Destination London

German-Speaking Emigrés and British Cinema, 1925-1950

Tim Bergfelder, Christian Cargnelli, Tim Bergfelder, Christian Cargnelli

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450197
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Histoire et critique du cinéma

The legacy of emigrés in the British film industry, from the silent film era until after the Second World War, has been largely neglected in the scholarly literature. Destination London is the first book to redress this imbalance. Focusing on areas such as exile, genre, technological transfer, professional training and education, cross-cultural exchange and representation, it begins by mapping the reasons for this neglect before examining the contributions made to British cinema by emigré directors, actors, screenwriters, cinematographers, set designers, and composers. It goes on to assess the cultural and economic contexts of transnational industry collaborations in the 1920s, artistic cosmopolitanism in the 1930s, and anti-Nazi propaganda in the 1940s.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: GERMAN-SPEAKING EMIGRÉS AND BRITISH CINEMA, 1925–50: CULTURAL EXCHANGE, EXILE AND THE BOUNDARIES OF NATIONAL CINEMA

Tim Bergfelder

Britain can be considered, with the possible exception of the Netherlands, the European country benefiting most from the diaspora of continental film personnel that resulted from the Nazis’ rise to power.¹ Kevin Gough-Yates, who pioneered the study of exiles in British cinema, argues that ‘when we consider the films of the 1930s, in which the Europeans played a lesser role, the list of important films is small.’² Yet the legacy of these Europeans, including their contribution to aesthetic trends, production methods, to professional training and to technological development in the film industry of their host country has been largely forgotten. With the exception of very few individuals, including the screenwriter Emeric Pressburger³ and the producer/director Alexander Korda,⁴ the history of émigrés in the British film industry from the 1920s through to the end of the Second World War and beyond remains unwritten. This introductory chapter aims to map some of the reasons for this neglect, while also pointing towards the new interventions on the subject that are collected in this anthology.

There are complex reasons why the various waves of migrations of German-speaking artists to Britain, from the mid-1920s through to the postwar period, have not received much attention. The first has to do with the dominance of Hollywood in film historical accounts, which has given prominence to the exodus of European film artists to the United States. Numerous studies since the 1970s have charted the trajectories of German-speaking (and other European) film personnel to Los Angeles, especially after 1933, and their eventual integration or failure within the studio system.⁵ A succession of scholars has traced the legacy of ‘mittel-European’ émigrés either through high-profile biographical trajectories (e.g., Ernst Lubitsch, Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Peter Lorre),⁶ or in terms of specific genres such as film noir.⁷ Other studies have documented how Hollywood became a dead end for formerly successful or promising filmmakers, including directors Joe May, Reinhold Schünzel, E.A. Dupont, Richard Oswald, and Gustav Machaty.⁸

Thus, emigration in film historical terms has been mostly associated with the lure of Hollywood as the focal point or as the crucible of the global film business. This perception gains even more strength given the fact that indeed many relocations within Europe during the 1930s often only marked an intermediate stopover for émigrés who would continue and usually end their journey (by the outbreak of the Second World War at the latest) in the USA. In terms of the sheer volume of individuals, the dominance of this particular stream of migration is thus undoubtedly justified. However, as a result of the overwhelming focus on Hollywood, a whole range of other, and culturally significant, migratory processes and cultural exchanges, some permanent and some more temporary, have been ignored.⁹

Exiles or Emigrés?

The assessment of the legacy of émigrés is complicated by the very definition of the word ‘émigré’. This umbrella term has been used in film historical accounts, sometimes too indiscriminately, for a range of quite different existential experiences, encompassing purely economically motivated, brief and voluntary production trips between countries, extended and often permanent periods of enforced exile and personal reinvention, and a number of ambiguous cases in between. For an accurate assessment of émigré activities it is essential to differentiate their place within wider paradigms, such as sociopolitical events and developments (e.g., the migrations from and within Central and Eastern Europe prior, during and after the First World War; and the rise of fascism and ethnic and political persecution that follow in the 1930s), but also within the parameters of national and transnational economic strategies and policies.

For the film historian, it is important not to conflate these contexts too readily, as the aims and requirements associated with politics and economics may indeed sometimes coincide, but may on occasion also pull in different directions. As I have argued in a previous essay, the history of European cinema has frequently been ‘characterised by two simultaneous yet diverging processes, namely the film industries’ economic imperative of international expansion, competition and cooperation (often accompanied by a migration of labour), and the ideological project of recentring the definition of national cinema through critical and public discourse, and film policy’.¹⁰

The case of British cinema from the 1920s through to the 1940s, and its shifting relations with other film industries in Europe as well as with Hollywood, is particularly instructive in this respect. As several scholars have suggested, the deliberate adoption of internationalist principles, looking across the English Channel for artistic inspiration and technological innovation and training, and across the Atlantic for economic success and potential distribution markets, was key to the resurgence of the British film industry in the second half of the 1920s and the mid-1930s, and resulted in a busy transnational traffic of production strategies, generic formulae and personnel.¹¹

The same period, however, saw the emergence of protectionist measures, such as the introduction of national quotas in the 1927 Cinematograph Act (designed primarily to stem the growing influence of Hollywood), and from the early 1930s the attempts by the film technicians’ union, the Association of Cine-Technicians (ACT), to block and prevent the employment of foreigners in British studios (a policy that was primarily aimed at continental technicians).¹² It is against this context of contradictory forces impacting on the film industry that émigré activity in Britain during this period needs to be seen, while it is also important to acknowledge that the exchange and migration of film personnel was well established before the Nazis’ rise to power initiated a far more urgent and existentially motivated wave of emigration.

Extending the time frame of émigré activity back into the 1920s allows one to recognise filmmakers and artists who, within the parameters of reciprocal arrangements between national film industries, travelled between, and made films in, different countries. Such an understanding would encompass on the British side temporary ‘émigrés’ such as Alfred Hitchcock who made his first films in Germany in 1925, but also Graham Cutts, Ivor Novello, Henry Edwards, Mabel Poulton, Warwick Ward, Robert Stevenson and a host of other names, all of whom were filming at one time or another in German studios. Michael Powell, meanwhile, began his career at about the same time working for American director Rex Ingram in the South of France. To these names one could add the British-born actors Lilian Harvey or Jack Trevor, who predominantly worked in German cinema. Arriving from the continent were figures such as the directors E.A. Dupont, Arthur Robison and Paul Czinner; actresses including Anny Ondra, Pola Negri, Olga Chekhova and Lya de Putti; cinematographers Werner Brandes and Theodor Sparkuhl; and set designer Alfred Junge, who made films in Britain in the late 1920s, joining other professionals who were arriving from the United States.

In a previous article I referred to this category of film personnel as ‘commercial travellers’.¹³ Such purely industry-determined migrations extended to some extent from the late 1920s until the late 1930s, reaching its peak during the years of multilingual sound film production early to mid-decade, which is mapped in this volume by Chris Wahl’s essay on Ufa’s English-language projects.¹⁴ However, from 1933 onwards, the term émigré became more prominently associated with the experience of exile, as numerous film artists were forced to leave Nazi Germany, and subsequently other European countries, to escape persecution on racial and/or political grounds. The commercial two-way traffic of the late 1920s thus gradually turned into a forceful one-way exodus, with the number of émigrés in the British film industry in the late 1930s and 1940s rising to around 400, a significant amount considering the size of the British film industry.

Again, it is necessary to distinguish between individual cases, as the emerging differences often challenge a straightforward historical narrative of a clear-cut caesura, or normative experiences of exile. As a part of the close relationship between the German and British film industries in the 1920s and 1930s, a number of German-speaking filmmakers working on Anglo-German co-productions or multilingual versions of the early sound period later became established in the film industry of the Third Reich, including cinematographer Robert Baberske (A Knight in London, 1929) and Hans Steinhoff (Nachtgestalten/The Alley Cat, 1929), the latter one of the most prominent directors of Nazi propaganda films and prestige productions from 1933 onwards. Although far less common than before 1933, German film personnel continued coming to Britain on purely professional temporary visits for the remainder of the decade (often under contract with Korda), including cinematographers Franz Weihmayr, Sepp Allgeier, and Hans Schneeberger.

Other film artists, however, such as the set designers Alfred Junge or Oscar Werndorff, may originally have moved to Britain for economic reasons, but they effectively changed into political exiles after 1933 when a return to Germany became a definitive impossibility. They thus shared the same fate, though not the same professional status, as those filmmakers who entered Britain as refugees. Indeed, while many of the émigrés of the late 1920s could attain a relatively stable position within the British studios, for later émigrés the situation looked far bleaker. Influential studio positions such as the one Alfred Junge enjoyed at Gaumont-British and later at M-G-M British, or the public profile of émigré actors such as Conrad Veidt, Elisabeth Bergner, Richard Tauber, Anton Walbrook or Lilli Palmer remained relatively isolated occurrences in the British film industry of the 1930s and 1940s.

In some cases, exile could spell the end of one’s career altogether. Brigitte Mayr’s moving account in this volume of the screenwriter Carl Mayer’s years in British exile documents one of the more tragic examples in this respect. Penniless and unemployed, the celebrated creator of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920) and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) could in his final years at least rely on the kindness and pity of his British friends. Kevin Gough-Yates has previously pointed to similar destinies of formerly celebrated artists of Weimar stage and screen, including the directors Leo Lasko and Max Mack.¹⁵ Meanwhile, not even established industry figures such as Junge were immune from being interned as ‘enemy aliens’ following the outbreak of the Second World War, let alone artists who were less settled at this moment in time, such as another Powell and Pressburger stalwart, Hein Heckroth, who was temporarily deported to Australia.

In between those ‘who had to flee’ and those ‘who stayed’ were, especially during the 1930s, a number of more ambiguous career trajectories. Actress Lilian Harvey and the Czech-born cinematographer Franz Planer, for example, continued prolific pan-European careers until the late 1930s, which significantly included working for the Nazi film industry. Planer’s credits in Britain included Vistor Saville’s The Dictator (1935) and Curtis Bernhardt’s The Beloved Vagabond (1936), while in Germany he worked until 1937 with directors such as Gustaf Gründgens and Carl Froelich. As Michael Omasta in his essay in this book notes, the cinematographer Günther Krampf returned in 1935 from Britain to Nazi Germany to shoot Gustav Ucicky’s Das Mädchen Johanna (Joan of Arc). Harvey made her last film in Germany in 1939 (see Chris Wahl’s chapter in this volume). That same year, she fled to Hollywood via France while Planer and his Jewish wife also sought safety in the USA. They were part of a final wave of émigrés that included directors Douglas Sirk and Frank Wysbar. There were some last-minute émigrés to Britain too, including the Czech actor Karel (Karl) Stepanek, who had appeared in German productions up to the outbreak of the Second World War, and who from 1942 became one of the most reliable foreign villains in British films.

It is worth remembering in this context that although the German film industry introduced racial exclusion policies almost immediately after the Nazis took control and summarily dismissed the overwhelming majority of Jewish film personnel (including such prominent figures as the producer Erich Pommer), until the late 1930s policies of exclusion on ethnic or political grounds were applied expediently. In the early years of the regime, Jewish or half-Jewish directors such as Kurt (Curtis) Bernhardt or Reinhold Schünzel (who both eventually emigrated to Hollywood) were given special permission not only to direct films in Germany, but also to provide with their work an illusion of continuity from Weimar cinema in terms of visual style and urbanely modern narratives.¹⁶ Prior to his emigration to London (via Hollywood, an unusual trajectory), Anton Walbrook was (as Adolf Wohlbrück) an established matinee idol of German-speaking productions until 1936.

A particularly ambiguous case is the career of producer Günter Stapenhorst during the 1930s and 1940s. A lifetime personal friend of Emeric Pressburger, he did not face any personal threats from the Nazis on either political or racial grounds; indeed he had endeared himself to the regime by producing two of the most nationalistic films at Ufa in the early 1930s, Morgenrot (Dawn, 1933) and Flüchtlinge (Refugees, 1933). As a former ‘old school’ naval officer, however, Stapenhorst (reputedly a model for Anton Walbrook’s Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff in Pressburger’s 1943 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp) refused to join the Nazi Party and emigrated to Britain in 1935.

Working for Korda, he produced Milton Rosmer and Geoffrey Barkas’ The Great Barrier (1937), with an uncredited contribution to the screenplay by Pressburger. The film was an adventure spectacle about the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway that featured the exile actress Lilli Palmer, but was photographed by Sepp Allgeier, previously one of the principal cameramen on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935). Stapenhorst’s other contribution to British cinema was The Challenge (1938), a remake of Luis Trenker’s mountaineering drama Der Berg ruft (The Mountain Calls, 1937), a film that in its German version displayed explicit nationalist tendencies. After a failed attempt to return to Germany in the late 1930s, Stapenhorst spent the war years in neutral Switzerland, supporting and employing genuine exiles, but also surreptitiously receiving financial support from the Nazi film industry, which brought him under suspicion of espionage.¹⁷

Stapenhorst’s biography illustrates the murky distinctions between a more traditional form of German nationalism and National Socialism, and the rather dubious importation of at best ambivalent ideological messages into British cinema; and it helps to disperse the assumption that all exiles and émigré technicians working in Britain prior to the Second World War were politically on the left (although some, such as the cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, or the set designer Ernö Metzner, indisputably were).

There were, of course, numerous émigrés who actively campaigned during the 1930s against fascism, German nationalism, and anti-Semitism, and who subsequently made significant contributions to Britain’s war effort, both on-screen and off. It is no coincidence that some of the most prominent attacks on Hitler’s Germany in British cinema during the 1930s (as far as this was possible given the stringent restrictions by the British censorship board, BBFC), including Lothar Mendes’ Jew Süss (1934) and Karl Grune’s Abdul the Damned (1935),¹⁸ were made by film teams comprising a high proportion of émigrés, including the non-Jewish Conrad Veidt who through his role in Jew Süss effectively and very publicly declared his rejection of the Nazi regime. As Gerd Gemünden in his essay on Veidt in this book demonstrates, this not only earned the star the status of a persona non grata in the eyes of the Nazis, but also placed him in genuine danger during his final visit to Germany in 1934. During the Second World War, émigrés supported the war effort by playing Nazi villains in, or con...