Antisemitism in Film Comedy in Nazi Germany

Valerie Weinstein

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253040725
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

1. This book provides a new perspective and interpretation of Nazi comedy films that explores films where antisemitism is not overt, but instead present in the absence of Jewishness. It is a timely look at how prejudice and racism can manifest by absence in popular culture. German readers may find this book controversial, because it shows that the much loved, classic comedies they have assumed are innocent are tainted by Nazi antisemitism.

2. This is a work that further illuminates how and why challenging racism's most overt manifestations has not been enough to eliminate racism's institutional effects in today's culture.

3. This book has a broad appeal across a number of audiences where we have a strong presence as a press: Antisemitism Studies, Film & Media studies, Jewish Studies, and Holocaust studies. It is written by an up-and-coming scholar of German cinema.

1

OVERT AND INFERENTIAL ANTISEMITISM IN NAZI WRITINGS AND THE FILM TRADE PRESS

IN THIS CHAPTER, I HIGHLIGHT RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN OVERT antisemitism and implicit discourses of Jewish difference in Third Reich writing about film, relationships that explain how antisemitism came to shape German film comedy and that illustrate how inferential antisemitism works. Inferences based on what a word or concept usually means enable speakers and listeners (or writers and readers, filmmakers and spectators, and so on) to communicate with one another and to negotiate the meaning of their communications. Associations with known discourses, patterns, and communal norms, which change based on time, place, and perspective, make such inferences possible. The interplay of inferences made by different individuals results in meaning being contextually dependent and neither fixed nor static. Rooted in communal norms and larger inferential patterns, such inferences are not arbitrary. Speakers license listeners to infer that which is commonly meant or understood by a particular word or phrase. The same is true of visual representations. Therefore, inferences, which are necessary for communication, also tend to have a normative function, perpetuating the concepts, premises, and communicative rules that a statement or representation was based on in the first place.¹ The implicit coding of Jewish difference in some Third Reich film writing and in many Third Reich film comedies licenses inferences linked to the overtly antisemitic discourses around them, generating inferential meanings that naturalize and normalize antisemitic premises. I call this antisemitic residue, licensed by codings of Jewish difference particular to a specific historical-discursive context, inferential antisemitism.

Inferential antisemitism reinforces assumptions, values, tropes, and language fundamental to overt antisemitism without targeting Jews explicitly and without necessarily intending to target them at all. Some instances of inferential antisemitism discussed here unselfconsciously reproduce Nazi-era cultural norms with antisemitic inflections. Other instances mobilize existing tropes of Jewish difference, separate the “Jewish” from the “non-Jewish,” and attack identifiable components of the former. The construct of the “Jewish,” as inherited and adapted by the Nazis, encompassed a suite of abstract negative concepts, such as intellectualism, cunning, and greed. Within the inferential networks created by overtly antisemitic polemic in Nazi Germany, statements condemning international capitalism—for example, the constraints it imposed on German film art and the sexual immorality it promoted—function as inferential antisemitism. Without naming Jews, such statements echo overtly antisemitic accusations and reject components of the “Jewish,” which the Nazis sought to purge and about which they spoke openly and frequently. By expounding on the significance and coding of Jewishness in the Third Reich and emphasizing the conceptual links between overt and inferential antisemitism, this chapter reframes inferential antisemitism in Third Reich film comedy in a way that renders it legible to outsiders.

Some inferential antisemitism is accompanied by innuendo, as described by Theodor Adorno in his essay titled “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda.” According to Adorno, “one of the intrinsic characteristics of the fascist ritual is innuendo, sometimes followed by the actual revelation of the facts hinted at, sometimes not.”² Of innuendo at fascist political rallies, Adorno writes, “For example, the agitator says ‘those dark forces, you know whom I mean,’ and the audience at once understands that his remarks are directed against the Jews. The listeners are thus treated as an in-group who already know everything the orator wishes to tell them and who agree with him before any explanation is given.”³ Like humor, which separates those who do and do not get the joke, innuendo creates in-groups and out-groups, forging communities who get the allusion and others who don’t.⁴ Building on the work of Sigmund Freud, Adorno argues that innuendo creates cohesion and identity; it binds “feeling and opinion,” “leader and follower,” and “conscious and unconscious.”⁵ Innuendo facilitates imagining a Volksgemeinschaft free of Jews. It creates a non-Jewish “us” with a secret code (and, in comedies, a shared sense of humor), opposed to a Jewish “them” that the allusion or joke excludes. Both innuendo and inferential patterns created by overt antisemitism activated implicit codings of Jewish difference in Third Reich writings about film and comedy, resulting in inferential antisemitism.

While theorizing and explaining the relationship between overt and inferential antisemitism, this chapter reconstructs some of the ideological and aesthetic conversations that informed filmmaking under the Nazi dictatorship. It explains the dominant understandings and coding of Jewish difference in relation to German film and film humor in the period. It refines the concept of inferential antisemitism and reconstructs inferential patterns that make it easier to interpret not only the overt but also the inferential manifestations of antisemitism in Third Reich film comedy.

