1POPULAR CINEMA

logical innovations, artistic movements, political events, and social developments.
In particular, the casting of aging stars in the role of aging stars
(e.g., Emil Jannings in The Last Command, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard)
has provided an effective way of confronting the cinema’s institutional
and ideological crises through its own “heavenly bodies” (Richard
Dyer). Equally or even more widespread has been the elevation of certain
stars to symbols of a particular period, genre, or style (e.g., Asta Nielsen as
an icon of the art of silent film, Charlie Chaplin’s identification with slapstick
comedy) and the enlistment of such intertextual references in critical
reflections on one’s own filmic practices. 3 The stars of the Third Reich are
no exception here, as can be gleaned even from a superficial look at their
film roles, public appearances, and journalistic treatments in the illustrated
press after 1945.
The initial process of de-Nazification and the early debates about film
artists with a compromising past are essential to the functioning of the star
discourse in the postwar period. During the first years, only a few actors
were temporarily prohibited from appearing on the stage or screen, including
those who, like Gustaf Gründgens and Zarah Leander, had performed
official functions or appeared in propaganda vehicles. Because of his close
association in the propaganda effort during the war, Heinrich George had
been interned in Sachsenhausen, where he died in 1946. Yet soon afterwards,
most actors from the 1930s and early 1940s gradually returned to the
screen. From then on identified with “the golden era of UFA,” they contributed
to the acts of forgetting that made possible the collective amnesia of
the postwar period. Thus in the prevailing accounts, their work in the dream
factory became an allegory of life under National Socialism. As powerless
employees of the studios, the general argument went, actors could not be
held responsible for cases of political infiltration and manipulation. Ostensibly
the high degree of specialization prevented them from understanding
the propagandistic function of the films in which they were ordered to
appear. Bernhard Minetti’s description of his involvement with the anti-
Semitic Die Rothschilds (The Rothschilds, 1940) is very revealing and, with
its apologetic tone, rather typical of the profession as a whole: “Of course,
the film had a tendency, but I hadn’t read the whole book. I played Fouché,
who had financial dealings with the Rothschilds; it was the work of a day.” 4
Thus released from the pressures of accountability, actors played a key
role in the imaginary encounter between pre- and postwar filmic traditions.
As this final chapter will argue, the historical continuities and discontinui-
212 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich