public dimension of cinematic reception and spectatorship. After all, the struggle over sound film was not just a struggle over the poetic logic of the medium. It was also, and perhaps foremost, a confrontation between different notions of cinema as a public trading ground of meaning and experience. Many of the talkie’s critics envisioned (silent) cinema as a twentieth-century manifestation of the bourgeois public sphere. It opened a space of public discourse based on the educated reception and edifying valorization of aesthetic artifacts. Sound, according to this view, poisoned the formal integrity of filmic texts and hence undermined the structural possibility of public discourse. Seen with historical hindsight, the popular success of the talkie might therefore be understood as testimony to the rudimentary existence of different types of publicity and spectatorial initiative around 1930. Although the consolidation of sound film standardized formerly diverse acts of reception in the long run, sound film offered a space in which viewers could embrace the products of commercial culture to negotiate needs and identities within an industrial-commercial context. Although it would no doubt go too far to celebrate this new site per se as one of popular resistance, it seems reasonable to conceptualize early sound film as an ambiguous juncture at which desire, fantasy, and experience could be expressed through commodity consumption itself, through cultural practices that differed from the work of bourgeois publicity and that become legible only if seen against the turmoils of the time.
Nazi film culture sought to do away with the understanding of cinema in terms of bourgeois publicity and critical discourse and with the conception of the movie theater as an alternative public sphere allowing for the articulation of vernacular experiences, including those of blockage, displacement, and speechlessness. Nazi feature films were designed to emancipate the spectator from the restrictions of time and place. They supplanted audiences into a dream world radically different from Nazi realities; they subdued critical thought and simulated the advent of new communities beyond class, conflict, and discontent. The use of sound was an integral part of this project. Sound helped erase what had been locally specific about spectatorship during the silent era and caused empirical viewers to surrender their experience to the affective spectacle onscreen. Borrowing from Goebbels’s own rhetoric, one might describe this approach to film sound as one based on an orchestra principle. In the performance of an orchestra composition every group of instruments has its own part, but with the help of a good score and conductor all result in one symphonic whole. “We do not expect everyone to play the same instruments, we only expect that people play according to plan.”24 Nazi feature films tapped into the new possibilities of
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cinematic audiovision not to propagate agitational sound bites so much as to define the general plan—a unified horizon of meaning, knowledge, and sense perception—that would tune different voices into one larger symphony. The use of sound in Nazi cinema introduced German film culture to what Adorno, with his eyes on the American culture industry, called the principle of pseudoindividualization—the “halo of free choice” on the basis of standardization itself.25 It is to this ideological function of sound in Nazi film, its coordination of choice and its leveling of conflicting configurations of publicity, to which we now turn.
s p e a k i n g b o d i e s , s i l e n c e d m i n d s Semiotic and psychoanalytic film theory suggests that we may understand the coming of sound as a revolution in the representation of bodies and a reconfiguration of spectatorial pleasures. Sound carried with it the potential danger of uncovering the heterogeneity of the filmic medium, but it also offered ample means of conjuring fantasies of wholeness and corporeal self-presence: “The addition of sound to cinema [introduced] the possibility of re-presenting a fuller (and organically unified) body, and of conforming the status of speech as an individual property right.”26 Sound in dominant cinema reanchored the body in the space of the narrated world. It positioned the spectator as an “auditory subject”27 and amplified illusions of oneness, of identity and meaning, sustained by a body situated in space.
According to this argument one might think that German film theoreticians and filmmakers of the 1930s would have considered the presence of speaking bodies onscreen as a timely blessing playing right into the hands of their ideological designs. After all, Nazi Germany set out to counteract the fragmentation of identity and meaning in modern life; it promised to empower German men to become men again, to reassert themselves as resolute, unified subjects. Strangely enough, however, German films of the Nazi period by and large lacked the economy and precision that typified Hollywood dialogues of the same time. As my discussion of The Tunnel in chapter 2 will illustrate, Nazi feature films were often populated with protagonists who relapsed into silence or assumed stylized positions of muted suffering—think, for instance, of the heroes in Morgenrot (1933) , Hitlerjunge Quex (1933), Der verlorene Sohn (1934), Patrioten (1937), Friedemann Bach (1941), Carl Peters (1941), and Der große König (1942). Over and over again, we witness heroes struggling for verbal expression or withdrawing from speech entirely, heroes who never seem to be quite at home
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in their language. Other films presented speech itself as the primary site of heroic action and self-assertion. As we will see in chapter 4, films such as Der Kaiser von Kalifornien and Wasser für Canitoga fed on the voice and allowed men, by merely emitting a voice, to become masters.
All films discussed in the following three chapters are marked by often-contradictory efforts to identify new bodies and spaces from which proper German voices could emanate. In all films we will notice either an assertive overabundance or a puzzling deficiency of speech. At first, one might be tempted to blame the low status of screenwriting in Nazi cinema for this.
It is a well-known fact that—with the exception of star dramatists such as Gerhard Menzel (Morgenrot, Flüchtlinge, La Habanera, Robert Koch, Heimkehr) 28—screenwriters did not enjoy much recognition for their work under Goebbels. Yet to attribute the dearth or the surplus of film dialogue simply to clumsy screenplays, we would have to overlook how the linguistic properties of Nazi features resonated with larger political configurations. Three possible reasons come immediately to mind when trying to account for the unsettled role of recorded voices in Nazi cinema. First, one might see the vocal repose of many protagonists as a direct application of Nazi film theory and its definition of cinema as a “biocentric” rather than logocentric organ of national education.29 Because speech onscreen appeals primarily to the viewer’s rational cognition, it was seen by some as antithetical to film’s explicit goal of shaping moods and feelings, of overcoming discord and resentment, of conquering the deepest recesses of the unconscious. Heroism, it was claimed, “does not always need big words at all, and it can be expressed in film much more compellingly with other means.”30 Recorded voices, it was argued, spoil images of immediacy, and they interrupt spectatorial identification. Spoken dialogue led fantasy back to the real world and thus thwarted collective dreaming and spectatorial bonding.
Second, what often seems compulsive about spoken dialogue in German films of the 1930s might also be seen against the backdrop of Goebbels’s intention to make cinema into a visceral mass event that, in order to beat American competition, had to break with the legacy of German literary and stage traditions. An outspoken cineaste, Goebbels surely favored a cinema of formal excellence and artistic merit, but he did not intend to accomplish this goal simply by raiding the treasures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literature or stagecraft. German cinema, he argued, should shun canned theater or wordy introspection. Narrative film is driven by conflict and action, and therefore it needs to learn how to translate cultural val-
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ues into compelling visual surfaces. Americans in fact had it much better in this respect, Goebbels explained in 1941: “They entered film production as young peoples, without being somehow burdened by the ballast of the work of many hundreds of years. They therefore also found in a natural way what we were able to find only via detours, namely to emancipate film from literature, to sever its ties to the theater, and to make it into an autonomous and self-centered art form.”31 Learning from American culture, Goebbels insisted that philosophical eloquence and poetic locution had no place onscreen. Only a resolute privileging of gesture over word, of emotion over reason, could help build a national film culture that would deliver something for everyone.
Third, and finally, to better understand the unstable position of speaking bodies in Nazi film space, one might refer to what Karsten Witte has called the Nazis’ fear of decadence and decay, of flowing into dissipation.32
Nazi film aesthetics hallowed the freezing of individual bodies in ornamental configurations. It fragmented movements and bodies only to convert them into rigid and ritualized expressions. “Film narratives of the Nazi era generally privileged space over time, composition over editing, design over movement, sets over human shapes. Compared to Hollywood movies, most features of the Third Reich appeared slow and static. They were more prone to panoramas and tableaus than to close-ups, decidedly sparing in their physical displays (very little nudity, few stunts and action scenes).”33 Driven by deep-seated fears about spontaneity and desire, Nazi film tried to desexualize the body and contain what could thwart the appearance of consecration and control. The design of spoken dialogue in Nazi film was deeply implicated in this project of halting dissipation and de-eroticizing the body.
Many Nazi features, on the one hand, endorsed what one might call antilanguage. They involved a grave mistrust about linguistic expressions simply because oral communication signaled a loss of mastery, an emasculating opening toward the contingencies of the real. When the hero talked, his language was supposed to be minimalist and self-effacing. On the other hand, however, spoken words in Nazi movies were also meant to shift the viewer’s attention away from the body. Excessive dialogue displaced desire, contained physical displays and movements with emotive sounds, and bonded the viewers’ pleasure to larger compositions and designs. Spoken dialogue in Nazi film thus played an important role in channeling perception and regulating desire. What may strike today’s viewers as awkward about recorded voices in Nazi film is the often self-contradictory use of dialogue: to frame and domesticate pleasure in cinema, that most pleasurable of all sites of modern entertainment.
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s p e c ta c l e s o f s y n c h r o n i z at i o n Heide Schlüpmann has argued that Nazi film configured image and sound in a strictly hierarchical relationship.34 Sound in Nazi cinema deepened and dramatized diegetic space, but, similar to dominant Hollywood practices, it remained subordinate to the image track. My comments on dialogue in Nazi film so far urge us to modify Schlüpmann’s findings: the hero’s voice, whether it speaks too much or too little, was considered not as secondary but as an integral moment in a larger aesthetic gestalt. The point, therefore, is not to theorize whether Nazi cinema privileged one over the other but to understand how Nazi feature films readily and equally exploited the power of the visual and the sonic in order to organize attention and regulate desire. Speech in many feature films of the 1930s is meant to be sensuous and emotive. As I will argue in particular in my analysis of the Nazi cowboy in chapter 4, the perlocutionary aspects of language—the ability of words to make something happen in the world— overrule the power of discourse to enable rational insight and noncoercive forms of human interaction. Speech here assumes the status of a nonrepresentational sign.35 It generates meaning in ways that differ from conventionalized processes of signification; it emphasizes that which knows no real referent in language, that is, the material rhythm, texture, and color of verbal expressions. In a sense film dialogue—as discussed in the following chapters—mimics the role leading Nazi film theoreticians ascribed to the power of film music: to emancipate the viewer from discursive thought, to silence the spectators’ censor, and to cue them into shared narrational positions.36
Nazi sound films placed great emphasis on the timbre of regional dialects and variegated accents, on the tessitura of local German vernaculars. Regional actors and their regional modes of speaking enjoyed great popularity in Nazi cinema. Furthermore, many films cultivated strategies of what I call linguistic sampling: they gave voice to various German dialects even if the plot’s setting did not warrant the presentation of this kind of diversity.37 It seems reasonable to suppose that this regional grain of Nazi film dialogue, at the level of discursive construction, was meant to recall the emphasis nineteenth-century discourse had placed on the German language as a catalyst of ethnic identity. Richard Wagner’s by no means original linguistic theories found a curious echo in Nazi film practice. For Wagner, language reflected national essences, and the coloratura of speech provided a sign of ethnic identity. Language, for Wagner, essentially belonged to the realm of natural history and biology; its nonreferential textures would always be imperfectly accommodated by those who were foreign or physiologically
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different, particularly the Jew and the French.38 Nazi film practitioners applied these theories to the domain of industrial culture. They espoused film dialogue as a means to set specifically German moods and orchestrate eth-nically specific affects. With its many regional voices, Nazi dialogue hoped to inundate audiences with typically German patterns of intonation. The sound of speech was designed to function as a sign of mythic Germanness; it was thought to amplify cultural difference and tie the viewer into the national community.
Yet Nazi cinema, of course, aspired not only to become “German through and through”39 but also to conquer foreign markets. Commercial imperatives clearly set limits to the way feature films could broadcast the German language as a catalyst of national identity. The remarkable number of foreign-language versions produced by Nazi film studios even during the second half of the 1930s bears testimony to the often-contradictory coexistence of economic and ideological protocols in Nazi cinema. Nazi film officials may have considered sound as a tool to conjure a homogeneous community integrated via the regional textures of the German language, but they were no less willing to produce feature films in foreign languages, as well, in an attempt to end Hollywood’s postwar dominance in Europe and re-fashion German cinema as the most successful European cinema of all time.
The practical design of film dialogue in Nazi cinema, therefore, clearly exceeded the discursive construction of language as a conduit for typically German affects. The actual function of speech in Nazi feature films, I suggest, was in fact less to accentuate national specificity or celebrate community than to restrain desire and restrict the power of language to enable symmetrical forms of human interaction. As we will see in chapters 2 through 4, Nazi feature films often identified male and female voices with the materiality of their vocal idiosyncrasies. Speech incorporated the subject into the diegesis. Although protagonists may speak lavishly, no one in Nazi cinema really becomes a subject of discourse. Instead, the grain of both men’s and women’s voices communicates their bodies as objects of control that elude any control over the mechanisms of signification. Although Nazi feature films aspired to push linguistic expressions beyond the coded and, by foregrounding the materiality of speech, gave language the appearance of an unmediated sensory experience, they at the same time presented speech as entirely in the image. Dominant editing rules privileged the speaking body, even in shot /countershot scenarios. Throughout the 1930s they restricted the role of disembodied voices, whether they speak offscreen or as a voice-over. Nazi feature films thus attempted to arrest the migratory potential of the human voice and inhibit its power to establish new bonds and
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