m u s i c a l p o a c h i n g
In 1878 Richard Wagner declared that the essence of German national identity could be found in music, yet at the same time he acknowledged the difficulties of defining exactly what made German music German: Bach’s work had relied on French and Italian models; Händel had achieved his fame in London as a composer of Italian operas; the Austrians Haydn and Mozart had been heavily influenced by Italian music of the time. Confronted with the dilemma of the international character of German musical traditions, Wagner ended up explaining the Germanness of German music by pointing to the remarkable ability of German composers to rework foreign sources and unlock the true meaning of other aesthetic traditions: “[H]is is no mere idle gaping at the Foreign, as such, as purely foreign; he wills to understand it ‘Germanly.’ . . . [H]e strips the Foreign of its accidental, its externals, of all that to him is unintelligible, and makes good the loss by adding just so much of his own externals and accidentals as it needs to set the foreign object plain and undefaced before him.”53
Nazi musicologists, in their attempt to define the essence of German music, largely followed Wagner’s reasoning. Vague assumptions about the German ability to adapt foreign models persisted throughout the Nazi period, in spite of various projects to find more rudimentary forms of musical Germanness in folk music, local traditions, and Gregorian chant.54 Nazi film music, I suggest, at once reflected and exploited this dilemma. To be sure, Goebbels in 1933 had quickly ordered roughly 45 percent of all film
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composers to be removed from their positions, the majority of them Jewish, in order to make German film music “German.”55 But similar to both Wagner and Nazi musicology, Nazi cinema failed to clearly define essentially German musical traits. In fact, responding to the continued receptiv-ity of German audiences and composers to international compositional practices, Nazi film sound tracks featured many musical idioms that official Nazi doctrine deemed inauthentic, including jazz and swing. Nazi film music, particularly during the prewar era, often overstepped the boundaries of what its ideologues prescribed, yet it did so not to give voice to some kind of aesthetic resistance but rather to meet popular demand halfway and bring it safely home. It poached on the foreign, transposed the exotic into the familiar, to address and simultaneously domesticate the entire spectrum of modern musical pleasure and thus to contain possible aesthetic resistance within the dominant order itself.
The interaction of sounds and images in Glückskinder (Lucky kids, 1936, Paul Martin), a German remake of Frank Capra’s 1933 It Happened One Night, is a good case in point. Lucky Kids, as Eric Rentschler has argued,
“replicated a Hollywood film on a Babelsberg studio set, imitating a generic pleasure made in a foreign dream factory, in effect creating the illusion of an already illusory world, raising artifice to a higher power by frankly ad-mitting its own derivation and desire.”56 In contrast to Capra’s original, which engaged a multitude of visual puns and erotic metaphors, Lucky Kids is at pains to bracket sexuality and desire or—at best—to relocate desire from the visual level to the much safer and more controllable sphere of dialogue. Cosmopolitan music styles, although mostly constructed by Nazi ideology as overly sexualized and degenerate, play a significant part in this project of displacement. Peter Kreuder’s sound track for Lucky Kids appeals to the continuous popularity of jazz and swing in the Third Reich,57 yet at the same time it helps discipline the actors’ bodies as much as the viewers’
perceptions. This effort to contain pleasure and perception culminates when Lilian Harvey, Willy Fritsch, and two friends engage in a brief song-and-dance interlude, performed in Fritsch’s New York apartment to the sounds of Kreuder’s hit song “Ich wollt’ ich wär’ ein Huhn” (I wish I were a chicken [lyrics by Hans Fritz Beckmann]).58
A remarkable exercise in cultural redress, Kreuder’s song for Lucky Kids borrows from various musical traditions to set the stage for a series of ever-shifting dance formations. Allusions to French, Russian, and American folk songs intermingle swiftly with the citation of Viennese waltzing music, American fox-trot, and the habanera from Bizet’s Carmen. Everything seems possible; indeed, nothing seems to halt the song’s grasp for distant
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realities and exotic modalities. Nevertheless, camera work and editing throughout the performance number are motivated by a fundamental fear of corporeality, a fear that a sudden ecstasy may yield a dissolution of identity and, hence, anarchy. Instead of tracking dancing bodies with imaginative travel shots, pans, or shifting perspectives, Martin’s camera remains extremely static. It renders motion from a stifling frontal point of view; it freezes speed and activity into images of rigidity. Several times the camera pulls back straight along a central axis as if to increase the frame’s defining and confining power. Even when the number, featuring jazzy big band sounds, involves all four actors in eccentric activities such as step- and belly-dancing, the camera remains in a safe position of control and in fact recruits the help of an additional framing device, a door frame, to transform horizontal movement into vertical stasis. The interlude ends with a series of tilted, disconnected close-ups of all four singers. This final montage not only reveres what is to be understood as the superiority of embodied yet curiously desexualized voices, but it also shows us the quartet’s amused reaction when the needle of the record player gets caught in a crack and endlessly repeats a single phrase. What camera movement and editing have already established is thus affirmed by the failure of mechanical reproduction.
The film urges disavowal to emerge from the very space of ecstasy. It exorcises the objects of its own fascination.59
Like speech, music in Nazi feature films is routinely subjected to processes of narrative and visual containment. Although on the one hand music is considered an unmediated expression of passion and the German soul, on the other hand it should resound from the visual field itself, from a visible body framed and contained by the cinematic image. Rather than help the body to communicate or signify, singing and music in films such as Lucky Kids communicate the body as an object of control, a captive within the material textures of the diegesis. As a container of song and music, the body becomes contained itself, situated and excessively diegeticized through audiovisual spectacles of embodiment. In the final analysis, then, foreign sounds in Lucky Kids offer the National Socialist body yet another chance to chicken out. Thoroughly domesticated by what Liebeneiner understood as the Wagnerian edifice of German cinema, “un-German” music helps stage affective outbursts that end up cementing given identities and prohibiting any decentering experience of alterity. Lucky Kids incorporates word, dance, and music into a compelling aesthetic synthesis. It frames alternative pleasures, synchronizes different traditions and tastes, and implicates music in a repressive project of disciplining the senses.
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a n a e s t h e t i c p o p u l i s m
Nazi music politics was characterized by continuous conflicts over the relationship between serious and light-entertainment music. Goebbels’s dismissal of composer Richard Strauss as head of the Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) in July 1935, for example, resulted largely from Strauss’s reluctance to place greater weight on popular music as an instrument of cultural politics. Goebbels, by contrast, “who had some elitist tastes and certainly scorned the masses, nonetheless was a consummate politician and realized that if he was to co-opt the largest number of people to satisfy the aims of the regime, they would have to be wooed, and this could be achieved only with the help of popular culture, not Bach or Beethoven.”60
The idea of film as a Wagnerian total work of art offered a compromise to these controversies. It allowed for the possibility of satisfying popular demand for hit songs and cosmopolitan idioms and at the same time justified film as a comprehensive art form grounded in high cultural traditions. Such synthetic aspirations became best exemplified by the way Nazi cinema used opera stars in order to proliferate light musical entertainment. Although films such as Georg Zoch’s Ein Lied klagt an (A song accuses, 1936) and Carl Froelich’s Frühlingsmärchen (Spring fairytale, 1934) problematized musical crossovers, Nazi film music readily exploited vocal talent in order to bestow popular material with cultural aura and thus close the pernicious gap between high and low. Following the lead of Wagner’s ambitious aesthetic program, music in Nazi film played an important role in fusing contradictory elements into a synthetic whole that could gratify diverse tastes, interlock different auditory media channels, and disseminate sounds that could be consumed at all times. Many leading film composers may have expressed their unease about using classical music in their scores,61 but on the sets of Babelsberg the conception of film as a total work of art helped justify the parallel existence of Beethoven and popular hit songs, of eighteenth-century marches and easy-listening music, of symphonic extravaganzas and cliché-ridden sing-alongs.62
Nazi film music during the 1930s clearly fell short of actualizing the kind of German musical essences that many zealous ideologues assigned to Wagner’s music.63 Similar to the implementation of film dialogue, the use of film music in Nazi cinema was characterized by many disjunctions between discourse and practice, intention and reception, ideology and commercialism.
Nevertheless, in its endeavor to integrate high and low, familiar and foreign, old and new, Nazi film music did assume some of the same gestures that
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had characterized Wagner’s own compositional practice. Adorno’s work on Wagner once again captures the full scope of Nazi populism: “As advocate of the effect,” Adorno wrote about Wagner, “the conductor is the advocate of the public in the work. As the striker of blows, however, the composer-conductor gives the claims of the public a terrorist emphasis. Democratic considerateness towards the listener is transformed into connivance with the powers of discipline: in the name of the listener, anyone whose feelings accord with any yardstick other than the beat of the music is silenced.”64
Similar to Wagner, who assimilated nineteenth-century high art to public taste at the expense of structural coherence, the German sound cinema of the 1930s aspired to control all possible effects. Nazi film music beat audiences into delightful submission. It poached on various musical traditions, not to intermingle competing cultural codes but to exorcize the other and remake the viewers’ desires in the film itself. Musical sound tracks in Nazi cinema were designed to seize and overwhelm the audience. They rendered domestication and discipline a pleasure. As they encouraged viewers to become universal German spectators, they put sound in the service of silencing minds and bodies.
National Socialism and fascism have often been characterized by their surplus of aesthetics, that is, the aestheticization of politics. Nazi sound film practice reveals that if we recall the original sense of the word aesthetics—
the sensory experience of perception—the opposite seems much closer to the truth. Like Wagner’s compositions (in Adorno’s reading), Nazi sound film excelled in anaesthetics. Although appealing to the viewer’s emotions, Nazi cinema hoped to neutralize sense perception and deny the corporeal nature of experience. Understood as a Wagnerian total work of art, Nazi sound film aspired not only to arouse powerful sentiments but at the same time to obliterate the private body as a site of spontaneity and experience.
It assaulted the body and disregarded sentience with the intention of arresting the individual mind and body in isolation. As Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi has put it: “[T]he lack of aesthetics, rather than its excess, made fascism totalitarian.”65
h e g e m o n i z i n g s p e c tat o r s h i p Although film historians generally agree that in the long run the coming of synchronized sound supported the dominance of Hollywood in Europe,66
for Nazi cinema sound played an indispensable role in the attempt to build a viable alternative to Hollywood filmmaking during the 1930s.67 Nazi cinema embraced sound not as a means of overt agitation so much as a tool to
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