1POPULAR CINEMA

seek the spiritual rewards available in the auditory realm, Charlotte remains
under the sway of the presumably more physical impulses associated with
visual pleasure. Accordingly, the power of the sexual woman permeates all
visual relations, from the theatrical acting style of the actress to the obsession
of her character with external appearances. Functioning as a blockage
in the film’s narrative structure, the alluring Charlotte emerges as the privileged
medium for the director’s stylistic interventions. Her double position
between cliché and cipher allows Sierck to explore the tension between
catharsis and distanciation in self-reflexive terms, but of course only under
the conditions of her obsolescence; this obsolescence finds a perfect vehicle
in the tainted legacies of Weimar culture.
To begin with, Charlotte’s emotional outbursts suggest a hysterical condition
caused by the excesses of female emancipation and sexual liberation.
Reduced to a beautiful image, Charlotte stands for a desire without object
and remains caught in a narcissistic stage; hence the many mirrors around
her. A child, according to the husband, would integrate these free-floating
energies and reconnect her longings to the internal and external rewards
of motherhood. Through her insistence on pleasure and her unwillingness
to serve—as a dutiful wife to her husband, as a mother to the family and,
by extension, the national community—this classic femme fatale becomes
a figure of visual and performative excess. Yet even her vilification in the
narrative does not diminish an appeal that derives precisely from her
overdetermined status as an icon of Weimar culture within the film’s selfreferential
strategies.
As a familiar figure from the erotic imagination of silent film, the femme
fatale attests to the melodrama’s old-fashioned preoccupations but also uncovers
its changing sensibilities after 1933. Of particular relevance in this
case is the denunciation of the sexual woman through her association with
a culture described by its detractors as feminized. Charlotte’s insistence on
personal fulfillment, her consumerist attitudes, her eccentric tastes, her apparent
lack of moral values, and most importantly, her growing psychological
instability all evoke the specter of Weimar, the despised Systemzeit. Her
tragic death, in a way, rehearses the conditions under which a liberal, progressive,
cosmopolitan culture came to an end as well. Whenever the pursuit
of happiness becomes all-consuming, Charlotte’s fate suggests, individual
actions and beliefs can no longer be integrated into the larger whole.
Without a community, the yearning for love deteriorates into erotic obsessions,
and the search for meaning exhausts itself in empty rituals and spiri-
120 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich