1POPULAR CINEMA

the goodwill of the giver. And that is Reinhold Schünzel.” 4 Similarly, the
Lichtbildbühne concluded that the genre of “musical comedy has acquired
new and more distinct contours in this quality piece by director Reinhold
Schünzel.” 5 Some announcements even compared the director to Ernst Lubitsch,
a surprising choice given the defamatory identification of the latter
with the allegedly Jewish-dominated film culture of the Weimar years. 6
Categorized by the Propaganda Ministry as a “half-Jew,” Schünzel continued
to work with special permission until 1937, when a new production,
Land der Liebe (Land of Love), encountered serious opposition during a
second wave of purges within the industry. Now Goebbels wrote in his diary:
“A typical Jewish concoction [Judenmache]. Totally unbearable. It can’t
be released like that,” and, two days later: “This half-Jew did that on purpose.”
7 Soon afterward Schünzel, too, left for the United States. Rejected by
the exile community as an opportunist and considered politically suspect by
many colleagues, he would only achieve minor successes as a Hollywood actor
and director.
What does the designation “made in 1933” mean for the critical assessment
of individual films and their place in German film history? Does the
year refer to a radical break, defined in terms of political, institutional, and
artistic practices, or is it merely a historiographical construct that, in hindsight,
positions the films within the social and political conditions under
which they were produced and consumed? Here a closer look at another
kind of Überläuferfilme (transitional films) draws attention to the relevance
of dates, periods, and chronologies in the writing of a national cinema indelibly
marked by the politics of identity and its most extreme articulation
in the anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. 8 Most German film histories are
organized around the year 1933 as a pivotal moment that is evoked both to
confirm that cinema’s essentially tragic teleology (e.g., in Kracauer’s conception
of Weimar cinema as a movement “from Caligari to Hitler”) and to
account for its historical burdens through various notions of exceptionalism
(e.g., in the argument of a German Sonderweg). The predominance of such
highly politicized readings accounts for the sharp divisions that, until the
1990s, have excluded the 1933–1945 period from the grand narratives of
art cinema and limited serious scholarship to the theoretical paradigms of
propaganda and ideology.
Here a closer attention to the continuities, whether in relation to a particular
sound aesthetic or a distinct thirties sensibility, is bound to sharpen
our awareness of the processes of inclusion and exclusion that in fact sus-
Made in 1933 25