Willing Seduction

The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, and Mass Culture

Barbara Kosta

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459147
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film The Blue Ange l ( Der blaue Engel ) is among the best known films of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933). A significant landmark as one of Germany's first major sound films, it is known primarily for launching Marlene Dietrich into Hollywood stardom and for initiating the mythic pairing of the Austrian-born American director von Sternberg with the star performer Dietrich.

This fascinating cultural history of The Blue Angel provides a new interpretive framework with which to approach this classic Weimar film and suggests that discourses on mass and high culture are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure. These discourses surface above all in the relationship between the two main characters, the cabaret entertainer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and the high school teacher Immanuel Rath (one-time Oscar winner Emil Jannings). In addition to offering insight into some of the major debates that informed the Weimar Republic, this book demonstrates that similar issues continue to shape the contemporary cultural landscape of Germany. Barbara Kosta thus also looks at Dietrich as a contemporary cultural icon and at her symbolic value since German unification and at Lola Lola's various "incarnations."

Chapter 1

MASS ENTERTAINMENT AND “SERIOUS” CULTURE

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and
furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared
to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came film and burst this
prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second,
so that now in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris,
we calmly and adventurously go traveling.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”

Not so long ago it was still difficult to convince the Philistines that the
film was an independent, autonomous new art with laws of its own.
Béla Balász, Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art

The story of Josef von Sternberg's filming of The Blue Angel often begins with the account of von Sternberg's search for the perfect Lola, and his fateful discovery of Marlene Dietrich. She allegedly had a minor role in a theater performance of Expressionist playwright Georg Kaiser's Zwei Krawatten (Two Bow Ties) in the Berliner Theater, where she played an American and had one line—”May I invite one and all to dine with me tonight?” Delighted with Dietrich's nonchalant stage presence, von Sternberg immediately arranged an audition.¹ In Dietrich he found his perfect Lola, whose image reminded him of images of women he liked in paintings by Félicien Rops and Toulouse Lautrec.² This intricate relationship between art and life would play a key role in their future collaboration.

Yet the story of The Blue Angel's filming begins long before the director selected his cast. It begins with the relationship between Hollywood and Berlin, and with Emil Jannings's star role in the film The Last Command, which von Sternberg directed in 1928. Emil Jannings's performance not only earned him an Oscar for best actor but occasioned yet another collaboration between film giants. Hollywood's Paramount studio and Berlin's Ufa chief business manager, Ludwig Klitzsch, brought the successful producer Erich Pommer back to Berlin from Hollywood to lead a production company with Ufa. Since Jannings was eager to make the passage into sound film, he and Pommer invited Austrian-born von Sternberg, who was versed in the new technology of sound, to Berlin, where von Sternberg would smooth the path for Ufa's inevitable transition into sound and secure the German studio's position as a viable competitor to Hollywood. The film studio hoped to duplicate the success of von Sternberg's and Jannings's previous collaboration, as well as that of von Sternberg's first sound film, Thunderbolt; to that end, it was willing to pay the director handsomely and to give him free rein. In fact, Dietrich got the part only at the insistence of von Sternberg and because Pommer wished to retain him. Based loosely on Heinrich Mann's 1905 novel Professor Unrat and filmed in both German and English to gain an international market, the Berlin production would be exemplary in its synthesis of art and commercialism. Although originally intended to launch the career of Jannings in the new medium, once retitled and transformed into The Blue Angel, the film instead gave birth to the legend of Marlene Dietrich, whose performance captivated her audience.³

The Blue Angel premiered on April 1, 1930, at the Gloria Palast in Berlin, and was met with great enthusiasm. Critics lauded the performances of both Jannings and Dietrich; the Reichsfilmblatt reported: “One is downright overwhelmed by Miss Dietrich's performance. Her ability to dominate scenes without great effort, yet with simple and absolute authority is unprecedented.”⁴ Emil Jannings was recognized primarily for his expansive talent, despite reservations about his theatricality. Kurt Pinthus wrote in Das Tagebuch that Jannings “proves himself here as an aggregate figure with a thousand individual traits of incredible genuine talent for characterization, particularly in awakening, in transitions of tragic grotesque feelings.”⁵ In the Vössische Zeitung on the day after the premier, Pinthus particularly lauds Dietrich for a “vulgarity” that derived from filmic presentation alone. “Everything here is film, not theater…Extraordinary!”⁶

Those reviews that did not focus on the captivating performances of Dietrich and Jannings addressed either implicitly or explicitly the relationship between serious culture and mass culture, and especially the relationship between literature and film and between Heinrich Mann's novel and its filmic adaptation. To a great extent, these reviews rehearse the divergent understandings and expectations of “culture” and cinema that shaped public debate during the Weimar Republic. These polarized definitions of serious culture and mass culture, as I will show, are at the heart of The Blue Angel. Indeed, these debates resonate in the encounter of Rath and Lola, an encounter that rests on the divide between high culture and mass entertainment, and in attitudes toward cinema, and highlights the assumptions underlying—and vulnerabilities of—interwar Germanness. Having found there was far more to the film's success than Miss Dietrich's naked thighs, as Heinrich Mann famously proposed, I contend that discourses on mass culture and “serious” culture of the Bildungsbürger are integral to the film's thematic and narrative structure.⁷

It was in the discussion of the adaptation of Mann's novel that critics were politically divided in a climate that was moving increasingly toward the right. Prone to a sense of cultural despair, verging on disenchantment with everything modern, the right only partially was relieved to see that von Sternberg had sanitized the film of any political content, sparing German educators the condemnation of the tyrannical Wilhelminian schoolmaster that Mann develops in his novel. While cultural conservatives applauded the film version, they did not miss the opportunity to condemn Mann's novel as an affront to long-cherished national institutions that laid the foundation of German national identity. The Nazi press was less appeased by the changes, and the right-wing Völkische Beobachter branded the film a product of “Jewish erotic thinking…a conscious Jewish subversion and denigration of German character and of German educational values; Jewish cynicism shows itself here with a baseness that is seldom seen so openly.”⁸ Measures taken against the film during the Third Reich were anticipated in this diatribe against the film, in which the author commemorates a teacher's conference day in Bavaria, decrying the slanderous representation of Professor Rath. Once Hitler came to power in 1933, the film was placed into the “Giftschrank” (poison cabinet).

No less critical of the film, the left claimed that it was deliberately directed against Heinrich Mann; they reproached von Sternberg for his lack of social analysis, for his failure to critique the authoritarian educational system, and for his “misuse” (Kracauer) of the novel's social consciousness.⁹ A review in the leftist newspaper Die rote Fahne, purposely playing off of the name of The Blue Angel screenplay writer Carl Zuckmayer, accused the writers “of having ‘sugar-coated’ <verzuckmayert>” Mann's novel, indeed of selling out to Ufa owner Hugenberg's conservative party line. The leftist intellectual Carl von Ossietzsky went even further in Die Weltbühne and accused the screenplay writers of betraying their calling as writers and intellectuals: “It would have been better, if they had left the vandalizing bowdlerization of an intelligent German novel to Ufa's ghostwriters.”¹⁰

Indeed, in light of his 1928 speech at the Capitol movie theater in Berlin, in which Heinrich Mann, a fervent advocate of cinema, clearly outlined the social function of the medium, it is somewhat surprising that he approved of von Sternberg's revisions. Echoing the sentiments that many leftist intellectuals held at the time, Mann, in other contexts, alerted his audience to the intellectually impoverished state of Weimar's popular film culture, asserting “intellect and taste get short shrift in daily film productions.”¹¹ The majority of films, he went on to say, were based on sensation and denied their audiences a critical commentary of reality. Cinema had the power to structure perception, and, contrary to popular belief, affect daily life. As an art form, rather than a mere commercial enterprise, film's primary obligation was “to teach <us> to see and think.” To that end, it was not necessary for directors, literally “film poets” (Filmdichter), as he called them, to turn to literature for their stories. Like many left-wing Weimar intellectuals, Mann looked to Russian film (Eisenstein, Vertov) as exemplifying film's potential to produce insightful poetic narratives independent of literary adaptations.

In step with the social changes the interwar years demanded, and in contrast to his brother Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann refused to separate art from politics, and harshly criticized the cultural elitism of the Bildungbürgertum. In “Geistiges Gesellschaftskapital” (Intellectual social capital, 1924), he addresses the ineffectiveness of past cultural ideals and the insular society that emerged from them: “What should society do with the intellectual education of the prewar years, with culture that was considered a privilege and that was espoused by a few thousand snobby bearers of culture, that they never imparted to others? That type of culture did not advocate the politicization of the nation, but rather hindered it, it was against the democratization of culture.”¹²

Despite his pointedly laid out expectations of film, Mann agreed to radical changes in both the substance and in the title of his novel (even though it was said he complained privately); during the filming of The Blue Angel, he even visited the set regularly and enjoyed an amicable working relationship with von Sternberg. Pommer also arranged a screening of the final version for Mann in Nice, France before premiering the film in Berlin.¹³ All of this allowed Pommer to counter critics and claim that the script was written with Mann. S.S. Prawer suspects that Mann was motivated by the sizeable payment Ufa offered him and the prospect of improved book sales.¹⁴ Other critics have speculated that Mann had too much respect for his colleagues Zuckmayer and Liebmann to interfere with their work.¹⁵ More to the point, however, had von Sternberg not made the changes he did to the original story, it is doubtful whether the film mogul Alfred Hugenberg, an extreme right-wing nationalist, would ever have accepted Mann's novel for the film. Even as changed, the film had to maneuver its way through a politically volatile period in German history, and through the intense debates on the relationship between mass culture, literature, and national identity.¹⁶

More critical than Mann of the discrepancies between the literary work and its filmic adaptation, Siegfried Kracauer, in his 1930 review in Die Neue Rundschau, joined others in objecting to the film's content, whose vacuity and superficiality he saw as only thinly veiled by its ornamentation. While acknowledging the talent of both Jannings and Dietrich, and mentioning especially Dietrich's attractive legs and voice, Kracauer provocatively queries, “But to what purpose the legs, the effects, the technique, and the enormous fanfare <Riesentheater>?” The purpose, in his estimation, is “to forget reality and conceal it.”¹⁷ Given that the film was made during a time of great economic instability and great political uncertainty in Germany, with the right gaining popularity, his words carry a weight missing from the haughty dismissal of mass culture on the part of many Weimar intellectuals. Indeed, as an intellectual who, during the 1920s, appreciated the democratizing potential of mass culture and saw in it an implicit critique of a bourgeois culture that promoted authoritarian structures and paid homage to the arts as a sign of social status, Kracauer may be counted among Weimar's most ardent proponents of mass culture, modernity, and Americanization. In Miriam Hansen's words: “Like many Weimar intellectuals, Kracauer welcomed mass culture as a practical critique of the remnants of bourgeois high culture and philosophical attempts to patch up the actual state of disintegration and disorder.”¹⁸

While Kracauer understood the need for people in modern society to seek diversion from their tedious working conditions, the state of distractedness was at once an integral element of modernity and a sign of disarray. “The Berlin public,” Kracauer wrote, “behaves in a profoundly truthful manner when it increasingly shuns <conventional forms of high art>…and shows its preferences for the superficial luster of stars, films, revues, and production numbers. Here, in pure externality, it finds itself; the dismembered succession of splendid sensory perceptions brings to light its own reality.”¹⁹ Even though mass culture could offer crucial insight into the problems of modernity, more often it disappointed its advocates and simply blinded its audiences. For Kracauer, distraction ultimately robbed the individual of psychological and social insight and the possibility of reflection. Thus, reading Kracauer's 1930 critique of The Blue Angel beyond its function as a review reveals his expectations of the cinema, or, for that matter, any art form. Art and cinema should comment on the increasing disaffectedness of the modern condition and the growing sense of isolation from a chaotic, fragmented world; they should explore individual psychologies since “don't individual destinies and psychology exist now after the war as they did before?”²⁰ Indeed, where mass culture was not invested in its innovative potential, it was no more than an obstruction to cultural progress, an escapist and inferior form of cultural expression.

In 1952, and five years after coining the term “culture industry” with Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno was even less convinced than Kracauer of The Blue Angel's worth. Echoing the objections of critics before him, Adorno submits that the film falls short of the aesthetic quality of the novel and undermines its social relevance. The ultimate adoption of the film title for the book title served as yet another example of “earnest culture” suffering a kind of putrefaction in the modern world, with modern mass culture as instrumental in bringing about this decomposition. Indeed, mass culture seemed to compromise the very integrity of an elite ennobling culture, which Adorno, according to Robert Witkin,

identified with the intellectual and aesthetic systems that developed in the eighteenth century; those grand systems of Enlightenment ideas and of speculative metaphysics that constituted, for example, the culture of German Idealism, together with the aesthetic ideals embodied in the literature and Culture in this larger sense secures for the individual some degree of autonomy and integrity at the level of agency.²¹

The cinema's indiscriminate use of highly regarded literary texts confirmed for critics of mass culture the decline of literary culture, which they foresaw as soon as cinema developed narrative sophistication and became popular. In fact, early critics of the cinema saw mass culture encroaching on all art forms. In reaction, they theorized mass culture's limitations, doggedly drawing sharp distinctions between high and mass culture and installing a cultural divide that would be both reinforced and challenged throughout the twentieth century. As an alternative to popular cinema, a number of leftist intellectuals proposed a cinéma pur to protect art from its predatory “other,” and to secure the distinct nature of art as opposed to entertainment. They, in effect, attributed the dictates of authenticity and superiority to art as opposed to culture for mass consumption, that is, for profit. Underlying the assumptions about art and mass culture that these reviews of The Blue Angel convey is a concept of Germanness deeply rooted in notions of high culture and education (Bildung) as cultivated by the Enlightenment and borne by the educated middle class (Bildungsbürgertum).

To begin exploration into the relationship between the arts—that is, cultu...