Veit Harlan

The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker

Frank Noack

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813167008
• eBook ISBN: 9780813167015
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Veit Harlan (1899–1964) was one of Germany's most controversial and loathed directors. After studying with theatre and film pioneer Max Reinhardt and beginning a promising career, he became one of Joseph Goebbels's leading filmmakers under the National Socialist regime. Harlan's Jud Süss (Jew Suss, 1940), in particular, stands as one of the most artistically distinct and morally reprehensible films produced by the Third Reich. His involvement with this movie has led to many critical questions: Was the director truly forced to make the film under penalty of death? Is anti-Semitism a theme in his other productions? Can and should his work be studied in light of the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust?

The first English-language biography of the notorious director, Veit Harlan presents an in-depth portrait of the man who is arguably the only Nazi filmmaker with a distinct authorial style and body of work. Author Frank Noack reveals that both Harlan's life and work were marked by creative vision, startling ambiguities, and deep moral flaws. His meticulously detailed study explores the director's influence on German cinema and places his work within the contexts of World War II and film history as a whole.

Rivaled only by Leni Riefenstahl, Veit Harlan remains one of Germany's most infamous filmmakers, and virtually every book on Nazi cinema contains at least one chapter about Harlan or an analysis of one of his movies. This biography—supplemented by production histories and rare interviews with actors, actresses, and cameramen—offers the first comprehensive analysis of the director and his work and adds new perspective to the growing body of scholarship on filmmaking under the Third Reich.

PART 1

1

The Father

The Harlan family was of French Huguenot origin and had its name changed from “Herland” to “Harlan.”¹ Veit Harlan’s grandfather Otto had originally been a cloth maker and, after marrying Bertha Bienert—whose father, a former miller, had become the second-wealthiest man in Saxonia next to the king—successfully went into the bank business, acquiring the title of consul. On December 24, 1875, Bertha Harlan gave birth to Walter, Veit’s father. Seven more children followed until she died at the age of forty. Walter Harlan was to walk in his father’s footsteps, leaving his hometown Dresden to study law in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Leipzig to become more adept at leading a bank business. However, he turned out to be a passionate man led by instinct rather than by reason or duty. To his father’s dismay, the twenty-year-old student fell in love with a sixteen-year-old waitress who did not even know who her father was.

According to family legend, Adele Boothby was a foundling, the daughter of an Irish girl and a Gypsy man, left in a basket and raised by one Frau Boothby. In those years, Roma and Sinti were persecuted not on racial grounds but because of their lifestyles; their children could be integrated into bourgeois society if given up for adoption, which Adele’s mother seems to have done. Harlan family historian Ingrid Buchloh’s research for her book Veit Harlan led to different results. Adele’s father has remained unknown, indeed, but her mother’s identity was verifiable: she was chambermaid Rebecca Boothby, and the child was born in Hamburg on January 25, 1871. As is the case so often, the truth here is not too far from the legend. Rebecca Boothby did give her child away to foster parents immediately, so, according to National Socialist laws, Adele Harlan was “of dubious racial origin.” Interestingly, the only Jewish woman to appear in Jud Süss, a film whose Jewish cast is otherwise all male, is told by an old man who might be her grandfather or uncle or pimp, “Put on some clothes, Rebecca.” Adele ran away from her foster parents, joined a circus to become an actress, but ended up being a waitress in a Leipzig café. Whatever her social deficiencies, Walter Harlan fell in love with her. When his father threatened to disinherit him, he stood by his girlfriend and even enjoyed the thought of being a poor poet, poetry being his second “vice.” Curiously, he still succeeded as a law student. In Leipzig, he was promoted to doctor of the law and after his first law exam became Royal Saxon junior lawyer at the Leipzig Inferior Court (Amtsgericht). His interest in the law waned nevertheless. In 1894, he published a small volume of poems and in 1895 cofounded the literary and music magazine Die redenden Künste (The talking arts). He also got involved with an acting troupe, gaining experience as a performer and director.

By then, Walter had fathered two illegitimate children with his girlfriend of illegitimate birth. The couple’s first child, Walter, was born in 1893 but died before he could walk. Then came Esther, born on January 16, 1895. An offer to become dramatic adviser at the Lessing-Theater encouraged Walter Harlan to move to Berlin, where he and Adele finally married. Their next child, Peter, was born on February 20, 1898. Peter later became a music instrument manufacturer and helped to reestablish the Blockflöte (fipple flute or internal-duct flute). Walter Harlan’s first entry in the Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch (German stage almanac) is for the season from September 1, 1898, to July 1, 1899.² The Lessing-Theater had about 1,100 seats, and although its owner, Dr. Oskar Blumenthal, could not afford to put top talent under contract, his guest stars included such celebrities as Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt. The Harlans’ address at this time was Savignyplatz 12, which is one train station west of the Zoologischer Garten and a few minutes’ walk from the Kurfürstendamm. Walter did not remain at the Lessing-Theater for long—his last entry in the almanac was for the 1903–1904 season—but he did not lose interest in being a dramatic adviser. Having completed his novel Die Dichterbörse (The poet’s stock market, 1899), he worked on the critical theory book Die Schule des Lustspiels (The school of comedy, 1903), and the comedy Der Jahrmarkt in Polsnitz (State fair in Polsnitz), first presented in 1905 at the Dresden Court Theater, was his first major success as an author. It marked him as a poet who “knows how to turn low comedy into higher spheres.”³

Walter’s drama Das Nürnbergisch Ei (The Nurembergian egg), about the inventor of the pocketwatch, came out in 1913; two years later it was produced at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, with future stars Werner Krauss and Emil Jannings in supporting roles. It even found a New York publisher years later, in 1927. In Führer durch die deutsche Literatur des 20 Jahrhunderts (Guide through German literature of the twentieth century, 1913), Max Geissler complained that Harlan “likes to spice his works with weltanschauung and philosophy” and lapses into “overstatements and one-sidedness.”⁴ Because of his contributions to the German theater, Walter Harlan was elected chairman of the Verband Deutscher Bühnenschriftsteller und Bühnenkomponisten (Association of German Stage Authors and Composers). His closest friend was the conservative Jewish stage theoretician Julius Bab, who dedicated his book Nebenrollen (Secondary roles, 1913) to him. Today, there would be no mention of Walter Harlan if not for his son. In an obituary for the Deutsches Bühnen-Jahrbuch 1932, he was described as a writer who, though “as a whole not of the first rank,” was “pleasant” and whose chief virtue was his “unpretentiousness and his honest care for the form.”⁵ The obituary ended by mentioning that Walter’s son was, “as everybody knows, for several years an outstanding member of the Berlin State Theater.” The truth was that not everybody knew Walter Harlan, and nobody really used the word outstanding in connection with him.

Walter’s younger brother Wolfgang (1882–1951) chose a completely different path, becoming an airplane engineer (inventing the “Harlan–Eindecker” monoplane) and car manufacturer. Curiously, most of Walter and Adele’s grandchildren would pursue either artistic or technical professions, and Veit Harlan’s first grandson became a lawyer. Politically, most of Walter Harlan’s siblings were right-leaning nationalists, whereas he himself was a liberal. In religious terms, he defined himself as a neo-Lutheran. Adele Harlan enjoyed her husband’s increasing success as both lawyer and poet but remained socially insecure, frequently becoming ill. She left an indelible impression on the young playwright Sigmund Graff, who remembered, “She had deep black hair and noble features. I would have thought her to be Jewish, but her children told me that her Aryan papers had been lost when a ship went down. Her being was tender, almost submissive. As I learnt later, Harlan had met her in a night club where she had sold flowers.”⁶ Adele Harlan was possibly the inspiration for such Harlan film characters as Aels in Opfergang: wild, mysterious, and frail women whose temperament brings life into a stiff upper-class family. Her dark side and feminine neurosis in general would remain a taboo subject for Harlan throughout his career. The central women characters he created were pure and innocent, sinned against but never sinning.

2

The Son

In Walter and Adele Harlan’s Savignyplatz apartment, Veit Harlan was born on September 22, 1899, at 9:15 p.m. Like all of his siblings, he was baptized as a Protestant. A third son, Fritz Moritz, was born on January 26, 1901. He became an opera singer, beginning his career in 1926 in operettas at the Grosses Schauspielhaus Berlin. His actress daughter, Christiane Susanne, was to play the only female role in the film Paths of Glory (1957) and marry its director, Stanley Kubrick. Her brother, Jan, also became an important Kubrick associate, working as production manager or producer on all of his films from A Clockwork Orange (1971) to Eyes Wide Shut (1999).¹ When A Clockwork Orange was dubbed into German, Veit Harlan’s daughter Maria spoke the part of the psychiatrist, and the dubbing director was Wolfgang Staudte, who had played a small part in Jud Süss.

Walter and Adele Harlan then had a daughter, Berta Elise, who was born on July 16, 1906. Called “Lise,” she studied dance under Mary Wigman, whose unique style was conserved for eternity by such pupils as La Jana and Leni Riefenstahl. Lise was engaged to a man of Jewish faith, but then she married a Gentile and had eight children by him. Another daughter, Nele, was born on December 26, 1908. She took on the name “Jakob” by marriage and became a photographer. In the 1930s, she was registered with the Fotografisches Atelier für Bildnis und Werbung on Deidesheimer Strasse in Berlin-Wilmersdorf. Veit Harlan did not take his sisters’ professions seriously. With casual, unintentional cruelty, he wrote in his memoirs: “I don’t have to introduce my three sisters. They will hardly make claims for that. Their lives were passed in bourgeois Gleichklang [accordance or consonance].”² He himself had to fight for attention, being of smaller size than his brothers. He astonished and shocked his family with daredevil stunts, such as walking upstairs on his hands. On one such occasion, he suffered a severe head injury and indeed would have headaches for the rest of his life. Like so many children, he also did some shoplifting, and when he was caught, his punishment was unusual. Instead of getting some slaps in the face, he was forced by his father to walk down the sidewalk carrying a sign around his neck that said “I am a thief.”

Another incident was so dramatic that both father and son would turn it into works of fiction. Because of Adele Harlan’s vulnerable state of mind, her husband had given little Veit into the care of a maid whose name was Maria Klimek. She came from a small village, and when she visited her family, she was allowed to take Veit with her. In the village, other boys talked him into joining them to hunt for crawfish in a mountain torrent, naturally without informing the adults about their adventure. It began to rain heavily. Maria desperately searched for the boy but could not find him because he and the other boys had taken refuge under a bridge. The wild water caused such a noise that communication was impossible. The incident had a happy outcome, nobody got hurt, but Maria’s hysteria left a deep impression on Walter and Veit, respectively. Walter wrote the novella Die Kindsmagd (The maid, date unknown) on which Veit’s first melodrama Maria, die Magd would be based. A family’s desperate search for a lost child or woman would become a recurrent motif in his oeuvre, providing highlights for Jugend, Die Reise nach Tilsit, Jud Süss, Die goldene Stadt, and Es war die erste Liebe. A second childhood experience that influenced Harlan’s films was the contrast between two different worlds or two different temperaments. Harlan’s parents were opposite but equal. As a director, Harlan treated both the familiar and the alien characters with equal attention. As an actor, he portrayed five Jews, one black African, and one Japanese. The first women he fell in love with were a French teacher and two Jewish actresses. His mother, who had completely spoiled him, did not like any of his girlfriends or wives.

