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e m p ow e r i n g s u b m i s s i o n
In one of the episodes of Edgar Reitz’s TV series Heimat (Homeland, 1984) Maria and her sister-in-law, Pauline, fashion their hair in front of a mirror according to the exotic coiffure of the film star they have just seen at the movies: Zarah Leander in Detlef Sierck’s La Habanera. Highly prominent in Sierck’s stylized mise-en-scène itself, the mirror enables both women to project Leander’s cosmopolitan appearance onto their own bodies. It provides temporary release from the constraints of rural life and allows Maria and Pauline to articulate a surprisingly autonomous notion of female identity. Relying on the magnetism of stars, melodramatic excess, and exotic diversion, prewar mass culture here is shown as a site of individual empowerment. As if inhabiting a niche unfettered from Nazi politics, both women appropriate the popular in order to perform nonconformist gestures of self-expression and redress their position within everyday life.
Reitz’s ethnography of female spectatorship challenges the notion of Nazi mass culture as a functional engine of ideological manipulation, as one continual “communal celebration that eliminated the brain and led to ecstasy.”15 Although this is not the place to discuss the problematic nature of Reitz’s historiographical method, it is interesting to note that his portrait of Nazi popular culture can muster ample support in the postwar reception of Leander, on the one hand, and in critical discussions of Sierck’s melodramatic authorship, as practiced during both his tenure at UFA and his later career in Hollywood, on the other. Leander’s often-exotic screen presence has inspired many later critics to heroize her as an icon of transgressive sexuality and ideological subversion. Through excess and stylization, so the argument goes, Leander unmasked the constructedness of gendered identity under Nazi rule. Leander’s masquerade debunked what society considered natural in the constitution of identities and thus undermined the Nazis’
politics of gender.16 In particular Leander’s voice, similar to the deep tones of Dietrich and Garbo, has served for postwar critics as evidence of her subversive effects.17 More attractive to women and to gay men than to straight men, these critics contend,18 Leander’s exotic baritone voice mocked the repressive conception of sexuality and gender identity under Nazi rule.
Seemingly similar narratives of nonconformity and social commentary have informed the academic assessment of Sierck’s melodramas. Ever since the 1970s critics have emphasized that Sierck’s films used mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro lighting, and textual manipulation to subvert what the viewer sees at the film’s surface. Rendering style and rhythm instead of dialogue
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and narrative progression as the primary catalysts of meaning, Sierck’s films exposed the constraints society imposes on the individual; surplus sentimentalism unraveled the hypocrisy of twentieth-century civilization.19 Although Sierck’s German films of the 1930s have found much less attention than his 1950s Hollywood productions, they too have been read primarily as ironic works of subversion. Sierck’s German films, critics have argued, played out sophisticated formal characteristics against overt narratives and ideologies. They somehow succeeded in smuggling modernist or even countercultural sensibilities into the domains of Nazi mass culture. For Jon Halliday Sierck’s German melodramas constituted “a sign of what the German cinema could have been after 1933.” For Marc Silberman films such as To New Shores probed the limits of Nazi politics and ideology.20
Although resulting in similar claims about the possibility of resistance and nonconformity in Nazi Germany, both lines of argument rely on very different and in fact incompatible premises that reflect different understandings of cinema as a site of ideological signification. Those who attribute subversive meanings to Leander’s exoticism and feminine masquerade conventionally refer first and foremost to the spectacular surplus of Leander’s performances. Leander deconstructs the Nazis’ politics of race and gender because through excess she cancels out her own appearance. As she stages her body as spectacle, she undoes any attempt to fix individual bodies in mythic conceptions of national specificity and gendered identity. By way of contrast, Sierck’s melodramas are seen as sites of defiance because they group different layers of meaning in volatile force fields: Sierck pushes the limits of Nazi culture by fusing image, dialogue, narrative, and music into disruptive constellations. Whereas Leander’s noncompliance allegedly originates in the operatic tableau of her look and voice, Sierck’s nonconformity lies in his art of cinematic counterpoint; Leander draws on the power of spectacle, whereas Sierck is at pains to sabotage it.
In spite of such crucial differences, both positions share the assumption that a film’s ideological status rests primarily on particular strategies of textual expression and cinematic self-reflexivity. Therefore, both positions, I would argue, overlook the complex ways in which the political status of cinema is constituted and contested at historically contingent crossroads of texts, institutions, modes of reception, and ideological, as well as economic, mandates. Furthermore, reducing the individual text to the exclusive site of a film’s political meaning, both positions also forfeit a more thorough understanding of the function of mass culture in prewar Nazi Germany. As they focus on the economy of formal structures, neither position considers discrete structures of perception by means of which viewers received the
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outputs of the Nazi distraction factory, nor does either address the often-astonishing ways in which the Nazis themselves allowed aesthetic resistance to overwrite political ideology. What in the eyes of the astute critic emerges as a subversive effect of textual features, in other words, might have very well offered in the context of the films’ original reception a stage for consumer practices long accustomed to the logic Schäfer calls the split consciousness of Nazi culture. What for the textual critic looks like a violation of the ideology of closure might have constituted for the mass cultural bricoleur a crucial compromise with Nazi politics, a state powerful enough to permit apolitical distraction amidst an otherwise highly politicized society.
There is surely no reason to question the self-reflexive intentions of Detlef Sierck, a director ostensibly familiar with Brechtian distanciation and self-commentary. What is striking, however, is that several generations of Sierck scholars have accessed his films’ cultural status solely through formal analysis, unearthing instances of rupture or ambiguity underneath the texts’ glossy veneer. In the most extreme cases they have not hesitated to claim that Sierck’s historical audiences, incapable of recognizing irony, camp, or trash in Sierck, simply got it wrong when indulging in the hyperbolic emotions of the films’ respective narratives and characters.21 Although Sierck’s contrapuntal manipulation of textual arrangements might indeed have pushed the limits of Nazi ideology, one cannot neglect the fact—as I will detail in a moment—that his two Leander films were also clearly marketed as showcases featuring the sights and sounds of a new star. For the greater public, Sierck’s mise-en-scène—whether or not it was meant to be ironic—provided ample opportunities to consume the star doing her peculiar thing. Leander’s star image buttressed the relationship between cinema and modern consumerism. It encouraged the spectator to desire not only the body of the star but also the kinds of spaces and objects that in their fetishized form as commodities helped display the star’s body: houses, rooms, fur-niture, appliances, and fashion items. Sierck’s Leander served a double mission. Whereas her voice and look pointed the viewer to newly emerging arenas of commodity consumption beyond the theater, her star persona at the same time anchored different viewing positions in the filmic text itself.
Leander’s peculiar presentation admonished the female spectator-consumer of the time to, as Mary Ann Doane has written in a different context, “concern herself with her own appearance and position—an appearance that can only be fortified and assured through the purchase of a multiplicity of products.”22 As a trigger of feelings of immediacy and affective intimacy, Leander’s voice allowed the mass-cultural consumer to reconcile the curious split between the experience of cinema as a collective space on the one
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hand and a newly emerging notion of spectatorship as private, albeit mass-produced, experience on the other.
Commodities are mysterious things. They appear in a dreamlike framework that eclipses their actual source of value; they reduce an object to a means of its own consumption.23 Leander’s star persona documents the extent to which the Nazi culture industry captured emotions not in recourse to the use value of ideology but the mysticism of cultural commodities and consumption. Leander’s appeal, as Eric Rentschler writes, derived “from an ability to unite opposites: a tender physiognomy and a thick body, silent suffering and animated expressivity, domestic charm and foreign allure, solemn spirituality and playful sensuality, maternal warmth and vampish sadism.”24 Leander’s sights and sounds produced spectators who were eager to convert cultural expression into personal property, who knew how to reify the object of desire into a thing the spectator thought “he can put in his pocket and take home.”25
Leander’s work with directors other than Sierck magnifies what is precarious about any redemptive approach to her star image or the power of melodramatic excess. In 1942 spectators such as Reitz’s Maria and Pauline would be invited to transfer their delight to the image of Leander playing the role of Hanna Holberg in the UFA melodrama Die große Liebe (The great love), one of the biggest box office hits between 1933 and 1945. Directed by Rolf Hansen, this film was to boost the morale of those waiting and working at the home front. It has become famous for Leander’s infamous “Durchhaltelieder,” her melodramatic songs of perseverance. The film’s final shot links what Reitz presents as female defiance directly to the German war effort; it inscribes—as the reviewer for Der Film saw correctly—“the order of the day” as a rhetoric of “greatness and relentless-ness” in the realm of what is left of private life.26 In this last shot we see Holberg, temporarily united with the aviator Paul Wendlandt (Victor Staal), attentively watching the skies, not in order to discover shooting stars but to behold a bomber formation en route to the front. Far from experiencing war as an antagonistic element, Holberg detects in war a figure that fascinates: war emerges as the very condition that makes great love possible in the first place. Leander’s star persona, in this final shot, glorifies warfare as the telos of melodramatic attentiveness and female spectatorship. Watching Leander watching, listening to Leander listening, the 1942 spectator was asked to understand war as a melodramatic spectacle of the first order. “Ich weiß, es wird einmal ein Wunder geschehen” (I know a miracle will happen at some point), Leander intones in this film in what is perhaps her most illustrious song ever—both a consolation to those fighting at the home
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front and a tribute to Hitler’s myth of the “Wunderwaffe,” the vision of a missile magically undoing the enemy.27
“ h a b a n e r a v s . c h r i s t m a s c a r o l ”
Zarah Leander was born on March 15, 1907, as Zarah Stina Hedberg in Karlstad, Sweden.28 Although never promoted by Hitler to the position of a state actress, Leander captivated the emotions of German audiences between 1937 and 1943 with her curious mix of renunciation and determination, exoticism and “German” faith, fatalism and autonomy, sensuality and spontaneity. As UFA’s highest-paid star during this period, Leander in fact provided the film industry with a charismatic flagship giving direction to the entire star system. Even before she was seen in a German production for the first time, Leander’s image was shaped into that of a metastar whose primary function was to set up a framework in which Hollywood-like elements—including the media stardom of political leaders— could assume their respective operations.
What originally incited UFA to attract Leander to Germany was her success in Ralph Benatzky’s Axel an der Himmelstür (Axel at heaven’s gate, 1936) in Vienna, an operetta in which Leander played a glamorous film star.
In contrast to the domestic actresses who populated German screens circa 1936, Leander promised to supply German audiences once again with the image of a powerful femme fatale, an ideal stopgap to fill the void left after both Garbo and Dietrich had turned their backs on the German film industry. From the moment of its inception, Leander’s star persona was therefore characterized, and jeopardized, by ostensible signatures of simulation.
Whereas film stars commonly derive their charisma from peculiar signatures of individual authenticity, from presumed continuities between on-and offscreen persona, Leander entered the German film industry as a substitute, a mere copy measured against what she was supposed to replace.
