1POPULAR CINEMA

tender impulses that hitherto sustained their antagonistic exchanges, she
breaks down crying, appeals to his compassion, but still has to vacate her
desk in the end. His subsequent confession about the ruse offers insufficient
compensation for her complete humiliation in the earlier scenes. Likewise,
his promise to treat her as an equal partner and colleague remains untested,
since she suddenly announces that she is pregnant and plans to quit her job
anyway.
Two dictation scenes illustrate to what degree patterns of identification
and point of view are enlisted to eliminate the career woman from the workplace
and, even more importantly, to undermine her sense of accomplishment.
The first dictation scene places Maria in a position of barely attained
and hardly sustainable authority. Furious about taking dictation from a
woman, Paul sits on top of her desk, calls her first “my dear child,” then,
mockingly, “Ma’am.” Finally he grabs her in exasperation and asks: “Tell
me: Who are you anyway?” To which she responds: “Your boss, and you
have to obey me.” Yet as Maria makes this defiant declaration, she already
closes her eyes in expectation of a conciliatory kiss. Paul releases her
abruptly and sits down at the typewriter while she, by now in tears, starts
with the dictation. Obviously, the central question—“Who are you anyway?”—can
only be answered through her initiation into traditional femininity.
This process begins with crude sexual advances, including the suggestion
that he would tolerate her lateness if she visited him in his apartment
at night, and it culminates in open threats concerning her continued employment.
Again it is the woman who cracks first under pressure. Receiving
her letter of termination with the president’s signature, Maria declares: “Of
course, you men band together.... If you had only said one kind word . . .”
Under these conditions, the woman’s tearful departure, complete with a
teddy bear clutched to her chest, represents the successful outcome of her
degradation to the little girl who, if the husband’s self-satisfied smirk is any
indication, is now ready to become the ideal wife and mother.
Released only one year later, Unser Fräulein Doktor (Our Miss Ph.D.,
1940), a romantic comedy with Jenny Jugo and Albert Matterstock as two
math teachers at a boys’ high school, takes a very different approach. Here
it is the man who is forced to overcome his sexist attitudes. Like his colleagues
and students, who have already accepted the woman as a productive
member of the community, he must adjust to the growing presence
of upper-level female teachers under conditions (i.e., of shortages) that
obliquely evoke the home front. Not surprisingly, the Erich Engel film re-
204 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich