is precisely through the displacement of social conflicts into sexual categories<br />

that the generic traditions of Weimar cinema could be incorporated<br />

into the ideological configurations of national cinema and redefined in the<br />

essentializing terms of an “ordinary Germanness.”<br />

II.<br />

What are some of the biographical factors that made possible the almost uncanny<br />

match among a comic actor, social type, and national cinema? The<br />

young Rühmann started out in the theater, where he became known as an<br />

ensemble actor with an appealing personality and adaptable acting style.<br />

The naturalist dramas of Gerhart Hauptmann, the folk plays of Carl Zuckmayer,<br />

and the sophisticated comedies of Curt Goetz familiarized this beginner<br />

with the gestures and rituals of middle-class society, including its<br />

92 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


promises of upward mobility. Appearing in productions of popular British<br />

authors like George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward developed<br />

further his talent for verbal humor and spirited repartee.<br />

Rühmann’s film career took off after the box-office hit Die drei von der<br />

Tankstelle (The Three from the Filling Station, 1930). For Heinz im Mond<br />

(Heinz in the Moon, 1934), Robert A. Stemmele already changed the name<br />

of the title figure from Hans to Heinz in order to take advantage of the actor’s<br />

growing popularity. Later even his well-known passion for flying—he<br />

owned a private plane—would be thematized in famous roles like Quax, der<br />

Bruchpilot (Quax, the Crash Pilot, 1941). Between 1933 and 1945, Rühmann<br />

made forty films, in which he usually played the male lead. Whereas the romantic<br />

comedies explored the vicissitudes of modern love and marriage,<br />

the situation comedies offered comic relief from the crisis of masculinity by<br />

focusing on the camaraderie in all-male groups. Sometimes Rühmann was<br />

cast as the comic sidekick to Hans Albers, or he appeared in groups together<br />

with Theo Lingen and Hans Moser. His favorite female partners included<br />

Hertha Feiler, who in 1938 became his second wife. Rühmann’s busy film<br />

schedule prevented him from taking any stage engagements from 1937 to<br />

1941. Beginning with Lauter Lügen (All Lies, 1938), he directed several films<br />

for the Heinz Rühmann production unit at Terra-Filmkunst. By the early<br />

1940s, he was considered a major star, and paid accordingly by the UFA studio;<br />

in 1940, he received the honorary title of state actor (Staatsschauspieler).<br />

Rühmann’s private life, though not without controversy (e.g., the<br />

1938 divorce from his Jewish first wife), failed to generate much public attention—not<br />

because of any restraint on the part of film journalists but because<br />

of his unique celebrity status. He belonged to Goebbels’s inner circle<br />

and socialized with the Nazi elite. During the war, Rühmann participated<br />

actively in the propaganda effort, among other things through his charity<br />

work for the Winterhilfswerk and his appearance in the box-office hit<br />

Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940).<br />

Although Rühmann received consistently good reviews during these<br />

formative years, there were occasional complaints about his heavy reliance<br />

on elements of the grotesque. Such criticism points to the constraints under<br />

which any comic actor could aspire to national significance. For similar reasons,<br />

his debts to the American slapstick tradition prompted some anxious<br />

remarks about the true nature of German humor and its contribution to<br />

the building of a national cinema. When his performance in Der Mann, der<br />

seinen Mörder sucht (The Man Looking for His Murderer, 1931) reminded<br />

Stars 93


some of Harold Lloyd, Edith Hamann was quick to assert that “just as Harold<br />

is American, Heinz is different; he is German: his comic style is more<br />

reserved, more childlike, more congenial.” 16 Sometimes the remarks on<br />

Rühmann as the personification of Germanness also acknowledged more<br />

ambiguous qualities. Thus a review of So ein Flegel (Such a Brat, 1934)<br />

linked his comic style to “the strengths and weaknesses of the German,” 17<br />

and an early monograph described the actor as “the typical representative<br />

of German humor” 18 and its characteristic mixture of exuberance and<br />

inhibition.<br />

After 1936, most references to Rühmann as a “world-class actor” 19<br />

bracketed these earlier concerns about adequate representations of national<br />

character and focused exclusively on his remarkable ability to resist<br />

all external determinations. His familiarity with international styles and<br />

mentalities was now perceived as an advantage; hence the assertion by a reviewer<br />

of Allotria (Tomfoolery, 1936) that “Rühmann possesses the nonchalance,<br />

which distinguishes so many Americans, of showing the small human<br />

things with great subtlety.” 20 From then on, the comparisons to fairy<br />

tale characters like “Johnny Go-Lucky” (Hans im Glück) and “Johnny<br />

Head-in-the-Air” (Hansguckindieluft) identified the actor with highly individual,<br />

but invariably defeatist and conformist, modes of resistance: to the<br />

pressures of mass society, to the demands on modern masculinity, and to<br />

the very forces of ideology that had created the need for such strategies of<br />

avoidance in the first place. 21<br />

Thus identified with an existential condition of being “in-between,” the<br />

typical Rühmann character from the period either pretends, or is perceived,<br />

to be someone else. He either tries to live up to the expectations of others<br />

or disregards all external demands; he either suffers from visions of grandeur<br />

or remains content being a nobody. His hobbies are either very modest<br />

(e.g., collecting stamps, playing with model trains) or overly ambitious<br />

(e.g., racing cars, flying airplanes). Working as an accountant, bank employee,<br />

legal secretary, traveling salesman, or civil servant, he is usually an<br />

underachiever without any ambition but with an almost instinctual aversion<br />

to power and authority. He may behave like a conformist but then reverses<br />

the effects of his subservience by acting inappropriately. Advocating a strict<br />

separation of public and private life, he lives according to the motto from<br />

Hauptsache glücklich (Happiness Is the Main Thing, 1940), “The main thing<br />

is that nobody bothers us.” Accordingly, when the Rühmann character in<br />

this film attends a reception at the company president’s house— of course,<br />

94 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


under false pretenses—he takes advantage of the formal occasion, and the<br />

availability of free drinks, to share his views on the blessings of being a nobody,<br />

“a small wheel in the machine.” Needless to say, such pronounced<br />

lack of aspiration, which finds expression in his philosophy of “working in<br />

order to live” and not “living in order to work,” requires a fundamental adjustment<br />

in attitude—not because he must make the transition to mature<br />

masculinity but because the “little man” needs to accept his responsibility<br />

to the community, personified, in this film, by the employer and the wife as<br />

forceful advocates of the status quo.<br />

Film scholars have explained the high degree of continuity in Rühmann’s<br />

choice of roles through their shared background in the social and<br />

economic problems of the Weimar period. Yet a closer look at his changing<br />

performance of these conflicts also indicates to what degree the markers of<br />

petit bourgeois mentality were evoked without any social consciousness. In<br />

addition to the above-mentioned All Lies, Tomfoolery, and Happiness Is the<br />

Main Thing, the following films participated in this process of psychologization:<br />

Wenn wir alle Engel wären (If We All Were Angels, 1936), Der Mustergatte<br />

(The Model Husband, 1937), and Ich vertraue dir meine Frau an (I<br />

Entrust You with My Wife, 1943). The basic structure for these comedies<br />

about small employees was developed during the world economic crisis, and<br />

must be regarded, in the view of Ulrich Kurowski, as symptomatic of the<br />

mixture of optimism, pragmatism, and opportunism associated with the<br />

New Objectivity. 22 And indeed, the problems of the “little man” who overcomes<br />

internal and external obstacles provide the narrative structure for<br />

an early white-collar comedy like Der brave Sünder (The Humble Sinner,<br />

1931). The rejection of heterosexual love in favor of male friendship becomes<br />

a constitutive part of the actor’s screen persona after The Three from<br />

the Filling Station. Similarly, the problems of modern marriage are fully<br />

developed as early as Meine Frau, die Hochstaplerin (My Wife, the Impostor,<br />

1931). And the burdens of family life are already apparent in a Max Ophüls<br />

comedy about a troublesome inheritance, Lachende Erben (Laughing<br />

Heirs, 1933).<br />

It would be easy to interpret Rühmann’s roles before 1933 as a manifestation<br />

of what Thomas Elsaesser and Richard McCormick have described as<br />

the fateful alliance between Weimar art cinema and male identity crisis; in<br />

other words, the gendered manifestation of the traumatic war and postwar<br />

years and their temporary normalization in the mentality of the New Objectivity.<br />

23 It would be equally convincing to look at Rühmann’s roles after<br />

Stars 95


1933 as an ongoing reflection on the legacies of Weimar society, including<br />

the problem of women’s emancipation and the rise of white-collar culture.<br />

However, what is even more striking than the obvious continuities is the degree<br />

to which the representation of sexuality gets reconfigured within these<br />

constellations, whether in relation to modern marriage, as an aspect of professional<br />

life, or through the confrontation with public institutions.<br />

The world of small employees in the early sound comedies was filled<br />

with economic opportunities and romantic possibilities. Yet by the mid-<br />

1930s, characters began to reject the modern workplace, with its promise of<br />

self-advancement, for the quiet comforts of routine desk jobs and conventional<br />

marriages. As a result, the petit bourgeois comedies from the early<br />

and the late 1930s exhibit considerable differences in their erotic encoding<br />

of social status. Rühmann’s contribution to the desexualization of the genre<br />

took part in a larger trend toward the privatization of individual desire and<br />

its separation from social, economic, and political determinants. In the end,<br />

the phenomenon of male hysteria appeared in petit bourgeois as well as<br />

upper-class settings. Any awareness of economic or social factors gave way<br />

to normative gender roles and the psychologizing of individual difference.<br />

In this form of restoration comedy, resistance became possible only in the<br />

terms of emotional regression, a process predicated on the renunciation of<br />

sexuality in favor of decidedly narcissistic scenarios. As the “little man’s”<br />

(failed) quest for independence could no longer be compensated for by repeated<br />

successes in love and romance, the progressive elements in these<br />

humorous vignettes of contemporary life were absorbed into the genre’s<br />

affirmative functions.<br />

A brief comparison between two scenes of public intoxication from The<br />

Humble Sinner and If We All Were Angels illustrates this point. Both films<br />

show the adventures of office workers who travel from the small town to the<br />

big city. In each case, the man spends the evening drinking in an exclusive<br />

nightclub only to wake up the next morning with a strange woman in his<br />

hotel room. In each case, the entry into the nighttime world of beautiful<br />

girls, lascivious dances, and, of course, uninhibited drinking is equated with<br />

an act of sinning, as indicated by the biblical allusions in the film titles.<br />

However, this is where the similarities end. In the Fritz Kortner film from<br />

1931, Rühmann is still paired with a colleague, played by Max Pallenberg,<br />

and acts primarily as an innocent bystander to the seduction of the middleaged<br />

bank accountant by a Josephine Baker look-alike. Yet their “sinning”<br />

remains limited to paying for the bacchanalia at the Eden-Bar with bank de-<br />

96 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


posits, which explains their desperate efforts during the remainder of the<br />

story to cover that loss through whatever means possible.<br />

In the Carl Froelich comedy from 1936, any racial and erotic ambiguities<br />

are eliminated in favor of clean harmless fun, and the main crime is not<br />

even embezzlement, a crime based on economic inequity, but the mere suggestion<br />

of an extramarital affair. No longer a naïve young man but the respected<br />

member of a small-town establishment, Rühmann in If We All Were<br />

Angels returns to the scene of the crime as the quintessential German<br />

philistine, complete with three-piece suit, wire-rim glasses, and the obligatory<br />

stand-up collar. These attributes recall the Pallenberg figure from The<br />

Humble Sinner, yet their positive identification with social propriety, moral<br />

righteousness, and barely concealed lechery has little in common with the<br />

mild mockery of provincial awkwardness in the earlier film. Arriving at the<br />

Galathee-Varieté in Cologne, a much older and very married Rühmann first<br />

asks the waiter about the “indecent stage number” but then proceeds to lecture<br />

the young woman next to him about her dubious lifestyle. In such an<br />

atmosphere, his subsequent stumbling down the stairs in a drunken stupor<br />

marks a paradigmatic moment in that it excuses any moral downfalls in advance<br />

by linking transgression to lack of consciousness. Moreover, by making<br />

no distinction between real or imagined acts, this highly symbolic scene<br />

reduces sexual desire to the realm of prurient fantasies and dirty jokes.<br />

After 1933, the presentation of gender trouble rarely reached the level<br />

of social commentary prevalent in the early sound comedies. Instead the<br />

stories and images confirmed the underlying assumptions about identity as<br />

an essential and performative category, but never a social construction. This<br />

apparent contradiction—that identity could be fully evident to itself and<br />

completely dependent on images—is most pronounced in situations that allow<br />

for the articulation of hidden sexual and social anxieties. In many ways,<br />

these situations reveal the underside of the almost compulsory preoccupation<br />

with ordinariness. The degree to which the figure of the “little man”<br />

became codified in terms of sexual inadequacy is especially astonishing if<br />

one compares the German preference for a comical solution—that is to say,<br />

a basic acceptance of the status quo—with the very different approaches to<br />

modern masculinity in other European cinemas during the 1930s. Here a<br />

brief comparison to, say, Jean Gabin would corroborate the suggestion made<br />

earlier that the Rühmann persona of the “little man” required the containment<br />

of male sexuality through the false alternatives of adolescent unruliness<br />

and marital contentment. By contrast, the more traditional masculin-<br />

Stars 97


ity projected by one of the leading stars of the classical French cinema still<br />

allowed for some sense of individual agency and, despite the connection to<br />

social disempowerment, a strong dose of erotic charisma.<br />

While asexuality is often found in comic performances, the lack of any<br />

compensatory qualities such as violence or aggression draws attention to the<br />

underlying identificatory patterns and spectatorial regimes. The driving<br />

force in all cases seems to be a profound fear of women even where, or especially<br />

where, feelings of inadequacy culminate in fantasies of flight and<br />

retribution. In Tomfoolery, Rühmann visits a former lady friend with the intention<br />

of telling her about his impending engagement but ends up using<br />

the unexpected arrival of an acquaintance to flee from the scene. In the<br />

dream sequence that follows, Rühmann remains seated while his more audacious<br />

doppelgänger acts out what amounts to a sadomasochistic fantasy,<br />

namely the imagined reversal of power between the obedient little boy and<br />

his cruel and stern mistress.<br />

In order to understand such paradigmatic scenes, we need to look more<br />

closely at the performance of threatened masculinity in the context of modern<br />

romance and, more specifically, the institution of marriage. Given the<br />

“little man’s” yearning for peace and privacy, it should not surprise that romantic<br />

love is usually equated with comfort, security, and stability: the kind<br />

of pleasures associated with bourgeois marriage. This explains why Rühmann<br />

fails as a romantic lead in Tomfoolery but succeeds brilliantly as The<br />

Model Husband, to evoke his signature role from the Wolfgang Liebeneiner<br />

adaptation of the popular Avery Hopwood play. Even where he temporarily<br />

rejects the idea of marriage, as in Paradise of Bachelors and I Entrust You<br />

with My Wife, he remains under the influence of domestic, and domesticated,<br />

notions of masculinity and femininity. He may dream about sexual<br />

adventures, but in the end always opts for the companionship of a sisterly<br />

or motherly wife. And whenever he is portrayed as a (harmless) lady-killer,<br />

as in Hurra! Ich bin Papa! (Hurrah! I Am a Dad!, 1939), the implied sexual<br />

pleasures are quickly passed over in favor of familial concerns, including<br />

unexpected fatherhood. Yet whether he is dealing with capricious mistresses<br />

or devoted wives, Rühmann’s various strategies of submission,<br />

compliance, and revolt can never fully compensate him for the lack of selfdetermination.<br />

Therefore the assertion of his will to power remains ultimately<br />

unconvincing, and that despite all the external rewards in his personal<br />

and professional life.<br />

98 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


In The Model Husband the state of inebriation provides a convenient<br />

framework for the articulation of sexual desire inside and outside of marriage.<br />

Again the representation of sexuality remains limited to double entendres,<br />

veiled allusions, and dirty jokes. It is the function of the heavy<br />

drinking to bring out the discrepancy between the characters’ obsession<br />

with the idea of temptation and their inability to be anything but virtuous<br />

and faithful to their partners. The circumstances are fairly typical of sophisticated<br />

comedies from the period. Rühmann and the wife of his best<br />

friend get together for a romantic evening in order to make their spouses<br />

jealous and, they hope, revive their marriages. While their halfhearted attempts<br />

at creating a compromising situation lead nowhere, except to immature<br />

pranks, both manage to get completely drunk on cocktails and<br />

champagne. Thus when the woman, now in pajamas, lies down next to the<br />

Rühmann character, he first mutters, “What a dame!” and then shrieks,<br />

“But not with me!” Of course, such inconsistencies do not stop “the model<br />

husband” from responding to the sudden arrival of his wife and best friend<br />

with the self-serving question, “How can I help it if women are crazy<br />

about me?”<br />

This sentence articulates the basic conflict between the grandiose visions<br />

of self and the deep fears of inadequacy that lies at the core of the<br />

Rühmann persona. No matter whether the problems are defined in terms of<br />

economic status, as in Heimkehr ins Glück (Homecoming to Happiness,<br />

1933), creative imagination, as in Nanu, Sie kennen Korff noch nicht? (What,<br />

You Haven’t Met Korff Yet?, 1938), or technical know-how, as in Quax, the<br />

Crash Pilot, the basic psychological constellation remains always the same.<br />

Rühmann finds himself in circumstances where he is judged, or feels judged,<br />

by someone in a position of power. To what degree such experiences resemble<br />

the behavioral patterns of adolescence, including its wavering between<br />

regression and revolt, can be seen in the two adaptations of the popular<br />

Heinrich Spoerl novel, including Die Feuerzangenbowle (The Hot Fruit<br />

Punch, 1944). Significantly, it is again an alcoholic beverage that inspires<br />

the quintessential retrograde fantasy of returning to school: out of a desire<br />

to “turn loose” in a tightly controlled environment, a desire to have adventures<br />

free of risk and danger, and a desire to commit transgressive acts<br />

without responsibility. Somewhat polemically, Karsten Witte has characterized<br />

such tendencies as a key ingredient of fascist fantasy production. 24<br />

Rühmann, it might be concluded, was necessary to the staging of these con-<br />

Stars 99


figurations—but less through his association with a particular social stereotype<br />

than through his performative approach to the experience of ambivalence<br />

and the crisis of identity.<br />

III.<br />

When we think of Nazi movie stars, we usually think of Zarah Leander,<br />

Hans Albers, Brigitte Horney, Willy Birgel, Marika Rökk, and Kristina Söderbaum,<br />

to name some of the more famous ones. They received fan mail,<br />

inspired fashion trends, endorsed consumer products, appeared at premieres<br />

and benefits, socialized with members of the party elite, and were<br />

the subject of gossip columns and celebrity worship. Whether enlisted in<br />

propaganda efforts or connected to popular genres, these products of the socalled<br />

“golden age of UFA” were marketed in a way consistent with the<br />

Hollywood studio system of the 1930s. However, the official pronouncements<br />

on the new German film art made necessary a more pronounced distinction<br />

between stars like Zarah Leander, whose glamorous screen image<br />

reflected the power of the dream factory, and respected stage actors who,<br />

like Gustaf Gründgens or Marianne Hoppe, had come from the theater and<br />

often continued to work in both settings. Courted by the studios, but not<br />

necessarily loved by the fans, these actors contributed an aura of cultural<br />

respectability through their connection to the German-speaking stage (e.g.,<br />

the Deutsche Theater in Berlin, the Burgtheater in Vienna); their association<br />

with particular character parts and signature roles; and their full command<br />

of a distinct acting style that included the famous Bühnendeutsch<br />

(standard pronunciation). In a middle-class culture still firmly committed<br />

to theater as a privileged site in the making of national identity, these references<br />

were important for reconciling the demands of official political culture<br />

and traditional high culture with the irreversible and indisputable ascendancy<br />

of popular cinema.<br />

The development of a modified star system equally indebted to popular<br />

tastes and populist ideas brought together seemingly irreconcilable tendencies,<br />

and not without some controversy. On the one hand, the star phenomenon<br />

continued to take advantage of what some saw as clear evidence of the<br />

industry’s dependency on international tastes and what others denounced<br />

as an un-German fixation on beauty and sex appeal. On the other hand, the<br />

search for new screen idols after 1933 was regarded as a welcome opportunity<br />

to infuse the established rituals of fandom with contemporary contents,<br />

100 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


which included the racialized discourses of the body as the presumed locus<br />

of German identity. During the early years of the regime, the star system<br />

was frequently attacked as the manifestation of an industrialized mass culture<br />

preoccupied only with external appearances and spectatorial pleasures.<br />

Speaking out against these excesses, commentators demanded: “No<br />

more stars—we want to see human beings.” 25 Their repeated calls for popular<br />

(volkstümlich) actors “connected to the people” (volksverbunden) were<br />

motivated not only by artistic concerns about a pernicious tendency toward<br />

typecasting and stereotyping but also by growing financial problems allegedly<br />

caused by skyrocketing star salaries. 26 Similarly, the extensive wartime<br />

writings about a renewed “commitment to the ensemble film” 27 reflect<br />

both the obvious need for powerful symbols of national community and a<br />

more hidden message to UFA’s leading stars about the ethos of teamwork.<br />

Even Rühmann at one time provoked the critical remark that he would<br />

reach the full “articulation of his abilities” 28 only as the supportive member<br />

of a strong ensemble.<br />

Notwithstanding the polemical treatises on the dangers of typecasting,<br />

the demand for young, talented actors able to fill the gaps left by the exiles<br />

and émigrés remained undiminished throughout the 1930s. That is why<br />

critical attention shifted to the sociopsychological importance of the star<br />

phenomenon in producing social consensus and maintaining the status quo.<br />

Even Reichsfilmintendant Fritz Hippler overcame his initial opposition and<br />

emphasized the importance of stars in propagating new programs and policies,<br />

if through the detour of everyday behavior. Interestingly, Hippler<br />

makes no references to specific character traits or mental attitudes. Instead<br />

he speaks of casual gestures and mundane situations and evokes the ordinary<br />

things that, in the form of clothes, accessories, and utensils, convey a<br />

sense of being in the world and implicate even the more abstract (or politicized)<br />

terms of identity in the rituals of self-presentation sustained by fashion<br />

styles and consumerist choices:<br />

In addition to the personal connection to a leading actor during the<br />

screening, film creates the desire in the audience to be like him. How<br />

he clears his throat and spits, how he is dressed, how he carries himself,<br />

what he drinks (if he drinks), what he smokes and how, whether<br />

he behaves like a philistine or a bon vivant—all of this has not only<br />

an effect in the film but also in the life of the audience. 29<br />

Stars 101


7. Heinz Rühmann, Terra Advertisement, Film-Kurier, 6 February 1941<br />

The exceptional status of Rühmann within the two-tiered system of<br />

movie stars and character actors and the changing attitudes toward the star<br />

phenomenon can be explained through a closer look at his performative approach<br />

to the question of male identity—which also means: his body. Obviously,<br />

there are many ways of thinking about a star: as an image and a sign,<br />

as a cultural commodity and a social phenomenon, as a textual and intertextual<br />

effect, as a figure of identification and projection, as the object of<br />

voyeuristic and fetishistic investments, and so forth. 30 Whereas some stars<br />

of the Third Reich brought their popularity to a variety of stories and settings,<br />

others remained connected to specific genres and achieved popularity<br />

through their close identification with a particular mood or mentality.<br />

Cast only in comic parts, Rühmann belongs to the second category. His<br />

physiognomy, or, to evoke Hayward’s more analytical term, his gestural<br />

code, was defined through the categories of lack and deficiency, a fact that<br />

furthermore limited its style to humorous treatments. Against the highly<br />

politicized spectacle of a body “too much” in larger-than-life actors like<br />

George or Jannings, Rühmann asserted himself as a body “too little” and<br />

therefore proved ideally suited to perform the double crises of masculinity<br />

and petit bourgeois consciousness. 31<br />

To begin with Rühmann’s facial features, every detail from the round<br />

cheeks and dimpled chin and the slightly pointed nose to the full, soft lips<br />

and the fine blond hair points to a childlike personality. Whether he is pouting<br />

out of frustration or smirking in joyous anticipation, his mouth always<br />

expresses a need, if not also neediness. If the mouth and chin area is ever<br />

used to display stereotypical male traits like willpower and strength, it is<br />

only through a puerile variant such as stubbornness. His distinctive voice<br />

articulates the problem of self-assertion across the entire expressive range,<br />

from the familiar whining, mumbling, and stammering to the kind of<br />

breathless speaking without volume and resonance that has been described<br />

as a “speaking to the side, as if he were ashamed of saying anything at all.” 32<br />

Similar conclusions can be drawn about the way Rühmann stares or frowns<br />

102 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


under pressure and looks downward or sideways in embarrassment. The direction<br />

of his gaze requires constant adjustment; his swiftness and agility are<br />

a defensive physical response to a perceived lack of orientation and control.<br />

The placement and movement of the actor’s body within the miseen-scène<br />

add to this overall impression of painful self-awareness. Rühmann<br />

compensates for his short stature with increased physical activity. In difficult<br />

situations, he utilizes the entire repertoire from clutched hands, raised<br />

shoulders, twisted arms to curved spine, caved-in chest, and lowered head.<br />

Of course, any detailed analysis of his screen persona must also extend to<br />

hairstyles, clothes, and accessories, as well as the possessions with which he<br />

surrounds himself. These markers of personality become especially pronounced<br />

in situations that bring out his most fundamental problem, the desire<br />

for self-actualization and the impossibility of its realization. These situations<br />

often arise as a result of the binge drinking that has already been<br />

discussed within the representational strategies of white-collar comedy but<br />

now also calls for a more detailed consideration of the presentational modes<br />

associated with comic performance styles.<br />

From the beginning of cinema, excessive drinking has been one of the<br />

standards in the comic repertory. Given its association with loss of control,<br />

drunkenness allows for the representation of transgressive and disruptive<br />

forms of behavior: challenging institutional authority, rejecting social convention,<br />

violating public decorum, overcoming sexual inhibitions, and, most<br />

important in the case of Rühmann, regressing to a state of blissful irresponsibility.<br />

More specifically, the various stages of inebriation and the increasing<br />

sense of physical and psychological impairment give the comic actor<br />

a perfect opportunity to show off his physical swiftness and dexterity. As<br />

a departure from naturalistic acting, drunken scenes legitimate a return to<br />

the expressive registers of slapstick and pantomime. The privileging of interiority<br />

in classical screen acting—that is, when actions are psychologically<br />

motivated—is thus overlaid by an older, highly externalized acting tradition<br />

based on mechanical gestures and exaggerated movements.<br />

In the Rühmann comedies, alcohol is frequently introduced in moments<br />

when a solution can be achieved only through temporary amnesia in the<br />

main protagonist. Following in the tradition of the carnivalesque, the altered<br />

state bears witness to the binary opposition of public vs. private, latent<br />

vs. manifest, hidden vs. concealed, and real vs. imagined that constitutes<br />

his screen persona, from the tacit acceptance of self-control as a condition<br />

of social harmony to the sentimental belief in childishness as the true es-<br />

Stars 103


sence of man. His performance encourages identification with the experience<br />

of self-abandonment, but it also speaks to more hidden sadistic and<br />

masochistic impulses released by such a spectacle of disempowerment. For<br />

that reason, the drunken scenes are usually built around the tension between<br />

the character who, for a brief moment, falls apart and “loses it” and<br />

the actor who skillfully performs these effects. Beginning with Laughing<br />

Heirs, which introduced the drunken theme through its silly story of a<br />

family-owned vineyard and a troubling inheritance with an abstinence<br />

clause, Rühmann’s comic style hinges on such calculated moments of transgression<br />

and the underlying assumptions about male identity that make<br />

them both possible and necessary. Acknowledging the close ties between intoxication<br />

and visual pleasure, one reviewer even referred to this early Rühmann<br />

comedy from 1933 as an “exclusive brand from the sparkling wine<br />

cellar of German humor.” 33<br />

Many of these points can be developed further through an extended<br />

drinking scene from Paradies der Junggesellen (Paradise of Bachelors,<br />

1939). As in The Three from the Filling Station, Rühmann belongs to a group<br />

of friends who derive much of their confidence from the rituals of homosocial<br />

behavior, including a professed disdain for women. On one occasion,<br />

the twice-divorced marriage registrar and his two bachelor friends get terribly<br />

drunk on beer and schnapps during a reunion dinner for the crew of<br />

the torpedo boat Victoria. Their exuberant song-and-dance number soon<br />

gives way to the obligatory boasting about amorous adventures that barely<br />

hides the men’s deep fear of female sexuality. Rühmann announces that he<br />

can’t go home to his landlady because, to quote this amateur lothario, “I<br />

don’t want to be seduced” or, rather, “I can’t be stopped” when under the<br />

influence (of eggnog, that is). Of course, these bold claims are invalidated as<br />

soon as he confronts the object of such sexual bragging. Back in his furnished<br />

room, Rühmann desperately tries to play the “man of the world” by<br />

bouncing up and down (to look taller) and by speaking assertively (to hide<br />

his nervousness). Yet as soon as his buxom landlady pushes him onto the<br />

sofa and puts her arm around him (“I want to spoil you!”), he acts like a<br />

scared little boy and signals his two friends to come to his aid. Their participation<br />

in the subsequent exchange of words allows him to lose his inhibitions,<br />

if only for a brief moment. He announces that he is moving out, to<br />

which the landlady responds with a barrage of insults and accusations. Annoyed,<br />

he throws hot tea in her face. Finally the three men take off like<br />

104 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


naughty boys after a successful prank and agree never to have anything to<br />

do with women; thus begins their (short-lived) paradise of bachelors.<br />

This rather typical scene, which showcases the main elements of the<br />

Rühmann persona, is structured around a secret affinity between fear and<br />

aggression, and shyness and impertinence, that brings us back to the important<br />

question of national character. Edith Hamann once described the<br />

young Rühmann as “the inventor of shy impertinence or impertinent shyness,”<br />

and Hermann Gressieker explained the actor’s popular appeal<br />

through his unique ability to perform two contradictory impulses or tendencies<br />

at the same time. 34 The humorous effect in all cases, both seem to<br />

agree, derives from the gestural exuberance that links the promise of a temporary<br />

return to childhood to the deeply unconvincing (because always<br />

adolescent) performance of masculinity. This is not the place to speculate<br />

about the relevance of these scenarios of male regression for audiences<br />

trained in the heroic registers of Aryan virility. It would require a more detailed<br />

investigation of the prevailing pattern of identification in the Rühmann<br />

comedies to arrive at some preliminary conclusions about the underlying<br />

sadistic and masochistic impulses and their very different function for<br />

male and female spectators. 35 What we can deduce from this exemplary<br />

scene is the centrality of nonidentity as a psychological problem and of performance<br />

as a psychological necessity. Both conditions give rise to a physical<br />

form of humor that must indeed be described as typical, if not highly<br />

symptomatic, of the contradictions within the definitions of Germanness<br />

prevalent at the time. For instance, a 1941 advertisement by the Terra film<br />

studio describes this staging of ambivalence as a permanent condition in the<br />

following way:<br />

He is the character who suddenly casts off an awkward reserve, a visible<br />

modesty with atypical daring. In the beginning, he is still a little<br />

inhibited but fully aware of what he wants to achieve. Then suddenly<br />

his face lightens up. It is the joyous anticipation of success, it is the<br />

passion of the boyish man who already sees his impudence rewarded<br />

and who is now able to take a more playful approach to a serious<br />

situation. And once he has found both, he resolutely embarks on a<br />

strange adventure or a great love affair or an almost heroic deed.<br />

Time and again, his sense of fulfillment is clearly in evidence: I, the<br />

little man, am now very big. 36<br />

Stars 105


To conclude: As the prototype of the “little man,” Rühmann played a<br />

key role in the presentation of the private sphere as separate from social and<br />

political concerns and untouched by the pressures of ideology. Through his<br />

comic acting style, he offered an imaginary solution to the continuous existence<br />

of social conflicts and gender troubles by collapsing the one into the<br />

other and by translating both into purely psychological terms. Recently<br />

Antje Ascheid has argued that even “if stars under National Socialism could<br />

not help but become tools that were used to further the National Socialist<br />

cause—their sociohistorical function can neither be fixed nor limited to<br />

these determinants.” 37 The case of Rühmann suggests that it was precisely<br />

the resistance to all neat distinctions between intentions and effects that<br />

constituted his popular appeal and his political relevance. With these qualities,<br />

the textually articulated tension among role, persona, and performance<br />

and the historically specific alliance between Heinz Rühmann’s<br />

comic style and the German national character implicate the actor forever<br />

in the performative strategies of avoidance and denial that I have identified<br />

earlier as one of the constitutive elements of popular cinema in the Third<br />

Reich.<br />

106 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


6<br />

DETLEF SIERCK AND<br />

Schlußakkord<br />

(FINAL CHORD, 1936)<br />

A CASE STUDY OF<br />

FILM AUTHORSHIP<br />

I.<br />

The writings on Douglas Sirk, who was known to German audiences of the<br />

1930s as Detlef Sierck, tend to imitate aspects of the melodramatic form, including<br />

an affinity for excess in meaning. Critics and scholars often stage, to<br />

quote Peter Brooks’s definition, “a heightened and hyperbolic drama, making<br />

reference to pure and polar concepts of darkness and light, salvation and<br />

damnation.” 1 Propelled by such motifs and motivations, Sirk scholarship<br />

from the 1970s to the 1990s has followed the main trends from auteurism<br />

and structuralism to feminist and cultural studies approaches. 2 Whether<br />

evoked as a true auteur or a representative of melodrama, the American


Sirk continues to feature prominently in the debates on genre cinema and<br />

dominant ideology. Organized around oppositional terms such as conventional<br />

vs. innovative, subversive vs. affirmative, and transgressive vs. repressive,<br />

these debates have shed light on the remarkable productivity of the<br />

melodramatic form and its potential as a means of aesthetic resistance. During<br />

the last decade, such readings and rereadings have been extended to the<br />

German Sierck and his hyperbolic representations of femininity in the registers<br />

of the foreign and the exotic. 3<br />

However, is it possible to examine the changing currency of stylistic excess<br />

in the transition from 1930s German cinema to 1950s American cinema<br />

through the textual categories of genre and authorship without taking into<br />

account the changing historical contexts? More specifically, can we apply<br />

these critical oppositions to a popular cinema in which the ideological function<br />

of melodrama seems so closely linked to oppressive notions of gender<br />

and where authorship remains a highly contested category, particularly in<br />

connection with a problematic notion like resistance? On the following<br />

pages, I focus on Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936) to address some of these<br />

questions, first through a closer look at the various influences on the early<br />

Sierck and his subsequent elevation to the status of auteur and, second,<br />

through the high-cultural references, including music, that made melodrama<br />

the preferred form of artistic expression both for him and for an entire<br />

generation of directors during the Third Reich. 4 As I hope to show,<br />

closer attention to the historical articulation of film authorship moves the<br />

terms of the debate beyond the false alternatives of melodrama as a liberating<br />

excess in signification, especially around issues of femininity, and of<br />

melodrama as part of a masochistic aesthetic that ends up legitimating<br />

social and sexual discrimination. 5 By considering the cultural and social significance<br />

of stylization, I want to explore a third possibility, the role of formal<br />

excess in engaging particular audiences and granting particular pleasures<br />

within the changing determinants of genre cinema.<br />

An authorial style defined in such contextual terms includes the director’s<br />

reliance on, and reference to, shared tastes, sensibilities, and modes of<br />

appreciation. These elements influence his aesthetic choices, including the<br />

affinity for theatricality, and connect them to the class-based cultural traditions<br />

that inform the popular reception of the melodrama. Such a framework<br />

of references sheds light on how existing cultural and critical traditions<br />

are integrated into, and transformed within, the framework of the<br />

melodramatic and how transgressive and affirmative effects can be ascribed<br />

108 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


to the same filmic text under different conditions of reception. In light of<br />

such processes, the overdetermined function of melodrama during the<br />

Third Reich brings into relief what Marcia Landy, in her reflections on theatricality<br />

in the Italian cinema under fascism, has described as “a crisis of<br />

representation concerning the nature and effects of cultural production,” 6<br />

a crisis that, among other things, finds expression in the elusive relationship<br />

between generic convention and authorial innovation.<br />

If we believe that there are stylistic continuities in the transition from<br />

the German to the American “name of the author,” we must locate the origins<br />

of a thus defined directorial style in the cinema of the Third Reich.<br />

Moreover, if we see melodrama as a genre with a particular aesthetic investment<br />

in the question of (female) identity, we must consider Sierck’s melodramatic<br />

imagination in light of the oppressive gender discourses that transformed<br />

all aspects of culture and society after 1933. It would be problematic<br />

to extend the recent debates about subversive meanings back to his early<br />

work in a genre so deeply implicated in the film industry’s attempts to appropriate<br />

elements from Weimar’s “cinema of quality.” At the same time, it<br />

would be equally unproductive to exclude from the outset all considerations<br />

of aesthetic resistance simply because his German films deal with such ideologically<br />

charged themes as the cult of motherhood and the celebration<br />

of community. For these reasons, my reading of Final Chord is organized<br />

around what I will describe as the shared marginality of the figure of the author<br />

and the genre of melodrama in the popular cinema of the 1930s in a<br />

case study on the importance of historical contextualization.<br />

Like the filmic texts, the double identity of Sierck /Sirk thrives on highly<br />

charged oppositions, beginning with his problematic position between German<br />

and American cinema. 7 During a period of great political changes, including<br />

the exclusionary measures described in Chapter 2, Sierck signed an<br />

initial contract with the UFA studio in 1934 and directed seven feature films<br />

until he and his Jewish wife, Hilde Jary, left Germany via Rome in 1937. In<br />

the German context, the director is usually identified with UFA melodramas<br />

like Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1937) and La Habanera (1937). In the<br />

Anglo-American context, Sirk is known best for his association during the<br />

1950s with the Universal studio, which produced such famous works as<br />

Magnificent Obsession (1953), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the<br />

Wind (1955), and Imitation of Life (1958). The tension between the two<br />

names brings out the main elements of an identifiable directorial style, even<br />

despite the changing status of authorship under different conditions of pro-<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 109


duction and reception. At the same time, these differences draw attention<br />

to the contribution of existing cultural traditions to the emergence of such<br />

a directorial style, particularly if style is understood as an aesthetic effect<br />

produced both by the visual and narrative elements unique to film and by<br />

the sensibilities and mentalities that sustain, and are sustained by, artistic<br />

practices in general. Thus in the case of Final Chord, the introduction of<br />

theatrical and iconographic elements into the filmic mise-en-scène and the<br />

reliance on classical music as a narrative device have to be examined not<br />

only in regard to the film as an early Sierck text but also in terms of its historical<br />

reception, which includes the implicit assumptions about film and<br />

the other arts.<br />

II.<br />

Until recently, little was known about Sierck’s films from the 1930s. In the<br />

Anglo-American debates, the reasons for such neglect are all too obvious.<br />

Acknowledging the Nazi culture industry as an important influence would<br />

implicate the director’s artistic vision in more complicated, if not highly<br />

compromised, negotiations of power and desire. That is why some critics<br />

have simply rewritten history in order to protect the later work from contamination.<br />

Michael Stern speaks of Sirk’s contribution to “German cinema<br />

on the verge of Nazification” 8 —all of his films were made after 1933!—and<br />

locates the high points of his career in Weimar Germany and Eisenhower<br />

America. Celebrating Sierck as a leftist theater producer from the 1920s has<br />

allowed other critics to distract from his film projects after 1933 and emphasize<br />

the close connection to the aesthetic and political avant-gardes.<br />

In order to avoid some of the critical blind spots around the notion of<br />

authorship, it might perhaps be more useful to begin by describing Sierck’s<br />

German period as a fairly typical career in theater and film, which corresponded,<br />

in often uncanny ways, to the crises of the late Weimar Republic<br />

and the rise of National Socialism. Like Veit Harlan, Helmut Käutner, and<br />

Wolfgang Liebeneiner, Sierck had come to filmmaking after 1933 and must<br />

therefore be counted among a group of young actors and directors who,<br />

in the absence of strong political convictions, are described best as apolitical<br />

artists, cynical careerists, and political opportunists. Sierck brought to<br />

melodrama a close familiarity with the canon of classical music and the history<br />

of the visual arts; he also possessed an extensive knowledge of silent<br />

film and, through his own involvement, of modern theater. Early studies in<br />

art history also left a mark on his use of symbolism that, in the melodramas,<br />

110 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


anges from flowers as sexual symbols to mirrors as active participants in<br />

the staging of identities. Such choices betray the strong influence of Erwin<br />

Panofsky, with whom Sierck had studied in Hamburg during the 1920s.<br />

Panofsky’s observation that film stands in the iconographic tradition of the<br />

medieval arts influenced the director’s approach to mise-en-scène and informed<br />

his frequent references to cultural icons (e.g., in Final Chord, in the<br />

transition from a beautiful medieval sculpture to a cheap miniature of the<br />

Statue of Liberty).<br />

Most importantly, Sierck’s approach to melodrama follows in the tradition<br />

of his extensive theater work during the 1920s and early 1930s. Staging<br />

plays in Chemnitz, Bremen, Leipzig, and as a guest producer in Berlin, he<br />

made a name for himself through innovative adaptations of the classics<br />

(Shakespeare, Kleist, Molière). Sierck rejected the expressionist legacy but<br />

showed little interest in the initiatives for a political theater spearheaded by<br />

Erwin Piscator. For Thomas Elsaesser these productions stood “within a<br />

recognizably German tradition of philosophical and aesthetic idealism.” 9<br />

The fact that Sierck also staged Bertolt Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny<br />

Opera) and that his production of Georg Kaiser’s Der Silbersee (The<br />

Silver Lake), with music by Kurt Weill, caused some political controversy<br />

does not necessarily make him a Brechtian filmmaker. As Gertrud Koch<br />

points out, many reviewers described Sierck’s approach as “humanistic,” 10<br />

a decidedly un-Brechtian designation indeed.<br />

There is no question that working in the theater gave Sierck a profound<br />

understanding of the mise-en-scènes of emotion, something Elsaesser<br />

characterizes as “psycho-symbolic realism.” 11 However, the director’s background<br />

in art history and his work in the theater were not the only inspiration<br />

for his skillfully constructed filmic mise-en-scènes. His familiarity with<br />

the Weimar art cinema must be considered an equally important factor,<br />

given the close ties between cinema and theater and their similar interest in<br />

staging, lighting, and mass choreography. To mention only one example, the<br />

chamberplay film, with its carefully constructed interiors, had been promoted<br />

during the 1920s as an attractive offering to middle-class audiences<br />

still committed to the bourgeois theater. Obviously aware of this tradition,<br />

Sierck tried to accommodate their highbrow tastes through a heavy reliance<br />

on theatrical devices such as foreground and background; the formal experiments<br />

with framing—for instance, the extensive traveling shots; and a<br />

general predilection for spatial over temporal relations in the approach to<br />

narrative continuity.<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 111


Delineating the formative influence of Weimar culture on Sierck, Jon<br />

Halliday nonetheless evokes the highly politicized theatrical and musical<br />

experiments in “the traditions of Weill, Ophuls, Brecht, and Sternheim.” 12<br />

Where Sierck’s activities during the Third Reich find any mention at all, his<br />

work tends to be associated with various forms of aesthetic resistance. Despite<br />

growing institutional and ideological pressures, the director was allegedly<br />

able to maintain a sense of artistic integrity, for instance, by infusing<br />

conventional material with new meanings. Final Chord, Halliday claims,<br />

forced Sierck to “accept an atrociously mawkish story, loaded down with<br />

‘melodrama,’ and turn it into something new.” 13 In his own words, the UFA<br />

may have been ultraconservative, but its corporate structure still protected<br />

the creative personnel from direct political interference: “It was still a privately<br />

owned company, and there weren’t any Nazis in it at the time. . . . In<br />

1934–35 the situation in the movies was still a lot better than in the theatre.”<br />

14 Sierck spoke from personal experience when he differentiated between<br />

the profit-driven film industry and the heavily subsidized repertory<br />

theater, a driving force in the project of cultural renewal and an important<br />

testing ground for Nazi cultural initiatives before 1933. However, Halliday<br />

translates these institutional differences into aesthetic practices and interprets<br />

them as a sign of independence; hence his conclusion: “It is striking<br />

then within the overall highly oppressive political context of Germany that<br />

there was considerable freedom of maneuver on such matters as re-writing<br />

the script, lighting, camerawork, and casting.” 15<br />

In their search for solutions to the creative crisis after the forced coordination<br />

of the industry, studio heads after 1933 turned increasingly to the<br />

melodrama, a genre neglected during the early sound period, in order to<br />

raise the quality of productions and attract more middle-class audiences.<br />

The training of a new generation of directors with original ideas and distinct<br />

styles was perceived as an important step in this direction; so was the<br />

increased emphasis on marketing. As part of this initiative, Final Chord premiered<br />

on 27 June, on the occasion of the annual convention of motionpicture<br />

theater owners in Leipzig, and again for nationwide release on<br />

24 July in Berlin’s famous Gloria-Palast. The film was a commercial and<br />

critical success, a fact that helped Sierck in his later negotiations with the<br />

UFA studio. Nonetheless, most reviewers ignored the emerging director and<br />

focused instead on the two leading actors, Willy Birgel and Lil Dagover.<br />

Based on their performances, Lichtbildbühne praised Final Chord as “the<br />

most honest, most decent and, in its form, most compelling film of the last<br />

112 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


years.” 16 An advertisement for the film in the trade press promised exhibitors<br />

that this “superb German film” 17 would bring new audiences to the<br />

cinema—again not necessarily because of the talented director, but because<br />

of the quality approach to the often maligned genre of melodrama.<br />

“From Schlußakkord onwards,” Sirk later told Halliday, “I tried to<br />

develop a cinema style. I began to understand that the camera is the<br />

main thing here, because there is emotion in the motion pictures. Motion<br />

is emotion, in a way it can never be in the theatre.” 18 The director’s selfpresentation<br />

as an auteur captures well his conception of melodrama as a<br />

uniquely filmic genre. Throughout his career, he used melos as a marker of<br />

emotionality and an agent of stylization. The power of the melodramatic<br />

found expression in the close attention to female problems; the emphasis on<br />

social and racial difference; the tension between individual and community;<br />

the fascination with decline and degeneration; and the reliance on standard<br />

melodramatic elements like the inevitability of guilt, the ubiquity of suffering,<br />

and the impossibility of happiness.<br />

Sirk’s definition of “melodramas in the sense of music + drama” 19 acknowledges<br />

classical music, and musical culture in general, as a driving<br />

force in the formation of public and private identities. This coupling of<br />

music and drama organizes his melodramas around two systems of signification,<br />

sound and image. Whereas the visual elements of framing and<br />

mise-en-scène produce a critical distance from the narrative events and, by<br />

extension, the myths of authenticity and immediacy, the auditory pleasures<br />

provided by diegetic and nondiegetic music compensate for these disruptions<br />

of style and reaffirm the desire for images based on the reality of desire.<br />

What is not acknowledged in the Sirk interview is the degree to which<br />

the active contribution of audiences is needed to complete these often contradictory<br />

effects. What is also missing in later tributes to the auteur is some<br />

recognition of the cultural traditions that influenced the development of his<br />

melodramatic style, beginning with the heavy reliance on theatrical devices<br />

and musical references in the staging of femininity.<br />

Since Final Chord is not very well known, a brief plot synopsis may be<br />

in order. The story opens on a New Year’s Eve party in New York. A man is<br />

found dead in Central Park, and his wife receives the sad news about what<br />

appears to be suicide. The couple fled Germany because the husband<br />

had embezzled some money; their young son was left behind. Now Hanna<br />

Müller (Maria von Tasnady) is free to return to the homeland. Meanwhile,<br />

in a Berlin orphanage, little Peter is adopted by the famous conductor Erich<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 113


Garvenberg (Willy Birgel) and his beautiful but unhappy wife Charlotte (Lil<br />

Dagover). The adoptive mother continues to conduct an affair with the<br />

astrologer Karl-Otto. Concerned about Peter’s well-being, the husband<br />

hires a nanny, Hanna, who has come to the orphanage to inquire about the<br />

whereabouts of her son. She is offered the position under the provision that<br />

she will never reveal her identity as the child’s real mother. Predictably, the<br />

domestic arrangement brings many complications. While Charlotte tries<br />

unsuccessfully to sever all ties with Karl-Otto, who, by now, is extorting<br />

money from her, Hanna and Garvenberg become friends through their<br />

shared love for the boy. Charlotte fires the nanny after compromising revelations<br />

about her husband’s criminal past. On the night that Hanna returns<br />

to the house to abduct the boy, the despondent Charlotte takes an overdose<br />

of morphine. Hanna is accused of murder but eventually cleared of all<br />

charges. Finally, she is free to marry the adoptive father of her biological<br />

son.<br />

How does this rather maudlin story engage the melodramatic imagination?<br />

In accordance with Brooks’s definition of melodrama, Final Chord<br />

offers “indulgence of strong emotionalism; moral polarization and schematization;<br />

extreme states of being, situations, actions; overt villainy, persecution<br />

of the good, and final reward of virtue” and so forth. 20 Melodramas can<br />

open up a space for controlled transgressions by deviating from established<br />

forms, styles, or techniques, but they realize these functions differently at<br />

different times. The genre offers conventional narratives and stereotypical<br />

characters, on the one hand, and performative excess, visual spectacle, and<br />

critical commentary, on the other. From the contemporary perspective of<br />

feminist film scholarship, the melodramatic form often lends itself to the<br />

displacement of social and sexual conflicts into more unstable perceptual<br />

relations and ambivalent structures of identification. What is less obvious<br />

without at least some historical contextualization is the degree to which<br />

Sierck’s stylistic interventions during the 1930s were predicated on the embattled<br />

status of a genre with cultural and critical aspirations. Appealing to<br />

the educated middle class, the director decided to rely on the same strategies<br />

of transgression and containment that later contributed to the triumphant<br />

reemergence of melodrama in the early 1940s; the role of music<br />

as a narrative agent and discursive device must be considered essential to<br />

this process.<br />

From the conditions of production and reception to the filmic miseen-scène<br />

of auditory relations and acoustic effects, music triumphs as the<br />

114 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


unifying force behind Sierck’s conception of melodrama. Already the participation<br />

of well-known musicians and the attention to musical detail suggest<br />

that the UFA wanted to produce a serious music film with highbrow appeal.<br />

Composer and conductor Kurt Schröder incorporated elements from<br />

extensive musical performances into an evocative original score reminiscent<br />

of later film scores by Erich Maria Korngold. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,<br />

which serves as a conduit between the trivial family drama and its<br />

new ideological investments, was performed by the orchestra of the Berlin<br />

State Opera. Soloists included the well-known tenor Hellmuth Melchert<br />

and Erna Berger, one of the best coloratura sopranos of her generation. Not<br />

surprisingly, the film was awarded the designation “artistically valuable”<br />

and received a prize for the best music film at the Venice Film Festival. In<br />

addition to the live performances, diegetic music structures the narrative in<br />

the form of radio broadcasts and gramophone recordings. Throughout, the<br />

act of listening to music is presented as a conduit for powerful epiphanies.<br />

The score makes a clear distinction between the destructive effect attributed<br />

to modern music (e.g., the jazz band in the New York episode, the<br />

swing music at Charlotte’s party) and the ability of classical music to give<br />

emotional sustenance and create connections across spatial and social divides.<br />

Surprisingly, live performances and radio broadcasts are treated<br />

equally, a comment perhaps on the growing importance of radio, the socalled<br />

Volksempfänger (people’s receiver), in forging imaginary communities<br />

of listeners in, and for, the Third Reich.<br />

At significant points in the narrative, the film’s score takes up themes<br />

from well-known musical pieces that are performed live in the diegesis.<br />

Most educated audiences would have recognized these standard pieces from<br />

the classical repertoire. A dense leitmotif structure dissolves the distinction<br />

between diegetic and nondiegetic music, thereby demonstrating the allencompassing<br />

power of melos. Several bars from The Nutcracker Suite by<br />

Tchaikovsky appear first in the credit sequence and then return repeatedly<br />

in the score, each time announcing an emotional crisis or insight. In the<br />

same way that the live broadcast of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in New<br />

York City reminds Hanna of her German roots, and the importance of family<br />

and home, the allusion in the musical score to a theme from “Dance of<br />

the Toy Flutes” confirms her primary identity as a mother. On the close-up<br />

of a boy’s photograph and the word “child,” uttered by Hanna during her<br />

first interrogation by the police, the camera shifts from the façades of cheap<br />

tenements and an illuminated Manhattan skyline via the Atlantic Ocean to<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 115


aerial shots of Berlin’s historical center and finally comes to a halt on the<br />

face of a toddler in an orphanage. In recognition of the differences between<br />

the cities, the score changes from dramatic to lyrical and pastoral tones. Associated<br />

with the trials and tribulations of motherhood, the theme from<br />

“Dance of the Toy Flutes” returns on two occasions: when Hanna administers<br />

medicine to Charlotte and when she dreams about their fateful last encounter.<br />

