1POPULAR CINEMA

object of admiration and worship, and rarely inspired groups or individuals
to imitate his appearance or behavior. After all, the similarities among the
actor, his roles, and his audiences were always already a constitutive part of
his screen persona.
This almost perfect fit offers the first clue to a better understanding of
Rühmann’s popular appeal. According to Richard Dyer, film stars articulate
“contradictions in ideology—whether within the dominant ideology or between
it and other subordinated/revolutionary ideologies.” 3 In the case
of Rühmann, his rise to stardom must be linked to the performance of
what Dyer calls “typical ways of behaving, feeling and thinking in contemporary
society, ways that have been socially, culturally, and historically constructed.”
4 The actor’s screen persona developed in the context of whitecollar
comedy and its humorous but also sentimental stories about the
problems of the so-called “little man.” His trademark comic style translated
the familiar elements of petit bourgeois mentality into the essentializing
terms of an ordinary Germanness beyond the divisions of gender and class.
Time and again, an imaginary resolution of social and sexual conflicts was
achieved through a comic performance of ambivalence that returned these
conflicts to the scene of contemporary life, but in the aggressive and defensive
registers of the body. As a function of identity formation, performance
thus draws attention to the complex processes that make possible the ultimate
affirmation of oppressive social and sexual roles. By utilizing and articulating
what Susan Hayward calls “indigenous cultural codes” 5 such as
movements, postures, glances, gestures, and so forth, stars—especially those
associated with the European popular cinema—define the terms of national
identity in relation to questions of class, race, and gender.
The countless obituaries for Rühmann, who died in 1994 at the age of
ninety-two, bear witness to his elevated status as the very embodiment of
Germanness. The natural progression mapped in the obituaries from “the
funny romantic lead, via the lovable comedian, to the great and, in rare
moments, magnificent character actor [Menschendarsteller]” 6 shows the extent
to which Rühmann today has come to personify those aspects of German
cinema that seem untouched by politics and its compromising associations.
The actor, whose last screen appearance in Wim Wenders’s In weiter
Ferne, so nah (Far Away, So Close, 1993) comments on his status as a national
icon, has always been identified with a very limited, but highly articulated,
range of movements, behaviors, and attitudes. All evoke a class mentality
that, despite euphemisms such as “the little man” and “the average
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