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tions at home, but at the same time it intended to endow Nazi politics and entertainment with respectability abroad. As Heinrich Fischer wrote in the exile journal Die neue Weltbühne, The Tunnel “is the shortest intellectual connection between Hitler Germany and other countries; it has the task to submerge audiences abroad, who are not yet totally infected, with the ideological bacteria of the Third Reich; its method is so dangerous because it does not propagate the political reality of the new Germany but, by the allegorical means of a seemingly private individual fate, the naked heroic view of inhumanity.”47 With a film elevating the marriage of cinematic voice and body to a formula of political transformation, no risks were to be taken. The perfection of dubbing techniques by 1933 notwithstanding, Bavaria hired Bernhardt to direct a second version with the same sets for the French market, using French actors and their voices. Under the sign of a new order The Tunnel thus catered to demands as different as domestic mobilization and international revenue amassing, national self-assertion and Americanization, politicization and distraction, recentered identity and national difference. As a sort of bricolage integrating different temporal and spatial coordinates, the film enlisted cinematic sound as a tool of moving the masses as masses; it sought to redefine German cinema as a laboratory of a new national community. However, although produced at the very outset of the Third Reich, The Tunnel at the same time already foreshadowed the final self-destruction of Nazi fantasy production. Just as the film presents labor and technology as agents of metallization, so it constructs the cinema as a mechanism in which the unity of sights and sounds prepares humanity to “experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”48 Mac Allan’s final melancholy bears testimony to what Bernhardt’s Americanist fiction—against its own ideological intention— cannot fully repress: that the film’s figuration of both the subter-ranean world and the cinematic apparatus, far from providing collective rejuvenation and sensual renewal, far from bringing American wonders safely home to Nazi Germany, in fact only recycles the mythic image of Hades, the Greek underground realm of the dead.
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3 Engendering Mass Culture
Zarah Leander and
the Economy of Desire
Curtis Bernhardt’s The Tunnel illustrated how Nazi cinema tried to establish a fully controlled production and reception process, an autonomous culture industry dedicated to capturing dormant utopias and shaping these into politically effective responses. The film navigated the Weimar fascination with American urbanity, speed, and mass culture into the arms of Nazi mobilization. Significantly, however, The Tunnel’s peculiar way of showcasing muscular bodies and armor-plated subjects remained an exception rather than the norm among the overall output of German film studios during the Nazi era. Contrary to long-held assumptions about Nazi cinema, only a minority of the more than one thousand feature films produced during the Third Reich evidenced the kind of iconography that Hollywood itself and many scholars since 1945 have reified into fascism’s fatal and fascinating aesthetics. Seen with historical hindsight, The Tunnel’s project of exorcizing America remained incomplete. Often seemingly at odds with the call for a unified weltanschauung, the signifier “America” endured popularity throughout the 1930s as a repository of diverse attractions and diversions, a utopia of modern consumption and private leisure activity.
Challenging the stereotype of Hitler Germany as a perfectly organized machine of domination and mobilization, historians during the last decades have increasingly turned their attention to the hiatus between the imperatives of Nazi propaganda and the existence of a relatively apolitical sphere of private distraction and commodity display. In many of these revisionist accounts the relationship between National Socialism and American-style modernization is understood as incongruous. The fact that the Third Reich’s consumer culture “could be described with the jargon of authenticity, that is, slogans celebrating immediacy, experience, the self, soul, feeling, permanence, will, instinct and finally the race,” is seen as an effect of ideological 72
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displacement.1 Historian Hans Dieter Schäfer, for instance, reads the contradictions between ideology and everyday practice as a sign of the pathological nature of Nazi society, a schizophrenia characteristic of the psychopathic disposition of Nazi politics.2
Contrary to Schäfer’s attempt to pathologize Nazi Americanism, I suggest that we need to understand the heterogeneity of Nazi culture not as a symptom but as an integral part of the Nazi project. Nazi cultural politics provided seemingly apolitical spaces of American-like diversion in order to set moods, define norms, and align conflicting interpretations of reality. Although often at variance with the strict demands of ideological correctness, American-style consumerism, in particular during the prewar years, provided a stage for what Adorno in his analysis of American hit songs considered pseudoindividualization: spurious expressions of spontaneity and choice that already anticipated resignation. “By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with the halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself. Standardization of hit songs keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. Pseudo-individualization, for its part, keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them, or ‘predigested.’”3 Nazi film culture followed this formula to the letter. Entertaining the viewer with the illusion that within this highly politicized society certain spaces remained free of control and coordination, Nazi entertainment features sought to organize the viewer’s spontaneity. They offered predigested choices that defined points of view and—with the help of film music’s beats and rhythms— organized emotions. Nazi Americanism disabled earlier forms of solidarity to produce lonely crowds. It co-opted the popular’s “ineradicable drive towards collectivity”4 and blocked alternative definitions of modern German identity that were coupled to notions of individual autonomy and political emancipation.
During the years 1935 to 1938 the Nazi regime tried frantically to build up a German Hollywood and endow pseudoindividualization with a political task. Severely hit by slumping profits around the middle of the decade,5 the film industry was first put under direct state authority. Production schedules were streamlined, and stronger budgetary controls were implemented at all levels of operation. Second, the regime sought to rekindle domestic consumption, not—as Victoria de Grazia has shown—“by promoting the fan club, the movie magazine, or the giveaways typical of U.S. marketing campaigns during the Depression and widely imitated in Europe, but by mobilizing the Nazi political apparatus (Kraft durch Freude and traveling cinemas), discounting tickets, and sponsoring the UFA ‘revivals.’”6 Third,
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Hollywood in Berlin, 1933 –1939
and finally, the regime tried to broaden the film industry’s export operations, in part through coproduction arrangements with its European neigh-bors and improved marketing strategies in areas as remote as the Balkans or Latin America. Coordinating the various aspects of film production, distribution, and consumption, the Nazi film industry became a multinational venue. It manufactured genre films whose plots and styles were often meant to speak to audiences abroad as much as to domestic viewers.7 It produced light-entertainment fare that omitted all overt references to Nazi agendas, to the aesthetics of metallized bodies in motion, or to specific party icons, yet it aspired to stir national sentiments and exploit Germanness as a conduit to international success. In many cases this simultaneous inscription of political and economic directives resulted in far less homogeneous texts than its proponents and many later historiographers would have liked. The products of Nazi cinema during the prewar era, in fact, were often based on surprisingly contradictory concessions, on gestures of cultural appropriation pregnant with fragile syntheses and glossed-over fault lines, gestures that “left the government caught in ludicrous forms of self-redress and strategic withdrawal before the commodity fetish.”8
Nowhere is this ideologically ambivalent attempt at producing mass culture from above more obvious than in the ways the German film industry of the mid-1930s constructed female star images. All of the most important female stars of the Third Reich—Zarah Leander (fig. 8), Marika Rökk, Lilian Harvey, and Kristina Söderbaum— entered the German culture industry from abroad. In the cases of Leander and Harvey these stars also deviated from the image of woman as the domestic soldier of racial reproduction.9
Imported stars projected cosmopolitan sensibilities onto the German screen.
Frequently cast in roles that thematized their foreignness, these stars embodied forms of sexual agency that—although a far cry from the aggressive female sexuality in contemporary Hollywood screwball comedies— challenged the general inhibition of pleasure so characteristic of Nazi cinema.10
Song and dance played an essential part in the popularity of these film divas.
Inaugurating new commercial relations between film and record industry, singing stars such as Leander, Rökk, and Harvey elevated sound film to a domineering position in the marketing of light-entertainment music.11
Their voices traveled across different media and could be consumed through various channels at once; they offered a sense of cultural mobility by means of their sheer ubiquity.
Nazi film stars proved highly instrumental in the transformation of German film into a mass cultural product package. Their stardom linked particular films to the extrafilmic arenas of musical consumption, fashion,
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Figure 8. Mirror, Mirror on the wall: Zarah Leander in The Heart of a Queen (1940, Carl Froelich). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
makeup, and tourism, arenas central to the Nazis’ modernization of German leisure culture. Whereas Nazi film theorists—somewhat anxious about the bourgeois vocabulary of commodification—tended to rephrase the cult of stars in cherished nineteenth-century notions of aesthetic genius,12 musical film stars such as Leander essentially helped redefine film
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spectatorship in middle-class terms of respectability and privatized consumption. Playing to popular desires for American-style leisure and melodramatic identification, these star personae became the trade winds of Nazi cinema: their performances gently reminded viewers of powerful attractions beyond the domain of ideological mobilization yet at the same time assisted the National Socialist political agenda by blowing the vessel of everyday culture into the harbor of a unified German distraction industry.
Georg Seeßlen locates the political moment of apolitical Nazi feature films in the fact that they were intended to offer not outright propaganda but individual strategies of survival and models of conformity under the condition of fascism.13 Rather than leveling crucial differences between Nazi modernism and Hollywood film culture of the 1930s and early 1940s, Seeßlen reminds us of the political task of the Third Reich’s “apolitical” entertainment films. Nazi features provided people with shared dreams and emotions; they standardized desires for attractive lifestyles and modern distractions and in doing so produced the impression of one body politic engaged in a common project. What was political about the apolitical products of the Nazis’ dream factory therefore must be seen not simply in internal textual characteristics but in the context of the distinctive projection situation and a set of external systems of signification that attributed meaning to a visit to the movie theater: the newsreel shows and cultural education films that framed individual screenings, the iconography of stardom as proliferated through the mass media and in advertising campaigns, the party galas meticulously staged for individual film premieres, and the intertextual dynamic of generic conventions and formulas. Against this broader notion of the cultural politics of Nazi film the following pages will examine the making of the UFA star Zarah Leander around 1937 and her first appearance on German screens in Zu neuen Ufern (To new shores, 1937) and La Habanera (1937), both directed by Detlef Sierck. Leander’s star persona, I suggest, constituted a site at which Nazi society negotiated ideologically unstable relations informing gender identity, modes of spectatorship, the location of mass culture in fascism, and the meaning of German identity. Understood as an intersection of different textual and contextual registers of meaning, the image and voice of Leander, I argue, bear witness to the perplexing syntheses of the Nazi culture industry, the shrewd ways in which Nazi mass culture allowed ideologically ambivalent representations of cultural alterity and sexual difference to enter the heart of a cinema whose implicit function was to bond the individual to the community of the people and redefine industrial mass culture as an art of and for the folk.14
