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set collective moods and channel emotions, to move minds and mobilize bodies. Cinematic sound appealed to Nazi film practitioners and industrialists alike because it opened new possibilities to capture the entire range of modern diversion and thus, in Goebbels’s words, “to produce ever more films that are accessible to the whole folk, to high and low, rich and poor, young and old.”68 Surely, as we have seen in the preceding pages, neither the use of film dialogue nor that of film music entirely followed the ideological mandate of elevating the viewer’s soul to the ineffable substance of Germanness. But in historical hindsight, what must be seen as the most notable aspect of Nazi audiovision is the much more elementary project of remaking the viewer’s sense perception and restraining reciprocal relations between self and other. Like Wagner in Adorno’s reading, Nazi sound cinema aimed at merging expression and repression into one and the same mechanism. It set out to neutralize desire and coordinate memory, to reshape the viewer’s temporal and spatial relations, to frame competing definitions of reality, and in so doing to reify rather than open up given boundaries of meaning, articulation, and identity. Put into the service of the Nazi culture industry, talking pictures became a primary tool to make existing frameworks of power, social integration, and cultural signification appear legitimate and natural.
In the eyes of Nazi film ideologues the relatively new possibility of synchronized sound allowed German cinema to develop a nationally specific film language powerful enough to achieve international success: “The national rejuvenation in Germany,” boasted Film-Kurier in 1934, “has done away with this nonsense of imitating foreign styles and customs. Today the German film is what it should and must be: German.”69 But Nazi film culture, as we have seen already, was far less unified than its ideologues wanted.
It contained elements that do not meet the textbook definition of totalitarian rule and mass coordination: a recurring split between theory and practice; a tendency toward administrative confusion and provisional decision making; an often-incoherent concurrence of opportunism, populism, and authoritarianism. Reckoning with the continuous popularity of American sights and sounds, Nazi filmmaking as a result often sought to co-opt rather than simply deny the persistent hunger for Hollywood-style genre products. It appealed to Americanist fantasies but at the same time articulated highly anti-American agendas (fig. 4). America was perceived as the harbinger of innovative technologies and fearless rationalization, but it was also seen as a laboratory of decentered and feminized identities, a site of emasculated, degenerate, and Jewish hybridity. At once incorporating and disciplining what endured as fascinating about America, Nazi cinema referenced
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Figure 4. American fantasies: Ad for Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son ( Film-Kurier, 1934).
Hollywood with the ambition of reminding German viewers of older sights and pleasures but also of building bridges to the new order. However paradoxical in nature, the emulation of Hollywood thus functioned as a crucial catalyst for the construction of Nazi hegemony, that is, the articulation of national consent beyond previous frictions of class, status, and gender.
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The notion of hegemony implies ongoing contestation and historical contingency at the very center of modern society; it rejects narratives of all-inclusive determination and acknowledges that “unfixity has become the condition of every social identity.”70 Hegemony is never a given; it is in constant need of sustenance and reproduction. The following three chapters discuss in greater detail how feature films of the Third Reich helped win and refix Nazi hegemony by anticipating desired viewing positions and thus gaining control over whatever remained contingent about the act of reception. In paradigmatic readings all three chapters argue that both the presence of synchronized sound and the ambivalent appeal of American popular culture were central to the rendering of history as nature and fate and thus to the hegemonization of spectatorship in the Third Reich. Although we cannot reconstitute the contours of empirical acts of viewing, we may infer, primarily by way of negation, what the interaction of image and sound in Nazi feature films really meant to individuals in their everyday lives by analyzing the various strategies intended to curb unwanted fantasies and control what Alexander Kluge has called cinema’s moment of unpredictability: the film as it unfolds in the spectator’s head.71
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2 Incorporating
the Underground
Curtis Bernhardt’s The Tunnel
Rudolf Arnheim, one of the most belligerent German critics of the talkie, rejected sound well into the 1930s as something foreign to the art of filmmaking. In Arnheim’s view synchronized sound polluted the film medium; it curtailed the camera’s poetic power.1 Arnheim’s critique of sound might seem puzzling in retrospect, but the early years of sound film did indeed bring an alarming loss of refinement in the areas of camera work and editing. The new pragmatics of sound effectively transformed a sophisticated visual language that had been shaped by silent directors such as Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Fritz Lang. As Claudia Gorbman explains, synch sound visually rooted actors to the spot, and limited the possibilities of exploring space within a scene. . . . Actors were obliged to remain close to the microphone[s], which . . . were hidden behind props; early mikes not only had poor sensitivity to voices but paradoxically seemed to pick up every other stray sound around the set. The camera, imprisoned in its soundproofed booth, would not generally regain freedom of movement until the development of the blimp and rolling camera carriages in 1930 –31.2
In the early 1930s cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner ( Westfront, 1930; Kameradschaft, 1931; M, 1931) was central to the reinvention of camera mobility. It was not until at least 1933, however, that editing practices, too, could fully recuperate their former flexibility. For only then did it become possible to record speech, music, and sound effects on separate tracks, to layer dialogue and film music, and, in doing so, to overcome the often stilted sequencing of early sound sources and scenes.
Throughout the 1930s almost all important innovations in cinema technology served the effort to produce the illusion of real people onscreen 50
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speaking real words.3 Industrialists and filmmakers alike aimed at technological solutions that would place sound and image in natural harmony.
German theater owners were often unable to keep pace with the industry’s speed of transformation. By 1932 only 60 percent of all theaters in Germany had been wired for sound projection. German audiences, however, quickly embraced what contemporary commentators routinely discussed as a gendered drama—the marriage of sight and sound, including the one of imported images and dubbed voices. By 1933 lip synchronization and sound remixing had improved to such a degree that German audiences gave up their earlier rejection of dubbing.4 For German spectators, dubbing no longer flattened diegetic space or drove bodies and voices apart. While technological advances had helped integrate sound and image into a myth of principal unity,5 audiences had learned how to imagine natural links between body and voice even where those links did not exist.
Given the domestic approval of dubbing, it might surprise us that Nazi film studios continued to produce foreign-language versions of domestic films in order to deal with the language problem in early sound cinema. For export-oriented film industries prior to 1933, multiple language versions had provided the most feasible method of selling sound films abroad. Foreign-language productions had raised artifice to a higher degree to communicate the marriage of image and sound across given linguistic boundaries.
That Nazi cinema extended the production of multiple language versions well beyond the point of technological necessity, on the one hand, must be seen as a result of purely commercial considerations. Because foreign-language versions could draw on the appeal of local stars and familiar faces, they promised a much more thorough penetration of foreign markets. On the other hand, the endurance of multiple-language productions throughout the 1930s must also be understood as a response to ideological mandates. Unlike subtitled or dubbed films, foreign-language versions allowed Nazi cinema to exploit foreign markets while upholding a sense of national difference and sonic segregation. Nazi filmmakers and ideologues cared much more than their audiences about who really owned the voices that came out of the loudspeakers. They embraced multiple-language productions in the hope of capturing foreign consumers without blurring linguistic boundaries and national affiliations.
Curtis Bernhardt’s Der Tunnel (The tunnel, 1933) was one of these
“freak”6 multiple-language productions (fig. 5). Based on Bernhard Kellermann’s popular 1913 science fiction novel of the same name,7 The Tunnel premiered on November 3, 1933, at the Capitol Theater in Berlin. Bernhardt,
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one of the last directors of Jewish background working for Nazi film studios, was brought back to Germany from Paris to shoot this film, in no small part because the film’s production company, Bavaria, intended to draw on Bernhardt’s French experience to produce a second-language version for French audiences.8 One of the few science fiction films produced during the Nazi period,9 The Tunnel narrates the construction of a subway connection between Long Island and Europe. The film draws the viewer into a domain of special effects in which modern technology becomes an awesome spectacle and in which disciplined (German) work in the end prevails over the destructive force of Jewish capital and American greed. The Tunnel engages the viewer in a struggle over sound and its national ownership. Similar to the task of multiple-language production in the Nazi film industry at large, the film renders cinematic audiovision of critical importance to the marketable conversion of cultural difference into radical alterity. While presenting a narrative of geographical transgression and spatial conquest, The Tunnel enlists synchronized sound in the effort to rework spectatorship, separate different cultures, and revoke the rule of Hollywood over Europe.
