Screening Transcendence

Film under Austrofascism and the Hollywood Hope, 1933-1938

Robert Dassanowsky

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780253034243
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

During the 1930s, Austrian film production companies developed a process to navigate the competing demands of audiences in Nazi Germany and those found in broader Western markets. In Screening Transcendence, film historian Robert Dassanowsky explores how Austrian filmmakers during the Austrofascist period (1933–1938) developed two overlapping industries: "Aryanized" films for distribution in Germany, its largest market, and "Emigrantenfilm," which employed émigré and Jewish talent that appealed to international audiences.

Through detailed archival research in both Vienna and the United States, Dassanowsky reveals what was culturally, socially, and politically at stake in these two simultaneous and overlapping film industries. Influenced by French auteurism, admired by Italian cinephiles, and ardently remade by Hollywood, these period Austrian films demonstrate a distinctive regional style mixed with transnational influences.

Combining brilliant close readings of individual films with thoroughly informed historical and cultural observations, Dassanowsky presents the story of a nation and an industry mired in politics, power, and intrigue on the brink of Nazi occupation.

PART 1

STRUCTURES

1

SYSTEM OF FAITH AND AESTHETICS OF LOSS

Austrian Cultural Politics in the First Republic and the Christian Corporate State

The clerico-authoritarian and corporate system in Austria following its First Republic from 1933 to the Nazi German annexation in 1938 is generally known as Austrofascism, a relatively recent term for a system that has been the subject of contested analysis and claims, and one that still causes division among historians and political scientists. The ideology of the Social Democratic Party of the First Republic is also known as Austromarxism for its unique national variant on the Marxist doctrines, particularly its “Intellectual Worker” concept, which was often accused of serving the bourgeoisie rather than fermenting revolution. Similarly, the unique antidemocratic right wing “Front,” which imagined an Austrian mission in Central Europe that had not ended with the Empire, and which understood Catholicism and corporatism as its philosophical and economic base structures, was also homegrown.¹ Ultimately, Austria ended up with two opposing antidemocratic forces—one based on the political right wing’s desire to quell both the socialism of the First Republic and growing German nationalism, which had already been one of the subversive elements of the transcultural Habsburg state, and another that found a racist mission in National Socialism. Their successes rested on the interests of foreign fascist leaders that considered Austria its charge: Mussolini for the Ständestaat or corporate clerico-authoritarian state, and Hitler for Austrian Nazism and integration into the Greater German Reich.

The Austrian authoritarian state under its two chancellors, Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg, has attracted various terms and combinations of qualifiers and modifiers that intend to capture the elusive internal values and the external assignment of meaning encountered in the hybridization of this regime’s ideology: Ständestaat (“State of Estates” corporate state), Heimwehrfaschismus (Heimwehr militia fascism), Halbfaschismus (half fascism), autoritäres Regime (authoritarian regime), Konkurrenzfaschismus (competition fascism), Imitationsfaschimus (imitation fascism), Regierungsdiktatur (government dictatorship), and the generalization that focuses on the regime’s reactionary desire to define an historically based Austrian sovereignty in authoritarianism within the scope of what was still considered the greater German nation, Austrofaschismus (Austrofascism).²

Such a variety of suggestive terms, the long avoidance of popular discourse on the period due to the partisan political atmosphere of the early Second Republic, and the relatively late scholarly analysis and access to records and resources, have all contributed to a continuing ambiguity surrounding this era and its politics. Moreover, much of the initial attempts at understanding the phenomenon of this movement, its culture, and its leaders have been limited to comparisons with Italy and Germany rather than to sorting out the implications of this panoply of fascistoid terms, especially as they also varied regionally within Austria. Questions remain even as examination grows: Was Austrofascism an undemocratic attempt at saving Austria’s sovereignty, which suggested groundwork for the creation of an Austrian national identity, or did its repression of the party system and parliamentary democracy encourage the National Socialist takeover in 1938? Could a democratic Austria have managed to resist the Anschluss, or did this postimperial neoabsolutistism simply prove that Austria’s sovereignty was of little interest to Europe regardless of what form its resistance might take?

The diverse terminology also suggests selectivity of purpose, as Emmerich Talos and Wolfgang Neugebauer posit, that has not aided in the understanding of the Austrian corporate state. Examination of its actual social, cultural, and political elements and contexts have brought us closer to discerning the qualities that made this regime so unique, and yet its cinema has been dismissed in these discussions on the basis of an assumed generalized decline in the arts due to the removal of the Left, to censorship, and to the clerical basis of the regime. This symptom is also part of the general lack of Austrian interest in its own significant cinema history until the emergence of the New Austrian Film at the end of the 1990s. Furthermore, the Austrian productions of the 1930s have been largely neglected and even maligned without the films being allowed to plead their visions to contemporary analysis, at least until recent film archival attempts at reconstructing the era as part of an overall endeavor to preserve film heritage.

Nevertheless, film used for propaganda, for nation building, and to project a people’s cultural imaginary is also the window into the soul of a regime and its ideology. It is the intent laid bare in audience reassuring or stimulating tropes, and the manipulation of a visual vocabulary that often is more powerful and more subversive than the cleverest demagogy. How then did film serve—or could it serve—the purposes of Austrofascism, and what was expected from filmmakers between 1933 and 1938? The popularity and variety of Austrian films made in that era—and they were popular for different reasons—underscores the failure of the ideology of a stable “Front” regime. It underscores the difficulty that scholars have had in understanding these films as a national cinema, as Austrian rather than just cosmopolitan or transculturally Viennese (in the way that émigré based Hollywood film is also American cinema), and in rejecting the folding into German cinema purely on the basis of language and shared talent. Ultimately, in retrospect and as a representative statement on concept of national cinema, Austrian film from 1933 to 1938 is as contradictory as the Austrian authoritarian state itself and successful in a manner wholly detached from the desires or conflicts of the regime.

Let me now turn to brief narratives to help clarify what is at stake in Austrian history and its state identity during the period under question.³ Following, I will introduce the cultural and market forces affecting the evolution of the Austrian film industry against this political landscape.

PRELUDE: OF THE RED AND THE BLACK

From its very conception as the poorly carved out German-language remnant of the disintegrated Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1919, through its First Republic (1919–1933) and the authoritarian state to 1938, Austria had two continuing crises that never abated: its economic survival, and the nature of its identity vis-à-vis the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. The economic challenges were formidable. The former imperial capital of Vienna, developed for an empire of sixty million, was now leading a fragment state of seven million. Inhabitants referred to it as the Wasserkopf or hydrocephalus, the inflated capital of a state where most of its traditional resources, natural and industrial, were now in other countries largely unfriendly to the now truncated and isolated core of what represented the former Habsburg empire. The first impulse regarding economic survival of the initial republican state was to join the equally beaten but relatively intact German republic (encouraged by the first head of state, the Social Democratic state chancellor Karl Renner under the provisional president Karl Seitz). That solution was denied by the Allied authors of the Treaty of Versailles, who had taken pains to reduce the size of the former German Empire and were not willing to increase it for the sake of Austria’s survival.

Even the Austrian state’s provisional name, German-Austria, which the state deemed necessary to differentiate it from all other “Austrias” of the past and present, revealed how isolated and problematically self-conscious the state would be. Independent Hungary and the other crownlands that had become postimperial states (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia) or joined re/established nations (Italy, Poland, Romania, Ukraine) hardly considered that the term Austria was descriptive of anything but Vienna and its Alpine territory westward. The Treaty of Saint Germain signed by Austria and the Allied Powers in 1919 was far more problematic in establishing the postimperial Austrian territory than the Versailles Treaty proved to be for Germany. Like so many of the resolutions of World War I, this treaty disregarded the actualities of Austro-German linguistic-cultural populations (in Bohemia and Moravia, as well as Italy) and favored the territorial demands of the breakaway crownlands, yet utilizing the same concept of a successor state as was the case with the redefinition of Germany. This ordained that legally and politically German-Austria would be treated as the single successor to the entire Empire, rather than the new state it actually was, which would have necessitated different definitions of its obligations and liabilities. The idea that Austria was now simply “what remains” (“L’Autriche, c’est ce qui reste”) as the Austrophobic French Prime Minister Clemenceau referred to it, would haunt it to its annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938 and beyond. It ensured that its development of a reborn political/national identity would be the most difficult and trauma-laden on the entire post World War I European continent. Indeed, from the proclamation of the Republic of Austria on November 12, 1918, through its first elections for a national assembly in February 1919; the seating of a coalition government composed of the Social Democratic Party, the Christian Social Party, the German National Parties, and the Communist Party; and the ratification of the new constitution in October 1920, an imbalance was created that would shape Austria’s interwar future. Coalition governments with small center-right interests kept the Christian Social Party in power nationally and moved the Social Democrats and the Left to control Vienna. Moreover, the very nature of the new state’s geography remained in question, with significant border regions threatening secession or annexation.

Several plebiscites intended to stabilize the new state had the opposite effect. In sorting out borders with Hungary, Austria lost the city of Sopron and gained the West Hungarian “Burgenland” province. Outright border conflicts with Slovenian occupation representing the new Yugoslav kingdom (defying the population of Lower Carinthia, which had favored Austria) became the trigger point for the Carinthian or Austria-Slovenian War of 1919–1920. Perhaps most complicated were the Tyrolean Plebiscite of 1921, in which German National Party adherents in East Tyrol aimed to join Germany, and the repercussions of the British Treaty of London (1915), which granted Trento, Trieste, and the Istrian Peninsula to Italy for its abandonment of the Central Powers. This plebiscite also included Italian-occupied South Tyrol (Bozen and Meran) and Venezia Giulia, which was not confirmed until June 1921. Additionally, the new elongated Austrian state seemed to have no geopolitical center: “The Alps and the Danube Valley divide the country into two unequal and distinct parts, and the federal capital of Vienna is far off center in the East. For the residents of Vorarlberg, Vienna and Paris are practically equidistant.”⁴

Not only did this geographic instability create a camp mentality that subverted the attempts of the new Austrian state to forge an identity that was as free of successor state mentality as its former partner in the Dual Monarchy, Hungary, but it also caused a provincial division that would pit Vienna and the “Danubian” region against the Alpine/Southern regions politically up to 1938, despite the efforts of the First Republic and the Austrofascist state to realign the regional identities of these territories with the new state. Politically, this division favored the Christian Social Party in the rural Alpine West and the South (the “Black” provinces, as per the color-coding of the political ideologies of the time) and the Social Democratic enclave of the capitol and its environs (“Red Vienna”⁵). This division also preserved an essentially two-party system that could not find a majority or even consider coalition for the sake of nation building. A third force threatened even this structure: the German Nationalists (whose representational color was blue), along with the support of rightist pan-German splinter parties—later the National Socialists or Austrian Nazis (brown)—continued to insist on union and thus ethnic/racial realization with Germany.

The inflexible party identification that divided Austria geographically did so also by class. The traditionalist, mostly practicing Catholic population that voted Black was rural provincial or urban middle class. The reform-minded mostly secular,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Structures
• Part 2: Genres, Narratives, Contexts
• Part 3: Locations
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover