The cinema of the 1930s marked an era of largely accelerated sounds and sights.11 The verbal and visual dynamism of Berkeley’s musicals, of Cagney’s gangsters, or of Hawks’s screwball comedies extended an idea of tempo that was at odds with the experience of stagnating economic realities throughout the Depression era. The verbal hyperactivity of Hollywood films was indicative of the fact that directors had relinquished some of their
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former control to screenwriters and dialogue coaches. It was also a part of concerted efforts to capture viewers across differences of class and race and to dramatically expedite the universal reach of cinematic pleasure. At the end of the 1920s many East Coast dramatists and writers had moved West to help Hollywood studios refine dialogues and tighten narratives. Joining professional screenwriters, these “word workers,” as Giuliana Muscio has called them, “produced a linguistic naturalism that standardized geographic and social gradations to make them comprehensible. This fundamental work on language undertaken by Hollywood cinema, alongside that of the radio, constructed the American way of speaking in the 1930s.”12 Screenwriters and voice trainers elaborated a new vernacular that eluded both the perceived arrogance of upper-class rhetoric and the putative vulgarity of working-class or regional idioms. The Hollywood studios of the early 1930s did not by any means do away with class-specific or local accents, but in their hope to streamline the spoken word they increasingly abandoned what had populated the screens of late silent cinema: the representation of ethnic immigrant cultures . Hearing the accents of immigrants onscreen seemed to abrade “the senses of the broad center of the audience and therefore obliged studios to soften otherness into mere difference, ethnicity into sentiment, and hardship into nostalgia. In any case, ethnicity became too much for classical Hollywood to handle and was easily rendered into a ‘structured absence.’”13
There is clearly something profoundly deplorable about the way American sound films during the early 1930s eliminated the flavors of ethnic, regional, or class-specific accents. In their efforts to deliver standardized consumer products Hollywood studios engineered a marketable lingua franca that muted the other by remaking it in the image of the self. They constructed an allegedly neutral language that denied traditional links between linguistic properties and particularistic identities. Yet if we recall how Nazi film theorists and practitioners, at the level of discursive construction, tried during this same period to remake film dialogue in terms of racist ideologies, Hollywood’s linguistic modernization of the 1930s might be viewed in a somewhat more favorable light. Nazi ideologues understood the coloratura of the German language and its dialects as transmission belts of national essence. Hollywood’s word engineers, on the other hand, remained distant to this ideology of sound. Instead, the new vernacular of the 1930s—
at least in the self-understanding of the studios—aimed at what one might call a post-traditional form of civic culture. Language standardization carried the seeds of a postnationalist definition of citizenship. It divorced notions of national belonging from nineteenth-century discourses on racial
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homogeneity or cultural superiority, and it advanced the formal recognition of shared institutions to the primary meaning of national identity.
Paradoxical though it may seem, capitalist mass culture thus ended up propagating a pragmatic view of language as a tool of mutual recognition and rational exchange.
Given Hollywood’s anxiety about the ethnic patinas of American English, it should come as no surprise that of all German exiles in Hollywood during the 1930s, film and theater actors experienced the greatest loss of status and artistic self-expression. In stark contrast to the late silent period, when Hollywood exploited transatlantic studio relations to attract foreign talent and stardom, classical Hollywood sound films allowed for linguistic particularism and foreign inflection mostly in character roles—and primarily for comic effects. Thus, even the most distinguished German actors such as Fritz Kortner, Ernst Deutsch, or Albert Bassermann found themselves relegated to the extreme margins of the studio system. Playing side roles as butlers, doctors, composers, or waiters in the popular costume films of the 1930s, their principal function was to provide vague aural impressions of Europeanness or cultural refinement.14 With the exception of a very few (for example, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, and Paul Henreid) who succeeded in aligning their foreignness with the studio’s need for exotic femme fatales, odd-ball villains, or charming cosmopolitans, most émigré actors had to experience their German accent as a signature of multiple displacement. It triggered a kind of heightened self-consciousness and latent self-hatred documented in the paranoid questions émigrés would ask after hearing other exiles speak: “No, my accent isn’t as bad as that?”15
The popularity of the anti-Nazi genre between 1939 and circa 1944
temporarily increased the presence of German exile actors on Hollywood screens although not exactly in the way these émigrés must have desired.
In a cynical twist of fate exile actors were suddenly contracted by Hollywood studios to typify the very personae responsible for their original dislocation: SS and Gestapo officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, Nazi spies. Dressed up as their enemy, German exile actors were now allowed to speak their native tongue and grant the German language a curious inroad into American entertainment. What most film scripts asked these actors to say, however, had little to do with what they had vocalized prior to their exile, for Hollywood reinvented German around 1940 as a bellowing idiom solely designed for sadists and tyrants. “What a strange stroke of fortune,” commented Alfred Polgar, “to gain prestige and maybe stardom as the performer of a kind of bestiality that has made oneself into a victim.”16 According to Horak’s analyses, 54 percent of all anti-Nazi features placed at
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least one German emigrant in a major or supporting role, whereas a total of 130 German-speaking exile actors were involved in the overall production of anti-Nazi films throughout World War II. Their precarious stardom, however, vanished again as early as 1943, when studio executives began to register the public’s growing unease with Hollywood’s new multilingual-ism and drastically reduced the number of foreign actors in domestic productions. As Hans Kafka wrote in September 1943 in the leading Jewish exile journal Der Aufbau: “Most of the studios now object to casting accent parts with accent people. In some of the most important forthcoming films, Nazis, Russians and Chinese are being played by Americans.”17
It is interesting to note in this context that German exile directors did often very little to reverse the marginalization of German émigré actors in Hollywood. Fritz Lang’s casting policy for Hangmen Also Die, the 1943
United Artist production about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942 in Prague, is a good case in point. Against the will of both his coproducer, Arnold Pressburger, and the film’s coscriptwriter, Bertolt Brecht, Lang insisted on casting only actors without middle-European accents in the roles of Czech resistance fighters. In order not to threaten the audience’s emotional identification with the courageous Czech, Lang deliberately wanted to Americanize the film’s heroes. His ideal cast consisted of what he called middle Americans (midwesterners) or Britons with flawless—that is,
“inaudible” and hence putatively universal— diction.18 Brecht was greatly disappointed by Lang’s quest for linguistic homogenization.19 Not only did Lang’s policy crudely contradict Brecht’s aesthetic program of affective distanciation, but it also frustrated Brecht’s hope to place both his wife, Helene Weigel, and his friend Fritz Kortner in prominent Hollywood roles.20 In the end Hangmen Also Die had only three exiles among its credited cast: Alexander Granach, Hans von Twardowski, and Reinhold Schünzel, all of whom played Nazis or Nazi collaborators.21
Edward Said has described the life of the exile as an always precarious existence in-between. In the modern world the exile’s fate is not simply to live away from home in a state of surgical separation but to live with many re-minders that his or her home is in fact not that far away, that old and new may intermesh yet never produce any real sense of fulfillment. The exile, Said argues, “exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against.”22 Hollywood
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studios of the 1930s and early 1940s were far from creating conditions under which German-speaking exile actors could indulge themselves in too much comfort or security. Studio filmmaking left little room for the exile actors’ mimetic faculty, their professional ability to liquefy the boundaries between self and other. Rather than lending American mass culture their various talents, these exiles became in many cases unwilling executioners of how Hollywood around 1940 pictured the whole of German culture, including its language, as intrinsically eliminationist.
In 1941 Der Aufbau published an almanac of American everyday phrases to facilitate the émigrés’ process of cultural survival.23 For German exile actors, however, a mere lexicon of ordinary speech was simply not enough to find them a place in Hollywood. Burdened with their German accent, these actors experienced “home” as something faraway, and they therefore hardly ever entered that state of cultural hybridity Said describes as the condition of the exile in a modern world. Unlike their much more successful and—
to use Said’s term— comfortable émigré colleagues in the studios’ scoring departments, the majority of exile actors after the end of the war quickly returned to whatever was left of their former home. It is this curious triumph of those other engineers of “German” sounds in exile, the middle-European film composers of the classical studio era, that concerns us now.
r o m a nt i c u n i v e r s a l i s m
Between the early 1930s and the early 1950s, film music fulfilled a more or less uniform set of tasks and expectations.24 It was designed to intensify dramatic moments, create narrative continuity between scenes, stitch together the various spaces of the cinematic experience, and transform the viewer into “an untroublesome (less critical, less wary) viewing subject.”25
Film music cued the viewer into desired viewing positions. It appealed to the irrational, the dreamlike, to make audiences more receptive to the power of fantasy. To fulfill these functions, studio film music relied on a fairly stable inventory of stylistic elements deeply influenced by the compositional practice of late-romantic composers such as Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Classical Hollywood film music capitalized on romanticism’s quest for expressive excess and emotional plenitude, on its melodic intensity and harmonic abundance, and on its interweaving of musical motives into an all-encompassing texture of sensual stimulation.
Although classical film music was characterized by a quasi-Fordist division and acceleration of labor, the romantic cult of genius continues to inform the widespread understanding of classical film music even today. If we
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