The making of the star Zarah Leander circa 1937 reminds us that we must not mistake the very existence of competing cultural practices during the National Socialist period for signs of ideological opposition, let alone political resistance. In its effort to achieve a Wagnerian alliance of word, image, and music, Nazi feature films advocated the pleasures of pseudoindividualization. They watched and listened for their viewers in order to bond different modes of reception to one calculated product package. Clearly aware of cinema’s historical possibilities as a heterogeneous and often unpredictable horizon of public experience, Nazi cinema in fact did not spare any effort to monitor the entire act of going to the movies. Advertising campaigns and press coverage played an essential role in protecting the studios’
products from undesirable interpretations; they contained surplus meaning and directed the reception process. The kinds of short films that accompanied the actual screening of Leander features illustrate this in an instructive manner. To New Shores, during its opening week in Berlin, was preceded by the short “Healthy Women—Healthy Folk,”67 which propagated the desirability of women’s sports, of shaping women’s bodies for the sake of the nation. La Habanera, by contrast, was initially featured in tandem with a film celebrating the community and hierarchy of a beehive.
This film left little doubt about the fact that biological wonders should serve as blueprints for human societies as well.68 Shorts such as these offered predigested meanings and set the stage for the pleasures of melodramatic excess. The “apolitical” consumption of stars such as Leander might have been the primary attraction of a night at the movies, but it took place in a public sphere organized and orchestrated from above, a public sphere exploiting the viewer’s desire rather than encouraging the articulation of concrete needs and interests.
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Figure 12. Home, sweet home: Zarah Leander as Magda von Schwartze on a film poster for Carl Froelich’s 1938 film Heimat ( Illustrierter Film-Kurier, 1938).
The TV series Heimat, to return for a last time to Reitz’s collection of ethnographic snapshots, seems to know about this reconstruction of cinema as a melodramatic space of pseudoindividualization, yet it struggles to suppress further insight under a highly subdued visual veneer. In a second film-within-the-film sequence Reitz confronts his spectators once again
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with a movie theater and a Leander spectacle. The film’s color switches back to black and white, and a curtain opens and brings into view the screening’s title: Carl Froelich’s 1938 Heimat. A director definitely not known for nonconformist intentions ever since his 1913 bioepic Richard Wagner, Froelich in his Heimat situated Leander in a father-daughter melodrama, a tale of renunciation and reconciliation (fig. 12). Once more Reitz’s spectator will find Maria and Pauline in the audience, mesmerized by their idol, although now watching the film side-by-side with their respective husbands and er-satz husbands. Similar to the earlier sequence, Reitz renders the audience a gathering of weeping listeners and cultural poachers. Leander’s extravagant apparel onscreen stimulates Pauline to muse about her own fur coat and the lack of possibilities for showing it off. Two other spectators parody what they see onscreen as they exchange and eat apples. In contrast to the earlier sequence, Reitz’s camera pictures the women’s acts of melodramatic viewing in one and the same frame with the matter-of-fact responses of their male partners. In a series of highly controlled images the film’s cinematography thus reinstates patriarchal order and compulsory heterosexuality. “I’m so happy to be back here,” we hear Leander sobbing onscreen at the chest of her father. In the end of this sequence Leander intones passages from the St. Matthew’s Passion, “Repentance and remorse cleaves the sinner’s heart asunder,” while her father and daughter watch attentively. Intimately resonating with Froelich’s patriarchal conception of female identity, Reitz’s Heimat in this second Leander sequence belies any redemptive approach to the Leander/Sierck productions, as much as to instances of cultural poaching in Nazi mass culture. Women’s place on and in front of the screen might have changed in comparison to the earlier sequence, yet their modes of melodramatic looking at and listening to the star have not. For the women there seems to be no perceived difference between consuming Leander in a film by Sierck and enjoying the icon in a film by the Nazi activist Froelich, between the putatively subversive image of an exotic woman gone astray and the close-up of a prodigal daughter returning to her patriarchal masters. Froelich’s 1938 Heimat—as it reappears in Reitz’s 1984 Heimat—
does not negate or recontain Maria and Pauline’s earlier pleasures of watching La Habanera. It simply complements them, adds to the opulent buffet of emotions that Nazi mass culture had to offer. Americanist articulations of multiplicity and difference in Nazi culture thus by no means signify subversive intentions or emancipatory practices. The curious genre of the Nazi Western and its cross-cultural constructions of assertive masculinity, to which I will turn my attention in the following chapter, provide further evidence to support this thesis.
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4 Siegfried Rides Again
Nazi Westerns and Modernity
In spite of its appeal to an explicitly modern demand for technological spectacle (The Tunnel) and commodity consumption (Leander), Nazi cinema built heavily on the fact that not everyone inhabits the same present and that many continue to adhere to seemingly outmoded thoughts, memories, and utopias. Nazi feature films were designed to assist audiences in negotiating major transformations in their contemporary lifeworlds. They helped carry viewers of diverse backgrounds across the threshold of the Third Reich in such a way that much older meanings could find a place amid the new order. The reconstruction of German cinema as a genre cinema was essential to this effort. Nazi genre films provided a sense of continuity in the face of radical transitions; they soothed emotions and displaced conflicting experiences. As Klaus Kreimeier has argued, “For twelve years genre cinema functioned as an advocate of the ordinary people, their everyday worries and desires, their demand for security, their visions of happiness, their brief escapes and, most of all, their longing for normality. In a world that seemed to topple all measures genre films not least of all warranted that normality existed and life continued to go on.”1 German cinema during the National Socialist period bridged temporal disjunctions and became German not because it subscribed to an intrinsically fascist aesthetic but because it consolidated the many elements of Weimar film practice into an economically viable genre cinema. Synchronized sound proved indispensable for this project. Neither what was understood as the German comedy, costume drama, or problem film nor as the German melodrama or revue film of the time would have succeeded without the magnetism of speaking and singing bodies onscreen.
Often seen as a kind of contract between the industry and the viewer, film genres occupy the space in-between specific films and the cinematic 99
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apparatus.2 Genres involve changeable structures of expectations and conventions that link the film industry, the individual text, and historically contingent modes of spectatorship. Like other expressions of the popular, genres therefore do not necessarily represent forms of standardized consumption. Instead, they may constitute an “active process of generating and articulating meanings and pleasures within a social system,”3 a process clearly marked by the imperatives of the industry but nevertheless also actuated by shifting audience expectations and structures of perception.
Genre texts are shot through with markers that indicate not only how political and economic agendas shape the contours of culture at a specific historical moment but also how people make use of the products of industrial culture, how they embrace textual meanings in order to articulate them into their everyday life. Understood as transmission belts between industry and audience expectations, film genres encrypt historically specific anxieties and wish fantasies; they evoke meanings that maintain identities and secure action beyond individual irritation, desperation, and speechlessness.
It has often been pointed out that the category of genre has been essential to the way that classical Hollywood cinema has come to dominate global markets since World War I. Genres helped streamline production processes, cut the costs of making films, and rationalized distribution. They supported an aesthetics of instantaneous recognizability that could easily traverse cultural boundaries. As a result genre cinema has often been seen as an essentially American mode of telling stories and organizing pleasure, as a ruthless application of assembly-line production to the arenas of cultural expression. Americanism in a nutshell, the art of genre in this view has often been condemned as an instrument of homogenization leveling the semantic wealth of group-specific experiences and national particularities.
Against the background of this suspicion that film genres promote a quasi-automatic Hollywoodization of local cultures, this chapter examines the way Nazi cinema appropriated that most American of all film genres, the western. Goebbels designed Nazi cinema as a genre cinema that would be at once entertaining, ideologically effective, politically useful, and financially profitable, a cinema dedicated to Hollywood illusionism yet at the same time devoted to a German mission. I will argue that during the 1930s, Nazi western productions such as Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien (The emperor of California, 1936), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938) and Wasser für Canitoga (Water for Canitoga, 1939), and Paul Verhoeven’s Gold in New Frisco (1939) were part and parcel of this project. By exploring issues of charismatic leadership, masculine identity, organic communality, and technological progress, Nazi westerns aspired at once to absorb
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Figure 13. Frontier fantasies: Native Americans in Luis Trenker’s The Emperor of California (1936). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
older aesthetic utopias and to fulfill urgent ideological functions. Part of a cinema that largely eschewed overt agitation in order to achieve popular appeal, the Nazi western genre helped redesign film “as a mechanized means to animate primal emotions, a modern technology to stir the soul’s inner speech. It was to move the hearts and minds of masses while seeming to have little in common with politics or party agendas.”4 Far from simply erasing national particularity, the Nazi western genre inundated the viewer with a fake sense of normality, yet at the same time it solicited politically effective meanings and subjectivities. Nazi western features stirred fantasies about forms of geographical expansion that did not involve cultural intermingling. They evacuated foreign spaces, or remade the other in the image of the self, to warrant the particularity and hierarchical segregation of different cultures. German westerns of the 1930s may have distracted their viewers with exotic adventures, yet simultaneously they elevated the representation of bodies, language, and music to the status of a total work of art, a laboratory of affective enthrallment that promoted vitalist power and imperial domination (fig. 13).
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