spade workers’ linguistic accents attest to the powerful bonds of nature, tradition, and ethnic identity, Trenker’s sequence takes recourse to the regional textures of the German language to orchestrate the impression of a new folk rooted in agrarian myths of community. Riefenstahl’s spade workers reemerge as colonial heroes, and the power of Hitler’s ordering perception is transferred to the patriarch Johann August Sutter. In an astounding exercise of cinematic intertextuality, the jargon of blood and soil becomes the core of California politics. Although worlds seem to separate Triumph of the Will and The Emperor of California, both films thus represent a curious double that documents the affinity of aestheticized politics and American-style consumption in Nazi Germany. What both films celebrate is the homogenizing effects of charismatic leadership strong enough to mold social and natural topographies into direct expressions of power. What triumphs in both films is also and foremost the power of cinematic audiovision to make viewers desire repression, to elicit desire for representation as repression.
i nt e r l u d e : wa g n e r, c ow b oy s t y l e Officially rated as “politically and artistically especially worthwhile,” The Emperor of California premiered in July 1936 at a gala in the Reichsminis-try in Berlin and subsequently earned considerable box office returns in Germany. In late August 1936 the film won the Mussolini Trophy at the Biennale in Venice, demonstrating that, according to a Film-Kurier commentator, German “film art is a living organism that actively strives towards its self-proclaimed goals and withstands international competition with astonishing successes.”50 Although after the end of the Nazi period Trenker denied any political affiliations of the past—in his notoriously un-reliable autobiography he emphasizes Hitler’s discontent with the conclusion of his western51—there can be little doubt that The Emperor of California hit a gold mine in artistic, economic, and political terms all at once.
Yet it was Trenker’s treatment of gold in The Emperor of California that struck a nerve with some of the initial reviewers. Because of his scathing anticapitalism and anti-American Americanism, Trenker, in the eyes of the critic for the Licht-Bild-Bühne, mystifies gold; he fails to understand that gold “turns destructive only when it becomes an end in itself,” that is to say, enters profit-oriented, and by implication Jewish, circulation.52 Trenker, the reviewer implied, mistakes historical contingencies for ontological facts, and in doing so he remains ensnared in the kind of delusions Jewish capitalism imposes on the individual. In fact, one might extend this reviewer’s reservations to argue that Trenker did not read his Wagner carefully enough.
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After all, in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung gold becomes calamitous only after greedy dealers such as Alberich insert it into the circuits of power and exchange, whereas it constitutes an object of aesthetic delight as long as it remains confined to the bottom of the Rhine, the bosom of nature.
The reviewer’s dissatisfaction with Trenker’s treatment of gold must surprise. It points to the general confusion that marked Nazi economic thought in the aftermath of the Roehm crackdown of June 1934 and the elimination of anticapitalist voices within the Nazi party. For it is not difficult to see that Trenker, contrary to the reviewer’s assumption, clearly follows the critique of modern life spelled out by Wagner and that Trenker’s figuration of gold closely adheres to the political agendas prefigured in the master’s magnum opus. Once turned into an object of possessive desire and exchange, gold, in both Trenker and Wagner, enables infinite circulation, traverses traditional boundaries, and thus fosters a dangerous loss of Heimat. Gold in Trenker—like in Wagner—must be expelled from circulation so that homogeneous communities may live again. In unison with Nazi westerns such as Water for Canitoga and Gold in New Frisco, as well as nonwesterns such as Karl Hartl’s Gold (1934) , Trenker ascribes to gold “a social-psychological power, a sublime essence independent of its real presence.”53 Gold hunters in Trenker, as much as in Wagner, deify gold’s exchange value and eclipse its actual use value. Trenker and Wagner, in turn, fetishize gold because they believe that the use value of commodities can be separated from their exchange value, that value can be measured outside social contract and economic exchange. Doubly fetishized, gold in both Trenker and Wagner haunts communities with a monstrous return of the repressed. It rouses powerful fears of penetration and signifies a dangerous opening of the social organism to the contingencies of history and the real.
