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fore the Albers character in the prologue sequence of Water for Canitoga kills the villain Westbrook, he bars the door of his hut with his own body.
Thus, a private interior becomes the only witness of Monstuart’s (Albers) rather clumsy shot at Westbrook, who is fumbling for a gun stuck in his pocket. Similarly, when Sutter (Trenker), in The Emperor of California, tries to keep a friend from broadcasting the discovery of gold, he is at pains to confine the conflict to his home, drawing the gun while blocking the antagonist’s way to the door. Although celebrated even by some American critics for its action sequences,26 Trenker’s film frustrates our hope for a heroic face-to-face shoot-out. Sutter is in fact so unacquainted with the logic of guns that he allows his opponent to seize control over the weapon and escape Sutter’s villa.
This privatization of gunfights in interior settings correlates with the tendency of German westerns to translate the classical model’s quest for law and order into a romantic struggle between materialism and spirituality.
Because Nazi westerns tend to shift our attention away from the classical showdown between different conceptions of legality and morality, and because Trenker and others omit the classical authorization of legality through violence in order to pit capitalist modernization against individual virtue, shoot-outs— the generic mechanisms of solving conflicts—are moved from the main street, the public domain of the law, to the interior, the private realm of economic activity and moral propriety. Guns in German westerns reveal the moral justification of conflicting economic projects instead of inaugurating legal orders and bestowing them with moral sanctity. Whereas the final showdown in the classical western encodes a retrospective discourse on the emergence of the American public sphere, the removal of gunfights from public spaces in German westerns aspires to collapse private and public realms, an aspiration whose ideological function will become clear by examining the Nazi western’s use not of bullets but of words and modes of linguistic address.
German westerns of the 1930s abound with language. They drown the linguistic austerity of the classical American model in a flood of words, verbal sidelines, puns and jokes, arguments, descriptions, and public speeches.
Where the American hero shoots, the German one starts to explain, to argue, to joke, or simply to babble. Trenker, in The Emperor of California, inundates other characters and the viewer with both dictatorial orders and lavish small talk. His thick Tyrolean accent, as the reviewer for the Film-Kurier remarked, endows his role with the jargon of Germanic hominess, with a sense of “rooted-in-the-soil-ness” (Bodenständigkeit).27 Albers, on the other hand, in both Water for Canitoga and Sergeant Berry professes
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the grandiloquence of a self-styled tramp and daredevil. His linguistic self-assertion entertained German audiences of the time with a German equiv-alent of Hemingway’s masculinist prose.28 Albers’s parlance expressed fundamental fears about any unrestrained articulation of physical desire, yet at the same time it opened pockets of subversive laughter and unpredictability.29
In the classical American western, written and oral language are primarily relegated to the domestic spheres of Victorian women. Cowboys, trappers, and bounty hunters, in turn, practice forms of linguistic minimalism. They clip their sentences, mutilate grammar, and often communicate through one-liners only. When the western hero speaks, he in fact seeks to efface the very language he deploys, for words open his quiet masculinity to a multiplicity of relations that threaten what he esteems most: control, action, and pure physical experience. The western is driven by antirepresentational impulses; it is “at heart antilanguage. Doing, not talking, is what it values.”30
Given the antibourgeois thrust of Nazi ideology, its promise to recenter identity by engineering a sense of unmediated physicality, it may seem surprising at first that Nazi westerns completely ignore the antirepresenta-tional urges of the classical model. After all, the Hollywood western’s antilanguage should have matched very well the image of a decisive Nazi cowboy in search of new communities and primary modes of belonging. Why, then, this hesitation to use the gun and the attempt to replace bullets with words? Why this lack of resolution, which according to the classical model borders on a state of emasculation? Why representation and rhetoric rather than action and the physical dialectics of the shoot-out?
In a speech of March 1937 Goebbels used the edifying setting of the Berlin Krolloper to promote a consciously German cinema, a homemade Hollywood integrating artistic merit and popular appeal. The sensitive execution of film dialogue, according to Goebbels, was to play an essential role in this nationalization of mass culture. “Luther once said: In order to affect people, we must listen to what people really say. He learned his language among the people, and in his German bible translation—so important for the history of the German language—he sought only to use expressions which could be understood by everyone. He dealt with problems that were very close to the people. It would be good if our film dialogues would do something similar.”31 In Goebbels’s view film dialogue ought to be folksy, tuned to the ear of the layperson, in order to reach and affect the widest audience possible. It should eschew highbrow deliberation and reproduce instead the thick materiality of local accents and regionally specific
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lexicons. Rather than asking actors to speak like marionettes, German cinema should discover the grain of film dialogue as the royal road to mass popularity, economic success, and ethnic identity.
The use of abundant dialogue in Nazi westerns follows Goebbels’s formula to the letter. The two most prominent Nazi cowboys, Trenker and Albers, may break with the antilinguistic codes of the Hollywood western, but by speaking in their folksy, accent-ridden tongues they at once fulfill ideological tasks and help establish a distinctly German alternative to Hollywood. Dialogue in Nazi westerns is, to use Roman Jakobson’s terms, largely emotive and phatic in function. On the one hand, it is meant to transport information not by cognitive but mostly by expressive means, by the nonreferential sound patterns that flavor utterances on different levels of articulation. Emotive speech in Nazi westerns aims at “a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about,”32 and in so doing it seeks to solicit affective reactions in the listener. On the other hand, the Nazi cowboy’s wordiness is largely ritualistic. It seeks “to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works . . . , to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention.”33 Putting into effect what Jakobson calls the phatic function of language, the wordy Nazi cowboy assumes manly authority not by means of his six-gun but by talking himself into unquestioned mastery over the terms of discourse and representation. Authority and power in Nazi westerns feed on the hero’s voice, on a vocal imperative. Speech in Nazi westerns is highly sensual. It appeals to the viewers’ emotions and guides their attentions in the text itself.
