Although often divided about how to reconcile the abundance of regional dialects with the idea of the linguistic nation,16 a myriad of nineteenth-century writers and literary critics were quick to follow Herder’s and Fichte’s lead. They endorsed the German language, not as a catalyst to but a sign and essence of German national identity. Likewise, in the absence of political unity nineteenth-century composers and conductors had been eager to
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elevate music to the principal component of what it meant to be German.
“The idea of a German nation-state had to overcome a long history of political fragmentation and regional differences, but music represented a mode of artistic expression in which all Germans could share.”17
Nazi film practitioners, in their efforts to remake Hollywood in Berlin, reckoned with the sonic construction of German nationhood during the nineteenth century. After seeing the first talkie shown in German theaters, Lloyd Bacon’s The Singing Fool (1928), future Minister of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment Dr. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary in September 1929: “I was surprised about the already far advanced technology of sound film. Here is the future, and we are wrong to reject all this as American bunk. . . . The content was dreadful, New-York-style, sentimental kitsch.
But nonetheless: what we have to recognize here is the future and coming opportunities.”18 Less than four years later Goebbels set out to convert opportunity into practice. As I will show in the four chapters of part 1, Nazi film practitioners embraced sound film to orchestrate collective fantasy and capture the national imagination. Reorganized under Goebbels’s direction, German cinema aspired to offer audiovisual spaces in which the sounds of German voices and musical traditions could integrate the viewer into the national community. In many respects Nazi sound films revived early cinema’s preference for self-contained attractions. They packaged German sounds into cinematic spectacles in the hope of folding individual viewers into the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk of the German nation.
Like many other facets of Nazi society, however, Nazi cinema was characterized by striking discrepancies between ideological intentions and institutional practices. Feature films of the Third Reich might have been designed to broadcast German linguistic and musical properties, but some of the most notable aspects of Nazi cinema must be seen in how it more broadly employed cinematic audiovision to regulate desire, discipline affect, and shatter unwanted forms of solidarity. Eager to please popular demand for cosmopolitan pleasures as much as to conquer foreign markets, Nazi feature films used synchronized sound to transport viewers to imaginary elsewheres and elsewhens without challenging the fixity of cultural boundaries. The addition of sound helped amplify pleasurable fantasies about the self as other, yet at the same time sound was used to restructure sense perception, contain spontaneity, and recast cultural difference as incompatible alterity. Nazi cinema subjected sound to a curious dialectic of rationalization. Rather than bridge the gap between self and other, synchronized sound played an important role in separating one from the other.
Whether or not it featured purely German sounds, Nazi cinema trans-
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formed linguistic and musical expressions into ideology. What was communicated seemed to matter less than the very act of vocalization and intonation, the magic ritual of speaking, singing, and hearing. As it incorporated word and music into the operations of mechanical reproduction, Nazi cinema demythologized spoken and musical language, but by depleting communicative reason and supplanting concrete experience, Nazi feature films also remythologized the world.
In the totalizing perspective of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment the sound designs of the American culture industry were every bit as totalitarian as the Nazis’ domestication of language and music.
Whatever fascist domination did to language in Nazi Germany was similarly effected by advertising and diversion in organized capitalism. Both Hitler and Hollywood, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, stripped language from everything that did not serve the purpose of producing conformity. Both fascism and American capitalism favored the formula, the set phrase, the unequivocal sign over semantic ambivalence and communicative substance:
Instead of making the object experiential, the purified word treats it as an abstract instance, and everything else (now excluded by the demand for ruthless clarity from expression—itself now banished) fades away in reality. A left-half at football, a black-shirt, a member of the Hitler Youth, and so on, are no more than names. If before its rationalization the word had given rise to lies as well as to longing, now, after its rationalization, it is a straightjacket for longing more even than for lies.19
As I will demonstrate in part 2 of this study, the work of Hitler refugees in Hollywood urges us to correct Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of sonic rationalization and manipulation. In all four chapters of the second part I discuss how German exiles explored possible tensions between the acoustical and the visual in order to speak out against the leveling effects of modern rationalization and mass culture. Contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno’s assumption, I show how the work of some German Hollywood exiles traversed different cultural codes, bridged gaps between self and other, and reclaimed the possibility of communicative reason. Instead of fastening the straightjacket around longing, the exiles of this study took recourse to linguistic and musical materials in order to complicate dominant viewing positions and puncture the screens of sameness. Whereas part 1 of The Dark Mirror traces how Nazi cinema redefined modern life as nature, part 2 documents the extent to which exile audiovisions were able not only to express a peculiarly modern sense of multiplicity and contingency but also to encode the promise of a different and better life in modernity.
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r e f r a m i n g / r e f r a c t i n g t h e p a s t This study borrows its title from a 1946 thriller by Robert Siodmak that—
like many films shot by Hitler refugees during the 1940s— engages the viewer in a mystifying splitting and multiplication of identity. Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror features Olivia de Havilland playing two identical twins, Terry and Ruth Collins, who are charged with the murder of a man but refuse to reveal who actually committed the crime. Dr. Scott Elliott (Lew Ayres), a young psychologist, analyzes both sisters in order to uncover different personality traits and thus identify the perpetrator. During the therapy Dr. Elliott falls in love with one of the sisters, Ruth, which triggers feelings of extreme jealousy in the other sister. Terry now reveals her darker side. She tries to drive Ruth into insanity, assume her sister’s identity, and present the authorities with the wrong culprit. Dr. Elliott upsets Terry’s plan and, in cooperation with the police, exposes Terry as the true murderer.
Siodmak’s drama of twins echoes the prominent role of doubles in the expressionist films of the early Weimar period (fig. 1). But it would make little sense to impose dominant readings of the Weimar doppelgänger onto Siodmak’s exile work in Hollywood.20 A studio worker par excellence, Siodmak reinscribed the doppelgänger in The Dark Mirror in a way that was, to say the least, discontinuous: his film referenced the past as a symbol for present concerns. As she manipulates perceptions and mystifies minds, Terry Collins turns one of the principal elements of modernity—the experience of contingency—against itself. A grand enunciator of deceitful sights and sounds, Terry asserts totalitarian control over appearances, events, and people in order to obstruct knowledge, agency, and justice. She symbolizes a cinema of fatal attractions in which Machiavellian calculation subdues all residues of substantive reason. Siodmak, by contrast, instead of solely passing moral judgment on Terry, actively wrestles with the evil sister over the use of cinematic representation. In the last sequence Terry throws a lighter at a mirror in which she beholds Ruth’s reflection. She shatters the glass and thereby produces a distorted image that recalls a shot we saw in the film’s opening sequence: a shot of a broken mirror at the site of the murder. No longer able to maintain her role as the despotic enunciator, Terry effects a violent return of the repressed. In the end refraction takes the place of reflection; discriminating perceptions and judgments triumph over Terry’s cinema of mythic fear and deception.
Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror enabled American audiences to see how a liberal modern order looked from an illiberal point of view. It encouraged contemporary viewers to engage with the enemies of liberal dialogue in
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Figure 1. Reflections/refractions: Olivia de Havilland in a dual role in Robert Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror (1946). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
order to interrogate their own rationalist commitments. At the same time, however, the film also allegorized the unsettled position of German exiles in Hollywood, a position marked by deceptive reflections, multiplied identities, and the “politics of make-believe.”21 Dominant understandings of exile have emphasized the émigrés’ traumatic experience of loss, dislocation, and fragmentation. Adorno’s famous description of exile as a state of inescapable mutilation and expropriation has expressed this paradigm most forcefully.22 Although it would be cynical to deny the hardship that separation from homeland brought for the majority of Jewish-German film workers in Hollywood, it is equally important to understand that Adorno’s paradigm might not fully describe the status of German film practitioners
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in exile. Many of these expatriates perceived their forced emigration to Hollywood as a continuation of careers that already in Germany had been deeply involved in American mass culture and Hollywood conventions.