Let me focus my attention now on other echoes of Wagner’s work in Trenker’s western project. I want to explore how The Emperor of California takes recourse to Wagner’s aesthetic practices in order to manufacture a nationally specific and politically effective German mass culture. For Wagner not only informs Trenker’s conception of gold; his nineteenth-century aesthetics inspired the way in which Giuseppe Becce’s score synthesizes sounds and sights into one overwhelming experience and gives, as the reviewer for Der Film wrote, “action and image their final effects.”54
Becce debuted in film with a drumroll that in many respects set the tone for his later scoring work for directors such as Arnold Fanck, Gerhard Lamprecht, Leni Riefenstahl, and Luis Trenker.55 Becce commenced his film career in 1913 by arranging the score and playing the title role for Carl Froelich and William Wauer’s bioepic Richard Wagner. Because of copyright
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struggles with the Wagner family, Becce, when arranging the score for Richard Wagner, was forced to draw mostly on musical sources other than Wagner, Viennese classicism in particular. Aside from legal reasons, however, Becce’s choice of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven “evidently had to do with the film’s overall aim of glorifying Wagner unconditionally. Entirely in line with Richard Wagner’s own teleological perspective, Becce suggests to the audience a history of German music where the Viennese classics lead directly to Bayreuth. Even Giacomo Rossini, whom Wagner, in his writings, considered one of his main adversaries, is used by Becce to underscore this perspective.”56 Wagnerian effects, in what can be safely named the first German film score,57 were thus achieved by means of a musical language that far surpassed Wagner’s own. Already in his very first film score, Becce envisioned a Wagnerian cinema that would integrate various traditions and idioms, including extant repertory pieces, into an effective whole, one that would formally adapt to and thematically consummate a film’s narrative.
The combination of disparate elements and conflicting classical legacies became Becce’s trademark as a film composer throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Characterized by Wagnerian leitmotifs and open forms, film music was meant to extend impressions of heroic courage and operatic grandeur, to establish irresistible continuities between past and present. The task of film music, according to Becce, was to articulate heterogeneous styles into one new expressive syntax. His orientation toward premodernist idioms notwithstanding, Becce advocated a quasi-Taylorist division and Fordist organization of scoring practices. Developed between 1919 and 1929, Becce’s Kinothek compiled hundreds of scoring segments that could be easily moved among different contexts and applied to highly diverse film subjects.58 Likewise, the Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik, coauthored in 1927 with Hans Erdmann, aspired to systematize the aesthetic possibilities of film scoring as it provided a multitude of atmospheric set pieces that intermingled allusions to nineteenth-century idioms from Weber via Wagner to Liszt’s symphonic poems. The best film music, Erdmann and Becce explained in the Handbuch, “is the one which dissolves with a particular film scene into one inseparable unity.”59 A bricoleur of the first order, Becce aimed even prior to the arrival of synchronized sound to put industrial principles of rationalization and interchangeability at the service of conjuring eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illusions of wholeness, of remaking industrial culture in the image of Wagner’s preindustrial visions of sensual synthesis and organic totality.
In the close cooperation with Luis Trenker throughout the 1930s Becce’s cinematic Wagnerianism became bonded to a political mission. Similar to
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Herbert Windt’s sound tracks for Riefenstahl’s spectacles,60 Becce’s lyric-heroic scores aimed at joining cinematic sights and sounds into a dramatic synthesis of overwhelming effects. Drawing heavily on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century styles, Becce’s musical language of the 1930s clearly avoided Hollywood’s contemporary experiments with modernist or even atonal idioms. Instead, it was in the German masters of the past, as well as in popular folk traditions, that German cinema was to find the sonic resources to extend impressions of perfection and integrity, to celebrate manly action and resolution, and thus to recuperate heroism for a postheroic age of machines and bureaucratic administrations.61 Although Becce’s scores inces-santly aroused expectation and catered to the demand for novelty and mobility, strictly speaking—to recall Adorno’s critique of Wagner—nothing new took place in them. Advocating the viewer’s desire in the film itself, Becce’s scores exalted in industrial sameness. They communicated identical materials “as if they were something new and thereby substitute[d] the abstract succession of bars for the dialectical progression of substance, its inner historicity.”62 Everything in these scores seemed to undergo dynamic change and development, yet in the end we get that which has putatively always been the same, the mythic as a calculated effect of the modern.
In Trenker’s film a three-minute intermezzo, which directly precedes Sutter’s discovery of California, demonstrates how Becce’s score translates disparate idioms into an overpowering language of authority and self-assertion. We see Trenker’s body mastering the cliffs of the Grand Canyon with Alpine virtuosity—an ecstatic display of physicality that advances the lonesome cowboy to the legitimate leader of New Helvetia. In the previous sequence we witnessed the hero’s voyage through the Arizona desert. Trenker’s mismatched, handheld desert shots here conveyed a quasi-neorealist impression of suffering and depravation. The succeeding climbing sequence, however, reverses this pathos of resignation. Instead of exploring the uncanniness of the desert, the camera now identifies with the muscular performance of the hero. In a rhythmic series of shots from ever-changing angles we observe Sutter carefully scouting the terrain, traversing rocks and crevasses, resting his head against the wall, and finally reaching the rim of the canyon, where a joyful explosion of physical power emancipates both the hero and the spectator from the emasculating gloom of the desert.
Becce’s score effectively illustrates the climber’s shifting positions and moods throughout this spectacular ascent. Melodically stagnating violins signify moments of hesitation; towering brass fanfares proclaim the resurgence of resolve and vitality. Driven by ever-more accelerating rhythms and assertive beats, Becce’s score in the first half of this sequence emulates
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the pulse of American two-step marches and the kind of chromatic arrangements well known from American western films. Toward the end, however, it turns to a more hymnic idiom that floods the listener with passionate melodies in the manner of Wagner, Strauss, or Puccini. Once atop the rim of the Grand Canyon, in a geographically somewhat astounding move, Sutter poses as a conqueror, triumphantly shouting “California!” A low-angle close-up pictures his proud act of looking, immediately followed by a subjective shot that scouts the wide-open spaces of California, the territories of Sutter’s colonial mission. It is in this moment of imperial triumph that Becce’s sound track performs one of its most stunning bricolages as it reaches out for a grandiose fanfare, a dazzling variation on the Star-Spangled Banner, modulated into a rather parodic flat key. Becce’s composition in this moment of triumph bonds the viewer’s affects directly to a breathtaking language of charismatic leadership. Not simply Sutter’s imperial resolution but also Becce’s irresistible sound track here takes command over America.
It arouses desire for a unified, mobile, and extraordinary body, for a synthesis of words, music, and dance, but at the same time this score, by means of its monumental gestures, also hits the viewer over the head. The triumph of Sutter’s will includes a triumph over the viewer’s will.
Adorno and Hanns Eisler, in their critique of Hollywood film music, argued that dominant scores aid in conjuring illusions of reality and physical immediacy. Film music presents the mediated effects of mechanical reproduction as natural and unmediated. Hollywood scoring practice, they wrote, “brings the picture close to the public, just as the picture brings itself close to it by means of the close-up. It attempts to interpose a human coating between the reeled-off pictures and the spectators.”63 Part of a project to bring Hollywood home to Nazi Germany, Becce’s sound track for The Emperor of California far exceeds this function. Becce’s fusion of popular and classical idioms—like Hollywood scoring practice of the time—
wants to offer glimpses of a better life; it caters to a nostalgia for lost periods of imagined integrity and unity, of mythic wholeness and mimetic immediacy. At the same time, however, in its peculiar interaction with the film’s image track, film music here becomes a medium to suppress the very desire it arouses in the first place. Becce’s Wagnerian attempt at integrating the different channels of sensual expression and perception offers a highly organized imitation of magic practices, the mimesis of mimesis.64 The score mimics mimetic behavior with the help of mechanical reproduction; it enlists “primitivist residues”—a utopian rebellion against domination—as a useful tool of domination itself. Grafting Nazi folklore and führer ideology onto the scenes of popular exoticism, Becce’s score opens up a mythic space in which suppressed nature—sentience, spontaneity, and the desire to be-
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come an other—may articulate itself only in order to succumb even more effectively to the powers of repression.
e n g i n e e r i n g t h e n a z i c ow b oy Nazi westerns explore the American West to rouse a paradoxical protest against capitalist modernity. Although the Nazi western, as I have argued with regard to The Emperor of California, sanctifies technological achievements as fascinating spectacles, it simultaneously mourns the disappearance of preindustrial lifeworlds, traditional identities, and unproblematic ethnic communities. Herbert Selpin’s 1939 Water for Canitoga, to which I now turn, further illuminates this ambivalent modernism. The film, as one reviewer wrote, “is of such closure and power, of such colorfulness and atmosphere, it is so polished in its details and made with such virtuosity, that it does not take second place to the most shining examples of the grandiose and fascinating American adventure film. We are thus in a position to equal Hollywood, indeed to surpass it with regard to a film’s ethical tendency.”65
Shot exclusively at the Bavaria studios in Munich-Geiselgasteig, Water for Canitoga pictures the Far West as a space where rugged individuals and greedy racketeers struggle over the meaning of technological progress and masculine identity, modernity and morality, labor and money. In contrast to the American western formula, it is not the sheer presence of modern machines here that disrupts the primeval integrity of the western landscapes but rather the confrontation between those who consider technology a triumph of the human spirit over nature and those who use modern machines solely to satisfy their egotistical demands for wealth and leisure. Although the advent of technological modernity in the West at first seems to undo the image of cowboy masculinity, the existential battle over the use of modern machines yields a modernized notion of masculine heroism. “Some will always have to perish so that a great work may succeed and last,” the Albers character proclaims in the end, positing the figure of the engineer as a twentieth-century reincarnation of the cowboy.
