POPULAR CINEMA OF THE THIRD REICH doc

Many factors have contributed to this develop-ment: the revisionist histories of the Third Reich and their relevance to theconception of postwar Germany; the confrontation with the legac

POPULAR CINEM A

OF THE THIRD REICH

Popular Cinema

SABINE HAKE

Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2001

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be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

 The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi /niso z 39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hake, Sabine, 1956 – Popular cinema of the Third Reich / Sabine Hake.— 1st ed.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 0-292-73457-3 (cloth : alk paper)—

isbn 0-292-73458-1 (pbk : alk paper)

1 National socialism and motion pictures 2 Motion pictures — Germany —History I Title.

pn 1995.9.n36 h 34 2001 791.43 094309043—dc21 2001027790

Preface vii

1. Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema:

A Definition of Terms 1

2. Made in 1933: German-Jewish Filmmakers and the

Forced Coordination of the Industry 23

3. Cinema, Set Design, and the Domestication of Modernism 46

4. At the Movies: Film Audiences and the Problem of Spectatorship 68

5. Stars: Heinz Rühmann and the Performance of the Ordinary 87

6. Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936):

A Case Study of Film Authorship 107

7. The Foreign and the Familiar:

On German-American Film Relations, 1933 –1940 128

8. The Annexation of an Imaginary City:

The Topos “Vienna” and the Wien-Film AG 149

9. The Power of Thought:

Redefining Popular Cinema between Realism and Illusionism 172

10. A Question of Representation:

Working Women and Wartime Cinema 189

11. The Legacies of the Past in the Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 210

Select Bibliography 263Index of German Titles and Names 267

CONTENTS

Why another study on the cinema of the Third Reich, and why now? Theslow unification of both Germanys after the opening of the Berlin Wall andthe changing political landscape in Europe since the 1990s have brought arenewed interest in the Third Reich, especially around issues of popularculture and everyday life Many factors have contributed to this develop-ment: the revisionist histories of the Third Reich and their relevance to theconception of postwar Germany; the confrontation with the legacies of theGerman Democratic Republic and the old Federal Republic; the heated de-bates around appropriate forms of public commemoration in relation to theHolocaust and World War II; and the growing attention to questions of na-tion and national identity in the new Berlin Republic.

In the cultural sphere, the return to conventional genre films since the1990s has demonstrated the importance of indigenous popular traditions.Contributing to this trend, German film scholars have turned to the cinema

of the Third Reich and begun to explore previously neglected areas and charted territories in what is still regarded by many as a highly problematicperiod of film history Most initiatives have been informed by the desire

un-to move beyond deterministic theories of propaganda and ideology and incorporate more film-specific methods and inquiries The main focus has

been on the so-called Unterhaltungsfilme (literally, entertainment films)

that, more than anything, confirm the pervasive influence of popular ture Among other things, this revisionist project has drawn attention to theconflicts, contradictions, and compromises in a cinema all too often dis-missed as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation Yet whatstill deserves to be examined in greater detail are the heterogeneous ele-ments, including the social fantasies, cultural traditions, economic interests,

cul-PREFACE

and institutional pressures, that thrive even under the conditions of stateownership or control.

It is in response to these larger debates that my study on popular cinema

in the Third Reich calls for the normalization of German film history til unification, Third Reich cinema has been treated as the ultimate Other

Un-of German cinema and its competing discourses Un-of art cinema, popular ema, and national cinema Especially the totalizing views of cinema andpropaganda, ideology, and the fascist imaginary have provided a substitutefor detailed historical research and political analysis Likewise, the circularreasoning behind much writing (e.g., cinema as ideology as cinema) hasproduced the kind of extraterritorial space, or bifurcated narrative, thatmakes possible the reconstruction of an untainted filmic tradition associ-ated with Weimar cinema, exile cinema, DEFA cinema, and New Germancinema The more Third Reich cinema is conceptualized in the homoge-nizing terms of domination and conformity, the more the pre-1933 andpost-1945 years can be associated with a liberating heterogeneity The iden-tification of fascist mass culture with classical Hollywood cinema often has

cin-a similcin-ar effect, with the blcin-anket dismisscin-al of these two extreme excin-amples ofthe culture industry opening up a space for the (often posthumous) valida-tion of modernist practices and postmodern sensibilities Normalization inthis overdetermined context therefore means the recognition of the conti-nuities on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic levels that haunt thehistory of German film beyond all ideological divisions and political rup-tures; it also means an acute awareness of the paradoxical, asymmetrical,and nonsynchronous relationship between cinema and politics both thenand now As a result, Third Reich cinema can no longer be treated as anaberration of the past but must be acknowledged as an integral part of theaesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including itstraumas and burdens

The present book contributes to the reassessment of popular cinema inthe Third Reich by redefining both the subject and the method of inves-tigation Three basic assumptions inform my thinking about the material

to be presented on the following pages First, cinema in the Third Reich wasabove all a popular cinema sustained by well-established generic conven-tions, cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highlydeveloped star system Second, these popular forms and styles developedthrough the selective incorporation of elements from the pre-1933 periodinto post-1933 cultural practices and the ongoing transformation of these

elements in the productive encounter with other national cinemas, cially the dominant Hollywood model Third, the discourses of the popularand the political remained at odds with each other and, based on their dif-ferent investment in the national and the international, and the modern andthe traditional, entered into highly unstable and invariably provisional al-liances Beyond the institutional and ideological pressures typical of anystate-controlled cinema, the often evoked specter of a media dictatorshipremained precisely that: a phantasmagoria However, this phantasmagoriaalso opened up a space for the convergence of popular traditions, culturalambitions, and international styles in the building of a public sphere pre-sumably free of politics.

espe-Paying equal attention to the constituent elements of popular cinema isrelevant not only for the rewriting of film history but also for a better un-derstanding of the politics of entertainment during (and after) the ThirdReich In light of these wider implications, the prevailing filmic forms andpractices can no longer be reduced to the opposition of entertainment vs.propaganda, nor can they be examined solely through the intentions of thePropaganda Ministry or the thematic overlaps with key ideas in Nazi ideol-ogy Instead the process of incorporation, transformation, and instrumen-talization must be evaluated in the larger context of German cinema, in-cluding its history and historiography For this reason, I propose to shift theterms of the debate from the study of individual films to the examination ofpopular cinema as a social, cultural, economic, and political practice Thatmeans: to move beyond the text-based models shared by the earliest stud-ies on film propaganda and the most recent theories of the fascist imaginaryand to develop further the contextual models that show popular cinema as

a historically specific articulation of social fantasies and mentalities and amine its relevance as an ongoing negotiation of conflicting positions andinfluences Key to this conceptual realignment is the insistence on cinema

ex-as a material practice and historical force Yet new insights into the taneously stabilizing and destabilizing function of popular cinema can only

simul-be gained through approaches that recognize its multiple functions as a cal and national industry, a cultural institution, a public sphere, a social ex-perience, and, of course, a fantasy machine

lo-Defining popular cinema as a dynamic process that involves aestheticstyles and social practices, cultural traditions and economic products, pub-lic institutions and private imaginations, and, last but not least, various no-tions of “the popular” expands the area of investigation not only in relation

to the constituent elements and processes Greater awareness of the plex nature of popular cinema and its privileged moments of crisis, contro-versy, and compromise also forces us to rethink many of the tacit assump-tions about the sociopsychological function of mass entertainment in theThird Reich and, more generally, in modern Germany In particular, theevent-based nature of cinema brings out the most effective forms of nego-tiation and the most important areas of contention in the social and culturalpractices that are implicated in, but never reducible to, dominant ideology.The theoretical implications of approaching popular cinema as a site

com-of ongoing struggle are far-reaching In terms com-of German film history, thefocus on typical genres, tastes, and styles draws attention to the discontinu-ous continuities — that is, the prevailing modes of representation and theirchanging critical and aesthetic investments — that defined classical genrecinema from the late 1920s to the 1950s Moreover, the attention to indus-try practices and audience expectations highlights the extensive exchanges,again with the necessary modifications, between a self-consciously national(and nationalistic) cinema and the kind of international tendencies and de-velopments associated with Hollywood In terms of modern German his-tory, the emphasis on popular traditions shifts the terms of the debate from

a deterministic relationship between cinema and ideology to the often consistent articulation of that relationship in economic strategies, politicalmeasures, artistic traditions, social movements, and, perhaps most impor-tantly, popular tastes and mentalities And in terms of film studies, the combination of textual and historical analysis moves the study of popularcinema beyond the binaries of propagandistic vs escapist, subversive vs.affirmative, or innovative vs conformist that continue to influence the de-bates on the fascist imaginary in often unproductive ways

in-As I want to argue, popular cinema in the Third Reich must be proached through its inherent contradictions On the one hand, its mostsuccessful genres and most popular stars confirm the formative influence

ap-of the early Weimar sound period and point to even stronger connectionswith the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s On the other hand, the

Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the industry in 1933 completed the

institutional alignment with the ideology of National Socialism, primarilythrough the new anti-Semitic measures and the creation of a highly politi-

cized genre, the so-called Staatsauftragsfilm (state-commissioned film) On

the one hand, the identification of popular cinema with escapist ment helped to maintain the institutional divisions between high and low

entertain-culture and between the public and private sphere of which cinema had ways been an integral part On the other hand, the affinities of popular cin-ema with consumerism, urbanism, and everyday life dissolved these bour-geois categories of distinction into more elusive configurations betweenaesthetics and politics, power and desire On the one hand, the emphasis onfantasy and illusion made popular cinema a privileged site for the imaginaryresolution of social and psychological conflicts and therefore instrumental

al-to the preservation of the status quo On the other hand, the cinematic perience in the widest sense gave rise to other meanings and effects that,while not subversive as such, often threatened the overall system of prohi-bitions, restrictions, and controlled transgressions

ex-Articulating some of these contradictions, the book is organized arounddifferent aspects of popular cinema and, by extension, elements of filmanalysis (e.g., genres, stars, directors, audiences) By exposing Third Reichcinema to these categories, the following eleven chapters try to shed light

on the cinema’s precarious position between political, social, and economicinterests; regional, national, and international influences; high and low cul-ture, as well as modern and antimodern definitions of art and design; petit

bourgeois, popular, populist, and völkisch traditions; and the various

ide-ologies that sustained classical narrative cinema during the 1930s and early1940s, including the ideology of National Socialism In such an expandeddefinition of popular cinema, the popular and its affiliated terms (e.g., pop-ulist, folkloric, petit bourgeois) open up a new perspective not only on Ger-man cinema before 1933 and after 1945 but also on the function of film history and, by extension, of cultural history in the conceptualization ofpopular culture in relation to national culture, regional culture, and folkculture

Several assumptions entered into the selection and presentation of thehistorical material First, only a context-based definition of popular cinema

is able to reconstruct the processes of appropriation, incorporation, andtransformation that connected filmic practices after 1933 to the Weimar pe-riod and to classical Hollywood cinema and that facilitated the many over-laps with musical, literary, and theatrical culture Second, the mass appeal

of popular cinema must be examined through the functioning of cinema

as social experience and public event and, furthermore, through its ties with modern design, urban lifestyles, and other mass media practices.Third, the ideological functions of popular cinema, whether in relation toclassical narrative cinema or the fascist public sphere, have to be assessed

affini-primarily through its successes and failures — that is, through those momentswhere the plans about political indoctrination and mass manipulation areimplemented, modified, or abandoned altogether.

While taking the form of self-contained essays, the individual chaptersare organized in a roughly chronological fashion that acknowledges theconsiderable differences between the prewar and war years and pays closeattention to the filmic legacies associated with the years before 1933 and af-ter 1945 In the selection of the material, I have tried to strike a balance be-tween relatively unknown topics (e.g., film theory in the Third Reich) andtopics with heightened relevance to film theoretical debates (e.g., DetlefSierck and authorship) Moreover, I have made an effort to include a widevariety of primary and secondary sources that, in ranging from star biogra-phies to studio histories and reception studies, are bound to bring out thecomplexities and contradictions of the historical period under investiga-tion Finally, I have emphasized the perspective of the typical, the average,and the ordinary in order to move away from the few privileged texts thathave been enlisted in the creation of a new symptomatology of fascism.Accordingly, Chapter 1 looks at the peripheral role of popular cinema

in the existing scholarship on propaganda and ideology and proposes a ical reassessment of ambiguous terms such as “escapist” and “entertain-ment” and their discursive function in the context of national cinema andpopular culture Chapter 2 reflects on the historical designation “made in1933” by measuring the impact of anti-Semitism through the thematization

crit-of exclusion in two romantic comedies by German-Jewish directors ter 3 considers the legacies of high modernism in the work of several famousset designers from the Weimar years and traces the domestication of themodern style from the technological thrillers of the early 1930s to thewomen’s films of the early 1940s Chapter 4 gives an overview of the exten-sive debates on audiences in the trade press and in academic scholarshipand shows to what degree mass-psychological theories served to addresspersistent concerns about the elusive conditions of film reception Chapter

Chap-5 enlists the screen persona of Heinz Rühmann and his approach to comicacting in a sustained reflection on the crisis of modern masculinity and pe-tit bourgeois consciousness

To continue with this brief overview, Chapter 6 uses a close reading

of Detlef Sierck’s Schlußakkord to look at film authorship in relation to the

stylistic possibilities of melodrama and the genre’s precarious alliance withartistic and cultural ambitions after 1933 Chapter 7 expands the concept of

national cinema into international practices by comparing the ished appeal of Hollywood films during the 1930s and the very different sit-uation of German films in U.S markets Chapter 8 follows the changingmeaning of “Vienna” as an important cultural and political topos in Ger-man and Austrian films made before and after the annexation, with specialattention paid to Willi Forst’s Vienna Trilogy Chapter 9 approaches the extensive writings on film during the Third Reich as part of an ongoing, and ultimately failed, effort to incorporate older discourses of filmic realisminto a more flexible aesthetic of reception indebted to fascist notions of pop-ulism and folk culture Chapter 10 analyzes the overdetermined function ofwomen, and the problem of modern femininity, by looking at the represen-tation of working women in wartime cinema And Chapter 11 considers thediverse attempts at coming to terms with the cinema’s own past in a num-ber of postwar films about, and with, famous stars from the Third Reich.The individual chapters are designed in the form of case studies that,while contributing to a coherent argument about the highly adaptable na-ture of popular cinema, cannot be reduced to one particular thematic fo-cus or conceptual category In response to the particular difficulties of writing about cinema in the Third Reich, I have chosen an approach thatarticulates my resistance to totalizing models on both the conceptual andanalytical levels Aiming at a kaleidoscopic effect, as it were, every chapter

undimin-is structured around one particular problem or problematic To give an ample, Chapter 4 on film audiences focuses on the prevailing debates on audience preferences during the Third Reich but also considers the widerimplications of introducing a category like reception into the study of a cin-ema often described as totalitarian Ideally every critical category shedslight on all the other categories and, in so doing, contributes to the process

ex-of historical revision that draws attention to the economic, ideological, cultural, and social influences and the pervasiveness of institutional andaesthetic compromises Moreover, every aspect of popular cinema interactswith all the other aspects in order to bring out the multitude of filmic prac-tices that can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the ideological andinstitutional pressures associated with National Socialism, the PropagandaMinistry, and the film industry during the Third Reich

Within this kaleidoscopic structure, the individual chapters are theless connected to each other through a number of recurring themes: thegeneric and stylistic traditions that link filmic practices in the Third Reich

none-to the Weimar period and the postwar years (2 and 11); the centrality of

clas-sical narrative cinema and the star system (7 and 11); the persistent lems in defining the project of national cinema against the dominance ofHollywood and through alliances with other German-speaking cinemas (7 and 9); the almost compulsive concern with identity, especially in rela-tion to gender and class (1 and 10); the preoccupation with audiences andquestions of spectatorship (4 and 9); the strong ties between popular cin-ema and musical culture and the heavy reliance on literary and theatricaltraditions (6 and 9); and, last but not least, the continuous compromises onall levels between film as art, entertainment, commodity, and propaganda(5 and 6).

prob-As regards the wider implications of this study, my reasons for creatingthese kaleidoscopic effects can be summarized as follows: First, by focusing

on popular cinema, I hope to move beyond the conceptual models that ordinate filmic practices to theories of fascism or the culture industry, and,

sub-in so dosub-ing, stabilize their more problematic qualities through the aestheticand ideological effects attributed to popular cinema Second, by organizing

my argument around the main elements of cinema, rather than those of itics and ideology, I want to emphasize what I have earlier described as dis-continuous continuities in German cinema before 1933 and after 1945 and

pol-in pol-international developments durpol-ing the 1930s and early 1940s From such

a perspective, what is at stake is no longer just the cinema of the Third Reich, but German cinema as a whole

Of course, my intention is neither to depict popular cinema in the ThirdReich as merely an artistically inferior or ideologically more insidious ver-sion of Hollywood; nor to disregard the conditions of production and re-ception in a state-controlled cinema and incorporate its films into an un-differentiated body of work— that is, of mass entertainment — available tochanging forms of cultural consumption On the contrary, it is my beliefthat only this process of historical revision will bring into relief the partic-ular characteristics — the Otherness — of German cinema after 1933, and do

so precisely through the practices shared with other national cinemas of the period Only by moving beyond the double dangers of demonizationand banalization can we engage productively with the continuous challenge

of the Third Reich to present-day debates on popular culture and politicalideology

In the writing of the book, many friends and colleagues have generouslyoffered their support during various stages of the project, and I would like

to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to them: Lucy Fischer,

Mary-Beth O’Brien, Stephen Brockmann, Fred Evans, Gerd Gemünden, Alice Kuzniar, Marcia Klotz, Marcia Landy, Barbara McCloskey, StephenLowry, Johannes von Moltke, Annette Kuhn, Thomas Saunders, and KatieTrumpener For their willingness to listen to preliminary thoughts on thesubject, I want to thank sympathetic audiences at the German Studies As-sociation Annual Convention and at the Hollins Colloquium on GermanFilm Parts of chapters have profited from the critical comments of col-leagues at conferences and at lecture series at the Universität Dresden, theUniversity of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southampton, theUniversity of Warwick, and Dartmouth College Discussions with graduatestudents at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me to clarify my argu-ment; I am particularly indebted to Daniel Wild Bozena Goscilo providedvaluable editorial advice Jan McInroy and Jim Burr at the University ofTexas Press were very supportive; Paul Spragens provided meticulous copy-editing Last, but not least, I am grateful to the staffs of the Margaret Her-rick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in BeverlyHills; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Stiftung DeutscheKinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin; and the Interli-brary Loan Office at Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh Parts of thisresearch have been supported by a DAAD Study Visit Grant, as well as aHewlett International Grant and a Small Research Grant from the Univer-sity of Pittsburgh It is with great joy and deep gratitude that I dedicate thisbook to Fred Nutt.

An earlier German version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Heinz Rühmann

und die Inszenierung des ‘kleinen Mannes,’ ” in montage a/v 7, no 1 (1998):

33 –56 An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Melodramatic

Imagination of Detlef Sierck: Final Chord (1936) and Its Resonances,” in

Screen 38, no 2 (Summer 1997): 129–148.

Until recently, the cinema of the Third Reich has been treated as the mate Other of world cinema Excluded from standard film historical andtheoretical analyses, the more than one thousand feature films producedduring the period have remained closely identified with the critical para-digms of propaganda studies and ideology critique Both have generated thekind of summary treatments, captured in terms like “Nazi cinema” or “Nazifilm,” that often include sweeping conclusions about mass manipulation,popular entertainment, and fascist aesthetics but divulge little about theconstituent elements of popular cinema: the leading stars and directors, the

ulti-1

POPULAR CINEM A, NATIONAL CINEM A, NAZI CINEM A

A DEFINITION OF TERMS

I.

popular genres and styles, the favorite studios and theaters, and so forth.Klaus Kanzog has recently concluded that “we have long ago reached con-sensus over the ideological premises of the films and even feel satisfactionabout having more or less closed the chapter on ‘National Socialism andFilm.’ ”1Nothing could be further from the truth The cinema of the ThirdReich has never been exposed to the full range of critical perspectives avail-able within film studies Much of the basic research still needs to be done,and many of the questions have not even been asked.

In this chapter, I want to develop new critical perspectives based on theaesthetic, social, cultural, and economic practices associated with popularcinema As a way of introducing the larger project, I begin with the defini-tions of “popular cinema” in the existing scholarship and examine some ofthe hidden assumptions behind the two main elements, “popular” and “cin-ema,” that have sustained this seemingly self-evident but also curiously un-dertheorized term The second and third parts then consider some of theother terms, including “national cinema,” that contributed to the specificqualities of popular cinema in the German tradition and that, in combina-tion with recent debates on the meaning of the popular in film studies andcultural studies, might be enlisted in a different history and historiography

of popular cinema in the Third Reich.2

To summarize a prevailing trend in the scholarship from the 1970s

to the 1980s: The more that was written about the propaganda films, the less became known — and appeared worth knowing — about those countlessgenre films categorized as “mere entertainment”; that is to say, films thatwere considered neither part of art nor propaganda and that often seemedcloser to other rituals of mass consumption than to legitimate cultural formsand practices The more some scholars concentrated on the filmic represen-tation of key concepts in Nazi ideology, the less they paid attention to thevast body of work that presumably only served escapist functions and had

no aesthetic value or social significance on its own And the more otherscholars speculated about the fascist aesthetics, the less they were willing toconsider the continuities of classical narrative cinema in an internationalcontext or to take into account the historical conditions of film productionand reception Even the turn to cultural studies in the last decade has notresulted in radically new approaches that, by moving from textual to con-textual models, might be better suited to trace the complicated processeswithin popular cinema as an economic, social, and cultural practice.Historically, the conceptualization of entertainment and propaganda as

a kind of figure-ground effect must be traced back to Propaganda MinisterJoseph Goebbels, who, in his public talks, always made the distinction be-tween the 20 percent big-budget films with clear propagandistic intentionsand “the 80 percent good, decent entertainment films on a high artisticlevel.”3Exile film critics were the first to challenge this division and drawattention to its political function In a pamphlet written for the “purposes

of psychological warfare,” Siegfried Kracauer asserted that “all Nazi filmswere more or less propaganda films — even the mere entertainment pictureswhich seem to be remote from politics.”4 The same argumentation in-formed Hans Wollenberg’s more tentative conclusion, also from the 1940s,that “even apparently harmless subjects, comedies or even musicals, havesomehow a tendency to advance Nazi ideologies.”5 Relying on an episte-mology of suspicion through qualifiers like “more or less” and “somehow,”Kracauer and Wollenberg laid the foundation for the conception of popularcinema as simultaneously separated from, and implicated in, the Nazi prop-aganda machine In most subsequent descriptions of this undistinguished,formless mass called “entertainment films,” aesthetic and moral judgmentusually takes the place of close analysis, a move that is legitimated with ref-erence to the escapist nature of the films in question And in all cases, theunquestioned assumptions about the total control of the Propaganda Min-istry over the filmic imagination serve to protect against uncomfortablequestions about the continuities of popular cinema and the social practices,attitudes, and mentalities that sustain it and, in turn, are sustained by it.The indifference toward, and ignorance of, the so-called entertainmentfilms fulfill three distinct but related functions, all of which bear witness tothe films’ problematic status in German film history and social histories ofthe Third Reich On the most obvious level, the argument about apoliticalentertainment provides justification for the pervasive presence of thesefilms in today’s culture, whether in the form of television programming,video releases, or film retrospectives The insistence on a sharp distinctionbetween politics and entertainment allows audiences both young and old toindulge freely in nostalgic celebrations of what has become known as “thegolden days of UFA [Universum Film AG].”6 The countless memoirs bywriters, actors, and directors have further contributed to such patterns ofreception To mention only two examples, screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht insists that “to a large degree, films in the Nazi state were not at all Nazifilms.”7And director Herbert Maisch cites the regular television reruns ofone of his films from the early 1940s as proof that the work remained “un-

blemished by the times in which it was produced.”8Thus it should not prise that even an unrepentant fan like Karlheinz Wendtland asserts that

sur-“the penetration of every single feature film with Nazi ideology has neverbeen proven.”9Yet no matter whether the films are enlisted in acts of ritu-alistic deconstruction or ironic appropriation (e.g., Zarah Leander as a gayicon) or exposed to redemptive readings that focus only on formal qualitiesand directorial styles (e.g., Veit Harlan as an unacknowledged auteur), theystill remain cultural products of, and historical documents from, the ThirdReich It is precisely for this reason that the historical and contemporaryrelevance of these films cannot be explained through the false oppositions

of art, entertainment, and politics that have accompanied their critical ception from the beginning

re-Secondly, the unwillingness of scholars to deal with popular cinemamasks an elitist contempt for mass cultural productions and their presum-ably passive consumers; hence the derogatory tone in many discussions ofescapism and illusionism In the same way that moral indignation about thePropaganda Ministry’s insidious manipulations is predicated on the model

of a liberal public sphere, the aesthetic dismissal of “mass entertainment”betrays two equally bourgeois notions, the aesthetic superiority of autono-mous art and the affirmative character of the culture industry Thirdly, thetendency to see popular cinema only in the context of hegemonic practicesdistracts from the differences and contradictions within popular culture andoften ends up supporting reactionary views on modern mass culture as aninsidious form of controlling private fantasies and desires — of course, notthose of educated individuals but only of “the masses.” Similar patterns ofargumentation can even be found in early Marxist studies on popular cin-ema that treat its mass-produced fantasies as a manifestation of false con-sciousness and the kind of petit bourgeois culture that allegedly poses a se-rious threat to the authentic culture of the working class

Within these argumentative patterns, the forms and functions of ular cinema tend to be examined either through the notion of politicalpropaganda or in the context of ideology critique To begin with the earlystudies on film and propaganda, most analyses assume an institutionalizedrelationship between propaganda and entertainment (i.e., Goebbels’s

p20 percent – 80 percent model) that can be studied through conceptual positions such as overt vs covert, latent vs manifest, textual vs contextual,and so forth.10 In the earliest and still most extensive quantitative study

op-published to this day, Gerhard Albrecht relies on such a conceptual model

in distinguishing between the few infamous films with a manifest propagandistic function and the overwhelming majority of entertainmentfilms with a latent political-propagandistic function According to Albrecht,the latent meanings in what he categorized as serious, humorous, and action-oriented films can be uncovered through a combination of textualand contextual factors, including narrative content, production history, andcritical reception.11

political-Most studies on film and propaganda determine the propagandisticfunction of the so-called entertainment film by looking either at the workitself, the conditions of production, or the conditions of reception Some-times the distinction between political propaganda and apolitical entertain-ment is based on essential textual differences that manifest themselves inthe thematic concerns of individual films This approach is exemplified byDavid Stuart Hull, who cites the Allied Control Commission’s findings that

as few as 141 of a total of 700 suspect feature films were “politically tionable” to conclude that “only a small number of films made during theThird Reich contained propaganda.”12Dissolving the meaning of propa-ganda entirely into the conditions of production, Richard Taylor offers aradically different definition, namely that if the “conscious purpose is to lullthe audience in order to manipulate its opinions for political ends, then weare concerned with film propaganda: if not, then we are concerned with en-tertainment pure and simple.”13At first, David Welch’s observations on “themajority of ‘escapist’ films that were produced principally for entertain-ment purposes”14 sounds surprisingly like Taylor’s, given the same refer-ence to “purposes” (i.e., intentionality) Yet Welch ultimately places greaterweight on the actualization of these intended meanings by different audi-ences Accordingly, he dismisses the official distinction between entertain-ment and propaganda as yet another attempt by the Propaganda Ministry

objec-to achieve full control over the cinema, its fantasies, and, perhaps even moreimportant, its discourses as well Where Hull relies on manifest content andthematic classifications in order to defend the majority of films against ac-cusations of ideological contamination, Welch turns to the rituals of movie-going to assess the contribution of the division between the “political” andthe “apolitical” to the preservation of the status quo In his view, the massappeal of the so-called entertainment films hinged on a carefully con-structed illusion about everyday life, for “by visiting the cinema, people

could pretend that fascist ideology or principles, as disseminated in films,did not meaningfully impinge on everyday life or force them to restructuretheir system of values radically.”15

The most radical challenge to the propaganda model and its conceptualbinaries has been developed in the context of ideology critique Here thecontribution by Stephen Neale is worth quoting at some length For it iden-tifies the basic contradiction at the core of all those contributions that

constantly hover between conceiving entertainment films as ideological and escapist and therefore performing an ideologicalfunction in not confronting “reality,” or else as embodying Nazi ide-ology in a hidden way through particular modes of characterisation

non-or the pnon-ortrayal of validated narrative actions The latter are entiated from propaganda because they are somehow not “overt” orwere not produced at Goebbels’s behest However, if they are not

differ-“overt” it is still assumed that they can be read in the covertly scribed manner that this will always be so, and this because of anintentionality that remains, in essence, in the film, rather than be-cause the nature of the specific conjuncture in which the films werefirst made and viewed forces that reading.16

in-According to Neale, an expanded notion of ideology avoids such passes in the theorizing of popular cinema, especially if its products andpractices are conceived not in the sense of deceptions and illusions but aspart of a fully developed theory of filmic representation and social reality.Defined in that sense, ideology establishes symbolic systems that take theform of cultural institutions, aesthetic practices, and critical discourses.Popular cinema represents one of the most important sites of negotiation forthe conflicting forces that define the relationship between individual andsociety In its infinite capacity for creating, circulating, and controlling pri-vate and public fantasies, classic narrative relies on specific patterns ofidentification in order to establish subject positions that actualize and inte-grate these conflicting forces The resultant subject effects, as it were, giverise to the fantasy of a coherent, unified self and, in so doing, contribute tothe production of social consensus and political hegemony Yet it should al-ways be remembered that, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the production ofaesthetic or narrative forms is to be seen as an ideological act in its own

im-right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to resolvable social contradictions.”17

un-Stephen Lowry has been one of the first to utilize such an extended tion of ideology in a thorough analysis of what he, somewhat surprisingly,still describes as “shallow, seemingly apolitical entertainment films.”18Fol-lowing Jameson, Lowry approaches ideology in Nazi cinema not throughparticular contents, but through the mobilization of emotions and desiresand their imaginary reconciliation in accordance with the changing de-mands of culture and society; hence his conclusion that “we need to shiftour perspective from a narrowly political definition of ideology which askswhat ‘message’ films might have had, and instead scrutinize how films actu-ally negotiated cultural and ideological conflicts.”19 According to Lowry,the question about the specifically fascist nature of these films can only beanswered through historical contextualization, including greater attention

no-to the close connections between new mass cultural forms and establishedcultural practices within the fascist public sphere

Such affinities undoubtedly confirm popular cinema as an integral part

of the process of modernization and the experience of modernity, but only

if cinema is fundamentally redefined as a practice and event The proposals

by Lowry and others for what is alternately referred to as historical textualization, interdisciplinary approaches, or cultural-studies readings re-main incomplete as long as they fail to achieve the conceptual shift fromIdeology to ideologies Above all, this requires greater attention to the com-plicated relationship of popular cinema to high and low culture, as well

con-as to regional, national, and international culture in the context of tional practices, aesthetic forms, and cultural traditions Otherwise thestudy of cinema and ideology will end up with new conceptual impassescaused by, on the one hand, the radical expansion of the fascist imaginaryinto popular culture and everyday life and, on the other hand, the equallyproblematic identification of cinema under fascism with the ideology ofclassical narrative cinema

institu-Resisting such temptations, Karsten Witte has perhaps gone furthest inopening up the field of inquiry to a variety of popular genres, especially therevue films and the romantic comedies; he also has been most willing to defythe conventions that have made research in this area such a difficult and of-ten inhibiting endeavor His intellectual commitments are captured in thesurprisingly simple and, for that reason, all the more provocative proposi-

tion that, “Instead of determining which features constitute a fascist film,

we need to examine how films functioned under fascism or rather, in thecontext of fascism.”20Continuing along similar lines, though in very differ-ent theoretical contexts, Linda Schulte-Sasse has recently suggested that

“rather than taking ideology as the starting point and looking at how moviesshow ideology, we can perhaps take movies as the starting point and exam-ine how they harbor, transform, exceed, and undermine political ideol-ogy.”21Her focus on fantasy as a framework in which desire becomes pos-sible, even if it remains an impossible desire, has shed new light on theaffective structures that dissolve the political into the experiential and, forthat reason, can only be understood through a similar conceptual shift fromthe “management of ideas” to the “management of desire.”22

The growing attention to the formal aspects of classical narrative ema has contributed significantly to the long overdue mapping of popularcinema and its hidden attractions However, the continuous privileging ofthe filmic text in the conceptual trajectory from “manipulation” (i.e., in thepropaganda model) to “interpellation” (i.e., in ideology critique) and “fan-tasy production” (i.e., through psychoanalytic readings) also raises newquestions For instance, it might be argued that these contributions haveonly updated the terms of analysis by enlisting the symptomatic nature of

cin-“Nazi cinema” in the new constellations of mass culture, modernity, andpostmodernity A thus expanded notion of fascist fantasy production, whichfinds its ideal manifestation in the Hollywood dream factory, is bound todistract from, if not act against, the historical specificity in the filmic artic-ulation of power and pleasure Accordingly, Schulte-Sasse’s emphasis on theclose affinities between the subject effects of fascism and classical narrativecinema culminates in a typical postmodern reading of “National Socialism

as virtually synonymous with illusion, theater, or spectacle.”23But behindthe theories of subjectivity, her study on fantasies and subject effects alsoperpetuates the vilification of classic narrative found in more familiar argu-ments against film propaganda as well as Hollywood cinema Following asimilar pattern of argumentation, Eric Rentschler uses a series of individ-ual readings to conjure up the image of a cinema of illusions that, in hisview, must be described less as the culmination of the dialectics of moder-nity than as “a preview of postmodern attractions.”24Yet this new theoret-ical alliance does not prevent him from denouncing Nazi cinema as “a cul-ture industry in the service of mass deception” where the films “offeredonly an illusion of escape from the Nazi status quo.”25

Based on the groundbreaking work of Witte, Rentschler, and Sasse, a younger generation of American scholars interested in culturalstudies has begun to study aspects of popular cinema in the context of othercultural practices, discourses, and traditions, including the persistent appeal

Schulte-of American mass culture, the phantasmagoria Schulte-of German colonialism, andthe predominance of the star system.26All contributions are informed bythe desire to move beyond the conceptual divides that have limited muchearly scholarship to totalizing models of explanation, whether they arecalled propaganda, ideology, or the fascist imaginary My study hopes tocontribute to this trend by presenting a number of critical concepts andmodels for thinking about popular cinema along social, cultural, political,and economic lines While open to interdisciplinary approaches, I rely pri-marily on film studies as a discipline perfectly suited to provide the basicterms of analysis in what must be regarded as a crucial moment of histori-cal and theoretical reassessment And while I am not denying the attrac-tiveness of a delineation of the postmodern that begins with Hitler’s appro-priation of Hollywood, as it were, I also take seriously the historical legacies

of modernization and modernity after 1933 and pay close attention to theirchanging interpretations in the aesthetic, economic, political, and socialpractices that constituted popular cinema in the Third Reich

II.

After this overview of the existing scholarship, my goal is to outline an alternative model that locates the specificity of cinema in the Third Reichnot in some stable ideological system or institutional structure but in actualfilmic practices In order to define these practices in a larger social and cul-tural context, I want to use the second part of this chapter to consider some

of the historical conditions that made popular cinema such an importantmedium, both of conflict and compromise, in the articulation of modernlifestyles and contemporary sensibilities after 1933 Three factors, I believe,are central to its undisputed ascendancy: the complicated relationship tothe project of mass culture and modernity, including the progressive lega-cies from the Weimar years; the heavy reliance on the conventions of clas-sical narrative cinema both in its Germanized and Americanized versions;and the inherent tension between a market-driven economy and a dictato-rial political regime

Throughout the period in question, the cinema’s direct appeal to petitbourgeois consciousness, including its social insecurities and rigid moral

codes, and the heavy loans from bourgeois culture, especially its intellectualpretensions, helped to gloss over the strains and ruptures in what essentiallyremained a class-based organization of culture Popular cinema developedfurther its affinities with modern consumer culture and a homogeneouswhite-collar society; references to questions of race and ethnicity remainedlargely absent Participating in increasingly elaborate marketing campaigns,films cultivated their close ties with the recording industry, book publish-ing, and the illustrated press, and they contributed actively to the consum-erist celebration of modern life by influencing fashion and design trends,definitions of female beauty and sex appeal, young and urban lifestyles, andrecreational activities like sports and traveling; even the war years did notsignificantly change these tendencies.

To phrase it differently, popular cinema continued to participate in velopments typical of any advanced industrial nation, urbanized white-collar society, and modern mass culture However, the cinema’s privilegedposition at the forefront of modernization must not be confused with a con-tinuous commitment to the project of modernity and the aesthetics of mod-ernism The means of standardization and homogenization were in fact of-ten used to mask more problematic divisions within culture and society as

de-a whole Reflecting on this contrde-adiction, Leonde-ardo Qude-aresimde-a describesthe “depoliticization of the entertainment film” after 1933 as the necessaryoutcome of a process “in which leisure time and the organization of leisuretime constituted a fundamental part of the regime’s social modernizationprogram.”27Participating in the public culture of accommodation and pre-

tense, the cinema provided both a refuge from the pressures of tion in the workplace and the organization of social life, and a refuge for the

moderniza-progressive tendencies associated with Weimar modernism and its dreams

of a democratic society This paradoxical quality has been described byWitte as “the removal of modernity from public life and its simultaneousreintroduction by means of film and other mass media.”28

What are some of the implications of the debates on modernization,modernism, and modernity for my earlier definition of popular cinema as asocial fantasy, a cultural event, and an aesthetic experience? Did genre filmscultivate modern sensibilities as a protection against the “aestheticization

of politics” and the rituals of the “mass ornament”?29And did such a retreat

to the private sphere, with the public sphere reserved for the cult of the tional community, contribute to the kind of “split consciousness”30that hasbeen considered essential to the functioning of the Third Reich as an elab-

na-orate system based on consensus as well as coercion? Must we think of ular cinema as one of the many heterogeneous forces and practices that sus-tained everyday life precisely through toleration of inconsistencies andopenness toward compromises, including those between the reality of anAmericanized urban culture and the fantasy of a Germanized folk cul-ture?31Or would it be more productive to speak of popular cinema in terms

pop-of a partial public sphere that, based on the functional division betweenpolitics and entertainment, absorbed some of the traditions associated withthe public /private divide into older cultural practices and other social con-texts, for instance through the consumerist celebration of individualism inthe highly circumscribed terms of escapism?

Popular cinema after 1933, it might be argued, contributed to the doing of the progressive /reactionary and modern /conservative divide thathad constituted Weimar culture and society in the terms of cultural exper-imentation and innovation as well as political crisis and controversy Con-tinuing in this tradition, the new films did much less, and much more, thancreate antimodern fantasies through modern means or use internationalstyles in nationalist mythmaking Likewise, the cinema’s various new in-carnations involved much more, and much less, than the replacement of amarket-driven industry committed to mass entertainment with a powerfuland highly effective propaganda machine under state ownership Examin-ing these continuities, Thomas Elsaesser has spoken of a “third form ofmodernity”32 that enlisted popular tastes and practices in a profoundlymodern derealization of space and time that remained limited to the cele-bration of personal lifestyles and excluded questions of labor and technol-ogy Participating in this momentous reconfiguration of cinema and moder-nity, even the divisions that informed the cinema’s contribution to the rise

un-of modern mass culture — namely as a critique un-of high culture — could finally

be utilized in the creation of a very different public sphere under the ditions of fascism

con-Within these constraints, the art film, given its heavy debts to the mar cinema of quality, remained obliged to middle-class artistic traditionsand cultural ambitions, but also made them more available to the ideologi-cal constellations of race and nation By contrast, the popular film relied in-creasingly on the conventions of classical narrative cinema and the kind ofstable identifications and reality effects that could respond best to variousideologies, including the bourgeois project of aesthetic education The codi-fication of generic formulas and stylistic conventions after 1933 cannot be

Wei-separated from the almost programmatic abandonment of formal tion for technical perfection and the emergence of a standardized model

innova-of mass entertainment without any artistic ambitions or critical agendas.Yet even under these conditions, films managed to project a wide range ofmoods and mentalities, from the serious reflections on fate and destiny inthe melodramas to the celebration of contemporary, cosmopolitan, and he-donistic lifestyles in the sophisticated comedies Filmmakers paid equal at-tention to the latest trends in popular music and dance and the great clas-sics of the literary and musical canon Their highly pragmatic approachesprovided a false sense of continuity that confirmed popular cinema as both

a regional, national, and international phenomenon and an important diator between high and low, popular and political, culture Making the un-avoidable comparison with the classical Hollywood cinema, Patrice Petrohas therefore asked: “Was Nazi cinema merely a version of the classicalHollywood cinema?” and, if that is the case, “to what extent did the popu-larity of Nazi film promote distinctly national preferences and designs?”33

me-Defying speculation about the nature of fascist aesthetics, the manygenre films produced during the Third Reich have given rise neither to adiscernible filmic style nor to a particular ideological agenda In accordancewith Petro, they might be described as an impoverished, derivative version

of the Hollywood original, which means: without the carefully writtenscripts, skilled direction, elaborate set designs, brilliant cinematography,glamorous stars, and, most importantly, generous budgets From such a per-spective, the products of forced aesthetic coordination bring into relief the pervasive lack of imagination in a popular cinema concerned above allwith the systematic elimination of formal innovation and social critique Ofcourse, the industry’s full embrace of the Hollywood model should not dis-tract from the many continuities with Weimar cinema, especially of the earlysound period, and the repeated efforts to “Germanize” successful Americanformulas through the introduction of different characters, settings, and at-mospheres After all, the cinematic articulation in what Witte, in a com-pelling phrase, calls “Germanized Americanism”34took place on the level

of texts and contexts, and was part of many other, more subtle forms of propriation and incorporation within the tradition of the European art filmand in relation to Central European theatrical and musical culture Refer-ring to the predatory nature of this process, Klaus Kreimeier has claimedthat “under Hitler’s fascism, the German film came into its own: not by be-coming fascist but by becoming thoroughly German.”35

ap-Yet what he describes as German melodrama and German comedy was

in fact characterized less by a particular form or style than by the atic avoidance of local and regional cultures, social and ethnic characters,and political and economic processes, except of course in the form of themost hackneyed clichés As a result, derivative styles and eclectic tenden-cies prevailed in all areas of cinema, from the heavy reliance on musical cul-ture — including a strong commitment to the operetta — to the many loansfrom the theatrical tradition in the acting styles and dramatic conventions.Indirectly confirming this point, the celebration of German literature (e.g.,

system-in literary adaptations) and of German history (e.g., system-in the historical mas) remained limited to the state-commissioned films and to prestige productions with artistic ambitions The designation “German,” in otherwords, functioned above all as a system of reductions and absences that, atbest, realized its populist ambitions in the established forms of petit bour-geois and bourgeois culture At worst, it betrayed its underlying contemptfor popular traditions in the shocking banality, triviality, and conventional-ity of its products The high level of craftsmanship and professionalism onlyconfirmed the pervasive pragmatism and utilitarianism in a national cin-ema interested primarily in its own efficiency and effectiveness

dra-What was the main purpose of such formal conventionality? Almost allgenres were structured around a persistent anxiety over questions of iden-tity in the form of petit bourgeois consciousness, bourgeois notions of truecharacter, and conflicting definitions of gender and class; hence the manycompensatory fantasies about rural, small-town, and upper-class life andthe insistence on national and ethnic stereotyping and on normative sex-ual identities However, the intense preoccupation with identity rarely re-mained limited to narrative and visual strategies It permeated all aspects ofcinema culture, from the conditions of film exhibition to the celebrity cultsurrounding certain stars Even the conditions of production and distribu-tion reflected these changing definitions of the “German” as a marker of na-tional identity and a function of product differentiation, whether in theform of casting choices and censorship decisions or through the marketing

of German films at home and abroad On the one hand, this obsession withidentity must be examined in relationship to the absent signifier of anti-Semitism and the myth of racial community On the other hand, the preoc-cupation with the problem of gender must be assessed through the conti-nuities and ruptures within classical narrative film and the organization ofcinema as a social event and public sphere Only as part of such an extended

definition of popular cinema can the hidden affinities between social andpsychic formations be retraced to what was represented and what excluded;the ways in which conflicts were resolved, and values and behaviors af-firmed; and, most importantly, the means through which normative as-sumptions about gender, class, nation, and the absent marker of race had to

be negotiated across the full range of cinema culture

III.

Instead of arguing that popular cinema is worthy of closer attention because

of previously unacknowledged qualities, I want to take advantage of its negligible status in the existing scholarship in order to address more funda-mental questions in the study of Third Reich cinema about the relation-ships among popular cinema, national cinema, and, as the most marginal-ized term, “art cinema.” This means: Rather than adding to the growingnumber of symptomatic readings, the following case studies are designed tochallenge preconceived notions about the power of the Propaganda Min-istry and the pervasiveness of Nazi ideology And rather than investing thepopular with new or different meanings, including those linked to the pos-sibility of aesthetic resistance, I propose to consider the overdeterminedfunction of popular cinema in relation to other, equally difficult categories,including that of national cinema

Just as the notion of the popular positions individual films in the largercontext of social and cultural practices, the category of the national opens

up the debates to the special conditions of film production and reception in

a state-controlled industry In the same way that popular cinema must beconceptualized through the interferences between the political and thepopular, including their illusory convergence in the ideology of populism,national cinema has to be defined through the national and internationalinfluences that gave rise to a uniquely, and problematically, “German” tra-dition of popular cinema Through their highly charged relationship bothterms, popular cinema and national cinema, can be enlisted in the creation

of a more dynamic model that, at least for the purposes of this study, isfixated less on the manifestations of power than on the difficulties in achiev-ing institutional and ideological dominance

From a film historical perspective, the double crisis throughout the1930s in the mutual articulation of popular cinema and national cinemapoints, first of all, to a serious problem experienced by all European cine-mas after the introduction of the sound film: their shared struggle against

Hollywood’s economic and cultural dominance and their search for artisticalternatives that would reconcile the growing demand for popular enter-tainment with national traditions and sensibilities In trying to solve theseproblems, the Nazi leadership took a radical organizational approach thatbegan with the forced coordination of the industry and ended with its ab-sorption into the gigantic media empire overseen by the Propaganda Min-istry At least on a rhetorical level, the false reconciliation promised by thepopulist reawakening of cinema was to be achieved in the heightened terms

of Nazi ideology, which meant: a virulent anti-Semitism and an equally gressive nationalism Despite all the initial measures and regulations, thepopulist discourses had to be adjusted constantly to the changing demands

ag-on popular cinema in relatiag-on both to natiag-onal and internatiag-onal trends and

to political and military developments, especially during the war years

As a way of delineating this failed project, one might want to think of the popular in German cinema as the expression of a highly unstable com-promise between the decline of traditional folk culture and bourgeois highculture and the simultaneous rise of a streamlined consumer culture and

a highly politicized media culture Likewise, national cinema should bethought of as an ongoing struggle among cultural traditions, economic objectives, and political interests The shifting alliances formed by theseheterogeneous influences shed light on the actual or perceived threat ofAmericanization to German culture and the various available strategies oftransformation, from the Germanization of American influences to theAmericanization of German practices Moreover, the fundamental tensionbetween popular cinema and national cinema that finds expression in thereception of foreign films draws attention to the more intangible pleasuresand preferences that are usually ignored by totalizing concepts such as thepolitics of mass deception, the fascist culture industry, the aestheticization

of politics, the society of the spectacle, and so forth

All reflections on the popular must begin with an acknowledgment of itsdifferent meanings in modern media culture In the two meanings identified

by Stuart Hall, the first has to be understood in the sense of belonging to thepeople, and therefore being popular; here the popular always presupposes

an oppositional term such as the cultural elite or high culture The secondmeaning simply refers to a product consumed by many people; in that sense,

“popular” implies being determined by the conditions of mass productionand consumption and being fully dependent on new media technologies.According to Hall, the popular in the first sense is often compared to, or con-

fused with, folk culture, which is produced and consumed by the people Bycontrast, the popular in the second sense usually refers to cultural productsproduced by specific industries for the purpose of mass consumption In thecontext of German film history and criticism, both meanings of the popularhave been used to justify an elitist disregard for genre film as inauthenticand derivative They have surfaced in mass-psychological theories of es-capist entertainment as well as in progressive critiques of the culture in-dustry Even the most recent debates in cultural studies on popular culture

as a potential site of resistance (e.g., in the act of consumption) are bound

to remain under the influence of such binary thinking as long as they ignoreeconomic and political factors for the liberating gesture of “reading against

the grain.” That is why Hall insists that “there is no whole, authentic

au-tonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the field of force of the tions of cultural power and domination.”36

rela-In the German language, the double meaning alluded to by Hall finds

expression in two terms, volkstümlich and populär, that attest to the

separa-tion of authentic folk culture and industrial mass culture in modern many since the late nineteenth century Given the highly politicized nature

Ger-of folk and folklore within the celebration Ger-of national community, theseterms introduce an additional tension after 1933 between an indigenousfolk culture nostalgically evoked in various scenarios of national renewaland the kind of mass-produced foreign products, Hollywood style, regularlydenounced as a threat to the nation’s cultural identity To be sure, the pop-ular had already been mobilized in earlier fantasies about a preindustrial,traditional folk culture, and an idealized vision of the nation as communityhad informed many progressive and reactionary struggles against techno-logical progress and modern mass culture Yet during the Third Reich, thevarious meanings of the popular were actively enlisted in achieving thephantasmagoric convergence of folk and mass culture, and of high and lowculture, that depended on the most advanced filmic techniques and tech-nologies available at the time

However, which qualities connected the general relevance of popularcinema to the production of social consensus and the preservation of cul-tural hegemony to the complicated dynamics, so specific to National So-

cialism, between retrograde fantasies of Volk (folk) and Gemeinschaft

(com-munity), on the one hand, and the unfinished projects of modernism andmodernity, on the other hand? With the popular conceived of as a particu-lar relationship between representation and reality, and between experi-

ence and desire, the individual films offered powerful fictions of the realthat were sustained by the conditions of collective production and recep-tion, the conventions of visual spectacle and classical narrative, and thecompeting tendencies toward realism and illusionism in the medium itself.For that reason, popular cinema produced social fantasies in which illusionsand illusionism assumed their most important sociopsychological functionnot as an escape from, but as a corrective and an alternative to, existing re-ality; there lay their simultaneously oppressive and liberating quality.Unlike Kracauer’s notion of “film as the daydreams of a society,” whichassumes some degree of unconsciousness, the more recent concept of so-cial fantasy assumes a more open, dynamic structure for engaging with re-ality, whether in the registers of playfulness, speculation, exploration, visualpleasure, or critical analysis.37Even more important, the concept assumes

an active relationship between the producers and consumers of social tasies that finds expression in their respective social, cultural, and politicalchoices And perhaps most crucial for this study, the conceptualization offantasy as a function of cinema in the widest sense underscores the perva-siveness of compromise in a political system usually characterized as a hierarchical power structure or totalizing ideological system From such

fan-a perspective of ongoing struggle, the ffan-antfan-asies produced by, for, in, fan-andthrough popular cinema must be regarded as an integral part of social real-ity, and as such, they are crucial to any analysis of popular culture andeveryday life in the Third Reich

Under these conditions, even the categories of escapism and illusionismcan contribute to the reassessment of popular cinema as a mediator betweenthe fascist public sphere and modern consumer culture For the concept ofpopular cinema as a shared production redefines “escapist entertainment”

as an active process involving producers and consumers, as well as productsand practices It brings into relief the public and private fantasies that re-quire at least some form of consensus even under the most oppressive con-ditions Looking at fantasy as such a productive force, Richard Dyer de-scribes escapism in the cinema as a form of utopian thinking based on thebelief “that something other than what is can be imagined and may be re-alized.”38Accordingly, he calls the display of abundance on the screen a re-action to scarcity in everyday life, and he links the celebration of energy tothe experience of exhaustion, the desire for intensity to the sense of dreari-ness, and so forth For Dyer such an emotional dynamic cannot be fully un-derstood through notions of compensation that ignore the active contribu-

tion of the spectator in the realization of these effects What is needed, inother words, is a theory of popular cinema that neither dismisses the filmicimagination as a mere reflection of social reality nor denounces its wish for-mations as deceptive and false.

The new approaches to so-called escapist entertainment also draw tention to the popular as compromise formation within the fictions of na-tional culture and identity During the Third Reich, their influence ex-tended from popular cinema as a cultural institution with competing classalliances and its contested social status as an essential, though often vilified,aspect of national culture to the overdetermined function of popular cin-ema as a psychological model for the desired convergence of individual and

at-collective fantasies Here Volkstümlichkeit (popularity, but also folksiness)

provided the perfect rhetorical device through which the realities of ern consumer culture — not to speak of a media-savvy political regime —could be translated into the fiction of modern folklore and its dreams ofessence and truth However, unlike the forced coordination of the industry,the coordination of filmic fantasies was never fully achieved, and the nos-talgic vision of a truly populist cinema was soon abandoned in favor of amore pragmatic division of labor between the popular and the political andtheir changing investments in the continuities and discontinuities of na-tional cinema Revealing their initial foundation in racial categories, thediscourses of folk and folklore remained limited to the sphere of official cul-ture and political ideology, whereas the modern versions of the popular be-came confined to the highly circumscribed conditions of what already thenwas dismissed as mere escapist entertainment Within these divisions, nei-ther the folkloric nor the popular could really develop its progressive potential On the contrary, both remained under the influence of the self-legitimizing constructions of difference that permeated all aspects of popu-lar culture from day-to-day decisions in the Propaganda Ministry to themost mundane rituals of cultural consumption

mod-Through its political function as a discourse of integration, the populist

notion of Volkstümlichkeit draws attention to the strategic divisions within

the institutions of culture and the complete dependence of popular culture

on a population or populace, as it were Here the concept of collective tality, which informed Kracauer’s reflections on an unconscious predisposi-tion toward fascism in Weimar cinema, cannot be applied to the cinema af-ter 1933 without some further qualifications For in the place of “a cinema

men-firmly rooted in middle-class mentality,”39the new alliances between stateand industry established a centralized power structure that, under the

motto of Volkstümlichkeit, cultivated two very different models of cinema: a

small, but highly subsidized, national cinema committed to the idea of raceand nation, and a large, market-driven popular cinema designed to satisfybourgeois and petit bourgeois tastes Just as Kracauer’s model of embour-geoisement gradually loses significance in the transition, during the 1920s,from the cinema of “Caligari” to that of “Hitler,” the assertion by JulianPetley that “in a significant number of films an ideological position is in-scribed which can most usefully be tagged ‘petty bourgeois’ ”40finds littlesupport in the prevailing genres and styles after 1933 On the contrary, theseclass distinctions were quickly absorbed by the new division between clas-sical genre cinema, whose formal conventions and social rituals had finallybeen validated as the expression of a streamlined consumer culture, and thekind of self-consciously German art film that realized its cultural ambitionsthrough a heavy reliance on the classical canon of German music and liter-ature in the form of literary adaptations and musical biographies

The resultant schism within the popular as a manifestation of, and an

escape from, political ideology produced the genre of the Staatsauftragsfilm

(state-commissioned film), which was distinguished above all by its ent mode of production and reception; but it also allowed for the continu-ous integration of international styles into the regional and national tradi-tions represented by more conventional genres Significantly, it was theconsolidation of these two sides of cinema, the new national(istic) film artand traditional genre cinema, that opened up an imaginary space for over-coming the collective traumas (e.g., fear of freedom, ambivalence towardauthority, crisis of masculinity) that, according to Kracauer, had alreadypreoccupied filmmakers during the 1920s and that could now be resolvedthrough the institutionalization, in the very terms of cinema as an illusorypublic sphere, of the widening abyss between individual and social fantasies

differ-In the same way that the notion of the popular offers privileged access

to the divisions within cinema culture as a social practice, the concept of tional cinema sheds light on the considerable tensions between economicand political forces For that reason, the reconceptualization of popularmust include its difficult relationship to the nation and to nationalism Na-tional perspectives in film history usually become relevant whenever filmsare discussed in economic terms, most frequently in the interests of a do-

na-mestic industry and its need for protective measures (e.g., quotas, tariffs)against foreign imports In a state-controlled film industry, political consid-erations often interfere with, and take precedence over, economic necessi-ties, especially under conditions of war Last but not least, national tradi-tions take on additional symbolic meanings whenever the cinema’scontribution to the preservation or promotion of national culture is atstake; hence the heated debates in most European cinemas since the 1910sabout film as a new art form with a cultural mission and social purpose.Contemplating the heterogeneous forces harnessed by such a homogeniz-ing concept as nation, Andrew Higson rightly insists that the boundaries ofnational cinema always be examined in relation to specific production, dis-tribution, and exhibition practices and through the concrete terms of cin-ema culture, from the films in circulation, including old classics and foreignfilms, to the various audiences and cultural settings and the competingfilmic discourses and institutions.41

In light of the close connection between film and politics since the solidation of the German film industry during World War I, it should not besurprising that the struggle over the meaning of the national has alwaysbeen a struggle over audiences and, by extension, definitions of gender andclass Following in the nineteenth-century tradition of the theater as thefounding site of German national identity, the cinema came to be identifiedwith competing initiatives to create a new public sphere, first in the form ofwhite-collar society and, after 1933, as an extension of the racial commu-nity At the same time that silent cinema was discovered by various artistic,social, and political movements, all of which promised to overcome the deepdivisions within culture and society, the new medium and its precarious po-sition within the established hierarchies of high and low culture acquiredheightened relevance in the project of national culture, namely as an in-strument of social and political stabilization

con-It is in the tradition of such initiatives and debates that the category

of the national was repeatedly evoked after 1933 to channel the perceiveddouble threat to traditional folk culture and established elite culture intopresumably more stable constellations capable of controlling the cinema’sdisruptive energies while harnessing its contemporary sensibilities For thatreason, the advocates of national cinema continued to fortify its boundariesthrough heavy loans from the other arts, especially theater and music; theselective incorporation of regional culture and ethnic tradition; and the

careful negotiation of two very different forms of the national in the old andnew discourses of Germanness (e.g., Germany as “the country of poets andthinkers”) and the highly politicized context of National Socialism (e.g., inthe ideology of anti-Semitism).

Of course, most national cinemas during the 1930s and 1940s definedtheir boundaries in relation to others, and that typically in the form of eco-nomic competition; this explains why Hollywood is rarely thought of as anational cinema No matter whether these unequal relationships were de-scribed in terms of friendly or hostile exchanges, national traditions werealways evoked as an alternative to international developments and, in that,bore witness to larger political power struggles No matter to what degreecollaboration with others was encouraged or discouraged, the resultant al-liances were always formed in full awareness of the cultural fantasies sub-sumed under the notion of “national cinema.” However, it would be mis-leading to think of the national and the international only through thedichotomy of self and other, or only in unambiguous and uncontested terms

In this particular case, the underlying economic and political constellationsalso involved the expanding binaries of regional vs national, Germany vs.other German-speaking countries, Germany vs Europe, and Europe vs.Hollywood that, more often than not, connected the selective incorporation

of other filmic styles and traditions to more aggressive nationalist agendas.42

During the Third Reich, the program of national cinema and the ogy of National Socialism created an illusion of ideological and institutionalunity through various mechanisms of exclusion that began with the forcedcoordination of the industry and culminated in the strategic division be-tween a self-consciously national cinema with political ambitions and apopular cinema committed to private pleasures and fantasies The hetero-geneous qualities and homogenizing tendencies of popular cinema were en-listed in the hypocritical celebration of social, cultural, and regional differ-

ideol-ences under the heading of an all-encompassing Volkstümlichkeit.

According to Neale, the dissolution of the boundaries between ment” and “politics”— in other words, the very process denied by the officialpronouncements by the Propaganda Ministry —was to be achieved throughthe ideology of nationalism In his words,

“entertain-there was a constant stress upon, and fostering of, the film industry

as a national industry and its production as a national product.

Hence its audience was constantly addressed as a German audience watching a German film If the industry’s dominant product was en- tertainment, it was above all German entertainment.43

Despite such rhetorical efforts, the integrative power of nationalismcould be fully realized only outside the cinema, namely through a retro-

grade mythology of Volk, which promised social and cultural harmony in

the ideal of the national community, and through the aggressive force ofanti-Semitism, which came to be identified with a defensive battle againstthe destructive effects of modernization and urbanization The vision of astrong national cinema provided the ideological framework in which thepopular was to be redefined in relation both to the projects of mass cultureand modernity and to folk culture as the original model of nation in the newsense of race.44

Nonetheless, in everyday life, the popular remained the primary site ofstruggle for the rearticulation of the national in its changing social, cultural,and political manifestations Identified with the continuities of mass cul-ture, including its strong consumerist orientation, popular cinema contin-ued to play its most important institutional and ideological functions by sus-taining the illusion of a public sphere free of politics and a form of popularentertainment concerned only with individual desires and fantasies Sus-tained by these powerful investments, popular cinema contributed to theconditions under which the official culture of mass spectacles, party cele-brations, art events, and, of course, propaganda campaigns sought, unsuc-cessfully, to realize the project of ideological dominance but then quicklysettled for more pragmatic solutions Yet popular cinema also provided a so-cial and cultural context in which audiences could partake in the ongoingtransformation of mass culture and modernity, including in an interna-tional context, and engage with the social fantasies that addressed persist-ent social anxieties over questions of identity in the registers of classical nar-rative cinema That is why the study of popular cinema is so important both

to a better understanding of the Third Reich and the ruptures and nuities that define German cinema to this very day

conti-The year 1933 brought the release of two white-collar comedies that must

be considered transitional in terms of film history and genre cinema.1Theirdirectors, who were Jewish, came from screenwriting and had a talent forwitty dialogues and spirited repartee Suddenly marked as Other by the newracial laws and subjected to personal attacks, the two men saw their lives andcareers forever changed by the Nazi takeover and the rise of anti-Semitism.Though at different points and under different circumstances, both even-tually left for the United States With them, and many other directors, ac-tors, composers, and screenwriters, a unique sensibility disappeared from

2 M ADE IN 1933

GERM AN-JEWISH FILMM AKERS AND THE FORCED COORDINATION

OF THE INDUSTRY

I.

the German cinema, a sensibility that found foremost expression in the isters of humor, irony, parody, and farce After 1933, obligatory cheerfulnessand crude sexual humor took the place of subtle innuendoes and double en-tendres Visual, acoustic, and linguistic wit was abandoned in favor of con-ventional dramatic effects, and the provocative play with identities gave way

reg-to highly normative definitions of gender and race

What are the films in question, and who are the directors? Number One:

Das häßliche Mädchen (The Ugly Girl), the first directorial effort by

Her-mann Kosterlitz, who had previously worked as a screenwriter, for KurtBernhardt among others Shooting took place in January and February inthe Grunewald studio of the Avanti-Tonfilm AG just as Hitler was appointedchancellor and the Reichstag went up in flames When the film opened af-ter much delay on 8 September, in the fashionable Atrium-Theater inBerlin, the director’s name had been omitted from the credits, and the (al-legedly Jewish) actor Max Hansen became the target of vicious anti-Semiticattacks, with members of the audience shouting: “We want German movies!

We want German actors!” Nonetheless, many reviewers in the trade pressstill praised Kosterlitz for his humorous approach to the problems of every-day life, and newspaper announcements advertised the film as “pleasant”and “amusing,” and “full of delightful ideas.”2At the time of the premiere,the director was already living and working in Paris Having left Germany

in early April, he never even saw the final cut.3 After assignments as ascreenwriter in Budapest and Vienna, Kosterlitz went to Hollywood in 1936

at the invitation of Carl Laemmle Working for Universal under the name

Henry Koster, he directed such successes as The Bishop’s Wife (1947) and

Harvey (1950).

Number Two: Viktor und Viktoria (Victor and Victoria), directed by the

prolific actor-director Reinhold Schünzel Production took place from tember to December at the UFA studios in Neu-Babelsberg The film opened

Sep-to generally positive reviews in the Christmas season on 23 December at theelegant Gloria-Palast in Berlin However, there was an undeniable sense ofambivalence about what some reviewers still praised as quality entertain-ment in the tradition established by Erich Pommer and what others alreadydenounced as fundamentally un-German in its aesthetic sensibilities Suchaccusations were never directed at Schünzel personally, a fact that may beattributed to widespread uncertainty about the new anti-Semitic measures

and their relevance to individual cases The review in the Film-Kurier

con-ceded that “some offerings are not entirely agreeable but they at least show