1POPULAR CINEMA

though his physical appearance could no longer live up to the public’s
expectations.
The star’s participation in the staging of his own demise is most noticeable
in the slumped body posture, the tired, uncoordinated movements, the
almost incomprehensible mumbling, and the increasingly unrecognizable
familiar features. What looked like a safe commercial formula—that is,
to take advantage of a star’s celebrity status—repeatedly failed at the box
office. 23 The mechanisms of the star system saved Birgel, but they destroyed
Albers. Film reviewers responded negatively to his self-imitations, and
younger audiences preferred more contemporary personalities. The fact
that these films nonetheless found an audience—and continue to do so—
confirms their significance not only for an older generation reminiscing
about the “golden age of UFA” but also for a new generation of filmmakers
and moviegoers who continue to use these filmic discourses to reflect on the
possibilities of a German cinema able simultaneously to accept and move
beyond the burdens of the past.
To close on a tentative note: my primary goal in this final chapter has
been to make a rather obvious but also somewhat more complicated point.
As is well known, the cinema of the postwar period defined its political and
artistic program in opposition to the Third Reich. Instead of rejecting the
entire legacy, actors and directors carried out what I have called an exorcism,
a ritualistic act that took place on the physical and metaphorical body
of cinema. The arrival of a new generation of actors completed the expulsion
of some elements from the filmic imagination; but it also made possible
the preservation of other traditions. The process of integrating these conflicting
influences and impulses involved a staged confrontation that showed
sadistic and masochistic tendencies. On the one hand, the films about two
UFA stars, Joachim Gottschalk and Renate Müller, served as a reminder of
the difficult legacies of the past but also marked the distance between the
Third Reich and the postwar period. On the other hand, the multilayered
references in the postwar careers of Hans Albers and Willy Birgel thrived on
the careful negotiation of old and new influences in terms of the star system.
Through such mechanisms, the so-called “golden years of UFA” became
an integral part of the history of cinema, namely a reminder of both
the possibility and impossibility of forgetting.
As I have tried to argue on the previous pages, the contribution of individual
stars to the cinema’s desire to come to terms with— or, rather, over-
The Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 229