This book argues that we must understand the course of German cinema between the early 1930s and the mid-1950s as one of enduring ruptures, enforced displacements, and imaginative detours. It is impossible, I suggest, to reconstruct the history of German cinema during this period as linear or unified. Nor can we explain its developments as the outcome of unambiguous intentions or transparent causes. Although written under very different historical conditions, the story of this book itself in some sense mirrors the fractured logic that I trace in the following pages. The Dark Mirror was conceived as a book from the beginning, yet it experienced many turns, trials, and diversions before it arrived at its final destination. Special thanks go to Eric Rentschler for having urged me not to lose my focus, patience, and direction. Many other colleagues and friends were invaluable in helping me to sharpen arguments, revise immature interpretations, gain new insights, and circumvent potential embarrassments, especially Nora Alter, Antje Ascheid, David Bathrick, Russell Berman, John Davidson, Karen Fiss, Gerd Gemünden, Sabine Hake, Miriam Hansen, Tony Kaes, Karen Kenkel, Alice Kuzniar, Dick Langston, Johannes von Moltke, David Pan, Patrice Petro, and Lawrence Rainey. The manuscript benefited greatly from the two anonymous readers who evaluated it for the University of California Press. Finally, I am particularly thankful to Hester Baer, who not only helped me out with a good deal of archival research but proved to be an incisive reader and critic of various drafts of this book.
I was extremely fortunate to have Eric Smoodin as my editor at the University of California Press. Without his steadfast enthusiasm and open-minded guidance this book would never have gotten off the ground. Many thanks to Joe Abbott, who did a great job copyediting the book for publication. Washington University provided me with many of the resources xi
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needed to conduct research and carry out the writing. I owe particular grat-itude to Edward Macias, dean of Arts and Sciences at Washington University, for offering financial support to illustrate this volume. Peter Latta of the Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek assisted in gathering most of the illustrations for this volume. Unless noted otherwise, all stills and images appear with the permission of the Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
I am grateful for having had the opportunity to test some of the ideas and interpretations put forward in this book in lectures and conference papers before. Drafts of certain chapters were presented at Dartmouth College, Duke University, Stanford University, and Washington University, as well as at the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association, the Society for Cinema Studies, and the German Studies Association. Preliminary versions of some portions of this book have also previously appeared as articles. In all cases, however, earlier readings underwent significant rewriting and reconceptualization. For their kind permissions to make selected use of earlier materials, I would nevertheless like to thank the publications in which they appeared (for specific acknowledgments of permissions please see the copyright page).
This book would not have been even remotely possible without the tire-less support and encouragement of Christa Johnson. She has accompanied me on many of the journeys that have led to its completion, whether it meant embarking on research trips to Berlin or Los Angeles, watching yet another (painful) Nazi feature or (perversely pleasurable) film noir, or sitting together in front of the computer screen and fixing my Germanic syntax.
Our two daughters, Nicola and Kirstin, were both born during the years I spent researching and writing The Dark Mirror. In more than one way Christa, Nicola, and Kirstin have made this study’s voyage between different times, cultures, and locations meaningful for me. And it is to them that I dedicate this book.
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Introduction: The Dark Mirror
This book traces the origin of what I understand—with full awareness of the term’s evocative and ambiguous history—as the Sonderweg (special path) of German popular cinema. In a series of typological readings, The Dark Mirror first investigates how Nazi entertainment features during the 1930s aspired to bring Hollywood to the Third Reich and then how Hitler refugees attuned German cultural material after 1939 to the demands of the Hollywood studio system. Throughout the following pages my principal interest is in the ways that German film practitioners, whether in Berlin or Hollywood, negotiated different cultural codes and encouraged their audiences to identify themselves as others. In all eight case studies we witness German directors, film stars, and film composers inviting their viewers to cross spatial and cultural boundaries. Yet rather than leveling crucial differences between Nazi film culture and the exiles’ Hollywood, this study argues that German cinema during the Hitler era split into incompatible and nonsynchronous parts. To put it simply, whereas in Nazi society cinematic pleasures served the purpose of domination and hierarchical segregation, the exile filmmakers of this book hoped to sustain notions of modern culture as a source of emancipation and multiplicity. Poised between Hitler and Hollywood, the golden age of German cinema, I suggest, owed its existence to a process of division, displacement, and doubling that cannot be reintegrated into any kind of unified national narrative.
By investigating the course of German film from the 1930s to the 1950s, this book contributes to current debates about the role of national cinemas as sites of cultural difference and particularity. Until very recently, to write about national cinemas meant to support semi- or noncommercial film practice, to commend the critique or subversion of mainstream conventions, to privilege auteurism over popular filmmaking. German cinema always played 1
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a prominent role in this kind of writing. Primarily focusing on the 1920s and 1970s, critics celebrated expressionist film and New German Cinema as beacons of oppositional meaning and cultural experimentation, as a national cinema whose insistence on product differentiation warranted cultural diversity and self-critique. The cultural turn of film studies since the late 1980s has led to a far-reaching demise of such normative conceptions of national cinema. Rather than tracking the careers of international art house directors, culturalist film history has drawn our awareness to how popular cinemas other than Hollywood may have produced local meanings or instilled Hollywood-like conventions with particular styles or accents.1 In the perspectives of this newer scholarship European cinemas are no longer defined solely in terms of their art film productions. Instead, they are seen as cinemas that have always been quite familiar with categories of genre and stardom, as national cinemas that were and still are by no means embarrassed about their popular films or audiences or preferences.
The Dark Mirror wants to contribute to film studies’ reconsideration of the national and the popular. It builds on recent work in German film scholarship that has emphasized the extent to which German cinema has been from its very inception a cinema of cultural transfers and transcultural fusions, of border crossings and transgressive identifications.2 Unlike a great deal of postwar scholarship, which simply disparaged European genre cinemas as bad objects, The Dark Mirror is intended to develop a nuanced vocabulary able to assess the narrative energies and stylistic shapes of German popular filmmaking. The point of this book, however, is neither to join those who, by stressing the continuities of popular traditions and domestic affiliations, hope to normalize the course of German national cinema3 nor simply to re-cite the culturalist view of the popular as a site of individual empowerment and difference. Nazi entertainment cinema, I will argue, deserves special attention in today’s debate because it charged the act of going to the movies with eminently political functions. Employing highly rationalized modes of industrial production and distribution, Nazi cinema appealed to both the national and the popular in order to break Hollywood’s hegemony in Europe. It capitalized on populist notions of linguistic, cultural, and racial belonging to integrate the viewer as a consumer into the imagined community of the nation. Whether or not it really succeeded with these objectives, Nazi cinema raises fundamental questions about the interaction between state and Fordist mass culture, between politics and modern distraction, between institutional contexts and individual acts of reception. As perhaps the single most successful European alternative to Hollywood ever, Nazi cinema urges cultural studies neither to reduce all relevant questions of power and
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domination to cultural matters nor to heroize contradictions between ideological designs and consumer practices as expressions of subversive difference and aesthetic resistance.
Contrary to the nationalist and revolutionary rhetoric of the Nazi movement, the German cinema of the Third Reich, according to Karsten Witte, “had little to call its own.”4 Nazi feature films borrowed freely from Hollywood models and from older domestic traditions. They transported fantasy to places far beyond the order of the day, and they were eager to please German and foreign audiences alike. Nazi cinema may have pursued the idea of synchronizing sights and sounds into peculiar German expressions, but we can neither consider its modes of spectatorial address intrinsically fascistic nor assume that its self-proclaimed Germanness only worked with and on the German viewers’ imagination. What complicates the picture even further is the fact that the history of German film during the Nazi period entails not only the narrative of Hollywood in Berlin but also the exile of hundreds of mostly Jewish-German film practitioners to the Hollywood studio system—Berlin in Hollywood. The professional survival of Hitler refugees in Southern California rested largely on their competence to adapt to the studios’ production modes. As important, however, it often depended on their willingness to mimic the very past they tried to leave behind. Studios hired refugee actors to play Nazi soldiers, immigrant composers to bring German musical traditions to Hollywood screens, émigré directors to imitate the expressionist language of Weimar cinema or to reference exoticized notions of European history and high culture. It is the historical irony of Nazi cinema that, in its very attempt to refix German identity and bring Hollywood home to Berlin, it triggered the rise of a German cinema of exile that not only outlasted Hitler’s rule but in which “Germany” reemerged as specter and simulacrum, a performative “Germany” replete with slippages, masquerades, and displacements. Situated between Hitler and Hollywood, German popular cinema after 1933 developed along incompatible spatial and temporal axes. There is no way to recuperate its history of doubling and enforced displacement as simple or normal.
This book maps the positions of German film between the 1930s and 1950s, between the inauguration of the Nazi culture industry on the one hand and the disintegration of the Hollywood studio system and the concomitant demise of a number of paradigmatic exile careers on the other. My aim is to approach the locations of German film during this era by examining what might be seen as eccentric moments and atypical figures. It is the extreme and extraordinary, I suggest, that best illuminates the continuities within the discontinuities and the discontinuities within the continuities of
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German film, Nazi or Hollywood. The first part of this book inquires into the extent to which Nazi entertainment features of the prewar era were readable in terms of Hollywood cinema. It reconstructs the bearing of Hollywood on Nazi film culture during the 1930s and probes the ambivalent ways that Nazi genre films transformed America into a fantastic playground of the imagination. Ever since the turn of the century, the topos of America had provided a site at which Germans debated the rapid rise of modern industrial culture, articulated social utopias and anxieties, and struggled over the relationship between high art and the popular. Nazi cinema, in its mission to create its own Hollywood in Berlin, reckoned with this Americanist imaginary. It invited audiences to identify themselves temporarily as American others, yet it did so not in order to liquefy but rather to redefine cultural differences in terms of radical alterity. It domesticated the “complex signifier”5 of Americanism so as to remake the viewer’s fantasy, fortify the boundaries between self and other, and thus erase the possibility of recognizing other cultures as potential sources of self-critique and enlightenment.
The second part of The Dark Mirror turns the tables and focuses on what, from the Nazi regime’s point of view, would have seemed a monstrous return of the repressed: the ways in which exile film practitioners after 1939
adjusted German cultural materials and experiences to the commercial expectations of the Hollywood studio system. The influx of European talents to Hollywood after the outbreak of World War II coincided with fundamental transformations of the classical studio system, which in some respects anticipated the system’s disintegration during the 1950s. The chapters of part 2 are devoted to the work of Hollywood exiles after 1939 who not only understood how to convert institutional changes into sources of individual success and creative experimentation but who also, at some point in the course of the 1950s, tried to return to West Germany and offer their talents to the reemerging film industry of the Federal Republic. It is in their jagged biographies and films that some of the paradoxes of exile become the clearest. Often torn by the challenges of professional and cultural assimilation, these film practitioners indexed German materials in order to make Hollywood products more self-reflexive, respectable, diverse, or simply glamorous. Whether imagined or authentic, German cultural traditions were meant to mirror studio operations or to align them with the changing demands of American wartime and postwar leisure. The figure of “Germany” thus became an important player in the transformation of studio filmmaking. It helped diversify the products of Fordist mass culture during the 1940s as much as it helped shape Hollywood’s response in the 1950s to middle-class calls for more participatory forms of recreation. Rather than
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reify cultural boundaries, the exiles’ spectral “Germany” acted as a catalyst of accommodation and renewal. It bridged seemingly incompatible codes, complicated generic formulas and spectatorial identifications, and thereby decentered modern industrial culture from within.
It has become a commonplace among historians of German culture to point out the modernity not only of Nazi society but of Nazi entertainment cinema as well. Feature films of the Third Reich, far from breaking with the modern, relied on the templates of a modern consumer society. They appealed to fantasies of social and geographical mobility, showcased the latest fads and fashions, and endorsed the achievements of technological progress.
The Dark Mirror probes what is modern about the course of German film after 1933 —and what is not. Suffice it to say at this point that this study operates with a differential concept of modernity. Modern societies entail various strands of modernization (social, political, economic, technological, aesthetic, and religious), strands that compete with and at times, in fact, displace each other. Modernity unfetters individuals from the restrictions of mythic or traditional lifeworlds, yet whenever modern societies prioritize certain tracks of modernization over others, they may just as well produce new myths and reinscribe unquestionable traditions. In the specific context of this study German film after 1933 must be seen as modern not only because it alluded to the signifiers of social or technological modernity but also because the doubling of German popular cinema resulted in a transatlantic scenario in which different meanings, norms, and institutional practices competed with each other. The modernity of German film between Hitler and Hollywood, in this sense, was often curiously circumstantial and inad-vertent. Both in Berlin and Hollywood it rested on numerous film practitioners who had a peculiarly modern sense of provisionalness and contingency forced on them and who in their films either worked through or disavowed the fleetingness of meaning in the modern age. At their best their works practiced forms of popular modernism that explored cinematic representation as a realm of shifting constructions of agency and individual autonomy. At their worst their films incorporated selected aspects of modern civilization in order to recast history as nature, erase the values and constitutional achievements of political modernity, and dispense with any utopian sense of culture as emancipation.