The use of richly textured speech and the absence of stylized shoot-outs in Nazi westerns reveals in an exemplary fashion how Nazi cinema reshaped seemingly apolitical conventions in order to bond the viewer’s emotions to ideology. In the classical American western, guns and dueling par-take of a charismatic foundation of legality, a spectacular redemption of law and order through violence. By way of contrast, the absence of shoot-outs in German westerns and the abundance of speech bestow legitimate authority, not to universal legal orders but to the individual hero, a leader whose charismatic presence provides the cement that may hold his ethnic communities together. Whereas bullets in American westerns negotiate the threshold between anarchy and legality, the German western resorts to emotive and phatic speech to reinforce the social fabric and justify forceful leadership. In contrast to the classical paradigm, then, which pictures discourse as a threatening feminization of the cowboy’s public sphere, German westerns render orality the pathway to success and heroic mastery. Linguistic austerity in
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the Nazi western is not a distinction of the hero but of those who submit to the hero’s talkative enactment of charismatic authority.
In the remainder of this chapter I will detail this fusion of charismatic leadership, modernity, and “cowboydom” with regard to the two single most important German western productions of the 1930s, The Emperor of California and Water for Canitoga. These films not only linked the rhetoric of home to practices of colonial appropriation, but they also enlisted the full spectrum of cinematic possibilities in order to engineer highly affective and politically effective responses. Providing dramatic, elaborately controlled choreographies of action, speech, and music, The Emperor of California and Water for Canitoga demonstrate how Nazi cinema stimulated desire so as to make people desire repression, how it appealed to the whole array of modern sense perception so as to negate the senses, how it canni-balized Hollywood elements so as to mold the national community.
c a l i f o r n i a d r e a m i n’
William Everson once described Trenker as “Germany’s John Wayne and John Ford rolled into one, . . . an auteur long before that term came into common usage.”34 Grossly exaggerated though this comparison may seem, Everson’s claim concerning Trenker’s peculiar auteurism—the fusion of director, offscreen personality, and onscreen character—is useful in approaching the hardy world of Trenker’s films. Trenker’s popularity during the Nazi period documented larger transformations in the construction of star images during the 1930s. His tanned physiognomy, windblown hair, and kinetic body replaced the pale and dismal faces of expressionist cinema; it opened up new kinds of commercial tie-ins with the burgeoning tourism, alpinism, and skiing industries.35 Ford and Wayne in one, Trenker in fact never hesitated to connect his outdoor masculinity to the art of filmmaking. The act of filming itself was supposed to reflect the rugged nature of a film’s principal characters. Not just the product but the making of a film was meant to be heroic, muscular, commanding—a “tough performance,”
as a Film-Kurier critic reported in February 1936 about the shooting of majestic mass scenes for The Emperor of California. 36
Grand panoramic vistas, in colonial discourse, often yield commanding views in which aesthetic sentiments, the production of knowledge, and the assumption of authority become one and the same. Mapping unknown territories as spaces of future appropriation, majestic views are often presented as the first gesture of colonization itself.37 In Trenker’s The Emperor of California ocular practices of this sort—intensified by Giuseppe Becce’s
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film score—recurrently signify Sutter’s efforts to establish an agrarian community in Northern California and ensure his authority over the new homeland. What occurs in The Emperor of California, in other words, is a fusion of power and audiovision that climaxes whenever the hero places himself in a “monarch of all I survey” position.38 In the film’s opening sequence Sutter, persecuted by the Napoleonic police, takes refuge on top of the church of his Swiss hometown. As he climbs the stairs, striking super-impositions conflate his image with a slow upward tilt following the tower’s rise into the sky, a motion that fuses camerawork and heroic ascent into a sublime vista point that, in turn, will become the setting for a scene of spiritual introspection and redemption. Once on the tower’s peak, Sutter meets his alter ego, the apparition of Ernst Moritz Arndt (Bernhard Minetti), the icon for a national resistance against French foreign rule in Germany both in the early nineteenth century and after the Treaty of Versailles.39 Arndt, in the posture of a magician, conjures a sequence of panoramic audiovisions that capture Sutter’s attention: mountain ridges and lakesides, wide open prairies, the Grand Canyon, empty deserts, and, finally, the ocean, the utopian signifier of emigration and escape. Becce’s operatic sound track in this scene endows the images with overwhelming magnetism. Ascending and accelerating chord progressions signify coming attractions, and triumphant brass fanfares and dreamlike harp glissandos provide a sonic impression of sublime wonder and compelling monumentality. “Isn’t the world still beautiful?” asks Arndt as the master of the imaginary. Dressed like a cowboy, the poet Arndt sketches out a program of colonization that translates the power of audiovision directly into a spectacle of power. “You can serve your people everywhere,” he encourages Sutter. “You can fight everywhere.”
