1POPULAR CINEMA

of the eponymous 1924 film by F. W. Murnau into the present. Then there
were the films from the Third Reich, including the Gerhart Hauptmann
drama Sonnenuntergang (Before Sunset, 1956), first adapted to the screen
by Veit Harlan under the title Der Herrscher (The Ruler, 1937). Finally, the
postwar period produced several inexpensive remakes of earlier Albers
films. Promotional campaigns informed audiences about, or refamiliarized
them with, the famous characters, images, and scenes from German film
history. Often such reverential gesturing proved enough to reactivate the
cult of celebrity that, to this day, sustains familiar images such as “the baron
on the cannonball” and “the sailor with the accordion.”
For instance, the 1958 production of Der Greifer (The Catcher) brought
back the figure of the street-smart inspector that Albers had played in the
1930 Richard Eichberg film of the same title. His phenomenal success as
Münchhausen (1943) even occasioned a repeat performance in Der tolle
Bomberg (The Mad Bomberg, 1957), but without the high production value
of the original. Finally, Große Freiheit Nr. 7 (Great Freedom Street No. 7,
1944) inspired two other Hamburg milieu studies, Auf der Reeperbahn
nachts um halb eins (On Reeperbahn Half Past Midnight, 1954) and Das
Herz von St. Pauli (The Heart of St. Pauli, 1957). In all three films, Albers’s
infatuation with a much younger woman forces him to accept the impossibility
of returning home, of belonging. Unwilling to mourn his loss, he seeks
refuge in melancholy. Yet what in the original scenario of Great Freedom
Street No. 7 might have had subversive effects is now reduced to sentimental
recollections, nostalgic reenactments, selective memories, and, above all,
acts of willful forgetting.
In what ways Albers’s postwar career remained under the influence of
his earlier work for UFA is most apparent in a compilation film based on a
variety show in Berlin’s Titania Palace, Das gab’s nur einmal (It Happened
Only Once, 1958). In this film, he gives an aspiring young actress a nostalgic
tour through the world of filmmaking that includes clips from his own
films. In leading the postwar audience back to the “glory days of German
film,” to evoke the well-known Curt Riess book of the same title, Albers
took full advantage of his mythical status. What he could not control quite
as successfully was the way in which his appearance as a mediator between
past and present implicated his screen persona in more problematic aspects
of film history. Like other stars who reached iconic status but then became
caught in their own mythology, Albers was doomed to remain the same even
228 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich