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solidarities. Arresting speech within established boundaries, Nazi film dialogue excelled in what Michel Chion has called de-acousmatization: “a sort of enclosing of the voice in the circumscribed limits of the body—which tames the voice and drains it of its power.”40 Speech in Nazi film dissociated people much more than it allowed them to open up for each other through the medium of language, whereas it became the task of film music, as we will see in a moment, to reunite the isolated as isolated and to fulfill, under conditions of domination, popular demands for play, plenty, and community.
wa g n e r i n b a b e l s b e r g
It has become a commonplace for film historians to point out the influence of Richard Wagner on Hollywood film scores of the classical studio era. European émigré composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Miklós Rósza, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman played a critical role in the process of adapt-ing Wagner’s compositional techniques to the narrative demands of Hollywood feature films.41 Hollywood film composers since the early 1930s had evoked Wagnerian harmony, chromatism, and unending melody to ameliorate dramatic action. They used Wagner’s leitmotif technique to illustrate thoughts, feelings, or motivations and, thereby, to supplement the diegetic world with glimpses of anticipation, remembrance, or irony. Whereas Nazi Germany embraced Wagner as an icon of national and racial self-assertion, Hollywood’s film composers utilized the master’s compositional methods to extend impressions of narrative integrity and roundness, to unveil putative truths and essences that amplified the work of dialogue, narrative, and image track.
Theodor W. Adorno was little surprised about Wagner’s popularity in Hollywood. Like Wagner’s mature music dramas, which for Adorno already contained the seeds of twentieth-century industrial culture, studio film music was designed for audiences no longer capable of concentrated structural listening. But, according to Adorno, in its very effort to complete Wagner’s individual techniques with the means of a Fordist culture industry, Hollywood eluded the utopian elements of Wagner’s aesthetics. Let us briefly recall that Wagner’s famous concept of the total artwork envisioned future artworks that would reintegrate the alienated siblings of music, dance, and poetry. For Wagner the total artwork intended to restore the possibility of sensual plentitude and communal solidarity, to recenter experience and overcome cultural fragmentation. The total artwork aspired to nothing less than reclaiming the role of tragedy in ancient Greek society. It was to reestablish aesthetic experience as the principal path of communal
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integration and identity. In the critical perspective of Adorno, Hollywood failed to recognize how Wagner sought to couple aesthetic innovation with political reform. Studio film composers, pressed by Hollywood commercialism, reified Wagner’s leitmotifs into mere signposts that captured the viewer’s attention like advertisements. Void of any substance and complexity, Hollywood leitmotifs merely typified heroes and announced situations.
Their sole purpose was to facilitate the audience’s perception. For Adorno Hollywood Wagnerianism in fact rendered music a mere lackey to image and narrative. It valorized musical expressions that remained below the threshold of conscious perception and critical awareness. Although film music—like Wagner’s monumental style—was designed to be seductive, it was said to do its job best whenever we don’t hear or, as Hanns Eisler argued, see it.42 Although for Wagner “the unity of the music drama was achieved through the synthesis of its elements, with the total effect equal-ing more than the sum of its parts, classical film music critics and practitioners believed cinematic unity was attained through redundancy and overdetermination—not through a true synthesis of elements.”43
Adorno is of course an unlikely candidate to defend Wagner’s total work of art against Hollywood. In Adorno’s view Wagner himself already delivered false goods because he neither lived up to his own project of restoring spontaneity nor ever contemplated the possibility of creating art through collective labor. Nonetheless, Adorno’s criticism can help us better understand the popularity of Wagner’s larger aesthetic program in the self-reflection not only of exile film composers but also of Nazi filmmaking.
Wagner’s concept of the total work of art deeply informed the way leading film practitioners of the Third Reich aspired to use narrative film to stimulate national awakening. Looking more at Wagner’s general program than at his individual techniques, Nazi film theorists and filmmakers assigned music—understood as that most German of all arts—a much more audible and visible place than did their Hollywood counterparts (fig. 3). In often granting diegetic and nondiegetic music the possibility of energizing the image track, they also professed the final coming into being of Wagner’s original vision of future art—the advent of a truly synthetic form of public art that would close the gulf between the aesthetic and other domains of modern experience.
Whether we consider the electrifying sound tracks by film composers such as Giuseppe Becce, Hans-Otto Borgmann, Theo Mackeben, Willy Richartz, Herbert Windt, and Wolfgang Zeller or the prominence of the revue and music-film genre,44 Nazi cinema accentuated music as an equal participant in the composite art of filmmaking. It cultivated many stars
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Figure 3. Music matters: Ads for music films shown in Germany in 1933
(Film-Kurier).
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combining proficient acting and singing skills, but it also opened many a door for current opera and operetta celebrities to appear on German screens (for example, Maria Cebotari, Beniamino Gigli, Louis Graveure, Maria Jeritza, Jan Kiepura, Tresi Rudolph, Erna Sack, and Joseph Schmidt).45 Far from simply fulfilling an auxiliary role, music— diegetic and nondiegetic—took center stage in a great number of Nazi entertainment films and genres. Instead of subjecting film scores to what Eisler called Hollywood’s “vanishing function,”46 Nazi cinema put it on display in what one might call a cinema of sonic attractions: a cinema privileging spectacle, exhibitionism, and sensuous immediacy over narrative development, voyeurism, and dramatic closure. The comparatively large proportion of diegetic music performances—
from classical symphonies to contemporary hit songs—gave voice to the effort of converting (German) sounds into appealing sights, into showcases of what nineteenth-century romanticism had constructed as the primal source of German identity. Unlike classical Hollywood practice, Nazi film music was often meant to be heard and seen. It wanted to seduce and lull the mind, but it also wanted to impress, astound, and overwhelm, with the aim of incorporating German viewers into the national community.
In July 1936 Joseph Goebbels declared that Wagner’s work had “conquered the world because it was consciously German and did not wish to be anything else.”47 Goebbels suggested on numerous public occasions that Wagner’s international success should inspire the film industry to develop a distinctly German and stylistically assured film language that could revive domestic popularity and increase revenues abroad. Significantly, however, in the eyes of Nazi filmmakers and film composers—with the exception of explicit Wagnerians such as Becce (Hans Westmar, Der verlorene Sohn, Der Kaiser von Kalifornien, Condottieri, Der Berg ruft) or Borgmann (HitlerjungeQuex,Gold,VerwehteSpuren,DiegoldeneStadt,Opfergang)—
it was less Wagner’s compositional technique itself than his metaphysics of sense perception that was seen as the most important medium of giving German cinema Goebbels’s desired Wagnerian turn. Except for the diegetic staging of Wagner’s music in Erich Waschneck’s 1934 Musik im Blut (Music in the blood) and Karl Ritter’s 1941 Stukas, Nazi feature films strangely shunned any direct references to Wagner’s music dramas. Whereas Hollywood Wagnerians such as Korngold and Steiner consciously adopted Wagner’s intricate methods of weaving voice and music into a dramatic syntax, their German counterparts considered Wagner primarily an ideological soul mate, a nineteenth-century soothsayer foretelling film’s power to engineer utopian states in which neither the arts nor the human senses would suffer their modern condition of separation.
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Sounds of Silence
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In an instructive essay of 1939, director Wolfgang Liebeneiner (Du und Ich, Bismarck, Ich klage an), who would serve as UFA production head from 1942 to 1945, explicated these Wagnerian undertones of Nazi cinema.48
The basic law of silent and sound film, Liebeneiner argued, lies in film’s musicality, in how cutting and editing impute images with rhythm. Film is music with other means; therefore, it is the primary function of sound to accentuate the basic musicality of the image track and ameliorate cinema’s work of enchantment. “We know that the word, the dialogue, has a formulating and sobering function, and that it on the other hand deepens, spiritualizes, and interiorizes. But it can only fulfill the demands of film if it adheres to the musical rhythm of the image and becomes its equal.”49 It is not what actors say but how they say it—not discursive logic but intonation, stress, and accent—that makes film dialogue persuasive.50 Film music, too, should emphasize the rhythmical structure of film instead of simply illustrating emotions or stitching narratives together. According to Liebeneiner, scores meet the laws of film whenever they crown a movie’s principal rhythm with harmony, melody, color, and timbre, whenever they fulfill the “old Germanic longing to include the whole world into one artwork and to combine all art forms into one powerful experience.”51
Silent film, Liebeneiner continued, was only the first step toward the full unfolding of cinema’s musicality. It left the acoustical space open for the viewer’s own imagination, and it is for this reason that undubbed or subtitled American features enjoyed great popularity in Nazi Germany, simply because spectators falsely rendered the sound of foreign voices as music and melody. But when seen from a more critical perspective, Liebeneiner insisted, Hollywood lacks the cultural resources to produce aesthetically relevant sound films. Driven by greed and the whim of industrial progress, modern America has endorsed pure, disenchanted rhythm and thereby obliterated the community-building power of harmony, melody, and timbre. Contemporary Germany, by way of contrast, sustains rich musical traditions in spite of all signs of modernization. As the most immediate expression of the German soul, music saturates daily life literally at every corner; it emanates from coffee shops and entertainment places, from domestic gramophones and the public marching grounds. It is Germany, therefore, the country that “created music and conquered the world with it,”52 that provides what is essential to perfect the musical logic of film, to synthesize cinematic sounds and sights, and thus to fulfill Wagner’s dream of future art as a public medium of plenitude and communal integration.
Babelsberg, not Hollywood, is the privileged site at which authentic sound films can come into being.
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Informed by Wagner’s programmatic vision of future opera as a space of cultural synthesis, Nazi film theorists and filmmakers such as Liebeneiner recognized film as the most effective instrument of modern culture to unify experience and reshape sense perception. Film was seen as essentially melodrama, and by definition Germans did best in infusing the drama of images with melos, with emotional timbre and an imaginary sense of plenitude. What Liebeneiner and others envisioned as Wagnerian film art was meant not only to unify the heterogeneous elements of cinematic representation but in so doing to reform the nation’s body politic. Similar to Wagner’s quest for a musical idiom that would speak to the entirety of the German people, film music was meant to close the great divide of modern culture: the gap between legitimate art and mass culture that had existed since the late nineteenth century. As conceived by Nazi film theorists, film music proved essential to set collective moods and bond the people, to mobilize desire and regenerate lost experiences of community.
