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experiences in the heart of the most pertinent site of modern mass distraction itself, the cinema. Mechanical reproduction reproduces the magic it—
following Walter Benjamin’s famous postulate— originally set out to destroy. Fusing high and low, the popular form of melodrama aspires to become an “intensified, primary, and exemplary version of what the most ambitious art, since the beginnings of Romanticism, has been about.”55
In a sense the film’s passage from London to Sydney, from cultural consumption to aesthetic elevation, closely follows the logic described by Gertrud Koch as the sadistic impulse behind Sierck’s melodramatic imagination.56 The film first construes what amounts to a repulsive image of female sexuality only to then resort to ritual acts of cleansing. Sierck privileges a gaze that moves from aversion to purification, and in so doing he arrests the female body as a deformed, disciplined fetish.57 To New Shores links this authoritarian logic to a conservative project of cultural criticism.
True to Sierck’s lifelong preoccupation with religious themes and images, the end of To New Shores resorts to the sights and sounds of organized religion in order to foreground Sierck’s vision of a homogeneous culture consolidating aesthetic refinement and popular traditions. Sierck literally exorcizes Leander’s voice and body in a final purgatorium so as to hammer home his vision of a new community integrated via affects and intuitions rather than formal principles, legal procedures, or economic relations.
When Gloria marries the faithful farmer Henry in the last sequence, the church’s altar, the choir’s “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” and the final close-ups of the choirboys all allegorize what lies beyond the end of the gap between high and low. However baroque they may seem, the film’s final images encrypt Sierck’s dream of a culture in which melodramatic pathos and contemplative attentiveness heal the rifts between legitimate art and popular culture and thus revitalize social integration and identity formation. Religious sights and sounds here channel conflicting voices, tastes, and perspectives into a symphonic whole. Popular culture becomes art, art popular culture, so that the formerly divided community may live again.
Narrative development and mise-en-scène in Sierck’s To New Shores, then, delineate what appears to be a strangely ambivalent force field. On the one hand the film clearly supplied Nazi consumer culture with a spectacular commodity; it opened a series of seemingly private windows on the new star, her good looks as much as her perplexing voice. Focusing on Leander, the film’s image track and sound track appealed to modes of spectatorship associated with a Hollywood-like star system so as to fuel the audience’s desire for cultural consumption. On the other hand Sierck’s film exposes the very mechanisms that make and mark stars. The narrative seeks
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to undo the split between high and low and, thereby, to overcome what makes stars into cultural commodities in the first place. To New Shores denounces the triumph of commodified consumption over artistic expressivity as a step into a realm of inauthenticity. In addition, it renders melodramatic sensibilities as catalysts for acts of spiritual purification and elevation.
Melodrama is meant to redeem the individual from the respective excesses of both popular distraction and the elite’s hypocritical discourse of aesthetic refinement.
To New Shores, then, with its final images of religious redemption, seems to articulate a utopian vision that leads beyond the instrumentalization of the aesthetic in modern industrial society in general and National Socialism in particular. Sierck’s melodramatic reunification of high and low, of aura and distraction, seems to point at what transcends the organization of pleasure and desire in twentieth-century modernity. Does it really, though?
For Horkheimer and Adorno, we should recall, this melodramatic vision of cultural homogenization constituted the signature of industrial culture itself. Sierck’s dream of unification was Horkheimer and Adorno’s night-mare. When analyzing the fate of cultural modernization under the sign of organized capitalism, Horkheimer and Adorno came to the conclusion that the culture industry collapsed former divisions between high and low into a “ruthless unity.”58 Symptomatic of a postliberal market society in which all aspects of production and consumption were controlled through bureaucratic organizations, industrial mass culture provided everyone with everything; it forged into a false unity what no longer could add up to a whole. “Light art has been the shadow of autonomous art. It is the social bad conscience of serious art. The truth which the latter necessarily lacked because of its social premises gives the other the semblance of legitimacy.
The division itself is the truth: it does at least express the negativity of the culture which the different spheres constitute. Least of all can the antithesis be reconciled by absorbing light into serious art, or vice versa.”59
Unlike Sierck, Horkheimer and Adorno tried to break away from binaries such as high and low, authentic and inauthentic, true and false. Their criticism of modern culture differentiated between older forms of popular culture and the peculiarly modern formation of Fordist mass culture and at the same time separated traditional dogmas of high culture from the notion of aesthetic modernism as a mouthpiece of determined negation.60 Neither Sierck’s understanding of the modern gulf between high and low nor his desire for cultural synthesis is therefore compatible with the argument of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the contrary, the melodramatic utopianism of To New Shores directly echoes the synthetic tasks of industrial
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mass culture itself. Sierck’s utopia of reconciliation encodes what was also at the top of Goebbels’s cinematic agenda, namely the mutual absorption of high and low, of artistic merit and popular appeal. Reminiscent of Wagner’s nineteenth-century aesthetic visions, which intended to overcome the fragmentation of art in modern society, Sierck’s film merges word, image, and music into a new form of public art. The final sequence of To New Shores unifies nonidentical particulars under the hallmark of some new kind of aesthetic totality and thus converts visions of wholeness into consumer items.
Eric Rentschler has argued that Sierck’s melodramas “fit well into Nazi constellations, both as ideological affirmations and as the sites of what appeared to be transgressive designs. Aesthetic resistance was part of the system; it provided a crucial function in a larger gestalt.”61 My reading of To New Shores confirms and in fact expands this proposition. A composite of Sierck’s melodramatic craftsmanship and Leander’s star presence, the film highlights the often contradictory, albeit no doubt effective, ways in which the National Socialists in their pursuit of a homogeneous community of the folk relied on the power of cosmopolitan distractions and the demand for commodity consumption, social mobility, and the accoutrements of a bourgeois lifestyle. On the one hand To New Shores illustrates the Nazis’
hope to exploit Fordist mass culture as a political tool, a crucible of fantasy production powerful enough to break older bonds of solidarity and fragment the body politic into a multitude of pleasure-seeking monads. Part of a project that sought to establish an economically viable alternative to Hollywood, the film draws our attention to the way Nazi leisure culture entertained the poachers of industrial culture with the illusion that within this highly politicized society certain spaces remained beyond politics and coordination. On the other hand To New Shores informs about the curious telos of fascist cultural politics in general, the fact that sweeping narratives and the outright imitation of American patterns often went hand in hand with the intention to organize national consent within an autonomous yet marketable German mass culture. The film exemplifies how Nazi mass culture, far from subverting the dictates of ideology, hoped to fabricate a new national community through American-style consumption. It is difficult to see, therefore, how Sierck’s simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the popular dimension in To New Shores, of distraction and consumption, could have really pushed the limits of Nazi politics, as one branch of Sierck scholarship would like us to believe. Instead of heroizing Sierck’s ambivalences as signs of aesthetic resistance,62 it seems much more appropriate to read the negotiation of mass culture, gender, and community in films such as To New Shores as an integral element of prewar Nazi cultural politics. The film
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exemplifies how Nazi cinema enlisted cultural consumption—including the identification with ideologically inconsistent representations of gender and cultural otherness—for the project of displacing politics with aesthetics, society with community.
c o d a : h e a l t h y wo m e n a n d b u s y b e e s According to Benjamin’s famous thesis fascism implemented technologically advanced communication technologies such as film in order to simulate a utopian community of equals.63 Mass spectacles and their mechanical reproduction onscreen addressed the modern hunger for distraction and scopic pleasure, yet they did so solely to give the masses emotional expressions but no rights. Within the context of fascist mass culture, distraction and modern spectatorship constituted forms that reproduced as a sensational event what mechanical reproduction allegedly rendered obsolete: the charisma of auratic experiences.
Implicitly challenging Benjamin’s account of modern mass culture, Patrice Petro has argued that the category of distraction as a peculiar mode of experiencing modern life was far less universal and gender-neutral than Benjamin assumed.64 Benjamin’s category of distraction, she argues, might encode the experience of those permitted to participate in the processes of modernization since the middle of the nineteenth century, but it omits the experiences of those who, owing to given landscapes of power, remained at the margins of these processes, in particular women. Highly popular in Weimar cinema as a “female” genre, the melodrama—according to Petro—
bears testimony to the existence of modes of spectatorship different from those described by Benjamin under the rubric of distraction. In the melodrama mechanical reproduction addresses those for whom distraction has not become the norm, those whose “concentrated gaze involves a perceptual activity that is neither passive nor entirely distracted” 65 and who therefore desire contemplative identification and emotional intensity.
Petro’s insistence on the diversity and gender specificity of modern spectatorship, on the parallel existence of industrialized and emotionally attentive modes of film viewing, should make us wonder about the accuracy of Benjamin’s theory of fascist mass culture. If, following Benjamin, fascism musters distraction in order to engineer political homogeneity, then do we have to assume that those committed to melodramatic spectatorship and consumption escaped the suturing effects of the Nazi spectacles? One might be tempted at first to answer this question in the affirmative and thus attribute a rather ironic moment of resistance to those who found themselves
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positioned at the fringes of technological modernization in a patriarchal society. But such an answer, after more careful consideration, would blindly fall prey to false alternatives suggested in the question itself, that is, the definition of Nazi cultural politics solely in terms of the stage managing that Benjamin called the aestheticization of politics. What it would overlook is the fact that—in contrast to Benjamin’s model—Nazi politics relied on both at once, on “proletarian” mobilization as much as on bourgeois leisure and modern commodity consumption. Melodrama helped essentially build bridges between the ideological and temporal disjunctures of Nazi politics. As a genre of excess and operatic intensity it ameliorated the
“fuzzy totalitarianism” that characterized fascist modernism.66 Melodramatic narratives recalled earlier viewing pleasures, but in doing so they also bonded diverging experiences to the new order.
