1POPULAR CINEMA

practice of “locked doors” (i.e., no admissions after the beginning of the
show), audiences during the war years had no choice but to sit through the
entire program of newsreel, cultural film, and main feature. The resultant
mixture of fact and fiction was considered essential to the process of derealization
that had informed the restructuring of the fascist public sphere
from the very beginning. However, at the movies, the active participation
of the audience produced both very predictable results and less calculable
effects. Anecdotal accounts from the war years are filled with stories about
women and children who turned the motion-picture theater into their “asylum
for the homeless,” 14 literally and figuratively speaking. In letters from
the front, soldiers, too, confess using excursions to theaters in occupied
cities to immunize themselves against the horrors of war. Taking advantage
of such individual survival strategies, the Ministry frequently organized
mandatory film screenings for those special units of the SS (Schutzstaffeln)
involved in the Final Solution (e.g., in the case of The Eternal Jew), as well
as for members of the armed forces fighting for the Final Victory (e.g., in
the case of Kolberg).
The official anxieties over the elusive nature of spectatorship are nowhere
more apparent than in the personal viewing habits of the minister in
charge. Until the war, Goebbels saw most films prior to their release, made
recommendations about changes, and had unlimited access to foreign films
even after they were banned in 1939. His diaries give some indication of how
he thought about audience reactions and how he intended to control a film’s
potentially subversive effects. On 27 January 1939, for instance, Goebbels
noted about Hotel Sacher: “Superbly made, but not quite politically watertight.
I shall have it re-edited and a few scenes reshot.” 15 And on 10 October
1940, he concluded about Über alles in der Welt (Above All in the
World): “Absolutely naïve and primitive, but could well be a big hit with the
public. Ritter says patriotic things with a lack of inhibition that would have
anyone else blushing. A few things will have to be changed.” 16
Throughout, Goebbels uses the metaphoric registers of transgression
and containment to identify the two sides in the textual actualization of ideological
positions. Terms like “not quite watertight” and “lack of inhibition”
present spectatorship as a destabilizing force. By evoking the image
of a pressure chamber, Goebbels implies that any excess of representation
might threaten the precarious balance between aesthetic and political intentions
and give rise to dangerous forms of “reading against the grain.” His
sharp distinction between two groups of audiences hides this more troubling
74 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich