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www.dbebooks.com - Free Books & magazines POPULAR CINEM A OF THE THIRD REICH THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK SABINE HAKE Popular Cinema of the Third Reich UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUS TIN Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2001 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819. ⬁ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of 䊊 ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). LIBR ARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Hake, Sabine, 1956 – Popular cinema of the Third Reich / Sabine Hake.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-292-73457-3 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 0-292-73458-1 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. National socialism and motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures— Germany—History. I. Title. pn1995.9.n36 h34 2001 791.43⬘0943⬘09043— dc21 2001027790 CONTENTS Preface vii 1. Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema: A Definition of Terms 1 2. Made in 1933: German-Jewish Filmmakers and the Forced Coordination of the Industry 23 3. Cinema, Set Design, and the Domestication of Modernism 46 4. At the Movies: Film Audiences and the Problem of Spectatorship 5. Stars: Heinz Rühmann and the Performance of the Ordinary 68 87 6. Detlef Sierck and Schlußakkord (Final Chord, 1936): A Case Study of Film Authorship 107 7. The Foreign and the Familiar: On German-American Film Relations, 1933–1940 8. The Annexation of an Imaginary City: The Topos “Vienna” and the Wien-Film AG 128 149 9. The Power of Thought: Redefining Popular Cinema between Realism and Illusionism 172 10. A Question of Representation: Working Women and Wartime Cinema 189 11. The Legacies of the Past in the Cinema of Postwar Reconstruction 210 Notes 231 Select Bibliography 263 Index of German Titles and Names 267 THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK PREFACE Why another study on the cinema of the Third Reich, and why now? The slow unification of both Germanys after the opening of the Berlin Wall and the changing political landscape in Europe since the 1990s have brought a renewed interest in the Third Reich, especially around issues of popular culture and everyday life. Many factors have contributed to this development: the revisionist histories of the Third Reich and their relevance to the conception of postwar Germany; the confrontation with the legacies of the German Democratic Republic and the old Federal Republic; the heated debates around appropriate forms of public commemoration in relation to the Holocaust and World War II; and the growing attention to questions of nation and national identity in the new Berlin Republic. In the cultural sphere, the return to conventional genre films since the 1990s has demonstrated the importance of indigenous popular traditions. Contributing to this trend, German film scholars have turned to the cinema of the Third Reich and begun to explore previously neglected areas and uncharted territories in what is still regarded by many as a highly problematic period of film history. Most initiatives have been informed by the desire to move beyond deterministic theories of propaganda and ideology and incorporate more film-specific methods and inquiries. The main focus has been on the so-called Unterhaltungsfilme (literally, entertainment films) that, more than anything, confirm the pervasive influence of popular culture. Among other things, this revisionist project has drawn attention to the conflicts, contradictions, and compromises in a cinema all too often dismissed as escapist entertainment or vilified as mass manipulation. Yet what still deserves to be examined in greater detail are the heterogeneous elements, including the social fantasies, cultural traditions, economic interests, and institutional pressures, that thrive even under the conditions of state ownership or control. It is in response to these larger debates that my study on popular cinema in the Third Reich calls for the normalization of German film history. Until unification, Third Reich cinema has been treated as the ultimate Other of German cinema and its competing discourses of art cinema, popular cinema, and national cinema. Especially the totalizing views of cinema and propaganda, ideology, and the fascist imaginary have provided a substitute for detailed historical research and political analysis. Likewise, the circular reasoning behind much writing (e.g., cinema as ideology as cinema) has produced the kind of extraterritorial space, or bifurcated narrative, that makes possible the reconstruction of an untainted filmic tradition associated with Weimar cinema, exile cinema, DEFA cinema, and New German cinema. The more Third Reich cinema is conceptualized in the homogenizing terms of domination and conformity, the more the pre-1933 and post-1945 years can be associated with a liberating heterogeneity. The identification of fascist mass culture with classical Hollywood cinema often has a similar effect, with the blanket dismissal of these two extreme examples of the culture industry opening up a space for the (often posthumous) validation of modernist practices and postmodern sensibilities. Normalization in this overdetermined context therefore means the recognition of the continuities on the aesthetic, cultural, social, and economic levels that haunt the history of German film beyond all ideological divisions and political ruptures; it also means an acute awareness of the paradoxical, asymmetrical, and nonsynchronous relationship between cinema and politics both then and now. As a result, Third Reich cinema can no longer be treated as an aberration of the past but must be acknowledged as an integral part of the aesthetic and ideological legacies of the twentieth century, including its traumas and burdens. The present book contributes to the reassessment of popular cinema in the Third Reich by redefining both the subject and the method of investigation. Three basic assumptions inform my thinking about the material to be presented on the following pages. First, cinema in the Third Reich was above all a popular cinema sustained by well-established generic conventions, cultural traditions, aesthetic sensibilities, social practices, and a highly developed star system. Second, these popular forms and styles developed through the selective incorporation of elements from the pre-1933 period into post-1933 cultural practices and the ongoing transformation of these viii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich elements in the productive encounter with other national cinemas, especially the dominant Hollywood model. Third, the discourses of the popular and the political remained at odds with each other and, based on their different investment in the national and the international, and the modern and the traditional, entered into highly unstable and invariably provisional alliances. Beyond the institutional and ideological pressures typical of any state-controlled cinema, the often evoked specter of a media dictatorship remained precisely that: a phantasmagoria. However, this phantasmagoria also opened up a space for the convergence of popular traditions, cultural ambitions, and international styles in the building of a public sphere presumably free of politics. Paying equal attention to the constituent elements of popular cinema is relevant not only for the rewriting of film history but also for a better understanding of the politics of entertainment during (and after) the Third Reich. In light of these wider implications, the prevailing filmic forms and practices can no longer be reduced to the opposition of entertainment vs. propaganda, nor can they be examined solely through the intentions of the Propaganda Ministry or the thematic overlaps with key ideas in Nazi ideology. Instead the process of incorporation, transformation, and instrumentalization must be evaluated in the larger context of German cinema, including its history and historiography. For this reason, I propose to shift the terms of the debate from the study of individual films to the examination of popular cinema as a social, cultural, economic, and political practice. That means: to move beyond the text-based models shared by the earliest studies on film propaganda and the most recent theories of the fascist imaginary and to develop further the contextual models that show popular cinema as a historically specific articulation of social fantasies and mentalities and examine its relevance as an ongoing negotiation of conflicting positions and influences. Key to this conceptual realignment is the insistence on cinema as a material practice and historical force. Yet new insights into the simultaneously stabilizing and destabilizing function of popular cinema can only be gained through approaches that recognize its multiple functions as a local and national industry, a cultural institution, a public sphere, a social experience, and, of course, a fantasy machine. Defining popular cinema as a dynamic process that involves aesthetic styles and social practices, cultural traditions and economic products, public institutions and private imaginations, and, last but not least, various notions of “the popular” expands the area of investigation not only in relation Preface ix to the constituent elements and processes. Greater awareness of the complex nature of popular cinema and its privileged moments of crisis, controversy, and compromise also forces us to rethink many of the tacit assumptions about the sociopsychological function of mass entertainment in the Third Reich and, more generally, in modern Germany. In particular, the event-based nature of cinema brings out the most effective forms of negotiation and the most important areas of contention in the social and cultural practices that are implicated in, but never reducible to, dominant ideology. The theoretical implications of approaching popular cinema as a site of ongoing struggle are far-reaching. In terms of German film history, the focus on typical genres, tastes, and styles draws attention to the discontinuous continuities—that is, the prevailing modes of representation and their changing critical and aesthetic investments—that defined classical genre cinema from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Moreover, the attention to industry practices and audience expectations highlights the extensive exchanges, again with the necessary modifications, between a self-consciously national (and nationalistic) cinema and the kind of international tendencies and developments associated with Hollywood. In terms of modern German history, the emphasis on popular traditions shifts the terms of the debate from a deterministic relationship between cinema and ideology to the often inconsistent articulation of that relationship in economic strategies, political measures, artistic traditions, social movements, and, perhaps most importantly, popular tastes and mentalities. And in terms of film studies, the combination of textual and historical analysis moves the study of popular cinema beyond the binaries of propagandistic