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Figure 24. Speak or die: Dorothy McGuire in The Spiral Staircase. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
perversion. Die Welt discouraged sensible individuals from watching the film unless they hungered for the “torture of real thrill.”45 Der Abend and Der Tagesspiegel censured the film as an absurd amalgamation of colportage and bogus psychotherapy, a typically American invitation to moral corruption.46 Whether Protestant or Catholic, the influential Christian organs of
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film criticism tried to persuade their constituencies not to attend any viewing at all. Although the Catholic bulletin Filmdienst der Jugend at least praised Nicholas Musuraca’s cinematography,47 Evangelischer Film-Beobachter considered The Spiral Staircase detrimental to the task of reconstructing German culture after Hitler: “Perhaps Americans need someone who shreds their nerves every once in a while. We, however, need our nerves; we have enough behind us and probably also enough ahead of us.
Please spare us this kind of torture of our nerves. Let us as Christians avoid such import goods.”48
The moralizing anti-Americanism of the Christian press found remarkable echoes on the left. In a lengthy essay written for Tägliche Rundschau Berlin, Hans Ulrich Eylau charged The Spiral Staircase with tastelessness and kitsch. The film, for Eylau, represented a typical expression of Hollywood imperialism and aesthetic banality. Germans, Eylau argued, have experienced enough terror and eliminationism during the Nazi period. They do not need Hollywood in order to confront their own murderous past as film and fiction. “Whoever as a victor of a war waged in the name of ethical principles, assumes the responsibility of reeducating and spiritually reshaping the Germans, should be able to recognize that murder films are not exactly an appropriate instrument to eradicate fascistic convictions.”49 In Eylau’s view commercial Hollywood exports such as The Spiral Staircase rekindle fascism in postfascist Germany. They take German history away from the Germans and in so doing obstruct any authentic reformulation of German identity after the Nazis (fig. 25).
The hostile response to Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase in postwar Germany exemplifies a double process of displacement characteristic of German film culture in the 1940s and 1950s. It brings to view both the postwar failure to address the texts and meanings produced by Hitler refugees in Hollywood exile and the unwillingness to see in contemporary American film noir more than simply a harbinger of deviance and corruption.
Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s German reviewers spoke of Siodmak vaguely as a director who had once left his homeland to become a Hollywood star, as an uprooted wanderer between the worlds, as an artist German audiences might still recall from Weimar days. But as if driven by some secret agreement, these reviewers categorically refused to mention the fact of Siodmak’s exile and forced displacement in their respective accounts. Although German entertainment features of the 1940s and 1950s drew in large measure on the stars, directors, technicians, and generic formulas of the Nazi period, dominant discourses dehistoricized the paths of exile filmmakers by comparing their fortunes to those of prodigal sons and
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Figure 25. Pleasure or perversion? Poster for the German-language release of The Spiral Staircase. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
restless Ahasvers. Even more so than in the arena of literary expressions, German postwar cinema rendered the experience of exile taboo—it reminded one too vividly of what one was eager to forget. If reviewers mentioned the names of Siodmak, Bernhardt, Lang, Sirk, or Wilder at all, they did so either in seemingly neutralizing terms or, alternatively, to decry the extent to which Hollywood imports eroded the reconstructive mission of postwar German cinema.
Although film noir quickly entered the scenes of postwar German film culture, it failed to muster responses similar to the ones of contemporary French critics. Unlike their counterparts in France, German reviewers of the time rarely addressed the formal departures of Hollywood’s dark cinema. Nor did they perceive these films as symptoms of crucial transformations in Hollywood studio filmmaking and American society. Film noir, in the eyes of German critics, attested to the inauthenticity of American mass culture, a claim that customarily included the work of German exile directors such as Lang, Siodmak, and Wilder. Siodmak’s American productions,
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as Prümm reports, “were seen as sensationalist blockbusters, as part of a cinema that sought to overwhelm the viewer emotionally and lacked any moral foundation or clear-cut message.”50 Whereas Siodmak’s best films of the mid-1940s questioned representations of history as nature and of identity as essentially unified, postwar German critics and audiences alike experienced any view of history as contingent—and hence constructible—as the greatest of all terrors. As a specialist in cultural transformation and redress, Siodmak and his dark films of the 1940s in fact threatened to spoil Germany’s postwar quest for unquestioned traditions and transcendental securities. Deploring the growing influence of American mass culture on postwar Germany, middle-class audiences in particular rejected films such as The Spiral Staircase as debased because the majority of moviegoers were disinclined to recognize a cinema that interrupted narratives of continuity and explored horror’s horror.
In spite of such anti-American resentments, however, German film culture in the immediate postwar era in many respects shied away from the outright fantasies of Hollywood competition and confrontation that had driven German filmmaking throughout the Weimar and Nazi era. After the end of World War II the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA), with the help of the U.S. State Department, inaugurated a number of regulations that granted Hollywood’s major studios virtually unrestricted access to the ravaged German film market. Americans started to screen their films to German audiences as early as the summer of 1945.
Unlike their Soviet counterparts they did not even hesitate to release American motion pictures without adding German subtitles or dubbing. Yet although original U.S. policies—implemented with the help of film émigrés such as Erich Pommer51 and Billy Wilder52— conceived of American film as a powerful tool of moral and political reeducation, the Western zones of occupied Germany quickly emerged as a welcome dumping ground for all kinds of second-rate Hollywood fare.53 German audiences before long rejected this ideological fusion of U.S. politics and export business. Once it was perceived as being directly associated with the directives of military occupation, the interwar fascination of Germans with Hollywood began to fade and to make way for a reprise of prewar German favorites—homemade musicals, glamour films, and comedies. But even when German spectators in 1946 started to rail against the then exclusive presence of American films in the U.S. zone, they articulated their appetite for domestic films less in terms of a clamor for national self-assertion than—turning “American” arguments against their American conquerors—by demanding freedom of consumer choice.54 In face of a situation in which U.S. occupational
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policies had more or less eliminated the possibility of any German head-on confrontation, West German audiences in the late 1940s endorsed the vision of a peaceful coexistence of American and German products as the order of the day.
Beginning in 1948 (the year Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase opened in German theaters), West Germany started to develop a relatively viable film industry that relied heavily on former UFA directors, stars, and technicians and excelled in traditional genre films. “This domestic industry,” as Thomas Elsaesser notes, “concentrated on the home market, and calculated its topics as well as its budgets accordingly.”55 In spite of Hollywood’s postwar thrust into German territory, homemade genre films swiftly reclaimed the domestic market as they accomplished stunning box office returns. But in contrast to Nazi film policies, West German producers and film officials around 1950 had little ambition to build an industry that could really compete with Hollywood on a large scale; too many feared the social and cultural effects associated with any kind of cinematic cosmopolitanism. Dominant genres such as the Heimatfilm instead emphasized the timeless integrity of rural countrysides and local vernaculars. They glorified the aura of traditional lifeworlds so as to correct the putative emasculation of German men that had been caused by both the loss of the war and the presence of enemy soldiers on German territory.56 In a climate of apolitical withdrawal and public amnesia these films promised spiritual regeneration through a rigorous reconstruction of the patriarchal family. As they engaged the viewer on a double front against what was seen as a self-destructive past and an increasingly boundless present, German films of the immediate postwar era articulated acute anxieties about the modern so as to fortify traditional boundaries and moral codes. In the Heimatfilm, in particular, “untouched nature replace[d] ruined cities, church bells resound[ed] instead of ubiquitous jackhammers, quaint panel houses offer[ed] a hominess the city’s ugly and quickly erected concrete edifices could not.”57 Even though a good number of West German films of the 1950s incorporated noir elements, one can hardly imagine a cinema farther away from the lonely streets and fragmented spaces, from the broken dreams and shredded identities of American film noir than the German homeland cinema of the postwar era.
In spite of the escapist designs of postwar German cinema and the antagonistic response to his film noirs in the early 1950s, however, Siodmak left Hollywood in 1951 to return to Europe and, in 1955, to reinsert himself into the West German film industry. Siodmak could have given German postwar cinema a new voice, a formal language that would have spoken up against the postcard panoramas of 1950s feature films. But with the exception of
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