In The Emperor of California Trenker explored the western genre as a metaphor for the cinematic apparatus. For Trenker it was not such a leap of faith from the cowboy’s colonial to the camera’s techno-ideological work.
Selpin’s Water for Canitoga, by way of contrast, deploys the phallic rhetoric of the traditional western in order to suggest surprising continuities between the nineteenth-century world of cowboys and the twentieth-century cosmos of engineers. Monstuart’s engineerdom valorizes forms of labor that challenge the impact of both scientific reason and finance capital. The western’s toughness, in Selpin’s film, elevates technology from the realm of Zivilisation to the realm of Kultur, from the spheres of abstraction and conceptual reflection to the ones of immediacy and the soul, from images of
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polyphonous confusion and formlessness to strong enactments of the will to form and order. Technological progress, cloaked in the imagery of the western frontier, thus helps recuperate what it threatened in the first place: masculine identity and authentic expressiveness.
Monstuart’s existential engineerdom clearly resonated with what Goebbels, in a famous speech of 1939, was calling the contemporary age of “steel-made romanticism,”76 the Nazi attempt to give a soul to technology and to put it in the service of the German folk. Small wonder, then, that Goebbels’s distraction factory spared neither trouble nor expense to market Water for Canitoga with the most advanced technological means of the time: television.77 On the evening before the film’s Berlin premiere, Selpin and some of his actors chatted about their western on Berlin’s still experimental TV program.78 At the end of the show all guests suddenly decided to intone one of the film’s most marketable attractions, “Goodbye Jonny.” Albers himself, on the other hand, when asked in a different context, left little doubt about the political index of Water for Canitoga. In an interview with Film-Kurier the star drew direct lines between Monstuart’s spectacular caisson and Hitler’s Autobahns. The film, Albers pointed out, “plays around the turn of the century, but it is rather attractive to compare the technical problems of the past with our monumental constructions of bridges and roads today.”79 Albers’s remarks point to the fact that, similar to The Emperor of California, Water for Canitoga engages different cultural codes in an attempt to engineer a unified sense of identity. Rugged cowboys such as Monstuart reveal through technological mediation the organic essences of the German soul and folk. They prevent modern Germany from falling into the same trap of degenerate feminization that Nazi discourse attributed to the federal system and plutocratic order of the United States.80 At once cowboy and engineer, Monstuart embodies the Nazi call for a strong, masculine state resolutely defining the course of technological modernization. Challenging what Nazi ideology perceived as the polycentric gestalt of modern America, the film envisions a self-sufficient state that defies both the liberal-democratic separation of power and capital’s manipulation of politics.
Whereas the cowboy-politician Sutter perished not because of a want of will but because American settlers failed to live up to Trenker’s image of the faithful cowboy, the cowboy-engineer Monstuart redeems the West from the detrimental force of exchange, greed, and competitiveness. If America itself cannot uphold what German filmmakers consider the legendary world of the western, then German cinema must film the legend and activate it against its actual adversaries.
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w e s t e r n a d v e nt u r e s a n d wa r fa r e One of the economically most viable American genres of the silent film era, the Hollywood western went mostly underground in the early years of the talkies because of fundamental transformations of American film culture during the Great Depression and New Deal period, the technical problems of on-location sound recording, and the highly competitive attraction of new genres such as the musical and the gangster film.81 It was only by the end of the 1930s, with John Ford’s celebrated Stagecoach (1939) and George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (1939), that American westerns experienced an impressive renaissance lasting far into the 1950s. In spite of the great popularity of the western in prewar Germany, German audiences had to wait until the postwar era to witness this rebirth of the American western genre around 1940: Ford’s masterpiece was never screened in Nazi Germany.82
In contrast to the American development, the outbreak of World War II ended the German cowboy’s trek through Nazi cinema. Westerns such as The Emperor of California, Sergeant Berry, Gold in New Frisco, and Water for Canitoga had used the absence of American competition during the 1930s to bond the German viewer’s desire to a different and nationally specific interpretation of the genre. A site of multiple temporal and spatial dislocations, the German western of the 1930s was designed to carry viewers across fundamental social and political transformations of the time.
Men in search of charismatic power and the technological sublime, German cowboys such as Sutter and Monstuart played a critical role in unifying the controversial evaluation of the western frontier and American modernity so typical for the Weimar period. Nazi westerns absorbed competing views into one hegemonic interpretation, yet rather than empowering communication across the boundaries of different cultures, Nazi Westerns reified cultural particularities and coupled desire with ideology. That the trail of the Nazi cowboy through German cinemas in 1939 ended abruptly does not reflect a sudden change in Nazi film politics. Instead, it must be seen as resulting from the fact that the German western’s primary audience had now been effectively relocated from the urban movie theaters to the eastern and western fronts. By 1939 the Nazi cowboy had more or less served his preparatory mission. His former fans, converted into soldiers, were now called on to prove what they had learned.
A conduit to a seemingly lost world of masculine virility and unhampered physical immediacy, Nazi westerns captured the age’s constitutive nonsynchronicity. As they aligned new technologies with popular utopias, these westerns aspired to cater to both at once: to those who lost and to
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those who gained from Nazi modernization. Far from simply escaping into the past, Nazi westerns embraced modern machines and the “American”
art of genre to engineer the power of elemental forces. Cinematic and other machines here yielded access to a world where modern distraction seekers could hope to reconstitute an imaginary sense of corporeal plenitude and wholeness. Fusing exotic images and operatic sound tracks into total works of art, modern apparatuses thus helped align antimodern impulses with the tasks of the time. As they rendered the old as a product of the new or presented the new as the latest manifestation of the always same, Nazi westerns rolled myth and modernity into one overpowering experience. They ventured into the Far West in order to rewrite history as fate and replace historical contingency with the self-sufficient timetables of nature and charismatic leadership.
The Nazi cowboy’s quest for virility and charismatic authority fit well into the larger political constellations of Nazi Germany at the threshold of World War II. Nazi ideology strongly opposed the refraction of the modern state into competing apparatuses of domination. In the view of Nazi ideologues the liberal-democratic state—in particular in the United States—
effaced the existential dimension of the political. Politics was supposed to become Great Politics again, and to achieve this goal it was necessary to recenter the state and emancipate it from economic, administrative, or social imperatives. But Nazi politics by no means lived up to these ideals. Although penetrating most aspects of public and private life, the Nazi state entailed a great number of subcenters of bureaucratic domination. The Nazi elite therefore redefined politics as the art of maintaining distance among competing agencies of domination. They hoped to recenter the state by person-alizing politics and making the head of state, Adolf Hitler, into a charismatic judge who ruled out possible struggles among diffuse centers of power. The closer the Third Reich approached war, the more Hitler emerged as occupying “the nodal points between the partial fields of power.”83 The drive toward war in fact provided the only means by which the Nazi state was able to keep its organizational jungle in check. War was essential in giving politics the appearance of unified and resolute action. Combat, military leadership, and imperial exploitation alone could finally satisfy the call for autonomous politics.
Like the calculated presentation of Hitler as a mythic führer , 84 Nazi westerns aroused desire for forms of political action that defined the political as a site where authenticity could come into being. Nazi cowboys offered what helped gloss over the gap between ideological demands and political realities, past utopias and present realities. They rode in the service of an
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order that tried to sell war as the telos of all desire, a desire to undo the unpredictability of desire. The outbreak of World War II may have discontinued this ride, but if we are to believe Goebbels’s megalomaniac visions, this war also promoted the final triumph of the Nazi film cowboy and film culture. For imperial warfare, in Goebbels’s eyes, provided an important strategy to increase the export shares of the German film industry.85 War was meant to open up new markets for German film exports. It was designed to drive Hollywood out of Europe. If German film’s mission was to spread German culture and the German language abroad,86 then Nazi warfare was supposed to secure a radically expanded field in which Nazi cinema could serve as a new lingua franca. In the self-perception of Goebbels, World War II was therefore not just a war against the verdicts of the Treaty of Versailles but also against Hollywood and its dominant position in the world market.
On August 17, 1940, even prior to the American entry into World War II, Goebbels ordered Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to close its German offices and prohibited any future screening of American films in Germany or in German-occupied territories.87 Eager all along to protect the art form of film from commercial imperatives, Goebbels’s intervention concluded the way prewar entertainment features had sought to recast cultural difference as radical alterity and overpower any recognition of other cultures as possible sources of critique or emancipation. Although Nazi mass culture throughout the war clearly continued to supplant concrete experience with powerful illusions, Goebbels’s ban against American films effectively emancipated German cinema from direct Hollywood competition. It ended the narrative of Hollywood in Berlin as a narrative of cross-cultural transaction and rivalry. How Hollywood itself responded to the ambitions and for-mulae of Nazi cinema, and how German exile film practitioners employed American mass culture during the 1940s and 1950s to articulate their experience of cultural dislocation, is the focus of part 2 of this study.
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Part 2
b e r l i n i n h o l l y wo o d ,
1 9 3 9 – 1 9 5 5
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5 Wagner at Warner’s
German Sounds and
