1POPULAR CINEMA

career as Hamlet, Othello, and Romeo, to name only a few signature roles.
After several close-ups of lobby cards that show Thimig in dramatic poses,
the camera does its utmost to ridicule his megalomania, for instance by
showing his not so silent struggle with various mundane objects and by focusing
on his considerable effort necessary in conjuring up these images of
heroic masculinity. The skewed, low camera angles and the cross-cutting
between the agitated Viktor and the uninterested theatrical agents may offer
some comic relief, but, again, the underlying patterns of perception—
namely the perception of otherness—are ultimately based in feelings of
resentment.
What does Thimig’s performance of the hysterical male in this popular
comedy from the year 1933 have to do with the problem of race and, more
specifically, the specter of anti-Semitism? It might be argued that the disempowerment
of the outsider becomes the means through which the group
asserts its mastery: in The Ugly Girl through her lack of femininity, and in
Victor and Victoria through his lack of masculinity. As Sander Gilman has
shown, gender functions as a privileged trope in fantasies about the Jewish
body, beginning with the stereotype of the effeminate Jewish man; hence
the frequent equation of the male Jewish body with (mental) illness, homosexuality,
and neurasthenia and, in a kind of circular reasoning, with the diagnosis
of racial degeneracy. 29 In light of the imbalance between the centrality
of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology and the conspicuous absence of
anti-Semitic images from most feature films, stereotypes must be treated as
part of a more complex system of projections and displacements that is
equally effective in relation to what is present and what is absent. 30 Isolating
the function of the stereotype from its reliance on filmic means (e.g.,
camerawork, mise-en-scène, performance) only ends up validating the division
between the narratives of racial and sexual identity. After all, in the
transitional films from the early 1930s, Jewishness functions as the absent
signifier in films presumably concerned only with the performance of femininity.
These discursive effects confirm Ella Shohat’s observation that “ethnicity
is culturally ubiquitous and textually submerged” and must be seen
“as a spectrum of identities and differences, all ultimately involving questions
of inequalities of power.” 31
In using the problem of masculinity for a humorous reflection on identity
and difference, Schünzel took advantage of a long and predominantly
Jewish tradition in Weimar cinema. The stories of mistaken and false identities
that enjoyed renewed popularity in the early 1930s refer back to the
Made in 1933 43