Cinema in Democratizing Germany

Reconstructing National Identity After Hitler

Heide Fehrenbach

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807845127, 9780807822043
• eBook ISBN: 9780807861370
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

Heide Fehrenbach analyzes the important role cinema played in the reconstruction of German cultural and political identity between 1945 and 1962. Concentrating on the former West Germany, she explores the complex political uses of film--and the meanings attributed to film representation and spectatorship--during a period of abrupt transition to democracy. According to Fehrenbach, the process of national redefinition made cinema and cinematic control a focus of heated ideological debate. Moving beyond a narrow political examination of Allied-German negotiations, she investigates the broader social nexus of popular moviegoing, public demonstrations, film clubs, and municipal festivals. She also draws on work in gender and film studies to probe the ways filmmakers, students, church leaders, local politicians, and the general public articulated national identity in relation to the challenges posed by military occupation, American commercial culture, and redefined gender roles. Thus highlighting the links between national identity and cultural practice, this book provides a richer picture of what German reconstruction entailed for both women and men.

1: CINEMA AND GERMAN SOCIETY BEFORE 1945

In the movies On five continents simultaneously Is my homeland.
—Claire Goll, poet, 1922 (translated by Sabine Hake)

By the interwar years, filmgoing had become a habit, and sometimes an obsession, for millions in the industrialized West. Contemporary thinking attributed to cinema the power to shape perception, to somehow render the unreal more “real”—or at least more attractive and compelling—than lived actuality. In a wonderfully evocative reminiscence of the period, Italo Calvino recalled that “the cinema, for me, was the world, a different world from the one that surrounded me, but as far as I was concerned only [that which] I saw on screen possessed the properties of the world: the fullness, the necessity, the coherence. Outside of the screen, meanwhile, heterogeneous elements were shuffling together as if by chance, materials of my life that seemed to be devoid of form.” For Calvino and millions of other moviegoers, cinema offered an “imaginary” that could compete with experience and win—largely because it presented an aesthetic unity that appealed to the desire for meaning and order, particularly in a period of political and social upheaval.¹

In the first decades of the twentieth century in Germany—at a time when cinemas were proliferating and film was doing a brisk business attracting mass audiences—police, educators, clergy, and cultural elites began commenting, in strong and critical language, on the powerful “immediacy” and impact of the new medium. Film, they argued, drew the viewer into its fictional world by barraging the psyche with its visual specificity, photographic realism, and naturalistic locations. One energetic middle-class crusader for film censorship even warned in 1913 that film’s “profound impact upon its viewers would ultimately undermine their sense of reality.”² The unprecedented popularity of film provoked sustained concern and public debate regarding the psychological, emotional, and moral effects—or Wirkung—of movies on viewers. In addition, Filmwirkung was assumed to represent a potentially serious challenge to the social order, and many argued that film viewing caused, or at least contributed to, an explosion of crime, asocial behavior, and juvenile delinquency in imperial Germany. All assumed that its technological nature and mass appeal represented a marked departure from earlier forms of popular culture and thus presented new challenges to German society that could not be contained by traditional resort to the local police.³

Midway through World War I, a second approach to film developed. Recognizing the massive popularity and cross-class appeal of the medium, the German high command and imperial government attempted to employ film for purposes of “enlightenment and education.” By 1917, cinema’s potential as a “state-supporting medium” was officially endorsed,⁴ and Filmwirkung was redeemed as a positive force for social and political integration, a function that was further and most notoriously refined under the National Socialist regime.

State intervention also represented a push for national cultural sovereignty. Until World War I, the German market had been dominated by the film products of other (mostly European) nations. Native productions, in fact, constituted a minuscule number of the total films screened in German cinemas through 1914. No one seemed particularly alarmed by this situation until the outbreak of war, when the imperial government banned enemies’ products for reasons of state security. Shortly thereafter, General Erich Ludendorff proposed that the state exploit the propagandistic potential of film as a means to rally domestic support for the war effort. Thus, the state began to buttress domestic cinematic production to gain unimpeded access to the German viewer’s psyche. Moreover, official recognition established the fact that cultural sovereignty was a crucial dimension of a nation’s political sovereignty.

State interest also highlighted the tension that would develop between cinema as national culture on the one hand and as an object of commerce on the other. Cinema at the time was only the most technologically advanced form of commercialized culture to emerge from Germany’s ongoing process of modernization. Large-scale industrialization and urbanization initiated a period of long-term social disruption and political adjustment that extended into the second postwar period. Increased immigration and overall mobility began to alter the traditional ethnic and religious composition of localities, particularly in heavy industry and mining areas like the Ruhr and Berlin; and the repeal of anti-Socialist legislation in 1890 led to an explosion of Socialist Party membership and influence, which the terrorized propertied classes feared would destabilize the political and social system. World War I, the Depression, and the intensive economic rationalization and cartel building of the 1920s and 1930s increased an already pervasive sense of social disruption.

During this period, cinema and film-viewing practices acted as both an agent and indicator of social change. Moreover, the general understanding of cinema’s role in German society evolved as well. In the early years of the century, bourgeois society decried cinema as a force of social and cultural destabilization, and aspects of this response persisted throughout the period covered by this study. But film was concurrently embraced, at the highest levels of the German state and military, as a tool of social and political integration. This trend was amplified under Nazi rule, when Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels shrewdly supervised the cultivation of heroic and inspiring images of Hitler that, although “for the most part at crass variance with reality,” were designed to win legitimacy for the newly installed fascist leader and build consensus for his policies.⁵ Hitler entered the political sphere promising to “restore the disrupted ‘normality’ of life,” which had been disturbed by German military defeat, civil war, political factionalism, class tensions, economic restructuring, economic crisis, and cultural modernism. As Detlev Peukert has argued, this was a “utopian normality, to be sure, with a social hierarchy which was somehow ‘just’ and in which everyone had a niche where he could feel secure and respected: in short, a true ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) from which all sources of friction and unease had been removed . . . all abnormality, all that could jeopardize the ultimate ‘ideal order.’ “⁶ Goebbels’s emphasis on “image” served the function of disguising the gaps between the promises of Nazi ideology and the actualities of life, including the social-psychological dissonances caused by economic and technological modernization in the Third Reich. Thus, although “National Socialism was unable to abolish the reality of industrial society, . . . it did, through propaganda, impede the clear perception of this reality.”⁷ Given fascist preoccupation with visual self-representation and its reliance on “appearances, histrionics, and simulation,” film acquired a critical political role in the Third Reich.⁸

In order to gain a more differentiated understanding of the role of film under national socialism, one must examine the broader historical context of German film reception—both official and popular. The Nazi period did not, after all, represent a complete break with the imperial and republican past but rather continued and intensified trends that had developed earlier in the century.

Cinema’s Early Years

By the outbreak of World War I, cultural critics, intellectuals, and educators had dubbed motion pictures the quintessential “mass” medium, precisely because—unlike earlier cultural forms—their appeal and popularity transcended class, gender, and generational divisions. From cinema’s inception, its power to attract and fascinate claimed the attention of its mostly middle-class critics. Due to the socioeconomic background of cinema’s early customers and milieu and the foreign origins of most of its products, cinematic power appeared threatening and as a result provoked a great deal of anxiety among bourgeois Germans. Indeed, between 1895—when the first films were screened at the Wintergarten, a popular vaudeville theater in Berlin—and the outbreak of World War I, many in the upper and middle classes considered cinema to be a force of social and cultural destabilization.

Film historian Anton Kaes reminds us that the emergence of commercialized mass culture in the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a corresponding shift from the “word” to the “image.” This shift occurred slightly earlier in the print media with the popularization of the pictorial “yellow press” but also affected the theater, which revived mime and gestural acting styles (banished for years from the serious stage) under the influence of silent film. Yet unlike the theater, illustrated dailies, American-style dime novels (Groschenhefte), and film became big business and were marketed predominantly to the lower social and economic classes in the first decades of their existence. The serialized adventures of Buffalo Bill and Nick Carter, for example, sold up to 80,000 copies a week among the prewar German reading public. Given the size of that market, filmmakers were quick to appreciate the potential benefits of cross fertilization and freely borrowed the characters and plots of the most popular “trash literature” to translate the appeal of these Westerns and crime stories to the screen.⁹

Once the back rooms of pubs and small, poorly appointed shops were converted into exhibition rooms by enterprising local businesspeople around 1904, film evolved quickly from its early status as a traveling sideshow curiosity—displayed at fairs and circuses in cities, towns, and rural villages at the turn of the century—to popular entertainment for the working classes. Over the next few years, cinema became an increasingly urban entertainment, gradually moving from hastily constructed and inadequate accommodations to larger theaters designed specifically for film screenings, which began to be constructed in Berlin and other large- and medium-sized German cities. By 1910, cinema had attained the status of big business and mass entertainment, with 500 new cinemas founded each year. Four years later, Berlin had nearly 350 cinemas—over 10 percent of the estimated 2,500 to 3,000 German cinemas.¹⁰

Rapid commercial expansion meant that unprecedented numbers of people were seeing each cinematic product. On the eve of World War I in Mannheim, one-third of the population visited the cinema each week. Underscoring both its commercial significance and social impact, one industry report boasted that “every film is shown in ca. 20 theaters. . . . Every theater has an average of 550 guests per day . . . which adds up to 3,850 per week; so when a film has made it through its 20 theaters, it has been seen by 77,000 people. The same film idea has been copied a total of 45 times and offered into the public domain, so that a single film idea has been brought to the attention of 3,465,000 people.”¹¹ The largest German cinemas seated 1,000 people, and film programs were attracting over a million customers a day. Moreover, statistics indicated that the lower social classes (and especially industrial laborers and residents of densely populated working-class districts in larger cities and ports like Berlin and Hamburg) had a “higher than average” attendance rate.¹²

By the early 1910s, film came to be considered the quintessential urban entertainment, in part due to its massive popularity in urban areas. Indeed, film struck contemporaries as particularly well suited to the urban psyche. One early commentator, perhaps taking his cue from Berlin sociologist Georg Simmel’s essays on the psychological impact of city life, noted that the “psychology of the cinematographic triumph is metropolitan psychology . . . because the metropolitan soul, that ever-harried soul, curious and unanchored, tumbling from fleeting impression to fleeting impression, is quite rightly the cinematographic soul.”¹³ The identification of cinema with the city became a recurrent theme in literary and legal reflections on the new medium into the Weimar period. Often, unsurprisingly, cultural commentary slipped easily into social and moral critique. Kaes notes that “insofar as cinema [was] a part of metropolitan mass culture, the critique of cinema adopt[ed] some elements of the critique of the big city.”¹⁴

Cinema was also linked to the city by its very content. Representations of urban life—and particularly its underside—figured prominently in early silent films. Whereas the first nonnarrative films may have depicted mundane urban scenes like strollers on the famous Berlin promenade, Unter den Linden, by the early 1900s, the most popular pictures focused on “urban exoticism.” These featured sensational stories involving gangsters, detectives, robberies, murders, seduction, poison, arson, adultery, and prostitution, with titles like Robbers’ Revenge, Lost in the Metropolis, Hell of Death, Sinful Love, White Slave Woman, Death in the Nude, and Queen of the Night.¹⁵

Prewar critics of the cinema were not reticent to draw parallels between the sensational presentation of the stories on the screen and the behavior of cinemagoers. Admittedly, the unchaperoned darkness was conducive to sexual experimentation, particularly among working-class adolescents, and the atmosphere has been described as “raucous” and “uninhibited” when compared to early twentieth-century bourgeois conventions of behavior. Local police seemed to suspect cinemas as sites of potential criminal activity when they declared them “centers of immorality” and cast a suspicious eye on the clientele, which they characterized as composed of “all types of disreputable characters.” Perhaps as telling, those moviegoing members of the lower middle class (such as salespeople and clerical workers) who aspired to middle-class status were more concerned with the reputation and respectability of the theater than with what was showing on the program.¹⁶

The cinema was also visited by young intellectuals who attempted to quench their curiosity by going “slumming.” Given the accounts they left behind, it seems that these observers—almost exclusively young men—were often fascinated as much by what went on in front of the screen as by what was projected onto it. Writer Alfred Döblin’s comments from 1909 provide a colorful example of this fascination: “[The] screen glares over a monster of an audience, a white eye fixating the mass with a monotonous gaze. Couples making out . . . are carried away and withdraw their undisciplined fingers . . . children wheezing with consumption . . . badly smelling workers with bulging eyes, women in musty clothes, heavily made-up prostitutes. . . . Here you see ‘panem et circenses’ fulfilled; spectacle as essential as bread.”¹⁷ Miriam Hansen has argued in an analysis of early German cinema that the hindrance to cinema’s respectability “was sexual and gender-related, rather than primarily class-related.” Male intellectuals focused their descriptions on the women in the audience, who in fact constituted a large proportion of film viewers. According to Hansen, “It is no coincidence that literary intellectuals fascinated by the whiff of Otherness that emanated from the movies hardly ever failed to mention the presence of prostitutes in the audience. The image of the prostitute was actually used as an epithet for the cinema as a whole.”¹⁸

Thus, cinema came to be understood as a force of moral and national corruption, the irresistible seductress responsible for luring the susceptible (uneducated, undisciplined, undiscerning, and often youthful) masses away from a loftier national culture. Couched in gendered language intended to underscore the urgency of the threat, criticism of the medium sprang from national-cultural and class biases. Pointing to both its popular appeal and its overwhelmingly fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• CINEMA IN DEMOCRATIZING GERMANY
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: CINEMA AND GERMAN SOCIETY BEFORE 1945
• 2: FROM MILITARY SURVEILLANCE TO SELF-SUPERVISION
• 3: DIE SÜNDERIN OR WHO KILLED THE GERMAN MAN?
• 4: THE FIGHT FOR THE “CHRISTIAN WEST”
• 5: POPULAR CINEMA, SPECTATORSHIP, AND IDENTITY IN THE EARLY 1950s
• 6: FROM FECKLESS MASSES TO ENGAGED CRITICS
• 7: LOCAL CHALLENGES TO THE DOMINANT CULTURE
• 8: MASS CULTURE AND COLD WAR POLITICS
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIXES
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX