Hence an extravagant press campaign accompanied her move to Nazi Germany: an attempt to naturalize her stardom, don her in an aura of exceptionality, and make audiences forget about the fact that her stardom designated the presence of an absence. Masterminded by Carl Opitz, the public relations manager of UFA, Leander’s promotion built up mass expectations long before the new star had even appeared in front of the UFA cameras. “I was supposed to be found so high above the audience,” Leander herself recalled the fabrication of her aura, “that it became possible to see me distinctly as the ‘star’ who I was, yet not so distinctly that the common man would be unable to fancy and add details according to his own desires.” 29
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Finally projected on the screens of Nazi cinema, Leander’s composite star image did not embody collective mentalities so much as it offered a projection screen itself, an imaginary space open for multiple and often contradictory desires and uses. For Detlef Sierck, her first UFA director, Leander’s face resembled Garbo’s owing to what he called its flatness. Accordingly, it required the modeling work of the camera and the director to endow Leander’s physiognomy—a silent mask and virtual “cow face”30—with allure in the first place. For a columnist in a 1938 issue of Filmwelt, by way of contrast, Leander’s face introduced to German cinema not a malleable surface but a perfect embodiment of the essence of Germanic femininity: “This in-credibly impeccable and sculptured face mirrors everything that moves a woman: wistfulness and pain, love and bliss, melancholy and resignation. In her attitude as an actress, Zarah Leander is the epitome of ‘spiritualized sensuality.’ As dark as her low, indefinable alto—which is able to represent so excitingly the expression of hidden female desires—is also her essence.”31
Alternatively seen as an empty signifier or an archetype of eternal wom-anhood, Leander’s face carried either less (Sierck) or more (the Filmwelt reviewer) than necessary to propagate the idea of self-determination and self-authorship so central to the Hollywood star cult of the time.32 From the moment UFA inaugurated Leander’s aura, her face simultaneously meant nothing and everything. Instead of simply giving form to the viewer’s daydreams, it defined a liminal space in which it was possible to play out one’s desire seemingly without being disturbed by the reality principle.
But more than her face and looks, Leander’s voice was perceived as the hallmark of her stardom. Musical numbers and revue elements within Leander’s films suspended narrative progress and invited the film’s audiences to consume the aural presence of the star. Significantly, however, the popularity of Leander’s voice and singing relied on an array of ambivalences similar to the one that concerned the discursive construction of her face.33
Whereas her baritone indeed probed given constructions of femininity, her Swedish accent infused the rigorous idiom of the German fatherland with a melos culturally coded as feminine. Like her face, Leander’s voice had something in stock for everyone. As one reviewer wrote in 1937, this voice
“is intoxicating as heavy dark wine. It can sound as powerful as the sound of an organ. It can appear as transparent as glass, as low as metal. Everything is in this voice: jubilation, happiness, the drunken melody and the wild pain of life.”34
Leander’s film songs were typically broadcast on radio several weeks prior to a film’s premiere, a marketing strategy that built up audience expectation and allowed distributors to advertise particular films as show-
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cases of Leander songs. Reminiscent of Fred Astaire’s concurrent media popularity in the United States,35 Leander became simultaneously a film star and a radio personality; she entered German hearts and minds through her performance onscreen as much as over the Volksempfänger. Significant shifts in the diegetic position of Leander’s musical numbers quickly reflected the commercial value of her voice. In her first UFA feature, To New Shores, Leander’s singing still remained relatively subordinated to the narrative; most of her numbers are interrupted halfway through. It is only with La Habanera that Leander’s films developed narrative arrangements that allowed the star to perform entire songs and thus deliver what audiences (and industrialists) expected from their new idol. Some critics responded to the latter strategy with understandable suspicion. They were concerned that future features might completely disregard the star’s skills as a dramatic actress36 or breach the laws of narrative film by “unconditionally and with violence heading for ‘the Song.’”37
It is interesting to note that whatever in Leander’s inner-diegetic performances provoked sexual mores and gender definitions was typically corrected by the overall lines of narrative development. Here, too, spectators could have their cake and eat it too. Gloria Vane in To New Shores, for example, appears onstage as a lascivious and aggressive femme fatale, rous-ing her audiences through direct forms of address and pulsating refrains, whereas beyond her performance she emerges as a faithful and reclusive lover. What most deserves our interest, however, is the extent to which Leander proliferated musical forms clearly at odds with Nazi cultural politics.
Only a few of Leander’s hit songs during her UFA period really adhered to the musical vocabulary defined by Nazi ideologues as German music.
Clearly dominating Leander’s performances, “Foxtrot, tango, habanera, and czardas, strictly speaking also polka, were musical forms that had to be considered as ‘racially degenerate’ within the National Socialist ideology because of their Afro-American or Slavic origin.”38 In most of her films Leander’s sounds transported the listener beyond the boundaries of the National Socialist worldview and its essentializing definitions of what it meant to be German. Typically, however, such moments of transgression summoned a variety of narrative devices that realigned exotic pleasure with the ideological orders of the day. Leander’s songs provided a prime example for the exorcising tasks of Nazi film music. They exploited desire for the unknown with the intention of segregating self and other and making the individual body disappear in larger constellations of power.39
Intoned in the role of the Swede Astrée Sternhjelm, who becomes entrenched in a love triangle in Puerto Rico, Leander’s musical numbers in La
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Habanera are a good case in point. Composed by Lothar Brühne, her most memorable song, “Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt” (The wind has told me a song), borrows from the Caribbean habanera tradition. It uses balalai-kas, castanets, and stuffed trumpets, instruments that were on the official blacklist of the Nazi music board. Set in duple meter and a slow tempo, the habanera idiom originated from Creole and African American sources at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although some of its compositional features can also be found in Iberian music. Sometimes called “con-tradanza criolla,” it provided the rhythmical basis for many varieties of Latin American dance music, including the tango.40 Like jazz, the habanera emerged as a popular response to the experience of cultural displacement; it defined itself as an intrinsically hybrid mode of expression, the intersection of different cross-cultural trajectories. In Sierck’s film habanera rhythms yield a recurring sonic background to the dramatic action. They intensify Sternhjelm’s despair and melancholy, her desire to break away from the despotic Don Pedro and to return home to northern Europe. While the narrative stages the triumph of European rationality over southern lust and greed,41 the musical sound track intermingles the familiar with the foreign and invites the viewer to travel across cultural boundaries. Whereas the film first imagines Puerto Rico as a structured opposite to the Aryan state and then destroys the island’s idyllic façade,42 Leander’s song espouses an exoticized other as a playground for the imagination to underscore that there is no place like home (fig. 9).
Most contemporary reviewers, in order to channel exotic distractions back into the Procrustean bed of ideological correctness, deemphasized Leander’s habanera and instead praised the film’s Teutonic “Kinderlied,” a Christmas carol Sternhjelm intones for her son at that most bourgeois and
“feminine” of all musical instruments, the piano.43 Whereas the habanera was seen as a generic number, signifying the kind of seduction, blindness, and racial miscegenation that prevail in Puerto Rico, the rather pedestrian
“Kinderlied” was hailed as Leander’s most compelling musical performance in La Habanera. 44 At once a language primer and a vehicle to express the protagonist’s yearning for her Northern origins (“A, B, C, D, E, F, G, the whole garden is full of snow”), the carol, for most reviewers, articulated the immutable melos of Sternhjelm’s ethnic identity. She, wrote the Film-Kurier, “sings the ‘Kinderlied’ to her boy who originates from a marriage with a Southerner. It is in this simple and hearty melody that her heart beats, her memory of and longing for the homeland.”45 Understood as a counterpoint to “Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzählt,” “Kinderlied”—in the eyes of the majority of reviewers—provided a glimpse of a better, unified
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Figure 9. Exotic pleasures: A festive scene from Detlef Sierck’s La Habanera (1937). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
world amid southern hybridity. The song expressed desire for ethnic particularity, for forms of identity anchored in nationally specific sounds and materialities of language. Whereas the habanera, then, was downplayed as inauthentic and mere pretense, it was in the straightforward tonality and rhythmic uniformity of the “Kinderlied” that most critics heard the film’s redeeming voice of authenticity, a voice that recuperated lost utopias and fused them with the order of the day.
In many respects the reviewers’ selective praise for Leander’s songs echoed UFA’s overall advertising strategies for La Habanera. The film was released shortly before Christmas, and in tandem with Luis Trenker’s mountain spectacle Der Berg ruft! (The mountain calls), it was meant to become the year’s most captivating holiday attraction—a must-see, adding exotic adventure to days of familial and national recluse.46 UFA’s advertising campaign for La Habanera in fact mapped the film’s ambivalent themes of cultural dislocation onto the all-too-familiar topographical myth of North and South. Leander’s delicate immersion into a “degenerate” musical idiom was turned into an Italian journey, a journey that takes one beyond oneself but does not revise existing formulations of cultural boundaries and
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