Having thus established some of the central concerns and perspectives of this study, I will in the remainder of this introduction explain the signposts according to which The Dark Mirror follows the paths of Nazi and exile cinema from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s. I will first sketch the theoretical stakes of this study; second, delineate why the role of film sound
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will be of great importance for my examination; and third, explain the historiographic model that informs the itinerary of this book.
h i t l e r a n d h o l l y wo o d
In juxtaposing Nazi entertainment cinema and the work of Hollywood exiles, this study confronts one of the most enduring tropes of German thought throughout the postwar era: the identification of Nazi manipulation and Hollywood mass culture. In Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s 1977 Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Our Hitler), this figure has found its most emblematic formulation within postwar German cinema.6 Presenting Hitler as a would-be Cecil B. DeMille, Syberberg’s six-hour opus proposed that twentieth-century show business and fascism were virtually identical. According to Syberberg both Hitler and Hollywood obliterated the autonomy of art and used aesthetic experience for the purpose of mass manipulation.
In doing so they compromised the utopian power embedded in myth, in Richard Wagner’s music, and in preindustrial forms of popular culture.
Syberberg’s film advocated a rigid antinomy between, on the one hand, fascism and Hollywood and, on the other, Syberberg’s own art cinema, “which engages in a heroic struggle with commercial cinema over the right to inherit nineteenth-century popular culture, with its romantic myths, its kitsch objects, its sentimentality and peasant piety, as well as its wit, sarcasm and peasant slyness.”7 According to Syberberg both Hollywood and Hitler de-graded the mythic by transforming politics and culture into spellbinding movie sets. Both exemplified a cynical triumph of instrumental reason over the irrational substratum of what Syberberg understands as authentic culture. In the unyielding perspective of Our Hitler Hollywood in fact turns out to be even more fascist than fascism itself. For thanks to their hegemonic position during the postwar era, Hollywood feature films exploited the Germans’ need to mourn their past and thus extended Hitler’s strategies of mass deception beyond the Nazis’ historical demise. Syberberg’s film, by way of contrast, wants to recuperate what could make German culture authentic again. His Wagnerian exercise pits Wagner’s romantic longings for redemption against their own legacy in Hollywood and Nazi Germany. It intends to emancipate the irrational from the grasp of instrumental reason so as to help Germans overcome the fact that after Hitler they have lived
“in a country without homeland [Heimat].”8
A widespread view within contemporary criticism suggests that Syberberg’s critique of American industrial culture basically repeated the identification of Hollywood and Hitler Germany in Max Horkheimer and
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Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947). Similar to Syberberg, Horkheimer and Adorno indeed saw industrial mass culture as a tool of domination that stripped reason down to pure forms of instrumental rationality. The classical Hollywood studio system, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s understanding, applied Fordist principles of production to the realm of cultural expression. Driven by the pressures of monopoly capitalism, Hollywood mass culture negated autonomous art and its peculiar power to establish noncoercive, mimetic relationships between nonidentical particulars. Horkheimer and Adorno in fact saw no principal difference between the makeup of studio films and that of commercial advertising, because both media employ modern technology to engineer desire and organize conformity: “In both cases the insistent demand for effectiveness makes technology into psycho-technology, into a procedure of manipulating men.
In both cases the standards are striking yet familiar, the easy yet catchy, the skillful yet simple; the object is to overpower the customer, who is conceived as absent-minded or resistant.”9 Similar to the coordination of cultural life in German fascism, the studio system streamlined products and homogenized audiences. Assembly-line entertainment films imprinted the stamp of absolute sameness on their recipients. In both the Hollywood culture industry and Nazi Germany the modern formalization of rationality resulted in nothing other than a terrorist regime of identity. Everyone was effectively provided for with one and the same product. Every possible response was preordained by the film itself.
In recent Anglo-American debates about popular culture Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of the culture industry has “received less than favorable treatment.”10 The following three arguments strike me as today’s most substantial charges against the disapproval of Hollywood in Dialectic of Enlightenment. 11 First, Horkheimer and Adorno, in their hyperbolic critique of mass culture, underestimated the rationality of Hollywood’s consumers—their ability to form qualified judgments and to develop unforeseen strategies of reception. Horkheimer and Adorno overlooked crucial differences between the function of films as streamlined commodities and their status as symbolic texts whose meanings and pleasures are established in the discriminating appropriation of the recipient. The culture industry thesis thus not only ignored the productivity of consumption but also failed to elucidate the many ways films can enter their viewers’ imaginations and resonate with consumers’ everyday experiences. Second, as they directly correlated the dynamic of modern rationalization with the politics of culture, Horkheimer and Adorno failed to distinguish between different and nationally specific versions of industrial mass culture. Although
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we should clearly be very careful not to isolate the political from the economic, we must take into consideration the fact that from their very inception some formations of industrial culture—unlike the American model, whose emergence corresponded to the consolidation of organized capitalism—were shot through with variegated political or administrative agendas. Contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, the political effects of modern mass culture depended not only on the rationalization of cultural production itself but on how it interacted with specific social, economic, and constitutional contexts. And third, critics have argued that Horkheimer and Adorno’s animosity toward empirical analysis led them to exaggerate the homogeneity of Hollywood’s production methods. Although indeed aspir-ing to a Fordist and Taylorist organization of labor, studio filmmaking was less a process of seamless collaboration “than of negotiation and struggle—
occasionally approaching armed conflict.”12 Responding to ever-increasing pressures for product differentiation, the classical studio system rested on its ability to maintain unstable equilibriums. Far less unified than Horkheimer and Adorno assumed, studio filmmaking could not do without games of internal and external tug of war.
Most critics today seem to agree that the culture industry thesis—and, hence, the identification of Hollywood with Hitler—was motivated in large measure by Adorno’s elitist rejection of the popular, which makes this aspect of Adorno’s work unsuitable for the agendas of contemporary cultural studies. If The Dark Mirror nevertheless draws on (and modifies) the theoretical model of the culture industry, it does so not only because Adorno himself participated in the drama of displacement at stake in these pages but also because— on a conceptual level—Adorno’s critique of modern mass culture was much less Manichean than many critics today want us to believe. Adorno read industrial mass culture as a negative utopia, “as the fulfillment, under conditions of domination, of legitimate human needs for plenty, inclusion, play, and happiness.”13 Industrial culture reified what autonomous art no longer dared to say except in the cryptic language of determined negation—the promise of a better life. Rather than situate modern mass culture and twentieth-century modernism as radical opposites, however, Adorno claimed that both owed their existence to the existence of its respective other. Modern art was born as a reaction to the gradual commodification of cultural material during the second half of the nineteenth century. Modern mass culture, on the other hand, emerged out of high art’s compromises with public taste and commercial interests. Adorno may have opted for aesthetic modernism as a last repository of authentic meaning under the sign of organized capitalism. Unlike the elitist Syberberg, how-
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ever, Adorno remained keenly aware of the fact that the practice of high art in modern culture in some sense at once presupposed and reinscribed mass culture. No overarching cultural reform or spiritual redemption could be expected from art anymore. Its glimpses of truth were borrowed from the ruptures of the age itself.
This book is guided by the assumption that even though we clearly need to move beyond the equation of German National Socialism and American mass culture, Adorno’s dialectical understanding of modern culture can help us to evaluate the political dimensions of industrial mass culture between roughly the 1920s and the late 1950s. As we will see, the culture industry thesis provides a valuable benchmark against which we can measure different versions of modern culture and their methods of coping with older aesthetic traditions and utopian desires. Moreover, what makes Adorno important for a nuanced study of German-American film relations during the peak decades of Fordist modernity is that his work presses us to triangulate Hollywood mass culture and Nazi Germany with a third and, as it turns out, highly instructive variable: the legacy of Richard Wagner. According to Adorno’s seminal Versuch über Wagner (written in 1937/38),14 Wagner’s music dramas foreshadowed the twentieth-century culture industry in em-bryonic form. Wagner’s orchestration favored sonic effects over structural coherence so as to assimilate high culture to popular taste. At the same time, however, Wagner’s music dramas contained elements of modernist negation. The weakness of Wagner’s subjects was “not only a symptom of decadence but also a move toward overcoming alienation.”15 It is Wagner’s curious ambivalence between regressive reconciliation and utopian nonidentity that—as I argue in this study— elucidates the competing positions of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. As it probes different appropriations of Wagner’s aesthetic program, The Dark Mirror submits not that Hollywood was more fascist than fascism but, on the contrary, that fascism—following the definitions of Dialectic of Enlightenment—was more Hollywood than Hollywood. Whereas the Wagnerian film ideologues of Nazi cinema, to put it schematically, endorsed film sound as a means of engineering coercive forms of sameness, German exile cinema was at its best whenever it explored possible tensions between the aural and the visual and thereby actualized Wagnerian utopias of nonidentity. Syberberg’s desire to mobilize Wagner’s music against Hitler and Hollywood, I suggest, answers the wrong question. As the dissimilar narratives of Hollywood in Berlin and Berlin in Hollywood in this book reveal, the point is not to ask
“Wagner or modernity?” but rather “Whose Wagner?” and “What kind of modernity?”
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t h e s o u n d s o f m o d e r n i t y Adorno’s work on Wagner informs one of the principal propositions of this book: that we cannot speak about German cinema after 1933 without speaking about how it used synchronized sound to manage the viewer’s attention.
Throughout this book I argue that the legacy of German national cinema was by no means only visual. In contrast to those who have canonized the canted angles of expressionist film art or the muted designs of the New German Cinema as the dominant language of German filmmaking, this book emphasizes that German cinema since the early 1930s was bound up with sound and film music. To be sure, as my title already suggests, The Dark Mirror is not meant solely to chronicle the uses of sound in Nazi or exile cinema. International film culture after 1930 was decisively audiovisual. Any attempt to reduce it to one of its components would eliminate the possibility of nuanced analysis and evaluation. Yet this book repeatedly stresses the sonic dimension of German cinema because it is in the different treatment of film sound that some of the most striking differences between Nazi feature productions and the work of Hollywood exiles emerge. Whether they worked in Berlin or Hollywood, German film practitioners embraced synchronized sound as a means to reinforce, modernize, or reject the prominent role of the acoustical in conventional constructions of German identity. By examining the relationship between sounds and images we can best understand how German cinema negotiated the tensions between romanticism and twentieth-century modernism, between autonomous art and the popular. It is by listening to their sound tracks that we can tax how German filmmakers tackled the Wagnerian legacy of modern industrial culture.
The sound of music and of the German language had played a significant role in the symbolism of the German nation long before the Nazi takeover and the coming of the sound film. In the face of the division of Germany into many disparate political entities and regional groups, German intellectuals since around 1800 had conceived of musical and linguistic dispositions as the nation’s most palpable common ground. Romantic philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Gottlieb Fichte had laid the ground-work for the view of language as the primary predicate of German identity.
