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Nazi Film Melodrama
By Laura Heins UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09502-3
CHAPTER 1
An Aesthetics of Aggression: German Fascist vs. Classical Hollywood Melodrama
Melodrama, as Linda Williams asserts, is the "fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures." According to this account, almost all Hollywood films can be considered melodramatic, including "male genres" such as Westerns, war films, film noir, and action films. Melodrama, of course, can also be considered the fundamental mode of fascist film. Nazi cinema, like Italian Fascist cinema, tended toward simplification and dualistic perspectives. The Nazi propaganda minister disapproved of film scripts in which conflicts were not clearly and simply drawn. Characters in Third Reich film projects had to represent primary social functions and be immediately legible types rather than complex individuals. Film, according to Goebbels, should not speak to the intellect, and melodrama's concentrated affects were well suited to elaborating clear moral choices and embodying these in characters of limited complexity. One of the telling ways that Goebbels expressed his disapproval of films was to dismiss them as "literature," which implied a deemphasizing of emotional effect in favor of a more ambiguous portrait of character psychology.
Despite the disdain that virtually all fascists displayed toward femininity, the melodrama as a genre was no less privileged in Nazi cinema than it was in Hollywood of the classical era. In both cinemas, films now considered "women's pictures" were often accorded the highest budgets and the greatest recognition by film reviewers and audiences. However, romance and domestic melodramas were not viewed by Nazi filmmakers and party leaders as being primarily for female audiences; the concept of gendered spectatorship, and particularly of gendered genres, was less developed in Germany in the 1930s and '40s than in the United States at the same time. Consequently, melodramatic affect was not viewed by the Nazis as thoroughly tainted by effeminacy.
This does not mean that their relationship to the genre was entirely non-conflicted. On the one hand, melodrama was granted a privileged status in the Third Reich; on the other, there were constant efforts to contain the risks inherent in melodramatic excess. Goebbels was vigilant about not allowing melodrama to go too far, for fear that the very same narrative and formal devices that produced desirable spectator effects could, when exaggerated, become alienation devices that could interrupt the process of ideological interpellation by making the spectator aware of the workings of the filmic text. Pathos, while necessary, could easily be overdosed. Goebbels felt that the American film melodrama delivered exactly the right dose, while the Italian Fascist melodrama failed to conform to an ideal Nazi aesthetics. The Third Reich melodrama was thus to be largely modeled after Hollywood examples.
However, there were a few significant stylistic distinctions between German melodrama of the period and its American counterpart. Hollywood cinema's greater emphasis on the communicative codes of mise-en-scène, dynamic editing, and camera movement was countered in Nazi cinema with a greater stress on bodily displays and a theatrical acting style that subordinated the intimacy of the face in close-up to the authority of the actor's voice and scripted dialogue. As we will see in a comparative analysis of a characteristic Nazi melodrama, Der Postmeister (1940), with the Hollywood film Anna Karenina (1935) at the end of this chapter, subtle formal and narrative differences in the Nazi melodrama encouraged a more aggressive form of voyeurism than was common in the Hollywood melodrama, in accordance with the Nazis' recruiting of romance to support imperial expansion in the east. Instead of the masochistic aesthetic of many Hollywood melodramas, therefore, the Nazi melodrama distinguished itself by its formally encoded appeals to spectatorial sadism and by the masculinity of its pathos.
Film Genre, Gender, and Spectatorship in the Third Reich
According to Thomas Schatz, the melodrama, the comedy, and the musical are "genres of integration," and war, action, and crime films are "genres of order." Whereas the latter allows for a violent removal of adversaries or threats to the social system, the former tends toward their reeducation and a more subtle reestablishment of harmony. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Nazis generally found cinematic integration more useful than order—or at least more popular. Overall, the feature film production of the Third Reich was composed of approximately 76 percent of the first category (genres of integration) and 17 percent of the second (genres of order), and about 30 percent of all films produced in the Third Reich were melodramas. Almost all films of the Third Reich fulfilled some kind of propagandistic or ideological function, but some were more recognizable to contemporary audiences as explicitly political films, and the number of these was (arguably) quite small.
Likewise, there is much evidence that melodramas were not recognized as such at the time. The term "melodrama" was rarely used in the Third Reich; instead, terms like "dramatic fate" or "tragedy" were sometimes employed in descriptions of films in a melodramatic register. However, the avoidance of the term "melodrama" did not so much indicate an inferior status of the mode as an underdeveloped concept of cinematic genres during the Third Reich; the Nazis made extensive use of melodramatic conventions without attempting to theorize a genre taxonomy or hierarchy. In contemporary film reviews, general descriptions were given in the form of plot synopses, but there was usually no attempt to categorize films in generic types. The Reich Film Archive did make use of categories when compiling a catalogue of films from 1933 to 1942, but these were remarkably vague; melodramas were described by terms such as "dramatic narrative film," "serious entertainment film," or "historical narrative film." The lack of genre theory led to an inability to adequately describe differences in narrative type and emotional register among individual films. This suggests that the production of films in the Third Reich followed a somewhat random pattern rather than a carefully planned proportion of films according to intended audience. It was not until after the war that a systematic genre categorization of films from the Third Reich was attempted.
Following postwar classifications, it is evident that the distribution of melodramatic subgenres in the Third Reich differed from classical Hollywood cinema. The maternal melodrama and the family melodrama, both core subgenres for American cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s, were far less significant in terms of production numbers for Nazi cinema than the love story, the subgenre that made up the majority of Third Reich melodramatic production. The Heimatfilm, a romance or family melodrama that celebrates rural life, is specific to the German cinema and has no genuine Hollywood equivalent (though it was a less significant subgenre in the Third Reich than in the postwar era of Konrad Adenauer.) Likewise, several Hollywood melodramatic subgenres were missing in the cinema of the Third Reich, and these absences reveal some distinctions between the Nazi uses of melodrama and those of American cinema. The American "medical discourse" melodrama—in which a woman afflicted with physical or mental illness becomes the object of study and the erotic interest of a male doctor who attempts to unravel her mystery and cure her—was virtually impossible to copy in the Third Reich, since the Nazis had more interest in eliminating than curing the sick; the film that stands perhaps closest to Hollywood melodramas like Dark Victory (1939) and Now, Voyager (1942) is the notorious euthanasia film Ich klage an (I Accuse, 1941). The "medical discourse" film, as Mary Ann Doane has outlined it, was a result of the explosion of interest in psychoanalysis in America during the 1940s. No comparable interest in solving the riddles of feminine desire and its repression could be found in Germany at the same time. Freud was banned by the Nazis, and German exiles, who had explored psychoanalysis in Weimar films, took the subject to Hollywood.
There was also no genuine equivalent of gothic melodramas such as Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Gaslight (1944) in the cinema of the Third Reich. According to Tania Modleski, such films expressed a paranoid consciousness and spoke to the fantasies of women who suffered from the nuclear family structures that were romanticized in the majority of classical Hollywood features. Modleski connects the renewed popularity of gothic melodramas in 1940s Hollywood to women's wartime experiences, chiefly to a fear of what would happen when men returned from war and reassumed their positions as head (or tyrant) of the household and workplace. In Germany such paranoid visions were rarely so openly expressed. Furthermore, as we will see in the next chapters, the image of the nuclear family was generally less stable in the Reich than in the United States, and there was ultimately less risk that German men would return from the war, particularly after 1942. The absence of the gothic melodrama also coincided with an extreme scarcity of the mode of horror in the cinema of the Third Reich. The Nazis had little tolerance for the uncanny, and even the fantastic was repudiated in favor of an unambiguous classicism. Hitler disapproved of all forms of the gothic as tainted with religiosity; as Goebbels wrote: "The Führer is a man who is completely antiquity-oriented. He hates Christianity ... What a difference there is between a gloomy cathedral and a bright, free antique temple. He wants clarity, brightness, beauty. That is also the ideal of our time. In this respect, the Führer is a totally modern man." Even the Third Reich film melodrama was expected to convey an impression of transparency, in concert with fascist modernity's revival of the imperial style of antiquity. Accordingly, even melodramas were supposed to conform to Nazi cinema's compulsory optimism and to avoid too much "effeminate" gloom and rumination by stressing the heroic value of sacrifice.
It is a common assumption today that family melodramas and romance films address themselves primarily to female spectators, while crime and action films are "male" genres. The gendering of narrative types has led to a hierarchy of genres along male/female lines: while the "male" action genre has taken its privileged position as the big-budget blockbuster and is thus the very prototype of postclassical Hollywood cinema, romance films are relegated to a special-interest ghetto. Similarly, the gender divisions and their accompanying quality labels are still in force in popular thinking about classical Hollywood cinema: while film noir has been elevated to the status of art, 1930s and '40s romances remain low-culture kitsch. Scholarship of the last forty years has certainly done much work to rescue melodrama from its earlier critical dismissal as trivial, and the label "woman's film" has become a productive critical category. For most cinemagoers, though, it remains a derogatory designation.
However, this genre hierarchy is a relatively recent invention, as Stephen Neale has shown. According to his study of film reviews in industry journals of the 1930s to 1950s, the classical Hollywood melodrama was by no means considered an inferior form by producers or critics, and the term "melodrama" was not employed in a negative or derogatory sense, as it often is in contemporary film reviews. According to Neale, melodrama was also not identified exclusively or even primarily with female spectators: the prison drama The Big House (1930), for example, was called a "virile realist melodrama" by the contemporary reviewer. Even maternal melodramas were not seen as trivial, B-list productions at the time of their original release; rather, films such as Stella Dallas (1937) were considered "prestige projects" by their producers.
Similarly, melodrama was not considered a trivial or inferior form in the Third Reich either but was actually privileged in many respects. Indeed, some of the highest production budgets were invested in love stories starring Zarah Leander. As Felix Moeller has pointed out, melodramas had the deepest effect on Goebbels personally. The language Goebbels used to describe his reactions to films suggests that he saw melodramas as producing the most intense and most politically desirable spectator effects. Goebbels often wrote that he was "moved" (ergriffen), "swept away" (mitgerissen), or "spellbound" (hingerissen) by a film, all words that connote a violently imposed emotion, a forcefully "moving" experience that only the melodramatic mode is capable of producing. Likewise, Third Reich film reviewers sometimes praised films by calling them "distressing" (erschütternd), and this positive valuing of the experience of shock or distress suggests a sensationalism that is at the heart of melodrama. Although he was not particularly articulate or consistent in his judgments, Goebbels's comments on film suggest that, for him, melodrama also had the highest aesthetic potential. In his March 1933 "Kaiserhof" speech, Goebbels praised the 1927 Greta Garbo melodrama Anna Karenina (alternatively titled Love) for delivering purely cinematic art and proving that film is not a debased "surrogate of theater" and he proposed the Hollywood production as a model for Third Reich filmmakers to copy.
The fact that Goebbels was particularly moved by Garbo melodramas proves that, according to his thinking, films with female main protagonists did not preclude male spectator identifications. Like classical Hollywood producers and critics who could describe a film as a "virile melodrama" the Nazis also did not think of melodrama as a form for women only. In fact, there is little evidence that they generally thought of genres as gendered, even if they did feel that male and female spectatorship were somehow different. Some films were certainly planned with female spectators in mind, but they were rarely advertised openly as "women's films" On the contrary, melodramas were marketed to both genders, and some love stories were apparently more warmly received by male than by female viewers. Veit Harlan's Immensee (1943) is a well-known example of a romance melodrama that was very popular with male viewers, especially soldiers, although this sentimental tale features a female protagonist caught in a love triangle with two men and it celebrates feminine self-sacrifice. Kristina Söderbaum, the film's star, referred to Immensee as a film that "gave male spectators the most," and she added that it appealed to adolescent males in particular. Correspondingly, Astrid Pohl's study on melodrama in the Third Reich has identified a whole subgenre of "men's melodramas." Third Reich crime films, on the other hand, often feature female main protagonists, and the crime film was by no means considered an exclusively male genre as it often was in Hollywood. Even war films were apparently supposed to appeal to female spectators. Battle- and war-related historical films were shown to girls during the compulsory film screenings of the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel, or BDM), as well as to boys in the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend, or HJ).
In general, Nazi cinema aimed to be universal and to appeal to spectators of both sexes and all regions of the Reich, yet spectators did not always react to films as the propaganda minister intended. The issue of spectator response became even more crucial after 1939, since, as Goebbels said, cinema and the good moods it manufactured were "decisive to the outcome of the war." Starting in October 1939, the Security Service (the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) of the Schutzstaffel (SS) provided Goebbels and other leaders with reports on the opinions and morale of the civilian populace. Many of the spies were placed in cinema seats; an important section of these reports concerned reactions to newsreel and feature films. The SD noted the differing reactions of men and women as well as regional variances in responses. Based on these reports, Goebbels recognized that the reception of films was not uniform and that spectator response could not be entirely planned, but this fact often took him by surprise. As late as 1942, for example, he noted in regard to an SD report: "I get word from various cities that the film Die Entlassung [The Dismissal, 1942] is not enjoying the sort of success in certain sectors of the population that we expected from it. It is a typical men's film, and because it doesn't represent any real women's conflicts, it is generally being rejected by women ... when one measures it by a higher standard, it doesn't seem to completely fulfill the hopes that we initially had for it." Although Goebbels does speak here about "men's film," suggesting some awareness of gender differences in spectatorship, he also reveals his previous expectation that one film could successfully speak to all viewers. His comments furthermore reveal his somewhat limited grasp on audience film preferences. The leaders of the Nazi regime were clearly preoccupied with the effectiveness of their propaganda efforts, but there was little empirical audience research conducted during the Third Reich, in contrast to the United States. Hollywood studio heads were regularly informed about audience opinions through Gallup polls and preview screening interviews, and they would alter films accordingly. Because of the general Nazi hostility toward "democratic" methods of opinion polling, the SD reports were more anecdotal than systematic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Nazi Film Melodrama by Laura Heins. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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