1POPULAR CINEMA

terity. The two love stories that I have chosen to make this point, Auf Wiedersehn,
Franziska (Good-bye, Franziska, 1941) and Liebespremiere (Love
Premiere, 1943), are fairly typical of a wartime cinema striving to reassess
modern femininity within the new designs for living. In both cases, the
man’s initial opposition to domesticity is portrayed as a sign of healthy masculinity
that expresses itself in his professional commitments: as a war journalist
in Good-bye, Franziska and a serious composer in Love Premiere. By
contrast, the women use interior design to express their principled opposition
to traditional female role definitions.
With considerable didactic ambition, the dramatic events reveal these
interiors as a mere protective shield, a mask of modern emancipation, behind
which the woman hides her personal and professional insecurities.
Both the arts-and-crafts studio apartment of the (asexual) good companion
in Good-bye, Franziska and the elegant town house of the cold (frigid) career
woman in Love Premiere are designed to demonstrate the inevitable
failure of such emancipatory gestures. In the end, it is the woman who, as
part of her successful initiation into sexual desire and romantic love, has to
leave her own space in order to move, quite literally, into the man’s world.
This process no longer involves the kind of talking cures performed in the
sophisticated comedies of the early 1930s, with their madcap heroines and
spirited sexual banter. Instead the woman’s surrender to social and aesthetic
convention requires a spatial cure, as it were, that results in her expulsion
from the utopian spaces of modernity.
In accordance with these underlying tendencies, Good-bye, Franziska,
the only openly propagandistic work by Helmut Käutner, matches a quintessential
German actress, Marianne Hoppe, with a similarly wholesome
version of moderate modernism. Designed by Willi A. Hermann, Hoppe’s
small Berlin studio apartment evokes associations with life reform, healthy
living, and, of course, Kunsthandwerk (arts-and-crafts). Hoppe uses the
combined living/working space to make wooden toys, “little fetishes for big
people,” as she calls them. Her many knickknacks, from figurative candleholders
to animal sculptures, serve to diminish her ambitions as a wood
artist and a working woman. Like the actress herself, whose plain but classic
beauty conveys wholesomeness, the apartment realizes the modest desires
of its occupant with a healthy pragmatism; hence her description of
the rooms as “simple, functional, a little cool—like me.”
In terms of aesthetic choices, Hoppe’s studio apartment might well be
on display in one of the halls devoted to good German design in the annual
62 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich