Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema
368
Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema
368eBook
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Overview
Drawing on theoretical work, particularly that of Lacan and Zizek, Schulte-Sasse shows how films such as Jew Süsss and The Great King construct fantasies of social harmony, often through distorted versions of familiar stories from eighteenth-century German literature, history, and philosophy. Schulte-Sasse observes, for example, that Nazi films, with their valorization of bourgeois culture and use of familiar narrative models, display a curious affinity with the world of Enlightenment culture that the politics of National Socialism would seem to contradict.
Schulte-Sasse argues that film served National Socialism less because of its ideological homogeneity than because of the appeal and familiarity of its underlying literary paradigms and because the medium itself guarantees a pleasurable illusion of wholeness. Entertaining the Third Reich will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including those engaged in the study of cinema, popular culture, Nazism and Nazi art, the workings of fascist culture, and the history of modern ideology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822399872 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/1996 |
| Series: | Post-contemporary interventions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Lexile: | 1540L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Linda Schulte-Sasse is Professor of German Studies at Macalester College.
Read an Excerpt
Entertaining The Third Reich
Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema
By Linda Schulte-Sasse
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9987-2
CHAPTER 1
Mass Spectacle, History, Cinema: Embodiments of Social Fantasy
The Spring of festivals was to be followed by a Summer of festivals, and when with the approach of Fall the miserable condition of the country had still not improved, the decision was made to celebrate the triumph of the regime in a festival that would surpass all others, a powerful party rally. Since enough fireworks were available, there was nothing to prevent such an event. — Bertolt Brecht
When, at the end of his famous essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin wrote that communism responds to National Socialism's aestheticization of politics by politicizing art, he surely did not mean to imply that Nazism did not politicize art. In this chapter, I want to lay some groundwork by examining both sides of this chiasmus, Nazism's infusion of the political with aesthetics and of aesthetics with the political — the latter of which has been the basis of propaganda study and the reason why Nazi art has often not received the attention it warrants ("political" art is not "real" art, etc.). The chapter offers a theoretical grounding for what I will subsequently demonstrate on a case-by-case basis: that the most important "political" lesson in Nazi cinema is not to be found in its political content but in its generation of a subject effect that would seem to have little to do with politics. This subject effect of wholeness and mastery depended on "imaginary" experience, which we can take in an everyday sense or in Lacan's psychoanalytic sense. It is the common factor in the representational practices — mass spectacle, historical discourse, and cinema — that this chapter addresses and that come together in my film readings. An excursus at the end of the chapter examines the importance of anchoring Nazism's beautiful illusion within the Western cultural heritage it appropriates. I will draw throughout on theories attesting to the inadequacy of viewing Nazi culture only in terms of cynicism, thus underscoring that Nazism's project encompasses both cynicism and "authentic" need. As Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy remark in discussing the myth that was Nazism, "exploitation ... remains within the logic of the belief: for it is necessary to awaken ... the Aryan dream in the Germans." By no means should we assume that masters of manipulation are masters of themselves.
NAZISM'S BEAUTIFUL ILLUSION I: SPECTACLE FOR AND BY THE MASSES
However historians of fascism may otherwise differ, they seem to concur on the affective character of Nazi "politics," on Nazism's emotional rather than intellectual appeal (whether or not they theorize that the "emotional" constitution of subjectivity is the very precondition for "intellectual" judgment). Equally familiar is its deemphasis of written texts or manifestos in favor of the spoken word, to which Hitler, following Gustave Le Bon's Psychologie des foules (1895), ascribed "all great, world-shaking events." In his psychoanalytic study of fascism, Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit describes fascist oratory as therapy, as a "monstrous form that ... emerges from the mouth of the Führer and closes around ... open wounds." Theweleit takes pains to argue that a disparagement of fascist language for lack of "substance" overlooks the very source of its effectiveness. Similarly, Saul Friedländer describes fascist language as circular rather than linear: it replaces interconnected argument with accumulation, repetition, and redundancy, launching "a play of images sent back, in turn, from one to the other in echoes without end, creating a kind of hypnosis by repetition." By no means is fascist language "just" a tool, "just" the form that gives body to contents. Rather, this form is the content; it is, as Brecht puts it, "most cunning when it is most confusing."
Not surprisingly, then, National Socialism's party conventions, where speech joined forces with music and visual plenitude, stand out as its "greatest aesthetic accomplishments." Nor is it an accident that Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 NSDAP congress, Triumph of the Will, has provided the images with which we conceive of the Nazi public sphere today. Few if any documentaries about this period have failed to include clips from the film, which attests to the true Gesamtkunstwerk character of these rallies and to Riefenstahl's ability to capture, even transcend, "real" experience through cinema. As many have commented, it is unclear in the film where the text begins and reality ends, since the "reality" she filmed was pure "text," an event staged for the very purpose of being filmed.
How does this kind of spectacle, for which Nazism spared neither cost nor effort, figure in the grounding concept of the movement, its rejection of modernity? In Mein Kampf, Hitler describes in astonishingly clinical terms the subject effect he expects of mass rallies:
The mass meeting is ... necessary for the reason that in it the individual, who at first, while becoming a supporter of a young movement, feels lonely and easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, for the first time gets the picture of a larger community, which in most people has a strengthening, encouraging effect.... The community of the great demonstration not only strengthens the individual, it also unites and helps to create an esprit de corps. The man who is exposed to grave tribulations, as the first advocate of a new doctrine in his factory or workshop, absolutely needs that strengthening which lies in the conviction of being a member and fighter in a great comprehensive body. And he obtains an impression of this body for the first time in the mass demonstration. When from his little workshop or big factory, in which he feels very small, he steps for the first time into a mass meeting and has thousands and thousands of people of the same opinions around him, when, as a seeker, he is swept away by three or four thousand others into the mighty effect of suggestive intoxication and enthusiasm, when the visible success and agreement of thousands confirm to him the Tightness of the new doctrine ... — then he himself has succumbed to the magic influence of what we designate as "mass suggestion" (italics in original).
The central opposition structuring the passage is that of isolation ("lonely" man's "fear of being alone") versus a "larger," "strengthening, encouraging" community imagined as a literal and metaphoric body ("comprehensive body," "esprit de corps"). With this opposition Hitler makes recourse to a critique of modernity that dates back to Rousseau, Sentimentality, Storm and Stress, and Romanticism, and that has been theorized many times since. As modernity becomes increasingly rationalized and instrumentalized, the individual feels driven into a position of isolation. In response to this isolation, social institutions like art, the nuclear family (with its relatively new ideal of love "as passion," to cite Niklas Luhmann), and other forms of communal experience began to take on a compensatory function; they provided a sanctuary in which other, noncompetitive standards exist. The institutions of art and the family may be very different, but within both the individual forced into a perpetual agonistic struggle can be "decentered" or dissolve individual boundaries, merge with an Other. As institutional practices, however, these decentering experiences are simultaneously centered or contained in a manageable framework. They compensate, rather than disrupt, the everyday pressures of modern life.
The precondition for this process of isolation and its compensation is what Luhmann describes as a shift from "stratified" to "functionally differentiated" societies that occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first term refers to hierarchically organized premodern societies, the second to modern societies in which social stratification has increasingly given way to functional differentiation; the economic becomes a sphere separate from the political or the aesthetic, and a given individual comes to be defined more as a doctor or merchant than as a baron or peasant (though obviously class remains an important factor to this day). This process of differentiation also separated the fine arts from the crafts, which had earlier been subsumed under one category; a watchmaker was in social terms the equivalent of a painter or composer. Thus the compensatory effect of the aesthetic and of "community" is a function of modernity's compartmentalization or functional differentiation; the aesthetic reacts to an overemphasis on rationalization in the structurally predominant realms of modern societies — to our perception (today more than ever) that we're "just a number."
We can find reference to the compartmentalization Luhmann theorizes in another of Hitler's juxtapositions: that of the economic sphere (the "little workshop or big factory," where the man feels "very small" and is "exposed to grave tribulations") versus the "strengthening" mass meeting. Here, however, we run into a problem: if Hitler codes the economic sphere as isolating, what label should we give the mass meeting that remedies this isolation? The meeting's association with a political movement would seem to make it "political," yet another glance at Hitler's language clearly belies this presupposition. His emphasis of seeing (the "picture of a larger community," "an impression of this body," "the visible success") and implicitly of hearing moves the experience he describes into the sphere of the sensual and the aesthetic; the speech is a kind of show. More ominously, words like "swept away," "suggestive intoxication," "succumb," and "magic" leave no doubt that we've entered the realm of the religious and erotic; more precisely the religious as erotic — an effect driven to an extreme in Goebbels's novel Michael, when the narrator's description of his experience of a mass meeting is nothing short of orgasmic: "Shivers of hot and cold ran through me. I had no knowledge of what was happening inside me. But all at once I seemed to hear cannons thunder.... Revelation! Revelation! ... I no longer knew what I was doing. I was almost out of my mind.... In this instant I was reborn.... I was intoxicated."
Either Hitler's or Goebbels's quotations alone would back up Theweleit's point that National Socialism does not lack "substance"; on the contrary, it rests on a profound, if purely intuitive, insight into the social and psychic structure of modernity. It turns modernity's constitutive experience of lack into political capital, and, as suggested by Zizek's term "social fantasy," it turns "society" into a kind of narrative or fiction. In order to pretend that social harmony is possible, it makes up the idea of a Leader as well as his antagonists, using the kind of displacements and condensations discussed earlier. Even its source of legitimation, the People symbiotically fused with the Leader, is a construction that fits into this fiction, and into the power structure that this fiction sustains. Whether we choose to call it Nazism's fiction or its "big lie," it worked by reconciling incompatible discourses, by pretending to retrieve a community perceived as "lost."
This is the essence of Benjamin's notion of "aestheticized politics," which is crucial to understanding not only fascism but all modern political forms. In "aestheticizing" politics, National Socialism went a step further than the early modernity that allowed the aesthetic to compensate for a rationalized world; it attempted rather to let the aesthetic become "reality" by breaking down traditional boundaries and turning the political experience into an aesthetic experience of community (which is by nature aesthetic). Certainly no political practice in modernity has been devoid of aesthetics, but National Socialism infused aesthetics into the political and public sphere to an unprecedented degree, trying to turn "life" into a work of art. While real life is subject to destabilizing contingencies and numbing banalities, "life as a work of art" represents the realm of the beautiful, a delimited realm of harmony.
In the process of aestheticizing politics, Nazism elided many other boundaries as well. Following Benjamin, Alice Kaplan aptly labels fascism a "polarity machine" that is in its very essence contradictory, particularly with respect to its "antimodern" ideology and its "modern" political practice: "Since fascism can be characterized formally as an entry of aesthetic criteria into the political and economic realms ... it makes way for the possibility that a social defense against modernization can itself be (aesthetically) modern." Besides effecting what Jean Pierre Faye calls a "crosspollination" of revolutionary and conservative ideologies, fascism fuses elitism with populism, the individual with the collective. In this respect the passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Goebbels's Michael speak for themselves, elaborating how the individual experiencing the fascist public sphere gains a sense of identity paradoxically through the very sublation of individual identity, through "succumbing" and fusing with the "great comprehensive body."
This sublation of part and whole is manifested visually in a compositional principle that was dominant in the ritualized Nazi public sphere and that turns up at times in films: the "mass ornament" or merging of individuals into ornamental groupings in which they lose the appearance of individuals. Siegfried Kracauer invented the term with reference to new aesthetic forms that seemed to reflect rationalized modern economic forms. He wrote his famous essay "The Mass Ornament" in 1930, describing the synchronization of bodies in modern entertainment, in which chorus lines like the American Tiller Girls echoed the Taylorization of the modern production process, with synchronously working and dancing body parts corresponding to each other. Only later did Kracauer apply the term to Nazi aesthetics, epitomized again by Triumph of the Will with its "officially fabricated mass ornaments" or "tableaux vivants."
Like Nazism itself, the mass ornament tries to achieve an illusory reconciliation of oppositional experiences in modernity: of the rational and the beautiful, difference and sameness, the mechanized and the organic. Indeed, its integration of individuals into an aesthetic totality recalls eighteenth-century discussions on the relations of the manifold (das Mannigfaltige) to the unity of the whole. In his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, for example, Schiller sees the aesthetic state as unique in its ability to harmonize individual and society: "The aesthetic State alone ... carries out the will of the whole through the nature of the individual.... Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it establishes harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide a man, because they are exclusively based on the sensuous or on the intellectual part of his being; only the perception of the Beautiful makes something whole of him, because both his natures must accord with it."
Nazism, of course, functionalizes the perception of aesthetic harmony, the illusion of reconciliation experienced via the mass ornament, which comes to manifest in visual and spatial form its ideal subject position, described by Alice Kaplan as a dialectic of "selfishness" and "selflessness," and by Susan Sontag as one of "egomania and servitude" (whereby we must remember that images of ornamentalized masses not only reflected life in the Nazi state but were disseminated to create that very disposition). Nowhere is this double effect of spectacle or the dialectic of egomania and servitude better captured than in the ambiguous title of Robert Brasillach's French fascist newspaper: Je Suis Partout, meaning both I am everywhere and I follow everywhere. Kaplan reads the slogan as an abdication of nineteenth-century liberalism with its illusion of individual autonomy, which is "succeeded in fascism by a sense of being able to follow and belong to a limitlessly large world. To be everywhere is to see or hear images of one's own progenitor everywhere."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Entertaining The Third Reich by Linda Schulte-Sasse. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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