Inferential Networks: Overt Antisemitism, German Film, and German Humor

In Nazi Germany, widespread overt antisemitism created inferential patterns around the coding of Jewish difference, licensing audiences to make antisemitic inferences based on such coding. Building on preexisting understandings of Jewish difference, Nazis insisted that Jews and their power were pervasive and dangerous and that they needed to be eliminated. They misinterpreted Jewish scripture to show how it reflected negative, alien values resulting from the Jewish people’s origins in “ancient, unharmonious racial mixings.”⁶ Josef Keller and Hanns Andersen, for example, in Der Jude als Verbrecher (The Jew as Criminal), allege that the Talmud demands Jews follow Jewish law primarily as a tit-for-tat that will make them rich and powerful and that by prohibiting various sexual behaviors and temptations, Jewish religious texts prove Jews to be inherently prone to transgressive sexuality.⁷ Keller and Andersen assert that “three features are characteristic of the Jew: unscrupulous lust for power, lust for money, and a high degree of sexual lust, paired with ‘morality’ that is alien and hostile to us.”⁸ Nazis conceived of Jewishness as both congenital and infectious. Julius Streicher, publisher of the rabidly antisemitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer (The Stormer), proclaimed that Jews, like bacteria, had infected Germans, their institutions, and their culture with “Jewishness,” which needed to be purged.⁹ Consequently, the Nazis’ obsessive elimination of Jewish influence targeted not only Jewish people but also a disembodied, identifiable Jewishness that existed independently of them. The elimination of real Jews and their influence and the phantasm of lingering, pervasive, and infectious Jewishness directly motivated the restructuring of the film industry and stylistic and thematic shifts in German film under Nazi leadership.

Imagining a racially authentic German culture depended on separating the “Jewish” from the “non-Jewish.” Abstract, racist understandings of Jewishness, the premise that Jewish influence was a Kulturschande (a shaming, dishonoring, or deflowering of culture), and the proposition that Jews dominated the film industry grounded Nazi cultural policy. According to Der Stürmer, Jews were “the people of decomposition, the people of degradation and destruction” that seduced and preyed upon Kulturvölker (peoples of culture) like the Germans.¹⁰ The Nazi position was an extreme version of widespread perceptions of and dissatisfaction with the extensive involvement of Jewish people in German media, literature, and the arts prior to 1933. According to Saul Friedländer, “the ‘pernicious’ influence of Jews on German culture was the most common theme of Weimar antisemitism. On this terrain, the conservative German bourgeoisie, the traditional academic world, the majority of opinion in the provinces—in short, all those who ‘felt German’ came together with the more radical anti-Semites.”¹¹

Within such a conceptual framework, the actual involvement of Jewish people in German cinema during the Weimar Republic metamorphosed, in antisemitic imaginations and rhetoric, into Jewish control and aesthetic and ethical corruption of German film. In 1933, Der Angriff (The Attack), the Berlin Nazi newspaper, claimed that 90 percent of the members of the pre-Nazi German film industry were Jewish.¹² For committed antisemites, such inflated statistics substantiated what they perceived as a major problem. Nazis claimed that Jewish domination had made Weimar cinema a decadent commercial product targeted at international markets and lacking in authentic expression of German racial values and artistry. Removing Jews and their influence would enable German film art to flourish.

The distinction between the “Jewish” and the “non-Jewish” was fundamental to Goebbels’s vision for the film industry, which emphasized the liberation of German film from presumed Jewish economic and artistic influence. In a major address to 1,500 film industry members at the Krolloper in Berlin on December 14, 1935, Goebbels boasted that “the accomplishment of making the film industry, which at the time of the political transition was almost exclusively in non-Aryan hands, pure German, is so great that it alone could mean a justification of the film politics of the Third Reich.”¹³ Goebbels, however, did not see his successful removal of people with Jewish ancestry from German filmmaking as having accomplished his ultimate goal; he also wanted to erase what he construed as lingering Jewish effects on the industry. Goebbels and other party ideologues believed that “Jewish” obsessions with profit had damaged film stylistically, turning it into an assembly-line industrial product rather than a work of art. Thus, in his address at the Krolloper, Goebbels called for filmmakers to turn away from “shallow amusement wares” and the “serial production of copycats,” both coded as Jewish.¹⁴ Instead, he wanted the German film industry to produce non-Jewish films, or “good and decent” films that reflect everyday life, that are perceived as German by both domestic and export audiences, and that make “contact with the Volk,” whose taste the artist should guide.¹⁵ To that end, Goebbels announced changes in film production and distribution intended to increase German film’s artistic value. Goebbels’s scorn for film as an industrial product (Jewish film), Germany’s need to produce artistic films that were true to life and to the Volk (non-Jewish film), and his desire to cultivate audience tastes appeared often, both in Goebbels’s other writings and speeches and throughout much film policy and criticism of the time. While not always stated as overtly as in the speech at the Krolloper, removing both Jews and Jewishness from German film was central to this agenda.

The most detailed formulation of how Nazis conceived of and sought to defeat Jewish influence in film is Carl Neumann, Curt Belling, and Hans Walther Betz’s book...