1POPULAR CINEMA

joint appearance in the Viktor Tourjansky film Vom Teufel gejagt (Chased
by the Devil, 1950) takes advantage of this kind of heightened symbolism,
with Albers cast as a famous psychiatrist, Dr. Blank [sic!], who descends into
a world of madness after a self-experiment gone awry and with Birgel as his
concerned colleague and best friend, helplessly looking on. This lurid tale
of guilt without consciousness, and of agency without responsibility, uses
extensive medical discussions about the symptoms of paranoia to initiate
the kind of discussion about repressed feelings of shame and guilt usually
confined to the psychoanalytic profession. Adding to the film’s multilayered
meanings, the private mental hospital run by Drs. Albers and Birgel is populated
by patients who commit criminal acts but insist on their innocence,
who follow orders but avoid accountability, and who explain all of their actions
as acts of defense against external threats—a more than revealing comment
on the problematic project of dealing with the past. 18
In the exorcism of collective guilt through famous stars associated with
the Third Reich, two psychological forces were at work: the need to preserve
and retain, which could only be achieved through the crucible of repression,
and the need to destroy, to extricate and eliminate, a process that
could be liberating but also extremely painful. Accordingly, Birgel, who in
his signature roles from the late 1930s and early 1940s had come to embody
the masochistic pleasures of self-denial, turned into an object of compassionate
self-identification. The sympathetic presentation of his suffering in
the postwar films was predicated on shared notions of victimization. Albers,
whose heroic screen persona had always included aggressive tendencies,
now offered his aging body as a projection screen for the aggressions previously
directed at others. In both cases, the confrontation with the legacies
of the past took place in the dramatic register of screen performance and
through the established iconography of the star. And in both cases, the
terms of engagement involved two equally radical reversals in the conception
of the roles and the patterns of identification.
Willy Birgel’s popular appeal hinged on the performance of ambiguity
and ambivalence; his screen persona was from the beginning codified in the
terms of alterity. This identification with a marginal position made the actor
particularly attractive for scenarios of postwar revisionism. Unlike Albers,
Birgel never acquired a larger following, and his death did not result
in the kind of posthumous tributes and accolades reserved for the “blond
Hans.” Birgel had started out as a classic villain with considerable skills at
cheating, deceiving, and betraying. Even in more respectable parts and dig-
224 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich