Part 1
h o l l y wo o d i n b e r l i n ,
1 9 3 3 – 1 9 3 9
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1 Sounds of Silence
Nazi Cinema and the Quest for
a National Culture Industry
The examination of Nazi film culture remains challenging not only because of the German film industry’s remarkable familiarity with classical American cinema but also because Hollywood elements were often not seen as opposed to the creation of a self-consciously national mass culture. Nazi entertainment cinema aspired to be highly popular, a distraction factory that proliferated upbeat scores and impressive production values. In common with international trends of the 1930s, it cultivated stars and promoted new films with elaborate publicity campaigns, it capitalized on popular genre formulas, and it used individual films to showcase the latest commercial products. To be sure, in contrast to the Hollywood studio system, Nazi cinema was commanded by powerful politicians rather than almighty studio moguls. Minister of Enlightenment and Public Propaganda Joseph Goebbels supervised scripts, coordinated opening dates, defined star salaries, directed technological developments, chose film awards, and ordered the construction of new studio facilities. Unlike Hollywood tycoons, “film minister”1
Goebbels believed that only state interventions, by separating the artistic from the commercial aspects of film production, could ensure the formal quality of German cinema. Yet in spite of such differences in ideology and institutional makeup, Nazi cinema perceived Hollywood as a measuring stick of creativity and spectatorial appeal. Like Hollywood during the classical era, Nazi cinema adopted industrial methods of production and distribution to reach the widest audience possible. It understood studio filmmaking as a means to reclaim domestic territory and conquer foreign markets.
American-style distractions thus became primary tools to establish National Socialist hegemony. They served the Nazi state to win and secure legitimacy, not by means of political agitation or direct coercion but by mold-ing a new public above class and conflict.
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Hollywood in Berlin, 1933 –1939
It has often been pointed out that the National Socialist regime employed modern industrial culture to give twentieth-century politics the appearance of resolute action. Nazi politics, following such readings, blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, appearance and essence. It recycled decadent notions of artistic practice with the intention to convert the political into a self-referential space of authenticity and existential self-assertion.
The 1,086 German feature films that premiered between 1933 and 1945 in many respects complemented this project. Nazi cinema was meant to convince people that they would all pursue the same goals and desires—living prosperously and amassing fashionable goods. Integrating dissimilar meanings and traditions, Nazi feature films broke older bonds of solidarity and displaced configurations of experience that originated from socially specific contexts of living. As the other side of aesthetic politics, they fostered the illusion of a new collective of consumers that would overcome economic competition, social struggle, regional difference, and gender conflict.
Following the understanding of Nazi society as one in which spectacular illusions replaced post-Enlightenment codes of legality and political emancipation, postwar scholarship has focused much of its attention on the peculiar organization of visual elements in Nazi cinema. Accordingly, Nazi cinema has been described as a laboratory of primal effects silencing spectators with the spellbinding power of images.2 Similar to propaganda spectacles such as Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), Nazi feature films entertained the scopic drive with fantasies of wholeness and harmony.3
They first overwhelmed the viewer with fascinating sights and then reintegrated the shattered body in fascist mass ornaments.4 In doing so Nazi film upheld structures of domination that obscured their actual effects.5
Joining visual pleasure and shrewd repression, Nazi cinema caused audiences to identify with what forced them into submission and, ultimately, brought about their destruction.
Nazi Germany, in the realms of both politics and cinematic entertainment, aspired to transform diverse publics into spectators. It homogenized conflicting viewing positions and redefined people with different social, cultural, religious, and gender backgrounds as members of one and the same national audience. Although it is difficult indeed to overlook the focal role of vision in this process, the use of sounds in Nazi cinema and their contribution to the coordination of distraction have remained largely unexamined. This lack of attention becomes particularly striking if we consider the historical juncture at which Hitler rose to power and Goebbels assumed control over German cinema. After all, the passage into the Third Reich coincided with both the economic and aesthetic consolidation of the sound film,
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Sounds of Silence
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which had been introduced to German audiences in 1929. In the early 1930s sound film was often seen as a remedy for what many loathed as the ever-increasing leveling of cultural differences. Not only did the breakthrough of the talkies activate feverish hopes to overturn the rule of Hollywood over the European film market. It was also embraced as a unique chance to rearticulate nineteenth-century constructions of German national identity, constructions that defined the substance of national belonging in terms of linguistic properties and domestic musical traditions. With this in mind we should not be surprised that the coming of sound film really mattered to Nazi film ideologues. In spite of technical transition problems and international patent battles, Nazi film officials and filmmakers endorsed talking pictures as a viable method to develop a popular, nationally specific, vernacular.
As we will see in a moment, Richard Wagner’s nineteenth-century visions of language and art inhabited a prominent place in this nationalization of cinematic pleasure. Revamping Wagner’s longings with the help of industrial culture, Nazi sound film set out to fuse acting, dialogue, and music into a seamless total work of art, an audiovisual cocoon that stirred German emotions and forged contradictory experiences into fantasies of reconciliation.
Obviously, the establishment of sound film around 1930 did not constitute a necessary condition for Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Silent film, too, had proven instrumental to rouse emotions and move bodies for populist agendas, and there are of course many more significant reasons for the rise of National Socialism in Germany than the historical course of film technology.6 But given the fact that the Third Reich turned out to be the first full-fledged media dictatorship in world history,7 the concurrence of Hitler’s march to power and the triumph of sound film remains intriguing. It in fact poses a series of both historical and theoretical questions that have been largely neglected. To what extent was the arrival of the talkies in Germany essential to the Nazi vision of a homegrown German Hollywood?
Did Nazi cinema shape cinematic sound practices into a nationally specific style? How did German sound films of the 1930s in both ideological and formal terms negotiate Goebbels’s call for national specificity and European success? And how did the actual use of film sound in Nazi cinema correspond with certain ideological dictates of the Nazi movement, a movement valorizing resolute action over feminine talk and bourgeois debate?
This chapter attempts to provide some preliminary answers to these questions. Sound in Nazi cinema served as a welcome technology of fantasy production. Nazi sound tracks recalled earlier popular traditions and at the same time heralded coming attractions. They transported viewers to other places and times but at the same time impeded any recognition of the other
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Hollywood in Berlin, 1933 –1939
as a source of insight and self-reflection. Although Nazi entertainment films were often fraught with precarious self-contradictions, their sound played a critical role in managing the viewer’s attention. Whether it overwhelmed, held in check, or was subordinate to the image track, sound helped appropriate desire, undercut rather than empowered communication, and recast diverse publics as textually anchored spectators. For the new masters of Babelsberg, the legendary home of the UFA film studios, the talkies did not lead to a Babel-like cacophony of different languages, voices, and musical idioms; rather, they offered welcome opportunities to nationalize entertainment and promised new lifestyles through consumption.
d i s s o n a nt b e g i n n i n g s
Sound film entered the German scene in the form of a spectacle, a cinema of audiovisual attractions. German technicians had experimented with sound technologies ever since 1922, but it was an imported Hollywood film that broke the sound barrier in German cinemas.8 Opening in the Berlin Gloria-Palast on the evening of June 3, 1929, the Warner production The Singing Fool (1928, Lloyd Bacon) was immediately hailed as a historical turning point in the history of film (fig. 2). Significantly, most reviews of the premiere night focused not on the film itself but on the viewers’ response to Al Jolson’s voice. Much of the audience’s enthusiasm apparently had little to do with any sudden expansion of narrative realism or illusion. Instead, the true star of the evening was the new apparatus itself.9 Recalling the reception of the very first moving pictures in the 1890s,10 The Singing Fool, through the presence of Jolson’s voice, once again accented the extraordinary nature of cinema to restructure human perception and the individual’s spatiotempo-ral relations. As one critic put it, the arrival of sound transformed the space of the theater into “something uncanny. Voices have always been there since the beginning of the universe, but now we have an apparatus which makes a voice and a singer or an actor immortal.”11
Only six months after the premiere of The Singing Fool the public’s understanding of sound film had undergone significant transformations. The first 100-percent-German sound production, Melodie des Herzens (Melody of the heart, 1929, Hanns Schwarz), no longer struck reviewers and audiences as uncanny. Rather, the addition of sound in this film was seen as a highly effective amplification of illusion, thanks to the way sound reinforced the actors’ corporeal presence onscreen. Although some reviewers com-plained about the film’s multilingual voice track (German and Hungarian),12
most agreed that the use of sound bestowed the image with heightened in-
