1POPULAR CINEMA

Viennized Berlin.” 21 Of course, what had to disappear from the screen were
all references to Austria as a Kulturgroßmacht (cultural empire), whether
they included emotional tributes to the Habsburg dynasty as the perfect
union between church and state or nostalgic reminiscences about the multiethnic
culture of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. Instead big-budget
Mozart biographies like Eine kleine Nachtmusik (A Little Night Music, 1939)
and Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love, 1942) appropriated the
image of Vienna as the world capital of music in order to depict artistic genius
as a manifestation of racial superiority. Milieu studies like Wiener
G’schichten (Viennese Stories, 1940) continued to celebrate the legendary
coffeehouse culture, but without its intellectual contentiousness and, of
course, without any references to the strong Jewish presence in Vienna’s
cultural life. Even a popular hit like Schrammeln (Schrammel Music, 1944)
used the competition between a composer and a violinist for the love of the
proverbial “Wiener Mädel” (Viennese girl) to achieve the reconciliation of
classical, modern, and folkloristic elements in terms that applied to contemporary
Austrian culture as well.
In light of such problematic elisions and emphases, the liberating forces
and impulses in these films often end up being domesticated: by the conventional
musical scores, the leaden dialogue scenes, and the theatrical
mise-en-scènes. This discrepancy between the representation of excess and
the lack of excess in the representational means accounts for the superficial
nature of most Vienna films from the period. Under the new conditions of
production, the elements that had constituted Vienna as a literary topos
were reduced to empty ciphers, images of images without referents. In this
pervasive culture of simulation, even the elevation of folk song to a gesture
of resistance—a move often attributed to Der liebe Augustin (Beloved Augustin,
1940), with its cautionary tale about a bankel singer in nineteenthcentury
Vienna—must be seen as part of a larger trend toward derealization
in the filmic construction of imaginary urban topographies. Likewise, the
observation made in Whom the Gods Love that “in Vienna, nobody ever
achieved anything the straightforward way, only in a backward fashion”
must be understood not as a call for subversive action, as apologists of Wien-
Film would argue, but as a reflection on the city’s well-established culture
of accommodation and compromise. Accordingly, when Konstanze in the
same film reminds Wolfgang Amadeus during a conversation about leaving
Vienna that “music is your homeland,” we cannot but read this statement
as a recognition of the power of music to conjure up imaginary worlds be-
The Annexation of an Imaginary City 157