In both cases, the cheerful piccolo flute promises that, in the end,<br />

nothing will stand between a mother and her child. Providing additional<br />

assurances, other pieces from The Nutcracker Suite, the “Chinese Dance”<br />

and the “Russian Dance,” are introduced during a theater performance attended<br />

by Hanna and the director of the orphanage. Here the cross-cutting<br />

from the Russian folk dancers on the stage to the adulterous wife and her<br />

lover in the bedroom underscores the depravity of Hanna’s antagonists and<br />

morally justifies their elimination from the narrative. 21<br />

Most importantly, these musical references allow the ideal mother figure<br />

to find her voice and claim her place in the new scenarios of community. In<br />

what ways music functions as a means of exclusion is evident during the<br />

performance, attended by Hanna after a heated confrontation with Charlotte,<br />

of an (unidentified) early-twentieth-century opera in the neoromantic<br />

style of Richard Strauss. 22 Whereas the contralto aria “Drop of Hemlock,<br />

Sweet and Deadly,” as sung by an older woman, expresses Hanna’s fear of<br />

being eliminated by the more powerful rival, the subsequent poisoning of a<br />

younger woman on the stage provides a release for Hanna’s displaced desire<br />

to eliminate the “false” mother. The happy ending relies on the same doubling<br />

effect when it culminates in a musical tribute to the mother-child dyad<br />

in the triumphant sounds of the Baroque. In the closing sequence, a performance<br />

of the Händel oratory Judas Maccabeus installs Hanna and Peter<br />

in their rightful place within the reconstitution of the nuclear family. From<br />

this secular version of Madonna with Child, the camera moves to jubilant<br />

angels with trumpets on the ceiling of the concert hall. This closing image<br />

gives yet another indication of the cultural and social values that sustain the<br />

movements between textual and contextual effects within the Sierckian<br />

melodrama. For just as the object symbolism requires some familiarity with<br />

art historical conventions, the numerous musical references privilege a<br />

model of listening that addresses either an educated bourgeois audience or<br />

a petit bourgeois audience with cultural aspirations.<br />

The classical pieces performed in the film’s diegesis give expression to<br />

116 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the characters’ innermost desires, but they also establish a model of listening<br />

that becomes crucial for conceptualizing community in social, psychological,<br />

and cultural terms. Consider the following sequence under this aspect:<br />

Close-up of a poster announcing a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth<br />

Symphony at the Berlin Philharmonic. An exquisitely dressed lady hastily<br />

leaves a private seance to attend the concert, reason enough for the slightly<br />

irritated host—as it turns out, her lover—to quip: “Have fun with Beethoven.”<br />

Cut to a large hall. At the beginning of the performance, one front<br />

row seat is still empty, a fact that does not escape the conductor, her husband.<br />

In response to an acoustic disturbance offscreen, the scene cuts to the<br />

hallway, where the conductor’s wife is demanding admission. The ushers refuse,<br />

and she leaves in a huff. The subsequent dissolve from the conductor<br />

on the stage, now shown in a heroic low-angle shot, to the exasperated wife<br />

in the bedroom has its acoustic equivalent in the cut from a plaintive theme<br />

from the symphony’s first movement to her impatient response to the maid<br />

and, indirectly, the husband: “Just stop it!” The woman explains that “sometimes<br />

he is so foreign to me. Always with Bach, Beethoven, and whatever<br />

their names are,” but then she decides to return to the concert hall for the<br />

grand finale.<br />

During the symphony’s fourth movement, the scene of action moves<br />

from the auditorium via mighty ocean waves to a tenement building in New<br />

York City. Broadcast worldwide, the performance brings together a group of<br />

attentive listeners in two elderly gentlemen, one of whom is even reading<br />

the score, and a young woman, who is slowly rising from her sickbed, revived<br />

in body and soul by the powerful melodies. “Beethoven,” she whispers<br />

full of yearning and regret. Overwhelmed by memories of her former<br />

life in Germany, she vows to regain her strength and return home, to her<br />

child; at that point, the scene returns to the auditorium just in time for<br />

Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” The entire sequence is organized around two different<br />

modes of listening, the complete lack of understanding exhibited by<br />

the conductor’s wife and the spiritual regeneration experienced by the<br />

“other” woman. Whereas the listener in Berlin speaks of her profound sense<br />

of estrangement, the listener in New York recognizes her need for belonging<br />

and declares that “I must go home, to my child.” Home, of course, means<br />

the reunification of mother and child; it means the celebration of (national)<br />

community. The juxtaposition of two stereotypical female characters via<br />

two contrasting models of listening constitutes community through the mu-<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 117


sical encoding of otherness. As an overdetermined marker of identity, classical<br />

music in particular defines the regimes of inclusion and exclusion that<br />

are necessary to the process of community building.<br />

Lasting approximately fifteen minutes, the sequence described above is<br />

unusually long for a feature film and requires us to consider more closely its<br />

cultural references and ideological functions. As is well known, Beethoven<br />

has always been a key figure in the construction of German national identity.<br />

23 His critical reception during the Nazi period, however, added to the<br />

well-established cult of musical genius a new obsession with national identity.<br />

In fact, the Garvenberg concert in the film can be said to prefigure<br />

the famous wartime performances of the Ninth Symphony by Wilhelm<br />

Furtwängler. A similar process of appropriation informed the rediscovery<br />

of Schiller as the quintessential German dramatist.<br />

Sustained by these additional references, the concert performance in<br />

Final Chord formulates its vision of community in accordance with the venerable<br />

traditions established by the classics and the new oppressive discourses<br />

of gender and race. The sequence suggests that the experience of<br />

closeness and the forging of a common bond can be accomplished only<br />

through the figure of the outsider. Accordingly, the empty seat in the concert<br />

hall not only signifies the absence of Charlotte but also refers to anyone<br />

excluded from the community because of some unacceptable choices,<br />

opinions, or attributes. Guarding the sanctity of the performance, the ushers<br />

only enforce the will of the community that finds expression in several<br />

reaction shots, including one of a stern-looking woman seated in the aisle<br />

near the door. The fates of Charlotte and Hanna are therefore decided<br />

with the closing lines, “Those who hold a heart in keeping,/One—in all the<br />

world—his own / Who has failed, let him with weeping/From our fellowship<br />

be gone!” Hanna will reenter the community because of her love for the<br />

child, whereas Charlotte will be expelled and punished for her deviation<br />

from the norm. Through the dynamic shot /shot-reverse pattern and a series<br />

of increasingly long shots that extend from the conductor, the orchestra,<br />

and the chorus to the entire audience, this highly suggestive sequence<br />

concludes by making even the historical audience in the motion-picture<br />

theater an active participant in the musical staging of national community.<br />

The performance of the Ninth Symphony is essential to a critical assessment<br />

of Final Chord for three reasons. First, it establishes the dramatic<br />

triangle among the main protagonists in accordance with the generic conventions<br />

of the maternal melodrama. Secondly, it organizes a number of<br />

118 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


highly charged oppositions—most importantly, American vs. German culture<br />

and popular vs. classical music—that motivate all subsequent mechanisms<br />

of exclusion. And thirdly, the sequence introduces a model of art<br />

appreciation that endows the film with an aura not only of aesthetic selfreferentiality,<br />

but also of (German) cultural superiority.<br />

The question of femininity plays a key role on all three levels, beginning<br />

with the polemical juxtaposition between a decadent past and a healthy,<br />

hopeful present. While Charlotte stands for the dangerous attractions of<br />

Weimar culture, Garvenberg and Hanna combine the best of the old (pre-<br />

1919) and the new (post-1933) Germany. Providing the background against<br />

which the undoing of Charlotte acquires an almost symptomatic quality,<br />

both characters remain stereotypical figures without psychological depth.<br />

Garvenberg, who does not even seem to have a first name, lives only through<br />

his devotion to classical music. His is a world where decisions are unambiguous<br />

and where choices always make sense in relation to the larger<br />

whole. Thus he stands out as a model of the ideal leader and the ideal member<br />

of the community. Not surprisingly, the figure of the conductor was used<br />

repeatedly in films that extended the leadership principle to artistic practices<br />

and, in so doing, confirmed the compatibility of culture and power.<br />

Like Garvenberg, Hanna is guided by a strong sense of duty and honor.<br />

Allegiance to her husband once forced her to leave child and country and<br />

to endure the humiliations of exile. 24 Yet the maternal instinct also gives<br />

this plain, soft-spoken woman the necessary strength after her husband’s<br />

death to reclaim her son. Throughout she remains defined by the universality<br />

of the mother role. This normative quality creates a dramatic void<br />

around Hanna and turns her into an empty signifier of traditional femininity.<br />

Her modesty and reserve make her sexually nonthreatening, and her interactions<br />

with Garvenberg are familial from the outset. The equation of the<br />

biological mother with health, which is heightened by the purging effect of<br />

her early illness, establishes her as a character with inner conflicts but without<br />

ambivalences. Hanna’s acceptance of traditional gender roles and her<br />

submission to the patriarchal order place her outside the written law. As<br />

soon as she is reunited with her native country, she follows the higher laws<br />

of the blood; that is why her very being is captured in her declaration, “I<br />

am here for the child.”<br />

The gendered divisions that structure the musical sequences—including<br />

the opposition of active and passive listening—continue in the relationship<br />

between the image and the soundtrack. Whereas Garvenberg and Hanna<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 119


seek the spiritual rewards available in the auditory realm, Charlotte remains<br />

under the sway of the presumably more physical impulses associated with<br />

visual pleasure. Accordingly, the power of the sexual woman permeates all<br />

visual relations, from the theatrical acting style of the actress to the obsession<br />

of her character with external appearances. Functioning as a blockage<br />

in the film’s narrative structure, the alluring Charlotte emerges as the privileged<br />

medium for the director’s stylistic interventions. Her double position<br />

between cliché and cipher allows Sierck to explore the tension between<br />

catharsis and distanciation in self-reflexive terms, but of course only under<br />

the conditions of her obsolescence; this obsolescence finds a perfect vehicle<br />

in the tainted legacies of Weimar culture.<br />

To begin with, Charlotte’s emotional outbursts suggest a hysterical condition<br />

caused by the excesses of female emancipation and sexual liberation.<br />

Reduced to a beautiful image, Charlotte stands for a desire without object<br />

and remains caught in a narcissistic stage; hence the many mirrors around<br />

her. A child, according to the husband, would integrate these free-floating<br />

energies and reconnect her longings to the internal and external rewards<br />

of motherhood. Through her insistence on pleasure and her unwillingness<br />

to serve—as a dutiful wife to her husband, as a mother to the family and,<br />

by extension, the national community—this classic femme fatale becomes<br />

a figure of visual and performative excess. Yet even her vilification in the<br />

narrative does not diminish an appeal that derives precisely from her<br />

overdetermined status as an icon of Weimar culture within the film’s selfreferential<br />

strategies.<br />

As a familiar figure from the erotic imagination of silent film, the femme<br />

fatale attests to the melodrama’s old-fashioned preoccupations but also uncovers<br />

its changing sensibilities after 1933. Of particular relevance in this<br />

case is the denunciation of the sexual woman through her association with<br />

a culture described by its detractors as feminized. Charlotte’s insistence on<br />

personal fulfillment, her consumerist attitudes, her eccentric tastes, her apparent<br />

lack of moral values, and most importantly, her growing psychological<br />

instability all evoke the specter of Weimar, the despised Systemzeit. Her<br />

tragic death, in a way, rehearses the conditions under which a liberal, progressive,<br />

cosmopolitan culture came to an end as well. Whenever the pursuit<br />

of happiness becomes all-consuming, Charlotte’s fate suggests, individual<br />

actions and beliefs can no longer be integrated into the larger whole.<br />

Without a community, the yearning for love deteriorates into erotic obsessions,<br />

and the search for meaning exhausts itself in empty rituals and spiri-<br />

120 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


8. Schlußakkord (1936, Final Chord), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv<br />

tual fads. Sustained by such references, the figure of Charlotte demonstrates<br />

the inevitable self-destruction of a society that allows for too much individual<br />

freedom. Here the constellation of characters rehearses the main arguments<br />

of right-wing critics against the Weimar Republic.<br />

However, the allusions to the “wild twenties” also open up a space for<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 121


the articulation, however compromised, of increasingly marginalized tastes<br />

and preferences. Charlotte’s personal problems, and presumably those of<br />

Weimar culture as a whole, are closely linked to the cultivation of ambiguity<br />

and one of its preferred aesthetic modes, decadence. The conflicts endured<br />

by other Sierck heroines, including those played by Zarah Leander,<br />

presuppose the existence of clear boundaries and an inner core, an essence<br />

untouched by external change; that is why these women are usually vindicated<br />

in the end. Charlotte’s conflicts, by contrast, not only originate in<br />

a dissolution of stable categories; they even validate the pleasures to be<br />

gained from such indeterminacy. Already her first appearance in the film—<br />

she is attending an astrological lecture—coincides with a comment by Karl-<br />

Otto about Gemini and “the contradictions that define those born under<br />

this sign.” This blurring of boundaries continues in her own preference for<br />

the androgynous name “Charlie.” There may even be a hint of racial ambiguity<br />

in oblique references to “unforgettable childhood years” shared with<br />

her (nurse)maid Freese, a woman with Slavic features and an Eastern European<br />

accent.<br />

The validation of traditional gender roles in the narrative does not account<br />

for the intense interest with which Sierck, through his portrayal of<br />

Charlotte, indulges in a fantasy of female eroticism unburdened by the demands<br />

of motherhood. Whereas the character is punished for her transgressions,<br />

Dagover’s sheer presence as an image that articulates the pain of<br />

difference undercuts such punitive strategies. Sustained by the tension between<br />

role and actress, the power of Charlotte as an object of the gaze can<br />

be understood only in reference to the performative aspects of female identity<br />

and its aesthetic manifestations. The close identification with object<br />

symbolism makes her the perfect embodiment of stylization and its transgressive<br />

effects. Accordingly, the camera focuses on the spectacle of the<br />

desiring woman not only to witness her inevitable destruction, but also to<br />

celebrate her resistance to external determinations and simplistic explanations.<br />

In light of these powerful investments, Charlotte clearly occupies the<br />

libidinal center of the film.<br />

Confirming Fredric Jameson’s observation that narrative is a privileged<br />

medium for the articulation of social conflicts and that ideological positions<br />

are always contested, the problem of female eroticism is therefore “resolved”<br />

through a strategy of simultaneous articulation and containment.<br />

While the affirmation of motherhood provides the narrative with a clear<br />

trajectory, the apotheosis of the erotic woman introduces the blockages<br />

122 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


through which narrative continuity is suspended in favor of pure specularity.<br />

Such sublime moments occur whenever the camera partakes in Charlotte’s<br />

narcissistic rituals. With female sexuality reduced to a performance,<br />

eroticism in the cinema becomes dependent on, and ultimately disappears<br />

into, the visual effects reminiscent of silent melodrama, but without its disruptive<br />

energies. Under the ideological pressures of his times, Sierck ends<br />

up denouncing female eroticism while celebrating an eroticism of cinema<br />

based on the narrative containment of the sexual woman.<br />

Of course, the unique position of Charlotte as a signified (i.e., of the<br />

woman as Other) and a signifier (i.e., of the power of eroticism) could be analyzed<br />

through what some film scholars have called a two-leveled approach<br />

in the staging of stylistic and emotional excess. This so-called Sirkian system<br />

usually involves a multilayered text(ure) of latent and manifest meanings,<br />

theatrical and cinematic elements, formal convention and artistic innovation,<br />

social conformity and semiotic instability. Arguing along these<br />

lines, Paul Willemen maintains that distance in Sirk melodramas must be<br />

described as an effect produced not through audiences—they are too deeply<br />

implicated, after all—but through the more important relationship between<br />

the producer and his product. Transgressive effects emanate from a textual<br />

configuration irrespective of the historical conditions of reception, for instance<br />

through the ways a director inscribes his own detachment into the<br />

filmic text. Precisely through the “contradiction between distanciation and<br />

implication, between fascination and its critique,” Willemen concludes,<br />

a director like Sirk was able during the 1930s “to thematise a great many<br />

contradictions inherent in the society in which he worked and the world he<br />

depicted.” 25<br />

Evaluating the function of such textual duplicities is particularly difficult<br />

under the conditions of the Third Reich. For instance, the sadistic impulses<br />

behind the patterns of exclusion described above could be read as<br />

further proof of Sierck’s hidden affinities both with the racism in Nazi ideology<br />

and with the sexism of classical Hollywood cinema. Taking this position,<br />

Gertrud Koch speaks of “a privileging of confirmed racial or ideological<br />

communities over conventional society, of the internally ‘illuminated’<br />

[individuals] over the shallow hedonists, of renunciation over fulfillment, of<br />

recuperation over degeneration.” 26 In her view, stylistic excess is achieved<br />

through the inscription of the viewing subject into narrative constellations<br />

that depend on relations of domination and subordination. Moving beyond<br />

critical readings of the film that focus only on the textual articulation of<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 123


dominant ideology, Linda Schulte-Sasse has recently made a compelling<br />

case for the aesthetic as a category that defies narrative conventions and political<br />

appropriations. She insists that “the resistant potential of aesthetic<br />

operations themselves, whether within a totalitarian or democratic context,”<br />

27 must be analyzed not in the terms of authorship but through a film’s<br />

discursive effects; in this case, a reflection on the impossibility of desire.<br />

Yet is it productive for the study of popular cinema in the Third Reich<br />

to exchange a politically charged term like resistance for the aesthetic category<br />

of reflexive space? Can we simply reduce the question of authorship<br />

to conceptual oppositions (auteur vs. text, ideology vs. aesthetics) that end<br />

up either reproducing the false alternatives of “Nazi” and “non-Nazi” or<br />

eliminating such distinctions altogether? Returning to the initial problem<br />

of authorship and the meaning of style, I would argue that the relevance<br />

of Sierck /Sirk cannot be reduced to the alternatives of resistance or cooptation<br />

but must be conceptualized through the changing function of stylization<br />

in different cultural contexts and ideological systems. Most references<br />

to a distinct Sierck /Sirk style assume that formal excess is inherently<br />

destabilizing—as if stylization were not also an integral part of Nazi aesthetics!<br />

Given the very different conditions under which the director pursued<br />

his stylistic experiments during the 1930s, I would speak not just of<br />

continuities, as Koch and Schulte-Sasse do, but also of strategies of cultural<br />

transfer and transformation. And instead of evoking the concept of “inner<br />

emigration” that informs Willemen’s remarks, I would again shift the focus<br />

from authorial intentions to different modes of address and forms of reception.<br />

Accordingly, Sierck in Final Chord can be said to address two distinct<br />

audiences, the regular (female) consumers of melodramas and the members<br />

of the educated middle class. From such a perspective, the resultant textual<br />

contradictions could hardly be described as inherently critical, subversive,<br />

or counterhegemonic. They are always several things at once, and they must<br />

always be examined in relation to the pressures on popular cinema under<br />

changing social, economic, and political conditions.<br />

III.<br />

Any reassessment of Sierck’s film work during the Third Reich requires<br />

some concluding remarks about the prevailing attitudes toward the melodrama<br />

as a privileged medium for the marginalized perspectives of women,<br />

artists, and intellectuals. In the case of Final Chord, such historical contex-<br />

124 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


tualization is bound to center on the cultural tastes and preferences shared<br />

by the highly educated director and the film’s intended audiences. For the<br />

most part, film directors played only a supporting role in the institutional<br />

and ideological transformation of German national cinema. Not surprisingly,<br />

many directors found an outlet for their artistic and critical ambitions<br />

in a genre known for its relative openness to aesthetic experimentation.<br />

Compared to the 1920s, when melodramatic forms were explored in popular<br />

genres like the chamberplay film and the street film, the 1930s contributed<br />

very little to the melodramatic imagination and its critical potential.<br />

Of course, numbers are not necessarily an indication of lesser relevance, but<br />

they draw attention to the constraints that forced elements from the emancipatory<br />

mass culture of the Weimar years, including the commitment to<br />

film as an art form, to survive in marginal sensibilities. Only after 1939, with<br />

the beginning of the war, did melodrama make a triumphant return as the<br />

preferred medium, not just for escapist fantasies, defeatist attitudes, and<br />

masochistic identifications, but also for the kind of oppositional gestures often<br />

attributed to the melodramatic imagination.<br />

Heide Schlüpmann and Patrice Petro have shown how melodramatic<br />

forms during the Wilhelmine and Weimar years directly addressed new<br />

women audiences and, in the attention to typical female concerns (e.g., sexual<br />

inequality and discrimination), often served emancipatory functions. 28<br />

Enlisting this filmic tradition in the reaffirmation of traditional gender<br />

roles, the few melodramas made after 1933 still alluded to such concerns but<br />

explained them through the psychological problems of middle-class and<br />

upper-middle-class women. For the most part, the close attention to the<br />

conflicting demands on the “modern woman” only set the stage and defined<br />

the terms for her final acceptance of the “natural” order of things, including<br />

the identification of femininity with suffering and sacrifice. Here titles<br />

such as Versprich mir nichts (Don’t Promise Me Anything, 1937), Frauenliebe—Frauenleid<br />

(Woman’s Love—Woman’s Suffering, 1937), and Eine Mutter<br />

kämpft um ihr Kind (A Mother Fights for Her Child, 1938) identify well<br />

the prevailing themes. Usually, the behavior of a single career woman or<br />

frustrated wife in a childless marriage threatens the patriarchal order and<br />

makes necessary a reaffirmation of traditional gender roles. Whether dealing<br />

with a younger rival, an inattentive husband, or a difficult child, the<br />

central woman character in these melodramas must either fulfill her obligation<br />

to nature and society or accept the (negative) consequences of her<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 125


unhealthy need for self-discovery, a choice that seems to confirm prevailing<br />

ideas about the oppressive alliance of gender and cinema during the Third<br />

Reich.<br />

Surprisingly, even during the late 1930s and early 1940s, the identification<br />

of the feminine with the maternal remained the exception in a popular<br />

cinema dominated by single career women and childless society wives.<br />

Thus identified with marginal subjects and sensibilities, melodramas proved<br />

ideal for accommodating the artistic ambitions of such well-known directors<br />

as Käutner, Liebeneiner, and, of course, Harlan. As in the case of<br />

Sierck, their directorial styles can only be analyzed in relation to the widespread<br />

disregard for melodrama and the equally pervasive indifference to<br />

questions of authorship. On the one hand, their similar approach to the<br />

melodramatic form sheds light on their creative background in the Weimar<br />

theater, a background most noticeable in shared bourgeois sensibilities. On<br />

the other hand, such auteurist categories are not sufficient to explain the<br />

differences in the contributions of, say, Sierck, Harlan, and Käutner to the<br />

cinema of the Third Reich. Käutner’s efforts to infuse a much-maligned<br />

genre with artistic, if not critical, significance have been linked to forms of<br />

“aesthetic opposition,” 29 among others by Karsten Witte. However, as long<br />

as such arguments remain limited to textual categories, the appreciative rereadings<br />

accorded to Käutner or Sierck would also have to be extended to<br />

Harlan. After all, their approach to stylistic excess shares at least some key<br />

traits with the overwrought aesthetic sensibility on display in late Harlan<br />

works like Immensee (1943) and Opfergang (Sacrifice, 1944).<br />

To conclude: By infusing high-culture elements into an established but<br />

unappreciated genre, Final Chord in 1936 ended up being conventional precisely<br />

in its most self-referential moments. In a culture with a long tradition<br />

of suspicion toward the visual, stylization offered an effective method of<br />

anchoring the image in specific perceptual and interpretive patterns. The<br />

allusions to theater, painting, and, above all, classical music reconciled the<br />

cinema and its attractions with the demands of high culture and aligned<br />

both with a heightened national consciousness. Moreover, the melodramatic<br />

imagination established a narrative framework within which sexual<br />

conflicts could be dissolved into aesthetic experiences, and alternative sensibilities<br />

be expressed in the idioms of bourgeois art appreciation. To call<br />

these strategies subversive would mean to treat any departure from the realist<br />

norm as inherently critical and counterhegemonic.<br />

Perhaps the German melodramas of Detlef Sierck can be described best<br />

126 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


in the registers of resignation and retreat, but without the positive connotations<br />

associated with the conditions of exile. Seeking relief from the politicization<br />

of the theater, Sierck in the 1930s turned to cinema as the quintessential<br />

mixed medium and took advantage of its surprising openness to<br />

contradictions and compromises. Perhaps melodrama as a whole depends,<br />

more than other genres, on the historical conditions of spectatorship and<br />

the frameworks of reference established by different aesthetic and cultural<br />

traditions. Only an awareness of the forces that enter into the melodramatic<br />

imagination at certain times and places can shed light on this elusive dynamic.<br />

Greater attention to stylization as a function of historical reception<br />

is a first step in this direction. In the case of the Third Reich, such a critical<br />

project depends fundamentally on the reassessment of film authorship.<br />

Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord 127


7<br />

THE FOREIGN AND<br />

THE FAMILIAR<br />

ON GERMAN-AMERICAN<br />

FILM RELATIONS,<br />

1933–1940<br />

I.<br />

There is one important aspect that is usually neglected in the study of national<br />

cinemas: the popular and critical reception of foreign films and their<br />

fundamental impact on the national as a cultural, political, and economic<br />

category. The cinema of the Third Reich is no exception here. Just as we<br />

cannot assume an absolute primacy of politics over economics when studying<br />

foreign relations during these years, so we must acknowledge the growing<br />

relevance of film as a commodity in an increasingly global marketplace.<br />

Especially the period from 1933 to 1940 offers an opportunity for tracing


the remarkable continuities in the fascination with all things American and<br />

in the search for artistic alternatives to the classical Hollywood style.<br />

Of particular relevance to a better understanding of popular cinema in<br />

the Third Reich, the reception of foreign films moves the debates beyond<br />

the circular reasoning that often confines critical analyses of the national<br />

within the parameters of the nation and that, in the absence of relational<br />

categories, ends up supporting nationalist discourses. Looking at a national<br />

cinema through the lens of foreign films draws attention to the national as<br />

a category of difference, a difference that is not simply posited in political,<br />

economic, or aesthetic terms but constantly renegotiated in the daily business<br />

of import licenses, export quotas, and protective tariffs and rearticulated<br />

in the heightened terms of film advertising and reviewing. Here the<br />

asymmetries in the relationship between national cinemas (e.g., Hollywood<br />

vs. Europe, Germany vs. Austria) introduce an additional vantage point, or<br />

a double reflection, as it were, through which to link the national to various<br />

efforts of either establishing dominance or resisting domination in the<br />

economic and cultural realms. With these larger questions in mind, the following<br />

pages examine the reception during the 1930s of American films in<br />

the Third Reich, and of German films in the United States, and utilize such<br />

an extended definition of national cinema to trace the compromises between<br />

film as political propaganda and cultural commodity.<br />

Until now, very little research has been done on the persistent appeal<br />

of American mass culture during the Third Reich, and almost nothing<br />

is known about the small but significant market for German films in the<br />

United States during the same period. A strong preference for product- or<br />

text-oriented approaches in studies on national cinemas has contributed to<br />

the essentializing definitions that mark “Nazi cinema” as the ultimate Other<br />

in aesthetic and ideological terms. Challenging the persistent myths about<br />

its highly politicized nature, the many movements across borders introduce<br />

a more nuanced view of cinema that, among other things, includes<br />

economic considerations. Likewise, the emphasis on “Nazi films” as commodities<br />

circulating in various national and international contexts protects<br />

against the homogenizing tendencies in much theoretical writing on cinema,<br />

ideology, and the fascist imaginary. In the previous chapters, I have<br />

tried to develop an alternative model that focuses on the conflicts and compromises<br />

in the constituent elements of popular cinema; the reception of<br />

foreign films in essential to such a critical project.<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 129


The myth of the Hollywood dream factory and, more generally, the phenomenon<br />

known since the Weimar years as Americanism play the key role<br />

in such an expanded definition of German national cinema. For that reason,<br />

the references after 1933 to “America” as a shorthand for the Americanization<br />

of Germany addressed old concerns, relied on established patterns, and<br />

utilized familiar stereotypes. These contributions revolved around the pervasiveness<br />

of American influences in all areas of everyday life. During the<br />

same time period, the more vicious assaults on Americanism as a legacy of<br />

Weimar culture originated in fanatical campaigns for an authentic German<br />

film art and a self-consciously German popular cinema. Sustained by these<br />

political polemics as well as the actual cultural practices, “America” continued<br />

to be both admired and vilified as the driving force behind a global entertainment<br />

industry and its most advanced forms of mass production and<br />

consumption. While the influence of American mass culture could also be<br />

seen in popular literature and popular music (e.g., swing), it was above all<br />

the classical Hollywood film which fueled the undiminished fascination<br />

with American lifestyles and mentalities. 1 Even the Propaganda Ministry<br />

saw the seemingly endless stream of Hollywood comedies, musicals, Westerns,<br />

and melodramas into German theaters as undesirable but, nonetheless,<br />

unavoidable. Such pragmatism indicates an acute awareness among industry<br />

and party officials of the continuous need and demand for foreign<br />

films on domestic markets; it also shows their generally positive view of<br />

Hollywood as a model for filmmakers trying to reconcile art and entertainment.<br />

Of course, toward the end of the 1930s, the persistent problems in<br />

creating a strong national cinema outside the movements of international<br />

finance capital and commodity culture were finally “resolved” through the<br />

monopolization of the film industry and the militarization of everyday<br />

life during the war. Yet until that moment, the appearance of diversity<br />

was considered essential to the industry’s self-image as a provider of the<br />

kind of quality entertainment that could be competitive with non-German<br />

productions.<br />

II.<br />

Any discussion of foreign films in the Third Reich must begin with the<br />

recognition of Hollywood’s undisputed dominance since the advent of the<br />

sound film. 2 Of the 206 feature films released in Germany in 1933, 114 were<br />

of German and 64 of American origin. Over the next years, the number of<br />

German films remained relatively constant until 1939, when production<br />

130 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


dropped to approximately 80 films per year. During the same period, American<br />

films slowly lost their influence, falling to 41 in 1935, to 39 in 1937, and<br />

to 20 in 1939. In 1940, the second year of the war, only 5 American films<br />

were released, a result primarily of the reideologization of popular culture<br />

after years of relative openness and indifference. 3<br />

Several distribution companies handled the import of foreign films during<br />

these years. After the creation of the UFI concern in 1939, importrelated<br />

questions were handled by Transit-Film GmbH. All foreign films,<br />

whether dubbed or subtitled, were subject to the Reich Cinema Law. In accordance<br />

with the protective measures known from the Weimar years, strict<br />

Kontingenzbestimmungen (contingency or quota laws) regulated the import<br />

of foreign films. On average, 105 contingent licenses were issued to 60 distributors<br />

and 30 importers; blind booking was prohibited from the start.<br />

Approximately 15 of these licenses remained reserved for special arrangements<br />

by the Propaganda Ministry, which also had the power to grant additional<br />

licenses. 4 The foreign films not only guaranteed a steady flow of<br />

new releases to motion-picture theaters but also supported official pronouncements<br />

on film as an international art form that were meant to discredit<br />

European concerns about growing German isolationism. For that<br />

reason, studio executives praised films from other countries as an important<br />

inspiration both for educated audiences curious about different cultures<br />

and for professionals interested in new styles and techniques. A selfconfident<br />

German cinema, the standard argument went, could only develop<br />

through productive exchanges with other national cinemas. Of course, the<br />

overwhelming preference for dubbing—Verdeutschung (Germanization) to<br />

use the appropriate term—made these film imports seem less conspicuous:<br />

different, but not unfamiliar in a threatening sense.<br />

Throughout the 1930s, the Hollywood majors in Europe followed<br />

marketing strategies tested first on domestic audiences in the United States.<br />

Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Twentieth Century–Fox even<br />

formed German subsidiaries, which they maintained until 1940, long after<br />

the other studios had terminated all contracts with the Reich. Paramount’s<br />

and MGM’s strong German connections harked back to the Parufamet<br />

agreement of 1925, which gave UFA a much-needed infusion of capital in<br />

exchange for providing the Americans with access to its coveted motionpicture<br />

theater chain. During the 1930s, Twentieth Century–Fox conquered<br />

the German market with a single product, the child star Shirley<br />

Temple, whose films, from Curly Top (1935) to Heidi (1938), were big box-<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 131


office hits. Paramount’s reputation rested on its trademark sophisticated<br />

comedies, which conjured up a world of luxury and refinement through<br />

spectacular sets and attractive actors like Gary Cooper, Ronald Coleman,<br />

and Claudette Colbert. In fact, It Happened One Night (1934), which established<br />

Frank Capra as the master of romantic comedies and turned Colbert<br />

into a leading Paramount star, was remade only two years later as Glückskinder<br />

(Lucky Kids, 1936) with the “dream couple of the German film,”<br />

Willy Fritsch and Lilian Harvey.<br />

Meanwhile Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the largest Hollywood studio during<br />

the 1930s, continued to make big-budget films with plenty of action, glamour,<br />

beauty, and sex appeal. MGM stars with a large German following included<br />

Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Joan<br />

Crawford, and above all Greta Garbo. The enthusiastic reception of Garbo<br />

since the late 1920s, which recalls the Asta Nielsen cult of the early 1920s,<br />

confirms how easily a product of the dream factory could be incorporated<br />

into modernist dreams of cinema as well as racist fantasies about the body.<br />

Thus earlier physiognomic reflections on appearance and character now<br />

gave way to effusive tributes to Garbo as “the essence of race.” 5 Because of<br />

the close identification of Hollywood with the star phenomenon, several rising<br />

stars modeled themselves after the American originals, or were marketed<br />

as such. For instance, Marika Rökk was called the Hungarian answer<br />

to tap-dancing legend Eleanor Powell, Marianne Hoppe compared to screwball<br />

heroine Katharine Hepburn, and Swedish-born Zarah Leander promoted<br />

as “the German Garbo.”<br />

The popular and critical reception of the Hollywood films followed patterns<br />

established during the Weimar years. During the early sound period,<br />

German audiences had developed a special liking for musical comedies that<br />

combined elements from the musical and the operetta. Equally successful<br />

were sophisticated comedies that used the new possibilities of dialogue to<br />

offer spirited repartee between the sexes. Audiences continued to demand<br />

stories that fit their romantic image of America as a frontier and wilderness;<br />

hence their undiminished enthusiasm for Westerns and gangster films. The<br />

enormous popularity of Mickey Mouse, and animated shorts in general,<br />

must be explained through the association of American society with a mechanical<br />

worldview; the same holds true for the clichés about American optimism<br />

and innocence and the fairy-tale images conjured up by Disney productions<br />

like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 6<br />

132 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


9. “Im Reiche der Micky Maus” (Inside the Reich of Mickey Mouse), Lichtbildbühne,<br />

20 December 1934


Less frequently, Hollywood became identified with innovative approaches<br />

in the form of new subject matter or filmic techniques. For instance,<br />

Mervyn Le Roy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, 1934<br />

German release) received accolades in the trade press for its stark realism,<br />

and King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934, 1936 German release) garnered<br />

respect for its deeply humanistic approach. Thanks to a growing interest in<br />

individual actors and directors, Henry Hathaway was singled out for his<br />

direction of Peter Ibbetson (1935) and Charles Laughton for his performance<br />

in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Throughout the decade, reviewers<br />

paid close attention to productions with a German theme, reserving special<br />

praise for the Vicki Baum adaptation Grand Hotel (1932) and the Fallada<br />

adaptation Little Man—What Now? (1934). While the fascination with<br />

Americanism in Weimar films was regularly denounced as a sign of Überfremdung<br />

(foreign infiltration), the contemporary Hollywood productions<br />

continued to garner respect for their artistic and technical quality. Even<br />

the occasional diatribes against an “American studio system dominated by<br />

Jews” failed to distract from the generally high regard for its superior products.<br />

This situation changed only during the war years.<br />

During the first years of the regime, most film studios were concerned<br />

about a decline in quality caused by, among other things, the massive talent<br />

drain after the coordination of the industry. Learning from Hollywood<br />

seemed the only solution available at the moment. Apparently the Americans<br />

knew how to apply the insights of mass psychology to the making of<br />

commercially viable and socially relevant films; they clearly understood how<br />

to sell a national iconography to an international mass audience. Abandoning<br />

earlier plans for film as a tool of political propaganda, studio heads and<br />

ministry officials quickly embraced Hollywood as the ideal model for reconciling<br />

economic and aesthetic concerns. Their admiration for American<br />

know-how was no longer tempered by contempt for a mass-produced culture<br />

presumably indifferent to the loftier goals of art. Even the organizational<br />

structure of the majors found admirers like the Film-Kurier reporter<br />

who, after a tour of the MGM studio, “discovered” the secret of its success<br />

in the systematic application of the Führerprinzip (leadership principle). 7<br />

Not surprisingly, reflections on Hollywood from these years often read<br />

like a wish list for the German production, of course always with the assurance<br />

that true German film artists would never settle for blind imitation but<br />

strive toward a complete transformation of the material. In the words of one<br />

cultural functionary: “There is no shame in admitting that the German film<br />

134 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


in recent years has learned something from the good American film. . . .<br />

Even a Dürer went to Venice once to study the formal elements of the Renaissance.”<br />

8 Supporting this kind of selective opening toward other cinemas,<br />

trade paper headlines declared that “the national film is the international<br />

film,” 9 and Hans-Walther Betz concluded that “an art of the film can<br />

only develop through a serious commitment to the national character. Then<br />

film’s effect is indeed international.” 10<br />

It is through this perspective of imitation and incorporation that we<br />

must consider the overwhelmingly positive reception of Hollywood films in<br />

the German trade press. To mention only a few examples, Gabriel over the<br />

White House (1933) and its “serious treatment of the present and future<br />

of a nation” 11 inspired filmmakers in their quest for a strong national cinema.<br />

Saratoga (1937) provoked effusive remarks about the ability of Hollywood<br />

screenwriters and directors “always to present familiar conflicts in<br />

new ways,” 12 a skill considered essential to the mass appeal of cinema. Especially<br />

the American ability “to speak to subconscious wish formations” 13<br />

must have been of great interest to officials in the Propaganda Ministry.<br />

Likewise, the frequent comments on the “brilliant presentation of milieu” 14<br />

and the convincing portrayal of everyday life attest to an acute awareness of<br />

the audience’s demand for more contemporary subject matter. And behind<br />

the open admiration for the films’ realistic characters and settings, we find<br />

many references to the scholarly debates on the medium’s inherent tendency<br />

toward realism or, to introduce a key term from Chapter 9, Wirklichkeitsnähe<br />

(closeness to reality).<br />

Nonetheless, the prevailing attitudes toward Hollywood as the vanguard<br />

of an international mass culture underwent significant changes between the<br />

early transitional phase from 1932 to 1933, the period of film-political normalization<br />

between 1934 and 1938, and the war years from 1939 to 1945,<br />

which, after the breakdown of trade relations, brought back the familiar<br />

anti-American polemics. As in other areas of cultural life, the first year of<br />

the regime gave rise to diametrically opposed positions on the future of German<br />

film and the contribution of other countries to its triumphant rise.<br />

Some functionaries wanted to deal with foreign films “only under the perspective<br />

of nationalism or, to be more precise, the perspective of National<br />

Socialism.” 15 However, even during this highly politicized period, exhibition<br />

practices continued in the cosmopolitan spirit of the late Weimar Republic,<br />

with most of the differences found between more liberal audiences<br />

in the big cities and more conservative audiences in the small towns. Berlin<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 135


motion-picture theaters, including the Marmorhaus and the Kurbel, showed<br />

foreign films in their original versions. Together with the Kamera, the Kurbel<br />

organized retrospectives of the classics of world cinema. The participation<br />

of many German exiles and émigrés in Hollywood productions was<br />

rarely perceived as a problem and sometimes even noted with pride, as in<br />

the case of Cradle Song (1933), with Dorothea Wieck. MGM still had Ernst<br />

Lubitsch’s The Merry Widow in its lineup for the year 1934, despite the fact<br />

that the director had been the target of anti-Semitic attacks. And as late as<br />

1936, Marlene Dietrich received favorable reviews for her performance in<br />

the Paramount production Desire. Even a 1936 interview with Dietrich in<br />

London, published in the trade press, made no reference to the strained relationship<br />

between the star and her native country.<br />

Throughout the 1930s, the Hollywood majors consolidated their position<br />

in the German market and, within the constraints of the quota system,<br />

conducted a very profitable business. Ironically, it was the massive infusion<br />

of artistic talent through the European exiles and émigrés arriving in Hollywood<br />

that accelerated this process of consolidation and strengthened the<br />

uncontested power of the majors worldwide. Trade journals like The Motion<br />

Picture Herald had their own Berlin correspondents, who wrote about<br />

everything from the restructuring of the industry under Goebbels to persistent<br />

problems in raising the quality of productions. 16 The Trade Commissioner<br />

in Charge of the Department of Commerce submitted regular<br />

“Reports from Abroad” about the treatment of U.S.-based companies. Responding<br />

to increasing problems in German-American trade relations, he<br />

sometimes also suggested more fundamental policy changes.<br />

Meanwhile, the majors continued to pursue their expansionist ambitions<br />

throughout Europe and tried to get a foothold in markets with a previously<br />

strong German presence, such as Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and<br />

the Netherlands. Despite rumors about an impending liquidation of its German<br />

subsidiaries, MGM in 1937 still lured distributors with top box-office<br />

hits such as Naughty Marietta (1935), Libeled Lady (1936), Theodora Goes<br />

Wild (1936), and Saratoga (1937). Unfazed by the many signs of political<br />

trouble, Paramount offered a similarly impressive lineup for the 1938 season<br />

that included the immensely successful Wells Fargo (1937). Relying on<br />

these Hollywood imports, the Propaganda Ministry was obviously in no position<br />

to sacrifice economic exigency for political ideology; the majors knew<br />

this and acted accordingly. Defending its corporate policies, perhaps also to<br />

critics in the United States, MGM in 1939 even issued an official statement<br />

136 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


that it would “make pictures without regard to politics and with only box<br />

office and entertainment in mind.” 17<br />

The situation changed dramatically in the late 1930s when the Propaganda<br />

Ministry negotiated more restrictive contracts with some of its European<br />

trade partners (e.g., the Aryan Clause in the 1937 agreement with<br />

Austria, the guarantee of unlimited access to exhibition venues in the 1939<br />

agreement with France). Finally, in 1939, Hollywood became the target of<br />

official protests that focused on Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1938) and other<br />

anti-Nazi films in production. The release in the same year of critical newsreels<br />

like The March of Time’s “Inside Nazi Germany” contributed to the<br />

sudden deterioration of trade relations. The Propaganda Ministry used<br />

these incidents as a welcome excuse for completing the nationalization of<br />

cinema with greatest efficiency and for enlisting films more openly in the<br />

militarization of culture. Suddenly industry representatives described the<br />

film work of the exiles as a serious threat to the nation’s international reputation.<br />

Now they complained bitterly about the negative portrayal of Germans<br />

in Hollywood films and accused the big studio bosses of promoting<br />

anti-German propaganda. Of course, the activities of the Anti-Nazi League<br />

and the Emergency Rescue Committee were regularly dismissed as the work<br />

of an international conspiracy made up of Jews and Communists. Fueled<br />

by such new resentments, the debates returned to the earlier model of political<br />

agitation, in which claims of German racial and cultural superiority<br />

were often presented in the most sensationalist terms. “Warners Rape Beethoven,”<br />

18 reads one lurid headline from 1939 about a film project on the<br />

venerable German composer, the most recent victim of what now was habitually<br />

referred to as the embodiment of American greed and barbarism.<br />

Soon film magazines and trade journals organized smear campaigns<br />

against Hollywood studios involved in the production of anti-German films.<br />

Lists began to circulate with the names of those Jewish actors and directors<br />

working on these so-called Hetzfilme (hate films). 19 Moral indignation about<br />

such “tendentious propaganda” alternated with hypocritical expressions of<br />

concern for the welfare of the uneducated American masses. Film journalists<br />

were instructed not to mention any films that featured German exiles,<br />

American Jews, or individuals active in anti-Nazi organizations. Well-placed<br />

reports about spontaneous demonstrations in front of motion-picture theaters<br />

that still showed Hollywood films further fueled anti-American sentiments.<br />

Therefore it surprised nobody when, in 1940, all films by Universal,<br />

Warner, and RKO were banned from public exhibition. Paramount and<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 137


MGM maintained their Berlin offices for a while longer but then left as well.<br />

Of course, their films continued to be seen in private screenings at the Führer’s<br />

rustic getaway in Berchtesgaden, where Cinderella and Gone with the<br />

Wind became all-time favorites with his friends and associates.<br />

As part of the larger project on popular cinema, the positive reception<br />

of Hollywood films during the 1930s sheds new light on the flexible boundaries<br />

of cinema culture from the perspective of trade relations, audience<br />

tastes, and critical debates. Yet the particular nature of this encounter also<br />

raises new questions. For instance, must we see the undisputed popularity<br />

of American-style entertainment as further proof of the economic continuities<br />

that align the cinema of the Third Reich with an international mass<br />

culture indifferent to national differences and political considerations? Does<br />

the strong presence of the Hollywood majors after 1933 corroborate the historical<br />

victory of the commodity over traditional cultural forms and practices?<br />

Or, to move to questions of reception, must we see the mass appeal of<br />

all things American as an individualized expression of resistance directed<br />

against the prescribed official culture? And, to return to the concerns of film<br />

producers and distributors, in what ways does the history of trade relations<br />

draw attention to the not always unproblematic relationship between industry<br />

and state and their conflicting views on film as popular entertainment,<br />

political propaganda, and, last but not least, export commodity? The<br />

chapter’s third part will address some of these questions by examining the<br />

very different situation of German films in U.S. markets.<br />

III.<br />

Just as the success of American films in the Third Reich can only be understood<br />

in the context of Hollywood’s global ambitions, the various efforts<br />

by German film companies to gain access to the American market during<br />

the same years need to be assessed within the conditions of their growing<br />

marginality. After the introduction of the sound film, foreign films no longer<br />

played a significant role in the United States, not even as an alternative<br />

artistic vision. During the silent era, the critical success of the European art<br />

film in major metropolitan areas had contributed to the perception of the<br />

foreign film as a vehicle for different aesthetic sensibilities. Taking advantage<br />

of this division between art and entertainment, the UFA studio briefly<br />

developed an international reputation for quality films. Since the phenomenal<br />

success of Caligari, which sparked fears about a “German invasion,”<br />

Hollywood studio heads responded with a two-pronged approach: bringing<br />

138 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the best directors to Hollywood (e.g., Ernst Lubitsch and F. W. Murnau in<br />

the 1920s) and incorporating innovative formal elements into conventional<br />

genre cinema (e.g., chiaroscuro lighting, object symbolism).<br />

With the coming of sound, the speculation about silent film’s inherently<br />

democratic tendencies soon gave way to the celebration of national, social,<br />

and ethnic differences in the newly available registers of language, speech,<br />

and dialogue. During the transitional period, many studios promoted<br />

foreign-language versions as a way of holding on to the promises of a progressive<br />

international film culture without boundaries. Yet the films’ heavy<br />

reliance on national typologies and ethnic physiognomies only ended up<br />

confirming the power of difference. On the level of aesthetic practices, the<br />

sound film brought a further codification of the techniques and devices associated<br />

with classical narrative cinema. More importantly still, the renewed<br />

attention to national cinemas coincided with the rise of nationalistic sentiments<br />

throughout Europe in the form of old-fashioned conservatism as well<br />

as new mass political movements. In the United States, the credo of Americanism<br />

fueled isolationist tendencies in cultural practices ranging from<br />

progressive public art initiatives to reactionary feature films devoted to patriotic<br />

subject matter. Under the influence of the economic depression and<br />

the New Deal, new protectionist trade policies reduced the numbers of foreign<br />

films admitted into the country. For the most part, any extended or<br />

continual reception of these films remained limited to lower-middle-class<br />

and working-class immigrant communities.<br />

To what degree foreign films became subsequently identified with nostalgia<br />

and kitsch depended on the particular national cinema. Upholding<br />

the tradition of quality entertainment, British films built on their reputation<br />

for historical spectacles and social dramas, and French films still appealed<br />

through the innovative style of poetic realism. The reception of Soviet<br />

films, including those by Eisenstein, remained highly politicized, as is<br />

evidenced by the heated public debates about art and propaganda. In sharp<br />

contrast, feature films from the Third Reich rarely inspired expressions of<br />

aesthetic pleasure or critical appreciation. Identified with lowbrow entertainment,<br />

most German films suffered the same fate as those from Hungary,<br />

another country with large unassimilated immigrant communities in the industrial<br />

East and the rural Midwest. Both nationalities provided a readymade<br />

audience for inexpensive productions with conventional story lines,<br />

formulaic characters, and little interest in serious problems. 20<br />

Most German films were shown in cheaply produced subtitled versions<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 139


and often marred by insufficient titles and faulty translations; dubbed versions<br />

remained the exception. Programming practices reflected the preference<br />

for apolitical entertainment. Musical comedies and film operettas<br />

dominated the program, followed by rustic comedies. Despite heavy promotion<br />

by the Propaganda Ministry, the ambitious genius films and the patriotic<br />

historical dramas rarely succeeded in the export business; the same<br />

held true for the state-commissioned films. Responding to these patterns of<br />

reception, officials in the Reich concluded that “National Socialism is not<br />

an export article,” 21 at least not in the cinema, and subsequently concentrated<br />

on other avenues of infiltration and indoctrination.<br />

Despite these shortcomings, the Third Reich repeatedly headed the list<br />

of foreign films released in the United States. According to industry statistics,<br />

106 German films were imported in 1932; this number dropped to 54<br />

in 1933 but then increased again over the following years. By 1936, 74 of<br />

235 imported films were of German origin; in 1937, 69 of 216 films, in 1938,<br />

77 of 269 films, and in 1939, 85 of 272 films. It was only in 1940 that the<br />

number fell to 35 films per year. 22 To be sure, these numbers reveal very<br />

little about box-office receipts and even less about the films’ critical reception.<br />

Statistics also fail to take into account the difference between national<br />

and regional releases. Whereas British and French films were often shown<br />

in the first-run theaters of major cities, German films catered almost exclusively<br />

to German-Americans who had settled in the Northeast and the Midwest.<br />

Entertainment made in Germany gave these groups a convenient<br />

opportunity to connect to their cultural heritage, to maintain a sense of<br />

community, to seek alternatives to the highly politicized images coming out<br />

of Nazi Germany, and, perhaps, to withdraw from a society increasingly hostile<br />

toward Germans and German culture. Neither the initial calls for boycotts<br />

in 1933 nor the political campaigns after 1938 had any significant impact<br />

on a self-contained national film culture sustained by approximately<br />

50 motion-picture theaters mostly located in areas with a long history of<br />

German immigration. 23 Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Cincinnati,<br />

and Seattle had their own German-language theaters, but only New<br />

York City supported as many as four theaters during the 1930s.<br />

Whenever theaters advertised Austrian films as German-made, they<br />

tried to take advantage of the close cultural and economic ties between both<br />

cinemas. The common practice of distributing UFA films from the early<br />

1930s in their French-language versions also reflected more dubious efforts<br />

to profit from the good reputation of the French art film. Increasingly, the<br />

140 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


marketing of German films as French or Austrian seemed like an easy way<br />

of avoiding political controversy. As the controversies surrounding the 1936<br />

U.S. release of Amphitryon indicate, such ruses sometimes had the opposite<br />

effect. In New York City, the Anti-Nazi League picketed the Fifty-fifth Street<br />

Playhouse as part of its nationwide boycott of German goods after the theater<br />

proprietor had advertised Amphitryon as a French film. Responding to<br />

these events, one trade journal concluded that “The market for German<br />

films in this country is reported to have almost disappeared except in German-language<br />

theaters in sections of large cities where the population is<br />

largely of German extraction.” 24<br />

For all of these reasons, the distribution and exhibition of German films<br />

in the United States remained a highly improvised affair throughout the<br />

1930s. Only the larger film companies maintained subsidiaries in New York<br />

City, including the UFA Film Inc., which advertised its products under the<br />

motto “The Insignia of Quality—Pictures of International Merit.” Much<br />

more important for supplying a regular stream of films to the German-<br />

American community were the motion-picture theaters themselves, which,<br />

like the Eighty-sixth Street Organization and, after 1936, the Casino Theatre,<br />

also functioned as distributors in New York state and other regional<br />

markets on the East Coast. The German trade press repeatedly complained<br />

about such makeshift arrangements, whereas officials in the Propaganda<br />

Ministry were more concerned about the continuing employment of German<br />

and American Jews in these foreign film offices. 25 All agreed that the<br />

total lack of box-office success had largely to do with the mediocre films<br />

chosen for the export business. And indeed, well aware of the limited<br />

chances for German films in the United States, most studios reserved bigbudget<br />

productions for the more profitable European market and, with the<br />

exception of a few propaganda films, cultural films, and war newsreels, sent<br />

only older and second-rate productions across the Atlantic.<br />

As mentioned above, New York City supported several neighborhood<br />

theaters that showed German films exclusively. Even larger first-run theaters<br />

like the Fifty-fifth Street Playhouse had an occasional German film in<br />

their program. In order to avoid misunderstandings in a city that, after 1933,<br />

became home to a large number of German-Jewish refugees, the foreign<br />

film festivals at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse always referred to their German<br />

films with the designation B.H. (i.e., made “before Hitler”). Most of the<br />

neighborhood theaters that attracted audiences without issuing such disclaimers<br />

were still located in the Yorkville section on the Upper East Side. 26<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 141


They included the Seventy-ninth Street Theatre, sometimes also referred<br />

to as the Yorkville Theatre, the Eighty-sixth Street Casino Theatre, and the<br />

Eighty-sixth Street Garden Theatre. The German-American community<br />

that had settled in the Yorkville section was made up of first- and secondgeneration<br />

immigrants. Only a few were active Nazi sympathizers, but many<br />

felt some vague allegiance to the Third Reich. For a while, the headquarters<br />

of the local Nazi Bund was located above the Yorkville Theatre. In 1939,<br />

when W. H. Auden attended a screening of the Hans Moser vehicle Das Ekel<br />

(The Grouch, 1939), he was stunned by the enthusiastic reactions to wartime<br />

newsreels depicting Hitler reviewing his troops. 27 And when Yorkville<br />

audiences greeted Feldzug in Polen (The Polish Campaign, 1940) with<br />

cheers, the progressive German-American paper Aufbau felt compelled to<br />

note that “the spirit of the fifth column wafts through the auditorium.” 28<br />

During 1934 and 1935, films from the early 1930s period dominated the<br />

programs. The resultant mixture of late Weimar and early Nazi films sometimes<br />

created strange effects. For instance, New York City audiences could<br />

still delight in the performances of exiled German-Jewish comedians like<br />

Curt Bois in Der Schlemihl (The Schlemiel, 1931) and Felix Bressart in Der<br />

Glückszylinder (The Magic Top Hat, 1932). They were also able to see Weimar<br />

classics like M (1931), Kuhle Wampe (Whither Germany?, 1932), Mädchen<br />

in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, 1932), and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse<br />

(The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). After this brief transitional period,<br />

the steady stream of conventional genre films was interrupted only by a<br />

few propaganda vehicles. Top hits in the 1934 season included the crossdressing<br />

comedy Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria, 1933) as well as<br />

the Nazi movement film Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran (Our Flag Shows<br />

Us the Way, 1933), which was the American title for Hitlerjunge Quex. In<br />

1935, the patriotic mountain drama Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son,<br />

1934) and the musical comedy Barcarole (1935) both received glowing reviews,<br />

and the 1936 season brought equally positive reactions to the Riefenstahl<br />

Nazi party film Tag der Freiheit (Day of Freedom, 1935) and the zany<br />

sophisticated comedy Allotria (Tomfoolery, 1936). In 1937, war films like<br />

Patrioten (Patriots, 1937) proved just as appealing as film operettas like Das<br />

Hofkonzert (The Court Concert, 1936). Marital dramas in the style of Der<br />

Blaufuchs (The Arctic Fox Stole, 1938) and Der Schritt vom Weg (The Step<br />

from the Path, 1939) dominated the 1939 season. And as late as 1940, when<br />

45 German feature films still arrived in the United States via the Pacific,<br />

142 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


The Polish Campaign was given instant approval by the Censorship Review<br />

Board.<br />

Most new releases in the Yorkville theaters were reviewed in the New<br />

York Times. The sole reviewer of German films from 1933 to 1941, Harry T.<br />

Smith, had rather predictable preferences and relied on categories of evaluation<br />

modeled on the Hollywood star system. Smith promoted the pre-<br />

1933 work of recent émigrés like Anton Wahlbrück, Peter Lorre, Elisabeth<br />

Bergner, and Dolly Haas. He often made cross-cultural references, comparing<br />

Brigitte Horney to Claudette Colbert and Marianne Hoppe to Katharine<br />

Hepburn. Among the men, character actors like Emil Jannings, romantic<br />

leads like Willy Fritsch, and comedians like Heinz Rühmann (“plays second<br />

fiddle to none in the fatherland”) consistently received critical praise. However,<br />

the real favorite with Yorkville audiences seems to have been Weiss<br />

Ferdl in his trademark Bavarian comedies. Smith himself had a special<br />

liking for Lucie Englisch, but he also spoke favorably of Renate Müller<br />

(“splendid as usual”), Kristina Söderbaum (“exceptional ability”), and,<br />

sometimes, Zarah Leander (when exercising “those amazing tubes of hers”).<br />

Beyond the good acting, the skilled direction, and some ephemeral aspects<br />

of camerawork and costume design, the reviewer for the New York<br />

Times found very little to recommend to his readers. Thus in 1936, he concludes:<br />

“If all the unnecessary German footage were laid end to end, it<br />

would represent a staggering waste of production.” 29 Repeatedly Smith<br />

complains about “the usual low-caliber product of these days” and “the<br />

current dearth of first-class films.” Characterizations like “pleasing little<br />

musical romance” or “a delightful cream-puff confection of music” remain<br />

limited to the more favorable reviews. For the most part, disparaging formulations<br />

like “a harmless little piece” and “a perfectly harmless little offering”<br />

predominate. Smith’s indifference to aesthetic matters is coupled<br />

with a blatant disregard for politics that comes out in the assertion that “the<br />

advent of the Nazi regime and the coordination of the German motion<br />

picture industry have made no radical change.” 30 His unwavering belief<br />

in apolitical entertainment allows the reviewer of the New York Times to<br />

conclude about one of the last German films to be released that, “for what<br />

minuscule market there is in the U.S. for films made in Naziland, this is<br />

passable.” 31<br />

Audiences interested in films from the Third Reich could be found in<br />

large markets like New York City but also small markets like Los Angeles,<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 143


and they included American Nazi sympathizers as well as recent exiles and<br />

émigrés. Programming practices at Los Angeles’s Continental Theatre on<br />

Twenty-fourth Street took advantage of the immigrants’ nostalgia for their<br />

homeland and, as in New York City, exploited such sentiments for more explicitly<br />

political agendas. For instance, in 1939, the Continental presented<br />

the film operetta Der Bettelstudent (The Beggar Student) together with a<br />

lecture by well-known travel author Colin Ross, titled “At the Turning Point<br />

of World Politics,” and a newsreel about the invasion of the Sudetenland. 32<br />

The comedy Seine Tochter ist der Peter (His Daughter Is Called Peter, 1937),<br />

starring Vienna’s own Shirley Temple, Traudl Stark, was preceded by Soldiers<br />

and Sports, a cultural film that, according to the program notes, offered<br />

visible proof that “the new German people’s army is simply unconquerable.”<br />

The Jan Kiepura vehicle Im Sonnenschein (In the Sunshine,<br />

1936) appeared together with Soldiers at the Front and a repeat screening,<br />

by popular demand, of The Annexation of Austria. However, these programs<br />

were modified as soon as more general audiences could be reached.<br />

When In the Sunshine was screened at UC Berkeley Extension, in cooperation<br />

with the Department of Germanic Languages and the Deutsche Verein,<br />

the program consisted only of travel films about the Bavarian Alps and other<br />

tourist attractions.<br />

A good impression of the prevailing attitudes outside these German-<br />

American enclaves can be gained from the short film reviews in the trade<br />

journal Variety. Their conclusions are often devastating from a commercial<br />

and artistic standpoint. “Imported strictly for screenings in German nabes<br />

[neighborhoods],” one reads time and again. Recurring phrases include<br />

“crude humor,” “painfully slow,” “morbid touch,” and “typical German<br />

heaviness.” 33 However, lack of subtlety was also a distinguishing mark of<br />

trade publications concerned solely with assessing a film’s chances at the<br />

“b. o.,” to use the preferred term. When venturing into the political realm,<br />

reviewers tended to reproduce the prejudices and preconceptions of their<br />

times. A generally favorable review of the Joseph Schmidt vehicle Ein Lied<br />

geht um die Welt (A Song Travels around the World, 1933) summarized its<br />

findings in the following way: “Subject is good b. o. in spite of the fact that<br />

the star (picture debut of a famous radio warbler) is a Jew.” 34 The 1933 release<br />

of SA-Mann Brand (SA Man Brand) prompted the flippant remark that<br />

“it should be explained that S. A. in Germany does not stand for ‘Sex Appeal.’”<br />

35 In most cases, a film’s propagandistic intentions were considered<br />

144 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


external to its artistic qualities. A 1936 review described Lieselotte von der<br />

Pfalz (English title: The Private Life of Louis XIV) as “Nazi propaganda,<br />

but not too thick and not especially annoying.” 36 That same year, Variety<br />

praised Verräter (Traitors, 1936) as a “fast-paced and thrilling propaganda<br />

film,” while rejecting Friesennot (Frisian Plight, 1935) for its “heavy use of<br />

propaganda and vehement acting.” 37 These examples suggest that the term<br />

“propaganda” was employed rather loosely to refer either to a genre with<br />

particular thematic concerns or a set of techniques aimed at mass manipulation.<br />

This usage reflected widespread views during the 1930s about propaganda<br />

as a legitimate form of advertising the American way of life.<br />

Further evidence for the apolitical reception of German feature films in<br />

the United States can be found in the censorship decisions that enforced the<br />

standards of the Production Code but paid little attention to political questions.<br />

Sexuality and religion remained the main concerns. For that reason,<br />

in New York state, the following phrases had to be deleted from the subtitles<br />

of Das Mädchen Johanna (The Girl Called Johanna, 1935): “by God,”<br />

“bastard,” “cursed,” “venereal disease,” “Holy Virgin Mary,” and “stallion”<br />

(31 October 1935). Before approving Anton der Letzte (Anton the Last,<br />

1939), the New York Board of Censors demanded the elimination of “Jesus”<br />

from the expletive “Jesus, Maria und Josef” (10 March 1940). For the Ohio<br />

Board of Censors, bestiality was the only problem with Alles wegen dem<br />

Hund (All Because of the Dog, 1935); hence its ruling: “Eliminate back view<br />

of dog as he hoists his leg over the tomato plants” (10 November 1937).<br />

In the case of films with explicit political messages, the patterns of approval<br />

are just as revealing as the causes for rejection. To begin with Frisian<br />

Plight, the refugee drama required cuts not because of its anti-Slavic imagery,<br />

but because of some blasphemous scenes. That is why the New York<br />

Board of Censors ordered distributors to “eliminate all views of Russians in<br />

church drinking . . . [and] destroying property in church, including tearing<br />

down of cross” (31 October 1936). The Pennsylvania Board of Censors requested<br />

the removal of the English title “Go to hell!” (31 December 1937)<br />

from Der Herrscher (The Ruler, 1937) but found nothing objectionable in<br />

the film’s celebration of the leadership principle. Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (On<br />

Honorable Leave, 1938) was approved in Pennsylvania (30 April 1940) after<br />

all bedroom scenes were eliminated; the military subject matter apparently<br />

troubled no one despite the ongoing war in Europe. The arbitrary application<br />

of political categories of evaluation also explains the fact that the war<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 145


newsreel Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West, 1941) was initially approved<br />

without changes in Pennsylvania and rejected several months later because<br />

of moral objections by religious groups to the graphic violence.<br />

When the controversies over German films increased, largely in response<br />

to the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 and the increased activities<br />

by anti-Nazi groups, the representatives of the Reich did not remain<br />

silent for very long. In public statements, they confirmed their commitment<br />

to free-market principles and expressed the hope that “we could meet with<br />

less distrust abroad. We want to serve peacefully and with understanding<br />

any peoples and nations, and we can do so only when the doors of film theaters<br />

abroad will remain open to receive exportable films from Germany<br />

as is the case in Germany with foreign films.” 38 Nonetheless, several cases<br />

of attempted interference with Hollywood films in production occurred.<br />

In 1936, the German consul in Los Angeles, Georg Gyssling, tried to intervene<br />

during the shooting of I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany, Isobel Lilian<br />

Steele’s account of her experiences in 1934 Germany. 39 And in 1937, Gyssling<br />

threatened the actors appearing in Universal’s The Road Back, a sequel<br />

to All Quiet on the Western Front, with bans on all of their other films<br />

shown in German theaters. 40 Government officials even sent a note to the<br />

White House protesting the screening of Modern German Christian Martyrs<br />

at Riverside Church in New York because the film was allegedly nothing but<br />

“Jewish agitation brought into Christian churches.” 41 Sometimes, such initiatives<br />

proved successful—for instance, when the mayor of Chicago in 1938<br />

yielded to pressure by German-Americans and withheld a censorship permit<br />

to The March of Time’s “Inside Nazi Germany.” Yet in the majority of<br />

cases, these threats remained as ineffective as efforts by isolated German-<br />

American groups to stage boycotts against films that allegedly contained<br />

anti-German propaganda. 42<br />

If there was any effective political opposition to the Third Reich during<br />

the 1930s, it came from the Anti-Nazi League and its allied organizations.<br />

Their articles warned readers about the advances of fascist and totalitarian<br />

movements in the United States. Their rallies and fund-raisers in Los Angeles<br />

(e.g., at the Shrine Auditorium) brought together influential members<br />

of the film community, including Melvyn Douglas, Groucho Marx, and Carl<br />

Laemmle. Beginning in 1936, the League tried repeatedly to persuade distributors<br />

and exhibitors to boycott all new German releases. Under the<br />

battle cry “Quarantine Hitler,” members appealed to the president and<br />

Congress to sever trade relations with the Third Reich. Adding to a growing<br />

146 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


awareness about the relationship between politics and entertainment, Leni<br />

Riefenstahl’s promotional tour for Olympia coincided with shocking news<br />

about the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938. Immediately, Samuel<br />

Untermyer, an important figure in the League, organized a letter-writing<br />

campaign directed against the American distributor of Olympia. 43 According<br />

to her memoirs, Riefenstahl received a rather chilly reception in Hollywood,<br />

especially from the unions, but even more disappointing to her was<br />

the evasive behavior of Walt Disney, whom she had considered an ally.<br />

It was not until 1938–1939 that the various anti-Nazi groups began to<br />

pay closer attention to the German films in their midst, including war newsreels<br />

like The Polish Campaign and Victory in the West. The Hollywood<br />

community, which had started several initiatives to aid film émigrés (e.g.,<br />

through the Emergency Rescue Fund), played a key role in this process.<br />

Their sudden involvement after years of indifference could be explained<br />

through the successful lobbying by liberal political groups. More likely, the<br />

loss of the overseas business in Europe made the industry more susceptible<br />

to the idea of political commitment. 44 Thus the turning-point for German-<br />

American trade relations came in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy, a film<br />

advertised to theater owners as “It Was Warner’s American Duty to Make<br />

It! It Is Your American Privilege to Show It!” 45 Soon others followed, including<br />

Boycott, about the activities of the Bund, and the sensationalist<br />

B-picture I Married a Nazi. Many of the émigrés appeared in anti-Nazi films<br />

with the kind of liberal-humanist message celebrated in classics like Casablanca<br />

(1942). With public opinion leaning more and more toward interventionist<br />

policies, the end for German films finally arrived in 1940. In<br />

January of that year, distributor Frank Ferenz of Continental Films still organized<br />

an all-German program at the Los Angeles Criterion, showing To<br />

New Shores together with war newsreels and Traumulus together with cultural<br />

films. But in 1941, when “the brain of the Friends of Progress” tried<br />

to screen the famous Robert Koch film at the Pacific Electric Theater, which<br />

was rented specially for the occasion, he was shut down by company officials;<br />

no reasons were given at the time. 46 By the end of the year, films from<br />

the Third Reich could no longer be seen anywhere in the United States.<br />

The preceding analysis of German-American trade relations from 1933<br />

to 1940 and the different patterns of reception in this uneven relationship<br />

has tried to shed light on the contested status of the national in filmic practices<br />

during the Third Reich. My main goal has been to examine a frequently<br />

neglected aspect of German film history—the persistent popularity<br />

The Foreign and the Familiar 147


of Hollywood films—and, in so doing, to challenge widespread assumptions<br />

about the homogeneous nature of popular cinema during the Nazi period.<br />

The many movements across borders, I have argued, were motivated by the<br />

economic imbalance of power in the German-American film trade, and they<br />

resulted in repeated efforts by the Propaganda Ministry to resolve this imbalance<br />

in political terms. In both cases, the category of the national functioned<br />

not as a fixed set of characteristics but as the boundary between<br />

domestic productions and foreign films or, to use a more conceptual terminology,<br />

between the self and the Other. Of course, a national cinema always<br />

defines its boundaries through the difference from other national cinemas.<br />

Yet as the case of the Third Reich demonstrates, it is often an otherness that,<br />

when conceived or perceived as threatening, can move the discourses of<br />

cinema toward more essentializing definitions and exclusionary practices.<br />

148 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


8<br />

THE ANNEXATION OF<br />

AN IMAGINARY CITY<br />

THE TOPOS “VIENNA”<br />

AND THE WIEN-FILM AG<br />

On 15 March 1938, Hitler stood on the balcony of the Hofburg in Vienna<br />

and triumphantly declared the return of his homeland into the Reich. Annexation<br />

not only ended Austrian state sovereignty, with far-reaching social,<br />

political, and economic consequences, but also had a profound impact<br />

on a film industry with well-established structures and traditions. 1 I.<br />

Preparations<br />

for this moment had been under way for some time, and the remaining<br />

official measures were carried out with great efficiency. Goebbels<br />

gave his customary speech about new directions before members of the film<br />

community and announced major changes in exhibition practices, admis-


sion policies, and, of greatest relevance for everyone present, the professional<br />

organizations. By June, the Reich Cultural Chamber controlled all<br />

film-related activities in what now was called the Ostmark. 2 This included<br />

the process of “voluntary” Aryanization that had begun in 1935 with organized<br />

boycotts against Jewish theater owners and continued with smear<br />

campaigns against well-known screen actors. 3<br />

Finally, on 7 October 1938, the largest Austrian film studio, Tobis-<br />

Sascha, was dissolved and, on 16 December, supplanted by the Wien-Film<br />

AG to become the fifth-largest German studio after UFA, Tobis, Terra, and<br />

Bavaria. The owners of Tobis-Sascha, Oskar Pilzer and Company, sold their<br />

shares to the Austrian Kreditanstalt, where Max Winkler of the Cautio AG,<br />

a front organization for the Reich, oversaw the transaction as the majority<br />

stockholder. Smaller companies such as Styria-Film, Emo-Film, and Forst-<br />

Film either began or resumed operations and adjusted quickly to the new<br />

conditions. Fully integrated into Goebbels’s gigantic media empire, Vienna<br />

over the next six years would function as an important center of filmmaking<br />

and a seemingly inexhaustible filmic topos. 4<br />

Whereas the city’s actual streets and buildings displayed the signs of the<br />

German occupation openly, most filmic representations from these years<br />

avoided the signatures of the visible and concentrated instead on the traditions<br />

and mentalities associated with the label “Viennese.” The resultant<br />

convergence of urban images, cultural myths, and geopolitical fantasies<br />

came about through a complicated process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization<br />

that, in the context of this study, raises important questions<br />

such as the following: In what ways did the annexation change the meaning<br />

of “Vienna” as a highly codified set of stories, characters, locations, and musical<br />

styles? Was the Vienna produced by the Wien-Film AG still the one that<br />

had been the most successful export good of Tobis-Sascha or was it already<br />

a Vienna as seen from the Berlin perspective of the Propaganda Ministry?<br />

Or, to suggest a third possibility, did the production goal “Vienna” make<br />

such distinctions irrelevant after 1938 and introduce entirely new possibilities<br />

of containment as well as co-optation? Taking into account all three<br />

possibilities, the chapter’s second part gives an overview of the Vienna films<br />

produced by Wien-Film in the larger context of Austrian and German film<br />

production before and after 1938. In the third part, I concentrate on Willi<br />

Forst’s Viennese Trilogy as the most sustained reflection of what might be<br />

called the annexation of an imaginary city. As I hope to show, closer consideration<br />

of the “Vienna effect” during the Third Reich not only positions<br />

150 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the topos in an expanded cinematic landscape but also introduces yet another<br />

vantage point from which to rethink the category of the national along<br />

the lines described in Chapter 1.<br />

“Vienna” reemerged as an imaginary city of cinema during a fundamental<br />

crisis in the city’s cultural, social, and political identity. But 1938 was<br />

not the first occasion for such heightened textual productivity; it simply<br />

marked the moment when the existing urban narratives became available<br />

to appropriation by the new institutional and ideological constellations.<br />

From the literary and musical origins of this famous urban myth in the<br />

nineteenth century to its further filmic encoding during the silent and early<br />

sound period, “Vienna” had always functioned as a mediator between political<br />

and cultural practices. However, the convergence of cinema and psychoanalysis<br />

at the turn of the century also enlisted the city in more elusive<br />

constellations of desire and fantasy. Through the modernist designs of Hoffmann<br />

and Loos, the reflections on language by Hofmannsthal and Wittgenstein,<br />

the erotic provocations of Schiele and Klimt, and the dissonant sounds<br />

of Schönberg and Krenek, Vienna established itself as a privileged locus<br />

within the dialectics of mass culture and modernity. Associated with new<br />

artistic, literary, and musical trends, but still embedded in the rituals of tradition,<br />

the capital of the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire became<br />

identified with such highly charged oppositions as regeneration vs. degeneration,<br />

innovation vs. conservation, provocation vs. contemplation, and so<br />

forth. Cultural historians have shown how this oppositional structure found<br />

expression in a deep sense of ambivalence in the conception of modern life<br />

that affected everything from aesthetic tastes and artistic practices to social<br />

attitudes and political beliefs. 5<br />

However, the most advanced mass medium did not participate in this<br />

reflection on modern urban life. In fact, Vienna’s liberating effect on avantgarde<br />

practices started a powerful countertrend that gave new credence to<br />

the nostalgic images of the Austrian capital prevalent in popular culture.<br />

Two points seem particularly relevant for an analysis of the Vienna films<br />

made after the annexation: the preference for historical settings and the<br />

close identification of the city with music. 6 In the majority of popular operettas,<br />

folk plays, and genre films, sentimentality ruled; in their artificial<br />

worlds, modernism and modernity seemed never to have occurred. Profoundly<br />

modern in terms of its technological means but deeply invested in<br />

the representational models of the nineteenth century, the cinema continued<br />

to conjure up an imaginary past sustained by stable social relations and<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 151


a clear sense of national identity. As a result, the city’s rich literary, artistic,<br />

and musical heritage gave rise to the highly adaptable myth of an “eternal<br />

Vienna” seemingly untouched by reality. Above all, the almost fetishistic involvement<br />

with “the artistic Vienna” enabled filmmakers to “present the<br />

Viennese element in a filmic way.” 7<br />

More specifically, most filmic representations hinged on the close identification<br />

of Vienna with music, whether through the lives of famous composers<br />

and conductors or the identification with typical musical pieces and<br />

genres. Especially in the making of the romantic couple and, by extension,<br />

of the national community, music and musicality were confirmed as the<br />

driving force behind the Vienna myth. The musical references established<br />

a convenient structure for combining and recombining locations, characters,<br />

and situations, but always in the realm of fantasy. Actual urban settings,<br />

whether in the form of famous landmarks or typical neighborhoods, disappeared<br />

from the screen, were supplanted by generic locations like the drawing<br />

room, the court theater, the ballroom, and the coffeehouse. Interiors<br />

displaced exteriors as the main sites of Viennese culture and society, and the<br />

protagonists’ physical movements within the city became increasingly limited<br />

to musical movements, as it were. Through the transforming power of<br />

a waltz or march, the urban setting was absorbed into an imaginary cityscape<br />

or, to be more accurate, a soundscape. This new filmic topography<br />

was sustained not by the tension between the city and its representations<br />

but by an ongoing process of textual appropriation and transformation.<br />

Pointing to the negative effects of this kind of self-commodification, one<br />

critic already in the early 1930s warned of the inevitable decline in quality<br />

“if one were to limit the artistic tasks of the Austrian film to Austrian subject<br />

matter and Austrian milieu.” 8 Yet precisely this strategy was the one<br />

chosen by the Wien-Film under Karl Hartl. The alignment of the Vienna<br />

myth with the new power constellations confirmed its status as a fantasy of<br />

self but reconfigured its elements from the perspective of the Other.<br />

II.<br />

Wien-Film began production in March 1939 with the biopic Unsterblicher<br />

Walzer (Immortal Waltz) about the Strauss dynasty and released its first film,<br />

Frau im Strom (Woman in the River), in October of 1939. Over the following<br />

years, the studio under Hartl as head of production produced an average<br />

of five feature films a year and reached its high point with more than<br />

ten films in 1943 and 1944. In addition, the studio produced numerous cul-<br />

152 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


tural films about the landscapes and peoples of the Ostmark. 9 Not counting<br />

the few propaganda films that, like the anti-Semitic Wien 1910 (1943) about<br />

former mayor Karl Lueger, were later described by studio executives as exercises<br />

in “goodwill,” Wien-Film specialized in the musical traditions symbolized<br />

by its famous logo, the treble clef in the familiar UFA rhomboid. In<br />

the words of Hartl, the primary goal was to “enrich the all-German film<br />

production through everything Vienna and Austria has to offer in terms<br />

of culture, art, music, landscapes and acting talent.” 10 Whether his advice<br />

to the studio’s leading directors “to seek themes that are located in the distant<br />

past and have nothing to do with the present” 11 must be understood<br />

as simple opportunism or a more devious form of escapism cannot be answered<br />

conclusively and is less relevant for this discussion than the contribution<br />

of these films to the building of a Greater German cinema after 1938.<br />

Obviously, Hartl’s program proved convincing or convenient enough to be<br />

enlisted in the myth of noninvolvement still propagated today by, among<br />

others, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, which claims that “[b]y taking refuge<br />

in the past, Wien-Film generally managed to steer clear of involvement<br />

in political issues.” 12<br />

Yet how was this annexation of an imaginary city achieved? On an institutional<br />

level, through the strong continuities in German-Austrian film<br />

relations and Austria’s total dependence on Germany for film imports and<br />

exports. During the 1930s, the vast majority of films shown in Austrian theaters<br />

were of foreign origin. Surpassed only by the Hollywood majors, German<br />

companies dominated the scene, with 109 films imported in 1933, 129<br />

in 1934, 116 in 1935, and 112 in 1937. During that period, domestic productions<br />

increased from 13 in 1933 to 23 in 1936. 13 In order to sustain these levels,<br />

Austria relied heavily on the export business with the Third Reich and,<br />

to a lesser degree, the new nation-states in the Balkans. Shared cultural and<br />

political histories encouraged such movements across borders. From the<br />

German perspective, the difference represented by Austria was significant<br />

enough to introduce some kind of variation but not significant enough to<br />

evoke otherness in its more threatening implications. For Frieda Grafe, the<br />

illusionist quality of “Vienna” can be explained precisely through the limited<br />

possibilities of Austria as a film-producing nation; in her words, “the<br />

authentic Vienna films were always made extraterritorially, elsewhere,” 14<br />

for instance, in Berlin.<br />

And indeed, Austrian directors, screenwriters, composers, designers,<br />

and actors had been moving from Vienna to Berlin since the late 1910s<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 153


and had contributed significantly to the growth of the German film industry.<br />

Names like Joe May, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Carl Mayer reveal to<br />

what degree the Weimar cinema of quality was a decidedly transnational,<br />

multicultural phenomenon. From 1933 to 1938, this artistic migration was<br />

abruptly brought to an end and, for a short time, Vienna became a safe haven<br />

for many Austrian and German-Jewish film artists, including Richard<br />

Oswald and Wilhelm Thiele. However, the situation in Austria worsened as<br />

the governments under Dollfuß and, later, Schuschnigg fueled anti-Semitic<br />

sentiments through calls for a strong national culture based on Catholic<br />

doctrine and the kind of corporatist ideology identified with Austrofascism.<br />

For the struggling film industry, the negative German reaction to the employment<br />

of German-Jewish film émigrés had a devastating effect. 15 By the<br />

mid-1930s, film studios began monitoring the racial makeup of their casts<br />

and crews in order to guarantee German audiences a “100-percent-Aryan”<br />

production.<br />

Meanwhile, industry representatives in Berlin discussed the shortcomings<br />

of the Austrian production already from the perspective of an impending<br />

takeover. The complaints in the trade press about too much trivial subject<br />

matter implied that German film studios would soon be able to remedy<br />

the scandalous lack of patriotic themes and nationalistic sentiment in most<br />

productions from Vienna. The Austrian malaise of pessimism, Nazi polemicists<br />

asserted, would be cured the moment the country became part of the<br />

Reich; the import of “healthy” German films was meant to prepare the<br />

ground for such national healing. To establish the conditions for this cultural<br />

rebirth, the 1937 German-Austrian trade agreement contained a<br />

clause forbidding the production and distribution of all Austrian films critical<br />

of the Nazis and their anti-Semitic policies. 16 In light of such developments,<br />

the events of 1938 were hailed by many Austrian and German<br />

critics as a “final cleansing of [Jewish influence in] the Viennese film business”<br />

17 and a significant move toward the realization of Vienna’s full potential<br />

as a center of European filmmaking.<br />

The contribution of the leading Austrian actors and directors to the political<br />

myths about a peaceful annexation should not be underestimated.<br />

Both groups were equally known in, and familiar with, the cultural life<br />

of Vienna and the social scene in Berlin. The group of famous actors who<br />

helped to smooth the transition was headed by Hans Moser, Magda Schneider,<br />

Wolf Albach-Retty, Luise Ulrich, and the first family of Austrian cinema:<br />

Paula Wessely, her husband Attila Hörbiger, and his brother Paul Hör-<br />

154 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


iger. 18 Among the directors under contract at the new studio one finds<br />

well-known personalities such as the Austrians Willi Forst and Gustav<br />

Ucicky and the Hungarians Geza von Bolvary and Geza von Cziffra. All had<br />

worked in Berlin at some point and become closely identified with things<br />

Viennese. Now this “fifth column for the National Socialist cinema,” 19 to<br />

quote Klaus Kreimeier, could be enlisted and relied upon to complete the<br />

annexation of the filmic imagination.<br />

Assessing the particular meaning of “Vienna” in the Wien-Film pr0ductions<br />

requires a brief overview of what might be called typical images of<br />

Vienna in Austrian and German films made before 1938. The Austrian productions<br />

can be divided into four categories: historical films about the<br />

Habsburg Empire and the rule of Franz Joseph; folk dramas and comedies<br />

from the Biedermeier period; biopics about famous composers and musicians;<br />

and sentimental love stories set in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Max<br />

Ophüls’s Liebelei (1933) established the standard in the last category. The<br />

new sound technology gave rise to a wave of big-budget films that featured<br />

famous singers like Jan Kiepura and Marta Eggerth and covered the entire<br />

range from formulaic operetta adaptations to ambitious biographies of<br />

Mozart, Schubert, and Johann Strauss I and II. While profiting from modernist<br />

sensibilities in the choice of subject matter, the vast majority of Austrian<br />

Vienna films from the early 1930s followed the formal conventions of<br />

classical genre cinema.<br />

More creative approaches could be found in the contributions by Forst,<br />

from his first directorial effort, the Schubert biopic Leise flehen meine Lieder<br />

(Quietly My Songs Are Weeping, 1933), to his repeated collaboration with<br />

the screenwriter Walter Reisch on masterpieces like Maskerade (Masquerade,<br />

1934) and Episode (1935). Only a few sound films took advantage of the<br />

legacies of social realism from the silent period and incorporated them into<br />

their portrayal of urban types and milieus; Werner Hochbaum’s remarkable<br />

Vorstadtvarieté (Neighborhood Variety, 1935) is one such rare example.<br />

A few directors also problematized the function of Vienna as a cultural<br />

myth and, as in Erich Engel’s Hohe Schule (Haute École, 1934), offered revealing<br />

insights into the opportunism behind the façade of cordiality and<br />

equanimity.<br />

In the German-made Vienna films from the early 1930s, the tendency<br />

toward clichés was even more pronounced and rarely tempered by ironic<br />

self-reflection. The critique of the big city that had produced the Weimar<br />

classic Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1925) and its Austrian com-<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 155


panion piece, Café Electric (1927), gave way to the familiar mixture of nostalgia<br />

and kitsch known from the Vienna of the operetta world. Any references<br />

to the deep social and ethnic divisions, including the anti-Semitism<br />

that inspired the Hugo Bettauer adaptation Stadt ohne Juden (City without<br />

Jews, 1926), were replaced by the false rituals of reconciliation achieved<br />

through amorous encounters, public amusements, and musical diversions.<br />

Whether as part of the narrative in a romantic comedy or through the<br />

staged performance in a film operetta, music played a key role in the resultant<br />

process of derealization. Songs, symphonies, marches, and waltzes<br />

functioned as mediators in the complications of romantic love, but they often<br />

also interfered with local politics and international diplomacy. This<br />

strategic convergence of politics and eroticism in music as the tertium comparationis<br />

reduced all dramatic conflicts to emotional and sensory effects.<br />

Thus Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt (Two Hearts in Three-Four Time,<br />

1930), Der Kongress tanzt (The Congress Dances, 1932), and Walzerkrieg<br />

(Waltz Wars, 1933) indulged in what the Theo Lingen character in the last<br />

example describes as “world history in three-four time,” the abdication of<br />

individual and collective agency to the rhythms of a dance.<br />

Beginning in 1934, such frivolous pursuits prompted angry headlines in<br />

the trade press demanding: “Enough of Viennese milieu!” 20 Soon film operettas<br />

were attacked as a sign of aesthetic and cultural alienation, in short,<br />

as typical products of Weimar culture. Viennese themes would be wellsuited<br />

for Austrian films, polemicists now argued, whereas German films<br />

should concentrate on German peoples and landscapes. Allegedly the celebration<br />

of leisure and luxury and the validation of the pleasure principle no<br />

longer had a place in a national cinema committed, at least officially, to serious<br />

contemporary subject matter. As a result, the mid-1930s saw a steady<br />

decline in German productions with a Viennese theme, with the exception<br />

of the Wessely vehicle Die ganz großen Torheiten (Such Great Foolishness,<br />

1937). From then on the unflagging popular demand for sentimentality was<br />

satisfied by films produced in Vienna, first as part of the German-Austrian<br />

film trade and then under the conditions of political annexation.<br />

It was in the context of such a division of labor that the Wien-Film after<br />

1938 continued to offer musical entertainment, but from the German viewpoint<br />

of Vienna as a variation on, if not alternative to, true Germanness.<br />

Previously expressed fears about a Prussification of Austria turned out to be<br />

unfounded, and everyone praised the creative potential of the kind of cultural<br />

differences captured by the new motto “No Berlinized Vienna and No<br />

156 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Viennized Berlin.” 21 Of course, what had to disappear from the screen were<br />

all references to Austria as a Kulturgroßmacht (cultural empire), whether<br />

they included emotional tributes to the Habsburg dynasty as the perfect<br />

union between church and state or nostalgic reminiscences about the multiethnic<br />

culture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead big-budget<br />

Mozart biographies like Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music, 1939)<br />

and Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love, 1942) appropriated the<br />

image of Vienna as the world capital of music in order to depict artistic genius<br />

as a manifestation of racial superiority. Milieu studies like Wiener<br />

G’schichten (Viennese Stories, 1940) continued to celebrate the legendary<br />

coffeehouse culture, but without its intellectual contentiousness and, of<br />

course, without any references to the strong Jewish presence in Vienna’s<br />

cultural life. Even a popular hit like Schrammeln (Schrammel Music, 1944)<br />

used the competition between a composer and a violinist for the love of the<br />

proverbial “Wiener Mädel” (Viennese girl) to achieve the reconciliation of<br />

classical, modern, and folkloristic elements in terms that applied to contemporary<br />

Austrian culture as well.<br />

In light of such problematic elisions and emphases, the liberating forces<br />

and impulses in these films often end up being domesticated: by the conventional<br />

musical scores, the leaden dialogue scenes, and the theatrical<br />

mise-en-scènes. This discrepancy between the representation of excess and<br />

the lack of excess in the representational means accounts for the superficial<br />

nature of most Vienna films from the period. Under the new conditions of<br />

production, the elements that had constituted Vienna as a literary topos<br />

were reduced to empty ciphers, images of images without referents. In this<br />

pervasive culture of simulation, even the elevation of folk song to a gesture<br />

of resistance—a move often attributed to Der liebe Augustin (Beloved Augustin,<br />

1940), with its cautionary tale about a bankel singer in nineteenthcentury<br />

Vienna—must be seen as part of a larger trend toward derealization<br />

in the filmic construction of imaginary urban topographies. Likewise, the<br />

observation made in Whom the Gods Love that “in Vienna, nobody ever<br />

achieved anything the straightforward way, only in a backward fashion”<br />

must be understood not as a call for subversive action, as apologists of Wien-<br />

Film would argue, but as a reflection on the city’s well-established culture<br />

of accommodation and compromise. Accordingly, when Konstanze in the<br />

same film reminds Wolfgang Amadeus during a conversation about leaving<br />

Vienna that “music is your homeland,” we cannot but read this statement<br />

as a recognition of the power of music to conjure up imaginary worlds be-<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 157


yond local and national differences and the power of the capital of music to<br />

legitimize such defeatist tendencies.<br />

III.<br />

“Happy the person who forgets what cannot be changed”: this famous credo<br />

from Die Fledermaus applies to many of the films produced in Vienna after<br />

the annexation. However, what on the surface looks like withdrawal to some<br />

imaginary past was still very much part of the present and its complicated<br />

power negotiations. Many of these elements came together in Wiener Blut<br />

(Viennese Blood, 1942) and its highly symbolic story of personal growth<br />

through the acceptance of cultural difference. Directed and produced by<br />

Forst for Wien-Film, the film was part of his Viennese Trilogy, which also<br />

includes the earlier Operette (Operetta, 1940) and the later Wiener Mädeln<br />

(Viennese Girls, 1945–1949). The enormous success of these films confirmed<br />

Forst’s reputation as “the man who created a city,” 22 the legendary<br />

Vienna of music, dance, and beautiful girls and, after 1938, the preferred<br />

setting for more desperate escapist scenarios. The importance of his project<br />

of excessive escapism to the cultural establishment can be measured by the<br />

fact that, from the beginning, Forst received full support from such venerable<br />

institutions as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as well as from professional<br />

singers who lent their voices to some of the less talented actresses.<br />

After the release of the first film, the director was repeatedly hailed as<br />

a modern-day Franz Jauner bent on reviving an exhausted musical form<br />

through the possibilities of film. 23<br />

For Forst himself, the “Vienna” of Wien-Film provided a place of refuge<br />

and, through the metonymic slippage between capital and country, a locus<br />

of (imagined or imaginary) Austrian resistance. In the German trade press<br />

at the time, he declared: “Precisely during this period devoted to anonymous<br />

mass production, the Viennese operetta celebrates its greatest triumphs.”<br />

24 After the war he boldly inserted his own name into this narrative<br />

of heightened creativity and announced, “I made my most Austrian films at<br />

a time when Austria had ceased to exist.” 25 In portraying accommodation<br />

as passive resistance, Forst developed a convenient formula for separating<br />

all “true” Austrian elements from the cultural politics and political ideology<br />

of the Third Reich. The wild rumors circulating in March 1945 that<br />

Forst might be among the victims in the burning State Opera give an indication<br />

of how essential his public persona and filmic oeuvre were for<br />

158 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the survival of Vienna—if not as an actual city, then at least as a cultural<br />

fantasy. 26<br />

But can oppressive political conditions be translated so easily into subversive<br />

aesthetic strategies? In light of the Wien-Film’s overall contribution<br />

to a Greater German cinema, Forst’s typical “Austrian” solution amounted<br />

to little more than a fantasy of resistance, with the familiar subject matter<br />

providing merely an illusion of difference within a clearly demarcated institutional<br />

and discursive framework. Taking advantage of the desire for<br />

the unreal that had always been an integral part of the Vienna myth, Forst<br />

combined two technologies of illusionism, film and operetta, to dissolve<br />

standard Viennese binaries such as cynicism vs. sentimentality, naïveté vs.<br />

self-irony, and exuberance vs. resignation into the performative terms of<br />

nonidentity, that is, the theme of masquerade. Yet in contrast to his earlier<br />

films, which took a more detached approach, the films from the trilogy<br />

overcame the classic dilemma of ambivalence through an overindulgence in<br />

sensory effects, as evidenced by the many music and dance sequences. From<br />

that perspective, the observation by one reviewer that “openness to the<br />

world and preservation of the self are the two components of the Viennese”<br />

27 might well be understood as a tacit acknowledgment of the unstable<br />

(i.e., highly adaptable) qualities of the myth and its stabilizing effect on the<br />

popular imagination. Needless to say, the operetta, whether as a source text,<br />

a musical style, or an artistic milieu, offered the most appropriate context<br />

for such elusive and illusive effects.<br />

By the time Forst directed the first film in the Viennese Trilogy, the elements<br />

of that cultural myth were well known, if not already too familiar, to<br />

contemporary audiences. This familiarity provided a starting point for different<br />

readings (“with the grain” and “against the grain”) inflected in all<br />

cases by the conditions of occupation. Forst accommodated these multiple<br />

readings in full awareness of the ossification of the genre and the conventionality<br />

of its figures, symbols, tropes, and topoi. The trivialized elements<br />

of the myth allowed him to reflect on its overdetermined cultural function,<br />

thus contributing to a process described by Thomas Kramer and Martin<br />

Prucha as “the late Baroque flourishing” of the Viennese film during the<br />

war years. 28 Transformed through Forst’s deceptive lightness and ironic selfawareness,<br />

the Vienna myth became a game between the filmmaker and his<br />

audience. It could be enjoyed as much for its transparent fictions of authenticity<br />

as for its aestheticized view of artifice as the true nature of things.<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 159


10. Wiener Blut (1942, Viennese Blood), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv<br />

The credit sequence of Viennese Blood introduces precisely this possibility<br />

through the figure of a pharmacist (played by Forst in disguise) in the process<br />

of concocting “an elixir, a mixture of humor, happiness, heart, history,”<br />

with the term “elixir” an obvious reference to the therapeutic effect attributed<br />

to the Vienna myth. Once the ingredient of “music” is added, the elixir<br />

is complete, and the story can begin, propelled forward by the waltz as the<br />

main catalyst in what must be described as Forst’s most explicit and perhaps<br />

most problematic commentary on German-Austrian relations.<br />

Modeled after the eponymous operetta by Johann Strauss II, Viennese<br />

Blood returns to the mixture of musical romance, visual spectacle, and political<br />

intrigue that had made an earlier film about the Congress of Vienna,<br />

The Congress Dances, so popular with Weimar audiences. Back in the city<br />

of her youth as the wife of a German diplomat at the Congress of Vienna,<br />

the beautiful Melanie (Maria Holst) celebrates her homecoming by taking<br />

lessons in the latest dance, the waltz. Preoccupied with work, her husband,<br />

Count Georg Wolkersheim von Reuß-Greiz-Schleiz (Willy Fritsch), responds<br />

to what he perceives as acoustic pollution by closing all doors and windows<br />

on the city’s alluring melodies. “Vienna, I fear, is not for us,” he remarks to<br />

160 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


his manservant and proclaims loudly, “I protest against this Viennese commotion.”<br />

While the Countess uses dancing as a way of reconnecting to her<br />

roots, the Count first dismisses such diversions as unnecessary but nonetheless<br />

succumbs to the charms of a chorus girl, Liesl Stadler (Dorit Kreysler),<br />

who initiates him into the erotic subtleties of the waltz. The ensuing misunderstandings,<br />

all of which hinge on the equation of dancing with sexuality,<br />

culminate during the grand ball at court where the Countess meets the<br />

Count with the chorus girl and where, after some calculated flirting by the<br />

wife, the couple’s reconciliation is sealed by a jubilant rendition by both<br />

women of the famous Strauss waltz “Viennese Blood.” In the end, the call<br />

of the blood, here identified with an almost biological urge to dance (“zappeln”<br />

in the German original), proves stronger than all social, sexual, and,<br />

presumably, national differences; in the words of one character in the film:<br />

“Viennese blood cannot be denied.”<br />

Given the political situation in Austria at the time, it should not be surprising<br />

that the setting of the Congress of Vienna and the marital problems<br />

of a German-Austrian couple contained ample material for more than a superficial<br />

musical fantasy. Interestingly, the presentation of the material is<br />

rather conventional and the mood optimistic and conciliatory, compared to<br />

the other two films in the Viennese Trilogy. Throughout, the waltz serves as<br />

a device through which to measure differences and uncover similarities. As<br />

a typical Austrian, Metternich seems more concerned with final preparations<br />

for his “The Victory of the Waltz” pageant than with the redistribution<br />

of power in Europe. Even the diplomatic talks are implicated in, if not<br />

reduced to, the movements of a waltz; to quote one emissary: “This congress<br />

doesn’t convene, it dances!” Does the happy ending suggest that the contemporary<br />

situation might be resolved in similar ways: namely, through willing<br />

surrender to the waltz as a substitute for, and a paradigm of, realpolitik<br />

Austrian style?<br />

The confrontation between the Austrian and German mentality in the<br />

form of a famous urban myth relies on an ancient tradition of visualizing<br />

cities through female figures and of narrating the fate of cities through the<br />

imagery of sexual conquest. Vienna is from the beginning identified with female<br />

culture: fashion, design, music, dance, and eroticism, a seductive mixture<br />

that places the Austrian capital at the forefront of new cultural trends.<br />

“Everything modern and extravagant,” remarks the Countess about some<br />

accessories. “You mean everything Viennese,” replies her savvy aunt. Extending<br />

these gendered divisions to the representation of nations, Austria,<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 161


too, becomes associated with “feminine” qualities like emotionality, spontaneity,<br />

and playfulness—in short, the pleasure principle—whereas Germany<br />

is represented through “male” qualities like seriousness, diligence,<br />

and reliability—in short, the reality principle. Accordingly, the woman’s initial<br />

reaction to her husband’s work commitments—disappointed, she leaves<br />

town and retreats to her aunt’s country estate—may be read as a veiled commentary<br />

on Austria’s unwillingness to “understand” its place in the geopolitical<br />

ambitions of the Reich. Likewise, the man’s initial disregard for local<br />

customs could be interpreted as a reference to the Germans’ inability to<br />

recognize the valuable contribution of Austrian culture. However, in the<br />

same way that he must overcome his contempt for what he calls “dancers<br />

through life,” she must become more “German” and recognize the importance<br />

of work.<br />

This rather obvious rewriting of the annexation as a Greater German<br />

love story even extends to the couple’s servants. Again in accordance with<br />

established conventions, the dramatic conflicts between the aristocratic<br />

leads are mirrored in the comical registers of the servant class, with the<br />

stout but agile Hans Moser as Knöpfel (or Knöpfchen) exhibiting stereotypical<br />

Austrian traits such as sly servility and deliberate incompetence, and<br />

the tall and lanky Theo Lingen as Jean, the personification of German correctness,<br />

arrogance, and self-righteousness. Their decision after some initial<br />

antagonism to work together in reconciling the couple is obviously intended<br />

to serve as a behavioral model for film audiences in the Ostmark and elsewhere.<br />

The ending, which has the diplomat take a new assignment in Vienna,<br />

promises such a peaceful solution under the conditions of a permanent<br />

German presence in Vienna. In light of the real problems caused by<br />

the annexation, such a defeatist solution makes the superficial mirth and<br />

merriment in Viennese Blood appear all the more unconvincing.<br />

Operetta and Viennese Girls, the first and last films in the Viennese Trilogy,<br />

strive toward a more essentialist reconstruction of Viennese identity<br />

that does not involve the German-Austrian relationship and its highly gendered<br />

oppositions. To what degree the Austrian dilemma becomes subsequently<br />

linked to the question of masculinity can be seen in Forst’s decision<br />

to take complete control over the production by assuming the roles of director,<br />

screenwriter, and male lead in both movies. Perhaps this preference<br />

for male perspectives has to do with the different conditions of production<br />

at the beginning and the end of the German occupation. In both cases, resistance<br />

seemed still (or again) possible, if only in the filmic imagination and<br />

162 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


its highly symbolic stories of national shame and renewal. However, this<br />

politicization does not mean that gender and sexuality are no longer central<br />

to the assertion of Austrian cultural superiority. On the contrary, the<br />

coupling of the Vienna myth with the crisis of masculinity actually becomes<br />

more pronounced in the masochistic style of presentation that defines these<br />

two musical biographies. Operetta follows the turbulent life of Franz Jauner<br />

(1832–1900), who contributed to musical culture in the capital by serving<br />

as the artistic director of the Hofoper from 1875 to 1880, the Ringtheater<br />

until its destruction by fire in 1881, and the Carltheater after his release<br />

from prison in 1896. Taking place slightly later, Viennese Girls recounts the<br />

career of Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843–1922), the composer of more than<br />

twenty-two operettas, who was condemned to work in the shadow of the<br />

more successful Strauss dynasty. Both men were unappreciated by their<br />

contemporaries and had to overcome many obstacles in realizing their artistic<br />

visions.<br />

On one level, Operetta and Viennese Girls trace the rise of the Viennese<br />

operetta as a musical form and a cultural tradition, a process shown in extended<br />

performances of well-known pieces by Johann Strauss II, Franz<br />

von Suppé, and Karl Millöcker. But on another level, this operatic tradition<br />

gives rise to the figure of the composer as the embodiment of threatened<br />

masculinity, an association that resonates with larger concerns about Austrian<br />

culture and its own emasculated condition in the then-contemporary<br />

political and cultural landscape. This weakening of Vienna— or, rather, of<br />

the “Vienna effect”—is invariably expressed in musical terms, whether<br />

through the competitive relationship between a male composer and a female<br />

singer or the equally gendered dynamics between the musicians and<br />

their audiences. Adding to these divided loyalties, both stories place the<br />

struggling composer between two women, the devoted wife and good companion<br />

and the (unattainable) first love who in the end must be transformed<br />

into a muse and, therefore, an allegory of Vienna. It is the secret agreement<br />

between the women in the love triangle that allows the man to overcome<br />

his insecurities and accept his responsibilities as the representative of Austria<br />

at home and abroad.<br />

The story of Operetta begins with the arrival in Vienna of a talented and<br />

ambitious musician eager to make a name for himself in the city’s contentious<br />

musical scene. Establishing a pattern for the entire trilogy, the capital<br />

of music is from the beginning introduced as a feminine space, either<br />

through its identification with female characters or through its association<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 163


11. Operette (1940, Operetta), Advertisement, Illustrierter Film-Kurier<br />

with certain cultural activities. However, in a marked departure from earlier<br />

films, the future of Vienna and, by extension, of Austria is now predicated<br />

on the restoration of traditional masculinity. Unlike Viennese Blood,<br />

with its false fantasy of reconciliation, the earlier Operetta still insists on<br />

the need for defiance in the face of adversity; similar conclusions could be<br />

drawn about the later Viennese Girls, but from the perspective of (imminent)<br />

liberation. The underlying message in both films is obvious: Vienna can<br />

164 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


maintain its cultural identity only if it overcomes the legacies of decadence,<br />

which in the gendered terms of the operetta invariably means effeminacy.<br />

Likewise, the city’s cultural life can be preserved only if its main protagonist,<br />

the creative man, is confirmed in his discursive and narrative agency.<br />

The figure of the musician offers an ideal vehicle for such a revisionist account<br />

of culture, nation, and identity. Yet its realization hinges always on<br />

the sacrifice by or of a woman.<br />

Operetta takes advantage of the well-tried mixture of musical biography<br />

and costume drama that, since the beginnings of cinema, has sustained the<br />

ongoing triangulation of Vienna, music, and desire. All narrative and visual<br />

elements bear witness to this pervasive eroticization of musical culture,<br />

from the conventional love triangle between the man, the wife, and his<br />

muse to the polemical juxtaposition of art vs. entertainment, and opera vs.<br />

operetta. The story of Franz Jauner (Willi Forst), who comes to the city to<br />

work for the enterprising Marie Geistinger (Maria Holst), follows the typical<br />

stages in the representation of a musical career: struggle, fame, disaster,<br />

and, finally, the rebirth of music in the spirit of personal tragedy. His trials<br />

and tribulations position him between the ambitious woman of the world,<br />

the famous Geistinger, who renounces love for a career on the stage, and a<br />

talented young singer from back home, Emilie Krull (Dora Komar), who<br />

later becomes his wife. It is the women’s role to resolve all conflicts between<br />

power and desire, creativity and sexuality, in favor of the film’s true love<br />

story between the musician and his audience.<br />

Jauner’s search for a new musical form whose combined lyrical and dramatic,<br />

classical and popular, elements could revitalize musical life in the<br />

city takes place on several levels in the narrative: through direct references<br />

to the importance of music to Viennese identity; the various approaches to<br />

the emerging genre of the operetta; and, of course, the staging of these oppositions<br />

in the erotically charged terms of the Jauner-Geistinger relationship.<br />

Challenged by the independent career woman, the young conductor<br />

asserts himself by staging successful productions of Millöcker’s Der Bettelstudent<br />

(The Beggar Student) and Gasparone, as well as of Strauss classics<br />

like Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) and Der Zigeunerbaron (The<br />

Gypsy Baron). Eventually, Jauner’s dependency on the underlying dynamics<br />

of pursuit, seduction, and rejection compromises his dedication to music.<br />

After his sudden dismissal by Geistinger, personal resentment begins<br />

to interfere with his administrative decisions. Jauner’s struggles for public<br />

recognition as the director of the Carltheater, the Hofoper, and the<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 165


Ringtheater intensify after her first departure from Vienna, and his most<br />

destructive behavior occurs during an extended concert tour by Geistinger<br />

in the United States. Following the narrative logic of pride and punishment,<br />

Jauner first has to do penance for the double betrayal of his wife and his talent,<br />

in this case through his brief incarceration after the burning of the<br />

Ringtheater. In accepting the responsibilities borne by all great artists, he is<br />

finally ready for the reunion with the Viennese audience in the film’s triumphant<br />

musical finale.<br />

Jauner is able to reclaim his place in the city’s musical establishment<br />

because of a secret agreement between the two women. The man remains<br />

completely unaware of the need for such compromises, whereas the women<br />

tacitly accept their complementary roles and end up working together as<br />

the guardians of male genius. Significantly, it is the public appearance of<br />

an ailing Geistinger at the premiere of The Beggar Student that persuades<br />

the audience to forgive Jauner and welcome his version of the Viennese<br />

operetta. In that moment, the division between the woman as an object of<br />

sexual desire and a source of artistic inspiration is complete, with the one<br />

domesticated in a bourgeois marriage and the other elevated to the disembodied<br />

role of muse. Thus when Jauner takes a bow after the performance,<br />

Geistinger’s face appears superimposed over the enthusiastic crowd. She<br />

has sacrificed her health for the “reconciliation of him [Jauner] and Vienna.”<br />

No longer a woman of flesh and blood, she lives on as an allegory of<br />

the city of Vienna and, by extension, of Austrian identity.<br />

The triumph of the Viennese operetta is closely implicated in the negotiation<br />

of love and work that inspires two very different renditions of the<br />

theme song, “Today I Am So in Love.” Initially performed in the diegesis,<br />

the song returns as a leitmotif in the musical score and, as an expression<br />

of unspoken or unfulfilled desire, gives rise to a sustained reflection on the<br />

unique qualities of the Viennese operetta. Jauner and Geistinger meet for<br />

the first time when he is asked to accompany the famous singer at the piano.<br />

Afterwards he criticizes her dramatic performance and offers his lyrical<br />

interpretation as an alternative. Her second and much more melancholy<br />

rendition of the song attests to the conflicts caused by their growing artistic<br />

rivalry and mutual sexual attraction. The underlying tension between female<br />

fortitude and male sensibility structures all of their subsequent encounters<br />

and culminates in their opposing views on the operetta as a musical<br />

and theatrical form. Rejecting social conventions in her personal life,<br />

Geistinger closely adheres to the existing rules for staging operettas and<br />

166 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


even harbors secret dreams about a career on the more respectable operatic<br />

stage. Thus it is left to Jauner to initiate a “revolution of the operetta” by<br />

introducing spectacular set designs, imaginative costumes, and a dynamic<br />

mass choreography.<br />

During a contentious rehearsal for Die Fledermaus, Jauner explains to<br />

Geistinger and everyone present that the Viennese operetta, though much<br />

talked about, does not exist; it has not yet made the necessary transition<br />

from entertainment to art. For him, most productions can be described either<br />

as “an Italian opera with dialogue or a French farce with songs. Yet<br />

where is Vienna,” Jauner asks polemically, “the energy of this city, the<br />

rhythm, the tempo?” What is needed, in his view, is a deeper understanding<br />

both of the community of singers and musicians and of popular music<br />

as an expression of their shared values and beliefs. The “queen of the operetta”<br />

is not willing to take such a step and dismisses him on the spot. He<br />

responds with a defiant rendition of Count Orlofsky’s famous “It’s Just My<br />

Way, chacun à son goût!”<br />

By staging new works by Johann Strauss II, Franz von Suppé, and Karl<br />

Millöcker, Jauner and Geistinger in fact contribute equally to the birth of<br />

the Viennese operetta, but Jauner’s approach proves to be more popular<br />

and profitable in the end. 29 The competition between the small-scale productions<br />

at the staid Theater an der Wien, which include Strauss’s Die<br />

Fledermaus, Cagliostro, Das Spitzentuch der Königin (The Queen’s Lace<br />

Handkerchief), and Der lustige Krieg (The Merry War), and the more spectacular,<br />

revue-type productions of von Suppé’s Donna Juanita, Fatinitza,<br />

Boccachio, and Die schöne Galathee (The Beautiful Galathee) at the unabashedly<br />

populist Carltheater confirms Jauner’s position as the new “king<br />

of the operetta.” This reversal in fortunes sparks a heated argument between<br />

them over the operetta’s need for happy endings, which she sees as a<br />

sign of its inferiority and which he defends as a distinguishing mark of light<br />

entertainment and its duty to disseminate “joy of life.” Moving to a more<br />

personal level, he conjures up the vision of two individuals destined to be<br />

together, whereas she insists on her need to become a serious artist. A passionate<br />

kiss threatens the delicate balance between sexual sublimation and<br />

musical inspiration that hitherto sustained their shared commitment to the<br />

revival of the operetta. And because of that higher goal of cultural renewal,<br />

the romantic union between Jauner and Geistinger must remain forever<br />

unfulfilled.<br />

Produced in 1945 but released only in 1949, Viennese Girls belongs to<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 167


the so-called Überläuferfilme. Completed in two versions, the one by Forst<br />

in Vienna, the other for Sovexport in Berlin, the film extends the city’s selfrepresentations<br />

from the cultural compromises during the annexation into<br />

the political divisions of the Cold War. 30 The last film in the Viennese Trilogy<br />

once again confirmed the Vienna myth’s remarkable adaptability to<br />

changing inscriptions—perhaps a reason for its selection for the prestigious<br />

Sascha-Pokal in 1950. Emboldened by such public recognition, Forst during<br />

the 1950s began to recast his earlier work for Wien-Film in the terms of<br />

subversive escapism, while at the same time condemning the continuous<br />

production of Vienna films as a sign of artistic stagnation.<br />

As regards the second point, his own Viennese Girls could have served<br />

as a prime example for these counterproductive tendencies. Again elaborate<br />

sets, exquisite costumes, and romantic tunes allow for an escape from politics<br />

into musical fantasy, in this case a fantasy in muted pastel colors. Again<br />

the experience of annexation is displaced onto the crisis of masculinity, with<br />

the ensuing gender troubles adding a highly sexualized aura to the representation<br />

of musical culture and national identity. Again various musical<br />

and romantic triangles are resolved through the compensatory qualities of<br />

female allegory (see Operetta) and defeatist models of rapprochement (see<br />

Viennese Blood). But whereas the first and second films in the Viennese<br />

Trilogy define their strategies of accommodation in the context of cultural<br />

and political domination, Viennese Girls takes advantage of its complicated<br />

production history before and after Austrian liberation to distill the period<br />

of national humiliation into an empowering version of musical culture for<br />

the postwar period.<br />

The story of Viennese Girls focuses on Carl Michael Ziehrer (Willi Forst)<br />

and his problems as an emerging composer in the shadow of the celebrated<br />

creator of the Viennese waltz. Replacing the ailing rival at the baton,<br />

Ziehrer takes the opportunity to premiere his own “Viennese Citizens”<br />

in front of a thrilled ballroom audience. After meeting the three younger<br />

daughters of Court Councilor Munk, he writes a waltz in their honor, “Viennese<br />

Girls.” Yet after he falls in love with the oldest daughter, Klara (Judith<br />

Holzmeister), he changes the dedication of the waltz to “Viennese<br />

Girl.” Despite his success as a composer of popular waltzes and marches, he<br />

succumbs to self-doubt after she rejects his advances. Despondent and dejected,<br />

Ziehrer refuses to perform a new piece during a charity ball and<br />

subsequently loses both objects of his desire—the audience to his musical<br />

nemesis, Strauss, and the woman to a man of the world, the diplomat Count<br />

168 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


12. Wiener Mädeln (1945–1949, Viennese Girls), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-<br />

Filmarchiv<br />

Lechenberg (Curd Jürgens). Ziehrer’s explanation for his behavior is more<br />

than revealing as a reflection on the Viennese mentality: “No one can ask<br />

me to contribute to my own defeat knowingly.”<br />

Doubly humiliated, Ziehrer leaves Vienna to become an important figure<br />

in the international music scene. His portrayal during an extended European<br />

tour as “the best ambassador for his fatherland in the world” defines<br />

the terms under which he is able to preserve his Austrian identity (in exile,<br />

as it were) and to return home as the representative of a more confident—<br />

which also means more combative—Austria. This transformation requires<br />

that he give up the haughty and unattainable Klara and enter into a more<br />

supportive relationship with the younger Munk sister, Mitzi (Dora Komar),<br />

whom he meets again during a rehearsal for one of his operettas, Die fremde<br />

Herzogin (The Foreign Duchess). Her spirited rendition of the film’s theme<br />

song, now again in the original plural of “Viennese Girls,” reminds Ziehrer<br />

of his obligation to Austrian culture and makes possible his appearance as<br />

“Vienna’s savior” at the 1870 World Exhibition in Christiania. The muchanticipated<br />

reconciliation of culture and state takes place against the back-<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 169


drop of an artificial Vienna re-created on the exhibition grounds, complete<br />

with fake Heuringen restaurant and miniature St. Stephan Dome. As presented<br />

in the triumphant ending, the new alliance between musician and<br />

diplomat not only revives a long tradition in Austrian history but also provides<br />

a model for more forceful solutions to the preservation of national<br />

sovereignty in the future. The effective combination of waltzes and marches<br />

in the performance of Austrianness at the World Exhibition supports such<br />

a politicized postwar reading.<br />

The film’s finale clearly acknowledges the changing place of Austrian<br />

culture in postwar Europe, especially in light of the feared process of Americanization,<br />

but its real concern remains the experience of German occupation.<br />

After all, John Cross with his Sousa-style Navy band admits musical<br />

defeat as soon as the Deutschmeister perform “Viennese Girls” with strong<br />

vocal support from the two Munk sisters, united in their love for Vienna and<br />

the man who has kept alive the memory of the city during his self-imposed<br />

exile. However, the difficulties in reaching that point give a good indication<br />

of the trauma of disempowerment and the persistence of defeatist attitudes.<br />

Initially, Ziehrer shows no interest in entering the musical competition at<br />

the World Exhibition and refuses to think of culture in terms of struggle;<br />

hence his obstinate reply: “Whom should I defeat? I don’t see an enemy<br />

anywhere.” He feels no need to respond to the musical challenge by the<br />

Americans until his wife persuades him to dress the band members in<br />

Deutschmeister uniforms, a symbol of Austria’s glorious imperial past. He<br />

points to his lack of ambition—“I cannot become much more than I am already”—as<br />

an explanation for his flight from responsibility. And he expresses<br />

indifference to the demands of his country until his former rival, the<br />

diplomat, reminds him: “You cannot go now, Vienna is at stake.” According<br />

to Karla, who has not seen the city for seven years—exactly the duration of<br />

the German occupation—a more mature behavior by all of the characters,<br />

including Ziehrer, might have prevented what he too now acknowledges as<br />

a painful period of exile and banishment.<br />

To conclude: A closer look at the changing function of “Vienna” during<br />

annexation not only yields a better understanding of urban mythologies and<br />

their discursive function in the cinema. It also has wider implications for the<br />

conceptualization of national cinema and the centrality of such mythologies<br />

to the definition of cultural identity. The difficulty of dealing with this period<br />

can still be felt today in, among other things, the ways Austrian and<br />

German film histories claim (or refuse to claim) these films as their own. My<br />

170 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


close readings have tried to delineate the affirmative function of the Vienna<br />

films even, or especially, in the form of subversive effects. It would be too<br />

easy to explain the preference for film operettas and musical fantasies as a<br />

function of inner emigration. Yet it would be equally simplistic to dismiss<br />

the entire genre as politically corrupt and aesthetically irrelevant. As I have<br />

argued, the Vienna myth allowed Forst and Wien-Film to deal with a complicated<br />

situation in a typical Austrian way: to accommodate the new power<br />

structures by simultaneously reproducing the myth and using its gendered<br />

representations to conjure up alternative solutions that, of course, ended up<br />

confirming the power of tradition and convention. The Vienna films produced<br />

by Wien-Film between 1939 and 1945 appear strangely suspended in<br />

time and place, yet are in fact deeply affected by the institutional and ideological<br />

pressures exerted on the images of the city under the conditions of<br />

occupation. And precisely that quality makes these films an integral part of<br />

Austrian and German film history and the complicated relationship between<br />

both national cinemas.<br />

The Annexation of an Imaginary City 171


9THE POWER<br />

OF THOUGHT<br />

REDEFINING<br />

POPULAR <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

BETWEEN REALISM<br />

AND ILLUSIONISM<br />

I.<br />

Just as cinema in the Third Reich never attained the kind of internal unity<br />

and coherence claimed by its representatives, the theoretical writings from<br />

these years amounted to much more than programmatic statements on its<br />

political or sociopsychological function. On the one hand, the countless essays<br />

and treatises tried to develop a conceptual model for the intended convergence<br />

of cinema and ideology that began with the forced coordination of<br />

the film industry. On the other hand, critics and scholars constantly had to<br />

adjust their categories to the actual practices that, from generic traditions<br />

to audience preferences, continued to dominate popular cinema. Writing


thus served a twofold purpose, to lay out the program for a future film art<br />

and, in the absence of any real change, to justify the prevailing approaches<br />

within the new ideological constellations. Such an instrumentalization of<br />

film theory might easily be dismissed for its eclectic quality and affirmative<br />

function. However, while there exists widespread agreement about the<br />

compromised nature of much critical and scholarly writing from the Third<br />

Reich, little is still known about the actual processes of revision, reversal,<br />

and ongoing adjustment that made possible the enlistment of film theory in<br />

the legitimizing fictions of national cinema.<br />

On the following pages, I want to present one line of argumentation,<br />

namely the repeated efforts by film critics, journalists, scholars, and officials<br />

from the Propaganda Ministry to rearticulate the relationship between<br />

representation and reality through a modified notion of filmic realism. The<br />

production of Wirklichkeitsnähe (literally, closeness to reality) was considered<br />

central to the planned transformation of popular cinema into an expression<br />

of Volkstümlichkeit (popularity or popular appeal, but also folksiness),<br />

an almost untranslatable term that, even in the form of new mass<br />

media, evokes the authentic forms and communal structures of folklore.<br />

The fact that these theories were rarely tested on individual films is secondary<br />

in light of the considerable pressure exerted by such a reconceptualization<br />

of the real on existing genres and styles and, even more importantly,<br />

on established models of spectatorship. One might even argue that the strict<br />

separation between theory and practice, with philosophical speculation often<br />

functioning as a substitute for quality filmmaking, was absolutely essential<br />

to the phantasmagoric constructions that sustained cinema as a whole,<br />

including in its contradictions.<br />

The transformation of filmic reality into an experiential category involved<br />

a momentous shift from text-based to reception-based definitions of<br />

filmic realism. The final goal was the elevation of the motion-picture audience<br />

to a model of the racial community, the Volksgemeinschaft; Volkstümlichkeit<br />

was to be the means to that end. By avoiding film-specific concerns,<br />

contributors were able to speculate freely on the experiential dimension of<br />

cinema—its reality effects, as it were. In searching for a higher manifestation<br />

of reality in the viewing experience, they often turned to the established<br />

categories of mass psychology and used its observations on film audiences<br />

to assess the contribution of cinema to the making of the national<br />

community. The inclusion of older realist traditions in such an event-based<br />

cinematic reality established a model of integration—that is, of false recon-<br />

The Power of Thought 173


ciliation—for other mass cultural practices as well. Moreover, the new approaches<br />

to realism were considered an important contribution to the development<br />

of a national culture sustained, on the one hand, by the illusion<br />

of a popular culture untouched by political ideology and the promise, on<br />

the other hand, of a more inclusive culture of community that could dissolve<br />

the boundaries among fiction, fantasy, and lived experience into the<br />

authentic terms of film folklore. With these different investments, the writings<br />

gave rise to what might be called a populist aesthetic, with the notion<br />

of populism referring precisely to the intended convergence of the popular<br />

and the political. 1<br />

The concepts of Wirklichkeitsnähe and Volkstümlichkeit provided the<br />

shifting signifiers through which the strategic alliance between official political<br />

culture and modern mass culture was to be accomplished, if only in<br />

the hyperbolic terms of film criticism and theory. In the same way that the<br />

propaganda film and the entertainment film fulfilled their ideological functions<br />

only in relation to each other, the various writings were part of a larger<br />

effort to redraw the boundaries between filmic and political fictions and, in<br />

so doing, to reconfigure the political sphere according to the terms of popular<br />

culture. The proponents of Wirklichkeitsnähe appealed to a long tradition<br />

in literature of using realist styles to criticize existing social and political<br />

conditions. But they did so only in order to eliminate the very distinction<br />

between surface manifestations and underlying power structures that had<br />

fueled this tradition since the great bourgeois novels of the nineteenth century.<br />

For the same reason, the concept of Volkstümlichkeit was developed<br />

in response to official calls for a reemerging folk culture. Yet the ensuing<br />

debates fulfilled their primary function in accounting for the psychological<br />

processes that, despite all educational initiatives, contributed to the undiminished<br />

appeal of conventional genre films.<br />

In light of these larger concerns, it is no coincidence that the most extensive<br />

and intensive debates took place during the years of greatest change,<br />

namely from 1933 to 1935 and from 1939 to 1942. The close attention to aesthetic<br />

questions in the first years of the regime was necessitated by a decline<br />

in quality caused by the shortage of qualified personnel after the exclusion<br />

of all Jews and Communists, as well as many others, from the newly founded<br />

Reich Film Chamber. The return to theoretical questions during the early<br />

1940s must be explained through the enlistment of all artistic and critical<br />

practices in the war effort and the militarization of everyday life. By com-<br />

174 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ining the categories of aesthetic autonomy, political agitation, and mass<br />

entertainment in an inconsistent and formulaic, but nonetheless highly effective,<br />

fashion, the Propaganda Minister set the standard for the kind of<br />

relativistic thinking that could be adjusted to ever-changing circumstances.<br />

To give only a few examples, Goebbels simultaneously claimed that “convictions<br />

don’t make up for a lack of art” 2 but that “every art has a tendency.” 3<br />

He defended film as an art form with innate laws but opposed artistic experimentation<br />

in favor of a folk culture grounded in the rituals of community.<br />

4 The Minister fantasized about the cinema’s place in “a better, purer,<br />

and more authentic world” 5 built on the principles of National Socialism.<br />

Yet he rejected all proposals for the openly political film and proclaimed, in<br />

typical idealist phraseology, that “art has the duty and the task to transform<br />

life, to elevate, to condense, to intensify, and then to represent.” 6<br />

The emergence of a model of populist cinema that combined the political<br />

and the popular in the fantasy effects of Nazi ideology cannot be examined<br />

outside institutional structures, political developments, and disciplinary<br />

concerns. Aesthetic debates during the 1930s were quite common and<br />

not always harmonious, despite the severe restrictions on Filmkritik after<br />

the 1936 introduction of a merely appreciative Filmbetrachtung (film reviewing).<br />

These debates reflected widespread uncertainty among members<br />

of the industry about the new official positions on film and filmmaking; they<br />

also showed to what degree even established practices required constant<br />

renegotiation and reaffirmation. Writing on film offered a safe framework<br />

for considering economic, political, and artistic perspectives and for thinking<br />

about desirable and undesirable links between high- and low-culture<br />

traditions, and between national and international trends. Contributors wavered<br />

between an almost compulsive fixation on pragmatic solutions and an<br />

equally problematic concern with the eternal questions of art. Resorting<br />

to empty slogans like “Film should be a mirror of life!” “Diversity instead<br />

of typicality!” or “A prerequisite—the truth!” 7 film journalists sometimes<br />

abandoned argumentation altogether. At other times, they raised irrelevant<br />

questions like “Should the waiter in a film give change?” to illustrate the<br />

proper relationship between filmic stories and everyday life. But even here,<br />

the concrete example spawned universal truths like the following: “Art is<br />

not a poor imitation of life. The artist must compress it in order to make it<br />

appealing.” 8<br />

Ignoring Karl Ritter’s caveat that “film is still too young for theories,” 9<br />

The Power of Thought 175


film journalists and scholars over the following years argued about the social<br />

and psychological function of individual genres, debated the creative<br />

contribution of actors and directors, and contemplated the future of film as<br />

an art form. Celebrating the screenwriter as an auteur-like figure, some<br />

proposed to strengthen film’s ties to literature and theater, and by extension,<br />

to middle-class culture. Others insisted on the importance of ensemble acting<br />

as a valid alternative to the star phenomenon and what they dismissed<br />

as its superficial cult of physical beauty. Searching for new ways of making<br />

the cinema more relevant to everyday concerns, most writers agreed that<br />

the continuous preference for literary sources only perpetuated the petit<br />

bourgeois tastes of the past and deprived audiences of the more relevant<br />

contemporary subject matter presented so convincingly in the Hollywood<br />

films. 10 However, there was little agreement on the best solutions to these<br />

problems. A few contributors declared that a new filmic realism could be<br />

developed only through the rejection of urban culture and the rediscovery<br />

of rural culture. 11 Film directors, they insisted, should stop idealizing foreign<br />

countries and alien cultures and choose German characters and locations<br />

even for high-society dramas. 12 Equally limited in their thematic obsessions<br />

were the habitual calls for more films about average professions,<br />

typical workplaces, and the new ethos of labor. 13<br />

In the same way that the cinema of the Third Reich incorporated many<br />

features of Weimar cinema, the more ambitious theoretical contributions<br />

often reconnected to the highly politicized debates that had accompanied<br />

the rise of film from the very beginning. Many propagandists took advantage<br />

of the developments in mass psychology since the Wilhelmine period<br />

and, based on their reading of LeBon and Ortega y Gasset, offered more radical<br />

proposals on mass manipulation. The insights gained from the political<br />

uses of film during World War I proved particularly useful to the Propaganda<br />

Ministry in planning the media campaigns in World War II. Even the<br />

reform movements from the 1910s and 1920s, which had enlisted the cinema<br />

in the project of public education and social reform, inspired several<br />

publications on cinema as a group experience and social ritual. The “depravities”<br />

of Weimar cinema were evoked in polemical treatises that introduced<br />

race and nation as key ingredients of a truly popular and, by extension,<br />

truly national cinema. Yet some of the arguments exhibited surprising<br />

similarities with the highly politicized debates from the early 1930s about<br />

the class character of mainstream film production. This selective adaptation<br />

of established traditions, including from the Weimar years, allowed film<br />

176 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


critics, as well as Ministry officials, to embrace a range of theories while ignoring<br />

their social and cultural implications.<br />

The task of formulating a more systematic approach fell to Fritz Hippler,<br />

who headed the Film Department in the Propaganda Ministry and,<br />

in that function, was responsible for the anti-Semitic propaganda film Der<br />

ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1940). His writings from the war years established<br />

a conceptual framework for the state-commissioned films. Yet Hippler<br />

also outlined the conditions under which other filmic practices could<br />

contribute to the intricate system of public and private fantasies in which<br />

“realism” and “illusionism” would assume their rightful place as equal participants<br />

in the underlying process of derealization. The state-commissioned<br />

film, a genre defined through its highly politicized conditions of production<br />

and reception, had shown how to redraw the boundaries between past and<br />

present, public and private, and fiction and reality. Applied to conventional<br />

genres, the simulation of the real could be completed entirely within the<br />

terms of fantasy, desire, and pleasure. Yet in both cases, the displacement of<br />

reality effects into the conditions of spectatorship was predicated on a fundamental<br />

indifference to the question of film form and a surprising openness<br />

to various representational techniques.<br />

Interested only in the political applications of spectatorship, Hippler<br />

made no distinction between filmic representation and its psychological effects—feeling<br />

that the latter had become irrelevant in light of the greater<br />

task of aligning the popular imagination with the iconography of race and<br />

nation. All formal concerns were now subordinated to the main goal, the<br />

production of imaginary experiences: “The final effect is the main thing.<br />

And it has to have an effect as if it were reality.” 14 Unsurprisingly, Hippler<br />

never expressed any preferences for a particular genre or style; what mattered<br />

only was “the question: ‘meaningless or meaningful entertainment’!”<br />

15 Even his occasional outbursts against what he considered rampant<br />

arbitrariness in the choice of subject matter only supported his basic belief<br />

in the primacy of effects over means. After all, his assertion that “whether<br />

a film turns out to be bad or good depends almost exclusively on the quality<br />

of the material on which it is based” 16 referred only on the surface to<br />

higher standards, because filmic quality—as captured in an ambiguous term<br />

like Stoff (i.e., material, substance, subject matter)—was no longer defined<br />

in textual terms. Any decisions about form and content were already processed<br />

through the binary opposition of meaningful vs. meaningless—that<br />

is, effective vs. ineffective—established by the conditions of film reception.<br />

The Power of Thought 177


And these, in turn, were determined by the political objectives behind filmmaking,<br />

by what Hippler calls the basic “moral message” and its positive<br />

and negative identifications. 17<br />

Throughout the period, the officials in the Propaganda Ministry and the<br />

writers in the trade press played an active role in redefining filmic realism<br />

as a function of reception and promoting film folklore as a manifestation of<br />

the racial community. But what about the new generation of art philosophers,<br />

journalism students, and communications scholars? How did their<br />

commitment to film art and the legacies of idealist aesthetics hold up in<br />

light of the growing pressure on the scholarly community to formulate<br />

arguments for the intended convergence between the popular and the political?<br />

And what role did they play during a time when fantasizing about<br />

German film art more often than not served to compensate for its glaring<br />

absence?<br />

In numerous essays, treatises, and dissertations on film-related topics,<br />

two diametrically opposed tendencies prevailed: the complete alignment of<br />

popular cinema with the goals of National Socialism and the justification<br />

of illusionism as a necessary refuge from everyday problems. Both sides are<br />

equally relevant for my later discussion of Wirklichkeitsnähe and Volkstümlichkeit,<br />

insofar as they lay out the larger conceptual framework. Perhaps<br />

the most extreme attempt at rethinking film from the perspective of ideology<br />

was undertaken by Peter von Werder in Trugbild und Wirklichkeit im<br />

Film (Delusion and Reality in the Film). Written on the battlefield, this<br />

small treatise from 1943 brings earlier arguments on reality and realism as<br />

experiential categories to their (il)logical conclusion. Filmic images, the author<br />

asserts, convey an Anschauung in the double sense of the word, namely<br />

as a visual perception and a particular system of beliefs. Accordingly, the<br />

militarization of consciousness (Wehrgesinnung) must extend beyond any<br />

simplistic equation of specific genres with specific ideological contents and<br />

include all of cinema.<br />

According to one of von Werder’s examples, the new worldview conveyed<br />

by films like Bismarck (1942), Ohm Krüger (1942), and Heimkehr<br />

(Homecoming, 1941) amounts to much more than a fictionalization of political<br />

principles. In addressing the spectator as a member of the racial community,<br />

these films offer a solution to the depersonalization (Entpersönlichung)<br />

and derealization (Entwirklichung) that still haunt the popular<br />

imagination through the empty formulas of genre cinema. Yet in the realization<br />

of this effect, the external, rational type prevalent in modern mass<br />

178 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


society has to be replaced by the internal, emotional type who, as a member<br />

of the national community, always strives for what von Werder calls a<br />

“spiritual view of life and world.” 18 For in mobilizing inner resources like<br />

determination, enthusiasm, and faith, only the internal type achieves the<br />

kind of closeness to reality that for the author has always distinguished the<br />

German national character and finally reached its full potential in the allencompassing<br />

concept of race.<br />

Avoiding such ideological fervor, the more scholarly Gunter Groll formulated<br />

his ideas within the tradition of Weimar film theory. His study from<br />

1939 allowed for one last expression of what would soon be denounced as<br />

formalist tendencies. Groll, then only twenty-three years old, wrote Das<br />

Gesetz des Films (The Law of Film) as a dissertation at the University of Munich<br />

under Artur Kutscher, the well-known professor of theater arts. Groll’s<br />

main argument about the inherent principles of film recalls the approach<br />

taken by Rudolf Arnheim in Der Film als Kunst (1932, trans. in 1933 as Film<br />

as Art). Likewise, some of the observations on the silent language of gestures<br />

show the influence of Béla Balázs’s Der Geist des Films (The Spirit<br />

of Film, 1930). However, Groll’s conclusion that “through the selection of<br />

images, framing, rhythm, superimposition, montage, and sound, film has<br />

advanced from technology to art” 19 suggests that these techniques become<br />

meaningful only as long as they withstand all materialist or modernist impulses.<br />

Thus his proposal to uncover film’s Lebensgesetz (vital law) through<br />

its Materialgesetz (material law) in fact separates the medium from its technological<br />

basis and attributes its images entirely to the ontological processes<br />

of being and becoming. Ultimately it remains the task of the director to<br />

move beyond the mechanical reproduction of reality and, in the tradition<br />

of all heroic art, to transform its constitutive elements—not in order “to<br />

serve it, but to dominate it.” 20<br />

Where von Werder speaks emphatically about the importance of strong<br />

convictions, Groll makes every effort to separate his idea of worldview (Anschauung)<br />

from political interpretations. Where von Werder conjures up the<br />

dangers created by a fantasy without ideology, Groll insists that only the<br />

complete derealization of reality gives rise to the reality of art. This “new<br />

magical way of looking at real life,” 21 he argues, liberates film from the burden<br />

of mechanical reproduction and confirms man as the central force in<br />

making sense of the world. A thus defined hyperreality (Überwirklichkeit)<br />

does not contradict the direct experience of reality but, according to Groll,<br />

exists in a continuum with everyday life. Enlisted in the celebration of cre-<br />

The Power of Thought 179


ative subjectivity, film art achieves much more than a reenchantment of the<br />

visible world. The medium’s innate opposition to political uses and abuses<br />

releases the underlying vitalist principle that for him distinguishes all great<br />

artists and great nations: “Here the law of film coincides with the fundamental<br />

law of all art that, instead of weakening life, makes it stronger.” 22<br />

II.<br />

The conditions under which theories of filmic realism became part of the<br />

larger debate on popular cinema required a radical departure from traditional<br />

ways of thinking that culminated in the new terminology of Wirklichkeitsnähe,<br />

the central category in this chapter’s second part, and Volkstümlichkeit,<br />

which will be discussed in the third part. Predicated on a clear<br />

separation between filmic means and effects, this process aimed at the demarcation<br />

of a visual and narrative space seemingly free of the intrusions of<br />

the apparatus, to evoke an image from Walter Benjamin’s famous Art Work<br />

Essay.<br />

Expressing the prevailing view, film historian Walter Panofsky underscored<br />

the necessity of advancing from the “urge toward the greatest possible<br />

approximation to reality” 23 to a higher reality unburdened by technology.<br />

Arguing along similar lines, essayist Sigismund von Radecki asserted<br />

that cinematography on its own would achieve nothing but a mechanical<br />

recording of the visible world. As “a technology for the reproduction of the<br />

arts,” 24 film could rise to the level of art only through the infusion of a human<br />

perspective that protected the anthropocentric order against the leveling<br />

effect of new visual technologies. Screenwriter Rolf Lauckner explained<br />

that “the camera . . . as a machine, as a representational technique without<br />

inner spirit, is incapable of creating meaningful images and only capable of<br />

reproducing physical realities.” 25 Even Ritter followed this line of argumentation<br />

when he reminded fellow directors that the camera provided<br />

merely the raw material for “the experiential bringing to life of spiritual appearances”<br />

26 that was the hallmark of all true art.<br />

Most proposals for the transition from mechanical reproduction to artistic<br />

representation were organized around highly charged oppositions like<br />

passive vs. active, external vs. internal, sensual vs. spiritual, mechanical vs.<br />

organic, and so forth. All engaged directly or indirectly with the status of the<br />

filmic image and the nature of visuality. Hans Pauck followed established<br />

patterns when he maintained that “trueness to life, whether in the positive<br />

or negative sense, is never a measure of film art,” since only the visual rep-<br />

180 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


esentation of the idea in the symbol could aspire to such stature. Yet he was<br />

one of the few to offer some suggestions for moving from a mere reflection<br />

to a creative vision, namely through formal techniques strangely reminiscent<br />

of montage:<br />

Film is distinguished from reality only in that it deletes what is irrelevant<br />

to the visualization of the inner truth, that it combines elements<br />

of the real in a unique way, that it joins the multitude of realities<br />

to that organic symbolic unity that constitutes the essence of<br />

artistic creation. 27<br />

All of these programmatic statements confronted a fundamental obstacle<br />

in what Georg Herzberg called “the double illusion” of film. 28 Unlike<br />

the theater, Herzberg argued, the cinema produced a semblance of reality<br />

through its heavy reliance on mimetic principles. At the same time, all good<br />

films moved beyond the limitations of verisimilitude and reached into the<br />

realm of the imagination. Here a workable compromise had to be found. By<br />

creating an artificial, but nonetheless believable, external reality while anchoring<br />

its meaning in the internal reality of emotions, Herzberg concluded,<br />

the new realism could help to overcome the cult of surface phenomena<br />

identified with mechanical reproduction. Hermann Wanderscheck<br />

expressed similar sentiments when he declared that “film turns from a massproduced<br />

product into an authentic filmic experience only where there is<br />

spiritual and ethical substance.” 29 As implied by terms like “authentic,”<br />

“sincere,” and “truthful,” these new requirements effortlessly transcended<br />

the boundaries of conventional aesthetic judgment; the only valid criterion<br />

now was “the category of inner truthfulness.” 30 Of course, this meant abandoning<br />

earlier views, realized in movement films like the ill-fated SA-Mann<br />

Brand (SA Man Brand, 1933), about film as the manifestation of a specific<br />

worldview. At last, ideological functions and effects no longer had to be limited<br />

to a particular form or content but could be realized across the popular<br />

and political divide. When screenwriter Gerhard Menzel explained that<br />

a political drama, for instance, required a different approach to editing and<br />

camerawork from a love story or a thriller, 31 he not only validated the eclecticism<br />

practiced by most directors but also offered an explanation for the<br />

lack of a discernible style in the cinema of the Third Reich.<br />

As filmic means became less important to the advancement of realistic<br />

tendencies, terms like mood and atmosphere assumed a central role in the<br />

The Power of Thought 181


debates because of their greater ability to complete the shift from textual to<br />

contextual categories in the terms of the experiential. The resulting arguments<br />

often sound paradoxical. During the war years, filmic realism became<br />

the preferred code word for illusionism, with the power of Wirklichkeitsnähe<br />

habitually evoked to praise the reality effects provided by escapist entertainment.<br />

Now comedies with clean, healthy humor were hailed as an<br />

authentic display of national strength, whereas serious dramas found supporters<br />

only when they offered an uplifting message and remained constructive<br />

in their portrayal of personal difficulties. 32 Happy endings no<br />

longer prompted instant dismissals on aesthetic grounds but were regarded<br />

as a mass psychological necessity; hence Panofsky’s conclusion about the<br />

wartime productions, that “in their optimistic attitude, they are an expression<br />

of our times,” 33 which means, of the growing need for escapist entertainment.<br />

Even established genre categories disappeared under the impact<br />

of such an undiscriminating realism of emotional effects. For instance, the<br />

so-called Zeitfilm (topical film), a popular genre with respectable literary<br />

precursors in the Zeitroman, was no longer limited to contemporary settings<br />

and protagonists but now referred to everything relevant to the present situation.<br />

From such a perspective, even the historical drama and the genius<br />

film could be embraced as a contribution to a thus redefined Zeitfilm and,<br />

by extension, the redefinition of reality that informed it.<br />

However, both the ambitious theories about film’s internal truths and<br />

the practical hints on better filmmaking failed to come to terms with the allimportant<br />

question of identification. In dealing with its ubiquitous presence<br />

in issues ranging from generic conventions to audience expectations, film<br />

critics turned once more to Wirklichkeitsnähe as a privileged figure of reconciliation.<br />

Most screenwriters and directors agreed that “it is unquestionably<br />

easier to depict an unreal person, one who only exists in the collective<br />

imagination, than to portray a manual laborer or intellectual.” 34 Such social<br />

specificity, it appeared, prevented full identification with the characters<br />

because it introduced a level of concreteness that threatened the precarious<br />

system of reality effects in a popular cinema solidly committed to illusionism.<br />

Continuing in the traditions of the theater posed an equally ineffectual<br />

solution since audiences might reject the conventional characters as artificial<br />

and obsolete. The official vision of the new man, critics concluded,<br />

could only be realized in protagonists who embodied the desired identity of<br />

race and character and, in so doing, introduced an alternative both to the<br />

theories of social construction prevalent in Weimar cinema and to the con-<br />

182 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ventions of dramatic stereotyping known from the boulevard stage. Two<br />

factors had to be considered essential to this process: the emphasis on race<br />

as the unifying principle behind all forms of characterization and the centrality<br />

of fate and destiny in the development of narrative structures. 35<br />

Most surprisingly, the reconceptualization of realism from the perspective<br />

of reception brought a renewed appreciation for the notion of tendentiousness<br />

(Tendenz), a central term in the leftist debates of the late 1920s<br />

and early 1930s. Since all social and political conflicts had presumably been<br />

resolved through the rise of the national community, tendentiousness could<br />

no longer be considered external to filmic representation, the main argument<br />

against all political art by the proponents of art as disinterested pleasure.<br />

Instead, tendentiousness had to be seen as an essential ingredient in<br />

the engendering of new social and political realities; hence the recurring<br />

claim that “the tendentiousness of the German film is a courageous realism.”<br />

36 Yet without the theoretical rigor that had characterized the famous<br />

literary debates between Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács, the new contributions<br />

to the question of tendentiousness had little more to offer than hollow<br />

phrases about a renewed commitment to the national community. 37 Accordingly,<br />

Reichsfilmdramaturg Ewald von Demandowsky declared:<br />

tendentiousness [in film] is nothing but an application of the simple<br />

truth that art does not exist for its own sake but for the people! Art<br />

should make human beings more human, Germans more German,<br />

men more masculine, women more feminine. . . . Whether art<br />

reaches this goal through diversion and pleasure or through deep<br />

emotion and high drama is irrelevant. 38<br />

The antirealist thrust behind this new version of tendentiousness is most<br />

apparent in the scattered remarks on the role of the past in facilitating a<br />

more intense engagement with the present. Based on the privileged status<br />

of historical films as allegories of nation, many critics contemplated various<br />

ways in which classical narrative cinema might move beyond the constraints<br />

of the real and create entirely new realities, even if only in the form of compensatory<br />

fantasies. In their view, it was precisely through the unyielding<br />

commitment to the reality of thoughts and wishes that even the most superficial<br />

films had to be regarded as profoundly realistic. Of course, everyone<br />

agreed, these private desires needed to be contained within the public fantasies<br />

that could accommodate best the mutual infiltration of politics and<br />

The Power of Thought 183


entertainment. Such thinking propelled Hans Traub, one of the advocates<br />

of the openly political film, to speak out in defense of imagination as a<br />

higher form of reality:<br />

Photography and reality have little in common. Whatever we want<br />

to present as reality in the film is real even where reality resists the<br />

effort. Therefore let the films express these deceitful realities as a<br />

mirage of secret human desires. . . . It is the goal of the cinema to satisfy<br />

the all too human, too. 39<br />

Unlike the institutional division of labor between entertainment and<br />

propaganda, the exact contribution of these new reception-based theories<br />

to the planned convergence of cinema and ideology was never fully worked<br />

out on the theoretical level. Even in 1942, Panofsky still confidently proclaimed<br />

that “film as a reflection of the mentality of its country of origin is<br />

determined by the tendencies of its time.” 40 For him, actualizing the full<br />

power of realism meant liberating film from the constraints of reproduction<br />

and turning it into a powerful tool of creating the new; hence his conclusion<br />

that “film must not only give expression of an emerging consciousness<br />

but also contribute actively to its intensification.” 41 Needless to say, opinions<br />

about the precise nature of what really amounted to a more subtle process<br />

of ideologization differed considerably.<br />

Through the 1930s and early 1940s, the majority of critics preferred a<br />

mediated relationship between film and reality; hence their frequent disagreements<br />

on the most appropriate approach to political symbols, figures,<br />

and events. The participants agreed that direct references to the new regime<br />

had to be avoided at all costs. Some approved of the conspicuous absence of<br />

the Hitler salute from films because of respect for National Socialist organizations.<br />

Others feared for the export chances of German films because of<br />

the salute’s undeniably propagandistic nature. Addressing social problems<br />

seemed controversial for similar reasons. Especially any mention of class<br />

conflicts was considered a threat to the new emphasis on community; hence<br />

the suggestion “that the ongoing process of social pacification in Germany<br />

not be endangered by representations that arouse feelings of envy or bring<br />

back bitter memories in the national comrade of his earlier life in bourgeois<br />

society.” 42<br />

Increasingly, these structuring absences also accommodated more aggressive<br />

demands on the real. Being true to life meant making political ten-<br />

184 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


dentiousness an integral part of cinema, but from the side of reception, including<br />

the conditions of moviegoing and the rituals of fandom. 43 The psychological<br />

impact of a film on the audience was considered essential to the<br />

full realization of its meanings. Edmund Theodor Kauer proclaimed that<br />

“there are neither good nor bad films: there are only effective and ineffective<br />

films. The good and bad in a film, the moral standards that it establishes,<br />

do not evolve out of its formal means but they come from the outside,<br />

from another agency.” 44 Of course, this other agency was National<br />

Socialism: not in its dependence on anti-Semitism and anticommunism as<br />

unifying ideological systems, but through its dream of an imagined community<br />

born out of the convergence of public and private fantasies and sustained<br />

by the alliance of power and pleasure in an expanded discursive field.<br />

Rejecting all existing distinctions between texts and contexts, von Demandowsky<br />

had in mind precisely such a model of pure effectiveness when he<br />

declared: “Everything that touches us as people, that makes us laugh or cry,<br />

that is authentic and that reflects our times, that strengthens our ideology<br />

and that is German, should be made into a film.” 45<br />

To what degree such statements hinged on untested, if not purely hypothetical,<br />

assumptions about spectatorship as the primary locus of meaning<br />

production can be seen in Frank Maraun’s observations. Although based<br />

on the formal conventions of the newsreel, his reference to a peculiar slippage—captured<br />

in the image of the magic carpet—from perceptual to imaginary<br />

relations applies equally to the feature film:<br />

Film is the most profound [eindringlich] and most compelling [erlebnisstark]<br />

form of communication because looking is the most satisfying<br />

and most convincing form of engagement with an event. . . .<br />

Like a magic carpet, it [film] carries the eyes everywhere. It presents<br />

reality in a more intense, concentrated, condensed form. 46<br />

Attributes like “profound,”“satisfying,” and “convincing” allow Maraun<br />

to extend the act of looking into the modalities of human desire, a process<br />

described as intensification, concentration, condensation. These formal operations<br />

underscore the centrality of the symbol as the representation of an<br />

idea—in this case, the idea of community—and they confirm experience<br />

as the operative term in the proposed reinvention of the real. Even filmspecific<br />

effects such as the overcoming of distances through new spatiotemporal<br />

relations and the identification of visual perception with the cam-<br />

The Power of Thought 185


era’s point of view find a place, however marginal, in this almost hallucinatory<br />

model of experience in the cinema.<br />

III.<br />

So far I have shown how the concept of Wirklichkeitsnähe established a discursive<br />

field in which old-fashioned concerns about quality could simply be<br />

displaced onto the elusive terms of emotional depth and resonance. The relational<br />

and, therefore, relativistic nature of these new aesthetic categories<br />

becomes most apparent in the debate over Volkstümlichkeit and its contribution<br />

to the proposed reconceptualization of experience. An almost<br />

untranslatable term, Volkstümlichkeit covers the range from “folksy” and<br />

“populist” to “middlebrow” and “mainstream” culture. At the time, the<br />

term was strategically used to promise, or simply proclaim, the rapprochement<br />

of modern and antimodern tendencies through the integrative mechanisms<br />

of what might be called film folklore. 47 The dream of a popular cinema<br />

that combined elements of national culture, mass culture, and folk<br />

culture provided the backdrop against which the politically most advanced<br />

version of filmic realism, embodied by the state-commissioned films, could<br />

take advantage of the reality effects of cinema for a variety of purposes.<br />

Perhaps most importantly, the division of labor that reduced filmic realism<br />

to a function of political tendentiousness, and that turned film folklore<br />

into a model for popular cinema, helped to reconcile the economic<br />

interests of an industry still firmly committed to mass entertainment, Hollywood<br />

style, with the political goals of a regime deeply invested in the discourses<br />

of race, nation, and empire. In this instrumentalized approach to<br />

filmmaking, the new ethics of Wirklichkeitsnähe completed the process of<br />

derealization in the heightened terms of illusionism. And the notion of Volkstümlichkeit<br />

established the framework within which public and private<br />

fantasies joined forces in the eclectic programs of folklore and populism.<br />

Such a simulation of realism, as it were, was to emerge as the governing<br />

principle behind a national cinema striving for, but of course never reaching,<br />

full identity with the ideology of National Socialism.<br />

The process of rearticulating Wirklichkeitsnähe and Volkstümlichkeit<br />

within these constellations culminated in the apotheosis of Volk (alternately<br />

translated as folk, race, or people), a totalizing category that helped to distract<br />

from the rift between the filmic imagination and social reality that had<br />

opened up after the dismantling of the dialectics of form and content identified<br />

with older theories of realism. In the words of literary scholar Heinz<br />

186 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Kindermann, a harmonious relationship between mass production and<br />

mass reception could be achieved only through the living whole of the<br />

German people, “to whom all aesthetic, anthropological, sociological, and<br />

philosophical factors have to be subordinated.” 48 The overdetermined notion<br />

of Volk combined the biologistic category of race and the political rhetoric<br />

of nationalism with nostalgia for preindustrial communities and rural<br />

cultures.<br />

As regards filmic practices, the introduction of national or racial identity<br />

as an aesthetic category meant having to rethink the function of narrative<br />

in accordance with the experiential categories laid out in the beginning<br />

of this chapter. Like Volkstümlichkeit, the celebration of Volk entered the<br />

cinematic imagination less on the level of representations than through the<br />

conditions of reception, modes of spectatorship, and horizons of interpretation.<br />

However, what in the other visual arts gave rise to the neoclassical<br />

and pseudofolkloristic styles in painting and sculpture found surprisingly<br />

few opportunities for expression in a modern mass medium such as film.<br />

Only the state-commissioned films relied on a political definition of Volk in<br />

their heroic accounts of German history and their melodramatic stories of<br />

Germans abroad. The majority of genre films avoided direct references to<br />

the official folk culture and sought refuge in the established conventions of<br />

the rustic comedy and the folk drama as well as the much more elusive concept<br />

of Volkstümlichkeit that, through the translation of international styles<br />

into regional and national contexts, promised the perfect compromise between<br />

populist and popular tendencies.<br />

Unexpectedly, the proper relationship between Volk and Volkstümlichkeit<br />

caused as much confusion among critics as the dynamics between film<br />

and reality in the conceptualization of Wirklichkeitsnähe. Many did not<br />

know whether the official proclamations on Volk were meant in the political<br />

sense of nation, the anthropological sense of race, or the cultural sense<br />

of regional, local, and ethnic traditions. Even more problematic for those<br />

trained in Weimar cultural criticism were the many similarities between<br />

petit bourgeois consciousness and Volkstümlichkeit that became apparent<br />

in the continuous preference for certain themes, settings, characters, and,<br />

most importantly, moods and mentalities. 49 To be sure, any lingering doubts<br />

about the survival of class-based distinctions in the integrative model<br />

of Volkstümlichkeit were quickly dismissed with reference to the need for<br />

clearer boundaries between national and international cinema and a closer<br />

alliance between cultural and political definitions of the popular. The power<br />

The Power of Thought 187


of the racial community in resolving such conceptual inconsistencies was<br />

acknowledged in the rather typical declaration that “like all of German art,<br />

film art must be German, too,” 50 a declaration that simply put an end to further<br />

debate.<br />

In this chapter, I have tried to trace the transformation of filmic realism<br />

from a category of artistic innovation and social criticism in the Weimar<br />

years to a discursive device that blurred the boundaries between propaganda<br />

and entertainment and mediated among official culture, folk culture,<br />

and popular culture. This process involved a number of significant shifts in<br />

the definition of the political: from class to race, from society to community,<br />

and, most importantly for cinema, from the political category of ideology to<br />

the phantasmagoria of experience. Transforming realism from a category of<br />

production into a category of reception completed this complicated process<br />

and glossed over remaining tensions between official calls for a stronger national<br />

film art and the undiminished appeal of a popular cinema indebted<br />

to Hollywood styles. Similarly, the identification of filmic reality with perceptual<br />

and emotional effects closed the gap between ideologized constructions<br />

of the real in the state-commissioned film and the conventional techniques<br />

of illusionism associated with popular entertainment. As the most<br />

effective strategic principle of appropriation and incorporation, realism<br />

came to represent the claims of political cinema against the demands of the<br />

popular, while also establishing a framework in which such contradictions<br />

would be magically dissolved. Through the shift from representation to experience<br />

as the main site of meaning production, even the perspectives of<br />

popular taste, populist rhetoric, and folkloristic tradition could now be accommodated<br />

within a cinema predicated on, and moving toward, the seamless<br />

integration of public and private desires. While the various theories on<br />

a new filmic realism never reached the level of a coherent theory, even less<br />

a filmic practice, they clearly reveal why the desire for a “redemption of<br />

physical reality,” in Kracauer’s famous phrase, did not and could not find a<br />

place in the grandiose designs for a very different reenchantment of the<br />

world.<br />

188 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


10<br />

A QUESTION OF<br />

REPRESENTATION<br />

WORKING WOMEN AND<br />

WARTIME <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

I.<br />

Popular cinema in the Third Reich was characterized by a continuous, if<br />

not compulsive, concern with questions of sexual difference. Previous chapters<br />

have shown how melodramas and film operettas relied on the problem<br />

of femininity in the articulation of social and national identities. The romantic<br />

comedies with Rühmann thematized male anxieties over love and<br />

marriage in performative terms. Women functioned as an important reference<br />

point in sociological research on movie audiences and inspired highly<br />

charged metaphors in theories of spectatorship and visual pleasure. Even<br />

the revisions of modernism in set design were predicated on a gendered con-


ception of mise-en-scène. In the same way that the performativity of gender<br />

allowed German-Jewish filmmakers to address their concerns during the<br />

period of forced coordination, the gendered star system allowed audiences<br />

during the postwar years to confront the cinema’s problematic legacies. It is<br />

precisely because of the significance of sexual difference as a structuring device<br />

that the images of working women in wartime cinema, the subject of<br />

this chapter, cannot be reduced to the demands of war economy but must<br />

also be analyzed within the established traditions of popular cinema.<br />

What is often neglected in studies on the Third Reich that assume a direct<br />

relationship between social practices and filmic images is the degree to<br />

which popular cinema not only reflects the existing conditions but also gives<br />

rise to compensatory fantasies and suppressed desires. It may be useful for<br />

social historians to study the situation of working women through the filmic<br />

representation of central issues such as career, love, sexuality, marriage,<br />

motherhood, and family life. Because of the structuring absences that give<br />

equal, if not greater, relevance to that which is ignored, elided, or removed<br />

from view, the same approach taken by film historians would only reveal<br />

the differences between dominant ideology and popular cinema. After all,<br />

the many beautiful women from the silver screen who blissfully reject the<br />

joys of marriage and motherhood and ignore the rewards of housework and<br />

family life have nothing to do with the oppressive definitions of femininity<br />

that permeated every aspect of everyday life.<br />

This contradiction cannot be explained through the appeal of escapist<br />

entertainment alone. As feminist film theorists have shown, sexual difference<br />

in classical narrative cinema is articulated through the images of<br />

women, the woman as image, and the alternately voyeuristic and fetishistic<br />

investments that enter into the spectatorial and identificatory relationships<br />

around Woman as the center of all signifying practices. Heavily invested in<br />

an illusion of the real that shares reality’s basic structures of desire, these<br />

images and identifications are never self-evident, nor are they ever uncomplicated<br />

and unambiguous. That is why the films about working women in<br />

wartime cinema, too, must be described as “a mise en scène of desire which<br />

can be seen to have multiple places for the subject of the fantasy, and for<br />

the viewing subject who, through identification, may similarly take up these<br />

multiple positions.” 1<br />

Focusing on the representation of working women before and after 1939<br />

is bound to shed light on the heightened investment in illusionism that distinguishes<br />

Germany’s wartime productions from those of its enemy nations.<br />

190 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Moreover, closer attention to images and identifications brings into relief<br />

the symptomatic function of femininity in stabilizing the relationship between<br />

popular entertainment and everyday life during social and national<br />

crises and, especially, under conditions of war. Yet such an approach requires<br />

an expanded definition of female stereotypes that acknowledges its<br />

dependence on various forms of identification. As constructions of identity,<br />

stereotypes play a key role in the negotiation of ideological positions,<br />

whether in the form of iconographic traditions, narrative conventions, social<br />

practices, or more elusive phenomena such as common sense. Stereotypes<br />

in the cinema always function along two axes: characterization as a<br />

narrative device and identification as a psychic effect. Among other things,<br />

this important division of labor in the filmic construction of femininity<br />

glosses over the contradictions between the prevailing images of women and<br />

the actual living conditions of most women.<br />

In the particular case of wartime cinema, this distinction is very useful<br />

in examining the contradictory demands on popular cinema to at once recognize<br />

and disavow the difficulties of the home front. From such a double<br />

perspective, the dramas and comedies to be discussed in this chapter bear<br />

witness to the growing pressure exerted by the war economy on social and<br />

sexual practices and the resultant transformation of femininity into a privileged<br />

site of self-expression as well as self-oppression. By fortifying the illusionist<br />

framework against new realist tendencies, the images of working<br />

women in wartime cinema achieved much more than providing images of<br />

female empowerment or “illusions of female autonomy.” 2 They helped to<br />

preserve the conventions of genre cinema by incorporating and containing<br />

the pressures exerted by the real on the filmic imagination. But the problematic<br />

nature of these representations can only be understood through the<br />

complicated relationship between the available range of female stereotypes<br />

and patterns of identification that sustained them.<br />

Films about working women have always relied on stereotypes like the<br />

femme fatale, the modern flapper, the girl next door, the screwball heroine,<br />

and so forth. Moreover, the disruptive effects of sexual emancipation and<br />

economic independence have typically been processed through the generic<br />

conventions of melodrama, social drama, and romantic comedy. Yet whereas<br />

German filmmakers after 1939 continued to adhere to escapist and illusionist<br />

styles, filmmakers in Great Britain and the United States introduced significant<br />

changes in the gendered structure of classical narrative cinema, beginning<br />

with a growing preference for everyday types and situations and an<br />

A Question of Representation 191


equally noticeable shift from sentimental to dramatic modes. In fact, British<br />

wartime films contained extensive references to everyday life on the<br />

home front, from food and clothes rationing to nightly blackouts and women<br />

in uniform. These realist tendencies found expression, among other ways,<br />

in a renewed appreciation for British actresses. Under the impact of the<br />

war, the old binaries of gender were replaced by the new binaries of nation,<br />

and, to cite Antonia Lant, “the primary meaning of the opposition<br />

‘them’ and ‘us’ shifted from referring to the two sides of gender—the battle<br />

between the sexes—to the two sides of the war, the battle of nations.” 3<br />

Resisting such developments, German films continued to rely on the<br />

compensatory function of fantasy. Even where soldiers and officers became<br />

part of the narrative, and then primarily in romantic situations, gender continued<br />

to provide the main binary structure in films with a contemporary<br />

setting. It might be argued that, during the war years, the propagandistic<br />

films with their ethnic conflicts, national crises, and military battles—and,<br />

of course, the kind of strong women found in Heimkehr (Homecoming,<br />

1941) and Kolberg (1945)—assumed a much more important function in the<br />

rearticulation of the present and its gendered divides, namely as phantasmagoric<br />

constructions of the future in the past. Yet this temporary displacement<br />

does not fully account for the ways in which the representation of<br />

modern working women participated in the affirmation of cinema’s illusionist<br />

tendencies. Here the stories and images that were connected to, and<br />

removed from, the actual working conditions bring into relief the symptomatic<br />

function of modern femininity in offering imaginary solutions to private<br />

and public conflicts.<br />

Within these constraints, a surprisingly large number of comedies and<br />

dramas with a contemporary setting focused on single and married women<br />

in the workplace and showed the typical problems of the modern career<br />

woman. Even after 1933, unmarried women were primarily defined through<br />

their professional status, whether in the glamorous world of the theater<br />

and variety or in decidedly unglamorous white-collar jobs like secretary<br />

and salesgirl. Women in responsible positions and with demanding tasks<br />

appeared in rustic comedies where they inspired a crude but loving folk<br />

humor.<br />

It was only after 1939 that the question of professional ambition became<br />

a subject matter in its own right. The often didactic treatments established<br />

a framework for translating the contradictions between the oppressive ideology<br />

of gender and sexuality and the new social and economic realities into<br />

192 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


the private rituals of identification, emulation, and imitation. It would be<br />

fairly easy to link the growing appreciation of female skill and competence<br />

to the demands of a war economy dependent on women entering all fields<br />

of employment, including the industrial, managerial, and academic jobs<br />

previously reserved for men. 4 It would be equally logical to explain the popular<br />

appeal of these images of female strength through the changed composition<br />

of an audience divided along gender lines and brought into the<br />

motion-picture theater by the growing problems on the home front.<br />

However, the ideological adjustments necessitated by the war economy<br />

cannot fully account for the intense atmosphere of hostility and resentment<br />

in many of these films. At first glance, the contradictions in the narrative<br />

and visual presentation of working women seem to parallel the gendered<br />

divisions in classical narrative cinema, beginning with the privileging of a<br />

male point of view. Yet the breakdowns and inconsistencies also make clear<br />

that the conditions of war brought the narrative conventions and patterns<br />

of identification to the breaking point. In the absence of any aesthetic solutions—for<br />

instance, in the form of realist styles—the growing divergence<br />

among female images, female audiences, and female spectatorship had to be<br />

articulated on two different levels. The first level involved the conventional<br />

means of character development that, through recognition and imitation,<br />

allowed for a positive identification with the figure of the working woman—<br />

namely, on the most basic level, as a role model. By contrast, the second level<br />

gave expression to the more problematic investments around the woman<br />

as an object of desire constructed for the male gaze, and therefore available<br />

to female desire only through the equally problematic choices of selfobjectification<br />

and cross-gender identification.<br />

Thus defined by the conventional dynamics of image and gaze, the filmic<br />

representations of the working woman partook of the negative investments<br />

that made femininity the center of great anxieties and ambiguities, especially<br />

for the female spectator who had no choice but to adopt the male<br />

point of view. This “identification with the active masculine gaze and with<br />

the passive feminine image,” 5 to cite Teresa de Lauretis, gave rise to the prevailing<br />

images of working women before and during the war years. Yet the<br />

changed dynamics after 1939 between a popular genre cinema and a large<br />

female audience also created unwanted effects that challenged or modified<br />

established patterns of identification. Despite their conventional forms and<br />

affirmative functions, many of the wartime films provided images and identifications<br />

with highly contradictory meanings, including those I consider in<br />

A Question of Representation 193


the following thematic overview and the closer analysis of two films in the<br />

chapter’s third part.<br />

II.<br />

During the prewar years, the urban, cosmopolitan, and liberal white-collar<br />

mentality of the late Weimar years continued to dominate gendered representations.<br />

Even the phenomenon of the New Woman remained influential,<br />

despite a growing preference for the “good comrade–type” over the androgynous<br />

garçonne and the seductive flapper. Two subgenres of the romantic<br />

comedy proceeded to address the question of female work and employment,<br />

with one focusing on the struggle for economic survival by young<br />

women from the working class and the other concentrating on employees<br />

with personal and professional ambitions. Elements of social realism survived<br />

in Depression comedies like Das häßliche Mädchen (The Ugly Girl,<br />

1933) and Der Page vom Dalmasse-Hotel (The Page from the Dalmasse-<br />

Hotel, 1933), both with the charming Dolly Haas. But increasingly, fairytale<br />

elements invaded the treatment of more serious problems like female<br />

unemployment and sexual discrimination.<br />

This is most evident in several romantic comedies that, on the surface,<br />

cultivated the image of the New Woman, including her affinity for modern<br />

technology, but abandoned the more critical impulses for regressive fantasies<br />

about being saved, quite literally, by a prince. Käthe von Nagy as a car<br />

saleswoman in Einmal eine große Dame sein (To Be a Real Lady Once, 1933),<br />

Renate Müller as a driving instructor in Die englische Heirat (The English<br />

Marriage, 1934), and Jenny Jugo as a Lufthansa stewardess in Die große<br />

und die kleine Liebe (The Great and the Little Love, 1938) still behave like<br />

emancipated modern women. Yet for them, automobiles and airplanes no<br />

longer function as symbols of individual freedom through movement and<br />

mobility. Instead these means of transportation allow the female leads to escape<br />

from the pressures of contemporary life into the luxurious, privileged<br />

world of the old aristocracy. The markers of class, which during the 1920s<br />

connected the individual fates of similar young women to their petit bourgeois<br />

or proletarian backgrounds, disappeared entirely from view.<br />

The inevitable discrepancies between the private choices made in the<br />

confines of genre cinema and the collective solutions advocated as part<br />

of the larger propaganda effort became glaringly apparent in a “Strengththrough-Joy”<br />

film like Ich für dich und du für mich (I for You and You for<br />

Me, 1934). Yet this female version of the early movement film—ill-adjusted,<br />

194 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


discontented city girls are turned into well-adjusted, healthy German<br />

women after a stint in the Reich Labor Service—remained the exception in<br />

a popular cinema more than ever committed to containing the disruptions<br />

of femininity within the private sphere and the world of interiority. This<br />

momentous shift from social to psychological explanations obscured the<br />

connection, still acknowledged in the Depression comedies, between female<br />

employment and economic necessity, and from then on films concentrated<br />

only on the personal motives that had always prevailed in the portrayal of<br />

middle-class women with career ambitions. 6<br />

Significantly, the preference for psychological explanations was most<br />

noticeable in a genre that, during the 1920s, had invited more critical approaches<br />

to the dream of class mobility: the many romantic comedies about<br />

salesgirls and secretaries. Beginning with the Renate Müller hit Die Privatsekretärin<br />

(The Private Secretary, 1931), a German-Italian coproduction,<br />

films channeled the young woman’s desire for self-advancement into increasingly<br />

conventional romantic constellations. Ein Mädchen mit Prokura<br />

(A Young Woman with Power of Attorney, 1934), based on the popular novel<br />

by Christa Anita Brück, and the later Mädchen im Vorzimmer (The Girl<br />

at the Reception, 1940), directed by the respected Gerhard Lamprecht, still<br />

acknowledged the competence of female secretaries and accountants by<br />

presenting them in their work environment. However, as Geliebte Welt (Beloved<br />

World, 1942) and many later films show, the women’s accomplishments<br />

are more often than not overshadowed by romantic entanglements<br />

with superiors or colleagues. With the rewards of fame reserved for actresses<br />

and singers and with true recognition attainable only by women artists and<br />

scientists, the majority of working women in these dramas and comedies<br />

must find a much less glamorous compromise between work and love.<br />

At first glance, the comparison to working women in the Hollywood film<br />

reveals strong similarities that extend from the screwball comedies of the<br />

early 1930s to the melodramas of the early 1940s. 7 Such shared characteristics<br />

include the choice of the workplace as a preferred setting for flirts and<br />

romances; the use of professional competition as a source of erotic tension<br />

and sexual rivalry; and the narrative articulation of the conflicting demands<br />

of career, love, marriage, and family life. Yet the spirited repartee found, for<br />

instance, in the famous screwball comedies with Carol Lombard, Miriam<br />

Hopkins, and Myrna Loy also draws attention to the considerable differences<br />

in the pleasures to be gained from this kind of gender trouble. For instance,<br />

in the screwball comedies, language often functions as sexual fore-<br />

A Question of Representation 195


play rather than a didactic device in the preservation of traditional gender<br />

hierarchies. Words are used to provoke and seduce, but never to punish the<br />

prospective sexual partner. By contrast, the mixture of lascivious humor and<br />

blunt aggression in the German versions betrays a deep-seated insecurity<br />

about modern femininity that is only heightened by the systematic avoidance<br />

of real problems such as sexual discrimination or harassment.<br />

This tendency became even more pronounced during the war years,<br />

when the signs of female ambition and success required increasingly elaborate<br />

psychological explanations, preferably in the context of the Protestant<br />

work ethic and its rhetoric of duty and sacrifice. Thus whenever the female<br />

protagonist is driven solely by her narcissistic desire for public recognition,<br />

the requirements for a narrative resolution often involve punitive measures.<br />

In Ich brauche dich (I Need You, 1944), with Willy Birgel and Marianne<br />

Hoppe as the ultimate dual-career couple, their marriage survives only because<br />

the actress-wife gives up her career in the theater for the more famous<br />

conductor-husband. The contrast to an earlier Hollywood comedy of remarriage,<br />

Woman of the Year (1942) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine<br />

Hepburn, is striking, especially in light of the similar references to female<br />

emancipation and equal rights. In the American woman’s film of the early<br />

1940s, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwyck may find themselves<br />

alone at the end but not without some professional accomplishments<br />

or material compensations to call their own. By contrast, the kind of working<br />

women played by a major UFA star like Zarah Leander must renounce<br />

fame and fortune before they can even contemplate personal happiness. A<br />

happy ending becomes possible only after the woman’s willing submission<br />

to the man’s will to power and, by extension, the laws of patriarchy; hence<br />

the great divide that separates the male-female power struggle in a wartime<br />

melodrama like Die große Liebe (The Great Love, 1942) from the close attention<br />

to social processes in the sentimental family romance of Mrs. Miniver<br />

(1942) and the strident realist style of noir classic Mildred Pierce (1945). 8<br />

For all of these reasons, the growing demand for positive images of<br />

working women could only be satisfied within the established framework of<br />

generic conventions, predictable story lines, and familiar stereotypes. An<br />

overview of various genres during the war years reveals two equally problematic<br />

trends, a marked preference for younger and usually single women<br />

and for women in academic and artistic professions. The perspective of<br />

youthful vigor and innocence helped to compensate for any perceived challenges<br />

to male superiority, for instance by turning the ambitious student<br />

196 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


or apprentice into a nonthreatening daughter figure. Likewise, the proliferation<br />

of female characters with university degrees suggests less a more<br />

enlightened attitude toward intellectual women than a further separation<br />

of the problem of female employment from any economic factors and<br />

considerations.<br />

Only the explanatory patterns of social privilege and individual talent, it<br />

seemed, were able to express and contain the provocation caused by strong,<br />

powerful career women. Such compromise formations relied heavily on traditional<br />

middle-class assumptions about socially appropriate partners and<br />

conventional gender roles. The return to the categories of bourgeois individualism<br />

brought a renewed appreciation for the narrative structure of<br />

the bildungsroman, but from a female perspective. Time and again a young<br />

woman makes the difficult but ultimately successful entry into adulthood.<br />

Frequently this process takes place in the heightened terms of a first love or<br />

great love. In all cases, the woman’s insistence on having a professional identity<br />

causes complications that threaten the relationship to the man. Typically,<br />

the male lead and his loyal friends determine the circumstances under<br />

which she can reach personal as well as professional fulfillment. By<br />

contrast, a supporting cast of female colleagues serves to illustrate the pitfalls<br />

of independence and the excesses of emancipation. Confronted with<br />

these choices, the female lead invariably decides in favor of love and marriage<br />

but does so under conditions that allow for at least some acknowledgment<br />

of her personal dilemma.<br />

Within this basic structure, the negotiation of love and work, and, by extension,<br />

of fantasy and reality, encompasses the three main stages in the typical<br />

female biography. The first type of narrative focuses on young unmarried<br />

women who move to the big cities in order to realize their dreams<br />

of individual freedom. Working as apprentices, teachers, and nurses, these<br />

women are from the beginning identified with subordinate or dependent<br />

positions. Through mentors, teachers, and professors, a familial or patriarchal<br />

structure is established in which the female quest for self-realization<br />

can easily be dismissed as a mere developmental stage. References to the<br />

pervasive sexism in male-dominated institutions such as schools and universities<br />

are either avoided altogether or defused through humorous treatments.<br />

At the end of a period of extended adolescence, which often includes<br />

the bonding rituals of female friendship, the privileges of full womanhood<br />

are bestowed on these young women as they enter into a serious love relationship<br />

and accept their future role as a wife and mother.<br />

A Question of Representation 197


The disciplining force behind these exemplary stories of female students<br />

and apprentices can be seen best in Die vier Gesellen (The Four Apprentices,<br />

1938), with the young Ingrid Bergmann. Four students of the applied<br />

arts, who live and work together in a large loft, vow to concentrate only on<br />

their careers and to avoid all romantic entanglements with men. In facing<br />

the typical problems experienced by the modern woman—love, marriage,<br />

and pregnancy—three of the women eventually break their vows of celibacy.<br />

Only the oldest and least attractive among the four rejects the traditional<br />

female choices and decides to dedicate her life to the pursuit of true<br />

art. Praising the film for its measured approach to potentially controversial<br />

subject matter, one reviewer noted that “it does no good when exaggerated<br />

ambition overpowers the natural desires and emotions of young girls,” 9 except<br />

of course in the case of great talent. Only the woman artist whose genius<br />

transcends traditional gender categories remains exempt from such<br />

ordinary concerns. Like Ursula Herking in The Four Apprentices, Brigitte<br />

Horney in Befreite Hände (Liberated Hands, 1939) finds her true calling as<br />

a sculptress under the fatherly guidance of a famous professor of art: two<br />

exceptional cases that confirm the power of convention.<br />

In the more typical story of Renate im Quartett (Renate in the Quartet,<br />

1942), the appointment of a female violist, played by Käthe von Nagy, to an<br />

all-male string quartet causes serious professional conflicts and sexual rivalries<br />

among the three male musicians. With the woman’s dismissal after<br />

the return of the original fourth member, peace and harmony are quickly<br />

restored. She is compensated for such unprofessional treatment by a romantic<br />

involvement with a friend of the musicians. Taking a more conciliatory<br />

approach, Großstadtmelodie (Big City Melody, 1943), with Hilde Krahl, tells<br />

the story of a young woman from a small town who arrives in Berlin to find<br />

work as a press photographer. Again, the combination of work and love<br />

causes problems. Serious disagreements almost end her love affair with a<br />

fellow journalist before their happy reunion at a friend’s wedding. And in<br />

Ein Mann mit Grundsätzen? (A Man with Principles?, 1943) Elfie Mayerhofer<br />

plays a doctoral candidate in chemistry who comes to Hamburg for<br />

research purposes but ends up falling in love with a particularly sexist colleague.<br />

Fortunately, she is beautiful, charming, and intelligent and fulfills all<br />

the requirements for the kind of “real woman” who could persuade this<br />

well-known ladies’ man and declared enemy of female students to make an<br />

exception.<br />

The second type of narrative revolves around single career women in<br />

198 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


their late twenties and early thirties who have found responsible administrative<br />

or managerial positions in large corporations. Unlike the coming-ofage<br />

stories outlined above, these conversion stories feature women who<br />

have given up on love and marriage and become hard and bitter in the process:<br />

prototypes of the castrating female. However, under the guidance of a<br />

loving man, they rediscover their so-called feminine side and find fulfillment<br />

in a traditional love relationship. Thus in Die unmögliche Frau (The<br />

Impossible Woman, 1936), Dorothea Wieck plays the head of an oil company<br />

whose demeanor has earned her the attribution “impossible” among<br />

employees. In the end, a competent engineer saves the company from industrial<br />

sabotage and its female owner from a life without love. In Eine Frau<br />

wie Du (A Woman like You, 1939), Brigitte Horney lives only for her work<br />

as the head of personnel in a large corporation but then falls in love during<br />

an unplanned vacation trip. Sybille Schmitz in Clarissa (1941) is so demanding<br />

and controlling as a bank manager that the other employees refer<br />

to her mockingly as “Her Excellency,” including the one colleague who<br />

eventually wins her heart. Alles für Gloria (Everything for Gloria, 1941) introduces<br />

Italian newcomer Laura Solari as the ambitious chief executive<br />

of a record company who slowly succumbs to the charm of the head of<br />

production.<br />

Addressing similar problems in a more nuanced fashion, the third group<br />

of films concentrates on married women who refuse to give up their careers<br />

but after many problems, including a trial separation, recognize the necessity<br />

for such a gesture of compromise. Here the power struggles frequently<br />

manifest themselves around the question of domesticity, with the woman<br />

preoccupied with her career and the man reduced to doing housework.<br />

Sometimes these conflicts are resolved in favor of earlier commitments to<br />

an important mission or task. In Die Frau am Scheidewege (The Woman at<br />

the Crossroads, 1938) Magda Schneider plays a woman doctor who, after a<br />

failed marriage to a bohemian graphic designer, finds her proper place in<br />

the operating room at the side of an admired older professor. Such positive<br />

portrayals of the woman as an “ideal work mate” remain limited to the medical<br />

profession, where duty and sacrifice regularly triumph over more selfish<br />

needs. Taking advantage of the combative atmosphere in the legal profession,<br />

Zwei glückliche Menschen (Two Happy People, 1943) presents Magda<br />

Schneider and real-life husband Wolf Albach-Retty as two divorce lawyers<br />

whose professional partnership almost destroys their marriage. In Die<br />

schwarze Robe (The Black Robe, 1944), Lotte Koch is cast as an ambitious<br />

A Question of Representation 199


prosecutor who neglects her husband but, after a difficult court case involving<br />

his old girlfriend, finds her way back to him. And to return to the<br />

artistic milieu, Anneliese Uhlig in Solistin Anna Alt (Solo Artist Anna Alt,<br />

1945) gives up her career as a pianist so that her jealous husband can regain<br />

his confidence as a composer.<br />

At first glance, the primary function of these narratives seems to be the<br />

systematic containment of a woman’s ambition at various moments of her<br />

life, with at least some understanding reserved for the young single woman<br />

but more aggressive impulses directed against the married career woman.<br />

Time and again the necessity of some adjustment is demonstrated through<br />

minor female characters who manifest the excesses of sexual emancipation<br />

in their neurotic or hysterical behavior. Whereas the male lead’s unwillingness<br />

to change usually suggests true character, any principled position<br />

by these women only adds to their debased status as figures of scorn<br />

and ridicule.<br />

However, do the experiences of these working women only corroborate<br />

the pervasiveness of sexist attitudes? Do the films offer nothing but cautionary<br />

tales about a female emancipation gone awry, in other words, a warning<br />

about the limits of the acceptable? Or can the narrative structures, performative<br />

styles, and conflicting modes of address also give rise to a more<br />

complicated system of images and identifications that explicitly addresses a<br />

gendered spectator and opens up a space for different female subject positions?<br />

As the two model analyses in the third part will suggest, the overdetermined<br />

function of femininity in wartime cinema often allowed for<br />

more active forms of engagement through the tension between the woman<br />

as subject and object of the gaze in classical narrative cinema and women’s<br />

precarious position as participants in the public debate on female work and<br />

employment. While these possibilities should not be confused with the kind<br />

of subversive effects all too quickly attributed to popular culture, they nonetheless<br />

shed light on the overdetermined role of working women in the<br />

complicated negotiation of ideology, social reality, and the conventions of<br />

genre cinema.<br />

III.<br />

The two romantic comedies to be discussed on the remaining pages contain<br />

a veritable catalogue of typical sexist attitudes and beliefs about working<br />

women. Yet through their different solutions to the problem, they also bear<br />

witness to the considerable pressures on popular cinema to offer stories and<br />

200 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


images more responsive to, if not supportive of, the conditions in a nation<br />

at war. Released in 1939 and 1940, respectively, these films stand for two diametrically<br />

opposed positions, the justification of resentment and animosity<br />

and the insistence on tolerance and understanding. Through these differences,<br />

the films identify the conditions under which any fundamental<br />

change in the public perception of working women would be possible and<br />

desirable.<br />

The denigration of the working woman is taken to an extreme in the<br />

first film to be considered, Frau am Steuer (Woman at the Wheel, 1939). Set<br />

in Budapest, this contemporary “taming of the shrew” story focuses on the<br />

typical problems of a dual-career couple from their courtship and wedding<br />

to their separation and reconciliation. Produced by UFA and directed by<br />

Paul Martin, the 1939 release brought together once more the “dream<br />

couple of the German film,” Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch, before her<br />

second emigration; she left for France without seeing the final cut. Harvey<br />

was in the process of separating from her living companion, Martin, but had<br />

to fulfill her contract obligations to the studio, a fact that might have contributed<br />

both to the director’s unfavorable portrayal of an assertive career<br />

women and the star’s own dissatisfaction with the script and what she later<br />

described as its exclusively male point of view. 10 Notwithstanding the public<br />

campaigns against so-called Doppelverdiener (double earners, i.e., married<br />

women with an income), most reviewers rejected the film’s antagonistic<br />

play with role reversals as exaggerated and unconvincing. According to<br />

rumors, even Hitler found the gender politics of the film “repulsive.” 11<br />

To a large degree, the attacks in the press were aimed at Harvey, whose<br />

status as one of the leading stars of the early 1930s had suffered significantly<br />

after her return from Hollywood in the mid-1930s. Harvey’s screen persona<br />

of the free-spirited and slightly zany ingenue had fit well into Weimar ideals<br />

of androgyny. Yet by the late 1930s, when more shapely, feminine bodies became<br />

fashionable, her facial features were considered unflatteringly sharp,<br />

her voice too shrill, her body too angular, and her movements too controlled.<br />

Harvey’s limited repertoire of exuberance, capriciousness, and<br />

barely repressed nervous excitement may have worked for the “sweetest girl<br />

in the world” but not for a mature woman in her thirties.<br />

Nonetheless, her cruel treatment by a merciless director and cinematographer<br />

cannot solely be attributed to tensions on the set. The hostilities<br />

among the characters also suggest an aggressive desire to expunge this obsolete<br />

image of female autonomy from the national imaginary under condi-<br />

A Question of Representation 201


tions of war. The later Harvey films frequently exploited the faltering myth<br />

for their own misogynist exercises. Here the star system introduced additional<br />

scenarios of punishment acted out on the body of a once-famous actress<br />

who ended up performing the mechanisms of male aggression in unintentionally<br />

revealing ways, beginning with her unflattering presentation<br />

by the camera and the lighting. Thus Antje Ascheid in her work on Harvey<br />

concludes<br />

that the female star performer as a popular icon—regardless of the<br />

subject of her performance—speaks to the incongruity of the Nazis’<br />

philosophical ideal of womanhood and the cultural practices that<br />

informed, but also derived from, contemporary women’s own hermeneutic<br />

self-conceptions. 12<br />

Woman at the Wheel follows two newlyweds, Maria Kelemen and Paul<br />

Banky, as they deal with their marital difficulties because of a fundamental<br />

disagreement over the wife’s continuous employment as the secretary at a<br />

bank. From the beginning, their exchanges on this subject are very confrontational.<br />

It is her unwillingness to adapt to the role of dutiful wife—and<br />

not his unwillingness to consider her personal needs and, later, their shared<br />

economic needs—that is presented as the source of all problems. He cannot<br />

reconcile his vision of married life with the fact that she often has to work<br />

long hours. Despite his assertion that he earns enough money to support<br />

both, she refuses to give up her beloved job. Already the evening of their engagement<br />

ends on a bitter note when she declares, “I am much too modern<br />

for you.”<br />

Once the central conflict over the question of female employment is established,<br />

the film only needs to demonstrate that the wife is a traditional<br />

woman after all and, more generally, that all career women deserve to be<br />

mistreated—because they mistreat themselves, as it were. In a bizarre twist<br />

on contemporary policies concerning the employment of married women,<br />

Paul is fired from his job because he is perceived to be single— one of several<br />

improbabilities that add to the atmosphere of free-floating aggression<br />

in the film. The resultant role reversal, with the man as the increasingly<br />

frustrated house husband and the woman as the busy professional climbing<br />

the corporate ladder, is standard comic repertoire; so are the scenes that<br />

gently mock the rituals of masculinity, from her reading the newspaper at<br />

the dinner table to her night clubbing with the boss under the pretense of<br />

202 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


a business meeting. The husband responds to his wife’s newly found freedom<br />

with barely disguised (castration) anxiety: “I am no longer a real man.<br />

All of my masculinity is only an optical illusion.” Thus in order to regain a<br />

sense of self, he leaves his wife and returns to his mother.<br />

Involved in an intense struggle over definitions of femininity, the character<br />

of Maria Kelemen is bound to act out the detrimental effects of a professional<br />

career on a woman’s so-called feminine qualities. Under the pressures<br />

of the job, she becomes overly rational, assertive, and self-righteous,<br />

often acting with almost compulsive efficiency. While ignoring obvious<br />

causes such as a hostile work environment, the narrative focuses on the<br />

woman’s increasingly hysterical behavior as proof of a deep alienation from<br />

her biological destiny as a wife and mother. At no point does her difficult<br />

situation invite empathetic forms of identification, despite her legitimate<br />

claims to fair treatment. In an angry confrontation with her husband, Maria<br />

explains her reasons for concealing her marital status by citing married<br />

women’s fear of being measured by higher standards than their male colleagues<br />

and still being dismissed at the first opportunity. Significantly, the<br />

only one who at least acknowledges her professional qualifications is her<br />

slightly effeminate boss, whose unsuccessful sexual advances mark him as<br />

deviant or deficient from the outset. By contrast, her husband remains determined<br />

to weaken her confidence and turns for support to the bank president,<br />

a self-declared henpecked husband. As a result, Paul is offered a position<br />

that requires him to work under his estranged wife’s supervision, an<br />

occasion for more demonstrations of emphatic identification with the poor<br />

suffering man.<br />

As a fervent advocate of gender essentialism and what he calls the natural<br />

order of things, the husband categorically refuses to take orders from<br />

a female superior. Using corporate philosophy as a weapon in the fight for<br />

equal rights, the wife insists on their status as employees without sex or sexuality.<br />

Defending the interests of patriarchy (“When someone has to give<br />

orders, it’s the man!”), Paul takes up these challenges and intentionally ignores<br />

Maria’s charms in order to demonstrate that biology is indeed destiny.<br />

Having proven his skills to the bank president, the husband is soon promoted.<br />

As Maria’s new boss, Paul insists on the polite form of address but<br />

continues to flirt shamelessly. At the same time, Maria falls back into the<br />

personal form of address when accusing him of hidden motives—precisely<br />

those that prompt him to dictate to her what appears to be her letter of dismissal.<br />

No longer sustained by the precarious balance between hostile and<br />

A Question of Representation 203


tender impulses that hitherto sustained their antagonistic exchanges, she<br />

breaks down crying, appeals to his compassion, but still has to vacate her<br />

desk in the end. His subsequent confession about the ruse offers insufficient<br />

compensation for her complete humiliation in the earlier scenes. Likewise,<br />

his promise to treat her as an equal partner and colleague remains untested,<br />

since she suddenly announces that she is pregnant and plans to quit her job<br />

anyway.<br />

Two dictation scenes illustrate to what degree patterns of identification<br />

and point of view are enlisted to eliminate the career woman from the workplace<br />

and, even more importantly, to undermine her sense of accomplishment.<br />

The first dictation scene places Maria in a position of barely attained<br />

and hardly sustainable authority. Furious about taking dictation from a<br />

woman, Paul sits on top of her desk, calls her first “my dear child,” then,<br />

mockingly, “Ma’am.” Finally he grabs her in exasperation and asks: “Tell<br />

me: Who are you anyway?” To which she responds: “Your boss, and you<br />

have to obey me.” Yet as Maria makes this defiant declaration, she already<br />

closes her eyes in expectation of a conciliatory kiss. Paul releases her<br />

abruptly and sits down at the typewriter while she, by now in tears, starts<br />

with the dictation. Obviously, the central question—“Who are you anyway?”—can<br />

only be answered through her initiation into traditional femininity.<br />

This process begins with crude sexual advances, including the suggestion<br />

that he would tolerate her lateness if she visited him in his apartment<br />

at night, and it culminates in open threats concerning her continued employment.<br />

Again it is the woman who cracks first under pressure. Receiving<br />

her letter of termination with the president’s signature, Maria declares: “Of<br />

course, you men band together.... If you had only said one kind word . . .”<br />

Under these conditions, the woman’s tearful departure, complete with a<br />

teddy bear clutched to her chest, represents the successful outcome of her<br />

degradation to the little girl who, if the husband’s self-satisfied smirk is any<br />

indication, is now ready to become the ideal wife and mother.<br />

Released only one year later, Unser Fräulein Doktor (Our Miss Ph.D.,<br />

1940), a romantic comedy with Jenny Jugo and Albert Matterstock as two<br />

math teachers at a boys’ high school, takes a very different approach. Here<br />

it is the man who is forced to overcome his sexist attitudes. Like his colleagues<br />

and students, who have already accepted the woman as a productive<br />

member of the community, he must adjust to the growing presence<br />

of upper-level female teachers under conditions (i.e., of shortages) that<br />

obliquely evoke the home front. Not surprisingly, the Erich Engel film re-<br />

204 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


13. Ein Mann mit Grundsätzen? (1943, A Man with Principles?), Courtesy<br />

Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv<br />

ceived high praise for its balanced treatment of a difficult but highly relevant<br />

subject. 13 Much of the success of the film must be attributed to Jenny<br />

Jugo, a comic actress whose perky personality allowed her to be confident<br />

and assertive without appearing overly dominant. Reviewers were particularly<br />

pleased with the conciliatory ending, which preserved the dignity of<br />

the man even after his moral defeat by a woman.<br />

Whereas Woman at the Wheel uses the fear of gender equality to direct<br />

all of its aggressive impulses against the woman, Our Miss Ph.D. exposes<br />

male prejudice from an unmistakably female point of view, which in this<br />

case is also the perspective of reason and common sense. The shot /reverseshot<br />

patterns privilege her experience of antagonistic situations, especially<br />

when she responds to hostile behavior with composure and occasional mild<br />

mockery. Even the struggle over narrative agency is from the outset decided<br />

in the woman’s favor. Whereas she exhibits such traditionally male qualities<br />

as determination, authority, and confidence, he gradually turns into the<br />

caricature of a male chauvinist. For that reason, it is her probing question<br />

that sets the narrative into motion: “Does one have to be old and ugly<br />

to achieve something unique? Of course not. Does one have to be big and<br />

A Question of Representation 205


14. Unser Fräulein Doktor (1940, Our Miss Ph.D.), Courtesy Bundesarchiv-<br />

Filmarchiv<br />

strong as a woman in the humanities to fill the shoes of a man? No one<br />

would argue that!” 14<br />

The key to a critical assessment of Our Miss Ph.D. lies in the woman’s<br />

strong work ethic. Precisely her lack of personal ambitions qualifies her to<br />

function as a positive figure in both the war economy and the economy of<br />

genre cinema. The woman’s desire to give her best, no matter in what field<br />

or on what level, finds expression in the belief that “God has put me into<br />

this world to do my work.” Instead of pursuing middle-class dreams of selffulfillment<br />

or spouting radical ideas about female empowerment, the young<br />

math teacher on one level sounds very much like a spokesperson for some<br />

wartime agency advocating selfless service to the national community. She<br />

is the only woman in an almost exclusively male environment and seems to<br />

have no social contacts or interests outside of work. Her desire to write a<br />

Habilitationsschrift and teach at the university has little to do with scholarly<br />

interests and makes sense only in light of her marital status as a single<br />

woman able to devote all of her time to the education of the nation’s young.<br />

When the film opens, Dr. Elisabeth Hansen works as a fifth-grade<br />

206 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


teacher at a small-town gymnasium. The impact of her singing exercises on<br />

a colleague, the arrogant Dr. Klinger, complicates the gendered hierarchies<br />

when he, literally and figuratively speaking, falls off a pedestal in his classroom.<br />

At the request of the principal, she takes over the math and science<br />

instruction of the graduating seniors six weeks before their final examinations,<br />

much to the dismay of the students and their hospitalized teacher. Indignant<br />

about being replaced by a fifth-grade teacher, Dr. Klinger enlists<br />

willing accomplices in the young men, who vow to teach that “silly goose”<br />

Hansen a lesson. Of course, the teachers’ shared professional commitment<br />

precludes any serious personal rivalries from the outset; what is more, their<br />

deep love and respect for “their boys” bring them even closer together in<br />

the end.<br />

Accordingly, the reeducation of the male colleague begins with, and<br />

through, his students. The fact that her ostensible romantic interest in him<br />

is simply taken for granted, and never really developed, highlights the more<br />

important project of (national) service that made possible the sympathetic<br />

portrayal of a working woman in the first place. However, to achieve such<br />

unusual harmony, the film still needs to contain the disruptive effect of her<br />

femininity, first in relationship to the graduating class and then to her indignant<br />

male colleague. Whereas the fifth-grade students are introduced as<br />

living proof of the civilizing effect of female teachers on young boys, the initial<br />

reactions by the adolescents seem to confirm every argument against<br />

women in an all-male environment. Yet confronted with the typical pranks<br />

and jokes, Dr. Hansen quickly asserts her authority in the classroom and<br />

convinces the students of her academic qualifications. She seeks out outsiders<br />

as allies (e.g., the sensitive poet) and gently mocks the ringleaders in<br />

the conspiracy against her (e.g., the valedictorian). Abandoning their initial<br />

plan “to reject her because she is a woman,” the seniors one after the other<br />

succumb to what one of them calls “her female aroma.” Even when confronted<br />

with such pubescent infatuation, Dr. Hansen steadfastly promotes<br />

her program of male-female camaraderie until they all accept her as “comrade<br />

Elisabeth”— of course, with the expectation that she enters into a surrogate<br />

love relationship with one man: their original math teacher.<br />

Our Miss Ph.D. is structured around several romantic triangles that<br />

contribute equally to the portrayal of the working woman. As a teacher,<br />

Dr. Hansen divides her attention between the boys from the fifth grade, to<br />

whom she represents a mother figure, and the young men from the thirteenth<br />

grade, for whom she serves as a projection screen for their awaken-<br />

A Question of Representation 207


ing sexuality. As a woman, Elisabeth stands between the friendly but simpleminded<br />

P.E. teacher, whose calisthenic exercises in front of her classroom<br />

window offer a humorous commentary on the man as an object of the female<br />

gaze, and the unfriendly but intelligent math teacher, who confesses<br />

his growing infatuation only at the prompting of his students. The controversy<br />

over women in the workplace finds expression in several confrontations<br />

between the old and new teacher over the most appropriate method<br />

of instruction. Upset about her good rapport with the students, Dr. Klinger<br />

declares at one point that “mathematics seem particularly ill-suited to spark<br />

sexual desire in a graduating senior,” despite the fact that his own teaching<br />

method relies on the same unacknowledged erotic quality inherent in pedagogy.<br />

Naturally, she finds it amusing to be portrayed as what she mockingly<br />

describes as “a vampire in the guise of a female math teacher.”<br />

A satisfying resolution of these personal and professional conflicts is<br />

achieved in a two-step process, namely, Dr. Klinger’s recognition of Dr. Hansen’s<br />

skills as a teacher and his discovery of her charms as a woman. On the<br />

occasion of the end-of-school trip, the younger and the older boys arrange<br />

a coincidental meeting of both groups during a sleepover in an abandoned<br />

barn. In accordance with the most hackneyed gender clichés, the sight of<br />

a mouse brings out her weak feminine side and his strong masculine side.<br />

“Usually I don’t love the women who impress me,” he confesses and proceeds<br />

with a declaration of love. The next morning, a cowboys-and-Indians<br />

game finds the woman gagged and tied to a tree and the man lecturing her<br />

about the virtues of marriage. As the closing sequence in the university lecture<br />

hall suggests, she will marry him but not give up her plans for an academic<br />

career. Obviously he still has a lot to learn, and she is more than willing<br />

to teach him, a hopeful ending that offers some positive identifications,<br />

albeit only in the context of a romantic solution to male prejudice.<br />

As I have tried to show in this chapter, the representation of working<br />

women in wartime cinema involved more than a reflection of social reality<br />

or an illustration of sexist ideology. That is why the filmic images need to be<br />

examined through the contradictory emotional effects that extend from the<br />

negotiation of power between the sexes, including the fantasies of (self-)punishment,<br />

to the search for new models of gender equality and malefemale<br />

companionship. For the same reasons, the cautionary tales about female<br />

ambition cannot be dismissed as mere instruments of self-oppression<br />

or self-deception. Through the underlying dynamics between female images<br />

and identifications, the films about working women amounted to much<br />

208 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


more than a training ground for new social and sexual role models, a concession<br />

to female audiences, or a repository site for squelched hopes for female<br />

emancipation. Above all, these wartime productions facilitated a fictional<br />

dialogue between antagonistic positions and ambivalent attitudes,<br />

and did so across the entire range of filmic means: dialogue, actions, looks,<br />

and, most importantly, the gendered identifications and spectatorial pleasures<br />

available within classical narrative. Precisely this volatile mixture of<br />

resentment, aggression, guilt, jealousy, and rivalry, but also of new attitudes<br />

and ambitions, makes the wartime comedies and dramas discussed in this<br />

chapter highly relevant for a better understanding of popular cinema and<br />

its gendered divisions.<br />

A Question of Representation 209


11<br />

THE LEGACIES OF THE<br />

PAST IN THE <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

OF POSTWAR<br />

RECONSTRUCTION<br />

I.<br />

What remains?—this question resonating throughout twentieth-century<br />

German history—can also be asked about the cinema of the Third Reich<br />

and its place in German film history. Just as the year 1933 continues to function<br />

as an imaginary divide that, among other things, helps to safeguard the<br />

formal innovation and social critique of Weimar cinema against the oppressive<br />

conventionality of most 1930s genre films, so the year 1945 has<br />

played a key role in the emergence of postwar cinema and its own fantasy<br />

of a so-called Zero Hour.<br />

Only recently have scholars begun to examine the rebuilding of the West


German film industry through the different perspectives of the Allied occupation<br />

forces, the Hollywood majors, and various other cultural and political<br />

groups. New studies have focused on the complicated relationship between<br />

the postwar cinema of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and<br />

the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and considered their respective<br />

artistic, cultural, social, and economic developments in relation to the<br />

global culture industry and the politicized atmosphere of the Cold War. 1<br />

While most of these studies acknowledge the strong continuities in filmic<br />

styles, including in the postwar films about the Third Reich and World War<br />

II, little attention has been paid to the cinema’s desire for coming to terms<br />

with its own past.<br />

Focusing almost exclusively on the political and military elites, most<br />

postwar films about the Third Reich ignored or neglected the contribution<br />

of culture, both high and low, to the organization of an everyday life defined<br />

by an overly strong division between public and private spheres and<br />

an equally rigid distinction between official rhetoric and actual practices. 2<br />

Filmmakers rarely thematized cinema’s pivotal role in contributing to a culture<br />

of flawed compromises and divided allegiances. Sustained by these divisions,<br />

the filmic legacies of the Third Reich continued to haunt the postwar<br />

cinema in the form of generic, formal, and stylistic traditions. These<br />

continuities found a privileged expression in the self-referential casting of<br />

many stars from the 1930s and early 1940s in the feature films made after<br />

1945. In fact, the role of the star system was thematized by two extraordinary<br />

films, one from the DEFA studio, about the career of two famous film<br />

stars during the Third Reich. This kind of self-referentiality has escaped<br />

critical attention because of the prevailing focus in German film studies on<br />

thematic analysis and the preoccupation of much scholarship on films about<br />

the Third Reich with the grand narratives of power, oppression, and resistance.<br />

Here closer attention to the self-representation of German cinema<br />

as a star-based cinema—and, hence, a popular cinema sustained by longestablished<br />

tastes and mentalities— offers a necessary corrective, not least<br />

in relation to the overdetermined function of the Third Reich in presentday<br />

definitions of German national identity and popular culture.<br />

Since the earliest days of cinema, films about filmmaking have functioned<br />

as a form of product advertisement and cultural legitimization, but<br />

they have also served as a vehicle for self-reflection. Films about the lives of<br />

famous stars and about stars as icons of cinema have allowed directors to<br />

reflect on the cinema’s own cycles of rise and decline in relation to techno-<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 211


logical innovations, artistic movements, political events, and social developments.<br />

In particular, the casting of aging stars in the role of aging stars<br />

(e.g., Emil Jannings in The Last Command, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard)<br />

has provided an effective way of confronting the cinema’s institutional<br />

and ideological crises through its own “heavenly bodies” (Richard<br />

Dyer). Equally or even more widespread has been the elevation of certain<br />

stars to symbols of a particular period, genre, or style (e.g., Asta Nielsen as<br />

an icon of the art of silent film, Charlie Chaplin’s identification with slapstick<br />

comedy) and the enlistment of such intertextual references in critical<br />

reflections on one’s own filmic practices. 3 The stars of the Third Reich are<br />

no exception here, as can be gleaned even from a superficial look at their<br />

film roles, public appearances, and journalistic treatments in the illustrated<br />

press after 1945.<br />

The initial process of de-Nazification and the early debates about film<br />

artists with a compromising past are essential to the functioning of the star<br />

discourse in the postwar period. During the first years, only a few actors<br />

were temporarily prohibited from appearing on the stage or screen, including<br />

those who, like Gustaf Gründgens and Zarah Leander, had performed<br />

official functions or appeared in propaganda vehicles. Because of his close<br />

association in the propaganda effort during the war, Heinrich George had<br />

been interned in Sachsenhausen, where he died in 1946. Yet soon afterwards,<br />

most actors from the 1930s and early 1940s gradually returned to the<br />

screen. From then on identified with “the golden era of UFA,” they contributed<br />

to the acts of forgetting that made possible the collective amnesia of<br />

the postwar period. Thus in the prevailing accounts, their work in the dream<br />

factory became an allegory of life under National Socialism. As powerless<br />

employees of the studios, the general argument went, actors could not be<br />

held responsible for cases of political infiltration and manipulation. Ostensibly<br />

the high degree of specialization prevented them from understanding<br />

the propagandistic function of the films in which they were ordered to<br />

appear. Bernhard Minetti’s description of his involvement with the anti-<br />

Semitic Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds, 1940) is very revealing and, with<br />

its apologetic tone, rather typical of the profession as a whole: “Of course,<br />

the film had a tendency, but I hadn’t read the whole book. I played Fouché,<br />

who had financial dealings with the Rothschilds; it was the work of a day.” 4<br />

Thus released from the pressures of accountability, actors played a key<br />

role in the imaginary encounter between pre- and postwar filmic traditions.<br />

As this final chapter will argue, the historical continuities and discontinui-<br />

212 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ties resonated in the means of character development, dramatic performance,<br />

and, of course, the star phenomenon itself. Examining these processes,<br />

my discussion begins with two films about the tragic fate of two stars<br />

in the coordinated film industry after 1933, Joachim Gottschalk in the case<br />

of the DEFA production Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadow, 1947)<br />

and Renate Müller in the case of the CCC production Liebling der Götter<br />

(Darling of the Gods, 1960). Moving from representations to representatives,<br />

I conclude by examining the postwar careers of two famous UFA stars, Hans<br />

Albers and Willy Birgel, for their contribution to the available strategies of<br />

repression and denial within the star system.<br />

The films about Gottschalk and Müller and the casting of Albers and<br />

Birgel indicate to what degree the cinematic past remained a ubiquitous reference<br />

point for postwar culture in East and West Germany. The narrativization<br />

of filmmaking during the Third Reich and the transformation of particular<br />

stars into icons of German cinema contributed to the rebuilding of<br />

postwar film culture in constructive as well as destructive ways. Positioned<br />

at the abyss that divides the past from the present and invested equally in<br />

the myths of national cinema and the rewriting of its history, the two films<br />

to be discussed are ideally suited to articulate some of the complexities of<br />

postwar cinema, including the audience’s desire to forget as well as preserve<br />

and the psychological needs of a society haunted by what has been called<br />

“the inability to mourn.” 5<br />

II.<br />

Beginning with the East German contribution means beginning with the<br />

diagnosis of a lack, an absence. One of the most puzzling features of Marriage<br />

in the Shadow is how much the main character’s film career is played<br />

down, if not ignored, despite the closing dedication to the actor and his family<br />

and “all those who died innocently.” On 7 November 1941, Joachim<br />

Gottschalk had committed suicide together with his Jewish wife Meta and<br />

son Michael, one night before their scheduled deportation to Theresienstadt.<br />

“A humanly regrettable but objectively unavoidable case,” wrote the<br />

cynical Goebbels in his diary. 6 Earlier requests by Gottschalk to accompany<br />

his wife and son had been denied. His death, which was not reported in the<br />

press, shocked the film community, forcing them to reflect on their own<br />

compromises with the regime. Surprisingly, Hans Schweikart, on whose<br />

novel the script was based, chose not to use the working conditions in a<br />

state-controlled industry as the key dramatic conflict. Instead he wrote a<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 213


screenplay about the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism. With a distinguished<br />

career of his own as a director and producer at the Bavaria studios in the<br />

late 1930s, Schweikart may have wanted to play down his personal knowledge<br />

of, and involvement in, the film community. Perhaps the indifference<br />

to Gottschalk’s work in the “dream factory” reflected a widespread suspicion<br />

of, and disdain for, the star phenomenon, a fact that obviously contributed<br />

to DEFA’s unwillingness to employ old UFA stars. 7 Last but not least,<br />

any sustained reflection on the relationship between film and politics might<br />

have been too close to then-contemporary debates about the future of filmmaking<br />

under “real-existing socialism.”<br />

Whatever the case, director Kurt Maetzig chose the tragic fate of Gottschalk<br />

to show the destructive impact of political oppression and racial discrimination<br />

on personal relationships. In so doing, he took advantage of a<br />

long tradition in the cinema of addressing questions of artistic integrity and<br />

public responsibility through an actor’s individual biography. Rejecting the<br />

prevailing patterns of explanation and, ultimately, exculpation, Maetzig has<br />

said about the main characters that they “were not only victims, they were<br />

also responsible for their victimization. This connection creates the dramatic<br />

tension that elevates the material to a classical tragedy.” 8 As one of<br />

the first directors working for DEFA, Maetzig examined everyday life in the<br />

Third Reich from the perspective of anti-Semitism and used the tragic fate<br />

of a German-Jewish couple to develop—ex negativo—a model of public<br />

morality and political agency for the new socialist society. Following the example<br />

of Marriage in the Shadow, other DEFA films offered further reflections<br />

on the contribution of anti-Semitism to the rise of fascism during the<br />

Weimar Republic, including Affäre Blum (The Blum Affair, 1948) by Erich<br />

Engel and Professor Mamlock (1961) by Konrad Wolf.<br />

Notwithstanding the film’s phenomenal success, with more than twelve<br />

million tickets sold, it remained a compromise in aesthetic terms. On the<br />

one hand, the heavy reliance on melodramatic conventions (e.g., in the extensive<br />

use of close-ups) reveals the continuing influence of the UFA style,<br />

including in the makeup of the crew. 9 On the other hand, the director incorporates<br />

many expressionist devices and motifs (e.g., chiaroscuro lighting)<br />

and relies heavily on the spatial conventions of the chamberplay film (e.g.,<br />

in the symbolic use of mise-en-scène). The narrative structure is organized<br />

around moral categories informed by the philosophy of socialist humanism.<br />

At the same time, the psychological approach and the emphasis on interi-<br />

214 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ority confirm the values of bourgeois individualism, a point acknowledged<br />

by Maetzig in later self-critical remarks on the film’s shortcomings.<br />

Against the backdrop of such disparate filmic traditions and political debates,<br />

what precisely is the function of the actor Joachim Gottschalk in this<br />

early DEFA film? Gottschalk, “a sort of German Fredric March,” 10 to cite<br />

an American journalist living in Berlin during the 1930s, began his film career<br />

after several years as a stage actor in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main. 11<br />

As the partner of Brigitte Horney in Du und ich (You and Me, 1938), Eine<br />

Frau wie Du (A Woman like You, 1939), and Schweikart’s own Das Mädchen<br />

von Fanö (The Girl from Fanö, 1940), Gottschalk quickly acquired a large<br />

female following. With his sympathetic looks and masculine reserve, he<br />

most resembled Paul Klinger, who, after Gottschalk’s first serious clashes<br />

with the Propaganda Ministry, replaced him as the male lead in the Harlan<br />

film Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942) and who was chosen to play<br />

Gottschalk in the DEFA production. Several tense moments in the Maetzig<br />

film at the Deutsche Theater and the Propaganda Ministry suggest that<br />

Gottschalk worked with a special dispensation, the so-called Sonderauftrittserlaubnis,<br />

granted to famous actors (and other artists) with Jewish spouses.<br />

Establishing the professional milieu, a brief scene shows the actor on the set<br />

of his last film, Die schwedische Nachtigall (The Swedish Nightingale, 1941);<br />

the Greta Koch character is modeled on costar Horney. Finally, the gala<br />

premiere of what probably is You and Me (called Melody in the film), but<br />

should have been The Swedish Nightingale, provides the setting for the fateful<br />

encounter between Gottschalk’s wife and a high-ranking party member<br />

that contributes to the couple’s increased harassment by the secret police<br />

and their complete isolation from society. 12<br />

Several elements of the Gottschalk biography were changed to foreground<br />

the experiences of anti-Semitic discrimination. The real Meta Wolff<br />

and Joachim Gottschalk were married as early as 1930 and had a son by<br />

1933. In the film, the characters get married after the Nazi rise to power and<br />

remain childless. Hans Wieland, whose character is modeled on Gottschalk,<br />

falls in love with Elisabeth Maurer during a production of Schiller’s Kabale<br />

und Liebe. However, the famous actress has eyes only for their friend Herbert,<br />

a fanatical Nazi party member with political ambitions. The rise of<br />

anti-Semitism fundamentally changes the internal dynamics of this love triangle.<br />

The group’s return from a vacation trip to Hiddensee coincides with<br />

the burning of the Reichstag in February of 1933. Under political pressure,<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 215


the theater director cancels a Zuckmayer play and informs the Jewish actress<br />

of her dismissal. Concerned about Elisabeth’s safety, but also taking the<br />

opportunity to eliminate his rival, Hans proposes marriage. Betraying his<br />

true motives, he simply announces to her that they will get married because<br />

“we love each other.”<br />

After the passing of the Nuremberg Laws, Elisabeth’s confinement to the<br />

apartment puts a growing strain on the relationship. She feels guilty because<br />

he presumably married her only out of obligation, and he becomes resentful<br />

because she allegedly never really loved him. Adding to these complications,<br />

the Night of Broken Glass in 1938 coincides with a passionate<br />

encounter at a society affair between the Gottschalk and the Horney characters.<br />

When the actor returns home to his wife, she declares that she wants<br />

to leave Germany (and, of course, the marriage), but he responds: “You are<br />

my entire life. I need you.” By 1943, we find Elisabeth clearing the streets<br />

of glass after the Allied bombings and working night shifts at the Siemens<br />

machine factory. Hans recovers in a field hospital from typhoid but returns<br />

to resume his career after encouraging signs from the Ministry. Yet these<br />

plans never materialize after further revelations about the couple’s continued<br />

association with Jewish friends and relatives. As one of the supporting<br />

characters in the film notes: “Politics is destiny.” The forces that bring the<br />

two together as a couple also destroy them in the end. 13 With these implications,<br />

the suicide by Hans and Elisabeth must be understood both as an<br />

act of defiance and a demonstration of their love.<br />

With anti-Semitism functioning as a kind of focusing device, the Gottschalk<br />

character also motivates more general observations on the Nazi<br />

culture industry and, indirectly, on filmmaking in the new socialist state.<br />

The theatrical milieu offers a convenient setting for rehearsing the main<br />

arguments. These range from self-satisfied declarations by the cultured<br />

Dr. Blohm about the centrality of the arts for the new regime to fanatical<br />

calls by activist Nazi colleagues for a purification of German culture. Only<br />

interested in his career, Hans Wieland ignores the social responsibilities of<br />

the artist and later blames himself for not taking a more committed stance.<br />

Throughout, his personal experiences serve to illustrate the standard accusations<br />

leveled at successful artists working in the Third Reich. Yet the underlying<br />

diagnosis of careerism and opportunism also feeds into concurrent<br />

debates about socially relevant art and politically committed artists. At one<br />

point in the film, the Gottschalk character talks openly about having no<br />

connection to everyday life. This sense of social isolation, he declares, makes<br />

216 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


his work as an actor increasingly meaningless. The socialist critique of a<br />

popular cinema committed only to illusionist effects could not be more explicit;<br />

to quote the character:<br />

The task of the actor is to represent life as it really is. Yet what do I<br />

do? I have to represent a life that no longer exists. I seek refuge in<br />

illusions, in memories . . . but everything is so tainted. Then the success<br />

I am having: it’s so hollow, so . . . I confront the audience with<br />

an obvious lie and they applaud. 14<br />

Whereas Marriage in the Shadow offers a critical reflection on the personal<br />

and the political, Darling of the Gods displaces the same problematic<br />

into purely melodramatic terms. The film uses the fictionalized biography<br />

of Renate Müller from 1931, the year of her screen debut, to 1937, the year<br />

of her death, to create an allegory of “the life and death of a great artist in<br />

oppressive times,” to quote the opening credits. Appearing primarily in romantic<br />

and musical comedies, Müller had been closely identified with the<br />

figure of the so-called New Woman since her first appearance opposite Emil<br />

Jannings as a very different Liebling der Götter (Darling of the Gods, 1930).<br />

She played attractive, energetic, independent, and fun-loving young women<br />

who lived and worked in the big cities and exhibited a healthy pragmatism,<br />

including in their dealings with men. After her first box-office hit Die Privatsekretärin<br />

(The Private Secretary, 1931), which Paul Martin remade in<br />

1953 with Sonja Ziemann in the title role, Müller became the idol of countless<br />

female employees who flocked to the movies to see their own struggles<br />

depicted in these contemporary stories of female aspiration. Under the direction<br />

of Reinhold Schünzel, Müller perfected her comic skills in Viktor<br />

und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria, 1933) and Die englische Heirat (The English<br />

Marriage, 1934). Always maintaining a sense of ironic detachment, she<br />

proved equally convincing in the historical costumes of Ludwig Berger’s<br />

Walzerkrieg (Waltz Wars, 1933) and the contemporary mise-en-scène of the<br />

Willi Forst comedy Allotria (Tomfoolery, 1936). Health problems—some<br />

sources refer to epilepsy, others to drug abuse—forced Müller to limit her<br />

screen appearances and, eventually, to stop filming altogether. Her premature<br />

death on 7 October 1937 at the age of thirty-one understandably triggered<br />

some speculation about the exact circumstances of her death. 15<br />

However, what was the relevance of her story for audiences in 1960?<br />

Undoubtedly, Artur Brauner, whose production company CCC played a key<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 217


ole in the rebuilding of the German film industry, and director Gottfried<br />

Reinhardt, the son of Max Reinhardt and one of the most active Hollywood<br />

exiles, had a personal interest in the subject matter. Not only were both men<br />

Jewish, which would explain their decision to expand rumors about Müller’s<br />

private life into a tragic love story between the famous actress and a Prussian<br />

minister of state, the Jewish Dr. Hans Simon, played by Peter van Eyck,<br />

but apparently Brauner and Reinhardt also used the behind-the-scenes recreation<br />

of the film world to reflect on their own precarious position in the<br />

German film industry after the war.<br />

Here the casting of Ruth Leuwerik as Renate Müller created additional<br />

meanings, with the popular appeal of Müller translated into that of Leuwerik<br />

and with their considerable differences a telling commentary on the<br />

changing face of modern femininity. Accordingly, the high-spirited style of<br />

Müller was tempered by Leuwerik’s warmer, less confrontational humor.<br />

The physical agility of the famous 1930s screwball comedienne gave way to<br />

the calm disposition of one of the most beloved actresses from the 1950s. Although<br />

Leuwerik received a Bambi, the German equivalent of the Oscar, for<br />

her portrayal of Müller, the film was only moderately successful at the box<br />

office. Anticipating problems, motion-picture theater owners expressed<br />

concern over younger audiences’ lack of interest in the fate of an old UFA<br />

star, and over older audiences’ discomfort with the material, as suggested by<br />

their oblique references to feelings of “guilt” and “shame.” 16 In addition,<br />

the waning popularity of Leuwerik at the brink of the 1960s, a period that<br />

brought female emancipation and the sexual revolution, may have weakened<br />

the contemporary relevance of Müller’s problems as a working woman.<br />

The story of Darling of the Gods unfolds through the three competing<br />

forces in Müller’s life: love, work, and politics. Repeatedly, turning points in<br />

her career correspond with political events and contribute to her increasing<br />

sense of alienation from the industry. Scenes from the 1931 gala premiere<br />

of The Private Secretary at the Marmorhaus in Berlin are followed by<br />

threatening images of SA men at the train station. Her work on the set of<br />

Wenn die Liebe Mode macht (When Love Makes Fashion, 1932) is interrupted<br />

by news about Hindenburg’s rejection of Hitler as a valid political<br />

candidate. During location shooting for Saison in Kairo (Season in Cairo,<br />

1933), the film team learns about Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor.<br />

The power of the Propaganda Ministry is shown in several studio scenes<br />

about the pernicious effect of individual compliance, acquiescence, and res-<br />

218 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


ignation on professional relationships. Surprisingly, the film misses the opportunity<br />

to combine Müller’s clandestine trips to London with on-location<br />

shooting for The English Marriage.<br />

Announcing her inevitable downfall, the last day on the set of a costume<br />

drama, probably Lieselotte von der Pfalz (1935), ends with an open confrontation<br />

with the production head when the actress rejects a new script<br />

because it has “too little humor and too much ideology.” Once Goebbels<br />

finds out about her secret trysts abroad, Müller is ordered to appear in<br />

openly propagandistic films and to sign a declaration of loyalty to the regime.<br />

Soon she is no longer able to protect her personal life from her professional<br />

obligations. Addicted to sleeping pills and barely functional, she<br />

makes one last appearance during the production of Togger (1937) when<br />

news arrives about the German invasion of the Rhineland. After a mental<br />

breakdown, she is admitted to a sanitarium, where she jumps out of a window<br />

in what may be described as a final moment of delusion and clarity.<br />

Müller’s changing reasons for continuing to work in the industry are<br />

crucial for the self-thematization of cinema in Darling of the Gods. From the<br />

beginning, the decisions of the ambitious career woman are presented as the<br />

source of all problems. Justifying her decision not to stay with Simon in<br />

London, she refers to a sense of obligation toward her colleagues and a feeling<br />

of solidarity with less privileged countrymen. Like her earlier plans<br />

about earning more money to start a new life with her Jewish lover in Switzerland,<br />

these arguments sound unconvincing in the context of their relationship,<br />

and they fail entirely to address questions of individual guilt. In<br />

the first years of their affair, the actress and the minister still act as social<br />

and economic equals, with the gendered divisions between (male) power<br />

and (female) beauty offering some protection against outside interference,<br />

including threatening anonymous phone calls. Once Simon is forced to go<br />

underground, this power dynamic changes radically. When she helps him<br />

to escape to Czechoslovakia, there is a brief moment of suspense when a<br />

border guard inspects their passports but then asks only for her autograph.<br />

During her brief stays in London, Müller begins to exhibit typical male<br />

qualities, including sexual assertiveness and a proclivity for heavy drinking,<br />

whereas Simon complains about his desolate situation in England that, in a<br />

way, places him in the position of the castrated male. Highly self-critical<br />

about his lack of political foresight in assessing the Nazi threat, he fails to<br />

apply the same kind of thinking to their troubled relationship and insists on<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 219


the privileges of traditional masculinity. Along similar lines, Müller resorts<br />

to the empty rhetoric of female sacrifice in order to justify her continuous<br />

work in the state-controlled film industry.<br />

The centrality of gender trouble in this fictionalized star biography<br />

should not surprise anyone familiar with postwar culture and its heavy investment<br />

in traditional notions of femininity. Significantly, the denunciation<br />

of the ambitious career woman who jeopardizes personal happiness<br />

in exchange for fame and fortune confirms one of the recurring themes of<br />

postwar culture—the need for a clear separation between private and public<br />

life and an equally clear distinction between art and politics. Here the<br />

characterization of Müller in the eulogy “as a model of new German womanhood,”<br />

a “fighter for the creation of a National Socialist film art” who died<br />

in “fulfillment of her duty,” describes precisely the role that, her emancipated<br />

behavior notwithstanding, she ended up playing within the industry’s<br />

system of financial rewards, social privileges, and thinly veiled threats.<br />

Instead of using this process for a critique of popular cinema and its political<br />

functions, Darling of the Gods confirms the public-private divide by<br />

validating the quest for romantic love and condemning the excesses of female<br />

ambition. In the end, the woman’s failed attempt to “have it all” leaves<br />

her only with unanswered questions such as the standard “How did all of<br />

this happen?” Her explanation, “It looks easier from the outside than it is.<br />

I do not put up resistance either, and millions behave exactly as I do,” not<br />

only projects her personal compromises onto the entire nation but also acknowledges<br />

her professional ambition as a contributing factor in the erosion<br />

of public life and its gendered divisions.<br />

Although the two German-Jewish love stories in Marriage in the<br />

Shadow and Darling of the Gods rely on similar melodramatic conventions,<br />

their conclusions about the personal and the political are presented with<br />

very different ideological reference points and under very different conditions<br />

of historical reception. In the early DEFA film, the intrusion of politics<br />

into the private sphere is evoked with an acute awareness of the need<br />

for political commitment and, more specifically, for the values of socialist<br />

humanism. By contrast, the more conventional West German production<br />

constructs the threat of politics to personal relations as further proof that<br />

their separation is a crucial safeguard against the politicization of everyday<br />

life. Significantly, the endings in both films involve highly dramatic suicide<br />

scenes that, beyond the need for narrative closure, might also be linked to<br />

220 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


wishful fantasies about the symbolic death of the Third Reich and its legacies.<br />

Achieving this discursive effect meant to either incorporate the question<br />

of cinema and politics into the metanarratives of antifascism, the approach<br />

chosen by DEFA, or contain its challenges with the postwar myths<br />

of economic reconstruction, West German style.<br />

III.<br />

During the period marked by these two productions from 1947 and 1960,<br />

respectively, the engagement with the cinema’s past involved two aspects of<br />

the star system: representation (i.e., the star played by someone else) and<br />

performance (i.e., the star as himself or herself). So far, my discussion has<br />

focused on two exceptional films about famous stars of the Third Reich;<br />

now I will discuss a much more pervasive phenomenon, namely, the postwar<br />

films with UFA stars that took advantage of their continuous celebrity<br />

status and the audience’s close familiarity with their signature roles. This<br />

kind of self-referential casting relied on a fully established star system,<br />

developed to perfection during the 1930s, but it also reflected significant<br />

changes within that system, most notably in the context of DEFA cinema<br />

and its search for alternative models.<br />

Yet how can film stars play such an overdetermined role? Unlike “mere”<br />

actors, stars function as signs in a wider system of references: they are elevated<br />

to such status through their identification with particular roles and<br />

stereotypes; certain ideas about sexuality, gender, class, race, and ethnicity;<br />

and, finally, their enlistment in mass cultural and consumerist practices<br />

(e.g., fan clubs, product endorsements). As noted earlier, the transformation<br />

of some stars into symbols of a particular period continues a long tradition<br />

in the visual arts, including its gendered divisions. Attesting to the medium’s<br />

preoccupation with visual pleasure, beautiful female stars have inspired<br />

powerful allegories of cinema. Yet in the German case, it was a particular<br />

obsession with the national that accounted for the exclusive enlistment of<br />

male stars in the allegorical dramas of postwar reconstruction. The male<br />

body seemed both less compromised by the ideology of race and more fit to<br />

preserve the surviving dreams of nation. Exceptions notwithstanding, male<br />

actors played only a minor role in the UFA star system, a fact that, given<br />

their privileged relationship to questions of national identity, made them<br />

perfectly suited to complete the displacements necessary for the restoration<br />

of cinema and, by extension, the filmic imagination. Thus the historical<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 221


trauma, it might be argued, found expression in the performance of masculinity<br />

and a compulsive reenactment of disempowerment, disillusionment,<br />

and, symbolically speaking, castration. 17<br />

Sustained by such mechanisms, the male stars from the Third Reich entered<br />

the cinema of postwar reconstruction as figures of contention and<br />

compromise. Yet in order to perform these functions, they first had to be inserted<br />

into an established system of difference. Here the new generation of<br />

actors and actresses who were either associated with American youth culture<br />

(e.g., Horst Buchholz, Karin Baal) or connected to an older tradition of<br />

German inwardness (e.g., Dieter Borsche, Maria Schell) provided the necessary<br />

frame of reference. The appearance of the old among these representatives<br />

of the new amounted to a hidden commentary on the continuities<br />

and ruptures within German cinema. In what is perhaps the most obvious<br />

example of calculated casting, Willy Fritsch returned to the screen as a<br />

struggling screenwriter in Film ohne Titel (Film without Title, 1948), a selfserving<br />

portrayal by the industry of its great difficulties during the immediate<br />

postwar period. Fritsch was no longer a leading man, and the UFA studios<br />

lay in ruins. Yet as the film demonstrates, the romance of filmmaking<br />

goes on in the Lüneburg Heath, with the aging star-turned-screenwriter<br />

animated by the bucolic setting to write an almost idyllic rubble film. This<br />

double displacement made Fritsch a perfect mediator between the old illusionism<br />

and what briefly looked, in the late 1940s, like a new realist aesthetic.<br />

As a privileged commentator on the vagaries of German cinema, he<br />

was also ideally suited to welcome the unlikely couple that wandered into<br />

this movie-making idyll, an older man, played by Hans Söhnker as a proponent<br />

of the old approach to typecasting, and a young, beautiful woman,<br />

played by Hildegard Knef as the representative of a more natural acting<br />

style.<br />

In contrast to the rejuvenating effect of a rising female star on an aging<br />

male star in this programmatically titled “film without title,” the almost incestuous<br />

pairing of male and female UFA stars in several later melodramas<br />

was bound to yield mostly disappointing results. This diagnosis holds true<br />

for Gabriela (1950) and its almost cruel treatment of Carl Raddatz and Zarah<br />

Leander as two aging entertainers without a future. The ravaged body of Leander,<br />

who had entertained soldiers through her famous songs from Die<br />

große Liebe (The Great Love, 1942), offers visible proof that the world has<br />

indeed and forever fallen apart, and that despite her famous hymn to endurance,<br />

“It’s Not the End of the World.” Equally familiar to wartime audi-<br />

222 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


15. Willy Birgel (star postcard) 16. Hans Albers (star postcard)<br />

ences, Raddatz in this film returned to the screen as a disillusioned bar pianist<br />

with a drinking problem. At one point, he remarks, “Ten years ago, I<br />

was somebody. I could have become something,” a reference to the war hero<br />

he played in Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940).<br />

This kind of self-referential casting could be found in many contexts,<br />

but it was only in the postwar careers of Hans Albers and Willy Birgel that<br />

the reflection on roles, images, and personas became part of the larger<br />

project of preserving, transforming, and forgetting. As icons of traditional<br />

masculinity and German character, Albers and Birgel fulfilled almost complementary<br />

functions in the cinema’s rituals of self-referentiality. The process<br />

began with their casting in two famous 1947 Trümmerfilme (rubble<br />

films), . . . und über uns der Himmel (. . . and above Us the Sky) and Zwischen<br />

gestern und morgen (Between Yesterday and Tomorrow). Whereas the<br />

vigorous, optimistic Albers in the first film quickly adapts to the blackmarket<br />

economy in postwar Berlin, even if at the price of personal integrity,<br />

the somber, fatalistic Birgel in the second film finds personal redemption<br />

only through his sacrificial death after the suicide of his Jewish ex-wife.<br />

From then on, the Albers persona functioned as the preferred vehicle<br />

for the thematization of denial and amnesia. By contrast, the Birgel persona<br />

offered a heuristic device in the reflection on historical continuities. Their<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 223


joint appearance in the Viktor Tourjansky film Vom Teufel gejagt (Chased<br />

by the Devil, 1950) takes advantage of this kind of heightened symbolism,<br />

with Albers cast as a famous psychiatrist, Dr. Blank [sic!], who descends into<br />

a world of madness after a self-experiment gone awry and with Birgel as his<br />

concerned colleague and best friend, helplessly looking on. This lurid tale<br />

of guilt without consciousness, and of agency without responsibility, uses<br />

extensive medical discussions about the symptoms of paranoia to initiate<br />

the kind of discussion about repressed feelings of shame and guilt usually<br />

confined to the psychoanalytic profession. Adding to the film’s multilayered<br />

meanings, the private mental hospital run by Drs. Albers and Birgel is populated<br />

by patients who commit criminal acts but insist on their innocence,<br />

who follow orders but avoid accountability, and who explain all of their actions<br />

as acts of defense against external threats—a more than revealing comment<br />

on the problematic project of dealing with the past. 18<br />

In the exorcism of collective guilt through famous stars associated with<br />

the Third Reich, two psychological forces were at work: the need to preserve<br />

and retain, which could only be achieved through the crucible of repression,<br />

and the need to destroy, to extricate and eliminate, a process that<br />

could be liberating but also extremely painful. Accordingly, Birgel, who in<br />

his signature roles from the late 1930s and early 1940s had come to embody<br />

the masochistic pleasures of self-denial, turned into an object of compassionate<br />

self-identification. The sympathetic presentation of his suffering in<br />

the postwar films was predicated on shared notions of victimization. Albers,<br />

whose heroic screen persona had always included aggressive tendencies,<br />

now offered his aging body as a projection screen for the aggressions previously<br />

directed at others. In both cases, the confrontation with the legacies<br />

of the past took place in the dramatic register of screen performance and<br />

through the established iconography of the star. And in both cases, the<br />

terms of engagement involved two equally radical reversals in the conception<br />

of the roles and the patterns of identification.<br />

Willy Birgel’s popular appeal hinged on the performance of ambiguity<br />

and ambivalence; his screen persona was from the beginning codified in the<br />

terms of alterity. This identification with a marginal position made the actor<br />

particularly attractive for scenarios of postwar revisionism. Unlike Albers,<br />

Birgel never acquired a larger following, and his death did not result<br />

in the kind of posthumous tributes and accolades reserved for the “blond<br />

Hans.” Birgel had started out as a classic villain with considerable skills at<br />

cheating, deceiving, and betraying. Even in more respectable parts and dig-<br />

224 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


nified settings, he maintained an aura of mystery and secrecy. Deception remained<br />

part of his repertoire, especially in the pursuit of a higher goal. Not<br />

surprisingly, the familiar gestures of the cynic in the later films served to<br />

hide his idealism, sentimentality, and potential for love, and his perceived<br />

coldness only covered up a deep commitment to family and country. Thus<br />

implicated in an intricate game of appearances, Birgel came to personify the<br />

specter of difference, whether defined in ethnic, social, sexual, cultural, or<br />

generational terms.<br />

His first postwar appearance as a famous stage actor from the Nazi<br />

period in Between Yesterday and Tomorrow took advantage of this elusive<br />

quality by explaining the character’s ban from the stage through veiled references<br />

to his allegedly non-Aryan physiognomy and his close relationship<br />

to a Jewish ex-wife. And indeed, Birgel could be equally convincing as a foreign<br />

spy in Verräter (Traitors, 1936) and an East Prussian officer in the anti-<br />

Polish Feinde (Enemies, 1940). With his slender build, delicate features,<br />

dark hair, sensuous mouth, and thin mustache, he looked more Slavic than<br />

Germanic, a quality that is most apparent in Fürst Woronzeff (Count Woronzeff,<br />

1934) and Menschen ohne Vaterland (People without Fatherland,<br />

1937). He remained identified with the aristocracy and its obsolete value<br />

system long after the fashionable types associated with Weimar white-collar<br />

culture had taken over the screen; this explains his frequent appearance in<br />

historical dramas. Cast as a conductor in Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936)<br />

and Ich brauche dich (I Need You, 1944), he became associated with a position<br />

of cultural elitism that seemed equally at odds with the egalitarianism<br />

of modern mass society and with the populism of the new national community.<br />

Moreover, he sometimes projected a dangerous sensuality that either<br />

had to be contained within the ethos of asceticism or marginalized in<br />

terms of deviancy; Detlef Sierck’s Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1937) explored<br />

the latter possibility.<br />

Many of these contradictions come together in the Birgel star vehicle directed<br />

by Arthur Maria Rabenalt, Reitet für Deutschland (Riding for Germany,<br />

1941). Birgel’s postwar roles frequently referred back to this signature<br />

role as the “master equestrian of the German film,” to evoke a popular epithet.<br />

The figure of the elegant cavalry officer invited forms of identification<br />

that reconstituted traditional masculinity outside the traumas of German<br />

history. The impression of unbroken continuity was achieved through the<br />

aura of obsolescence that already surrounded Birgel in the 1930s and only<br />

intensified during the 1950s. Precisely this outdatedness made possible the<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 225


transformation of a figure of moral ambiguity into a figure of highest morality,<br />

a process that might be compared to what Freud calls secondary revision.<br />

The overarching goal was to preserve the legacies of German cinema<br />

through a rewriting of its symptomatic narratives. Two postwar productions<br />

modeled themselves explicitly on Riding for Germany and its heroic story<br />

of a cavalry officer, Rittmeister von Brenken, who, wounded on the battlefields<br />

of the Great War, overcomes physical and psychological paralysis in<br />

order to win the gold medal for Germany at a major international riding<br />

competition.<br />

Ten years later, the rebirth of German nationalism out of the quagmire<br />

of Weimar culture acquired new meaning in the desire of postwar cinema to<br />

cast off the burdens of the Third Reich. In Wenn die Abendglocken läuten<br />

(When the Evening Bells Ring, 1951), Birgel appears again at a riding competition,<br />

but this time only to commit suicide, as it were, by dislodging a bullet<br />

in his chest, “an old war memento.” The motif of self-punishment occasions<br />

several allusions to his true historical mission; says Birgel at one point:<br />

“Soldiers who are supposed to die should get what they want.” By committing<br />

suicide, the character in the 1951 production allows his beautiful wife<br />

to be reunited with her former, and younger, lover. Yet as a German star<br />

with a German past, Birgel in this moment also allowed postwar audiences<br />

to carry on their love affair with the old UFA stars through the pleasures of<br />

masochistic identification. In Rittmeister Wronski (Colonel Wronski, 1954),<br />

this fascination with the past as an instant future acquired an almost phantasmagoric<br />

quality. Not satisfied with the grand gestures of renunciation,<br />

this espionage thriller effectively rewrites Birgel’s contribution to the Nazi<br />

propaganda effort. Thus the 1920s Free Corps officer and ardent German<br />

nationalist from Riding for Germany returns to Berlin in the late 1930s as a<br />

secret agent working for the Polish government and reporting on military<br />

preparations for the planned invasion of Poland. In the process, this male<br />

icon of German nationalism and militarism is miraculously transformed<br />

into an antifascist resistance fighter, and that despite Wronski’s regretful remarks<br />

about “the old days [when] I had . . . oh well, forget it!”—a clear reference<br />

to his earlier life as von Brenken. Through such intertextual effects,<br />

Birgel’s physical and emotional rigidity established a model for the reconstruction<br />

of postwar masculinity.<br />

If Birgel allowed postwar audiences to embrace inflexibility as a sign of<br />

true character and to invest resistance to change with such positive qualities<br />

as loyalty, steadfastness, and perseverance, then Albers invited them to<br />

226 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


elease the aggressive energies resulting from the underlying trauma of loss<br />

and disillusionment. 19 With his tall, muscular build, strong facial features,<br />

blond hair, and steely blue eyes, Albers, “the ultimate male of the German<br />

film,” 20 came very close to the ideal of the Aryan superhero; that is why, after<br />

1945, this perfect image had to be systematically taken apart. Unlike the<br />

idealized male nudes in painting and sculpture, Albers came to embody German<br />

masculinity because he displayed his imperfections so openly: “proof”<br />

that the ideal could be realized in an actual living person. Above all, his elevated<br />

status as a folk character, acknowledged in references to this “child<br />

of the crowd,” 21 disengaged his screen persona from the more problematic<br />

associations with racialized discourse.<br />

In hindsight, Albers’s flaws must be described in the terms of “too<br />

much,” a kind of hysterical performance of masculinity, and that despite the<br />

praise for what many called his natural acting style. Albers was assertive<br />

with a disposition for rudeness and cruelty, confident with an almost pathological<br />

edge, and self-reliant with a strong sense of misanthropy. His hypermasculinity<br />

rarely led to erotic encounters and romantic entanglements. He<br />

remained a narcissistic character with a melancholy touch and a marked<br />

tendency during the later years toward pathetic self-parody. Given his close<br />

identification with the normative aspects of fantasy production, Albers became<br />

the preferred vehicle for (self-)destructive scenarios. His screen<br />

persona brought out the aggressive energies behind a process of idolization<br />

threatened by the recognition of loss and the need for (self-)punishment. By<br />

repeating the gestures, attitudes, and rituals from the UFA years, but without<br />

the indispensable sense of authority, Albers ended up acting out the<br />

tragedy of those resisting change and retreating to the filmic fantasies of the<br />

Third Reich.<br />

In the same way that Birgel must be connected to elitist forms of repression<br />

and denial, the more populist Albers can be understood only through<br />

rituals of aggression capable of exorcising the fascist imaginary from the<br />

body of postwar culture. At times, this process took the form of a repetition<br />

compulsion, which is always a sign of trauma. 22 The act of revisiting the past<br />

frequently involved remakes of earlier films, which took advantage of Albers’s<br />

status as an icon of national cinema even where these new versions<br />

bore little resemblance to the originals. To begin with, there were the classics<br />

of Weimar art cinema. Föhn (Foehn, 1950) retold the dramatic events of<br />

Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü (The White Hell of Piz Palü, 1929) by Arnold<br />

Fanck, whereas Der letzte Mann (The Last Man, 1955) introduced the story<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 227


of the eponymous 1924 film by F. W. Murnau into the present. Then there<br />

were the films from the Third Reich, including the Gerhart Hauptmann<br />

drama Sonnenuntergang (Before Sunset, 1956), first adapted to the screen<br />

by Veit Harlan under the title Der Herrscher (The Ruler, 1937). Finally, the<br />

postwar period produced several inexpensive remakes of earlier Albers<br />

films. Promotional campaigns informed audiences about, or refamiliarized<br />

them with, the famous characters, images, and scenes from German film<br />

history. Often such reverential gesturing proved enough to reactivate the<br />

cult of celebrity that, to this day, sustains familiar images such as “the baron<br />

on the cannonball” and “the sailor with the accordion.”<br />

For instance, the 1958 production of Der Greifer (The Catcher) brought<br />

back the figure of the street-smart inspector that Albers had played in the<br />

1930 Richard Eichberg film of the same title. His phenomenal success as<br />

Münchhausen (1943) even occasioned a repeat performance in Der tolle<br />

Bomberg (The Mad Bomberg, 1957), but without the high production value<br />

of the original. Finally, Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom Street No. 7,<br />

1944) inspired two other Hamburg milieu studies, Auf der Reeperbahn<br />

nachts um halb eins (On Reeperbahn Half Past Midnight, 1954) and Das<br />

Herz von St. Pauli (The Heart of St. Pauli, 1957). In all three films, Albers’s<br />

infatuation with a much younger woman forces him to accept the impossibility<br />

of returning home, of belonging. Unwilling to mourn his loss, he seeks<br />

refuge in melancholy. Yet what in the original scenario of Great Freedom<br />

Street No. 7 might have had subversive effects is now reduced to sentimental<br />

recollections, nostalgic reenactments, selective memories, and, above all,<br />

acts of willful forgetting.<br />

In what ways Albers’s postwar career remained under the influence of<br />

his earlier work for UFA is most apparent in a compilation film based on a<br />

variety show in Berlin’s Titania Palace, Das gab’s nur einmal (It Happened<br />

Only Once, 1958). In this film, he gives an aspiring young actress a nostalgic<br />

tour through the world of filmmaking that includes clips from his own<br />

films. In leading the postwar audience back to the “glory days of German<br />

film,” to evoke the well-known Curt Riess book of the same title, Albers<br />

took full advantage of his mythical status. What he could not control quite<br />

as successfully was the way in which his appearance as a mediator between<br />

past and present implicated his screen persona in more problematic aspects<br />

of film history. Like other stars who reached iconic status but then became<br />

caught in their own mythology, Albers was doomed to remain the same even<br />

228 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


though his physical appearance could no longer live up to the public’s<br />

expectations.<br />

The star’s participation in the staging of his own demise is most noticeable<br />

in the slumped body posture, the tired, uncoordinated movements, the<br />

almost incomprehensible mumbling, and the increasingly unrecognizable<br />

familiar features. What looked like a safe commercial formula—that is,<br />

to take advantage of a star’s celebrity status—repeatedly failed at the box<br />

office. 23 The mechanisms of the star system saved Birgel, but they destroyed<br />

Albers. Film reviewers responded negatively to his self-imitations, and<br />

younger audiences preferred more contemporary personalities. The fact<br />

that these films nonetheless found an audience—and continue to do so—<br />

confirms their significance not only for an older generation reminiscing<br />

about the “golden age of UFA” but also for a new generation of filmmakers<br />

and moviegoers who continue to use these filmic discourses to reflect on the<br />

possibilities of a German cinema able simultaneously to accept and move<br />

beyond the burdens of the past.<br />

To close on a tentative note: my primary goal in this final chapter has<br />

been to make a rather obvious but also somewhat more complicated point.<br />

As is well known, the cinema of the postwar period defined its political and<br />

artistic program in opposition to the Third Reich. Instead of rejecting the<br />

entire legacy, actors and directors carried out what I have called an exorcism,<br />

a ritualistic act that took place on the physical and metaphorical body<br />

of cinema. The arrival of a new generation of actors completed the expulsion<br />

of some elements from the filmic imagination; but it also made possible<br />

the preservation of other traditions. The process of integrating these conflicting<br />

influences and impulses involved a staged confrontation that showed<br />

sadistic and masochistic tendencies. On the one hand, the films about two<br />

UFA stars, Joachim Gottschalk and Renate Müller, served as a reminder of<br />

the difficult legacies of the past but also marked the distance between the<br />

Third Reich and the postwar period. On the other hand, the multilayered<br />

references in the postwar careers of Hans Albers and Willy Birgel thrived on<br />

the careful negotiation of old and new influences in terms of the star system.<br />

Through such mechanisms, the so-called “golden years of UFA” became<br />

an integral part of the history of cinema, namely a reminder of both<br />

the possibility and impossibility of forgetting.<br />

As I have tried to argue on the previous pages, the contribution of individual<br />

stars to the cinema’s desire to come to terms with— or, rather, over-<br />

The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 229


come—its own past played a key role in postwar cinema’s self-understanding<br />

as a popular cinema. The star provided the physical body through which<br />

the cinema’s past and future could be comprehended through the revisions<br />

performed on its “heavenly bodies.” Of course, it should be remembered<br />

that all exorcisms leave behind wounds that never heal; and it may be that<br />

the difficulty in reclaiming a popular tradition for German cinema has<br />

much to do with these strategies of expulsion and incorporation. The exorcism<br />

described on the preceding pages made possible the transition from<br />

history into mythmaking that, especially since the 1980s, has further reduced<br />

the legacies of the cinema’s past to highly codified images, gestures,<br />

and scenarios. No matter how one views this process of postmodern appropriation,<br />

one fact seems indisputable: With the stars from the 1930s and<br />

early 1940s either retired or deceased, with the films about the Nazi period<br />

an established part of world cinema, and with the cinema of the Third<br />

Reich the subject of renewed scholarly attention and popular interest, the<br />

transformation of film history into new myths and old clichés can finally be<br />

retraced to the beginning, in the 1950s, of a difficult process of coming to<br />

terms with the cinema’s past. This process of secondary revision may finally<br />

allow us today to understand better the popular cinema of the Third Reich<br />

and assess its historical and theoretical relevance both for the cinema of<br />

postwar reconstruction and, even more important, for the global media culture<br />

of today.<br />

230 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


NOTES<br />

1. POPULAR <strong>CINEMA</strong>, NATIONAL <strong>CINEMA</strong>,<br />

NAZI <strong>CINEMA</strong>: A DEFINITION OF TERMS<br />

1. Klaus Kanzog, “Staatspolitisch besonders wertvoll.” Ein Handbuch zu 30<br />

deutschen Spielfilmen der Jahre 1934 bis 1945, p. 7. All translations from the German,<br />

unless noted otherwise, are my own.<br />

2. For reasons that should become apparent in the Preface and Chapter 1, I use<br />

the term “popular cinema” rather than “entertainment film” (Unterhaltungsfilm),<br />

and I refer to “popular cinema in the Third Reich” rather than “Nazi film” or “Nazi<br />

cinema,” except, of course, in cases where I summarize historical debates or paraphrase<br />

other scholars.<br />

3. Goebbels, speech given on 28 February 1942, reprinted in Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische<br />

Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme<br />

des Dritten Reiches, p. 496.<br />

4. Siegfried Kracauer, “Propaganda and the Nazi War Film,” in From Caligari<br />

to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton<br />

University Press, 1974), p. 275.<br />

5. H. H. Wollenberg, Fifty Years of German Film (London: Falcon Press, 1947),<br />

p. 44. Nonetheless, the author insists that some films possess “a certain artistic<br />

value.”<br />

6. The phrase “the golden days of UFA” can be found in most popular accounts,<br />

but variations such as “the heyday of the German film” also appear in more scholarly<br />

studies. See Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–1945, p. 9.<br />

7. Axel Eggebrecht, Der halbe Weg. Zwischenbilanz einer Epoche (Reinbek:<br />

Rowohlt, 1975), p. 308.<br />

8. Herbert Maisch, Helm ab, Vorhang auf. Siebzig Jahre eines ungewöhnlichen<br />

Lebens (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1968), p. 294. The reference is to Friedrich Schiller<br />

(1940).<br />

9. Karlheinz Wendtland, Geliebter Kintopp. Sämtliche deutsche Spielfilme<br />

von 1929–1945, Gesamtregister, p. 2. On the opposite side, compare Erwin Leiser’s


equally problematic use of “feature films as documentary evidence.” In Nazi Cinema,<br />

p. 7.<br />

10. For an attempt to make productive use of recent historical debates, compare<br />

Ehrhard Bahr’s argument that the distinction between intentionalists and functionalists<br />

can also be applied to the sphere of cultural policy. In “Nazi Cultural Politics:<br />

Intentionalism vs. Functionalism,” in National Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. Glenn<br />

Cuomo, pp. 5–22 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). For two very different approaches<br />

to the question of cinema and ideology, see Gabriele Lange’s thematic<br />

study on the social stereotypes in Das Kino als moralische Anstalt. Soziale Leitbilder<br />

und die Darstellung gesellschaftlicher Realität im Spielfilm des Dritten Reiches, and<br />

Brigitte Welzel’s reception-based, quantitative study in Die Beliebigkeit der filmischen<br />

Botschaft aufgewiesen am “ideologischen Gehalt” von 120 NS-Spielfilmen<br />

(Rheinfelden: Schäuble, 1994).<br />

11. See Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik, p. 105. In fact, Albrecht estimates<br />

the percentage of entertainment films to be as high as 90 percent.<br />

12. David Stewart Hull, Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema<br />

1933–1945, p. 36. Relying heavily on memoirs by actors and directors working in the<br />

industry, Hull also insists that “the Filmwelt was a hotbed—however passive— of limited<br />

resistance to the government” (pp. 7–8).<br />

13. Richard Taylor, Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (London:<br />

Croom, 1979), p. 231. For a similar approach that includes British propaganda,<br />

compare Nicholas Reeves, The Power of Film Propaganda: Myth or Reality? (London:<br />

Cassell, 1999).<br />

14. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945, p. 3. A comparable<br />

approach, but with a stronger emphasis on aesthetic qualities, can be found<br />

in Pierre Cadars and Francis Courtade, Le cinéma nazi. On the use of political symbolism<br />

in the propaganda films, see Hilmar Hoffmann, The Triumph of Propaganda:<br />

Film and National Socialism 1933–1945. The preference for thematic approaches<br />

to film and ideology continues in the most recent contributions, including Gerhard<br />

Schoenberner, “Ideologie und Propaganda im NS-Film: Von der Eroberung<br />

der Studios zur Manipulation ihrer Produkte,” in Der deutsche Film: Aspekte seiner<br />

Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Uli Jung, pp. 91–110 (Trier:<br />

WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1993).<br />

15. Welch, “Nazi Film Policy: Control, Ideology, and Propaganda,” in National<br />

Socialist Cultural Policy, p. 114. Welch offers a similar definition in The Third Reich:<br />

Politics and Propaganda (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 46– 49.<br />

16. Stephen Neale, “Propaganda,” Screen 18, no. 3 (1977): 13–14.<br />

17. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic<br />

Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 79.<br />

18. Stephen Lowry, Pathos und Politik. Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus<br />

(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), p. 1.<br />

19. Lowry, “Ideology and Excess in Nazi Melodrama: The Golden City,” New<br />

German Critique 74 (1998): 130.<br />

232 Notes to pages 4 –7


20. Karsten Witte, “The Indivisible Legacy of Nazi Cinema,” New German Critique<br />

74 (1998): 23.<br />

21. Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in<br />

Nazi Cinema, p. xiii.<br />

22. Ibid., p. 11.<br />

23. Ibid., p. 13. On this point, compare her later “Douglas Sirk’s Schlußakkord,<br />

and the Question of Aesthetic Resistance,” Germanic Review 73, no. 1 (Winter<br />

1998): 2–31.<br />

24. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife,<br />

p. 223.<br />

25. Ibid., pp. 16, 218.<br />

26. I am referring to the work of Lutz Koepnick, Marcia Klotz, and Antje Ascheid.<br />

For some recent publications, see the two special issues of Augen-Blick: no. 15<br />

(1993), “Capriolen und Vexierbilder. Neue Studien zum NS-Unterhaltungsfilm,” and<br />

no. 22 (1996), “Das kalte Bild. Neue Studien zum NS-Propagandafilm,” as well as the<br />

montage a/v special issue, vol. 3, no. 2 (1994), “NS-Film: Modernisierung und Reaktion,”<br />

and the special issue of New German Critique 74 (Spring–Summer 1998) on<br />

Nazi cinema. Also compare the recent anthology edited by Robert Reimer, Cultural<br />

History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich.<br />

On some of the programmatic underpinnings, see Anton Kaes, “German Cultural<br />

History and the Study of Film: Ten Theses and a Postscript,” New German Critique<br />

65 (1995): 47–58.<br />

27. Leonardo Quaresima, “Der Film im Dritten Reich: Moderne, Amerikanismus,<br />

Unterhaltung,” montage/av 3, no. 2 (1994): 19.<br />

28. Witte, “The Indivisible Legacy of Nazi Cinema,” p. 24.<br />

29. The term “aestheticization of politics” refers to Walter Benjamin’s famous<br />

“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed.<br />

Hannah Arendt, p. 242 (New York: Schocken, 1969). The “mass ornament” is a<br />

figure of thought evoked by Siegfried Kracauer in “The Mass Ornament,” New German<br />

Critique 2, no. 5 (1975): 67–76.<br />

30. The term is taken from Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein.<br />

Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945 (Munich: Hanser, 1981),<br />

pp. 133–137.<br />

31. See Detlef Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism<br />

in Everyday Life, trans. Richard Deveson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University<br />

Press, 1987).<br />

32. Thomas Elsaesser, “Moderne und Modernisierung: Der deutsche Film der<br />

dreißiger Jahre,” montage/av 3, no. 2 (1994): 34.<br />

33. Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular,”<br />

New German Critique 74 (1998): 43.<br />

34. Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag. Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich (Berlin:<br />

Vorwerk, 1995), pp. 102–121.<br />

35. Klaus Kreimeier, “Von Henny Porten zu Zarah Leander. Filmgenres und<br />

Notes to pages 8–12 233


Genrefilm in der Weimarer Republik und im Nationalsozialismus,” montage/av 3,<br />

no. 2 (1994): 42.<br />

36. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” in People’s History<br />

and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 232.<br />

37. The concept plays a key role in writings on popular cinema but can also be<br />

found in the theoretical work of Slavoj Zizek, the main reference point for Schulte-<br />

Sasse’s work.<br />

38. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Movies and Methods, ed. Bill<br />

Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2:222.<br />

39. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German<br />

Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 8.<br />

40. Julian Petley, Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933– 45, p. 106. The<br />

author insists that these conclusions apply equally to the openly political films and<br />

the so-called entertainment films.<br />

41. See Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4<br />

(1989): 36– 46. On national cinema as a category in film studies, compare Philip<br />

Rosen, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch, and Some Problems in the<br />

Study of National Cinemas,” Iris 2, no. 2 (1984): 69–84, and Stephen Crofts, “Reconceptualizing<br />

National Cinema/s,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 14, no. 3<br />

(1993): 49– 67. Also see Graeme Turner, Film as a Social Practice, 3d ed. (London:<br />

Routledge, 1999), pp. 151–186.<br />

42. For a comparative perspective on the period, see the retrospectives Europa<br />

1939. Filme aus zehn Ländern, ed. Hans Helmut Prinzler (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche<br />

Kinemathek, 1989), and Das Jahr 1945. Filme aus fünfzehn Ländern, ed. Hans Helmut<br />

Prinzler (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1990). On German-Swiss relations<br />

during the early 1930s, see Thomas Kramer and Dominik Siegrist, Terra. Ein<br />

Schweizer Filmkonzern im Dritten Reich. On European cinemas and the Hollywood<br />

dominance, especially during the war years, see Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas,<br />

European Societies 1939–1990 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 23–51.<br />

43. Neale, “Propaganda,” p. 37.<br />

44. On the popular as a category in European cinema, see Ginette Vindendeau<br />

and Richard Dyer, Popular European Cinema (London: Routledge, 1992).<br />

2. MADE IN 1933: GERMAN-JEWISH FILMMAKERS<br />

AND THE FORCED COORDINATION OF THE INDUSTRY<br />

1. The year’s entire production has been catalogued in Deutsche Tonfilme. Filmlexikon<br />

der abendfüllenden deutschen und deutschsprachigen Tonfilme nach ihren<br />

deutschen Uraufführungen, vol. 4: 1933 (Berlin and Berchtesgarden: Ulrich J. Klaus,<br />

1992).<br />

2. Advertisement for Das häßliche Mädchen, Lichtbildbühne, 19 September 1933.<br />

On the critical reception, see W., “Ein Film aus dem Leben,” Filmwoche 31 (1933):<br />

984.<br />

234 Notes to pages 16–24


3. Henry Koster, interview with Irene Kahn Atkins (Methuen, N.J.: Director’s<br />

Guild of America and Scarecrow Press, 1987), pp. 32–34.<br />

4. Review of Viktor und Viktoria, Film-Kurier, 27 December 1933.<br />

5. Review of Viktor und Viktoria, Lichtbildbühne, 27 December 1933.<br />

6. Advertisement for Viktor und Viktoria, Film-Kurier, 12 January 1934.<br />

7. Quoted by Jörg Schönig, “Biografie,” in Reinhold Schünzel. Schauspieler und<br />

Regisseur (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1989), p. 61. The quotes are missing from<br />

Ralf Georg Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, 6 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1992).<br />

On the Goebbels diaries, see Felix Moeller, Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film<br />

im Dritten Reich.<br />

8. The term Überläuferfilme (literally, deserter films) usually refers to film productions<br />

started before 1945 and completed or released after 1945.<br />

9. See the project outline by Karl Prümm in “Historiographie einer Epochenschwelle:<br />

Der Übergang vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm in Deutschland (1928–1932),”<br />

in Filmgeschichte schreiben. Ansätze, Entwürfe und Methoden, ed. Knut Hickethier,<br />

pp. 93–103 (Berlin: edition sigma, 1989), and the voluminous reception study by<br />

Helmut Korte, Der Spielfilm und das Ende der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck<br />

& Ruprecht, 1998), which includes a discussion of the comedies of mistaken<br />

identity.<br />

10. Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag. Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich<br />

(Berlin: Vorwerk, 1995), pp. 49– 66.<br />

11. Wolfgang Becker, Film und Herrschaft. Organisationsprinzipien und Organisationsstrukturen<br />

der nationalsozialistischen Filmpropaganda, and Jürgen Spiker,<br />

Film und Kapital. Der Weg der deutschen Filmwirtschaft zum nationalsozialistischen<br />

Einheitskonzern (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1975).<br />

12. Anon., “Reichsminister Dr. Goebbels spricht vor Filmleuten,” Filmwoche 14<br />

(1933): 425.<br />

13. Anon., “Der jüdische Künstler im neuen deutschen Film,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

11 April 1933.<br />

14. Anon., “Arierparagraph und Film,” Lichtbildbühne, 7 August 1933.<br />

15. On this point, see Karsten Witte, “Die Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich,” in<br />

Die deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich. Themen—Tradition—Wirkungen, ed. Horst<br />

Denkler and Karl Prümm, pp. 347–365 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1976).<br />

16. According to Helga Belach, the director himself had decided to play down<br />

the anti-Semitic stereotyping in the original Bernhard Kellermann novel by casting<br />

the blond Gustaf Gründgens as the power-hungry businessman S. Woolf (Samuel<br />

Wolfsohn in the novel). In Aufruhr der Gefühle. Die Kinowelt des Curtis Bernhardt<br />

(Munich: C. J. Bucher, 1982), p. 172. In the same volume, also see Bernhardt’s remarks<br />

on anti-Semitic diatribes published in the Völkischer Beobachter during the<br />

production of The Tunnel in his interview with Mary Kiersch, pp. 101–103.<br />

17. Anon., “Modest Claims by Modest People,” Film-Kurier, 15 July 1933.<br />

18. Anon., “‘Art in Fetters,’” Film-Kurier, 21 October 1933.<br />

19. Anon., “The Wish, the Father of the Thought,” Film-Kurier, 19 August 1933.<br />

20. Anon., “Film Reciprocity or Boycott?,” Film-Kurier, 3 June 1933.<br />

Notes to pages 24 –30 235


21. Based on detailed analysis provided by Stig Hornshoj-Moller, “Der ewige<br />

Jude.” Quellenkritische Analyse eines antisemitischen Propagandafilms (Göttingen:<br />

Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, 1995). Hippler chose cross-dressing scenes<br />

from Oswald’s Der Fürst von Pappenheim (The Count of Pappenheim, 1927) to show<br />

the pervasiveness of sexual deviancy. Several scenes from Lang’s Spione (Spies,<br />

1928) and M (1931) were included to prove the obsession with madness, crime, and<br />

prostitution.<br />

22. See Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,<br />

1974).<br />

23. Anon., Filmwoche 45 (1933): 1566.<br />

24. See Karlheinz Wendtland, Geliebter Kintopp Jahrgang 1933–34, p. 78.<br />

25. On Dolly Haas (and Curt Bois) from the perspective of their exile experience,<br />

see the booklets for the retrospective Exil. Sechs Schauspieler aus Deutschland<br />

(Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1983). Haas left Germany in 1934, first for<br />

England, then the United States; she later married the cartoonist Al Hirschfeld. On<br />

exile cinema in general, see Jan-Christopher Horak, “German Exile Cinema, 1933–<br />

1950,” Film History 8 (1996): 373–389.<br />

26. Review of Scampolo, ein Kind der Straße, Lichtbildbühne, 27 October 1932.<br />

27. See Alice Kuzniar’s chapter “Gender Inverts and Cross-Dressers: Reading for<br />

a Queer Weimar Cinema,” in The Queer German Cinema (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford<br />

University Press, 2000), pp. 21–56. For a comprehensive study on the subject, see<br />

Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York:<br />

Routledge, 1997).<br />

28. For some remarkable real-life references, see the life story of Sylvin Rubinstein<br />

in Kuno Kruse, “Die Beine der Dolores,” Der Spiegel 27 (1998): 162–166.<br />

Holocaust survivor Rubinstein had appeared in a dance act together with his twin<br />

sister during the 1930s. After the war, he made a name for himself as the crossdressing<br />

flamenco dancer Dolores, appearing in nightclubs in all major cities of the<br />

Federal Republic.<br />

29. See Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality<br />

(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially the introductory chapter on<br />

stereotypes, and, by the same author, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, N.J.:<br />

Princeton University Press, 1993). For studies that focus more specifically on race,<br />

compare Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: “Race,” Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema<br />

(London: Routledge, 1996).<br />

30. For a general overview of anti-Semitic stereotypes in German culture, see<br />

Cilly Kugelmann and Fritz Backhaus, ed., Jüdische Figuren in Film und Karikatur.<br />

Die Rothschilds und Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Jan Thorbecke<br />

and Jüdisches Museum, 1996). For the particular case of the Third Reich, see Dorothea<br />

Hollstein, Antisemitische Filmpropaganda. Die Darstellung des Juden im nationalsozialistischen<br />

Spielfilm. For a comparative perspective, see Erika Gregor and<br />

Ulrich Gregor, eds., Jüdische Lebenswelten im Film (Berlin: Freunde der deutschen<br />

Kinemathek, 1992).<br />

31. Ella Shohat, “Ethnicities in Relation: Toward a Multicultural Reading of<br />

236 Notes to pages 30– 43


American Cinema,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, ed.<br />

Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 215–216.<br />

32. Film-critic-turned-director Hans-Christoph Blumenberg portrayed the life<br />

and career of Schünzel along these lines in Beim nächsten Kuß knall ich ihn nieder<br />

(With the Next Kiss I’ll Shoot Him, 1995).<br />

33. Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company,<br />

1918–1945, p. 283.<br />

34. Richard Grunberger, quoted by Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion:<br />

Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, p. 9.<br />

3. <strong>CINEMA</strong>, SET DESIGN, AND THE<br />

DOMESTICATION OF MODERNISM<br />

1. For an interesting, though not always accurate, overview of the productive relationship<br />

between film and architecture, see Helmut Weihsmann, Gebaute Illusionen.<br />

Architektur im Film (Vienna: Promedia, 1988). A number of representative<br />

films are included in the exhibition catalogue Filmarchitektur, ed. Dietrich Neumann<br />

(Munich: Prestel, 1996). For a more theoretical approach, also see Anthony<br />

Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Assemblage<br />

21 (1993): 45– 49.<br />

2. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (Berkeley: University<br />

of California Press, 1977), and Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:<br />

A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University<br />

Press, 1974).<br />

3. See Klaus Kreimeier, ed., Die Metaphysik des Dekors. Raum, Architektur und<br />

Licht im klassischen deutschen Stummfilm (Marburg and Berlin: Schüren, 1994).<br />

4. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, p. 216.<br />

5. The term is taken from Siegfried Kracauer’s famous essay “The Mass Ornament,”<br />

in The Ornament of the Masses, ed., trans., and intro. Thomas Y. Levin,<br />

pp. 75–86 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).<br />

6. Klaus Kreimeier, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company,<br />

1918–1945, p. 250.<br />

7. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Hollywood Berlin,” Sight and Sound 7, no. 11<br />

(1997): 15.<br />

8. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”<br />

in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, pp. 217–<br />

251 (New York: Schocken, 1969); and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic<br />

of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1992).<br />

9. Examples include Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Under the Sign of<br />

Saturn, pp. 71–105 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980).<br />

10. See Dieter Bartetzko, Zwischen Zucht und Exstase. Zur Theatralik von<br />

NS-Architektur (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1984), and, by the same author, Illusionen in<br />

Stein. Stimmungsarchitektur im deutschen Faschismus. Ihre Vorgeschichte in Theater-<br />

Notes to pages 44 –50 237


und Film-Bauten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985). At times, Bartetzko’s history of Nazi architecture<br />

closely resembles Kracauer’s history of Weimar cinema, from their shared<br />

interest in uncovering unconscious psychological structures behind aesthetic practices<br />

and traditions to a teleological view of history that equates the rise of National<br />

Socialism with the failures of Weimar modernism.<br />

11. On modern architecture and design in the Third Reich, see Winfried Nerdinger,<br />

ed., Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Anbiederung und<br />

Verfolgung (Munich: Prestel, 1993). On the need for a more expanded definition of<br />

modern design, see John Heskett, “Modernism and Archaism in Design in the Third<br />

Reich” (pp. 110–127), and Brandon Taylor, “Post-Modernism in the Third Reich”<br />

(pp. 128–143), both in The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture, and<br />

Film in the Third Reich, ed. Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will (Winchester,<br />

England: Winchester Press, 1990). On the continuities in product advertising and<br />

graphic design, also see Uwe Westphal, Werbung im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Transit,<br />

1989).<br />

12. Alfons Arns, “Der Alchemist von Babelsberg. Otto Hunte, Film-Architekt,”<br />

in Otto Hunte. Architekt für den Film (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Kinomuseum,<br />

1996), p. 9.<br />

13. The references are to the Bureau of Beauty of Labor, a branch within the<br />

leisure organization Strength through Joy, and to the Brechtian /Benjaminian notion<br />

of an aesthetics of production. On the continuous influence of Fordism and Taylorism,<br />

see Anson G. Rabinbach, “The Aesthetics of Production in the Third Reich,”<br />

Journal of Contemporary History 11 (1976): 43–74.<br />

14. Kreimeier, “Karl Hartl: Homo faber und Visionär,” in Ohne Untertitel. Fragmente<br />

einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos, ed. Ruth Beckermann and Christa<br />

Blümlinger (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1996), p. 45.<br />

15. On The Tunnel, see Helga Belach, Gero Gandert et al., eds., Aufruhr der<br />

Gefühle. Die Kinowelt des Curtis Bernhardt (Munich: C. J. Bucher, 1982). Taking a<br />

different approach, Lutz Koepnick reads the film as an allegory of the coming fascist<br />

cinema that “employs visual pleasure as a catalyst for mass mobilization and<br />

subordination, a project that endorses nothing other than the fascist remake of the<br />

proletarian public sphere, namely, fascism’s peculiar institutionalization of distraction<br />

which sought to displace politics with aesthetics, to obscure the existing distribution<br />

of wealth and power, and to present technological progress as fate and spectacle.”<br />

In “Screening Fascism’s Underground: Kurt Bernhardt’s The Tunnel,” New<br />

German Critique 74 (1998): 164.<br />

16. S-k., review of Gold, Lichtbildbühne, 31 March 1933.<br />

17. On the aesthetics and politics of the mass ornament, also see Reinhard Kloos<br />

and Thomas Reuter, Körperbilder. Menschenornament in Revuetheater und Revuefilm<br />

(Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1980).<br />

18. Ironically, it was the continuous popularity of Hollywood films that sustained<br />

the connection to the modernists of Weimar cinema vilified in Nazi treatises about<br />

true German art. In addition to German exiles in the United States, several of the<br />

designers associated with screen deco had been directly influenced by the famous<br />

238 Notes to pages 51–58


UFA tradition of quality, beginning with Paramount’s head designer Hans Dreier,<br />

who was responsible for the ultramodern interiors in Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in<br />

Paradise (1932). Acknowledging these patterns of influence, émigré director Edgar<br />

G. Ulmer used the figure of the satanic Hjalmar Poelzig, named after the architect<br />

Hans Poelzig, in the horror film The Black Cat (1934) to “demonstrate” the evils of<br />

high modernism.<br />

19. See Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1931–<br />

1943 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 230–275, and Howard<br />

Mandelbaum and Eric Myers, Screen Deco: A Celebration of High Style in Hollywood<br />

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985).<br />

20. See Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After<br />

the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana<br />

University Press, 1983), pp. 44– 62.<br />

21. Georg Herzberg, review of Venus vor Gericht, Film-Kurier, 5 June 1941.<br />

22. Some of these issues are discussed in the anthology Sexuality & Space,<br />

ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), especially<br />

the articles by Laura Mulvey, “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity”<br />

(pp. 53–72), and by Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism”<br />

(pp. 73–128).<br />

23. The “film-celebrities-at-home” series in the illustrated film magazine Filmwelt<br />

suggests that only a few chose modern designs for their Charlottenburg apartments<br />

and Grunewald villas: Leni Riefenstahl (in Filmwelt 30 [1933]) and Hertha<br />

Thiele (in Filmwelt 5 [1934]). The vast majority of stars, from Rühmann to Hoppe,<br />

preferred the signature style of the Reich’s artistic elites, neogothic and neobaroque<br />

interiors interspersed with contemporary designs in reed and raffia.<br />

24. On the relevance of women’s fashions as an ongoing compromise among the<br />

international trend toward more feminine styles, National Socialist ideas of femininity,<br />

and the new exigencies of the war economy (e.g., in the form of clothes rationing),<br />

see Gloria Sultano, . . . wie geistiges Kokain. Mode unterm Hakenkreuz (Vienna:<br />

Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1995).<br />

4. AT THE MOVIES: FILM AUDIENCES<br />

AND THE PROBLEM OF SPECTATORSHIP<br />

1. Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, p. 222.<br />

2. Linda Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in<br />

Nazi Cinema, p. 34. An insightful analysis of Der große König (The Great King, 1942)<br />

and Kolberg (1945) from the perspective of spectatorship can be found in Irmbert<br />

Schenk, “Geschichte im NS-Film. Kritische Anmerkungen zur filmwissenschaftlichen<br />

Suggestion der Identität von Propaganda und Wirkung,” montage/av 3, no. 2<br />

(1994): 73–98.<br />

3. On cinema as a public sphere, see John Ellis, Visible Fictions (London: Rout-<br />

Notes to pages 59–70 239


ledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 77–90, and Miriam Hansen’s foreword to Oskar Negt,<br />

Public Sphere and Experience: Towards an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian<br />

Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis:<br />

University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. ix–xli.<br />

4. For an overview of the debates on audiences in communications, see the anthology<br />

The Audience and Its Landscape, ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and<br />

Ellen Wartella (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996). For a helpful definition of<br />

spectatorship, see Judith Mayne: “Spectatorship is not only the act of watching a<br />

film, but also the ways one takes pleasure in the experience, or not; the means by<br />

which watching movies becomes a passion, or a leisure-time activity like any other.<br />

Spectatorship refers to how film-going and the consumption of movies and their<br />

myths are symbolic activities, culturally significant events.” In Cinema and Spectatorship<br />

(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 1.<br />

5. See Anon., “Von der Filmkritik zur Filmbetrachtung,” Lichtbildbühne, 2December<br />

1936.<br />

6. For two key texts, see Curt Belling and Alfred Schütze, Der Film in der Hitler-<br />

Jugend (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert, 1937), and Anneliese Ursula Sander, Jugend und<br />

Film (Berlin: Das junge Deutschland, 1944), which was published in conjunction<br />

with the ten-year anniversary of the Youth Film Hour. For an earlier study on young<br />

audiences, also see Alois Funk, “Film und Jugend. Eine Untersuchung über die psychologischen<br />

Wirkungen des Films im Leben der Jugendlichen” (diss., University of<br />

Munich, 1934). For a comparative perspective, see the Payne Fund Studies, especially<br />

Wendell S. Dysinger and Christian A. Ruckmick, The Emotional Responses of<br />

Children to the Motion Picture Situation (New York: Macmillan, 1933), and Ruth Peterson<br />

and L. L. Thurstone, Motion Pictures and the Social Attitudes of Children<br />

(New York: Macmillan, 1933).<br />

7. Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–1945, pp. 621– 627. Some of<br />

these numbers seem unusually high.<br />

8. Joseph Goebbels, speech in the Kaiserhof, 28 March 1933, reprinted in Gerd<br />

Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung über<br />

die Spielfilme des Dritten Reiches, pp. 440, 441.<br />

9. Anon., “Kölner Filmtheater verzichet auf jüdische Besucher,” Der Film 23,<br />

no. 19 (1938).<br />

10. Anon., “Die reinliche Scheidung,” Lichtbildbühne, 14 November 1938.<br />

11. These numbers are taken from Hans Helmut Prinzler, Chronik des deutschen<br />

Films 1895–1994 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995), pp. 151, 73, 303.<br />

12. See relevant data on working-class households in Hans Eiche, “Die Kinoausgaben<br />

im Arbeiterhaushalt,” Film-Kurier, 17 May 1939. On increases in movie attendance,<br />

also see Anon., “Anhaltende Steigerung des Kinobesuches,” Film-Kurier,<br />

3 October 1939.<br />

13. On the campaigns against double features, see Felix Henseleit, “Idee und<br />

Thema—sind das Entscheidende!,” Lichtbildbühne, 20 July 1937. On the importance<br />

of closed screenings, numbered seats, and advance ticket sales, see Anon., “Weiter<br />

auf dem Wege zur geschlossenen Vorstellung,” Film-Kurier, 12 September 1941.<br />

240 Notes to pages 70–73


14. The expression is taken from Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten. Aus dem<br />

neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 91.<br />

15. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1939–1941, p. 8.<br />

16. Ibid., 137.<br />

17. These characterizations appeared regularly in the film reviews published by<br />

Film-Kurier and Lichtbildbühne.<br />

18. Reprinted in Albrecht, Der Film im 3. Reich, p. 192.<br />

19. Deutschland-Berichte der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Deutschlands (Sopade),<br />

6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendundeins, 1980), Zweiter Jahrgang<br />

1935:712–716.<br />

20. Anon., “Das Ergebnis einer Umfrage. Wünsche der Filmbesucher,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

29 May 1933. For a comparative perspective, see the empirical study on<br />

British film audiences between 1939 and 1945, Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan,<br />

eds., Mass-Observation at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1987).<br />

21. Anon., “Eine neue interessante Umfrage. Das Publikum liebt nach wie vor<br />

die Stars...,” Lichtbildbühne, 6 June 1933.<br />

22. Anon., “Ergebnis einer Umfrage: ‘Das größte Filmerlebnis 1935,’” Film-<br />

Kurier, 30 October 1935.<br />

23. On this point, see Anon., “Das Publikum schätzt den guten Kulturfilm,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 28 June 1938.<br />

24. Anon., “Preisausschreiben spiegeln Publikumsgeschmack,” Film-Kurier,<br />

13 May 1941, and M. C. Jann, “‘Du und der Film,’” Film-Kurier, 7 June 1941. On<br />

audience tastes in 1942, compare Anon., “Das Publikum antwortet,” Film-Kurier,<br />

30 July 1942.<br />

25. See Johannes Eckardt, “Film und Masse,” Der deutsche Film 1, no. 1 (1936):<br />

3–7.<br />

26. Anon., “Nicht das Publikum entscheidet, sondern die Leistung der Künstler,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 27 November 1935. Translation slightly altered.<br />

27. See H. M., “Geschmackserziehung durch den Film,” Lichtbildbühne, 17 September<br />

1937, and Kurt Höllger, “Schulung des Geschmacks,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

17 January 1939.<br />

28. [Heinz] Zimmermann, “Die Anpassung an den Publikumsgeschmack,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 15 December 1938.<br />

29. Willibald Ziebis, “Filmbeurteilung und Publikumswirkung,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

12 August 1938. Compare Carl Froelich, “Der Geschmack des Volkes—nicht<br />

der Publikumsgeschmack!,” Der deutsche Film 2, no. 1 (1937): 3.<br />

30. Hermann Meyer, “Mundpropaganda und Film,” Film-Kurier, 19 February<br />

1937. On word of mouth and the emergence of a cinephile culture, see Georg Herzberg,<br />

“Der Film gehört heute zu den beliebtesten Gesprächsthemen,” Film-Kurier,<br />

27 January 1942, and, by the same author, G[eorg] H[erzberg], “Das Publikum ist<br />

heute sachverständiger als früher,” Film-Kurier, 14 May 1942.<br />

31. See W[alter] P[anofsky], “Es spricht für den Film, wenn geklatscht wird,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 29 March 1939.<br />

32. Rolf Flügel, “Das Weinen im Kino,” Film-Kurier, 14 January 1942.<br />

Notes to pages 74 –81 241


33. Anon., “Das ungelöste Rätsel ‘Publikumsgeschmack,’” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

24 August 1933.<br />

34. Wolfgang Liebeneiner, “Im entscheidenden Augenblick darf man nur sich<br />

selber fragen,” Film-Kurier, 31 December 1942.<br />

35. Hans-Walther Betz, Weissbuch des deutschen Films (Berlin: Verlag “Der<br />

Film,” 1936), p. 106.<br />

36. Ibid., p. 88.<br />

37. Walter Panofsky, “Was will das Publikum auf der Leinwand sehen?,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 24 September 1938. Some of these ideas were developed further in his published<br />

dissertation, Die Geburt des Films, ein Stück Kulturgeschichte (Würzburg-<br />

Aumühle: Druckerei wissenschaftlicher Werke, 1940).<br />

38. Felix Henseleit, “Der Filmschöpfer und sein Publikum,” Film-Kurier, 24 December<br />

1940.<br />

39. Wolfgang Wilhelm, Die Auftriebswirkung des Films (Bremen: Arthur Geist,<br />

1940). On some of the results, compare an earlier study by Gerhard Pahl, Die psychologischen<br />

Wirkungen des Films (diss., University of Leipzig, 1926).<br />

40. Anon., “Was Frauen sehen—was Männer sehen,” Lichtbildbühne, 13 January<br />

1937.<br />

41. E. F., “Das p.t. Kinopublikum,” Lichtbildbühne, 5 December 1935.<br />

42. Paula C. Karner, “Träume sind Schäume...,” Lichtbildbühne, 11 September<br />

1935.<br />

43. Anon., “Warum ich den Film dem Theater vorziehe,” Film-Kurier, 14 April<br />

1939.<br />

44. Dorothea Rohne, “17–19 jährige Mädel äußern sich über den Film,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 9 November 1939.<br />

45. The only industry questionnaire that explicitly addressed the interests of<br />

young men in the audience emphasized their preference for films about comradeship,<br />

loyalty, and bravery. In Anon., “Stimmen aus dem Publikum,” Film-Kurier,<br />

7 July 1939.<br />

46. Anon., “Ist der Film eine weibliche Kunst?,” Film-Kurier, 3 June 1938.<br />

47. Christine Großmann, “Worin besteht die Wirkung des Films auf die<br />

Frauen?,” Lichtbildbühne 30 Jahre 1908–1938 (special issue).<br />

48. Ingrid Binné, “Was erwartet die deutsche Frau vom Film?,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

11 June 1938, and, by the same author, “Was sagt die Frau über Wochenschau und<br />

Kulturfilm?,” Lichtbildbühne, 17 August 1938.<br />

49. Eva Zeller, Nein und Amen: autobiographischer Roman (Stuttgart: Deutsche<br />

Verlags-Anstalt, 1986), pp. 68, 79. The experiences of audiences in the Third Reich<br />

have been documented in a number of interviews in Gudrun Marci-Boehncke,<br />

P. Werner, and U. Wischemann, eds., BlickRichtung Frauen (Weinheim: Deutscher<br />

Verlag, 1996). For a historical study of attendance patterns, including during the<br />

Third Reich, see Elisabeth Pommer, Kinobesuch im Lebenslauf. Eine historische und<br />

medienbiographische Studie (Konstanz: IVK Medien, 1999), pp. 82–90.<br />

50. To give only one example, Hanns Joachim Friedrichs links his first thoughts<br />

242 Notes to pages 81–86


about becoming a journalist to a pivotal scene from Auf Wiedersehn, Franziska<br />

(Good-bye, Franziska, 1941): “Sometimes I think of this reporter, played by Hans<br />

Söhnker, whom I saw in a movie theater in Herford in 1942. When he said good-bye<br />

to Marianne Hoppe at the train station to cover the explosion of the Zeppelin or<br />

the dealings of shady characters in China, he always embraced her with the same<br />

words: ‘Good-bye, Franziska.’ That must be wonderful, that would be something,<br />

to run around with a microphone, to tell people something about what happens,<br />

then return home, then leave again.” In “‘Cool bleiben, nicht kalt,’” Der Spiegel 13<br />

(1995): 115.<br />

5. STARS: HEINZ RÜHMANN AND<br />

THE PERFORMANCE OF THE ORDINARY<br />

1. For examples of the recent reorientation, see Thomas Koebner, ed., Idole des<br />

deutschen Films (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1997), and Stephen Lowry and Helmut<br />

Korte, eds., Der Filmstar (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), as well as the two special issues<br />

of montage/av, vol. 6, nos. 2 and 3 (1997 and 1998).<br />

2. See Christa Bandmann, Es leuchten die Sterne. Aus der Glanzzeit des deutschen<br />

Films (Munich: Heyne, 1979), Friedemann Beyer, Die Ufa-Stars im Dritten<br />

Reich (Munich: Heyne, 1991), Cinzia Romani, Tainted Goddesses: Female Film<br />

Stars of the Third Reich, and, from a more scholarly perspective, Andrea Winkler-<br />

Mayerhöfer, Starkult als Propagandamittel. Studien zum Unterhaltungsfilm im Dritten<br />

Reich, especially the chapter on Rühmann (pp. 133–146).<br />

3. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1989), p. 30. Of course,<br />

the term “revolutionary” would require some further qualification.<br />

4. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: British Film Institute,<br />

1987), pp. 17–18.<br />

5. These definitions are taken from Susan Hayward, Key Concepts in Cinema<br />

Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 170.<br />

6. Hans-Dieter Seidel, “Das Lachen ist ein Groschen des Glücks,” Frankfurter<br />

Zeitung, 6 October 1994. For essays written on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday,<br />

see Ulrich Kurowski, EPD Film 9, no. 3 (March 1992), and Hans Peter Koll,<br />

“Hübsch häßlich habt ihr’s hier!,” Film-Dienst 45, no. 6 (March 1992). For an autobiographical<br />

perspective that offers little insight into the period of the Third Reich,<br />

see Heinz Rühmann, Das war’s: Erinnerungen (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1982).<br />

7. Thomas Brandlmeier, “Der ewig pubertierende Deutsche,” Cinegraph. Lexikon<br />

zum deutschsprachigen Film, Lg. 8, E1.<br />

8. Florian Kienzl, “Heinz Rühmann und das Allzumenschliche,” Film-Kurier,<br />

11 December 1940.<br />

9. E. T., “Vom inneren Wert des Humors,” Film-Kurier, 28 December 1940.<br />

10. On the idealized heroic masculinity usually associated with Nazi culture, see<br />

Bernd Hüppauf, “The Birth of Fascist Man from the Spirit of the Front: From<br />

Notes to pages 88–90 243


Langemarck to Verdun” (pp. 45–76), and Silke Hesse, “Fascism and the Hypertrophy<br />

of Male Adolescence” (pp. 157–175), both in The Attractions of Fascism: Social<br />

Psychology and Aesthetics of the “Triumph of the Right,” ed. John Milfull (New York:<br />

Berg, 1990).<br />

11. Michael Wenk, “Heinz im Glück,” Film-Dienst 47, no. 22 (1994): 14.<br />

12. For an argument that presents the harmonious tendencies as a key characteristic<br />

of the German film comedy, see Petra Grimm, “‘Herzensfreud und<br />

Herzensleid’—Anmerkungen zur deutschen Filmkomödie im diachronen Vergleich,”<br />

in Geschichte(n) NS-Film—NS-Spuren heute, ed. Hans Krah (Kiel: Ludwig, 1999),<br />

p. 56.<br />

13. Stephen Lowry, “Heinz Rühmann als Filmstar—Innerfilmische Imagebildung,”<br />

in Heinz Rühmann—ein deutscher Filmstar, ed. Helmut Korte and Stephen<br />

Lowry, pp. 65–92 (Braunschweig: IMF, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, 1995). By<br />

the same author, also see “Der kleine Mann als Star,” in Idole, ed. Koebner, pp. 265–<br />

278. On the class-specific aspects behind Rühmann’s humor, compare Peter Zimmermann,<br />

“Kleiner Mann, was nun? Der Komiker Heinz Rühmann im Obrichkeitsstaat,”<br />

in Idole, pp. 270–292.<br />

14. Georg Seesslen, “Der kleine Mann in Krieg und Frieden,” Frankfurter Rundschau,<br />

6 October 1992.<br />

15. Fritz Aeckerle, “Heinz Rühmann: Der Weg eines Humoristen” (1940), reprinted<br />

in Heinz Rühmann. Ich bin ein Anhänger der Stille, ed. Matthias Peip and<br />

Bernhard Springer (Munich: belleville, 1994), p. 105.<br />

16. Quoted in Karlheinz Wendtland, Geliebter Kintopp. Sämtliche deutsche<br />

Spielfilme, Jahrgang 1931, p. 34.<br />

17. dr. loh., review of So ein Flegel, Film-Kurier, 10 February 1934.<br />

18. Aeckerle, “Heinz Rühmann: Der Weg eines Humoristen,” p. 117.<br />

19. BeWe, “Schauspieler im Filmjahr 1935–36,” Film-Kurier, 8 July 1936.<br />

20. S-k., review of Allotria, Film-Kurier, 13 June 1936.<br />

21. References are taken from reviews of Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes war,<br />

Film-Kritik, 16 July 1937; Hauptsache glücklich!, Film-Kurier, 4 April 1941; and<br />

Quax der Bruchpilot, Film-Kurier, 23 December 1941.<br />

22. Ulrich Kurowski, “Komik aus neuer Sachlichkeit,” epd Kirche und Film 4<br />

(1982): 124.<br />

23. See Thomas Elsaesser, “Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent<br />

Film,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982): 14–25, and Richard McCormick, “From Caligari<br />

to Dietrich: Sexual, Social, and Cinematic Discourses in Weimar Film,” Signs 18,<br />

no. 3 (1993): 640– 668.<br />

24. Karsten Witte, Lachende Erben, toller Tag. Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich,<br />

pp. 240–245.<br />

25. “Keine Stars—Menschen wollen wir sehen!,” Lichtbildbühne, 17 March 1936.<br />

26. See Hans Steinbach, “Der deutsche Filmschauspieler muß volksverbunden<br />

sein,” Lichtbildbühne, 26 November 1935; S-k., “Besetzungsfragen des deutschen<br />

Films,” Film-Kurier, 26 February 1941; and Günther Schwark, “Keine Typengalerie<br />

und keine Erstarrung,” Film-Kurier, 11 March 1941.<br />

244 Notes to pages 91–101


27. On the high star salaries, see Anon., “Wettlauf um die Stars,” Film-Kurier,<br />

23 February 1935. On the importance of the ensemble, see Max Krüger, “Ensemblebildung<br />

im Film,” Film-Kurier, 25 October 1941; Ewald von Demandowsky, “Ensemblebildung<br />

und Gemeinschaftsgeist,” Film-Kurier, 4 August 1942; and Felix<br />

Henseleit, “Schauspielerische Leistung und Gesamtwerk,” Film-Kurier, 14 February<br />

1942. On the political relevance of the star phenomenon, also see S-k., “Star- oder<br />

Führertum?,” Lichtbildbühne, 26 June 1934.<br />

28. Georg Herzberg, review of Nanu, Sie kennen Korff noch nicht?, Film-Kurier,<br />

22 December 1938.<br />

29. Fritz Hippler, Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen, rev. ed. (Berlin: Max Hesse,<br />

1943), p. 95.<br />

30. This definition is inspired by recent anthologies like Christine Gledhill,<br />

ed., Stardom: The Industry of Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) and<br />

Jeremy G. Butler, ed., Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television<br />

(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), as well as by Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing:<br />

Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994). On<br />

screen performance, also see James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley:<br />

University of California Press, 1988), particularly his discussion of expressive<br />

coherence.<br />

31. The reference is to Kenneth Calhoon, “Emil Jannings, Falstaff, and the Spectacle<br />

of the Body Natural,” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 1 (March 1997): 83–<br />

109, especially his discussion of the king’s two bodies.<br />

32. Fritz Aeckerle, “Heinz Rühmann: Der Weg eines Humoristen,” p. 111.<br />

33. j-n., review of Lachende Erben, Film-Kurier, 7 March 1933.<br />

34. Edith Hamann, “Heinz Rühmann,” Filmwoche 23 (1933): 709, and Hermann<br />

Gressieker, “Ein Beispiel von hundert Möglichkeiten: Heinz Rühmann,” Der<br />

deutsche Film 1, no. 6 (1936): 172–173.<br />

35. On the various forms of cinematic and extracinematic identification, see<br />

Stacey, “Feminine Fascinations. Forms of Identification in Star-Audience Relations,”<br />

in Stardom, ed. Gledhill, pp. 141–163.<br />

36. Terra advertisement, Film-Kurier, 6 February 1941.<br />

37. Antje Ascheid, “Nazi Stardom and the ‘Modern Girl’: The Case of Lilian Harvey,”<br />

New German Critique 74 (1998): 62.<br />

6. DETLEF SIERCK AND SCHLUßAKKORD (FINAL CHORD,<br />

1936): A CASE STUDY OF FILM AUTHORSHIP<br />

1. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Columbia University<br />

Press, 1984), p. ix. Most recently, there has been a greater interest in exploring<br />

the historical continuities, as evidenced by two recent retrospectives on the occasion<br />

of the tenth anniversary of his death, the “Filmexil Exilfilm: Detlev Sierck /<br />

Douglas Sirk” retrospective at the Zeughaus-Kino/Deutsches Historisches Museum<br />

Notes to pages 101–107 245


Berlin and the conference organized by Gerd Gemünden at Dartmouth College in<br />

November 1997, which resulted in a special double issue on Detlef Sierck /Douglas<br />

Sirk of Film Criticism 23, nos. 2–3 (1999).<br />

2. On this point, see the excellent study by Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and<br />

Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana<br />

University Press, 1994). The auteurist rediscovery of Sirk has been mapped critically<br />

by William James Horrigan, “An Analysis of the Construction of an Author: The Example<br />

of Douglas Sirk” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1980). For a<br />

largely anecdotal biography published in German, see Elisabeth Läufer, Skeptiker<br />

des Lichts: Douglas Sirk und seine Filme (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987).<br />

3. On La Habanera, see Katie Trumpener, “Puerto Rico Fever: Douglas Sirk, La<br />

Habanera (1937) and the Epistemology of Exoticism,” in “Neue Welt”/“Dritte Welt.”<br />

Interkulturelle Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Lateinamerika und der Karibik, ed.<br />

Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan L. Cocalis, pp. 115–139 (Tübingen and Basel: Francke<br />

Verlag, 1994); Bruce Babington, “Written by the Wind: Sierck /Sirk’s La Habanera<br />

(1937),” Forum for Modern Language Studies 31, no. 1 (1995): 24–36; and the chapter<br />

on La Habanera in Eric Rentschler, Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife,<br />

pp. 125–146. For a close reading of To New Shores, see Marc Silberman, German<br />

Cinema: Texts and Contexts, pp. 51– 65. For a comparative reading of To New<br />

Shores and La Habanera, see Andrew G. Bonnell, “Melodrama for the Master Race:<br />

Two Films by Detlef Sierck (Douglas Sirk),” Film History 10 (1998): 208–218.<br />

4. References to Sierck’s first melodrama frequently contain mistakes and inaccuracies.<br />

For instance, Michael Stern (see note 8) describes Final Chord as the story<br />

of a “heroine [who] runs off to America to escape her impossible life in Germany”<br />

(p. 34). Caryl Flinn confuses Final Chord with Accord Final, a French Sierck film<br />

from 1939; see “Music and the Melodramatic Past of the New German Cinema,” in<br />

Melodrama, ed. Jack Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British<br />

Film Institute, 1994), p. 108. Such close similarity may have affected the director’s<br />

own judgment when he asserted in the Halliday interview that the title of the German<br />

film, which refers to a musical term, has an ambiguous quality; perhaps he was<br />

thinking of the French film, whose title “accord final” means “final chord” as well<br />

as “concluding agreement.”<br />

5. On melodrama and the problem of femininity, see Christine Gledhill, ed.,<br />

Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London:<br />

British Film Institute, 1987), and in particular Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound<br />

and Fury. Observations on the Family Melodrama” (pp. 43– 69) and Laura Mulvey,<br />

“Notes on Sirk and Melodrama” (pp. 75–81). Also see E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood<br />

and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge,<br />

1992), and Marcia Landy, ed., Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television<br />

Melodrama (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).<br />

6. Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–<br />

1943 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. xi–xii.<br />

7. Throughout I will refer to “Sierck” when discussing his German phase, and<br />

246 Notes to pages 107–109


to “Sirk” when discussing his American phase; this distinction also extends to his<br />

critical reception.<br />

8. Michael Stern, Douglas Sirk (Boston: Twayne, 1979), p. 23.<br />

9. Thomas Elsaesser, “Book Review: Sirk on Sirk,” Monogram 4 (1971): 42. A review<br />

in the film press compares his production of As You Like It to the work of<br />

Hilpert and Falkenberg; see “Detlef Siercks Berliner Debüt,” Lichtbildbühne, 9October<br />

1934.<br />

10. Gertrud Koch, “Von Detlef Sierck zu Douglas Sirk,” Frauen und Film 44/45<br />

(1988): 114.<br />

11. Elsaesser, “Documents on Sirk,” in Douglas Sirk, ed. Jon Halliday et al. (Edinburgh:<br />

Edinburgh Film Festival, 1972), p. 8.<br />

12. Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk (London: Secker & Warburg, 1971), pp. 20–21.<br />

A revised edition was published in London by Faber & Faber in 1997.<br />

13. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 18.<br />

14. Sirk in Ibid., 35. For portraits of the director in the German trade press of<br />

the time, see Detlef Sierck, “Das lockende Bild,” Lichtbildbühne, 20 May 1935 (interview),<br />

and S. Pfankuch, “Detlef Sierck und seine Kunst,” Filmwoche 34 (1936).<br />

15. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 9.<br />

16. Review of Schlußakkord, Lichtbildbühne, 25 July 1936. For another positive<br />

review, see “Die Kritik der Woche” in Der Film 21, no. 30 (1936). Sierck’s talent in<br />

working with actors is discussed in a rare article on his theater and film career; see<br />

Hete Nebel, “Der Filmregisseur Detlef Sierck,” Lichtbildbühne, 20 April 1936.<br />

17. Advertisement, Lichtbildbühne, 20 August 1936.<br />

18. Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, p. 43.<br />

19. Sirk in Ibid., 93.<br />

20. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, pp. 11–12.<br />

21. The scene was shot in Berlin’s Theater des Westens; see “Willy Birgel dirigiert<br />

Tschaikowsky,” Lichtbildbühne, 10 March 1936.<br />

22. The fact that the events on the stage so closely mirror the problems of the<br />

woman in the auditorium points to Schröder as the composer of this short operatic<br />

scene.<br />

23. On the use of Beethoven music in other films of the Third Reich, see Hans<br />

Rutz, “Beethoven und der Film,” Film-Kurier, 28 May 1938. In Dreiklang (Triad,<br />

1938), one of the examples cited by the author, Kurt Schröder again incorporated<br />

well-known classical motifs into his musical score; the film is allegedly based on an<br />

idea by Sierck.<br />

24. The movements between Germany and the United States provide a structuring<br />

device for the competing definitions of space, place, and identity in numerous<br />

films from the 1930s, including Verklungene Melodie (Faded Melody, 1938), a<br />

melodrama that keeps Brigitte Horney with conductor-husband and child in New<br />

York—yearning for the love of Willy Birgel in Berlin.<br />

25. Paul Willemen, “Towards an Analysis of the Sirkian System,” in Douglas<br />

Sirk: Imitation of Life, ed. Lucy Fischer (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University<br />

Notes to pages 110–123 247


Press, 1991), p. 274. Even someone as familiar with cinema in the Third Reich as Julian<br />

Petley praises Sierck’s ironic detachment as an effective method of subverting<br />

manifest ideological contents. In “Detlef Sierck,” Cinegraph. Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen<br />

Film, Lg. 8, E6–9. By the same author, see “Sirk in Germany,” Sight &<br />

Sound 57, no. 1 (1987/88): 58– 61.<br />

26. Koch, “Von Detlef Sierck zu Douglas Sirk,” pp. 118–119.<br />

27. Linda Schulte-Sasse, “Douglas Sirk’s Schlußakkord, and the Question of<br />

Aesthetic Resistance,” Germanic Review 73, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 5.<br />

28. See Heide Schlüpmann, Unheimlichkeit des Blicks. Das Drama des frühen<br />

deutschen Kinos (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1990), and Patrice Petro, Joyless<br />

Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton,<br />

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).<br />

29. Karsten Witte, “Ästhetische Opposition? Käutners Film im Faschismus,”<br />

Sammlung. Jahrbuch für antifaschistische Literatur und Kunst 2 (1979). In assessing<br />

the marginalization of the director within these fictions of national cinema, it might<br />

again be useful to resort to a comparative approach, this time involving the other<br />

Axis powers. Japanese filmmakers like Yasojiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi offered<br />

powerful reflections on national identity during the 1930s, and Italian filmmakers<br />

like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica laid the ground for the rise of neorealism<br />

in the early 1940s. By contrast, the German cinema of the 1930s and 1940s<br />

shunned creativity and innovation for the predictability of generic conventions and<br />

therefore failed to produce directors of comparable artistic caliber.<br />

7. THE FOREIGN AND THE FAMILIAR: ON GERMAN-<br />

AMERICAN FILM RELATIONS, 1933–1940<br />

1. See Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany<br />

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), and, more generally on American<br />

popular culture, Hans Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein. Deutsche Kultur<br />

und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945 (Munich: Hanser, 1981), pp. 128–133.<br />

2. On this point, see the important study by Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment:<br />

America in the World Film Market 1907–34 (London: British Film Institute,<br />

1985); Kerry Segrave, American Films Abroad: Hollywood’s Domination of<br />

the World’s Movie Screens (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1997); and, from a European<br />

perspective, Victoria de Grazia, “Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American<br />

Challenge to European Cinemas, 1920–1960,” Journal of Modern History 61, no. 1<br />

(1989): 53–87. In the larger context of German cinema, see Joseph Garncarz,<br />

“Hollywood in Germany: The Role of American Films in Germany, 1925–1990,” in<br />

Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of Cultural Hegemony, ed. David W. Ellwood and<br />

Rob Kroes, pp. 94–135 (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1996). On Hollywood<br />

films in the Third Reich, see Markus Spieker, Hollywood unterm Hakenkreuz. Der<br />

amerikanische Spielfilm im Dritten Reich (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1999).<br />

For the Weimar years, compare Thomas Saunders, From Berlin to Hollywood: Amer-<br />

248 Notes to pages 123–130


ican Cinema and Weimar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),<br />

and, by the same author, “Germany and Film Europe,” in “Film Europe” and “Film<br />

America”: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson<br />

and Richard Maltby, pp. 157–180 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1999).<br />

3. The numbers are taken from Boguslaw Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–<br />

1945, p. 814.<br />

4. According to Motion Picture Almanach 1934/35. On the distinction between<br />

internal and external contingent licenses, see Film Daily Yearbook 1937, p. 1219.<br />

5. r., reviews of Königin Christine, Film-Kurier, 25 October 1934, and Anna<br />

Karenina, Film-Kurier, 1 February 1936.<br />

6. On the popularity of Disney films, see J. P. Storm and M. Dressler, Im Reiche<br />

der Micky Maus: Walt Disney in Deutschland 1927–1945 (Berlin: Henschel, 1991).<br />

7. These are part of a series of letters about “Herbst in Hollywood” and other<br />

American impressions by r. in Film-Kurier, 9–12 November 1935. Compare the arguments<br />

presented by Hermann Gressieker, “Amerikanische Leistungsprinzipien,”<br />

under the motto “Hollywood: Vorbild, nicht Idol” in Der deutsche Film 2, no. 6<br />

(1937): 183, and the series of articles about the Hollywood studio system and the reception<br />

of German films in the United States, beginning in Der Film 22, no. 48 (1936).<br />

8. S-k., “Noch einmal: Die Amerikaner,” Film-Kurier, 2 July 1936.<br />

9. Heading from the English section of Film-Kurier, 1 January 1934.<br />

10. Hans-Walther Betz, Weissbuch des deutschen Films (Berlin: Verlag “Der<br />

Film,” 1936), pp. 102–103.<br />

11. r., review of Zwischen heute und morgen, Film-Kurier, 1 March 1934.<br />

12. Georg Herzberg, review of Saratoga, Film-Kurier, 5 February 1938.<br />

13. S-k., review of Meuterei auf der Bounty, Film-Kurier, 9 September 1936.<br />

14. S-k., review of Gold nach Singapur, Film-Kurier, 12 March 1936. The reference<br />

is to China Seas (1935). Compare the extensive use of American examples in<br />

“Wirklichkeitssinn im Film,” Lichtbildbühne, 6 December 1937.<br />

15. Anon., “Der USA.-Film im neuen Deutschland,” Lichtbildbühne, 25 August<br />

1933.<br />

16. On the impact of the Nazi takeover on the film industry, see “Hitlerism<br />

Forces Standstill of U.S. Film Trade in Germany,” Motion Picture Herald, 15 April<br />

1933, and “Nazis Finally Take Over German Film Industry Reorganization,” Motion<br />

Picture Herald, 10 June 1933; on the use of film as political propaganda, see “Nazis<br />

Set Standards for Future Films,” Motion Picture Herald, 3 April 1937. On the difficult<br />

economic situation for many German studios, see “Increased Costs and Shrinking<br />

Exports Affect German Profits,” Motion Picture Herald, 20 February 1937. The<br />

consequences for U.S. interests in Europe were spelled out in “German Product Decline<br />

Opens Eastern Europe to U.S. Pictures,” Motion Picture Herald, 19 August<br />

1933, and “Austro-German Negotiations Threaten U.S. Film Imports,” Motion Picture<br />

Herald, 12 December 1936. The worsening situation of the Hollywood majors<br />

and their German subsidiaries is also discussed in “U.S. Films Retain Lead in German<br />

Market despite British Rivalry,” Motion Picture Herald, 2 November 1935, and<br />

“Majors Not Quitting despite Nazi Restrictive Acts,” Motion Picture Herald, 4 July<br />

Notes to pages 131–136 249


1936. For the few articles dealing with the Aryan Clause, see “Nazis Begin New Purge<br />

of Film,” Motion Picture Herald, 3 August 1935, and “Aryan Issue Upsets Czech Market,”<br />

Motion Picture Herald, 19 November 1938. The gradual withdrawal of the majors<br />

from Germany is described in “U.S. Companies Quitting Germany as Nazis Admit<br />

Control of Films,” Motion Picture Herald, 10 April 1937; on the impact of the<br />

war, see “War Halts Hollywood’s Last Big European Mart,” Motion Picture Herald,<br />

9 September 1939, and “Nazis Seizing, Banning U.S. Films in Dominated Territories,”<br />

Motion Picture Herald, 13 July 1940.<br />

17. Box Office, 22 April 1939.<br />

18. J., “Es geht abwärts im Film von USA.,” Lichtbildbühne, 13 April 1939.<br />

19. S-r., “Hetzfilme im Dienste der Einkreisung,” Lichtbildbühne, 17 August<br />

1939.<br />

20. On foreign films in the United States, see “Market for Foreign Films in United<br />

States Triples in Three Years,” Motion Picture Herald, 16 April 1938, and “Foreign<br />

Language Films Show in 175 Theatres in 85 Communities,” Motion Picture Herald,<br />

15 July 1939.<br />

21. A.S., “Deutscher Film auf dem Weltmarkt,” Lichtbildbühne, 4 December<br />

1934. In the article, the statement is attributed to Goebbels.<br />

22. The numbers are taken from Drewniak, Der deutsche Film 1938–1945,<br />

p. 794.<br />

23. For reports in the German trade press about these initial boycotts, for instance,<br />

of Acht Mädels im Boot (Eight Girls in a Boat, 1932) in Cleveland, Ohio, see<br />

“The Boycott and Its Backers,” Film-Kurier, 8 July 1933.<br />

24. “Masking of Nazi Films as French Is Charged as New Boycott Looms,” Motion<br />

Picture Herald, 7 November 1936. In New York City, motion-picture theaters<br />

with foreign films in their program had made a gentlemen’s agreement not to show<br />

German films marketed under “foreign flags.” On later boycotts, see “Spanish and<br />

German ‘Political’ Films Attacked in Four States,” Motion Picture Herald, 3 April<br />

1937. On the same day, an enthusiastic title story about the positive reception of<br />

Amphitryon, “Großer moralischer Erfolg des deutschen Films in U.S.A.,” appeared<br />

in Der Film 22, no. 14 (1937). Similar hopes accompanied the U.S. release of<br />

Olympia, as is evident in articles like “Triumph Leni Riefenstahls in New York,” Der<br />

Film 23, no. 48 (1938). In both cases, public protests against films from the Reich<br />

brought a return of anti-Semitic diatribes in the German trade press.<br />

25. See Felix Moeller, Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich,<br />

p. 103.<br />

26. The significance of Yorkville for German-Americans, including as a site of<br />

political confrontations, is thematized in a novel by Emma Gelders Sterne, Incident<br />

in Yorkville (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943), which shows the conversion of a<br />

Hitler Youth into a good American. Yorkville also played a key role in the activities<br />

of the Amerikadeutsche Volksbund; for a general assessment, see Sander A. Diamond,<br />

The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924 –1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell<br />

University Press, 1974).<br />

250 Notes to pages 137–141


27. Nicholas Jenkins, “Goodbye, 1939,” New Yorker, 1 April 1996.<br />

28. K. H., “Kriegsfilm in Yorkville,” Aufbau, 26 July 1940. Responding to letters<br />

from angry German-Americans who protested what they saw as a defamatory equation<br />

of Germans with Nazis, the German-Jewish weekly published a rare statement<br />

on its relationship to the Yorkville population; see M.G., “Pastor Halls Kampf und<br />

Problem,” Aufbau, 27 September 1940. None of the other German films shown in<br />

Yorkville theaters was reviewed in Aufbau. The journal offered only articles on<br />

Hollywood productions with German-Jewish émigrés, the newest anti-Nazi films,<br />

the occasional Yiddish film shown in New York, and, of course, news about the making<br />

of Jew Suess. On the American reception of German war documentaries, see<br />

Thomas Sakmyster, “Nazi Documentaries of Intimidation: ‘Feldzug in Polen’ (1940),<br />

‘Feuertaufe’ (1940) and ‘Sieg im Westen’ (1941),” Historical Journal of Film, Radio<br />

and Television 16, no. 4 (1996): 500–514.<br />

29. H.S., The New York Times Film Reviews (New York: New York Times and<br />

Arno Press, 1970), 2:1044.<br />

30. Ibid.<br />

31. Ibid., 3:332. For a comparative approach, see the highly politicized reception<br />

of German films in Switzerland examined by Ernest Prodolliet, Der NS-Film in<br />

der Schweiz im Urteil der Presse 1933–1945. Eine Dokumentation (Zurich: Chronos,<br />

1999).<br />

32. Colin Ross had just published a book titled Unser Amerika. Der deutsche Anteil<br />

an den Vereinigten Staaten (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1936).<br />

33. All quotes are from Variety Film Reviews 4: 1930–1933, 5: 1934–1937, and<br />

6: 1938–1942 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1983). No page numbers given.<br />

34. Ibid. 4: 6 June 1933.<br />

35. Ibid. 4: 11 July 1933.<br />

36. Ibid. 5: 15 January 1936.<br />

37. Ibid. 5: 7 October and 28 October 1936.<br />

38. Film Daily Yearbook 1938, p. 1151.<br />

39. “New German Film Edict Applied to American Picture at Source,” Motion<br />

Picture Herald, 25 July 1936.<br />

40. See “Nazis, Italy and Japan Allied for Film ‘War,’” Motion Picture Herald,<br />

17 April 1937.<br />

41. As reported in Motion Picture Herald, 1 May 1937.<br />

42. Kurt Hellmer, “New Yorker Notizbuch,” Aufbau, 6 September 1940.<br />

43. See the letter by the Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi League reprinted in Archives<br />

of the Holocaust, Columbia University Library, ed. Karen J. Greenberg (New York<br />

and London: Garland Publ., 1990), 6:161.<br />

44. Exceptions are articles like Carl Dreher, “Parade Ground Art—The German<br />

Film under Hitler,” New Theatre, June 1936, pp. 19–37. On the anti-Nazi and prointerventionist<br />

positions advocated by Warner Brothers, see Michael E. Birdwell,<br />

Celluloid Soldiers (New York: New York University Press, 1999).<br />

45. Box Office, 22 April 1939 (advertisement). On reactions in the German trade<br />

Notes to pages 142–147 251


press, see “Jüdischer USA.-Kampf gegen ‘Nazi-Filme,’”Lichtbildbühne, 15 July 1939,<br />

and “Immer wieder Anti-Nazi-Filme in USA,” Lichtbildbühne, 25 August 1939.<br />

46. See “Showing of Nazi Film Barred in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times,<br />

28 April 1941. On Ferenz’s other political activities, see Cecilia Rasmussen, “Daring<br />

Duo Fought Nazism on Home Front,” Los Angeles Times, 18 April 1999.<br />

8. THE ANNEXATION OF AN IMAGINARY CITY:<br />

THE TOPOS “VIENNA” AND THE WIEN-FILM AG<br />

1. For a historical overview, see Radomir Luza, Austro-German Relations in the<br />

Anschluss Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). Several films offered<br />

veiled comments on the annexation through story lines that involved repeated<br />

border crossings, including Liebe ist zollfrei (Love Is Duty-free, 1941) and Der kleine<br />

Grenzverkehr (Small Border Traffic, 1943).<br />

2. See Anon., “Dr. Goebbels vor Österreichs Künstlern,” Film-Kurier, 31 March<br />

1938, and “Kulturkammer-Gesetz auf Österreich ausgedeht,” Film-Kurier, 16 June<br />

1938. On Austrian cinema before the annexation, see Armin Loacker, Anschluss<br />

im 3 ⁄4 Takt. Filmproduktion und Filmpolitik in Österreich 1930–1938 (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher<br />

Verlag, 1999). On the restructuring of the Austrian film industry during<br />

the 1930s, see Gerhard Renner, “The Anschluss of the Film Industry after 1934,”<br />

in Austria in the Thirties: Culture and Politics, ed. Kenneth Segar and John Warren,<br />

pp. 253–266 (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1991). On the Austrian film industry<br />

after the war, see Bernhard Frankfurter, “Rund um die ‘Wien-Film’-Produktion.<br />

Staatsinteresse als Impulsgeber des Massenmediums eines Jahrzehnts,” in Wien<br />

1945 davor/danach, ed. Liesbeth Waechter-Böhm, pp. 185–195 (Vienna: Christian<br />

Brandstätter, 1985), and, more generally, Ruth Beckermann and Christa Blüminger,<br />

ed., Ohne Untertitel. Fragmente einer Geschichte des österreichischen Kinos (Vienna:<br />

Sonderzahl, 1996).<br />

3. See Anon., “Filmproduktionsstätten in Österreich,” Film-Kurier, 2 April 1938,<br />

and “Filmproduktionspläne in Wien,” Film-Kurier, 18 May 1938. On Jewish motionpicture<br />

theater owners, also see “Was dem Berliner in Wien auffällt,” Film-Kurier,<br />

16 May 1938.<br />

4. On this period as part of Austrian film history, see Walter Fritz, Kino in Österreich<br />

1929–1945. Der Tonfilm (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1991),<br />

pp. 105–209. Fritz also edited two conference proceedings, Der Wiener Film im Dritten<br />

Reich (1988) and 1938 im Film. Vorher/Nachher (1989), both published by the<br />

Austrian Film Archives.<br />

5. On turn-of-the-century Vienna as a cultural paradigm, see Carl E. Schorske,<br />

Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage, 1981), and Allan<br />

Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Touchstone, 1973).<br />

6. In fact, “The Vienna Effect,” the title of a recent conference and film series<br />

held at UCLA in April 1999, played on the term’s currency as a cultural phenome-<br />

252 Notes to pages 147–151


non and a promotional factor relating to the city’s profitability as a backdrop in films<br />

and commercials.<br />

7. Ilse Wehner, “Ein Jahr Wien-Film,” Der deutsche Film 5, no. 1 (1940): 9.<br />

8. Volkmar Iro, quoted by Walter Fritz, Im Kino erlebe ich die Welt. 100 Jahre<br />

Kino und Film in Österreich (Vienna: Christian Brandstätter, 1997), p. 166.<br />

9. On the cultural films produced by Wien-Film, see Günter Krenn, Die Kulturfilme<br />

der Wien-Film 1938–1945 (Vienna: Schriftenreihe des Österreichischen<br />

Filmarchivs, 1992). The capital was portrayed in two films, Ein Tag in Schönbrunn<br />

(A Day in Schönbrunn, 1940) and Rund um Wien (Around Vienna, 1942).<br />

10. Karl Hartl, “Das künstlerische Programm des Wiener Films,” Film-Kurier,<br />

10 March 1939.<br />

11. As reported by Geza von Cziffra, Es war eine rauschende Ballnacht. Eine Sittengeschichte<br />

des deutschen Films (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1987), p. 177.<br />

12. Gertraud Steiner, Film Book Austria: The History of the Austrian Film from<br />

Its Beginnings to the Present Day (Vienna: Medium for the Federal Chancellery,<br />

1997), p. 39. Reading such continuities in more critical ways (for instance, with an<br />

eye toward Austrofascism), Gottfried Schlemmer has asserted that “the National Socialist<br />

film [in Austria] did not exist at all. Instead certain contents were interpreted<br />

differently, more strongly, under National Socialism.” In Elisabeth Büttner and<br />

Christian Dewald, Anschluß an morgen. Eine Geschichte des österreichischen Films<br />

von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1997), p. 141.<br />

13. The numbers appear in Anon., “Der deutsche Film im Ausland,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 10 March 1937.<br />

14. Frieda Grafe, “Wiener Beiträge zu einer wahren Geschichte des Kinos,” in<br />

Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Österreichische Filmschaffende in der Emigration vor 1945,<br />

ed. Christian Carnelli and Michael Omasta (Vienna: Wespennest, 1993), 1:227.<br />

15. See “Emigranten,” Lichtbildbühne, 24 January 1934.<br />

16. Dr. Lanske, “Österreich und Deutschland,” Film-Kurier, 8 April 1937. By the<br />

same author, see “Die weltanschauliche Ausrichtung des österreichischen Films,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 19 May 1937.<br />

17. Anon., “Der Weg ist frei!,” Film-Kurier, 12 March 1938.<br />

18. For an apologetic anecdotal account of the period, see Hans Moser, Ich trag<br />

im Herzen drin ein Stück vom alten Wien, with Georg Markus (Munich: Herbig,<br />

1980), pp. 169–212. The careers of Austrian stage and screen actors during the annexation<br />

have been examined repeatedly in recent years, most famously in the case<br />

of Paula Wessely, with contributions ranging from Elfriede Jelinek’s controversial<br />

play Burgtheater and Axel Conti’s filmic rendition of 1938 to Maria Steiner’s critical<br />

biography Paula Wessely. Die verdrängten Jahre (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik,<br />

1996).<br />

19. Klaus Kreimeier, “G. W. Pabst. Der große Unbekannte,” in G. W. Pabst, ed.<br />

Wolfgang Jacobsen (Berlin: Argon, 1997), p. 12.<br />

20. Anon., “Schluß jetzt mit dem Wiener Milieu!,” Lichtbildbühne, 23 October<br />

1934.<br />

Notes to pages 152–156 253


21. Hugo Jury, quoted by Oliver Rathkolb, Führertreu und gottbegnadet. Künstlereliten<br />

im Dritten Reich (Vienna: ÖBV, 1991), p. 52.<br />

22. “Willi Forst—der Mann, der eine Stadt schuf,” Lichtbildbühne, 10 June 1936.<br />

On Forst, see Robert Dachs, Willi Forst. Eine Biografie (Vienna: Kremayr & Schiriau,<br />

1986).<br />

23. The first part of a serialized novel about the life and work of Jauner, titled<br />

“König der Operette,” appeared in Filmwelt 5 (1941) together with reports about<br />

what was then hailed as the latest prestige production by the Wien-Film AG. On the<br />

attempted revival of the musical genre, also see K., “. . . Und sie lebt doch!,” Der<br />

deutsche Film 5, no. 6 (1940): 111–112. For a definition of the film operetta, see Gerd<br />

Eckert, “Filmoperette und Operettenfilm,” Der deutsche Film 6, no. 1 (1941): 2–5.<br />

24. Reprinted in Eberhard Mertens, ed., Die großen deutschen Filme: Ausgewählte<br />

Filmprogramme 1930–1945 (Hildesheim: Olms, 1995).<br />

25. Forst, quoted in Steiner, Film Book Austria, p. 35. For a similar argument,<br />

see Geza von Cziffra, Ungelogen. Erinnerungen an mein Jahrhundert (Munich: Herbig,<br />

1988), p. 243.<br />

26. As remembered by Walter Fritz in Kino in Österreich 1945–1983. Film zwischen<br />

Kommerz und Avantgarde (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1984),<br />

p. 16.<br />

27. “Das Geheimnis: Ewiges Wien,” Film-Kurier, 6 July 1940.<br />

28. Thomas Kramer and Martin Prucha, Film im Lauf der Zeit. 100 Jahre Kino<br />

in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz (Vienna: Ueberreuter, 1994), pp. 171,<br />

152.<br />

29. On the “golden age” of the Viennese operetta, see Richard Traubner, Operetta:<br />

A Theatrical History (New York: Doubleday, 1983), pp. 103–147.<br />

30. On the two film versions and Forst’s postwar claims about subversive filmmaking,<br />

see Karl Sierek’s “‘Wien’?-’Wien’!,” Synema 1 (1996): 103–139.<br />

9. THE POWER OF THOUGHT: REDEFINING POPULAR<br />

<strong>CINEMA</strong> BETWEEN REALISM AND ILLUSIONISM<br />

1. Earlier studies have examined theories of realism only in the context of documentary<br />

film practices, most notably Hans-Jürgen Brandt in NS-Filmtheorie und<br />

dokumentarische Praxis: Hippler, Noldan, Junghans (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987).<br />

2. Joseph Goebbels, quoted by Hans Traub, Der Film als politisches Machtmittel<br />

(Munich: Münchener Druck- und Verlagshaus, 1933), p. 27. The statement was made<br />

after the banning of the Horst-Wessel film. On a similar occasion, Goebbels also<br />

made the frequently quoted remark, “We don’t want our SA men to march through<br />

the film or across the stage. They should march on the street.” See the speech in the<br />

Tennishallen Berlin, 15 May 1933, reprinted in Gerd Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische<br />

Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reiches,<br />

p. 442.<br />

3. Goebbels, speech at the meeting of the Reich Film Chamber, 5 March 1937 in<br />

254 Notes to pages 157–175


the Krolloper Berlin, reprinted in Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik,<br />

p. 457.<br />

4. Goebbels, speech in the Kaiserhof, 28 March 1933, reprinted in Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische<br />

Filmpolitik, pp. 439, 441.<br />

5. Goebbels, “Grundsätzlichkeiten des Films,” Film-Kurier, 22–30 July 1935 (the<br />

quote is from the last article in the series). Compare the later “Die sieben Film-<br />

Thesen,” Lichtbildbühne, 19–20 April 1939.<br />

6. Goebbels, speech at the meeting of the Reich Film Chamber, 5 March 1937<br />

in the Krolloper Berlin, reprinted in Albrecht, Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik,<br />

p. 451.<br />

7. Anon., “Die Tagespresse hat das Wort,” Film-Kurier, 4 March 1938.<br />

8. Georg Herzberg, “Im Film muß es glatt gehen!,” Film-Kurier, 18 August 1942.<br />

On the same page, see Karl Ude, “Soll der Kellner im Film Wechselgeld herausgeben?”<br />

For earlier discussions, compare Georg C. Klaren, “Äußere Echtheit—<br />

innere Wahrheit,” Lichtbildbühne, 1 June 1938.<br />

9. Karl Ritter, “Vom Wesen echter Filmkunst,” Lichtbildbühne, 4 March 1938.<br />

10. S-k., “Mehr zeitnahe Stoffe mit Gegenwartsmenschen,” Film-Kurier, 29 April<br />

1938.<br />

11. Hermann Gleßgen, “Film und ‘Entstädterung,’” Lichtbildbühne, 18 March<br />

1938.<br />

12. Anon., “Laßt deutsche Filme in Deutschland spielen!,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

14 April 1939. According to Alfred Klütz, filmmakers chose foreign locations to avoid<br />

confrontations with professional organizations and regional tourist boards; see his<br />

“Ort der Handlung: Irgendwo im Ausland,” Film-Kurier, 4 June 1938.<br />

13. Hans Bramkamp, “Der Beruf auf der Leinwand,” Film-Kurier, 17 September<br />

1938. Also see Johannes Eckardt, “Der Film als Spiegel von Zeit und Menschen,”<br />

Lichtbildbühne, 14 September 1936. In fact, several feature films thematized the construction<br />

of the Reichsautobahnen.<br />

14. Fritz Hippler, Betrachtungen zum Filmschaffen, rev. ed. (Berlin: Max Hesse,<br />

1943), p. 39. The book is based on a series of articles published in the trade press in<br />

May of 1941.<br />

15. Hippler, “Politischer Film oder Unterhaltungsfilm?,” Film-Kurier, 26 September<br />

1940. Hippler wrote about his activities during the Third Reich in Die Verstrickung.<br />

Einstellungen und Rückblenden (Düsseldorf: Mehr Wissen, 1981).<br />

16. Hippler, “Die Stoff-Frage im Film,” Film-Kurier, 19 October 1940.<br />

17. Hippler, “Jeder Film muß eine Moral haben,” Film-Kurier, 14 May 1941.<br />

Hippler insisted that films always be clear on the question “Whom should I love and<br />

whom should I hate?” However, he also warned that the kind of black-and-white effect<br />

often used in the portrayal of Jews should not be duplicated in the juxtaposition<br />

of city and country folk or white-collar and blue-collar workers.<br />

18. Peter von Werder, Trugbild und Wirklichkeit im Film. Aufgaben des Films im<br />

Umbruch der Zeit, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Schwarzhäupter-Verlag, 1943), p. 21. The book<br />

was reviewed positively in Film-Kurier, 13 March 1942.<br />

19. Gunter Groll, Film. Die unentdeckte Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1939), p. 31.<br />

Notes to pages 175–179 255


The book is based on “Das Gesetz des Films. Eine Stil-Untersuchung über den Film<br />

als Kunstgattung” (diss., University of Munich, 1937). Similar arguments can be<br />

found in the dissertation of another Kutscher student, Hartwig von Behr, in “Kunst<br />

und Film. Beitrag zu einer Theorie über das Wesen der Filmkunst” (diss., University<br />

of Munich, 1942).<br />

20. Groll, Film: Die unentdeckte Kunst, p. 32. After the war, Groll worked as a<br />

film critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung and influenced an entire generation of German<br />

film critics and directors.<br />

21. Ibid., p. 34.<br />

22. Ibid., p. 131.<br />

23. Walter Panofsky, Die Geburt des Films, ein Stück Kulturgeschichte. Versuch<br />

einer zeitgeschichtlichen Darstellung des Lichtspiels in seinen Anfangsjahren<br />

(Würzburg-Aumühle: Druckerei wissenschaftlicher Werke Konrad Triltsch, 1940),<br />

p. 15.<br />

24. Sigismund von Radecki, “Ist der Film eine Kunst?,” Querschnitt 16 (1936): 6.<br />

25. Rolf Lauckner, “Film ist Kunst,” Film-Kurier, 10 March 1939.<br />

26. Ritter, “Über die Grenzen zwischen Bühne und Film,” Film-Kurier, 4 March<br />

1938.<br />

27. Heinz Pauck, “Ist Naturtreue unkünstlerisch?,” Film-Kurier, 19 May 1942.<br />

Making a very similar point, Heinrich Plog asserted elsewhere that “film’s trueness<br />

to life can and should never coincide with that of life, that film’s truth is another<br />

truth than that of life.” In “Phantastik und Realistik,” Film-Kurier, 12 May 1942. For<br />

a more sustained argument, see Heinrich Koch and Heinrich Braune, Von deutscher<br />

Filmkunst. Gehalt und Gestalt (Berlin: Hermann Scherping, 1943).<br />

28. G[eorg] H[erzberg], “Der Film darf nicht doppelte Illusion bieten,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 4 January 1940.<br />

29. Hermann Wanderscheck, “Film zwischen Illusion und Wirklichkeit,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 11 October 1941. Compare L. F. D., “Gibt der Film ein falsches Weltbild?,”<br />

Lichtbildbühne, 29 January 1938.<br />

30. Hermann Alexander Lang, “Keine Angst vor— Qualität!,” Film-Kurier,<br />

20 January 1934.<br />

31. Gerhard Menzel, “Der Stil eines Films richtet sich nach dem Stoff,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 6 August 1940.<br />

32. S-k., “Tragische Stoffe brauchen nicht zu deprimieren,” Film-Kurier, 14 October<br />

1939.<br />

33. Panofsky, “Die Sache mit dem happy end,” Film-Kurier, 11 May 1942. For an<br />

earlier defense of happy endings, see Anon., “Warum und wieso ‘happy end’?,” Lichtbildbühne,<br />

23 June 1936. On the sociopsychological function of comedies, compare<br />

“Deutschland kann lachen—weil es lachen kann!,” Lichtbildbühne, 19 October 1936;<br />

Wilhelm Utermann, “Der deutsche Lustspielfilm im jetzigen Kriege,” Film-Kurier,<br />

24 September 1940; Günter Ebert, “Komödie und Mimus. Untersuchung zur Dramaturgie<br />

des Filmlustspiels,” Film-Kurier, 4 January 1941; and Felix Henseleit, “Heitere<br />

Filme mit ernstem Hintergrund,” Film-Kurier, 2 December 1941.<br />

256 Notes to pages 179–182


34. Ritter, “Das soziale Problem—filmisch gestaltet,” Lichtbildbühne, 5 July<br />

1938. The conversation with Ritter was recorded by Wilhelm Schnauck.<br />

35. E. Hoppe, “Der Filmheld von vorgestern und heute,” Film-Kurier, 7 March<br />

1942.<br />

36. Gerd Eckert, “Unsere Filmtendenz ist ein mutiger Realismus,” Film-Kurier,<br />

27 February 1941.<br />

37. Here it might be interesting to consider in what ways the debates on filmic<br />

realism draw attention not only to the continuities with Weimar film theory but also<br />

to the overlaps with Marxist debates on proletarian film and literature during the<br />

1920s and 1930s, not to speak of the overlaps with the doctrine of socialist realism.<br />

After all, the leftist debates on film and literature in the late Weimar Republic established<br />

an important, but often unacknowledged, theoretical framework for thinking<br />

about class identity, culture, and ideology in the context of genre cinema. Here the<br />

contribution of Georg Lukács, the most influential voice in the debates on realism<br />

during the 1930s and 1940s, is especially useful when it comes to tracing the changing<br />

meaning of realism—and, by implication, of political tendency—from the avantgarde<br />

movements of the Weimar period and the emerging doctrine of socialist realism<br />

in the Soviet Union to the subterranean presence of realism as a category of<br />

perception, desire, and, ultimately, simulation in the cinema of the Third Reich. The<br />

important 1932 essays “‘Tendency’ and Partisanship?” and “Reportage or Portrayal?”<br />

are available in English in Georg Lukács, Essays on Realism, ed. and intro.<br />

Rodney Livingstone, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980).<br />

38. Ewald von Demandowsky, quoted in S-k., “Grundforderungen an den deutschen<br />

Film,” Film-Kurier, 21 September 1937.<br />

39. Traub, Der Film als politisches Machtmittel, p. 7.<br />

40. Panofsky, “Der Film als Zeiterscheinung,” Film-Kurier, 6 March 1942.<br />

41. Ibid., p. 95.<br />

42. Arnold Bacmeister, “Wann verletzt ein Film nationalsozialistisches Empfinden?,”<br />

Film-Kurier, 11 May 1934.<br />

43. Felix Henseleit, “Der Film von morgen,” summary of a lecture by Heinrich<br />

Zimmermann, Lichtbildbühne, 20 January 1938.<br />

44. Edmund Theodor Kauer, Der Film. Vom Werden einer neuen Kunstgattung<br />

(Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1943), p. 17.<br />

45. von Demandowsky, “Das Wie und Was im Film,” Film-Kurier, 31 December<br />

1937.<br />

46. Frank Maraun, “Die Bedeutung der Wochenschau neben Funk und Presse”<br />

(1935), reprinted in Albrecht, Der Film im 3. Reich, p. 141.<br />

47. For a comparative approach, see Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus:<br />

Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), especially<br />

in relation to Gramsci’s notion of folklore.<br />

48. Heinz Kindermann, “Die neuen Wertgrundlagen” (1939), reprinted in NS-<br />

Literaturtheorie. Eine Dokumentation, ed. Sander L. Gilman, intro. Cornelius<br />

Schnauber (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971), p. 21. On literary theory in the<br />

Notes to pages 182–187 257


Third Reich, see Klaus Vondung, Völkisch-nationale und nationalsozialistische Literaturtheorie<br />

(Munich: List, 1973).<br />

49. S-k., “Heraus aus der Enge! ‘Volkstümlich’ ist nicht ‘kleinbürgerlich,’” Film-<br />

Kurier, 30 November 1935. Also see st., “Grundlagen des volkhaften Films,” Film-<br />

Kurier, 22 October 1934.<br />

50. Anon., “Die deutsche Kunst hat Weg und Ziel,” Lichtbildbühne, 19 July 1937.<br />

10. A QUESTION OF REPRESENTATION:<br />

WORKING WOMEN AND WARTIME <strong>CINEMA</strong><br />

1. Elisabeth Cowie, untitled contribution, Camera Obscura 20/21 (1989): 129.<br />

2. See Heide Schlüpmann, “Trugbilder weiblicher Autonomie im nationalsozialistischen<br />

Film,” in Frauen und Faschismus in Europa. Der faschistische Körper,<br />

ed. Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Gerda Schuchlik, pp. 211–228 (Pfaffenweiler:<br />

Centaurus, 1990), and the earlier “Faschistische Trugbilder weiblicher Autonomie,”<br />

Frauen und Film 44/45 (1988): 44– 66. For studies on specific themes<br />

such as the representation of motherhood and the contribution of female stars, see<br />

Dora Traudisch, Mutterschaft mit Zuckerguß? Frauenfeindliche Propaganda im NS-<br />

Spielfilm, and Ute Bechdolf, Wunsch-Bilder? Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Unterhaltungsfilm.<br />

Male-female relations are also discussed in Gabriele Lange, Das<br />

Kino als moralische Anstalt. Soziale Leitbilder und die Darstellung gesellschaftlicher<br />

Realität im Spielfilm des Dritten Reiches, pp. 114–152. For a recent contribution that<br />

includes a chapter on home front films, see Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third<br />

Reich, especially pp. 119–150.<br />

3. Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema<br />

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 75–76. Citation modified.<br />

Her conclusion about the German wartime emphasis on women’s role as mothers<br />

(i.e., widespread resistance to the nationalization of women) is less convincing:<br />

“Germany was so ideologically overinvested in the image of woman as mother of the<br />

Aryan race that it could not resort to the military conscription of women, even when<br />

its survival was at stake. Further study would presumably show that Germany was<br />

unable to tolerate the kind of contradictory and fluid definitions of femininity in circulation<br />

in Britain” (p. 86).<br />

4. For studies on women in National Socialism, see Jill Stephenson, Women in<br />

Nazi Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) and The Nazi Organization of Women<br />

(London: Croom Helm, 1981). On female sexuality and the question of motherhood,<br />

see Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology<br />

Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review<br />

Press, 1984) and Claudia Kootz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and<br />

Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). On femininity and representation,<br />

also see Elaine Martin, ed., Gender, Patriarchy and Fascism in the Third Reich: The<br />

Response of Women Writers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). For more<br />

258 Notes to pages 187–193


detailed case studies, compare Annette Kuhn, ed., Frauenleben im NS-Alltag (Pfaffenweiler:<br />

Centaurus, 1994).<br />

5. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (London:<br />

Routledge, 1984), p. 144.<br />

6. On the representation of workers and employees in 1930s German film, see<br />

Holger Schettler, Arbeiter und Angestellte im Film. Die Darstellung der sozialen Lage<br />

von Arbeitern und Angestellten im deutschen Spielfilm 1918–1939 (Bielefeld: Verlag<br />

für Regionalgeschichte, 1992), pp. 195–224.<br />

7. Comparisons with other European cinemas would offer many insights as well,<br />

especially in light of the many German-French and German-Austrian coproductions<br />

during the early 1930s and the various efforts by European cinemas to develop alternatives<br />

to Hollywood through the incorporation of national and regional styles.<br />

8. For a case study on Leander in the terms of performance, see Gudrun<br />

Marci-Boehncke and Wolfgang Gast, “Vexierbilder im Lichtspielhaus. Eine Analyse<br />

von Wirkungspotentialen am Beispiel des NS-Unterhaltungsfilms Der Blaufuchs,”<br />

Augen-Blick 15 (1993): 9– 48. On the role of the female star in organizing identifications,<br />

see Verena Lueken, Zur Erzählstruktur des Nationalsozialistischen Films. Versuch<br />

einer strukturalen Analyse.<br />

9. Georg Herzberg, review of Die vier Gesellen, Film-Kurier, 11 October 1938.<br />

10. Among other things, Harvey notes inconsistencies in the development of her<br />

character, beginning with the calculated tone in which the naïve young bride informs<br />

her new husband at the altar of his dismissal from his job. See the unpublished<br />

typescript by Harvey in Christine Habich, Lilian Harvey (Berlin: Haude &<br />

Spener, 1990), p. 149.<br />

11. According to Felix Moeller, Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film im Dritten<br />

Reich, p. 207. On the negative reception in the trade press, see Günter Schwark,<br />

review of Frau am Steuer, Film-Kurier, 21 June 1939.<br />

12. Antje Ascheid, “Nazi Stardom and the ‘Modern Girl’: The Case of Lilian Harvey,”<br />

New German Critique 74 (Spring–Summer 1998): 88.<br />

13. See Georg Herzberg, review of Unser Fräulein Doktor, Film-Kurier, 18 March<br />

1941, and, for a different view, Der deutsche Film (1940/41): 204.<br />

14. Charlotte Decker, Unser Fräulein Doktor, Aktuelle Filmbücher (Berlin: Carl<br />

Curtius, 1941), p. 1.<br />

11. THE LEGACIES OF THE PAST IN THE<br />

<strong>CINEMA</strong> OF POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION<br />

1. For a general introduction to the cinema of the postwar period, see the<br />

exhibition catalogue Zwischen gestern und morgen. Westdeutscher Nachkriegsfilm<br />

1946–1962 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum, 1989). On the difficulties<br />

of coming to terms with the past, see Bettina Greffarth, Gesellschaftsbilder der<br />

Nachkriegszeit. Deutsche Spielfilme 1945–1949 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 1995),<br />

Notes to pages 193–211 259


and Ursula Bessen, Trümmer und Träume. Nachkriegszeit und fünfziger Jahre auf<br />

Zelluloid (Bochum: Studienverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1989). On important social<br />

and cultural aspects, see Heide Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing<br />

National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University<br />

Press, 1995). For more anecdotal accounts, see Manfred Barthel, Als Opas Kino jung<br />

war. Der deutsche Nachkriegsfilm (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1991), and Micaela<br />

Jary, Traumfabriken made in Germany. Die Geschichte des deutschen Nachkriegsfilms<br />

1945–1960 (Berlin: edition q, 1993). A case study on the last film in production<br />

can be found in Hans-Christoph Blumenberg, Das Leben geht weiter. Der letzte<br />

Film des Dritten Reiches (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1993). On the profitable business with the<br />

so-called Überläuferfilme, see Holger Theuerkauf, Goebbels Filmerbe. Das Geschäft<br />

mit unveröffentlichten Ufa-Filmen.<br />

2. The 1980s brought a growing awareness among filmmakers of the politics of<br />

culture in the Third Reich; examples include Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen<br />

(1981) and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (Veronika Voss, 1982), about the<br />

singer Lale Andersen and the actress Sibylle Schmitz, respectively, and Istvan<br />

Szabo’s Mephisto (1981), about the actor/director Gustaf Gründgens. This process<br />

continued in the 1990s with the two-part documentary by Ray Müller on Leni Riefenstahl,<br />

Die Macht der Bilder (The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl,<br />

1991), and Joseph Vilsmaier’s Comedian Harmonists (1998), about the famous a<br />

capella singing group from the 1920s and 1930s.<br />

3. For select examples of the countless star memoirs published since the 1960s,<br />

see (in alphabetical order): Lil Dagover, Ich war die Dame (Munich: Schneekluth,<br />

1979), Rudolf Forster, Das Spiel—mein Leben (Berlin: Propyläen, 1967), Willy<br />

Fritsch, . . . das kommt nicht wieder. Erinnerungen eines Filmschauspielers (Zurich:<br />

Classen, 1963), Käthe Haack, In Berlin und anderswo (Munich: Herbig, 1971), Johannes<br />

Heesters, Es kommt auf die Sekunde an. Erinnerungen an ein Leben im Frack<br />

(Munich: Blanvalet, 1978), Paul Hörbiger, Ich hab’ für Euch gespielt. Erinnerungen,<br />

written in collaboration with Georg Markus (Munich: Herbig, 1979), Emil Jannings,<br />

Theater—Film—das Leben und ich. Erinnerungen, written with C. C. Bergius (Berchtesgarden:<br />

Zimmer & Herzog, 1951), Viktor de Kowa, Achduliebezeit. Aus dem Libretto<br />

meines Lebens (Stuttgart: DVA, 1971), Zarah Leander, Es war so wunderbar!<br />

Mein Leben (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973), Marika Rökk, Herz mit Paprika<br />

(Munich: Heyne, 1976), and Kristina Söderbaum, Nichts bleibt immer so. Rückblende<br />

auf ein Leben vor und hinter der Kamera (Bayreuth: Hestia, 1983).<br />

4. Bernhard Minetti, Erinnerungen eines Schauspielers, ed. Günther Rühle<br />

(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1985), p. 148. Compare Wolfgang Staudte’s<br />

more nuanced remarks on his work as an extra in Jud Süss (Jew Suess, 1940), reprinted<br />

in Wolfgang Staudte, ed. Eva Orbanz (Berlin: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek,<br />

1977), p. 65.<br />

5. The term comes from the famous study by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich,<br />

Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich:<br />

R. Piper, 1968). Their study serves as an important reference point in Anton Kaes’s<br />

From ‘Hitler’ to ‘Heimat’: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard<br />

260 Notes to pages 211–213


University Press, 1989), and Eric L. Santner’s Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory,<br />

and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), the first<br />

scholarly books to focus on feature films—in this case, from the 1970s and 1980s—<br />

as a medium for working through the traumas of German history.<br />

6. Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth (Munich: Piper, 1992),<br />

4:1699. Details of the case are mentioned in Curt Riess, Das gab’s nur einmal. Die<br />

große Zeit des deutschen Films (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1985), 3:145–159.<br />

7. For an overview of DEFA cinema during the early years, see Christiane Mückenberger<br />

and Günter Jordan, “Sie sehen selbst, Sie hören selbst . . .” Die DEFA von<br />

ihren Anfängen bis 1949 (Marburg: Hitzenroth, 1994).<br />

8. Kurt Maetzig, quoted in Bessen, Trümmer und Träume, p. 153. On the historical<br />

relevance of the Maetzig film, also see Greffrath, Gesellschaftsbilder der Nachkriegszeit,<br />

pp. 175–188.<br />

9. As Christiane Mückenberger observes, the musical score for the Maetzig film<br />

was written by Wolfgang Zeller, who also worked on Jew Suess. Likewise, cinematographer<br />

Friedl Behn-Grund shot the suicide scene in a dramatic fashion reminiscent<br />

of Ich klage an (I Accuse, 1941). In Ralf Schnell, ed., Das zweite Leben der Filmstadt<br />

Babelsberg. DEFA-Spielfilme 1946–1992 (Berlin: Henschel, 1994), pp. 41– 42.<br />

10. Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942),<br />

p. 201.<br />

11. On Gottschalk, see Ulrich Liebe, verehrt verfolgt vergessen. Schauspieler als<br />

Naziopfer (Berlin: Quadriga, 1992), pp. 63–95.<br />

12. The Hamburg premiere of Marriage in the Shadow was accompanied by<br />

protests against the presence of Veit Harlan and his wife Kristina Söderbaum in the<br />

audience. Maetzig thematized this incident, as well as two highly publicized trials in<br />

1949 and 1950 against the director of Jew Suess for “crimes against humanity,” in<br />

Roman einer Ehe (Story of a Marriage, 1952) through the figure of film director<br />

Hartmann.<br />

13. A sequence analysis of the ending can be found in Peter Pleyer, Deutscher<br />

Nachkriegsfilm 1946–1948 (Münster: C. J. Fahle, 1965), pp. 219–231.<br />

14. Hence also Maetzig’s comment that “I wouldn’t have been as moved by the<br />

fate of the Wielands if they had been completely free of guilt.” In Kurt Maetzig, Filmarbeit:<br />

Gespräche, Reden, Schriften, ed. Günter Agde (Berlin: Henschel, 1987),<br />

p. 54.<br />

15. Compare the account by Riess, Das gab’s nur einmal, 3:44– 47.<br />

16. Claudia Dillmann-Kühn, Artur Brauner und die CCC. Filmgeschäft, Produktionsalltag,<br />

Studiogeschichte 1946–1990 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsches Filmmuseum,<br />

1990), p. 141.<br />

17. Compare the argument developed by Kaja Silverman in her analysis of<br />

Hollywood war films from the early 1940s in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New<br />

York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 52–121.<br />

18. On this point, compare Walther Schmieding, Kunst oder Kasse. Der Ärger mit<br />

dem deutschen Film (Hamburg: Rütting & Loening, 1961), p. 30.<br />

19. In contrast to Birgel, Albers inspired numerous biographies, including Uwe<br />

Notes to pages 213–227 261


Jens Schumann, Hans Albers: Seine Filme—sein Leben (Munich: Heyne, 1980), Hans<br />

Christoph Blumenberg, “In meinem Herzen, Schatz . . .” Die Lebensreise des Schauspielers<br />

und Sängers Hans Albers (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), and Michaela<br />

Krützen, Hans Albers. Eine deutsche Karriere (Weinheim: Beltz, 1995). Albers has<br />

also been the subject of a 1997 retrospective in the Filmmuseum Potsdam; see the<br />

catalogue, with an essay by Bärbel Dalichow, Hans Albers. Ein Leben in Bildern (Berlin:<br />

Henschel, 1997).<br />

20. Hermann Gressieker, “Der Schauspieler als Star: Hans Albers,” Der deutsche<br />

Film 2, no. 1 (1937): 16.<br />

21. R. A. Stemmle, “25 Jahre Hans Albers,” Der deutsche Film 7, no. 9 (1942): 12.<br />

22. I owe this insight to Daniel Wild.<br />

23. By 1955 and 1956, Albers had briefly appeared among the top four male stars<br />

measured by Star-Revue’s Starometer, but then rapidly declined in popularity. By<br />

contrast, his frequent costar Heinz Rühmann, the proverbial “little man,” continued<br />

to enjoy a phenomenal success, often sharing first place in the mid-1950s with a<br />

newcomer like O. W. Fischer. I am grateful to Temby Caprio for providing me with<br />

this information.<br />

262 Notes to pages 227–229


SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY<br />

Albrecht, Gerd. 1969. Nationalsozialistische Filmpolitik. Eine soziologische Untersuchung<br />

über die Spielfilme des Dritten Reiches. Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke.<br />

———. 1979. Der Film im 3. Reich. Karlsruhe: DOKU.<br />

Baird, Jay W. 1974. The Mythical World of Nazi War Propaganda, 1933–1945. Minneapolis:<br />

University of Minnesota Press.<br />

Bechdolf, Ute. 1992. Wunsch-Bilder? Frauen im nationalsozialistischen Unterhaltungsfilm.<br />

Tübingen: Vereinigung für Volkskunde.<br />

Becker, Wolfgang. 1973. Film und Herrschaft. Organisationsprinzipien und Organisationsstrukturen<br />

der nationalsozialistischen Filmpropaganda. Berlin: Spiess.<br />

Belach, Helga, ed. 1979. Wir tanzen um die Welt. Deutsche Revuefilme 1933–1945.<br />

Munich: Hanser.<br />

Cadars, Pierre, and Francis Courtade. 1972. Le cinéma nazi. Paris: Eric Losfeld.<br />

Donner, Wolf. 1995. Propaganda und Film im “Dritten Reich.” Afterw. Andreas Kilb.<br />

Berlin: TIP Verlag.<br />

Drewniak, Boguslaw. 1987. Der deutsche Film 1938–1945. Düsseldorf: Droste.<br />

Fox, Jo. 2000. Filming Women in the Third Reich. Oxford: Berg.<br />

Frieden, Sandra, et al., eds. 1993. Gender Perspectives in German Cinema. 2 vols.<br />

Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers.<br />

Ginsberg, Terri, and Kirsten Thompson, eds. 1996. Perspectives on German Cinema.<br />

New York: Simon & Schuster.<br />

Goebbels, Joseph. 1982. The Goebbels Diaries, 1939– 41. Trans. and ed. Fred Taylor.<br />

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.<br />

Hoffmann, Hilmar. 1994. The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism,<br />

1933–1945. Trans. Volker R. Berghahn. Providence, R.I.: Berghahn.<br />

Hollstein, Dorothea. 1971. Antisemitische Filmpropaganda. Die Darstellung des<br />

Juden im nationalsozialistischen Spielfilm. Munich and Berlin: Verlag für<br />

Dokumentation.<br />

Horak, Jan-Christopher. 1984. Fluchtpunkt Hollywood. Eine Dokumentation zur<br />

Filmemigration nach 1933. Münster: MAkS.


Hull, David Stewart. 1969. Film in the Third Reich: A Study of the German Cinema<br />

1933–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />

Jacobsen, Wolfgang, ed. 1992. Babelsberg. Ein Filmstudio 1912–1992. Berlin: Argon.<br />

———, Anton Kaes, and Hans Helmut Prinzler, eds. 1993. Die Geschichte des deutschen<br />

Films. Stuttgart: Metzler.<br />

Jung, Uli, ed. 1993. Der deutsche Film. Aspekte seiner Geschichte von den Anfängen<br />

bis zur Gegenwart. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.<br />

Kanzog, Klaus. 1994. “Staatspolitisch besonders wertvoll.” Ein Handbuch zu 30<br />

deutschen Spielfilmen der Jahre 1934 bis 1945. Munich: Diskurs Film.<br />

Kelson, John F. 1996. Catalogue of Forbidden German Feature and Short Film Productions<br />

Held in Zonal Film Archives of Film Section, Information Services<br />

Division, Control Commission for Germany (BE). Westport, Conn.: Greenwood<br />

Press.<br />

Koepnick, Lutz. Forthcoming. The Dark Mirror: German Cinema between Hitler<br />

and Hollywood. Berkeley: University of California Press.<br />

Krah, Hans, ed. 1999. Geschichte(n) NS-Film—NS-Spuren heute. Kiel: Ludwig.<br />

Kramer, Thomas, and Dominik Siegrist. 1991. Terra. Ein Schweizer Filmkonzern im<br />

Dritten Reich. Afterw. Hans-Ulrich Jost. Zurich: Chronos.<br />

Kreimeier, Klaus. 1996. The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company,<br />

1918–1945. Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber. New York: Hill and Wang.<br />

Lange, Gabriele. 1994. Das Kino als moralische Anstalt. Soziale Leitbilder und die<br />

Darstellung gesellschaftlicher Realität im Spielfilm des Dritten Reiches. Frankfurt<br />

am Main: Peter Lang.<br />

Leiser, Erwin. 1974. Nazi Cinema. Trans. G. Mander and D. Wilson. New York:<br />

Macmillan.<br />

Lowry, Stephen. 1991. Pathos und Politik. Ideologie in Spielfilmen des Nationalsozialismus.<br />

Tübingen: Niemeyer.<br />

Lueken, Verena. 1981. Zur Erzählstruktur des Nationalsozialistischen Films. Versuch<br />

einer strukturalen Analyse. Siegen: Universitäts-Gesamthochschule Siegen.<br />

Maiwald, Klaus-Jürgen. 1983. Filmzensur im NS-Staat. Dortmund: Nowotny.<br />

Moeller, Felix. 1998. Der Filmminister. Goebbels und der Film im Dritten Reich. Berlin:<br />

Henschel.<br />

Murray, Bruce, and Christopher Wickham, eds. 1992. Framing the Past: The Historiography<br />

of German Cinema and Television. Carbondale: University of Southern<br />

Illinois Press.<br />

Petley, Julian. 1979. Capital and Culture: German Cinema 1933– 45. London: British<br />

Film Institute.<br />

Peukert, Detlev J. K. 1987. Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism<br />

in Everyday Life. Trans. Richard Deveson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University<br />

Press.<br />

Reimer, Robert, ed. 2000. Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays<br />

on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House.<br />

Rentschler, Eric. 1996. The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife. Cambridge,<br />

Mass.: Harvard University Press.<br />

264 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich


Romani, Cinzia. 1992. Tainted Goddesses: Female Film Stars of the Third Reich.<br />

Trans. Robert Connolly. New York: Sarpedon.<br />

Schulte-Sasse, Linda. 1996. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in<br />

Nazi Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.<br />

Silberman, Marc. 1995. German Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Detroit: Wayne State<br />

University Press.<br />

Smith, David Calvert. 2000. The German Bibliography 1895–1949. Jefferson, N.C.:<br />

McFarland.<br />

Theuerkauf, Holger. 1998. Goebbels Filmerbe. Das Geschäft mit unveröffentlichten<br />

Ufa-Filmen. Berlin: Ullstein.<br />

Traudisch, Dora. 1993. Mutterschaft mit Zuckerguss? Frauenfeindliche Propaganda<br />

im NS-Spielfilm. Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus.<br />

Welch, David. 1985. Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945. Oxford: Oxford<br />

University Press.<br />

Wendtland, Karlheinz. 1988. Geliebter Kintopp. Sämtliche deutsche Spielfilme von<br />

1929–1945. Berlin: Verlag Medium Film.<br />

Wetzel, Kraft, and Peter A. Hagemann. 1982. Zensur—verbotene deutsche Filme<br />

1933–1945. Berlin: Volker Spiess.<br />

Winkler-Mayerhöfer, Andrea. 1992. Starkult als Propagandamittel. Studien zum Unterhaltungsfilm<br />

im Dritten Reich. Munich: Ölschläger.<br />

Witte, Karsten. 1995. Lachende Erben, toller Tag. Filmkomödie im Dritten Reich.<br />

Munich: Vorwerk.<br />

In addition, the following special issues of journals contain important<br />

articles:<br />

Augen-Blick 15 (1993)<br />

Augen-Blick 22 (1996)<br />

Frauen und Film 44/45 (1988)<br />

montage/av 3, no. 2 (1994)<br />

New German Critique 74 (1998)<br />

Select Bibliography 265


THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK


INDEX OF GERMAN<br />

TITLES AND NAMES<br />

Acht Mädels im Boot (Eight Girls in a Boat,<br />

1932), 250n.23<br />

Affäre Blum (1948), 214<br />

Albach-Retty, Wolf, 154, 199<br />

Albers, Hans, 35, 77, 90, 93, 100, 213, 223–<br />

224, 227–230<br />

Alles für Gloria (Everything for Gloria,<br />

1941), 199<br />

Alles wegen dem Hund (All Because of the<br />

Dog, 1935), 145<br />

Allotria (Tomfoolery, 1936), 58, 94, 95, 98,<br />

142, 217<br />

Amphitryon (1935), 64, 141<br />

Anschlag auf Baku (Attack on Baku,<br />

1942), 53<br />

Anton der Letzte (Anton the Last, 1939), 145<br />

Arnheim, Rudolf, 78, 179<br />

Asphalt (1929), 49, 53<br />

Auf der Reeperbahn nachts um halb eins<br />

(On Reeperbahn Half Past Midnight,<br />

1954), 228<br />

Auf Wiedersehn, Franziska (Good-bye,<br />

Franziska, 1941), 62, 243n.50<br />

Baal, Karin, 222<br />

Balázs, Béla, 179<br />

Barcarole (1935), 142<br />

Befreite Hände (Liberated Hands, 1935),<br />

198<br />

Beim nächsten Kuß knall ich ihn nieder<br />

(With the Next Kiss I’ll Shoot Him,<br />

1995), 237n.32<br />

Berger, Ludwig, 28, 29, 217<br />

Bergmann, Ingrid, 198<br />

Bergner, Elisabeth, 37, 143<br />

Bernhardt, Kurt (Curtis Bernhardt), 24, 29,<br />

30, 55<br />

Bettelstudent, Der (The Beggar Student,<br />

1936), 144<br />

Birgel, Willy, 77, 100, 112, 114, 196, 213,<br />

223–226, 230<br />

Bismarck (1942), 178<br />

Blaufuchs, Der (The Arctic Fox Stole, 1938),<br />

142<br />

Bois, Curt, 30<br />

Bolvary, Geza von, 155<br />

Borsche, Dieter, 222<br />

Brauner, Artur, 217<br />

brave Sünder, Der (The Humble Sinner,<br />

1931), 95–97<br />

Brecht, Bertolt, 111, 112, 183<br />

Brennendes Geheimnis (Burning Secret,<br />

1933), 30<br />

Buchholz, Horst, 222<br />

Buchner, Hans, 78<br />

Café Electric (1927), 156<br />

Clarissa (1941), 199<br />

Cziffra, Geza von, 155<br />

Dagover, Lil, 112, 114, 122<br />

Das gab’s nur einmal (It Happened Only<br />

Once, 1958), 228<br />

Demandowsky, Ewald von, 183, 185<br />

Dietrich, Marlene, 136<br />

Dr. Crippen an Bord (Dr. Crippen on Board,<br />

1942), 58<br />

drei von der Tankstelle, Die (The Three<br />

from the Filling Station, 1930), 93, 95,<br />

104<br />

Dreiklang (Triad, 1938), 147n.23


Eggebrecht, Axel, 3<br />

Eggerth, Marta, 155<br />

Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadow,<br />

1947), 213–217<br />

Eichberg, Richard, 228<br />

Ein Lied geht um die Welt (A Song Travels<br />

around the World, 1933), 29, 144<br />

Ein Mädchen mit Prokura (A Young Woman<br />

with Power of Attorney, 1934), 195<br />

Ein Mann mit Grundsätzen? (A Man with<br />

Principles?, 1943), 198<br />

Eine Frau wie Du (A Woman Like You,<br />

1939), 199, 215<br />

Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music,<br />

1939), 157<br />

Eine Mutter kämpft um ihr Kind (A Mother<br />

Fights for Her Child, 1938), 125<br />

Einmal eine große Dame sein (To Be a Real<br />

Lady Once, 1933), 194<br />

Ekel, Das (The Grouch, 1939), 142<br />

Engel, Erich, 155, 205, 214<br />

Englisch, Lucie, 143<br />

englische Heirat, Die (The English Marriage,<br />

1934), 194, 217<br />

Entlassung, Die (The Dismissal, 1942), 53<br />

Episode (1935), 155<br />

ewige Jude, Der (The Eternal Jew, 1940), 30,<br />

74, 177<br />

Eyck, Peter van, 218<br />

F.P.1 antwortet nicht (F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer,<br />

1932), 53, 54<br />

Fanck, Arnold, 227<br />

Feiler, Hertha, 93<br />

Feinde (Enemies, 1940), 225<br />

Feldzug in Polen (The Polish Campaign,<br />

1940), 142, 143, 147<br />

Feuerzangenbowle, Die (The Hot Fruit<br />

Punch, 1944), 99<br />

Film ohne Titel (Film without Title, 1948),<br />

222<br />

Fischer, O. W., 262n.23<br />

Föhn (Foehn, 1950), 227<br />

Forst, Willi, 150, 155, 158–160, 162, 165, 168,<br />

217<br />

Frau am Scheidewege, Die (The Woman at<br />

the Crossroads, 1938), 199<br />

Frau am Steuer (Woman at the Wheel,<br />

1939), 201–204<br />

Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon,<br />

1929), 53<br />

Frau im Strom (Woman in the River,<br />

1939), 152<br />

268 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich<br />

Frau meiner Träume, Die (The Woman of<br />

My Dreams, 1944), 54<br />

Frauen sind keine Engel (Women Are No<br />

Angels, 1943), 58<br />

Frauenliebe—Frauenleid (Woman’s Love—<br />

Woman’s Suffering, 1937), 125<br />

freudlose Gasse, Die (The Joyless Street,<br />

1925), 31, 155<br />

Freund, Karl, 52<br />

Friesennot (Frisian Plight, 1935), 145<br />

Fritsch, Willy, 132, 143, 160, 201, 222<br />

Froelich, Carl, 97<br />

Fürst von Pappenheim, Der (The Count of<br />

Pappenheim, 1927), 236n.21<br />

Fürst Woronzeff (Count Woronzeff, 1934),<br />

225<br />

Gabriela (1950), 222<br />

ganz großen Torheiten, Die (Such Great<br />

Foolishness, 1937), 156<br />

Geliebte Welt (Beloved World, 1942), 192<br />

George, Heinrich, 57, 77, 90, 102, 212<br />

Gerron, Kurt, 30<br />

Glückskinder (Lucky Kids, 1936), 54, 132<br />

Glückszylinder, Der (The Magic Top Hat,<br />

1932), 142<br />

Goebbels, Joseph, 3, 4, 6, 25, 27, 32, 52, 55,<br />

72, 74, 93, 136, 149, 150, 175, 213, 219<br />

Gold (1934), 53, 54, 56, 57<br />

goldene Stadt, Die (The Golden City, 1942),<br />

215<br />

Gottschalk, Joachim, 213–215, 229<br />

Greifer, Der (The Catcher, 1958), 228<br />

Groll, Gunter, 179<br />

Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom Street<br />

No. 7, 1944), 228<br />

große König, Der (The Great King, 1942),<br />

76, 239n.2<br />

große Liebe, Die (The Great Love, 1942), 96,<br />

222<br />

große und die kleine Liebe, Die (The Great<br />

and the Little Love, 1938), 194<br />

Großstadtmelodie (Big City Melody, 1943),<br />

198<br />

Gründgens, Gustaf, 100, 212, 235n.16,<br />

260n.2<br />

Haas, Dolly, 34, 37, 143<br />

Hallo Janine (Hello Janine, 1939), 58<br />

Hans Westmar (1933), 26<br />

Hansen, Max, 24, 30, 34, 37, 42<br />

Harlan, Veit, 4, 110, 126, 215, 228, 261n.12<br />

Harms, Rudolf, 78


Hartl, Karl, 152, 153<br />

Harvey, Lilian, 132, 201, 202<br />

häßliche Mädchen, Das (The Ugly Girl,<br />

1933), 24–39, 41, 45, 194<br />

Hauptsache glücklich (Happiness Is the<br />

Main Thing, 1940), 94, 95<br />

Heiberg, Kirsten, 64<br />

Heimkehr (Homecoming, 1941), 178, 192<br />

Heimkehr ins Glück (Homecoming to Happiness,<br />

1933), 99<br />

Heinz im Mond (Heinz in the Moon,<br />

1934), 93<br />

Helm, Brigitte, 77<br />

Herking, Ursula, 198<br />

Herlth, Robert, 52, 64<br />

Hermann, Willi A., 62<br />

Herrscher, Der (The Ruler, 1937), 145, 228<br />

Herz von St. Pauli, Das (The Heart of St.<br />

Pauli, 1957), 228<br />

Herzberg, Georg, 180<br />

Hildebrand, Hilde, 40<br />

Hippler, Fritz, 30, 78, 101, 177, 178<br />

Hitler, Adolf, 24, 55, 59, 149, 201<br />

Hitlerjunge Quex (Hitler Youth Quex, 1933),<br />

26, 57<br />

Hochbaum, Werner, 155<br />

Hofkonzert, Das (The Court Concert, 1936),<br />

142<br />

Hohe Schule (Haute École, 1934), 155<br />

Holst, Maria, 160, 165<br />

Holzmeister, Judith, 168<br />

Hoppe, Marianne, 62, 100, 132, 143, 196,<br />

239n.23, 243n.50<br />

Hörbiger, Attila, 154<br />

Hörbiger, Paul, 154<br />

Horney, Brigitte, 100, 143, 198, 199, 215<br />

Hotel Sacher (1939), 74<br />

Hunte, Otto, 52–54, 56<br />

Hurra! Ich bin Papa! (Hurrah! I Am a Dad!,<br />

1939), 98<br />

Ich brauche dich (I Need You, 1944), 196,<br />

225<br />

Ich für dich und du für mich (I for You and<br />

You for Me, 1934), 194<br />

Ich klage an (I Accuse, 1941), 76, 261<br />

Ich vertraue dir meine Frau an (I Entrust<br />

You with My Wife, 1943), 95, 98<br />

Im Sonnenschein (In the Sunshine, 1936),<br />

144n.9<br />

Immensee (1943), 126<br />

In weiter Ferne, so nah (Far Away, So Close,<br />

1993), 89<br />

Jacoby, Georg, 54<br />

Jannings, Emil, 102, 143, 212, 217<br />

Jud Süss (Jew Süss, 1940), 53<br />

Jugo, Jenny, 194, 204, 205<br />

Jürgens, Curd, 169<br />

Kameradschaft (Comradeship, 1932), 55<br />

Kauer, Edmund Theodor, 185<br />

Käutner, Helmut, 62, 110, 126<br />

Kettelhut, Erich, 52–55<br />

Kiepura, Jan, 144, 155<br />

Kindermann, Heinz, 187<br />

kleine Grenzverkehr, Der (Small Border<br />

Traffic, 1943), 252n.1<br />

Klinger, Paul, 215<br />

Knef, Hildegard, 222<br />

Koch, Lotte, 199<br />

Kolberg (1945), 74, 192, 239n.2<br />

Komar, Dora, 165, 169<br />

Kongress tanzt, Der (The Congress Dances,<br />

1932), 156, 160<br />

Kortner, Fritz, 29, 30, 96<br />

Kosterlitz, Hermann (Henry Koster), 24,<br />

28–31, 35, 36, 44, 45, 55<br />

Kracauer, Siegfried, 3, 25, 31, 47, 188<br />

Krahl, Hilde, 198<br />

Kreißler, Dorit, 161<br />

Kuhle Wampe (Whither Germany?, 1932),<br />

142<br />

La Habanera (1937), 109<br />

Lachende Erben (Laughing Heirs, 1933), 95,<br />

104<br />

Laemmle, Carl, 24, 146<br />

Lamprecht, Gerhard, 195<br />

Land der Liebe (Land of Love, 1937), 25<br />

Lang, Fritz, 26, 49, 52, 154<br />

Lange, Konrad, 78<br />

Lauckner, Rolf, 180<br />

Lauter Lügen (All Lies, 1938), 93, 95<br />

Leander, Zarah, 4, 77, 100, 122, 132, 143,<br />

196, 212, 222<br />

Leise flehen meine Lieder (Quietly My Songs<br />

Are Weeping, 1933), 155<br />

letzte Mann, Der (The Last Laugh, 1924),<br />

49, 52<br />

letzte Mann, Der (The Last Man, 1955),<br />

227<br />

Leuwerik, Ruth, 218<br />

liebe Augustin, Der (Beloved Augustin,<br />

1940), 157<br />

Liebe ist zollfrei (Love Is Duty-free, 1941),<br />

252n.1<br />

Index 269


Liebelei (1933), 29, 155<br />

Liebeneiner, Wolfgang, 53, 81, 98, 110, 126<br />

Liebespremiere (Love Premiere, 1943), 62<br />

Liebling der Götter (Darling of the Gods,<br />

1930), 217<br />

Liebling der Götter (Darling of the Gods,<br />

1960), 213, 217–220<br />

Lieselotte von der Pfalz (1935), 145, 219<br />

Lili Marleen (1981), 260n.2<br />

Lingen, Theo, 93, 156, 162<br />

Lorre, Peter, 30, 143<br />

Lubitsch, Ernst, 25, 28, 44, 136, 139<br />

Lukács, Georg, 183, 257n.37<br />

M (1931), 142, 236n.21<br />

Macht der Bilder, Die (The Wonderful, Horrible<br />

Life of Leni Riefenstahl, 1991),<br />

260n.2<br />

Mädchen im Vorzimmer, Das (The Girl at<br />

the Reception, 1940), 195<br />

Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform,<br />

1932), 142<br />

Mädchen Johanna, Das (The Girl Called<br />

Johanna, 1935), 145<br />

Mädchen von Fanö, Das (The Girl from<br />

Fanö, 1940), 215<br />

Maetzig, Kurt, 214<br />

Maich, Herbert, 3<br />

Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht, Der (The<br />

Man Looking for His Murderer, 1931), 93<br />

Maraun, Frank, 183<br />

Martin, Paul, 54, 201, 217<br />

Maskerade (Masquerade, 1934), 155<br />

Matterstock, Albert, 204<br />

Matull, Kurt, 56<br />

May, Joe, 154<br />

Mayer, Carl, 154<br />

Mayerhofer, Elfie, 198<br />

Meine Frau, die Hochstaplerin (My Wife,<br />

the Impostor, 1931), 95<br />

Menschen ohne Vaterland (1937, People<br />

without Fatherland), 225<br />

Menzel, Gerhard, 180<br />

Mephisto (1981), 260n.2<br />

Metropolis (1926), 49, 52, 55, 56<br />

Minetti, Bernhard, 212<br />

Moser, Hans, 93, 142, 154, 162<br />

Müller, Renate, 39, 41, 42, 143, 194, 195,<br />

217–220, 229<br />

Münchhausen (1943), 228<br />

Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm, 139, 228<br />

Mustergatte, Der (The Model Husband,<br />

1937), 95, 98, 99<br />

270 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich<br />

Nagy, Käthe von, 194, 198<br />

Nanu, Sie kennen Korff noch nicht? (What,<br />

You Haven’t Met Korff Yet?, 1938), 99<br />

Nielsen, Asta, 132<br />

Nikolajewa, Genia, 36<br />

Odemar, Fritz, 41<br />

Ohm Krüger (1942), 178<br />

Olympia (Olympiad, 1938), 147, 250n.24<br />

Operette (Operetta, 1940), 158, 162–168<br />

Opfergang (Sacrifice, 1944), 126<br />

Ophüls, Max, 29, 95, 112, 155<br />

Oswald, Richard, 29, 154<br />

Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 55<br />

Page vom Dalmasse-Hotel, Der (The Page<br />

from the Dalmasse-Hotel, 1933), 37, 194<br />

Pallenberg, Max, 96, 97<br />

Panowsky, Walter, 78, 82, 180, 182, 184<br />

Paradies der Junggesellen (Paradise of Bachelors,<br />

1939), 98, 104<br />

Patrioten (Patriots, 1937), 142<br />

Pommer, Erich, 24<br />

Privatsekretärin, Die (The Private Secretary,<br />

1931), 31, 217, 218<br />

Professor Mamlock (1961), 214<br />

Quax, der Bruchpilot (Quax, the Crash Pilot,<br />

1941), 93, 99<br />

Rabenalt, Arthur Maria, 64, 225<br />

Raddatz, Carl, 222<br />

Reinhardt, Gottfried, 218<br />

Reisch, Walter, 155<br />

Reise nach Tilsit, Die (The Journey to Tilsit,<br />

1940), 76<br />

. . . reitet für Deutschland (Riding for Germany,<br />

1941), 225<br />

Renate im Quartett (Renate in the Quartet,<br />

1942), 198<br />

Riefenstahl, Leni, 147, 239n.23, 260n.2<br />

Ritter, Karl, 74, 175, 180<br />

Rittmeister Wronski (Colonel Wronski,<br />

1954), 226<br />

Röhrig, Walter, 52<br />

Rökk, Marika, 54, 100, 132<br />

Roman einer Ehe (Story of a Marriage,<br />

1952), 261n.12<br />

Rothschilds, Die (The Rothschilds, 1940),<br />

212<br />

Rühmann, Heinz, 57, 59, 87–106, 143,<br />

239n.23<br />

Ruttmann, Walter, 153


Saison in Kairo (Season in Cairo, 1933), 218<br />

SA-Mann Brand (SA-Man Brand, 1933), 144,<br />

181<br />

Scampolo, ein Kind der Straße (Scampolo, a<br />

Child of the Street, 1932), 37<br />

Schell, Maria, 222<br />

Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936), 54, 107–<br />

127, 225<br />

Schmidt, Joseph, 29<br />

Schmitz, Sybille, 199, 260n.2<br />

Schneider, Madga, 199<br />

Schrammeln (Schrammel Music, 1944), 157<br />

Schritt vom Weg, Der (The Step from the<br />

Path, 1939), 142<br />

Schröder, Kurt, 115, 247n.22<br />

Schünzel, Reinhold, 24, 28, 29, 41–55, 217,<br />

237n.32<br />

schwarze Robe, Die (The Black Robe, 1944),<br />

199<br />

schwedische Nachtigall, Die (The Swedish<br />

Nightingale, 1941), 215<br />

Schweikart, Hans, 213<br />

Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss, Die (Veronika<br />

Voss, 1982), 260n.2<br />

Seine Tochter ist der Peter (His Daughter Is<br />

Called Peter, 1937), 144<br />

Sieg im Westen (Victory in the West, 1941),<br />

146, 147<br />

Sierck, Detlef (Douglas Sierck), 54, 107–113,<br />

122–127<br />

Siodmak, Curt, 56<br />

Siodmak, Robert, 29, 30<br />

So ein Flegel (Such a Brat, 1934), 96<br />

So ein Mädel vergißt man nicht (You Don’t<br />

Forget Such a Girl, 1933), 29<br />

Söderbaum, Kristina, 100, 143, 261n.12<br />

Söhnker, Hans, 64, 222, 243n.50<br />

Solari, Laura, 199<br />

Solistin Anna Alt (Solo Artist Anna Alt,<br />

1945), 200<br />

Sonnenuntergang (Before Sunset, 1956), 229<br />

Speer, Albert, 59<br />

Spione (Spies, 1928), 49, 236n.21<br />

Stadt Anatol (City of Anatol, 1936), 53<br />

Stadt ohne Juden (City without Jews, 1926),<br />

156<br />

Stark, Traudl, 144<br />

Stemmle, Rudolf Adolf, 93<br />

Tag der Freiheit (Day of Freedom, 1935), 142<br />

Tasnady, Maria von, 113<br />

Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Das (The Testament<br />

of Dr. Mabuse, 1933), 26, 142<br />

Thiele, Herta, 239n.23<br />

Thiele, Wilhelm, 154<br />

Thimig, Hermann, 39, 42, 43<br />

Togger (1937), 219<br />

tolle Bomberg, Der (The Mad Bomberg,<br />

1957), 228<br />

Tourjansky, Viktor, 224<br />

Traub, Hans, 184<br />

Traumulus (1936), 147<br />

Trenker, Luis, 57<br />

Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will,<br />

1935), 76<br />

Tunnel, Der (The Tunnel, 1933), 30, 54–56<br />

Über alles in der Welt (Above All in the<br />

World, 1940), 74<br />

. . . und über uns der Himmel (... and<br />

Above Us the Sky, 1947), 223<br />

Ucicky, Gustav, 155<br />

Uhlig, Anneliese, 200<br />

Ulrich, Luise, 154<br />

Umwege des schönen Karl, Die (The Roundabouts<br />

of Handsome Karl, 1938), 59<br />

unmögliche Frau, Die (The Impossible<br />

Woman, 1936), 199<br />

Unser Fräulein Doktor (Our Miss Ph.D.,<br />

1940), 204<br />

Unsterblicher Walzer (Immortal Waltz, 1939),<br />

152<br />

Urlaub auf Ehrenwort (On Honorable Leave,<br />

1938), 145<br />

Venus vor Gericht (Venus on Trial, 1941), 59<br />

Verklungene Melodie (Faded Melody, 1938),<br />

247n.24<br />

verlorene Sohn, Der (The Prodigal Son,<br />

1934), 57, 142<br />

Verräter (Traitors, 1936), 145, 225<br />

Versprich mir nichts (Don’t Promise Me Anything,<br />

1937), 125<br />

vier Gesellen, Die (The Four Apprentices,<br />

1938), 198<br />

Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria,<br />

1933), 23, 38– 45, 142, 217<br />

Vollbrecht, Karl, 52–55<br />

Vom Teufel gejagt (Chased by the Devil,<br />

1950), 224<br />

Vorstadtvarieté (Neighborhood Variety,<br />

1935), 155<br />

Wallburg, Otto, 36, 37<br />

Walzerkrieg (Waltz Wars, 1933), 30, 156, 217<br />

Weidemann, Hans, 78, 79<br />

Index 271


Weiss Ferdl, 143<br />

weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü, Die (The White<br />

Hell of Piz Palü, 1929), 227<br />

Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods<br />

Love, 1942), 157<br />

Wenn die Abendglocken läuten (When the<br />

Evening Bells Ring, 1951), 226<br />

Wenn die Liebe Mode macht (When Love<br />

Makes Fashion, 1932), 218<br />

Wenn wir alle Engel wären (If We All Were<br />

Angels, 1936), 95–97<br />

Werder, Peter von, 178, 179<br />

Wessely, Paula, 77, 154, 156<br />

Wieck, Dorothea, 136, 199<br />

Wien 1910 (1943), 153<br />

Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood, 1942), 158–<br />

162, 168<br />

Wiener G’schichten (Viennese Stories, 1940),<br />

157<br />

Wiener Mädeln (Viennese Girls, 1945– 49),<br />

158, 162–168<br />

272 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich<br />

Wilder, Billy, 154<br />

Wilhelm, Wolfgang, 82, 83<br />

Winkler, Max, 150<br />

Wir machen Musik (We Make Music, 1942),<br />

58<br />

Wohlbrück, Adolf (Anton Walbrook), 40, 41,<br />

143<br />

Wunschkonzert (Request Concert, 1940), 75,<br />

77, 93, 223<br />

Ziemann, Sonja, 217<br />

Zimmermann, Heinz, 79<br />

Zu neuen Ufern (To New Shores, 1937), 109,<br />

147, 225<br />

Zwei glückliche Menschen (Two Happy<br />

People, 1943), 199<br />

Zwei Herzen im Dreivierteltakt (Two Hearts<br />

in Three-Four Time, 1930), 156<br />

Zwischen gestern und morgen (Between Yesterday<br />

and Tomorrow, 1947), 223, 225

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!