vs. escapist, subversive vs. affirmative, or innovative vs. conformist that continue to influence the debates on the fascist imaginary in often unproductive ways. As I want to argue, popular cinema in the Third Reich must be approached through its inherent contradictions. On the one hand, its most successful genres and most popular stars confirm the formative influence of the early Weimar sound period and point to even stronger connections with the classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s. On the other hand, the Gleichschaltung (forced coordination) of the industry in 1933 completed the institutional alignment with the ideology of National Socialism, primarily through the new anti-Semitic measures and the creation of a highly politicized genre, the so-called Staatsauftragsfilm (state-commissioned film). On the one hand, the identification of popular cinema with escapist entertainment helped to maintain the institutional divisions between high and low x Popular Cinema of the Third Reich culture and between the public and private sphere of which cinema had always been an integral part. On the other hand, the affinities of popular cinema with consumerism, urbanism, and everyday life dissolved these bourgeois categories of distinction into more elusive configurations between aesthetics and politics, power and desire. On the one hand, the emphasis on fantasy and illusion made popular cinema a privileged site for the imaginary resolution of social and psychological conflicts and therefore instrumental to the preservation of the status quo. On the other hand, the cinematic experience in the widest sense gave rise to other meanings and effects that, while not subversive as such, often threatened the overall system of prohibitions, restrictions, and controlled transgressions. Articulating some of these contradictions, the book is organized around different aspects of popular cinema and, by extension, elements of film analysis (e.g., genres, stars, directors, audiences). By exposing Third Reich cinema to these categories, the following eleven chapters try to shed light on the cinema’s precarious position between political, social, and economic interests; regional, national, and international influences; high and low culture, as well as modern and antimodern definitions of art and design; petit bourgeois, popular, populist, and völkisch traditions; and the various ideologies that sustained classical narrative cinema during the 1930s and early 1940s, including the ideology of National Socialism. In such an expanded definition of popular cinema, the popular and its affiliated terms (e.g., populist, folkloric, petit bourgeois) open up a new perspective not only on German cinema before 1933 and after 1945 but also on the function of film history and, by extension, of cultural history in the conceptualization of popular culture in relation to national culture, regional culture, and folk culture. Several assumptions entered into the selection and presentation of the historical material. First, only a context-based definition of popular cinema is able to reconstruct the processes of appropriation, incorporation, and transformation that connected filmic practices after 1933 to the Weimar period and to classical Hollywood cinema and that facilitated the many overlaps with musical, literary, and theatrical culture. Second, the mass appeal of popular cinema must be examined through the functioning of cinema as social experience and public event and, furthermore, through its affinities with modern design, urban lifestyles, and other mass media practices. Third, the ideological functions of popular cinema, whether in relation to classical narrative cinema or the fascist public sphere, have to be assessed Preface xi primarily through its successes and failures—that is, through those moments where the plans about political indoctrination and mass manipulation are implemented, modified, or abandoned altogether. While taking the form of self-contained essays, the individual chapters are organized in a roughly chronological fashion that acknowledges the considerable differences between the prewar and war years and pays close attention to the filmic legacies associated with the years before 1933 and after 1945. In the selection of the material, I have tried to strike a balance between relatively unknown topics (e.g., film theory in the Third Reich) and topics with heightened relevance to film theoretical debates (e.g., Detlef Sierck and authorship). Moreover, I have made an effort to include a wide variety of primary and secondary sources that, in ranging from star biographies to studio histories and reception studies, are bound to bring out the complexities and contradictions of the historical period under investigation. Finally, I have emphasized the perspective of the typical, the average, and the ordinary in order to move away from the few privileged texts that have been enlisted in the creation of a new symptomatology of fascism. Accordingly, Chapter 1 looks at the peripheral role of popular cinema in the existing scholarship on propaganda and ideology and proposes a critical reassessment of ambiguous terms such as “escapist” and “entertainment” and their discursive function in the context of national cinema and popular culture. Chapter 2 reflects on the historical designation “made in 1933” by measuring the impact of anti-Semitism through the thematization of exclusion in two romantic comedies by German-Jewish directors. Chapter 3 considers the legacies of high modernism in the work of several famous set designers from the Weimar years and traces the domestication of the modern style from the technological thrillers of the early 1930s to the women’s films of the early 1940s. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the extensive debates on audiences in the trade press and in academic scholarship and shows to what degree mass-psychological theories served to address persistent concerns about the elusive conditions of film reception. Chapter 5 enlists the screen persona of Heinz Rühmann and his approach to comic acting in a sustained reflection on the crisis of modern masculinity and petit bourgeois consciousness. To continue with this brief overview, Chapter 6 uses a close reading of Detlef Sierck’s Schlußakkord to look at film authorship in relation to the stylistic possibilities of melodrama and the genre’s precarious alliance with artistic and cultural ambitions after 1933. Chapter 7 expands the concept of xii Popular Cinema of the Third Reich national cinema into international practices by comparing the undiminished appeal of Hollywood films during the 1930s and the very different situation of German films in U.S. markets. Chapter 8 follows the changing meaning of “Vienna” as an important cultural and political topos in German and Austrian films made before and after the annexation, with special attention paid to Willi Forst’s Vienna Trilogy. Chapter 9 approaches the extensive writings on film during the Third Reich as part of an ongoing, and ultimately failed, effort to incorporate older discourses of filmic realism into a more flexible aesthetic of reception indebted to fascist notions of populism and folk culture. Chapter 10 analyzes the overdetermined function of women, and the problem of modern femininity, by looking at the representation of working women in wartime cinema. And Chapter 11 considers the diverse attempts at coming to terms with the cinema’s own past in a number of postwar films about, and with, famous stars from the Third Reich. The individual chapters are designed in the form of case studies that, while contributing to a coherent argument about the highly adaptable nature of popular cinema, cannot be reduced to one particular thematic focus or conceptual category. In response to the particular difficulties of writing about cinema in the Third Reich, I have chosen an approach that articulates my resistance to totalizing models on both the conceptual and analytical levels. Aiming at a kaleidoscopic effect, as it were, every chapter is structured around one particular problem or problematic. To give an example, Chapter 4 on film audiences focuses on the prevailing debates on audience preferences during the Third Reich but also considers the wider implications of introducing a category like reception into the study of a cinema often described as totalitarian. Ideally every critical category sheds light on all the other categories and, in so doing, contributes to the process of historical revision that draws attention to the economic, ideological, cultural, and social influences and the pervasiveness of institutional and aesthetic compromises. Moreover, every aspect of popular cinema interacts with all the other aspects in order to bring out the multitude of filmic practices that can neither be reduced to, nor separated from, the ideological and institutional pressures associated with National Socialism, the Propaganda Ministry, and the film industry during the Third Reich. Within this kaleidoscopic structure, the individual chapters are nonetheless connected to each other through a number of recurring themes: the generic and stylistic traditions that link filmic practices in the Third Reich to the Weimar period and the postwar years (2 and 11); the centrality of clasPreface xiii sical narrative cinema and the star system (7 and 11); the persistent problems in defining the project of national cinema against the dominance of Hollywood and through alliances with other German-speaking cinemas (7 and 9); the almost compulsive concern with identity, especially in relation to gender and class (1 and 10); the preoccupation with audiences and questions of spectatorship (4 and 9); the strong ties between popular cinema and musical culture and the heavy reliance on literary and theatrical traditions (6 and 9); and, last but not least, the continuous compromises on all levels between film as art, entertainment, commodity, and propaganda (5 and 6). As regards the wider implications of this study, my reasons for creating these kaleidoscopic effects can be summarized as follows: First, by focusing on popular cinema, I hope to move beyond the conceptual models that subordinate filmic practices to theories of fascism or the culture industry, and, in so doing, stabilize their more problematic qualities through the aesthetic and ideological effects attributed to popular cinema. Second, by organizing my argument around the main elements of cinema, rather than those of politics and ideology, I want to emphasize what I have earlier described as discontinuous continuities in German cinema before 1933 and after 1945 and in international developments during the 1930s and early 1940s. From such a perspective, what is at stake is no longer just the cinema of the Third Reich, but German cinema as a whole. Of course, my intention is neither to depict popular cinema in the Third Reich as merely an artistically inferior or ideologically more insidious version of Hollywood; nor to disregard the conditions of production and reception in a state-controlled cinema and incorporate its films into an undifferentiated body of work—that is, of mass entertainment—available to changing forms of cultural consumption. On the contrary, it is my belief that only this process of historical revision will bring into relief the particular characteristics—the Otherness— of German cinema after 1933, and do so precisely through the practices shared with other national cinemas of the period. Only by moving beyond the double dangers of demonization and banalization can we engage productively with the continuous challenge of the Third Reich to present-day debates on popular culture and political ideology. In the writing of the book, many friends and colleagues have generously offered their support during various stages of the project, and I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to them: Lucy Fischer, xiv Popular Cinema of the Third Reich Mary-Beth O’Brien, Stephen Brockmann, Fred Evans, Gerd Gemünden, Alice Kuzniar, Marcia Klotz, Marcia Landy, Barbara McCloskey, Stephen Lowry, Johannes von Moltke, Annette Kuhn, Thomas Saunders, and Katie Trumpener. For their willingness to listen to preliminary thoughts on the subject, I want to thank sympathetic audiences at the German Studies Association Annual Convention and at the Hollins Colloquium on German Film. Parts of chapters have profited from the critical comments of colleagues at conferences and at lecture series at the Universität Dresden, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Southampton, the University of Warwick, and Dartmouth College. Discussions with graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh have helped me to clarify my argument; I am particularly indebted to Daniel Wild. Bozena Goscilo provided valuable editorial advice. Jan McInroy and Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press were very supportive; Paul Spragens provided meticulous copyediting. Last, but not least, I am grateful to the staffs of the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek and the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin; and the Interlibrary Loan Office at Hillman Library, University of Pittsburgh. Parts of this research have been supported by a DAAD Study Visit Grant, as well as a Hewlett International Grant and a Small Research Grant from the University of Pittsburgh. It is with great joy and deep gratitude that I dedicate this book to Fred Nutt. An earlier German version of Chapter 5 appeared as “Heinz Rühmann und die Inszenierung des ‘kleinen Mannes,’” in montage a/v 7, no. 1 (1998): 33–56. An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as “The Melodramatic Imagination of Detlef Sierck: Final Chord (1936) and Its Resonances,” in Screen 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 129–148. 1 P OPULAR CINEM A, NATIONAL CINEM A, NAZI CINEM A A DEFINITION OF TERMS I. Until recently, the cinema of the Third Reich has been treated as the ultimate Other of world cinema. Excluded from standard film historical and theoretical analyses, the more than one thousand feature films produced during the period have remained closely identified with the critical paradigms of propaganda studies and ideology critique. Both have generated the kind of summary treatments, captured in terms like “Nazi cinema” or “Nazi film,” that often include sweeping conclusions about mass manipulation, popular entertainment, and fascist aesthetics but divulge little about the constituent elements of popular cinema: the leading stars and directors, the popular genres and styles, the favorite studios and theaters, and so forth. Klaus Kanzog has recently concluded that “we have long ago reached consensus over the ideological premises of the films and even feel satisfaction about having more or less closed the chapter on ‘National Socialism and Film.’” 1 Nothing could be further from the truth. The cinema of the Third Reich has never been exposed to the full range of critical perspectives available within film studies. Much of the basic research still needs to be done, and many of the questions have not even been asked. In this chapter, I want to develop new critical perspectives based on the aesthetic, social, cultural, and economic practices associated with popular cinema. As a way of introducing the larger project, I begin with the definitions of “popular cinema” in the existing scholarship and examine some of the hidden assumptions behind the two main elements, “popular” and “cinema,” that have sustained this seemingly self-evident but also curiously undertheorized term. The second and third parts then consider some of the other terms, including “national cinema,” that contributed to the specific qualities of popular cinema in the German tradition and that, in combination with recent debates on the meaning of the popular in film studies and cultural studies, might be enlisted in a different history and historiography of popular cinema in the Third Reich.2 To summarize a prevailing trend in the scholarship from the 1970s to the 1980s: The more that was written about the propaganda films, the less became known—and appeared worth knowing—about those countless genre films categorized as “mere entertainment”; that is to say, films that were considered neither part of art nor propaganda and that often seemed closer to other rituals of mass consumption than to legitimate cultural forms and practices. The more some scholars concentrated on the filmic representation of key concepts in Nazi ideology, the less they paid attention to the vast body of work that presumably only served escapist functions and had no aesthetic value or social significance on its own. And the more other scholars speculated about the fascist aesthetics, the less they were willing to consider the continuities of classical narrative cinema in an international context or to take into account the historical conditions of film production and reception. Even the turn to cultural studies in the last decade has not resulted in radically new approaches that, by moving from textual to contextual models, might be better suited to trace the complicated processes within popular cinema as an economic, social, and cultural practice. Historically, the conceptualization of entertainment and propaganda as 2 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich a kind of figure-ground effect must be traced back to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who, in his public talks, always made the distinction between the 20 percent big-budget films with clear propagandistic intentions and “the 80 percent good, decent entertainment films on a high artistic level.” 3 Exile film critics were the first to challenge this division and draw attention to its political function. In a pamphlet written for the “purposes of psychological warfare,” Siegfried Kracauer asserted that “all Nazi films were more or less propaganda films— even the mere entertainment pictures which seem to be remote from politics.” 4 The same argumentation informed Hans Wollenberg’s more tentative conclusion, also from the 1940s, that “even apparently harmless subjects, comedies or even musicals, have somehow a tendency to advance Nazi ideologies.” 5 Relying on an epistemology of suspicion through qualifiers like “more or less” and “somehow,” Kracauer and Wollenberg laid the foundation for the conception of popular cinema as simultaneously separated from, and implicated in, the Nazi propaganda machine. In most subsequent descriptions of this undistinguished, formless mass called “entertainment films,” aesthetic and moral judgment usually takes the place of close analysis, a move that is legitimated with reference to the escapist nature of the films in question. And in all cases, the unquestioned assumptions about the total control of the Propaganda Ministry over the filmic imagination serve to protect against uncomfortable questions about the continuities of popular cinema and the social practices, attitudes, and mentalities that sustain it and, in turn, are sustained by it. The indifference toward, and ignorance of, the so-called entertainment films fulfill three distinct but related functions, all of which bear witness to the films’ problematic status in German film history and social histories of the Third Reich. On the most obvious level, the argument about apolitical entertainment provides justification for the pervasive presence of these films in today’s culture, whether in the form of television programming, video releases, or film retrospectives. The insistence on a sharp distinction between politics and entertainment allows audiences both young and old to indulge freely in nostalgic celebrations of what has become known as “the golden days of UFA [Universum Film AG].” 6 The countless memoirs by writers, actors, and directors have further contributed to such patterns of reception. To mention only two examples, screenwriter Axel Eggebrecht insists that “to a large degree, films in the Nazi state were not at all Nazi films.” 7 And director Herbert Maisch cites the regular television reruns of one of his films from the early 1940s as proof that the work remained “unPopular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 3 blemished by the times in which it was produced.” 8 Thus it should not surprise that even an unrepentant fan like Karlheinz Wendtland asserts that “the penetration of every single feature film with Nazi ideology has never been proven.” 9 Yet no matter whether the films are enlisted in acts of ritualistic deconstruction or ironic appropriation (e.g., Zarah Leander as a gay icon) or exposed to redemptive readings that focus only on formal qualities and directorial styles (e.g., Veit Harlan as an unacknowledged auteur), they still remain cultural products of, and historical documents from, the Third Reich. It is precisely for this reason that the historical and contemporary relevance of these films cannot be explained through the false oppositions of art, entertainment, and politics that have accompanied their critical reception from the beginning. Secondly, the unwillingness of scholars to deal with popular cinema masks an elitist contempt for mass cultural productions and their presumably passive consumers; hence the derogatory tone in many discussions of escapism and illusionism. In the same way that moral indignation about the Propaganda Ministry’s insidious manipulations is predicated on the model of a liberal public sphere, the aesthetic dismissal of “mass entertainment” betrays two equally bourgeois notions, the aesthetic superiority of autonomous art and the affirmative character of the culture industry. Thirdly, the tendency to see popular cinema only in the context of hegemonic practices distracts from the differences and contradictions within popular culture and often ends up supporting reactionary views on modern mass culture as an insidious form of controlling private fantasies and desires— of course, not those of educated individuals but only of “the masses.” Similar patterns of argumentation can even be found in early Marxist studies on popular cinema that treat its mass-produced fantasies as a manifestation of false consciousness and the kind of petit bourgeois culture that allegedly poses a serious threat to the authentic culture of the working class. Within these argumentative patterns, the forms and functions of popular cinema tend to be examined either through the notion of political propaganda or in the context of ideology critique. To begin with the early studies on film and propaganda, most analyses assume an institutionalized relationship between propaganda and entertainment (i.e., Goebbels’s 20 percent– 80 percent model) that can be studied through conceptual oppositions such as overt vs. covert, latent vs. manifest, textual vs. contextual, and so forth.10 In the earliest and still most extensive quantitative study 4 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich published to this day, Gerhard Albrecht relies on such a conceptual model in distinguishing between the few infamous films with a manifest politicalpropagandistic function and the overwhelming majority of entertainment films with a latent political-propagandistic function. According to Albrecht, the latent meanings in what he categorized as serious, humorous, and action-oriented films can be uncovered through a combination of textual and contextual factors, including narrative content, production history, and critical reception.11 Most studies on film and propaganda determine the propagandistic function of the so-called entertainment film by looking either at the work itself, the conditions of production, or the conditions of reception. Sometimes the distinction between political propaganda and apolitical entertainment is based on essential textual differences that manifest themselves in the thematic concerns of individual films. This approach is exemplified by David Stuart Hull, who cites the Allied Control Commission’s findings that as few as 141 of a total of 700 suspect feature films were “politically objectionable” to conclude that “only a small number of films made during the Third Reich contained propaganda.” 12 Dissolving the meaning of propaganda entirely into the conditions of production, Richard Taylor offers a radically different definition, namely that if the “conscious purpose is to lull the audience in order to manipulate its opinions for political ends, then we are concerned with film propaganda: if not, then we are concerned with entertainment pure and simple.” 13 At first, David Welch’s observations on “the majority of ‘escapist’ films that were produced . . . principally for entertainment purposes” 14 sounds surprisingly like Taylor’s, given the same reference to “purposes” (i.e., intentionality). Yet Welch ultimately places greater weight on the actualization of these intended meanings by different audiences. Accordingly, he dismisses the official distinction between entertainment and propaganda as yet another attempt by the Propaganda Ministry to achieve full control over the cinema, its fantasies, and, perhaps even more important, its discourses as well. Where Hull relies on manifest content and thematic classifications in order to defend the majority of films against accusations of ideological contamination, Welch turns to the rituals of moviegoing to assess the contribution of the division between the “political” and the “apolitical” to the preservation of the status quo. In his view, the mass appeal of the so-called entertainment films hinged on a carefully constructed illusion about everyday life, for “by visiting the cinema, people Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 5 could pretend that fascist ideology or principles, as disseminated in films, did not meaningfully impinge on everyday life or force them to restructure their system of values radically.” 15 The most radical challenge to the propaganda model and its conceptual binaries has been developed in the context of ideology critique. Here the contribution by Stephen Neale is worth quoting at some length. For it identifies the basic contradiction at the core of all those contributions that constantly hover between conceiving entertainment films as nonideological and escapist and therefore performing an ideological function in not confronting “reality,” or else as embodying Nazi ideology in a hidden way through particular modes of characterisation or the portrayal of validated narrative actions. The latter are differentiated from propaganda because they are somehow not “overt” or were not produced at Goebbels’s behest. However, if they are not “overt” it is still assumed that they can be read in the covertly inscribed manner . . . that this will always be so, and this because of an intentionality that remains, in essence, in the film, rather than because the nature of the specific conjuncture in which the films were first made and viewed forces that reading.16 According to Neale, an expanded notion of ideology avoids such impasses in the theorizing of popular cinema, especially if its products and practices are conceived not in the sense of deceptions and illusions but as part of a fully developed theory of filmic representation and social reality. Defined in that sense, ideology establishes symbolic systems that take the form of cultural institutions, aesthetic practices, and critical discourses. Popular cinema represents one of the most important sites of negotiation for the conflicting forces that define the relationship between individual and society. In its infinite capacity for creating, circulating, and controlling private and public fantasies, classic narrative relies on specific patterns of identification in order to establish subject positions that actualize and integrate these conflicting forces. The resultant subject effects, as it were, give rise to the fantasy of a coherent, unified self and, in so doing, contribute to the production of social consensus and political hegemony. Yet it should always be remembered that, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the production of aesthetic or narrative forms is to be seen as an ideological act in its own 6 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions.” 17 Stephen Lowry has been one of the first to utilize such an extended notion of ideology in a thorough analysis of what he, somewhat surprisingly, still describes as “shallow, seemingly apolitical entertainment films.” 18 Following Jameson, Lowry approaches ideology in Nazi cinema not through particular contents, but through the mobilization of emotions and desires and their imaginary reconciliation in accordance with the changing demands of culture and society; hence his conclusion that “we need to shift our perspective from a narrowly political definition of ideology which asks what ‘message’ films might have had, and instead scrutinize how films actually negotiated cultural and ideological conflicts.” 19 According to Lowry, the question about the specifically fascist nature of these films can only be answered through historical contextualization, including greater attention to the close connections between new mass cultural forms and established cultural practices within the fascist public sphere. Such affinities undoubtedly confirm popular cinema as an integral part of the process of modernization and the experience of modernity, but only if cinema is fundamentally redefined as a practice and event. The proposals by Lowry and others for what is alternately referred to as historical contextualization, interdisciplinary approaches, or cultural-studies readings remain incomplete as long as they fail to achieve the conceptual shift from Ideology to ideologies. Above all, this requires greater attention to the complicated relationship of popular cinema to high and low culture, as well as to regional, national, and international culture in the context of institutional practices, aesthetic forms, and cultural traditions. Otherwise the study of cinema and ideology will end up with new conceptual impasses caused by, on the one hand, the radical expansion of the fascist imaginary into popular culture and everyday life and, on the other hand, the equally problematic identification of cinema under fascism with the ideology of classical narrative cinema. Resisting such temptations, Karsten Witte has perhaps gone furthest in opening up the field of inquiry to a variety of popular genres, especially the revue films and the romantic comedies; he also has been most willing to defy the conventions that have made research in this area such a difficult and often inhibiting endeavor. His intellectual commitments are captured in the surprisingly simple and, for that reason, all the more provocative proposi- Popular Cinema, National Cinema, Nazi Cinema 7 tion that, “Instead of determining which features constitute a fascist film, we need to examine how films functioned under fascism or rather, in the context of fascism.” 20 Continuing along similar lines, though in very different theoretical contexts, Linda Schulte-Sasse has recently suggested that “rather than taking ideology as the starting point and looking at how movies show ideology, we can perhaps take movies as the starting point and examine how they harbor, transform, exceed, and undermine political ideology.” 21 Her focus on fantasy as a framework in which desire becomes possible, even if it remains an impossible desire, has shed new light on the affective structures that dissolve the political into the experiential and, for that reason, can only be understood through a similar conceptual shift from the “management of ideas” to the “management of desire.” 22 The growing attention to the formal aspects of classical narrative cinema has contributed significantly to the long overdue mapping of popular cinema and its hidden attractions. However, the continuous privileging of the filmic text in the conceptual trajectory from “manipulation” (i.e., in the propaganda model) to “interpellation” (i.e., in ideology critique) and “fantasy production” (i.e., through psychoanalytic readings) also raises new questions. For instance, it might be argued that these contributions have only updated the terms of analysis by enlisting the symptomatic nature of “Nazi cinema” in the new constellations of mass culture, modernity, and postmodernity. A thus expanded notion of fascist fantasy production, which finds its ideal manifestation in the Hollywood dream factory, is bound to distract from, if not act against, the historical specificity in the filmic articulation of power and pleasure. Accordingly, Schulte-Sasse’s emphasis on the close affinities between the subject effects of fascism and classical narrative cinema culminates in a typical postmodern reading of “National Socialism as virtually synonymous with illusion, theater, or spectacle.” 23 But behind the theories of subjectivity, her study on fantasies and subject effects also perpetuates the vilification of classic narrative found in more familiar arguments against film propaganda as well as Hollywood cinema. Following a similar pattern of argumentation, Eric Rentschler uses a series of individual readings to conjure up the image of a cinema of illusions that, in his view, must be described less as the culmination of the dialectics of modernity than as “a preview of postmodern attractions.” 24 Yet this new theoretical alliance does not prevent him from denouncing Nazi cinema as “a culture industry in the service of mass deception” where the films “offered only an illusion of escape from the Nazi status quo.” 25 8 Popular Cinema of the Third Reich