The Harlans had moved from the noisy Savignyplatz to the more off-center Kunz-Buntschuh-Strasse 10 in the Halensee district when film pioneer Max Mack asked to use their garden for a shooting. His cameraman had fallen ill, though, so fourteen-year-old Veit was allowed to turn the hand crank. He did not catch motion-picture fever at this time, even though in that year, 1913, Mack had enhanced the new medium’s status by hiring stage great Albert Bassermann for his drama Der Andere (The other), and Paul Wegener had scored a groundbreaking artistic success with Der Student von Prag (The student of Prague), in which he played a double role with the help of inventive split-screen technology. Veit preferred watching the era’s best actors onstage, and because he did not like being part of the audience, he applied for and got work as an extra. Only the most prestigious theater in town was good enough for him, so he went to Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, sharing the stage with Tilla Durieux and Paul Wegener in Judith (performed between 1910 and 1912) and with his real-life neighbor Alexander Moissi in The Living Corpse. He had seen Josef Kainz, who would die in 1910, guesting as Hamlet, and he personally heard Enrico Caruso sing. He was stunned by the Moscow Art Theater under Konstantin Stanislawski. There was no lack of inspiration for him.

The Luisen-Theater in the Reichenberger Strasse, led by Ernst Ritterfeld, was far less prestigious; its productions were not even reviewed by the critics. But here the young Veit was no longer an extra and got substantial roles, such as the rascal Moritz in Max und Moritz. He also appeared in adaptations of novels by Hedwig Courths-Mahler, who was the German equivalent to Fannie Hurst and equally underrated. Courths-Mahler appealed chiefly to housewives and chambermaids but managed to touch on some social issues to raise her apolitical readers’ consciousness. Veit also got parts at the Rose and Triano Theaters. The German Stage Almanac lists him as a member of the Luisen-Theater in 1917, and the October 4 issue of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger contains a cast list for an obviously sentimental play called Die Rose vom Rhein (Rose of the Rhine), in which he played the servant Franz. He liked drawing and sculpting, even at one point becoming a silversmith’s apprentice. There clearly was a desire in him to form something, and it says a great deal that the young Veit tried to express himself in the visual arts. He had no interest in writing. He did write his own screenplays when he became a director and autobiographical texts after 1945, yet he used language merely to express something else and never was in love with language for its own sake.

Meanwhile, World War I had devastating consequences for the civil populace. Harlan led a privileged life; his autobiography Im Schatten meiner Filme (In the shadow of my films, 1966) mentions no hunger or the various epidemics that killed millions of middle Europeans. He did, however, volunteer as a soldier on the Western Front, developed the first signs of a heart ailment that was widespread in his family, and fell in love for the first time, with a Frenchwoman called Lucile whom he met while using his skills as an interpreter in Viviers-Aucourt. Whatever happened between him and Lucile in the Ardennes, the affair ended as soon as Germany lost the war. He wrote passionate letters to her, which were returned unopened. Like so many recollections of youth, this episode cannot be verified, nor can rumors be verified that on that occasion he produced his first child.

Max Reinhardt had told Harlan that to become a director, he must be an actor first, so he took acting lessons at the Reinhardt-Seminar. In 1919, he became a trainee at the Volksbühne am Bülowplatz. Originally under Reinhardt’s control, with Deutsches Theater productions being presented to less-demanding audiences—same play, inferior cast—the Volksbühne was now led by Friedrich Kayssler, one of several first-class actors who tried their luck away from Reinhardt. One might unkindly say that older actors under contract to the Volksbühne were past their prime, and its young actors could be wooed away, which would happen with Harlan. The Volksbühne was definitely a step up for him from the Luisen, Rose, and Triano Theaters. On December 15, he got his first mention in a respected newspaper, the Berliner Börsen-Courier. The occasion was Goethe’s heroic drama Götz von Berlichingen, and the critic wrote that “the bits by the gentl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Individualist in a Totalitarian State
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Epilogue: “Hitler, Harlan, Honecker”
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Quotes on Harlan
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index