Hollywood, rather than confronting the exile with illegible scenes of cultural alterity, was often encountered as something quite familiar, something much closer to home than displaced writers or philosophers were willing to admit. In spite of all loss and trauma, the émigré’s experience of Hollywood was one of uncanny half-involvements and half-detachments,23
of “liminality and incorporation, of ambivalences, resistances, and slippages.”24 Similar to Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror, the exiles’ lives in Hollywood were beset with perplexing mirror images and false appearances.
And, as I will argue in this book, it is through their eyes and films that we can best recognize the discontinuous dynamic of German cinema after 1933
in general, its heterogeneous locations in-between the local and the global.
Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror, then, offers an emblem for this study, not because this film encourages us to search for causal connections linking Weimar expressionism, Nazi entertainment films, and the Hollywood culture industry but, on the contrary, because it urges us to map this relationship as a dialogical and refracted one—as a relationship structured by the figure of the double. Whether produced in Berlin or Hollywood, German cinema was replete with sights and sounds of cultural mimicry and performative identity, of hybridity and cross-dressing. It must be understood as a cinema in which different political, institutional, technological, and aesthetic visions mimicked each other to propose competing interpretations of what it meant to be modern. Like Siodmak’s The Dark Mirror, this study intends to discriminate among different visions of modern experience. In all chapters I ask how German film practitioners negotiated different traditions and cultural conventions and how they sought to create new meanings out of transitory and contingent presents.
The classical canon of film historiography and film theory provides few examples of how to recognize contingency as one key to the making of modern history. Early film historians had often been attracted to finalistic perspectives and teleological models. Whereas one scholar traced the history of film as a linear development toward greater realism, expressiveness, and subtlety, the other chronicled the story of cinema as the exfoliation of film’s inherent technological possibilities.25 Both might have taken recourse to biological metaphors to describe the evolution of film language and technology as an aging process from infancy to maturity. Both saw history as a linear chain of cause and effect that would subsume discrete developments for the realization of a unified goal. Although clearly breaking away from
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how earlier generations had thought about film and film viewership, the by now canonical texts of 1970s film theory largely eliminated difference and individual agency from the books of film history. Whether they conceptualized cinema as a Platonic cave, infantilizing the spectator, or whether they theorized classical editing as a mechanism to program the spectator-subject, the theoretical orthodoxies of the 1970s understood the viewer’s subjectivity as a direct effect of the film and every film as an effect of the ideological apparatus of dominant cinema. Asserting that thought, perception, and reception were merely functions of larger discursive paradigms, 1970s film theory left no conceptual space to account for alternative practices, historical changes, normative transgressions, and the voice of the viewer’s qualitative experience. Informed by Althusser’s, Foucault’s, or Lacan’s vocabulary, 1970s film theory ontologized discourse as the monolithic ground of all experience and thus—like early film historians—took individual agency and contingency out of film culture.
In accord with the more recent opening of film studies toward culture studies, The Dark Mirror wants to put back the conceptual possibility of agency and nonidentical acts of reception. Because the contingencies of historical experience matter even to the operations of industrial mass culture, neither teleological historiography nor poststructuralist discourse theory proves adequate for the attempt to assess the locations of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood. At the same time, however, the present study aspires to evade some of the potential traps of today’s culturalist scholarship, which by celebrating individualized reception often loses sight of how mass cultural expressions may implant ideology, orchestrate collective fantasy, and execute political domination. If German exile cinema in Hollywood alerts us to the pitfalls of deterministic and universalist historiographies, the case of Nazi cinema warns us against any misdirected heroization of cultural particularism and intentionality. Nazi film culture pressures cultural studies to develop historiographical strategies that can critically reconstruct historical contexts in which certain choices resulted in the erasure of choice, articulations of difference cemented hegemonic norms of unity, and the invocation of concrete experience neutralized sense perception and obliterated the individual body as an autonomous site of desire.
The task of this book, then, is one not of recuperation or deconstruction but of reconstruction. In all eight chapters I situate texts and modes of film consumption in their historical contexts. All of my readings seek to reconstruct what kinds of choices were available and why some choices prevailed over others. The Dark Mirror thus conceives of both film practitioners and film recipients as potentially active agents who can use, reuse, synthesize,
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reject, and renew given symbols, styles, and meanings. Yet because neither the production nor the consumption of films takes place in a vacuum of power, interest, and ideology, choices do not necessarily signify autonomy or emancipation. Rather, every choice must be seen in relation to the larger and historically variable force field of film culture in which individual events are products of diverse aesthetic, cultural, technological, social, economic, and political determinants. The point is therefore neither simply to record the course of individual films and their stylistic solutions nor to describe the institutions of film production and consumption. Instead, the aim is to chart the shifting role of cinema as a fragile and stratified public sphere where texts and audiences interacted with each other, films helped articulate or contain experience, and individual practices of consumption reinforced or challenged institutional environments.
The point of any reconstruction lies in the present. It rests on the assumption that many historical developments become fully intelligible only in hindsight. Because the concept of film culture designates a space at once symbolic and material, historians do well to avoid notions of linear causality and determination. To regard, say, economic or ideological mandates as distinct causes of certain symbolic events obscures the potential multiplicity of film culture and explains away in what form films really entered their viewers’ heads. Individual elements by themselves, as Hannah Arendt has written in a different context, “probably never cause anything. They become origins of events if and when they crystallize into fixed and definite forms. Then, and only then, can we trace their history backwards. The event illuminates its own past, but it can never be deduced from it.”26 Following Arendt’s suggestion, The Dark Mirror recalls the course of German popular cinema between the 1930s and the 1950s in a series of crystallizations that aspire not to sacrifice the principal possibility of contradiction and discontinuity for the sake of historical totalization. Although I, like any historian, clearly hope to cohere past temporalities in the course of my analysis, I am also guided by the assumption that any history of modern culture must reckon with the possibility of messy incoherence and simultaneity. Because this past itself was structured by conflicting temporalities and competing narrativizations of history, critical reconstruction will read events both backward and forward. Its task is to establish meaningful constellations in which specific texts and practices illuminate the era in all its complexity.
I do not claim to offer an exhaustive survey of German-American film relations. The case studies of this book aim at what one might call paradigmatic validity. They are meant to galvanize the course of German cinema between Hitler and Hollywood into typological situations. In the final analysis the
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selection of materials is justified not by their prominence or canonicity but by their capacity to produce persuasive views of how texts interacted with their contexts and how historical contexts defined frameworks of meaning, perception, and practice.
The primary aim of this book is to draw attention to the historical indexes of meaning, pleasure, spectatorship, and identity. Yet insofar as it questions the notion of a specifically fascist or antifascist film aesthetics, The Dark Mirror must face the question of how to deal with the legacy of Nazi cinema today. If the political effects of Nazi entertainment features in no small measure rested on contextual factors that are no longer in place, can contemporary television audiences simply relax and zap back and forth between showings of Luis Trenker’s Der Kaiser von Kalifornien and Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady, of Curtis Bernhardt’s Der Tunnel and his Interrupted Melody? If we have moved beyond the historical conditions that enabled fascism, has history consumed the very need to watch the products of Goebbels’s film studios with critical eyes and ears? Does the reconstructive perspective, in pointing out the historical relativity of meaning, thus not secretly feed into the project of historical normalization after all?
To put it simply: no. The reason for this negative answer is neatly illustrated in a short passage from Leslie Epstein’s 1997 Pandaemonium. This novel is a story about a Hitleresque German exile director in Hollywood as seen through the eyes of Ladislav Loewenstein, a.k.a. Peter Lorre. The passage narrates a Hollywood gala held in October 1940 to aid the victims of Nazism. Everyone of standing and reputation in the Hollywood studio system seems to be present: powerful studio moguls, star directors, charismatic actors, exiled writers and composers. Lion Feuchtwanger explains how he escaped from Nazi Germany, Charles Laughton mimics Winston Churchill, Fritz Lang boasts about how he rejected Goebbels’s recruitment efforts, Otto Klemperer conducts the L.A. Philharmonic through set pieces of European nineteenth-century music. Suddenly, the houselights dim and the orchestra offers soft, shimmering string and woodwind sounds. The audience is shocked. Arnold Schoenberg jumps up and insists that such music cannot be allowed; Albert Bassermann calls Klemperer crazy. Loewenstein/Lorre relates:
I knew the notes the Philharmonic was playing. They were by Wagner.
Parsifal? Tristan? No, Lohengrin. I could hardly believe my ears. How, on such an occasion, could they play the work of Hitler’s favorite composer?
Suddenly there was a gasp throughout the hall. Out onto the edge of the stage a tramp came tripping over his cane. Charlie! Chaplin!
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There was a burst of laughter and applause. The tramp turned, just in time to catch a large rubber ball that someone tossed from the wings.
Not a ball, but a giant globe, the same inflated world that all of us knew from the actor’s new picture. Now, to the vibrating strings, he performed the Great Dictator ballet, embracing the earth, tossing it sky-ward, wooing it, then caressing it like some great breast he meant to suck dry. I stood in awe. Amazing how the vagabond’s familiar mous-tache became that of the tyrant, how the stance of a man submissive to the world became the stride of one who was its conqueror.27
Frames guide perception. They enable aesthetic experience and delineate a range of possible judgments. In reframing Wagner’s music for Hollywood, Chaplin not only elicits pleasurable responses but simultaneously opens up the possibility for critical insight and perceptual self-awareness. Loewenstein/Lorre’s appreciation of Chaplin—the observer’s movement from shock to awe— emerges from the active recognition of fundamental differences between how Wagner works under Hitler and what he can do for Hollywood. This differential experience of Wagner’s music offers a glimpse of how we might want to approach the legacy of Nazi cinema today. The point, in my view, is neither to lock the products of Goebbels’s culture industry into the poison cabinet of cultural fascism nor simply to applaud them as by now innocent vehicles of escapism. Whereas the first strategy wants to see only the frame, the second presents the framed as all there is.
This book, by contrast, suggests that one of the tasks in viewing the films produced during the Third Reich is to recognize our own cultural distance to what made German feature films successful under the rule of Hitler. The work of exile film practitioners in Hollywood will help us to assess this distance not just along diachronic but also along synchronic axes. Rather than level crucial distinctions, the reconstructive case studies of The Dark Mirror intend to reframe and refract Nazi audiovisions from multiple points of view. They ask how entertainment films of the Third Reich may have acted on their historical audiences not in order to recuperate the legacy of Hollywood in Berlin for contemporary consumption but to probe what made classical Hollywood cinema and what makes our own frames of perception qualitatively different. Ultimately, this recognition of our own cultural distance might be the greatest pleasure we can still obtain from viewing Nazi feature films today.
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