Dismantling the Dream Factory

Gender, German Cinema, and the Postwar Quest for a New Film Language

Hester Baer

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781845459451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The history of postwar German cinema has most often been told as a story of failure, a failure paradoxically epitomized by the remarkable popularity of film throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. Through the analysis of 10 representative films, Hester Baer reassesses this period, looking in particular at how the attempt to 'dismantle the dream factory' of Nazi entertainment cinema resulted in a new cinematic language which developed as a result of the changing audience demographic. In an era when female viewers comprised 70 per cent of cinema audiences a 'women's cinema' emerged, which sought to appeal to female spectators through its genres, star choices, stories and formal conventions. In addition to analyzing the formal language and narrative content of these films, Baer uses a wide array of other sources to reconstruct the original context of their reception, including promotional and publicity materials, film programs, censorship documents, reviews and spreads in fan magazines. This book presents a new take on an essential period, which saw the rebirth of German cinema after its thorough delegitimization under the Nazi regime.

Part I

RELEGITIMATING CINEMA:
FEMALE SPECTATORS AND THE PROBLEM
OF REPRESENTATION

Chapter 1

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM
LIKE SUSANNE?: THE FEMALE GAZE
IN WOLFGANG STAUDTE'S
THE MURDERERS ARE AMONG US (1946)

At the end of World War II, only 1,150 cinemas remained standing in Germany, a mere fraction of the 7,000 cinemas operating at the height of the Third Reich. By 1946, there were already 2,125 movie theaters in the Western zones, which sold tickets to approximately 300 million spectators that year (an average of 6.5 visits to the movies for every Western German).¹ Though the Allies at first banned all German films, mandating that cinemas screen dubbed or subtitled foreign productions from the Allied countries instead, a large number of popular films from the Third Reich were approved for exhibition beginning in the autumn of 1945.²According to one American military survey, among the most popular films of the years 1945-46 were the Ufa color melodramas Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City, 1942) and Immensee (1943), both directed by Veit Harlan; the Marika Rökk vehicle Die Frau meiner Träume (The Woman of My Dreams, 1944), directed by Georg Jacobi; and the Viennese musical Der weisse Traum (The White Dream, 1943), directed by Geza von Cziffra.³ As this list makes clear, moviegoers preferred German films to foreign imports in the immediate postwar period. Indeed, they continued to do so throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The popular cinema of the Third Reich clearly represented a familiar and conservative choice for postwar spectators seeking escape from the hardships of everyday life. However, audiences and critics alike anxiously anticipated the first postwar German film, and their high expectations were not disappointed.

Wolfgang Staudte's Die Mörder sind unter uns premiered on October 15, 1946, in East Berlin. The premiere took place in the provisional home of the German State Opera, which was outfitted with projection equipment for the festive event, since there was no standing movie theater in the Eastern zone that could accommodate the world premiere of a newly released film. Despite technical difficulties and the poor quality of the print that was shown, critics noted that spontaneous applause broke out during the screening in response to particularly artistic sequences of the film. After the premiere and at subsequent screenings, audience members engaged in lengthy discussions of the film's representation of contemporary life and the dilemmas of recent German history.⁴

A spread on the film in the fan magazine Film Revue recorded several viewer responses to The Murderers Are Among Us soon after its premiere. Notably, the magazine chose to focus exclusively on the responses of female viewers, in a section entitled “Seen Through the Eyes of Woman.” As the magazine explained, “More than 70 percent of all cinema-goers in Germany are—women and girls. It is said that they just want to see entertainment in the film theater: pictures of fashion, heroes, and sentimental love scenes. Is that the truth?”⁵ In contrast to the common attitude that held female viewers (and their “retrograde” tastes) responsible for the failure of early postwar films to gain popularity with audiences, Film Revue suggested through its collection of testimonials about The Murderers Are Among Us that female viewers responded positively both to the social and political implications of the film's narrative and to its formal and artistic qualities. In the article's lead-off quote, viewer Hilde Nowack creates an explicit link between the film's representation of German history and her own wartime experiences, focusing both on guilt for Nazi crimes and on the suffering caused by the war:

In its simplicity and objectivity, the film has such a strong impact on the viewer that one leaves the cinema deeply affected, asking the question: how did such barbaric deeds ever befall humanity? By the end of the film, we feel responsible <mitschuldig> for the cruel acts that were performed, because we did not have the strength and were too cowardly to fight against such barbaric deeds…I personally can only give expression to my wish that every German see this film. My happiness was also destroyed: my child no longer has a father. For that reason, I will be engaged with all my strength my whole life long, especially in order to make young people understand that a Hitler dictatorship will never again overtake Germany, and therefore that a war will never again overtake Germany either.⁶

Drawing parallels between her own life and the images of personal and collective history portrayed in the film, this viewer emphasizes the film's moral tone and its indictment of the postwar atmosphere of reconstruction.

Reviewers of The Murderers Are Among Us generally expressed positive responses to the film as well. However, while they heaped praise on Staudte's contribution to the renewal of German filmmaking, they were also critical of the film's often muddled narrative and overblown symbolism. As critic Friedrich Luft put it, “One would have hoped that a film about this theme <guilt, responsibility, and retribution for the crimes of the Nazi past> would have conveyed clarity and energy rather than getting lost in the depths of imagistic symbolism. Finding the new form for the new film is difficult.” ⁷

Indeed, The Murderers Are Among Us showcases, at the levels of both form and content, the representational problems faced by postwar filmmakers. At the same time, the film foregrounds postwar social problems, in particular the pervasive problem of gender relations and the incompatibility of the sexes in the aftermath of the war. While The Murderers Are Among Us was ultimately unsuccessful in developing solutions for either set of problems, the traces that it leaves behind provide a useful starting point for understanding the reconstruction of popular cinema in the postwar period.

I

Following the end of the war, German film production ceased entirely for over a year. Caused by a combination of political, technical, and aesthetic factors (including the initial total ban on filmmaking by the Allies), this Filmpause, as it came to be known, provided the opportunity for critics and filmmakers to take stock of the current state of German cinema and begin planning for the future, thereby initiating a critical discussion that would last for years to come. Commenting on the Filmpause in November 1945, director Harald Braun highlighted the necessity of such a hiatus, arguing that before new films could be made, “The legitimacy of both the personnel and the artistic qualities <of filmmaking> must be completely assured.”⁸

While the discussion that emerged from the Filmpause explicitly addressed the problem of German cinema's legitimacy in the aftermath of National Socialism, developing new and newly legitimate artistic qualities for the postwar cinema proved much more difficult than filmmakers at first anticipated, and this problem would continue to vex German filmmaking throughout the 1950s. As Robert Shandley explains, “Whether because German filmmakers had abused the power of the image so egregiously during the Third Reich or simply because they lost the war, many of cinema's generic and narrative codes had been thoroughly delegitimated. It was unclear what cinematic language filmmakers would be able to call upon once they were able to resume production.”⁹ Should filmmakers return to the legacy of German cinema before 1933, in particular the language of the Weimar art cinema? Should they look abroad to discover new trends and styles that had been suppressed in the Third Reich during the war years? What elements of Third Reich cinema could or should be salvaged?

Of course it was neither possible nor desirable for postwar filmmakers seeking to appeal to German audiences to break entirely with the conventions of German cinema as it had developed during the 1930s and 1940s. However, within certain boundaries they did seek to establish new formal conventions, focus on the social and political problems of postwar life, and address changing audiences in new ways. Of central importance here was the quest to redefine the language of cinematic realism, and, by extension, to redefine the role of illusionism in cinema as well. While postwar films rarely departed from a realist idiom, they borrowed from a range of realist styles, including classical forms associated with both Hollywood and Third Reich cinema, as well as Italian neo-realism.¹⁰

The struggle to endow narrative cinema with a new legitimacy was a topic of debate among filmmakers and critics alike throughout the postwar period. Moreover, this struggle was often reproduced in the films themselves, resulting in narrative ambivalence, clashing codes and styles, and metacinematic elements that derived from experiments with film form and content. The representational eclecticism (or indecision) of these films was often cause for alarm among commentators and has contributed to the longstanding view of postwar cinema as aesthetically problematic. However, a closer look at the films suggests that they were not simply the result of confusion or entropy, but that they telescope the postwar representational crisis in ways that can prove instructive for film history. Demonstrating a concern with the formal language of cinema, these films also sought to find new narrative means to address the problems of postwar life. The search for legitimate aesthetic forms was thus inseparable from the narrative attempt to imagine solutions for social problems in postwar cinema. Both of these pursuits converged around issues of gender and sexuality, a process that begins already with the paradigmatic postwar film, The Murderers Are Among Us.

Clearly, gender and sexuality were implicated in many of the social problems faced by postwar Germans. Men and women had very different experiences of the war years, which led both to strained relations between the sexes and to the need to reformulate gender roles and gender relations in the postwar period. The emasculation of men after the military and political defeat of Nazi Germany was accompanied by a “masculinization” of women in public discourse, as epitomized by the figures of the passive, marginal Heimkehrer (soldier returning from war) and the active, central Trümmerfrau (rubble woman). Returning home, men often had a hard time rejoining changed families and finding a place in society, while women, who had gained independence during the war years, now played a central role in the reconstruction of Germany and the reformulation of society after 1945. That year, German women outnumbered men by at least 7.3 million; four million German men had been killed in World War II and 11.7 million German soldiers were held in prisoner-of-war camps.¹¹ According to one account of this so-called Frauenüberschuß (surplus of women), “For every 100 men between the ages of 20 and 40 there are 158 women; for men between the ages of 20 and 30 there are actually 168 women. In Leipzig, according to one count last fall, there were 211 women for every 100 men between the ages of 19 and 50. In the British zone, the population increased through resettlement by 2 million women and only by 90,000 men.”¹² The period between 1945 and 1948 soon became known as the “hour of the woman,” a term that reflected the gender imbalance in the population and the prominent role of women not only in the everyday work of reconstruction but also in the national imaginary during this time. Staple characters of early postwar cinema such as the Heimkehrer and the Trümmerfrau symbolized the inverted gender roles and strained gender relations of the postwar period, while also pointing to the gendered conceptions of memory and responsibility for Nazi crimes that shaped public discourse about the past.

Problems relating to sexuality were less visible but nonetheless central in postwar society. In particular, public debates focused on the perception of women's widespread adultery, prostitution, and fraternization. On the one hand, this perception masked the reality of rape by Allied soldiers and held women responsible for their own sexual victimization. On the other hand, by labeling sexually independent women as sexual aggressors, commentators blamed women for the moral degradation of wartime and postwar life and for a wide array of social, economic, and political problems that began with and emerged from Germany's defeat. Finally, in postwar social discourse and in the movies, problems of gender and sexuality often functioned as a cipher for the sublimated issues of race, ethnicity, and national identity.

Just as gender and sexuality were central to the social problems of the postwar period, issues of representation were also charged with gender politics during this era. As Kaja Silverman suggests in her study of male subjectivity, Hollywood films from the late 1940s, much like their German counterparts, reflect a preoccupation with problems of gender and sexuality stemming from the historical trauma of World War II. Silverman argues that these films, “attest to a massive loss of faith in traditional masculinity, and…dramatize the implications of that dissolution not only for gender and the family, but for the larger society.”¹³ According to Silverman, in the aftermath of the war, a historical moment ensued when the equation of the penis and the phallus collapsed, leading to a recognition of male lack and a concomitant “collective loss of belief in the whole of the dominant fiction.”¹⁴ That is, the impaired masculinity so evident in the postwar period contributed to a destabilization of the psychic and ideological structures that sustain conventional social formations, including sexual difference, the family, the nation, and, indeed, the perception of “reality” itself. Silverman demonstrates how certain films respond to this crisis of male subjectivity by departing from the conventions of classical cinema, and even, at times, by investing female characters with functions typically assumed by men. As her analysis shows, however, Hollywood films also developed compensatory mechanisms—primarily fetishism—in order to disavow the loss of masculine adequacy and mastery.

In the German context, the crisis of masculinity and the “ideological fatigue” it produced were, if anything, more acute than the American phenomenon analyzed by Silverman. In the Hollywood films, “the hero no longer feels ‘at home' in the house or town where he grew up, and resists cultural (re-)assimilation; he has been dislodged from the narratives and subject-positions which make up the dominant fiction, and he returns to them only under duress.”¹⁵ While the same can generally be said of postwar German cinema, in these films the houses and towns where the heroes grew up have often been decimated in the war, while the narratives and subject-positions that comprised Nazi ideology have been thoroughly discredited, leading to an even more radical ideological fatigue and loss of belief in the dominant fiction. Moreover, while Hollywood cinema certainly underwent a number of transformations at mid-century in part resulting from the caesura of World...